27-Sep-19: Weaponized Palestinian Arab children and more Arab-on-Israel stabbings

Image Source

From Israel National News, an on-duty Israel Police officer was stabbed in Jerusalem's Old City Thursday afternoon.

The attack on the woman is being treated as a terror attack. Her injuries were relatively mild (for a stabbing); she was brought to Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment.

The knifer was apprehended after being wrestled to the ground (not shot, not beaten to a pulp) and taken into custody by other officers at the scene. Israel's Channel 13 News shows a video clip [here] and says the attacker is a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen.

Thirteen. Yet another weaponized child. A life incomprehensibly cheapened, and in danger of being wasted before it gets underway.

Referring to this child assailant, Times of Israel says he approached a cluster of officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate (in Hebrew: Sha'ar Hashalshelet), above the Western Wall area, around 4:00 pm. He pulled out a knife and in the customary way attempted to stab anyone he could, indiscriminately. Any Jew would do.

We expect he will now become another poster child for the irresponsible human rights industry's pleas for Israel to stop arresting children. Listening, Amnesty?

A day earlier, Wednesday, an Israeli woman of about twenty was stabbed in another act of Arab-on-Israel terrorism near the busy Maccabim/Shilat Junction on Route 443. That's the major highway that runs between Jerusalem and the airport.

The website of i24News reports that the woman was standing at a bus stop which is adjacent to the main entrance to the city of Modi’in. For what it's worth, the bus stop is inside the Green Line which is frequently - and totally misleadingly - called the 1967 border. (It's simply the 1949 armistice line, nothing more.) The Arabb news reports we have seen tell their readers that this was an attack on settlers in some occupied place. It's a powerful form of incitement, too good to skip by troubling themselves with checking the actual facts.

The Israeli victim received emergency medical treatment at the scene and was brought to Tel Hashomer Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Her condition was described as light to moderate in a Magen David Adom bulletin.

We found this security camera footage on an Arab news site (the contents almost certainly originated with an Israeli source):



A 14-year-old Palestinian Arab male was taken into custody at the scene. Yes, 14. Yet another weaponized child. Who says the Palestinian Arab education system produces nothing notable?

Child weaponization by the Palestinian Arab despots of their people's children is a subject that enrages us. That's one reason why we address it so frequently. Click here for some our prior posts on this deplorable and ongoing phenomenon.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Zamienione w broń palestyńskie dzieci") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

UPDATE Thursday October 10, 2019: The stabber in the video above, the attack near Modi'in, turns out to be all of fifteen. Times of Israel reports today

15-year-old Palestinian indicted for stabbing Israeli woman near Modiin
Teen charged with terror offenses for attack at Maccabim Junction on Route 443 last month
October 10, 2019 at 2:18 pm | Prosecutors on Thursday indicted a 15-year-old on terror charges for stabbing an Israeli woman near the central city of Modiin last month. According to the indictment, the teenage boy is accused of carrying out a terror attack, illegal possession of a knife and entering Israel illegally. The prosecution has requested that the suspect be detained until the end of legal proceedings. The 22-year-old woman was stabbed on September 25 at the Maccabim Junction along Route 443. She was treated in a hospital for a stab wound to her upper body. Police said a Border Police officer was also lightly hurt while restraining the suspect. According to police, Border Police officers driving on Route 443 spotted the suspect trying to flee and chased after him on foot. The officers fired a number of bullets in the air, and collared the suspect a few hundred meters from the scene of the stabbing.

16-Aug-19: Children with knives and another Arab-on-Israeli stabbing frenzy

Photo montage from an online source [here] shows the stabbers

as depicted today in the social media and via security cam footage

In the latest such attack, two Palestinian Arab children armed with knives ["Cop injured in Jerusalem stabbing attack; 2 assailants shot", Times of Israel, August 15, 2019] were stopped from killing their Israeli targets on Thursday.

Both are minors. At least one is 14 years old. Some reports, but not all, say the other is too.

