31-May-15: Lights, camera, action, terror

Abdullah Barghouti: Poster child for those
lusting for the murder of still more
Jewish children [Image Source]

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Światła, kamera, akcja, terror") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the listyznaszegosadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

It might not come as the greatest of surprises that we follow from a distance the public appearances of two of the central actors in the killing of our fifteen year old child.

Malki, the oldest of our daughters, was one of the innocents murdered in a savage Hamas terror attack on central Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. Fifteen people were killed there that day. A sixteenth has been unconscious through all the years since the bombing. 130 more, most of them pedestrians passing through the busy central Jerusalem intersection outside the store, were maimed and terribly injured.

The explosion was achieved by the sending of a human bomb into the center of Jerusalem with what looked to be a guitar case slung across his back. The explosive device (for that is what it was) had been assembled by a bomb-maker, Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti, who during a brief career produced a series of civilian-seeking explosives that blew 66 people to pieces.

In 2004, he was convicted in an Israeli court and sentenced - having pleaded guilty - to one term of life imprisonment for each of the deaths he was instrumental in causing. Plus one additional life term for all those he injured and who survived: a total of 67 life terms in all.

Barghouti's satanic handicraft took innocent lives in some of the most horrific terror attacks of the period:

• The August 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria
• The December 2001 triple-bomb outrage on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall
• The March 2002 mass-victim bombing of Jerusalem's Cafe Moment
• The July 2002 bombing inside the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem campus on Mt Scopus.

And naturally, he is now the idol of untold millions. 

Some of the evidence for that statement is in a tour we did two years ago of his widespread fan base: see "1-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?"

If anyone feels upset by that gross and unfair generalization, then we want you to know about our standing offer. For years, we have undertaken to re-publish and/or link to any published condemnation of this man's actions and values. There's just one condition: it must have been published in Arabic. We have been waiting years for someone to challenge us on this. Apparently it's tougher than it looks.

Barghouti had a deep impact on some other people: the panel of judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. (The only time a death penalty has been carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman in 1962.)

The bomb-making sociopath has been confined to an Israeli prison since his 2004 trial. From inside, he has reminded every possible audience of the bestiality that underpins his murderous nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough, he declares - explicitly. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world by CBS television's '60 Minutes' program, Barghouti notoriously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

It's a point he emphasized when he appeared in a different Israeli court in 2010. At that time, he took the opportunity to reiterate his dedication to killing more if (when?) he is freed again.

We are going over all these matters here now not because we expect to arouse sympathy for the victims of this depraved individual (we certainly know better than that). The issue is that it enrages us to see how easily and cheaply he and his message succeed - from deep inside a high security jail within the vaunted Israeli justice system - to project a message out to the masses hungering, salivating, for the inspiration and message he embodies. It's almost as if the good people on our side don't comprehend how the triumphalism of the Islamist jihadists feeds, grows and thrives on exposure of this sort.

We are speaking of this news item published this afternoon:

Hamas inmate smuggles phone into cell, holds radio interview | Prison Service officials say Abdullah Barghouti will face disciplinary action | Times of Israel | May 31, 2015 | Hamas prisoner Abdullah Barghouti will face disciplinary action after he conducted an illegal telephone interview from his prison cell on Sunday. Barghouti, who is incarcerated in the Ramon Prison in southern Israel, used a cellphone smuggled into his prison cell to conduct an interview with the Al-Rai radio station in Gaza. The call was in violation of prison regulations, which prohibits him from speaking on the telephone or holding interviews. During the conversation, which lasted roughly four minutes, Barghouti urged Hamas and Izz al-Din al-Qassam, its military wing, to reach a deal with Israel on prisoner releases, the Ynet news website reported. “We are steadfast and waiting patiently, according to your promise to us,” he said. “We will continue adhering to it whether we are released today or in another thousand years.” He also called on Hamas’s military wing to have no mercy on “the Israeli enemy.”
Israel Prison Service officials said in response that "disciplinary measures will be taken against him for that interview, and the issue of the smuggling will be investigated"... 

A short while after this report went up, Israel National News, quoting a spokesperson from the Israel Prisons Service, said Barghouti was punished this afternoon by being sent to solitary confinement. For how long? A reasonable question - but they're not saying. (And it's not for the first time. Back in 2010, when he gave the interview published here, we were told by officials in the prison service that he paid a price in terms of solitary confinement then.)

Barghouti, evidently photographed last week
inside an Israeli prison, sending a message
to Moslem Brotherhood buddies in Egypt: How
allows this kind of thing in prisons?

We didn't hear the Al-Rai interview given by Barghouti. But during last week, via some of the Arab websites and social media we occasionally review, we encountered this photograph. That's Barghouti over on the right.

