28-Sep-11: Quotation of the day - just in time for having in mind when we formulate New Year wishes

85 people were murdered in the bombing of  the Asociación Mutual
Israelita Argentina (AMIA or Argentine Israelite Mutual Association)
building in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, Argentina's deadliest bombing.
Argentine formally charged the government of Iran in 2006 with
directing the bombing, and its client the Hezbollah terrorist organization
with carrying it out [Source]

While terrorism is a constant concern for Israelis, it's by no means limited to us or our part of the world.

The phenomenon of terrorism against Jewish communities and Israeli targets abroad represents the most violent aspect of contemporary anti-Semitism, and the greatest physical danger to diaspora Jewish communities. The rational calculations of political violence and the irrational fantasies of extreme ideologies can combine to threaten the lives of ordinary Jews and others all over the world. This clarifies in the starkest terms why Jewish communities require security at their synagogues, schools, and community buildings. 

From an article entitled "Terrorist Incidents Against Jewish Communities and Israeli Citizens Abroad, 1968-2010". The writer, Michael Whine, is Director of Government and International Affairs at the Community Security Trust in the UK [Source]

Our prayer, as the year winds down (Jewish New Year is this evening) is that the plotters of terrorism, in all their evil manifestations and many locations, be thoroughly confounded in their plans with the start of the new year. The future of mankind and of civil society depends on our decisively winning this ongoing war.

Shana Tova Umetuka. A sweet and good new year.

27-Sep-11: Press freedom, democracy and terrorism: how is it that some people keep getting them mixed up?

For some weeks, there has been a steady stream of protests and advocacy concerning the arrest by Israeli authorities of a senior journalist. We're referring to Samer Farik Muhammad Allawi. He lives in Pakistan and has worked until two months ago as Al Jazeera's Afghanistan bureau chief. Al Jazeera is headed by Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of Qatar's royal family.

On 9th August 2011, which happens to be the tenth anniversary of the murder of our daughter in a Hamas massacre, Allawi was arrested at the Allenby Crossing on Israel's border with Jordan. The charge was involvement in Hamas activities. Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization.

Yesterday, Allawi was convicted in an Israeli court. Since the fact of his arrest has gotten wide coverage, and since - for strange and inscrutable reasons - the things he admits to doing have not (the Reuters report here, for instance), we are making our small contribution here to publicizing what Samer Farik Muhammad Allawi admitted to doing.

• Allawi, who happens to call himself a Palestinian Arab by birth, admitted that was recruited to Hamas in 1993.  
• Until 2004, he served Hamas as a member of its Supreme Palestine Committee that supervises and directs Hamas institutions and activity.  
• He collected donations for Hamas fronts including the Al-Aqsa Association and the so-called Palestinian Information and Media Center.
• While working for SPC, Allawi traveled to Syria in 2001 and 2003 in order to report on his activities to Musa Abu Marzook, deputy to Hamas fuehrer, politbureau head and Terrorist-in-Chief Khaled Mashal.  
• Allawi says Mashal asked him in 2004 to come and work for him as Hamas representative in Iran.  Allawi said no.
• Allawi admitted that in 2000, during a meeting with a Hamas operative in Dubai, he agreed to carry out activity of a military or organizational nature for Hamas.  Specifically, Allawi proposed that he would work to aid Hamas in advancing its goals by utilizing his position as a senior journalist with Al Jazeera.
• In 2006, Allawi met in Qatar with Hamas terrorists who also serve as Al Jazeera correspondents. Collectively they agreed to exploit their work with Al Jazeera in order to strengthen Hamas in a variety of ways including criticizing American operations in Afghanistan and expressing support for the Palestinian resistance - a euphemism for the terrorist groups, chiefly Hamas, that target Israeli civilian populations.
• In 2010, during another meeting with Hamas "operatives" in Al-Jazzera's hometown of Qatar, Allawi was asked again to undertake subtle public advocacy to benefit Hamas and the Palestinian struggle by leveraging his journalistic position to undermine support for the Americans.

Allawi was convicted yesterday (26-Sep-11) on the basis of his own confession, in the framework of a plea bargain. He will serve no additional jail time, though he now has a suspended sentence of three years hanging over his head.