Two teenage assailants stabbed a police officer, moderately injuring him, in an apparent terror attack in Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday, officials said. The assailants were shot by security forces at the scene. One of them was pronounced dead at the scene, the second was critically wounded and taken to the hospital, a police spokesperson said.
Graphic video footage from the scene showed the two teenagers walk up from behind a group of police officers stationed in the Old City. As they approached, they suddenly pulled out knives and began repeatedly stabbing one of the cops. Other officers at the scene opened fire at the pair as they were stabbing the victim.
The injured police officer was approximately 40 years old. He sustained multiple stab wounds to the upper body, medics said.
“We gave him medical care, including stopping the bleeding and bandaging him, and we took him to the hospital,” one of the medics on the scene said. The officer was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Via social media [click to view], there's high quality graphic security cam video of the actual attack and of the quick and focused response by the Israeli security personnel.

The location is said to be the Old City's Chain Gate. It's one of the dozen open gates (though sometimes closed) that lead to the Temple Mount and is limited, in accordance with current Israeli security measures, to Muslim worshipers and visitors only. In Arabic, they call it Kubat A Silsila.

Shortly after the attack [Image Source]

Haaretz names the 14 year old knifer as Hamuda Khader a-Sheikh who is being treated for his wounds, and a 17 year old (in their version) they name as Nassim Abu Rumi who is said to have died at the scene. (In its report, Ynet says the dead attacker was also fourteen.)

Both evidently, though not confirmed, are from Al-Azaria, a village on the slopes of Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. It's better known to some as the Biblical town of Bethany, the home of Lazarus (hence its Arabic name).

Arab reports include wide-ranging claims that deny and distort:

• Eyewitnesses refuted the IDF's allegations and confirmed that there was no stabbing. They explained that a settler tried to storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and when the guards tried to stop him, he opened fire on the guard's foot... [Sabaharabi, Egypt]
• The police opened fire on two citizens at the Gate of Chains [in the Old City] from the outside, then announced the martyrdom of one of them. The injury of the other is described as medium. An Al Aqsa guard was shot in the foot. [Arabic edition of Ma'an News, Bethlehem]
• The Zionist media reported that a cop was injured by two Palestinian stabbers who attacked him in occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem). The Israeli occupation troops shot directly at the two youths, injuring both of them, and closes the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque, according to Palestinian sources. [Al-Manar, Lebanon]
• Video shows the pair approaching a group of Border Police officers and then lunging at them. The officers immediately open fire on the boys, and do not appear to attempt to subdue them with nonlethal means [from the especially loathsome propaganda mill of Electronic Intifada].
• From a Gaza-based Arab reporter: "2 palestinian kids got murdered by israeli occupation fire in occupied Jerusalem after allegedly stabbing operation #BDS" [Twitter account with more than 6,000 followers]

Source

How Palestinian Arab society weaponizes its children and encourages stabbing attacks in particular has troubled us for years. 

It's a chronic form of incitement that starts at the highest levels of the Palestinian Arab power structure: click for indexed articles.

Three years ago we wrote about how there is no way of avoiding the reality of large swathes of Palestinian Arab society being in the obvious thrall of a passionate embrace of vicious bigotry, murderous savagery and explicit incitement of their own children and grandchildren to murder and to be killed.

Two outside actors deserve a special mention in this grotesquerie:

• The central role of UNRWA, ostensibly an agency that exists to ameliorate the suffering of Arab refugees (Palestinian Arab refugees to be more precise) but in reality a cornerstone of the seven-decades-long Arab strategy to keep the Palestinian Arabs displaced, as miserable as possible and in the news - ought to be acknowledged at this point. By their own reckoning, they play a huge role in the education of Palestinian Arab children. They are certainly part of the problem and not of the solution.
• Amnesty International's increasingly explicit identification with the practitioners of the Palestinian Arab brand of terror makes plain their abandonment of principle and betrayal of their supporters' values. As we have noted several times [most recently here: "20-Sep-16: Another Pal Arab boy with a knife died today - exactly as the PA intended him to"], there's no longer anything to expect from them.

More than 80 of our blog posts have the tag "Weaponizing Children". This would be an excellent time to re-acquaint ourselves with the betrayal of, and the outrages perpetrated on, the children of Palestinian Arab society by those responsible for their well-being.

