28-Oct-08: Hate-based education... and the ignorance that sustains it

Whenever the perennial question of "Is there ever going to be a solution to the Arab-Israel conflict?" comes up, our answer is consistent.

"Yes", we say. "There is going to be a resolution because the pain and heartbreak that war brings with it is eventually unbearable, and people have to find a way. We're optimistic they will, sooner or later."

"But", we always add, "first the appalling way in which the official arms of Palestinian Arab society educate their children have to totally change. Until the PA and Hamas stop the endless inculcation of hatred via their school text books and the official curriculum of their education system, nothing will change. You can not educate towards the painful compromises that are inseparable from the peace process while teaching your children to hate."

Some get it, some don't. But we have no doubt that what we described is at the heart of this ongoing war.

Today, Barbara Crook and Itamar Marcus who have done invaluable work via Palestinian Media Watch since 1996 published an op ed in the Jerusalem Post that identifies the process sharply and with concrete examples. It's the sort of analysis and expose that ought to get maximum exposure. But because it punctures some of the most widely-held beliefs - and especially the one that holds that the Mahmoud Abbas Fatah regime holds the key to peace with Israel - the PMW article will be mostly ignored or buried.

Here is part of what they say:

Would you sign a check for $120 million and hand it over to a former terrorist without carefully supervising what he was doing with your money? That's exactly what Norway, chair of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee that co-ordinates international funding to the Palestinian Authority, is doing with its taxpayers' money.
In response to extensive documentation by Palestinian Media Watch about the hate promotion on official Palestinian Authority-Fatah TV, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre recently made a series of statements defending PA TV that indicate he is totally ignorant of its content. Then, to put his money where his misinformed mouth is, he wrote another check for 85 million kroner to the PA under Mahmoud Abbas, whose office controls PA TV...
The world was incensed when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his vision of a world without Israel, and there were calls to put him on trial. Yet when Abbas's TV teaches Palestinian children the identical vision of a world without Israel, Western countries run for their checkbooks to keep funding him. The PA openly glorifies terrorists...
The Palestinians have the inalienable right to indoctrinate their kids to blind evil and hate, but Norway and the West have the moral obligation to stop paying for it.

The full article is definitely worth your time. Please pass it along to whoever needs to know about the central role of hate-based education in the perpetuation by Palestinian Arab society of this ongoing war. Fix this one issue, and all of us - but especially the children of Palestinian Arab society - are going to be healthier, happier, safer and facing a much brighter future.

25-Oct-08: So who needs security checkpoints?

Three weeks ago and on numerous occasions before that, we wrote in this blog about terrorists being intercepted at the Hawara crossing by Israeli service personnel, and thus prevented from carrying out yet another in the tragic stream of stabbings, shootings and bombings directed by Palestinian Arab terror operatives against civilian Israelis and Israeli civil society.

Today, there's another.

A Palestinian Arab youth was stopped at Hawara today after a pipe bomb was found on his body. He had arrived at the security crossing from the direction of Nablus. A bag on his back aroused suspicion, and a search revealed the pipe bomb.

YNet reports that "During the search a number of Palestinians at the checkpoint advanced towards the soldiers, and warning shots were fired into the air as a response. The checkpoint was closed following the incident."

(And just for the record, the most-recent reported intercept of a terrorist at Hawara before this one was as far back as... this past Wednesday, when a 17-year old Palestinian Arab was arrested at the same place. This one had a Molotov cocktail, a pipe bomb and other explosives concealed under his clothing.)

Criticism of such passive security measures taken by Israel as the security barrier and the numerous security checkpoints that require traveling Palestinian Arabs to stop, identify themselves and, occasionally, to be searched, is a constant in this ongoing war.

So is the inability or unwillingness of those who report on events in this part of the world to report on the almost daily intercepts by Israeli security of active terror agents en route to an appointment with their seventy-two virgins.

The murder two days ago of an eighty-six year-old Israeli pedestrian in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Gilo would have been prevented if the terrorist who stabbed him had been caught en route. He was not stopped, and so an innocent life - one among thousands - was brutally ended.

Critics of Israeli policy frequently refer to the anger engendered by Israeli security checkpoints. "A daily exercise in humiliation", an article published in Canada's Globe & Mail a year ago, is one of many instances.

HAWARA CHECKPOINT, WEST BANK — Under the supervision of an Israeli soldier clutching an M-16 assault rifle, Qassem Saleh begins his daily disrobing. First, he lifts his bright orange shirt so the soldier can see there's no bomb strapped to his torso. Then, after passing through a metal floor-to-ceiling turnstile, he undoes his belt and hands it over for examination to a second soldier, along with his wallet, mobile phone and cigarettes. The second soldier peruses his documents and asks his reason for travel. The answer is a simple one: Mr. Saleh goes through all this, not to board a plane or visit a prison, but so that he can go home to his family after a day's studies at An-Najah University in Nablus. It's a process Israel says is necessary for security, but one that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians consider their daily humiliation. "If a person was carrying anything [illegal] do you think he'd pass through here?" the 23-year-old media student said as he walked through a crowd of taxi drivers shouting offers of rides to the cities of Ramallah and Hebron to the south. "They just do this to humiliate us, to annoy us into leaving this country."