Those who believe Al-Jazeera and similar news agencies deliver objective news reporting with no bias, no advocacy, no hidden deals or agendas, will keep believing. But at least now there's a written record of what this particular reporter has admitted. (And we have it in Arabic too, here.)

Oh, and in case he plans to go report from Gaza, Allawi's Hamas colleagues, those world-class champions of democracy and free speech, have introduced some brand new rules. The BBC has a summary today: "Gaza foreign press restrictions imposed by Hamas... New restrictions on foreign journalists working in the Gaza Strip have been introduced by the Hamas authorities. The Islamist movement which governs the Palestinian territory says journalists must now apply five days in advance in order to work there."

We wonder whether Al-Jazeera's editors will consider this worthy of their objective, impartial attention.

27-Sep-11: From another bereaved parent

"Mourning Under Glass: Reflections
on a Son's Murder" published in
August 2011 is available through
Amazon or at www.tragic-death.com

We received this letter today from Dr Naftali Moses. His son Avraham David, 16, was one of the eight high school students murdered in the cold-blooded massacre at Jerusalem's Merkaz Harav school in March 2008 (we reported it here):

Nothing can prepare one for the loss of a child. Nothing can prepare a parent to hear the news of a terror attack and slowly discover that his son is among the eight shot down in cold blood. Nothing can prepare a father for the heartrending pain that burying his firstborn son brings. On March 6, 2008, my sixteen-year-old son, Avraham David, was killed while studying in the Mercaz HaRav library in Jerusalem. On that day my life changed forever.

In the first year of mourning my son, I often felt torn between the intimacy of loss and its public expression. In one tragic moment, my son had become a “martyr,” and I, a “bereaved parent.” Having already buried his body, I worried how I could ever preserve his memory under the frequently too-bright lights of public attention. Mourning Under Glass explores the tensions between memory and memorial, between private pain and public mourning. Can any of our attempts at memorial adequately recall an extinguished life? Can any give voice to the nearly ineffable pain of loss?

You can learn more about me and Mourning Under Glass on my website.
Shanah tovah,
Dr. Naftali Moses, PhD
www.tragic-death.com

Dr. Moses makes his home in Efrat, Israel with his wife, three children and Choco the dog. He teaches Jewish medical ethics. He has written on philosophy in the Mishnah, aggadah in the Talmud and death in Israeli society.

27-Sep-11: Egypt-to-Israel gas pipeline sabotaged for sixth time this year

What does it tell us when a strategically invaluable gas pipeline linking Israel with Egypt gets blown up for the sixth time in seven months? February 2011 is when the Mubarak regime fell, and the start of the latest stage in the stepwise conversion of increasingly-lawless Sinai into Israel's third battlefront.

Now, in the latest such attack, three men opened fire  last night at a pumping station near the town of el-Arish in Sinai, according to Reuters. Under a 2008 agreement, Egypt is contractually committed to supply 1.7 bn cubic metres a year over 20 years. 43% of Israel's natural gas comes via this pipeline, and it's the basis for 40% of Israel's electricity production, according to AFP. El-Arish is 50km from the border with Israel.

According to JPost, Egypt has been trying to charge Israel and Jordan more for its gas after complaining that prices fixed during Mubarak's rule were below market rates. The pipeline is run by Gasco, Egypt's gas transport company which is a subsidiary of the national gas company EGAS. The Egyptian armed forces launched a security operation in Sinai in August to root out hundreds of suspected militants believed to be behind some of the attacks on the pipeline and police compounds in the peninsula. Security sources said then that they had captured a group of four Islamist militants as they prepared to blow up the gas pipeline in el-Arish. Whether true or not, the larger facts - six explosions since February - speak for themselves, and what they're saying bodes ill for relations with our southern neighbours.

A Wall Street Journal article yesterday says U.S. intelligence officials no longer have any doubt that al Qaeda are operating in the Sinai peninsula. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the post-Bin Laden head of Al-Qaeda was quoted last month exhorting his followers (and fellow Egyptians) in Egypt to take advantage of Mubarak's ouster. "I commend the heroes who blew up the gas pipeline to Israel. I ask Allah to reward them for their heroic act, for they have expressed the anger of the Islamic Ummah against this continuing crime from the reign of Hosni Mubarak to the rule of the Military Council."

