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| The Tamimi boy from Nabi Saleh with his arm in a plaster caste, being energetic and mobile in a screen-capture taken just moments before he was photographed headlocked by an IDF soldier. The source is this video clip. |
In one corner are those who see the villagers of Nabi Saleh as peace-loving, non-violent nobility, battling to preserve dignity and fields.
In the other, those who are left dumbfounded by the brazen manipulation of women and girls, naked child-abuse, and contrived exploitation of public opinion via the villagers' use of calculated provocations, staged clashes and strategically-placed photographers. Without the presence of those camera men, none of the drama would be happening.
Even if this were not the hamlet that spawned, encouraged, celebrated and then idolized the woman who planted a bomb (a human bomb) in a Jerusalem pizzeria in order to kill as many Jewish children as possible, and succeeded, we would surely have been in that first corner.
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| Same boy, different circumstances some minutes later |
We explained our rationale in a March 2013 post ["A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]. We wrote it in response to a cover story in the New York Times Magazine whose distortions, tendentiousness and adoration of murderous violence literally sickened us. We expressed our criticism in a letter to the editors at the New York Times who ignored us. We then found our own way to show our disgust; you can read about that here. We remain appalled and infuriated by some of the journalism we see them practice there.
Those who see only giants and heroes in that hateful little Palestinian Arab town probably share the view, typical of its kind, that asserts
the village is struggling for humanity, justice, peace and dignity, and... they need their freedom [via a far-left Israeli publication, yesterday]But there are Arabic-language sources that tell us with far greater candor and clarity what really drives Nabi Saleh's Tamimis. Those Arabic texts naturally were never intended to be seen by people like us and those who read our posts. But web tools make them easy to find.
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Take for example Wikipedia's Arabic-language entry on Nabi Saleh. As we wrote here on Saturday night, someone doctored the Wikipedia text shortly after we first publicized it. Every reference to the village people's adoration of jihad, martyrdom and death to the Israelis was erased. But this past weekend, we found the original Arabic text as it had appeared on Wikipedia in May 2013. We saved the original Arabic text to here, and a partial English translation to here. They are archived now thanks to the wonders of the Internet, and safe (we think) from the destructive attentions of those who feel compelled to re-invent the past.
That deleted Wikipedia text is the village of Nabi Saleh paying tribute to its own viciously violent true self: to its warriors, to its killers, to its dead fighters, and above all to its favourite daughter, the one who smiles on-camera when she recalls how many innocent Jewish children she blew to pieces in the Sbarro pizzeria, our daughter Malki among them.
Virtually everyone in Nabi Saleh is a member of the Tamimi clan. That includes our daughter's murderer and the murderer's husband who is also her cousin - and also a convicted murder of Jews. And also freed in the catastrophic Shalit Deal four years ago. (They now live in Amman, Jordan). And also a hero of those self-proclaimed peace-loving, non-violent villagers.
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An expert on that form of terror, Dr Anat Berko who authored "The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers", offers some sharp and relevant observations in an interview published today in Algemeiner. Noting that Palestinian Arab society, like virtually every other part of Arab society, is patriarchal, she points out that they systematically use women and children as front-line combatants. And as so often happens with the actions of people lacking scruples and fundamental morality, it pays off:
[T]he West will always view women and children as non-combatants. This is why they are often used as shields for the men. We have seen this in violent demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza, where the men literally hide under the skirts of females. We saw it this week in the viral video of the IDF soldier being attacked by a group of females – even bitten by a girl – while he was trying to stop a Palestinian boy throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Any wounds sustained by women and children are automatically viewed in the West as war crimes committed by Israel...which is plainly true. But in reality, what is happening is that
the crime against these women and children is being committed by the leaders of their society – who raise them to know nothing but hate – and by the terror masters, who treat them like cannon fodder. In this ongoing war, what we call non-combatants are actually combatants... and women and children are their ultimate weapons, because the West sees them as innocents. [Dr Anat Berko in Algemeiner, August 31, 2015]
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| In the company of men: The Tamimi child is taken to Turkey to be praised for her 'bravery', December 2012 - and groomed for more of the same [Image Source] |
Tamimi said she was proud to get the Handala award which would enhance her strength... Handala Courage Award, handed out by the Basaksehir Municipality, was named after the cartoon character Handala created by Palestinian cartoonist Naji Salim al-Ali noted for the political criticism of the Arab regimes and Israel in his works. Visiting Turkey as being the guest of Basaksehir Municipality of Istanbul, 13-year-old Tamimi attended a series of events ahead of the award ceremony and opened an art exhibition titled "Being children in Palestine". She thanked Turkish children for welcoming her as she was one of them, and called on the Palestinian children to stand tall, at the ceremony. [TimeTurk, December 27, 2012]We're not so sure the children heard her. But the many middle-aged men in the photo above did. It's their will she is doing. She evidently pleases them.
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How obvious is the ongoing abuse of women and children in bucolic Nabi Saleh? The answer is pretty clear in the video clips of Friday's staged confrontation. Take this video clip for instance. It's from Tamimi Press, the propaganda business operated by Shirley Temper's father,
At the start of the "clash", we see a group of mostly men, plus two or three women and girls setting off down the road to find the soldiers:
A few minutes later, it's men only as they launch into rock-hurling and sling-shot firing at the Israelis:
Then more of the same, with no women or girls to be seen:
And then finally, the now-gone-viral iconic scene of an IDF soldier, armed with lethal weapons that remain carefully under his control, suffering a biting- and manhandling-attack by women and children along with a freelance photographer:
So where are the rock-hurling, sling-shot-firing macho fellows, the men, whose manly voices are heard singing songs of triumph at the start of the video just a few minutes earlier? The men - where are the men?