The Palestinian Arab man's question is not to be taken rhetorically. Anyone with experience of daily life here knows the answer is: Yes, terrorists bring their instruments of death right up to the doors of Israeli security on a daily basis.

Knowing this changes the whole analysis.

Our personal experience with reporters covering the complex events that characterize the Middle East conflict and the ongoing war of the Arabs against Israel is that, for the most part, they are easy prey for the baseless assertions and simple distortions of their interview subjects.

And it's not only reporters. The same Canadian article says:

A report released last week by the International Committee for the Red Cross singled out the checkpoints and the isolation of Nablus as key parts of a system that denies Palestinians "normal and dignified lives."

Being wrong - as so many of those reporting and pontificating on these events are - on the moral, legal and strategic argument for security against terrorists is a very expensive mistake measured in human lives and grief. People, like us, who know the price from personal experience have an obligation to speak out on this. That's one of the reasons we write this blog.

Security checkpoints and barriers are unlikely to bring peace. But they go a considerable way towards protecting an innocent civilian population from religiously-inspired terrorist thugs with access to virtually unlimited stocks of weaponry. In this light, and until a better approach is devised, they are the most rational decision a society can take.

24-Oct-08: Natural responses

In a Haaretz report tonight, Hamas, the outlawed terror organization, says the murder of an 86 year-old Jewish man in a Jerusalem suburb on Thursday afternoon, was a "natural response to Israel's continued aggression".

In its own 'natural response', the all-knowing BBC places its version of the event under the misleading and politicized headline "Israeli dies in settlement attack". It is reporting at this hour that "There has been no immediate claim of responsibility for what the Israeli authorities called a "terror incident".

Seems to us there is something perfectly natural, sad to say and very much in character, about the BBC reporting the news this way. For decades, the BBC and several other agenda-driven media channels, have described the government of Israel -- whose offices are located in the nation's capital, Jerusalem -- as "the authorities in Tel-Aviv".

The Melbourne Age, relying on a Reuters video clip and story (see below), is reporting the terrorist attack and murder under this heading: "Settler dies in West Bank stabbing".

In fact, Gilo is a suburb of Jerusalem. The neighbourhood is located well within the city boundaries and built on land legally and properly acquired by Jews long before the state of Israel was established in 1948. The Egged city bus that serves our own Jerusalem neighbourhood ends its run in Gilo, and never comes close to leaving the city of Jerusalem at any stage.

Calling Gilo a settlement is mischievous and offensive. It's also a fine way to delegitimize the place and to dehumanize the people who call it home.

The unbearable lightness of the Hamas terror regime's statement, and the yawn with which it is being received by the media, is disturbing to us. A 21 year-old religiously-inspired thug, armed with a knife and a passion for Jewish blood-spilling, is now being healed in a Jerusalem hospital after Daniel Motza, the police officer whom he stabbed (the second of yesterday's victims), managed to fell him with a shot from his service pistol. His murderous intentions are perfectly natural to the authorities in Gaza.

Perfectly natural, too, that Israeli doctors will now spend time, effort, skill and units of Magen David Adom-supplied blood healing this barbarian.

And perfectly natural that the Palestinian Arab terror organizations in all their various guises and branches will continue to plot their next attack on children, elderly pensioners and mothers - oops, sorry - settlers - in this ongoing war.

UPDATE 8:00am Friday:



Above: The Melbourne Age today prominently carries this Reuters report on the wounding of a Palestinian man by the Israeli authorities "who say" he had stabbed a police officer. Reuters says "The man wielding the knife and the police officer are being treated for their injuries". The un-named eighty-six year old gets into this only because, as Reuters put it, the police "say" they shot the Palestinian after he killed a settler. For Reuters, the story is about allegations (presumably refutable) and about occupied territories (occupation is never refutable in the lexicon of its editors), but only marginally about murder and terrorism. And not at all about the humanity of the victims of terrorist organizations like Hamas.

21-Oct-08: Doing what they do best

Israel is ending three weeks of high holy days and pleasant festival dates tonight with the end of Tabernacles. A perfect time for the neighbourhood practitioners of terror to remind us they are still around:

Last update - 20:31 21/10/2008
Gaza militants fire Qassam into W. Negev after month-long lull
By Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondent
Gaza militants fired a Qassam rocket into the western Negev Tuesday evening, for the first time in over a month, in violation of a cease fire agreement between Israel Hamas, signed in mid-June. The rocket struck an open area near Nativ Ha'asara. No injuries or damage were reported. Defense Minister Ehud Barak consulted his advisors and security officials following the strike, and later announced his decision to shut down the border crossings between Israel and the Strip in response. This decision is in keeping with Israel's routine response to Qassam fire underscoring the message that rockets result in closed borders.

The most recent terror-missile strike on Israel happened a little over a month ago, on September 14, when a Qassam rocket hit the western Negev town of Sderot, sparking a fire on a construction site. The Al-Quds Brigades, an operating unit of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, announced responsibility for that terror attack. (Their orders mainly come from Syria.) Another missile attack failed a few days later - the explosive device fell inside the Hamas Gaza zone where no one (on their side or in the media) pays much attention to the damage or injuries.