Nearly half of our electricity being produced from energy that comes from an Al-Qaeda terrorist-controlled region, overseen by a mostly-passive military junta in Cairo. What could possibly go wrong?

25-Sep-11: "Only" rock throwers - but now a father and his infant son are dead

Rocks, slings and young men: Irresistible romantic imagery
for dishonest editors - and the source for a rising death toll of
innocent civilians 

Two of the constants in this part of the world are (a) the phenomenon of Palestinian Arab men - some young, but not all - hurling rocks at fast-moving Israeli cars; and (b) the wilful but completely dishonest minimization of the deadly threat posed by such attacks. Here's the latest illustration of why this double-headed problem is so serious.

What seemed on Friday to be a routine car accident now turns out to have been an attack by terrorists in the vicinity of the Jewish community of Kiryat Arba. [Source]. The Jerusalem Post reports this evening that police now believe that rock throwing was the cause of the car accident that killed Asher Hillel Palmer, 25, and his one-year-old son Yonatan on Friday. At a court hearing today, counsel for the police said that it now appears the car veered off the road after a rock shattered its  windshield. "The police said that the front window was shattered, and a large rock was found inside the car with Palmer's blood on it. People close to the victims claimed that the police quickly determined it as a car accident in order not to inflame the region."

A young man and his baby son are dead and a family is forever shattered.

It's possible the perpetrators drew inspiration from a highly publicized ambush by masked rock-throwing children of an Israeli in Jerusalem's suburbs last October. You might remember the incident (see video below): the Arab media and especially Al Jazeera presented what happened in their customary Daoud vs Goliath fashion: "innocent" and "meek" Arab schoolboys, armed only with loincloths and slingshots callously run down by aggressive Israeli in his armored Zionist vehicle. The presence of a phalanx of cameramen, clearly positioning themselves at that location because of the expectation that there would be some highly photogenic violence is completely absent from the anti-Israel reporting. Likewise the cynical abuse of Palestinian Arab children by their adults (Arabs) who are at the scene.

Throwing rocks at moving cars is an act of terrorism. Terrorism means the deliberate inflicting of violence on civilians in order to intimidate a population - to paraphrase the United Nations General Assembly's draft Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism. That's a convention that is highly unlikely ever to be enacted, by the way, given the perpetual opposition to it from the UN's most powerful lobby, the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Throwing rocks is as deadly as firing a rifle or throwing a grenade. The people who routinely portray rock throwing Palestinian Arabs as liberation warriors in training know this. That's why despicable is too mild a word for scurrilous advocacy/reportage pieces like "Throwing rocks at the occupation – and Western prejudice too" [Electronic Intifada] and "Forget rock-throwing teens. Growing peaceful Palestinian resistance could tip the conflict" [Christian Science Monitor].

Like some other kinds of terrorists, rock throwing youths can seem like romantic figures - especially when portrayed that way by naive or activist editors - right up until the moment they bring tragedy into your own family or community.

UPDATE 3-Oct-11: We just found this photograph (at left) of the father and son killed by rock-hurling thugs: Asher Hillel Palmer, and his infant son Yonatan Z"L. May their memories serve as a blessing, and may their family find comfort among the mourners of Zion.

UPDATE 27-Jan-12: There's a further postscript here.

19-Sep-11: Incoming Qassam rocket again tonight

A Qassam rocket fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza crashed into an open area in southern Israel's Eshkol region tonight. The reports says no injuries, no significant property damage. [Ynet]

18-Sep-11: National heroines, national catastrophes

Understanding the choice of a people’s heroes can tell you a lot about those people and their values.

The Palestinian Arabs have been busy the past two weeks with a series of symbolic public events in the run-down to their campaign for recognition by the United Nations. More than Mahmoud Abbas and his Muqata clique realize, they have revealed more about the values that motivate them than their careful speeches conceal.

Almost every nation and people on earth have their iconic female figures. Here’s the briefest of looks at some selected national heroines and mothers of revolutions from different parts of the world.

