12-Jun-06: Drive-by shooting

On a busy road just north of where we live in Jerusalem, an Israeli is shot dead and several passengers wounded. The shooting, Sunday night, is another blood-chilling illustration of what it's like to live next-door to a society completely infected with terrorism, managed by terrorists. 

The survivors, all of them Israeli Arabs, report seeing a Palestinian taxi (they're all yellow; see picture at right) and easily recognized) drive up to a spot between the village of Shadra and Kalandiyah where a major Israeli security checkpoint is located. A Palestinian passenger disembarks and opens fire on their vehicle as it drives by. Unfortunately for them, their vehicle has standard yellow license plates like all Israeli vehicles - the killer evidently thought he had achieved his ticket to paradise. 

Still unaware he has murdered the unfortunate Marwan Shuweiki from Jerusalem's Abu Tor neighborhood, the shooter returns to his cab and instructs the driver to return to Ramallah. There is, of course, zero expectation he will be found or apprehended by the Palestinian authorities. 

One of our children works as a volunteer ambulance paramedic and came home from her Sunday night shift with the initial report; we checked on the web and saw that Israeli sources were calling this either a family feud ("defending" family "honor" causes enormous numbers of casualties and misery in Arab society) or a criminal attack. This morning, maybe because no group has taken 'credit' for the attack (most unusual), the authorities and the media say this was a terror killing, with an element of identity confusion stemming from that Israeli license plate. 

Now what steps would you take if you knew there were shooters with murder on their minds living just down the road? And the authorities in their neighborhood think that's just fine. 

The Hamas government of the Palestinian Arabs has stated repeatedly it will neither disarm nor stop 'resistance' activities. Ditto, the 'moderate' Fatah leadership. On this there is wall-to-wall agreement among the Palestinian terror thugocracy. (A bomb was found yesterday, before the shooting, by Israeli soldiers not far from the scene of last night's murder.) 

Prediction: the media are having so much fun with Friday's Gaza beach deaths story that the murder of Mr Shuweiki will sink without a trace.