13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it

Malchei Yisrael Street, Geula, Jerusalem - aftermath of this morning's
murderous car-ramming of people standing innocently at a bus stop

It's been an incredibly stressful day here in Jerusalem, and throughout Israel.

Strikingly, four major attacks - and they were by no means all of today's attacks - took place at almost the exact same moment this morning.

All have been widely reported so we will not delve into details, and the smartphone videos of Palestinian Arabs engaged in terror have been posted and seen by those who can bear to look at them.

Videos like this one (be warned - it's explicit and very clear) of Alaa Abu Jamal, an East Jerusalem Arab employed as a service technician by Bezeq, Israel's dominant telecoms company, driving a work-supplied Bezeq-logo'ed van that he crashes deliberately at murderously high speed directly into a small group of Israelis standing at a bus stop on Jerusalem's busy Malchei Yisrael Street. And then, emerging from his smashed vehicle, he slashes furiously - with a meat cleaver - at an injured Jew lying prone on the ground, killing him, before being shot by a passing armed security man. It's all on the video. One of his victims - Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky, 60 - died in the remorseless attack and was buried this afternoon. Several more are seriously injured. The principal attacker, Abu Jamal (who will doubtless be termed "lone wolf" in parts of the media who avert their gaze when non-stop PA incitement to kill is shown) is now dead.

UPDATE February 4, 2016: File this enraging comment away for when the know-nothing reporters and editors of Big Media next serve up a portion of "Abbas the moderate" counter-factual nonsense: "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday hosted the families of Palestinian terrorists involved in Jerusalem attacks, just hours after three Palestinians killed an Israeli Border Police officer and injured a second in Jerusalem. Abbas met with the families of 11 terrorists in Ramallah who carried out attacks against Israelis in the past four months and whose bodies remain in Israeli custody, Ynet reported... Also present were the relatives of Alaa Abu Jamal, also of Jebel Mukkaber, who in October careened his car into Israeli pedestrians, exited the vehicle and stabbed the victims. The families of the terrorists called upon Abbas to act to secure the release of their bodies from Israel. Abbas said that the Palestinian leadership is making great efforts to do so in order to ease the pain for the families. “Your sons are martyrs,” the Palestinian Authority president told the families. [Source: Times of Israel]

And like this one of the aftermath of an assault on the city's Egged 78 bus in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv (Governor's Mansion) neighborhood. Two victims are dead; 16 are injured, some of them very seriously. This was an attack in which the outcome could have easily been much, much worse: the goal of the two terrorists, one armed with a gun and the other with a knife, was evidently to take control of the bus by force and use it to do even more serious harm.

One terrorist is Baha Aliyan, 22, from Jabel Mukaber. The second is Bilal Ghanem, from the same neighborhood, an "activist" in the Islamist Bloc at Al-Quds University who had a record as a Hamas terrorist [source] and was released from 14 months imprisonment just a year ago [source - Arabic]. Tom Gross, the distinguished media analyst who follows the Al-Quds school closely (it has a violent and hateful history) points out in a despatch today that the university's Fatah student faction published a tribute to the dead killer in Arabic on a university-affiliated website: our translation of the Arabic

جامعة القدس تزف شهيدها الثالث احد منفذي عملية اطلاق النار اليوم في 

الباص في مدينة القدس الشهيد بلال غانم ...

makes plain that (no surprise here) the students call their former colleague a martyr. Such is the deplorable value system of the better-educated of the Palestinian Arabs. (Fatah's head is the current PA president, Abu Mazen or Mahmoud Abbas.)

The two murder-minded jihadists boarded an Egged bus on Olei HaGardom Street in East Talpiot, a neighborhood also known as Armon HaNetziv. According to Ynet:

They started shooting and stabbing passengers while the bus kept moving, killing a man in his 60s and wounding 10 others. One of the wounded, a man in his 40s, was evacuated in critical condition and was declared dead at the hospital. Two others were seriously wounded - women aged around 60 and 40, who suffered stab wounds to their upper body. Two others were in moderate condition: a woman of about 60 years old with gunshot wounds to her upper body and a man in his 30s. Three were lightly wounded, and two were suffering from shock.

Today's other two major attacks were both in Ra'anana, a Tel Aviv suburb that has so far largely escaped acts of Arab terror. One was a walk-up stabbing (the perpetrator traveled from East Jerusalem for his moment in the sun) at a bus stop in Ra'anana's commercial center. One of the victims is badly injured; two others with light-to-moderate injuries. The second, again in a busy part of the city, resulted in six Israelis being injured, one seriously. The attacker is alive but in a bad way.

It's got to be observed that (a) all of today's perpetrators are the holders of Israeli identity papers; and (b) many of the Palestinian Arab stabbings of the past two weeks here in Israel have been the work of murder-minded children and teenagers.

For those who see this as a statistical blip, an issue of interest only to friends of Israel, or a matter of no particular significance (many of the reporters and editors in the mainstream media, in particular), we have nothing to say.

But for reasonably intelligent observers, it's evident that a web of interlocking influencers within the PA and Hamas regime governments - their civil services (such as they are), their mosques and youth groups and schools  - has been and continues to be involved in churning out battle-field-ready young people, boys and girls, their heads filled with visions of glory and a readiness - even a passion - for death.

What is the regime of Mahmoud Abbas, the highly-immoderate, allegedly "moderate" PA leader about whom we have nothing good to say, doing about it? Let's be clear: he's encouraging it, and facilitating it via overt incitement of the most barbaric kind.

The video above [translated from Arabic by Palestinian Media Watch] captures a fire-and-brimstone, rally-the-thugs speech given by the normally phlegmatic Abbas less than a month ago. It ran on official PA TV and was also posted to his personal website. It's a personal message, an official call to the masses, and it's entirely devoted to precisely the cause that is on the lips of the stabbers, the shooters, the car-rammers, the rock hurlers and the firebombers: the ancient and renewed capital of the State of Israel, Jerusalem, and the holiest site in Jewish life, the Temple Mount:

"We bless you [referring to those carrying out Ribat, the pursuit of religious conflict and/or war to protect land claimed to be Islamic), we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr (shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah. The Al-Aqsa [mosque] is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours, and they [the Israelis, the Jews] have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, September 16, 2015]

Yes: Every drop of blood.

Now if you were a callow teenage boy or girl of 13, 14, 15, and getting bombarded in the mosque and at school and on the street where you hang with your friends, always, always about Jerusalem and its sacred state - and then the president comes along and promises you paradise and a reward from Heaven, and a free pass to do whatever harm to the Jews that you can imagine, wouldn't your mother's largest kitchen knife be the very next you go looking for?

If any of Abbas adviser's are reading this, and want to deny the claim, they're invited to please send us written evidence of the PA president's calls to his people to stop their blood-lusting violence, their overt and cold-blooded weaponization of their society's children, and their hunting for defenceless, civilian Israelis at bus stops, tram stops and shopping precincts.

And for any Europeans reading this - congratulations! None of this could have happened without the tax money you pay to your governments who in turn send millions of Euros to Ramallah to enable Abbas and his henchmen to get away with murder.