The Spanish

 Agustina, maid of Aragon [Source]

Agustinade Aragón ('Agustina, maid of Aragon', known as the Spanish Joan of Arc) defended Spain during the Spanish War of Independence as a civilian and later as a professional officer in the Spanish Army. At the bloody sieges of Saragossa, at the moment Spanish troops abandoned their posts to avoid falling on the nearby French bayonets, she ran forward, loaded a cannon, lit the fuse and shredded a wave of attackers at point blank range. The sight of a lone woman bravely manning the cannons inspired the fleeing Spanish troops and other volunteers to return and assist her.

Joan [Source]

The French

Saint Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans (1412-1431), a national heroine of France and a Catholic saint, was a peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance. She led the French army in an astounding series of victories that reversed the tide of the Hundred Year’s War, paving the way for the coronation of Charles VII. Captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English, she was tried by an ecclesiastical court and burned at the stake when 19 years old. 25 years after the execution, Pope Callixtus III examined the trial, pronounced her innocent and declared her a martyr. She was canonized in 1920 and is one of the patron saints of France.

The Australians

Mary McKillop

Mary Helen MacKillop (1842 – 1909), also known as Saint Mary of the Cross, was an Australian Roman Catholic nun who, together with Father Julian Tenison Woods, founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart and a number of schools and welfare institutions throughout Australasia with an emphasis on education for the poor, particularly in country areas. Since her death she has attracted much veneration in Australia and internationally. She is the only Australian to be recognised by the Roman Catholic Church as a saint.


The Argentineans

MaríaEva Duarte de Perón (1919–1952) was the second wife of President Juan Perón (1895–1974) and served as the First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death in 1952. She is often referred to as simply Eva Perón, or by the affectionate Spanish language diminutive Evita. Born out of wedlock in a rural Argentina village, she pursued a career as a stage, radio, and film actress in the capital. Eva met Colonel Juan Perón on January 22, 1944, in Buenos Aires during a charity event at the Luna Park Stadium to benefit the victims of an earthquake in San Juan, Argentina. The two were married the following year. 

Evita

In 1946, Juan Perón was elected President of Argentina. Over the course of the next six years, Eva Perón became powerful within the pro-Peronist trade unions, primarily for speaking on behalf of labor rights. She also ran the Ministries of Labor and Health, founded and ran the charitable Eva Perón Foundation, championed women's suffrage in Argentina, and founded and ran the nation's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party. In 1951, Eva Perón renounced the Peronist nomination for the office of Vice President of Argentina. In this bid, she received great support from the Peronist political base, low-income and working class Argentines who were referred to as descamisados or "shirtless ones". However, opposition from the nation's military and bourgeoisie, coupled with her declining health, ultimately forced her to withdraw her candidacy. In 1952 shortly before her death from cancer at the age of 33, Eva Perón was given the official title of "Spiritual Leader of the Nation" by the Argentine Congress.


The British

Queen Boadicea [Source]

Boadicea (d. AD 60) was queen of the British Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. Her husband Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni tribe who had ruled as a nominally independent ally of Rome, left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman Emperor in his will. However, when he died, his will was ignored. The kingdom was annexed as if conquered, Boadicea was flogged and her daughters raped, and Roman financiers called in their loans. Boadicea led the Iceni people, along with the Trinovantes and others, in revolt. They destroyed Camulodunum (modern Colchester), formerly the capital of the Trinovantes. The crisis caused the emperor Nero to consider withdrawing all Roman forces from the island, but Suetonius' eventual victory secured Roman control of the province. Boadicea then killed herself so she would not be captured. 


The Israelis

Hannah Szenes (1921 - 1944) was a Hungarian Jewish woman, one of 37 Jews from the British Mandate for Palestine (now Israel) that were trained by the British army to parachute into Yugoslavia during the Second World War in order to help save the Jews of Hungary, who were about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz. Szenes was arrested at the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured, but she refused to reveal details of her mission and was eventually tried and executed by firing squad. She is regarded as a national heroine in Israel, where several streets, the headquarters of the Zionist youth movements Israel Hatzeira and a kibbutz are named after her, and her poetry is widely known.