An Arab source published earlier this week said the same terror group lost another in a long line of paradise-bound operatives in an explosion-handling 'work accident' in Gaza (his funeral is depicted above), quickly reminding its readers that Al-Quds "fighters will continue their resistance against the Israeli occupation until liberation and Independence for the Palestinian people."

One of its more prominent killers was quoted in a different report last week announcing plans to get married in a few days time, boasting that he had just "completed a lengthy and intensive training program... In any case, our first priority is the battle against the enemy and the jihad."

Israel has seen a significant decline in the number of rockets fired into its territory from the Gaza Strip by the Palestinian Arab terrorists since a cease-fire in this ongoing war went into effect on 19th June. Not a cessation, of course, but a definite reduction. For those counting, there have been about twenty reported missile attacks on Israel since the lull began.

Constant Israeli vigilance and military preparedness are indispensable tools when your neighbourhood is characterized, as ours is, by a culture of religiously-inspired terror, murder and vengeance.

5-Oct-08: Learning the lessons of the checkpoints

We've written numerous times here about events that happen at the military checkpoints through which Palestinian Arabs are obliged to pass and be checked.

The Hawara crossing, rarely mentioned in the foreign news but the scene of frequent trouble, offers an insight into this ongoing war and the many ways it is not understood by people who ought to know better.

This morning, alert Israeli service personnel at Hawara, located in the Shomron (Samaria) district near Shechem (Nablus) sensed that a man with a bag was worthy of closer checking. Turns out he was carrying two explosive pipe bombs. They detained him and called in a sapper who removed the weapons and destroyed them in a controlled detonation.

Two weeks ago, at the same place, a young Palestinian Arab man was stopped and arrested after pulling out a 10-centimeter (4-inch) knife and attempting to stab one of the Israeli personnel manning the station. YNet reports that "the soldier cocked his weapon, and the terrorist let go of the knife". A pity the report did not state the obvious which is never - somehow - obvious: the armed Israeli military personnel could have easily ended the would-be murderer's life. They had the arms, the military and moral justification and the opportunity. But that's not the nature of the transactions at the crossings. The Palestinian Arabs keep passing through on their journey to Paradise; the young Israeli service people are under strict orders to stand stoically and seek to disarm and stop them.

Two days before that, a Palestinian Arab woman poured acid on a young Israeli soldier stationed at the same checkpoint. He may lose the eyesight in one of his eyes.

The same woman had hurled an acidic substance on a soldier at the checkpoint two weeks earlier than that, managing to injure three Palestinian Arabs along the way according to AFP.

Time to state the obvious, though experience suggests it's rarely obvious to most people: the aim of the Palestinian Arabs mentioned here is not to achieve some strategic goal; not to capture some crossing; not even - based on years of data - to cause harm to the soldiers they regard as an occupation force, and whom we regard as the main reason why more Israelis have not been killed or maimed.

The aim of the stabber, the pipe-bomber, the acid thrower is to bring terrorism into Israeli society. If they can reach women, children, civilians, buses, hospitals, schools, restaurants - then they have won. Those are their goals. That is their morality and their value system.

The picture above shows a 14 year-old, somewhat learning-disabled Palestinian Arab boy called Hussam Muhammad Bilal Abdu. Four years ago, on 24th March 2004, the socially-awkward child was made to place an 8 kilogram explosive belt on his body under his coat and to carry it through Hawara and onward into those parts of Israel where large numbers of Jewish women and children can be found. He was in a literal sense turned into a walking bomb, like so many who have been stopped since then by Israeli forces.

The great gift made to this child by the Palestinian Arab education system was, by his own admission, to impregnate his mind with a vision of sex with heavenly virgins. That, and a daily regimen of Fatah-inspired hate training, was what it took to turn a child into a bomb. (Fatah is headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Fatah claimed responsibility for the Hussam Abdu outrage, and freely acknowledged equipping him and sending him.)

After years of construction and much political controversy, the security barrier that has brought such criticism onto Israel has still not been completed. There remain vast swathes of the country where terrorists can cross over unimpeded. And yet day after day, the security personnel manning the checkpoints find and stop terrorists. And day after day, clueless observers, many of them paid reporters for important media outlets, criticize and condemn Israel for the presence of these measures that have saved so many lives in the past eight years.

Not all of them are quite as witless or agenda-driven as the appalling Robert Fisk, author of a classic of the genre. Published in the Independent (UK) in April 2001, his noxious polemic entitled "How pointless checkpoints humiliate the lions of Palestine, sending them on the road to vengeance" appeared less than four months before our daughter and 14 other innocents were murdered by a man who carried a bomb through an Israeli checkpoint and was not stopped.

Fisk rhetorically asks of the Israelis "So why did they stop me? For "security" reasons? Or because their checkpoints are not about security at all, but about humiliation?" The man with the pipe bomb and the woman with the acid can probably help him and his colleagues figure it out.