It's a reality that's difficult to deny or ignore though plenty of reporters and their editors nonetheless do just that.

24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey

Ahed Tamimi in court last week
[Image Source]

A depressingly large number of people posting in various social media channels are hammering away right now at a campaign that tries to characterize the Palestinian Arab teen Ahed Tamimi as a victim of Israeli oppression, as a human rights activist, as a freedom fighter.

She's the young woman many know as Shirley Temper, a photogenic and compliant performer who for at least eight years now has been the central child figure in a long-running propaganda performance orchestrated by her father, the full-time propagandist Bassem Tamimi and his publicity business he operates, Tamimi Press.

What others say about this is very much on our minds. What Bassem Tamimi himself says is a matter of record. Child abuse? Manipulation? Ha! The ugly manipulation in which he and his fellow villagers engage chronically is dismissed in masterful fashion: "Our children are doing their duty and must be strong." It's an appalling message of which the directors of the Hitlerjugend would have been proud. 

We keep running into people who think they know the story of the Tamimi clan. But it's clear to us that in reality few understand the rich and ugly detail of their hatefulness. It's expressed not as mere protest and words but the kind of physical violence that has ended dozens of lives on the Tamimi side and among their many victims.

FBI Most Wanted Terrorist: The Arabic version is here

Regular readers of this blog know our oldest daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in a massacre engineered by Bassem Tamimi's niece, Ahlam Tamimi. 

Since March 2017, that Tamimi woman has been a fugitive from US justice, wanted by the FBI to face federal charges in Washington arising from the bombing/massacre of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem 16 years ago.

She has confessed often and in great detail about her role as the mastermind of the slaughter.

Meanwhile Bassem Tamimi has been crowned a hero of and by Amnesty International. In a shockingly cynical move that in large measure backfired on them, Amnesty's agitprop specialists sent him on a coast-to-coast roadshow in 2015.

We tried to get some straight answers from him and from his generous sponsors at the time to some straightforward, related questions... but all we got was ignored: see "04-Sep-15: Mr. Human Rights Defender, a question if we may".

But Ahlam Tamimi, the confessed murderer, along with her uncle and aunt and cousin Nariman, Bassem and Ahed, are simply part of a long list of Tamimis associated with Arab-on-Israeli terror. Some of the details have been deliberately obscured or hidden. We have been doing what we can to publicize them.

We revisited some of the barely-known details just a few days ago - see "19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets".

On any objective view, enthusiasm for the "bravery" of Ahed (sometimes written Ah'd and Aahd) Tamimi is a strange thing because of how it ignores the trajectory of her emergence as a media figure and the center of a multimedia "Free Ahed Now" project.

How old is she? 

Depends whom you ask. She was 12 in September 2011 [quoted by Israellycool from an Arab source]; 8 in August 2012 [Source: +972, a far-left Israeli site]; 13 in December 2012 [Source: TimeTurk News and other Turkish sources]; 10 in December 2012 [Source: World Bulletin]; 13 in June 2013 [Source: Your Middle East]; 12 in February 2014 [Source; The Guardian]; 14 in September 2015 [Source: NBC News]; 16 in February 2017 [a South African source]. Thus she was born (in the same order as those links) in 1999, 2004, 1999, 2002, 2000, 2002, 2001, 2001. It's hard to be precise. And to be clear, it's fair to assume all this vagueness is intentional.

[UPDATE January 1, 2018: The answer is - she will turn 17 on January 31, 2018, having been in 2001. Much if not most of what has been written and published in past years about her age has been wrong, and almost certainly deliberately fudged. See what we wrote here.]

We have pulled together some images (below) from public sources that chart the process by which her family and her village - but most of all her parents - cultivated a media-ready provocateur. It's a dismaying chronicle not only because it shows how there are loathsome people who, even though they are parents, would do this to a child. But also because of the individuals, a distressing number of them progressive Jews, who have embraced this distressing and very obvious child-abuse while giving no sign they see the malice, the hate, the bigotry and the overt and calculated manipulation that has accompanied it from the outset until today.

