8-Sep-06: Following Up the Almost-Entirely Unreported Story of Yet Another Stabbing

On 5th September, just a few days ago, we wrote about a stabbing in the Atarot industrial zone, not far from our north Jerusalem home.

Today it's reported that a Fatah operative, Ramaz Da'ar Haj, 24, from the village of Beituniya near Ramallah, was apprehended Tuesday. The Jerusalem Post says he had worked at two factories in the zone, had planned the attack well in advance, telling investigators that he had repeatedly practiced stabbing on his bedroom mattress.

Haj told investigators that he planned to carry out an attack on a Jew a year and a half ago in the city's northern French Hill neighborhood but changed his mind after encountering police in the area. On the morning of the attack, he came upon the factory worker and stabbed him in the shoulder from behind. The attacker had also concealed a second knife in the sole of his shoe, planning to stab his police investigators as well.

If, like us, you search for the terms "Palestinian" + "Unemployment" on Google News right now, this minute, you'll get 376 hits. The very first of them starts like this:

Some 75 percent of Palestinians live in poverty while there is a 65 percent unemployment rate...

It's from Socialist Worker Online, and there's nothing on that site about a 63 year-old proletarian Israeli being stabbed by a "desperate", terrorism-minded thug, strangely enough. Many of the other Google News results are along similar lines.

Meanwhile (as you can see from the picture at right, above) other Fatah operatives spent today trashing (again) the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza City. Thousands of them, well armed with expensive, high-power weapons that the PA say they can't afford, smashed windows in a violent protest on the fourth day of a strike called by Mahmoud Abbas over non-payment of civil service salaries.

Stabbing Israelis in the handful of industrial zones which employ Palestinian workers is a sure way to get those salaries paid.