The Palestinian Arabs

Which brings us to the Palestinian Arabs and their governments. They enjoy the experience so much, they have two of them (governments, that is), a fact that seems not to trouble the UN or most international governments but that we think may prove to be a little tricky in these coming weeks and months when a Palestinian Arab entity seeks to get to its feet and take its seat at the UN General Assembly. (As always, we're not so interested to deal here with the political issues. This blog's focus is terrorism and terrorists.)

Here's one of their highest profile heroines, as described by the most prominent of the Palestinian newsagencies, Maan. 

Leader of Hamas female detainees marks 11 years in jail

Published Friday 16/09/2011 (updated) 19/09/2011 11:12 

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- The Detainees Ministry in Gaza highlighted on Friday the case of Ahlam al-Tamimi, 31, detained by Israel exactly 11 years ago [ThisOngoingWar Comment: Actually not right - see our comments below.] Al-Tamimi was detained from her family home in Ramallah, and sentenced to life on charges of transferring a suicide bomber to Jerusalem. She heads the Hamas female detainees group in prison, and is currently in isolation at Hasharon prison after she delivered a speech to detainees during Eid al-Fitr. Al-Tamimi, who studied journalism, is married to Nizar al-Tamimi who received a life sentence in Israeli jail in 1993. The ministry said al-Tamimi now suffers from severe backache as a result of her detention.

Detained for eleven years and with a sore back and all. Makes you wonder about the Israelis and their vindictiveness, no? 

The reporters and editors at Maan somehow forget to mention that this woman was tried in a court and convicted of fifteen acts of murder. Not a single enemy soldier, not one Zionist bureaucrat or Israeli police officer or Jewish tax collector appear in the list of her victims. That's because she planned the massacre so that its victims would be women and children. In this, she succeeded. Our daughter Malki, who was fifteen years old when her life was stolen by this monster and the Hamas gang that helped her execute the plan, is one of those innocent civilian victims. 


[And it's not eleven years, despite what Maan published. The Sbarro massacre itself, which she engineered and played a critical role in executing, took place 10 years ago on 9th August 2001. As we wrote in this blog three years ago: "In October 2003, Ahlam Tamimi was sentenced to 16 consecutive life sentences for her role in the terror bombing of Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant." She had been arrested by the Israeli authorities 13 months earlier on 14th September 2001.]


This convict has been interviewed repeatedly in her Israeli prison and has taken the trouble each time to remove any doubts people might have about her state of mind. She makes clear that she has no feelings of remorse; she is proud that she can claim to have murdered so many children, woman and civilian men. 

And why not? Her governments, both of them, have said again and again and again that this convicted murderer is a heroine. A national heroine for a new state in need of role models and heroes. Killing the enemy's children? What could better express the sentiments that brought the Palestinian Arab leadership to want yet another Arab state? A barbarian in every sense of the word, she is the very embodiment of the spirit of our times.

Mrs Abu Hmeid: Embodying her people's
aspirations and values

Then there's Mrs Latifa Abu Hmeid (pictured at right). She received world-wide attention last week because it was she, a simple and bowed peasant woman, who presented a critically important document to the local representative of the UN secretary-general in the name of the Palestinian Arab government (one of them, at any rate).

Mrs Abu Hmeid evidently fits the Abbas regime's idea of Palestinian Motherhood with a capital M. This is because she stitches together quilts. Saves bean cans for recycling. And composes patriotic songs.

Actually no. in the words of a Palestinian government functionary called Issa Karake, a minister in the Abbas regime, she is the recipient of the Plaque of Resoluteness and Giving "and she deserves that we bow to her in salute and in honor."

The reason for the salute and honor? You won't find the answer in any of the Reuters, AP, AFP and other news-agency reports. They're too busy mindlessly recycling the press releases handed to them by the spin-masters of Ramallah. 