▲ July 2, 2010: Screaming on demand for her father's cameras and just 9 years old, Ahed Tamimi is confident enough to walk up to a fully armed soldier and shriek into his face. It's very likely someone told her not to worry, everything will be OK, just show fierce little-girl anger while the cameras roll. And so a career is launched. See more in this video from which the photo above was screen-captured. And here: "06-Sep-15: The making of a pigtailed provocateur". Watch carefully and you can see the child's mother in the same video clip. Mostly - since she has much less to offer than her child does - she stays out of camera range.

▲ June 16, 2012: With live-action TV news cameras everywhere, this is Ahed Tamimi on stage, age 11, in Amman, Jordan, gazing longingly at her role-model cousin and Nabi Saleh's pride and joy, the boastful and confessed murderer-who-got-away-with-it Ahlam Tamimi, our daughter Malki's killer. The occasion is the wedding of the Tamimi woman with another Nabi Saleh murderer (who happens also to be a Tamimi, the bride's cousin and little Ahed's cousin), Nizar Tamimi, the male in the photo. Everyone in the picture, along wih many of the wedding guests, is a blood-relative of everyone else. (The Tamimi's are deeply committed to marrying within their tribe.) As the published videos and photos attest, many members of the Nabi Saleh Tamimis traveled to Jordan to be present. Background: "22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"

▲ September 2012: Here she's eleven years old. The CAMERA caption reads: "Mahmoud Abbas congratulates A'hd (right) and her cousin Marah for their "bravery" (From the Nabi Sabeh Solidarity blog)" 

▲ November 2, 2012: Still not quite 12, and captured on video by the cameras of Tamimi Press while stage managed by Bassem Tamimi, her deeply-cynical father, Ahed screams "I spit in your face". [Image Source]

▲ December 24, 2012: Recognizing the power of a little blonde tyke, aged almost 12 and who teaches the Israelis a lesson, Mevlüt Uysal, then mayor of the Istanbul district of Başakşehir (and currently mayor of Istanbul) awards the always-willinng Tamimi girl the Başakşehir Hanzala Courage Award trophy [Image Source]

▲ December 31, 2012: The Tamimi handlers manage to set up an encounter for the sub-teen child with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [Image Source]

▲ December 31, 2012: Next thing you know, he gives her breakfast [Image Source]

▲ A widely-published portrait of Ahed with the proud parents (father on the left) in February 2013 [Image Source]. She's aged 12.

▲ March 17, 2013: That's twelve-year-old Ahed in the bottom row among the other eager "peace-makers" of Nabi Saleh. Her father and chief manipulator Bassem Tamimi is at top left; her mother Nariman Tamimi in the bottom left corner. Everyone's a relative of everyone else here - a major promotion for bigotry-rich terrorism from the editors of one of the world's major sources of news. Some people read this and may think the Tamimis are talking about some future activity of a peaceful nature. A reminder that in the so-called second Intifada, the death toll among Israelis was huge; among Arabs, substantially larger. We urge you to absorb some of the background: "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns". And this follow-up: "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters". And another: "01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists".

▲ November 21, 2014: AlwatanVoice publishes one of the many Tamimi Press snapshots of the Tamimi village children boldly marching to another entirely-artificial and contrived weekly "clash" with Israeli soldiers. As always, Ahed Tamimi, not quite 14, is placed by her father (she's always being placed by one of her parents) in the most photographed position. Right behind her is Naji Tamimi, a full-time paid Fatah "activist" and cousin or brother (according to different sources) of Bassem Tamimi

▲ March 13, 2015 Ahed Tamimi is 14 here. The weekly Nabi Saleh media-focused confrontation with remarkably restrained and patient Israeli soldiers [Image Source]

▲ March 13, 2015: Ahed, 14, playing the customary featured role she's been bred to fill, in the weekly performance-for-the-media outside Nabi Saleh. Once again, she's screaming on cue [Image Source]

▲ August 28, 2015: With her father Bassem moving into the camera's view for a brief moment (green shirt), but doing nothing to protect his daughter, Ahed Tamimi, 14, photogenically writhes and struggles with an embarrassed, lone Israeli serviceman who could have theoretically used his gun to get out of a difficult situation but naturally did not. It's as viral an image as Bassem Tamimi can ever have planned. [Image Source: CNN]

▲ September 2, 2015: Bassem, Nariman, Ahed (14) and other members of the family are again honored by a personal audience with the president-for-life of the Palestinian Authority [Image Source]

▲ September 3, 2015: Not to be outdone by his boss, Sabri Saidam, the Palestinian Authority's minister of education visits the little town of Nabi Saleh to get a grip on developments there. Background: "10-Sep-15: It takes a village: The passion for violence of the peace-loving Tamimis". No such visit would be complete without an Ahed pose. She's 14.