That's a question for the camera operator. If anyone knows what sort of image the global market needs to be fed, needs to buy, it's the camera person. And men are not part of it. You do what you need to do. This is war - that sort of war.
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| Nabi Saleh's children jubilant as they prepare to get back several of their beloved convicted murderers, October 2011 [Image Source] |
When the convicted and unrepentant mass-murderer Ahlam Tamimi, the architect of the Sbarro massacre and already a celebrity, was about to walk free in the Shalit Deal, the joyous public celebrations in Nabi Saleh featured prominently in media coverage.
(Three other Tamimis, all males, all convicted of the vicious 1993 murder of Chaim Mizrachi, a man with whom they had friendly relations, all sentenced to life terms, were due to be freed at the same time. Two of them - Nizar Samir Mahmud al-Tamimi and Ahmad Yusuf Mahmud al-Tamimi were in fact let loose and returned immediately to Nabi Saleh as heroes. The third, Sa’id Rushdi Mohammad At-Tamimi, was released in a separate round of US-inspired terrorist releases two years later in December 2013. The connection of these three convicted Nabi Saleh killers to non-violence, dignity and human rights is somewhat unclear to us.)
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| Nabi Saleh, October 2011. The woman holding the portrait of our daughter's murderer is the murderer's sister, Eftikhar Tamimi [Image Source] |
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The repurposing of Palestinian Arab women, and especially girls, for terrorist warfare took on a new reality in the past few weeks. An Al-Monitor reports ["Hamas concludes first-ever military training camp for girls", August 1, 2015] on a summer training program that was opened up for teen-age females in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Called "First al-Quds Army Camp" it was created
to prepare academically exceptional girls aged 12-18 for the liberation battle of Palestine... Hamas has never organized a female training camp before. Around 1,000 girls attend the camp, which offered a special curriculum to resist the occupation taught by women affiliated with the Hamas movement. These women enjoy extensive military experience and know how to intellectually mobilize people against the occupation. Camp director Rajaa al-Halabi told Al-Monitor, "The goal of the First al-Quds Army camp is to prepare girls for self-defense and for future battles against the occupation." [Al-Monitor]Dr Anat Berko naturally looks beyond the self-serving rhetoric of the Islamists who created it:
"Women in Palestinian society have always been abused; training them to become fighters along with the men is not an act of equality, but rather another form of abuse." Berko, who spent years interviewing would-be and actual terrorists in Israeli jails, has frequently pointed out that the terror masters and their dispatchers never send their own children on suicide missions. [The camp] is part of the wider campaign of Hamas and other groups to take advantage of and manipulate the population. "It is the socialization of kids through terror,” she said. “It is child abuse, plain and simple. But where is the international outrage about it?" [Algemeiner]There's no good answer to her question. Billions of dollars flow annually into the coffers of global child-protection and children's rights organizations like UNICEF, Defence for Children International, 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 and others.
Strangely, the Islamist regimes and the terrorist training they inflict on the children fated to live under their boots routinely get ignored by all of them. Why? Because.
(We have written about this ongoing Arab child-abuse tragedy several times: "24-Jan-13: Sacrificing the lives of an entire generation of adolescents on their altar of hatred, the thugs of Hamas boast of plans to create a children's army"; "10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed" and "12-Feb-15: It's Red Hand Day. Do you know where the children are?" The information we pulled together is open source and available to anyone who wants to find it.]
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| Among the last of the photos we have of our murdered daughter is this one from the few days she spent in August 2001 being a camp counselor to special-needs children |
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Our daughter Malki, whose life was stolen from us when she was the same age as little Shirley Temper is today, spent most of her last week of life at a summer camp too, as
a volunteer counselor at a summer camp for children with developmental delays and special needs. The camp takes place each summer in the north of Israel, and involves many hundreds of participants from all parts of the country. It's organized by Etgarim, an association with some lovely people running it. Malki and her friend Rachel traveled up north without being sure they would be accepted as volunteers. They were, in the end, and Malki came back from there smiling from ear to ear. She loved everything about it. She was murdered a few days afterwards, and we heard most of the stories we know about that camp from the other counsellors and the organizers... ["11-Aug-06: Good and evil"]Malki's mother Frimet wrote this nine years ago:
During the five days they were there assisting the counselors, Malki's gentle, caring way touched everyone. Many of the people associated with Etgarim travelled long distances to comfort us during the Shiva - one trekked all the way from Kiryat Shmona at Israel's northernmost edge and back in one day, a four hour drive each way-and related incredible stories to us about Malki.We're thinking still of Malki's gentle smile, and struggling even now with the fact that she will never reach her sixteenth birthday. And trying to make sense of the summer camps, role-models and futures our neighbours have created for their children.
One of the counsellors who had supervised her remembered the farewell chat he had conducted with the volunteers the night before their return home. When he asked each of the volunteers to stand up and tell the group what they viewed as the most important feature of their stint, they all emphasized the importance of and satisfaction gained from giving to others. Malki was the last one to speak. We were told that she was the only one who spoke of what she had gained - of the happiness she had experienced in working with the children. ["27-Nov-06: Today Would Have Been Our Daughter's 21st Birthday"]
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