From the context, it's clearly a fresh photo. We're guessing it was taken with the same phone as the one used to conduct the interview. We have not seen any news report which mentions that photos of the murderer were also taken and disseminated. Perhaps we're the only non-Arabs who know or care. We think people ought to know this, because something is is wrong if this can happen.

How wrong? If you click here, you can see via Google that it has been copied and republished on close to two hundred sites across the Arab world in the past few days. The number might be larger by the time you read this. There's a huge appetite for what emanates from this person.

We will leave for a different occasion an explanation of the four finger salute on his shirt and right hand. In brief, it's called the Rabia, or sometimes the R4BIA. And the woman in the photo below is doing it too, along with her buddies in the snapshot:

Happy, happy Islamists, 2013. Second from right in the
Islamist party dress is the confessed engineer of
the 2001 Sbarro massacre

We first reproduced this 2013 photo on the right - a woman in black, three goofy men, fingers splayed - four months ago, here.

Like the still-imprisoned murderer Barghouti, the fingers tell us that all four are Islamists. The woman with the relaxed smile and the black robes is the self-confessed planner of the terrorist outrage at the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria - the woman who murdered our daughter.

Back in August 2001, dressed in skimpy clothes and aged 21, she brought a bomb (a human bomb) through the IDF security checkpoints and right into the center of Jerusalem. She then slipped away, according to plan, before it exploded, and went right back to Ramallah to her evening job. She presented the news on a Palestinian Arab TV station. There in front of the cameras, she exulted in reading the first item - about a "resistance activity" in "occupied Al Quds". Many dead "Zionists". She did not mention that she was the killer in chief.

Our child's killer reads the news on a Palestinian Arab
TV station a few hours after engineering the massacre
herself, August 9, 2001

That confession came later when she stood trial in an Israeli court, and was convicted of the murder of 15 people including our Malki.

The photo above (the one captioned "Happy Islamists, 2013") is evidence of what became of the multiple life terms in prison to which she was sentenced. It's a photograph taken in 2013, in an Arab capital. She has been completely free since October 2011. The background is recounted here. Nine months after walking out of prison, triumphant, she was married in front of television cameras from all over the Arab world. The radiant groom was (is) another convicted, unrepentant, unjustly freed terrorist/murderer. As the picture suggests, she appears to be a contented woman on a mission, using her undoubted celebrity in the Arab world (and her Facebook and Twitter accounts) to encourage more people to kill more Jewish children.

From experience, a certain part of our readership is going to be sitting there, sadly shaking their heads, wondering how any of these horrible things could have happened.

The killer, now free as a bird, on her globally-beamed
weekly television show, marketing Islamist terror to
an enthusiastic international market

Another part is aching, just aching, for the day when the man in the yellow shirt can walk free from his cell, take his rightful place in open Arab society, and be hailed for his courage, heroism, leadership, achievement, vision and greatness.

The woman, meanwhile, can be seen on live television, every Friday night and via YouTube, on the pro-terror program she hosts from Amman, Jordan, beamed throughout the world on a Hamas satellite TV network. (Details are here.)

As parents of one of the many children killed by these insatiable monsters, we are left to get on with our constructive lives, to focus on our families, our careers, our communities, and to try not to be knocked off balance by the befuddling phenomenon of a prison system that permits itself to serve as a propaganda platform for hatred-driven jihadists.

We thought we had enough of that in 2007 when a film crew was ushered in to the Israeli prison where we had been encouraged to believe our daughter's killer would spend the rest of her days. We have never ascertained who approved the entry of the film people or why. The production that resulted, called Hot House, got her prominent coverage in the New York Times (to our fury) and eventually contributed, we think, to her unjustifiable and totally unjust release from that prison a few short years later.

A final thought to ponder, if we're dealing with perplexing matters.

Barghouti is paid each and every month a Palestinian Authority salary that is multiples of what senior civil servants in the Abbas-dominated PA government are paid. When he goes free, as we fear he may, he stands to be handed a huge lump sum. It's PA policy.

Tamimi, who served less time in Israeli prison for her crimes, earned less each month, but has already cashed in her massive walk-free bonus. Both happen to be aligned with the PA's rivals, Hamas. But that doesn't matter. The PA's funding/terror-reward scheme applies to all. It's not whom you support but whom you murdered that counts.

And to those of our readers who pay taxes to a European state: Who do you imagine funds those payments?

You might want to start your enquiry here: "Dutch, British and German MPs condemn PA deception, antisemitism, and terror glorification" [PMW, May 25, 2015]. And there's some detailed and disturbing background here for readers from the United Kingdom.