▲ November 2015: Bassem Tamimi, Ahed's father, is paraded around the US by Amnesty International, In Ithaca, NY, where this photo is taken, he addresses an audience of school-children from Grade 3. There's outrage in the city ["School District: Ithaca 3rd graders exposed to anti-Israel rhetoric in the classroom" and "Judge sends Ithaca schools a message over pro-Palestinian speaker"]. Shortly afterwards, his visa to enter the United States was permanently revoked by the Obama administration.

▲ November 2015: An invaluable examination by Petra Marquardt-Bigman of the Ahed Tamimi phenomenon, the horror of the messages emanating from her parents and cousins, and the context in which all this has been happening [The Tower] 

▲ Some months ago, Ahed Tamimi, not yet 17 and following the instructions of the event planners, addressed in Arabic a committee in the European Parliament.

▲ From the Jewish Voices for Peace Twitter feed

The idea of referring to Nariman Tamimi, Ahed's mother, as a person with a "voice full of love and tenderness" is delusional. Don't believe us? Check out "02-Oct-15: Truth, honesty, love, murder... and useful idiots".

But if the subject of "butchered childhoods" is mentioned, we happen to know something about how that actually works. Our daughter Malki, who never once thrust a fist into the face of anyone let alone a soldier, was just fifteen years old when she became an unwilling participant in the explosive moment which the murderous Tamimi clan celebrate yearly with such huge enthusiasm. 

The photo of Malki (above) stands for the absolute opposite of what the Tamimi propaganda machine is marketing: goodness, kindness, concern for others, embracing the different and the weak and the damaged, always optimistic.

It's tragic how many people fail to understand that simple truth.

20-Sep-16: Another Pal Arab boy with a knife died today - exactly as the PA intended him to

Another Palestinian Arab child, and the outcome of his Palestinian
Arab education courtesy of an UNRWA school [Background here]

We now know that the man and woman inside the pick-up vehicle that rammed into an Israeli bus stop this past Friday ["16-Sep-16: Vehicle ramming attack on Israelis near Kiryat Arba"] came from the Palestinian Arab village of Bani Na'im.

The hamlet is in the news again today because a child from there, presumably weaponized by the people who have ruled Bani Na'im since the nineties (it's located in Area A under the full control of the Palestinian Authority), was killed by the IDF soldiers he tried to stab to death this morning.

As reported by Times of Israel ["Palestinian teen tries to stab soldier, is shot dead — army"]:

A Palestinian teenager was shot and killed while attempting a stabbing attack on an IDF soldier near Bani Na’im, outside of Hebron, on Tuesday morning, the army said, marking a fifth straight day of attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem. During a search at a checkpoint, the assailant “tried to stab a soldier,” but did not injure him, according to the IDF. “The assailant was shot by the forces and killed,” the army said in a statement. The Palestinian health ministry identified him as Issa Salem Tarayrah, 16. The alleged assault was the ninth such attack in under a week, with the vast majority occurring in Jerusalem and the Hebron area, where Palestinians live in close proximity to settlers and Israeli troops. 

It's not likely we will ever learn much about 16 year-old Issa Salem Tarayrah (or as he's named in the Arabic-language version of the Ma'an story, "Issa Mahmoud Salem Taraarh the martyr") beyond the events of his last day alive. But we can speculate with confidence that the outcome of today's terrible events - the knife attack and its deadly response - are derivatives of a process that is deeply embedded in Palestinian Arab society.

