8-Oct-13: Children and their indispensable role in the conflict

The Commentator

In a series of events that have gotten almost no media attention outside our own land, two Palestinian Arab brothers, Alaa and Fares Adawi, aged 25 and 26, residents of El Bireh (population about forty thousand) a few kilometers north of Jerusalem, were apprehended last night by IDF soldiers.

The men are being charged with involvement in the near-fatal attack on a nine-year old child, Noam Glick, in the nearby Jewish community of Psagot. JTA reports that the two men live "several hundred yards from the girl’s home" and that "the IDF found a knife smeared with blood from the victim... near the scene of the attack".

Noam was attacked on Saturday night after Psagot's protective fence had been breached earlier in the day. The little girl suffered injuries to the neck and after emergency care at Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center is, thank Heavens, recovering well. The community of some 320 families was obliged by the authorities to remain in security lock-down until dawn on Sunday morning while searches for the perpetrators continued. A report in Algemeiner says Psagot has known no previous attack of this nature.

There's considerable attention being paid in the media to which Arab figures did and did not condemn that attack on a 9-year-old child playing in her family's yard. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA and head of the Fatah terrorist organization, is said to have failed to condemn or criticize it, but then mentioned it in a technically negative way in a meeting with Israeli parliamentarians yesterday ("We oppose, on principle, aggression against anyone..." etc.). Jibril Rajoub, an especially loathsome public figure in Palestinian Arab affairs about whom we have had cause to write several times (on May 9, 2013, and on July 26, 2012 among others), did condemn and in fact pointed to those who in his view are responsible: he meant the Israelis (naturally). An official Facebook page of the Fatah terrorist organization praised the attacker and predicted, or perhaps more accurately hoped, he or she would soon strike again. 

The pro-Israel media's concern about condemnations and whether or not they were made misses the point. Noam, thankfully, will live to talk about her oh-so-close encounter with the lethal hatefulness of the Palestinian Arab terrorists. 

Others (we include ourselves in that category) have been much less fortunate. 

We know that those mealy-mouthed "condemnations" mechanically trotted out by public figures in the Arab world and in many parts of the media in the wake of some (though certainly not all) terrorist attacks are, for the most part, shabby camouflage, mere lies. To see them as the true, sincere views of the people expressing them is folly, given what we know about the culture in which lethally toxic, personal terrorism is actively nurtured as a worthy and heroic pursuit. 

And we know a lot, even if serious observers and the mainstream media choose to politely (and disingenuously) look the other way so as not to see.

There's no need to look further than the officially sanctioned summer camps of the two Palestinian Arab statelets - those of Abbas' PA and of the Moslem Brotherhood's Hamas - to see the naked hypocrisy that underlies the empty expressions of sympathy for terror's victims and the condemnation of the terrorists themselves. We have talked about this here many times including:

• 3-Jul-13: Educating the next generation: an early-summer reflection on asymmetry
• 18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and Jibril Rajoub notwithstanding, we say it's self-deluding to think that the fatal grip terrorism has had on three generations of Palestinian Arab juveniles is the work of the Palestinian Arabs alone. They are aided and abetted by the silence and/or the active enabling encouragement of multiple high profile international agencies. 

These include UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development and several other child-focused NGOs. 

The silence of those bodies in the face of the decades of abuse of Palestinian Arab children, nurtured and prodded into becoming gunmen, stabbers, human shields and the hurlers of firebombs and explosives, makes them irrefutably complicit. It matters not one tiny bit whether they choose to condemn the outcomes or to ignore them.

Over at the website of The Commentator, its chief editor Robin Shepherd has expressed bluntly how the crown jewel of the UK's foreign policy (referring to that incomparably vast and rich media empire known as the BBC) fits into this grotesquerie. His short essay, published yesterday afternoon in the wake of the attempted murder of little Noam Glick, is entitled "It's not BBC bias against Israel; it's hate".

From an earlier blog post

If a 9 year old Palestinian girl had been shot by Israel, and the government had gloried in it, this would be headline news, worldwide. The BBC is shameless in its bigotry
Some readers may have little daughters of nine, younger or older. Regardless, you have the capacity for empathy? Palestinian children count just as much as any other. They suffer under the currents of history, in our view mainly due to their own leaders.
But no matter, a child is child. Unless she's an Israeli Jew, the BBC and most of the Western media appears to believe. We will keep this brief, but it is truly shocking and disgusting. As we reported here, a nine year old girl was shot by a Palestinian sniper while the supposedly "moderate" Palestinian Authority circulated on Facebook a celebration of the would-be child murderer, thus:
"The sniper of Palestine was here. He saluted Hebron, and rested in El-Bireh. He left the signature of [real] men in different parts of the homeland. He saluted and left, and moved on to a different place, with a new signature, as he tells the stories of those who love the homeland." If Israel had sent a sniper to kill a little Palestinian girl that on its own would have been major international news. If the Israeli Cabinet had gloried in it, this would have been top news for days or weeks on end. A UN resolution would not have been out of the question. BBC headline? Not at all. Since she's a 9 year old Israeli Jew, no-one cares. The BBC isn't biased. It's possessed with hate. And since they know this story - from us and others - there can really be no other conclusion than that. Or do you have a better explanation? Journalistic integrity just ain't one of them... [The Commentator, October 7, 2013]

Golda Meir, a legendary figure in Israel's first four decades, famously articulated the blend of deep regret and utter determination that Israelis feel when confronting the realities of the society that continues to evolve so disturbingly on the other side of our fence. Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington nearly sixty years ago, she said: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Most Israelis understand that we are not only not there yet; it's highly doubtful we are even on that road.

Golda also said - less famously, but no less incisively: "Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself." That's an idea that continues to inspire us.