The official PA daily laconically wrote that the woman is the "mother of seven prisoners". For reasons about which we can only guess, they somehow deleted the part about how four of the seven are convicted murderers. To put it plainly, Mrs Abu Hmeid was honored by her government because she gave birth to a string of sons who became killers and terrorists. [See "Mother of 4 terrorist murderers chosen by the PA to launch statehood campaign", online here.] Take a look at the 2002 charge sheet for just one of them, Nasser Bin Mohammed Yusuf Naji Abu-Hmeid, an ally of the infamous Marwan Barghouti; it recites a long list of crimes including murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder and assorted acts of barbaric terrorism.

So what does all this tell us about the prospects for peaceful relations with a constructive, welfare-focused democratic state in our neighbourhood? Not that much, in our view. Most Israelis - long familiar with the bloodbaths that have periodically characterized  relations between citizens and their despotic rulers in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, all of them on our borders - take a realistic view of how these things work.

But what can the Palestinian Arabs - and their European minders and funders - be thinking?

8-Sep-11: Stopping the jihadists before they strike - some successes, some failures

The impending tenth anniversary this coming Sunday of the 9/11 massacres carried out by Islamists in New York and Washington represents a moment for reflecting on lessons learned and not learned. We plan to write about this in the coming days. But two news events, yesterday and today, illustrate the need for a deeper level of understanding (by governments, by the media, by ordinary people like ourselves) of the price the terrorists exact from civil society.

In India yesterday, a terror group called Harkat-ul-Jihad operating in the name of Islam claimed credit for a placing a bomb in a briefcase in a crowded reception area at the entrance of the High Court building in Delhi. Eleven people were killed, more than 80 injured. (A similar explosion in more or less the same place happened in May.) The Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh is quoted saying that anti-terror "mechanisms" have been put in place by the Indian authorities, but that "there are weaknesses in our system [and] we must work hard to plug the weaknesses."

Truer words have never been said, and the problems are not limited to India. The war of the jihadists is global. Every society is their perceived enemy. 

The Israeli authorities understand this, by and large. Also yesterday (Wednesday), the authorities responsible for public security - chiefly the police and the Security Service (the Shin Bet, in Hebrew) - disclosed that an undercover effort of several months has uncovered multiple terror cells and plans in various stages designed to cause death and pain at several locations in our country.

Here's the essence of what was revealed:

• Though the terrorists apprehended in this campaign are mainly associated with Hamas which controls the Gaza Strip, the activities now disclosed are focused on the West Bank. 
• Dozens of Hamas terrorists were arrested, including the person who carried out the "heroic" placing of a bomb at a bus stop outside Jerusalem's busy congress center in March 2011 that took the life of a British woman and injured 47 others waiting to catch buses.
• Overseas Hamas bases - chiefly in Syria, Turkey and China - were involved in the co-ordination of these latest terrorist plots.
• Also uncovered were attempts to smuggle weapons from the Gaza Strip into the West Bank.
• Dozens of Hamas terrorists, organized in at least 13 terror cells, were arrested across the West Bank over the past few weeks.
• Ynet says the planned terror attacks included an intended bombing - by means of a religious maniac who was ready to blow himself up in order to murder innocent Israelis - in the Pisgat Ze'ev community on Jerusalem's outskirts. In that plot, the bomb was found in a home in the Jerusalem neighborhood of  Ras al-Amud. It carried three kilograms of explosive, topped with a mound of deadly metallic shrapnel, and concealed within a fire extinguisher. The human bomb, a man of 20 called Said Qawasmeh from Hebron has been obliged to postpone his meeting with the promised 72 virgins.
• Among their other goals: to kidnap IDF soldiers and hold them as bargaining chips in future prisoner exchange deals, which we think sounds especially chilling in view of the horrifying experiences of Gilad Shalit and his family. A terrorist from Hebron, Shaher Skaphi, provided his Israeli interrogators with copious details of the plot to kidnap and secure an Israeli serviceman and then negotiate for his release in exchange for Hamas prisoners held by Israel.

No one here is under any illusions that terrorism and its dangers were brought to an end by the breaking of this particular cluster of cells. The war against the jihadists and their enablers is never-ending, and includes numerous failures as well as occasional successes. There will be more such cells, and some will carry out their plans while others will be stopped. There are no silver-bullet solutions. 

But first you have to come to the conclusion that the threats are real and global, and the targeted victims are not always in far-off places like India and Israel.