Children and their pure blood: It's a deeply disturbing theme that runs
strongly through the messages PA president Abbas delivers to his people
[Image Source]

Some indicators of what that means when:

high school-age Arab youngsters - not a handful but many - are led to derive meaning from suicidal attacks on Israelis. It's simply their culture, and a matter about which, when the subject comes up, they are proud. The rest of us, at least some of us, can't shake from our minds the thought of a society living among us and right next to us thatliterally weaponizes its children, hijacking their education [see "18-May-16: Does Pal Arab hate-culture education leave room for messages of tolerance and kindness? Let's see."] and wiping thoughts of a better future from their young brains, replacing them with a diabolical vision of the redemptive power of martyrdom. ["24-May-16: Yet another knife-wielding Pal Arab teenage girl and her pointless, terror-driven death"]

And

There are... data-points that keep going unreported or under-reported. One is the number of posters eulogizing the terrorists who are killed in the course of doing these attacks - the so-called martyrs of the Palestinian Arabs. The anecdotal evidence from scanning Facebook, Twitter and other Arabic-speaking parts of the social media is that the rising tide of Palestinian Arab barbarism is happening against a sound track of constant incitement from the highest levels of the Mahmoud Abbas regime in Ramallah. The return on that "investment" is plain for anyone who wants to see. Not enough people do. And two: the substantial portion of the Palestinian Arabs doing the terror who are minors and children... ["24-Feb-16: Incitement and its harvest: What the numbers do and don't tell"]

And

We are witnesses to a massive loss of moral compass in which children - as young as 11 - are encouraged by the instrumentalities of Palestinian Arab society to see stabbings, shootings, car rammings and bombings as acts of redemption, justified by a sense of feverishly-cultivated victimhood and sense of oppression, validated by the most powerful voices in Palestinian Arab society. The lethal incitement comes non-stop from (among others) the prime minister, the president, the religious establishment, the schools. Describing their society as being in the grip of adeath cult seems a fair description to us. ["18-Feb-16: A Palestinian Arab reminder this afternoon of what, in their eyes, children are good for"]

And

Not for the first time, we ask: where is UNICEF? Or Save the Children, or Defence for Children Internation­al-Palestine (DCIP) or Terre des Hommes, or the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement or even the dishonorable Amnesty International (on whom we have not yet entirely given up hope)? Or the other well-funded, high-profile public interest organizations that purport to care for the welfare of children but that take so little interest in the unfolding tragedy of the children of the Palestinian Arabs and the terror-obsessed jihadists cheating them of their future? ["20-Oct-15: Children and what a soulless society can do to them"]

And

The moral depravity that brings government officials and ordinary folk to stand with, instead of against, the wielders of kitchen knifes and axes is mirrored by the strategic silence of the world's well-funded children's rights industry -  UNICEF, Defence for Children International, Human Rights Watch, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development to name just a few donor-supported, PR-savvy entities who have seem to have collectively lost their voices, their senses and their moral compasses when it comes to what Palestinian Arab society is doing to their own children. And to ours. (We no longer mention Amnesty International in that list. Amnesty's increasingly explicit identification with the practitioners of the Palestinian Arab brand of terror makes plain their abandonment of principle and betrayal of their supporters' values. There's no longer anything to expect from them.) ["19-Jan-16: Children with knives and what they destroy"]

So many wicked co-conspirators. But just one dead child (his photo is here), at least so far today.

24-Jul-16: Sociopaths, savagery and the seductiveness of Palestinian Arab victimhood

Ben Ehrenreich [Source]

Over at the LA Review of Books, under the title "The Humiliation Machine'", they have a new review by Amy Wilentz of

The Way to the Spring, Ben Ehrenreich’s new book about the Palestinian struggle against the ongoing and seemingly endless Israeli occupation [that] is bound to be a highly controversial work. 

Ehrenreich has been promoting the violent and hateful Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh, a village of about 550 people located a few kilometers north of Israel's capital, for years. It was the vehicle that enabled him to snag his biggest hit so far - a 2013 New York Times Magazine cover story about the place and its people. Long on romance and bravado and carefully phrased progressive-sounding rhetoric, that piece barely skims the deeply embedded bigotry and long record of acts of murder against Jews that are only too easy to see in the life of Nabi Saleh... if you look. 

Ehrenreich plainly prefers not to look. He's a key player in sanitizing the Tamimi clan's blood-lust and race-based hatred of Jews.

We wrote an angry response when that heavily-marketed New York Times piece appeared ["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]. Here's how it started:

Friends have pointed us to this week’s NYT Magazine cover story, published today. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. It's a place the author calls “spirited”, where “on warm summer evenings, life… could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone.” He says “a pilgrimage” to this magical place “has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s”.
How can a person not be captivated? 
But there is much wrong with the picture he conjures up. We know this because for years we have been tracking the media’s romance with the community called Nabi Saleh. Sitting here and looking over the online version of it, we are furious with anger about what the article says, and what the writer and his editors carefully avoid saying.

We wanted to be heard by the readers of the New York Times in a more direct manner at the time and tried. If you want to know how that went, we documented that too: "9-Aug-13: Protesting journalism of the amoral sort". 

And for a little more about actual life and real attitudes in the temporal Nabi Saleh, as distinct from the Pallywood fantasies of the talented Mr Ehrenreich, here's another of our past posts on that theme: "01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists".

Ehrenreich's previous major push for the
"struggling" Tamimi clan's campaign
for bigger and more deadly murderous
attacks [New York Times]

It has to be said that Amy Wilentz's LARB review of Ehrenreich's paen to those village monsters includes some sharp insights. And if you're interested in answers to some of the questions she refreshingly poses but doesn't entirely untangle, help can be found in the fine work of the historian Petra Marquardt-Bigman, in particular her November 2015 essay in The Tower focusing on the Tamimi clan: "How a Family Became a Propaganda Machine".

We were struck, though, by how little Ms Wilentz has to say about the vicious, murder-oriented polemic that the Tamimi pack specialize in propagating. Most of their work-product is (naturally) in Arabic and intended for an Arabic-speaking audience, but some of it is easily accessible to English-speaking readers. 

So we sent the following to the LARB editors last night as a comment on the book review. They have just posted it below the Wilentz piece:

Here's some more "poetry of the desert" that Ehrenreich might have included but chose not to. It's some frank opinion-sharing by Nariman Tamimi, whose under-appreciated, explosive bigotry rarely makes it into English publications. 

We translated it from the Hebrew source in our blog last year. The context is important: it appeared at the same time as Amnesty International was spending a small fortune putting Tamimi's husband Bassem into the center of a US roadshow designed to further burnish his entirely bogus "heroism", a process Amnesty had begun a couple of years earlier and continues today, and which was accompanied by a round-the-clock effort to shield him and themselves from the fury of people who understand Tamimi's key role in murderous anti-Jew violence over the past decade.The voice quoted in this extract is that of his wife, Nariman Tamimi: Source: 11-Sep-15: How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really? 

"Women and children have always been a part of the struggle in Nabi Saleh, as opposed to what has happened in Qadoum, Bil'in and Ni'lin. Here, it’s a cultural thing, something traditional and educational, and also the fact that everyone in our village belongs to the one family numbering about 500 people and in reality there’s no alternative..." One of the major Palestinian murderers who emerged from the village is Ahlam Tamimi who transported the perpetrator of the terror at Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria. [Nariman again] "What she [Ahlam Tamimi] did was an integral part of the struggle. Everyone fights in the manner in which he believes. There is armed uprising, and there is popular uprising. I support every form of uprising... 

Ahlam Tamimi, described in inappropriately benign terms here and in Ehrenreich's celebration of the murderous culture of the denizens of Nabi Saleh, is the engineer of the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. She planned it, chose the site, delivered the bomb to the location, and repeatedly - since being set free in the Shalit deal of 2011 - celebrates (in the Arabic-language media) what she says it stands for. Ehrenreich ought to say why this still-young woman is a figure of adulation among the members of the Tamimi clan in Nabi Saleh: not despite the murders she executed but explicitly because of them.  

Nabi Saleh, setting aside the poetry and the pretentious, cultural allusions, has a rich tradition of anti-Jew murder. Failing to put this in the center of the review of Ehrenreich's agitprop is to be complicit in the incitement emanating from that wretched village daily.

Wilentz is thankfully less entranced by the romanticism of both Ehrenreich and his sociopathic subjects than the editors at the New York Times seem to be. She writes:

Because he stands with the Palestinians, Ehrenreich has been called brave and courageous, but as someone who has also tried to do this kind of work in the Middle East, I can say that for a certain type of reporter, it doesn’t take bravery — there is something very seductive about victims, and to follow the Palestinians is simply to follow a reporter’s instinct for a good story... ["The Humiliation Machine", Los Angeles Review of Books, July 22, 2016]

She's being way too generous. And we ought to mention, for those who don't already know, that there's a terribly painful reason we pay attention to what's said about Nabi Saleh and its Tamimis. (Incidentally almost everyone in the dusty town is called Tamimi, with Tamimis routinely marrying other Tamimis in a cultural practice common among Palestinian Arabs and with consequences well-known in Israel's paediatric hospital wards). 

Baby carriages outside the devastated Sbarro pizzeria, minutes
after the Tamimi woman had fled the scene [Getty Images]

We do that because the engineer of the 2001 massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem is a woman called Tamimi. Her husband, who also happens to be her cousin, is another Tamimi. They are a pair of convicted and exultant murderers of Jews. 

He was raised in Nabi Saleh, and she says she has blood ties to almost everyone there, and reputedly lived there very briefly after she made aliyah from her homeland of Jordan in the late 1990's. 

Today the woman is the town's pin-up girl in the literal sense - they adore her there and all the barbaric hatred, bigotry and blood-shed she stands for.  If Nabi Saleh had a municipal symbol, it would probably be the grotesque smile on her face.

This Tamimi couple, both of them convicted murderers of Jews who were serving multiple life sentences in Israeli prisons after being convicted, live perfectly freely today in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, having both been released in the catastrophic Shalit Deal in 2011. 

Life has been awfully good. She has no money problems, having been a recipient of the notorious (and ongoing) Palestinian Authority Rewards for Terror payments scheme [background: "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look"]. Today. she's a full-time propagandist for the Islamists of Hamas. She burnishes her fame on that platform with an active social media presence that includes Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In addition, she travels and does well-publicized personal appearances throughout the Arab world. Indeed she is one of the most widely-recognized, very public faces of the savage Islamist bigotry of Hamas and the Moslem Brotherhood. 

And not only in the Middle East: she has her own heavily-promoted Hamas-branded weekly television program (in English, "Breezes of the Free") that's beamed each weekend via satellite and streaming internet video to television screens of Arabic-speaking households on every continent. 

This Tamimi woman also the murderer of our fifteen year old daughter Malki and of 14 other innocent patrons of that pizzeria. She can barely stop boasting about the role she played. She frequently returns to the disappointment she felt that she had not managed to murder yet more Jews and especially Jewish children. [You're doubting us?: "04-Feb-15: The stunningly different fates of two terrorists in Jordan and what they reveal about how the war against terror is going"] 

Her life's work, on constant public display, is devoted to encouraging additional acts of blood-curdling savagery. 

Analyzing Amnesty's culpability at The Tablet

The role of Amnesty International in the marketing of a Tamimi-centric view of terrorism-as-liberation has gotten much less attention in the media than it deserves. 

How any progressive-minded can be aware of that role and still send the occasional support check to Amnesty is totally baffling to us. Withholding support is one sure-fire way of getting its management to stop ignoring the criticism they have drawn from people like us - and ignoring is most assuredly what the Amnesty clique have been doing. 

Click here for a couple of dozen articles we have written in the past two years about Amnesty's odious promotion of Bassem Tamimi, a propagandist to whom Goebbels would surely have raised his hat. 

And if your time is short, please read just one of our posts that captures the essence of the others - this one for instance: 

• "07-Sep-15: Peace, human rights, the sheer joy of killing people". 

Or this: 

• "06-Nov-15: What Amnesty hath wrought: The elevation of the terror-minded Tamimis".

This has all worked out just peachy for Ben Ehrenreich who can be expected to return soon to the well for more public attention as the impresario of the little village in the hills. 

Did anyone ever say terrorism doesn't pay?