15-Dec-15: Speeding car, Israeli victims: a terrorist's fast path to martyrdom

Looking down at the scene of Monday's terror attack in Jerusalem

A video clip posted to YouTube overnight by an Arabic news agency [here] calls yesterday's deliberate running down of ordinary Israelis waiting for a bus by a young man sitting inside his speeding car a "heroic operation".

It's not an aberration: the passion for terror has erased all the remaining red lines in Palestinian Arab society.

Monday's attacker, a young man with a life of promise and (we assume with confidence) a Jerusalem-resident Israeli ID card, was shot by several armed by-standers, including security personnel, before he could get out of the smashed vehicle and do more harm with the axe and knife he brought along evidently for that purpose. The car's license plates were standard black-on-yellow Israeli [as this photo shows].

His funeral and the family's mourning tent in the coming few days (in Hebron, not Jerusalem) will probably provide further opportunities for elevating his wasted life to the kind of transcendental status that Palestinian Arab society so loves to honor.

As happens so often, the terrorist/ attacker, a 21 year old [عبد المحسن حسونة] from the Hassouna clan and a resident of a Jerusalem neighborhood, already features in a terror-promoting "martyr" poster, this one issued by a Hamas-aligned group in Hebron. (We don't know whether he was connected to Hamas, but in their society, failure is often an orphan while success, measured in injuries and deaths, has many fathers.)

"Martyr" poster celebrating the violent death of the young Arab
who drove his car into a cluster of Israelis on Monday [Image Source]

His victims, given that we are as much in a cognitive war as in a physical one, are termed "settlers" in parts of the Arabic media [see Alquds for instance, which is the most widely read of the Palestinian Arab daily newspapers]. Demonstrably, the notion that mothers and children standing in the cold, waiting for a bus, can be legitimate targets for a man equipped with a car, an axe, a knife and a brain-full of fervid, bigoted race-based hatred, is more effective when you demonize the victims. That's why they call Israelis "settlers" whether or not they know, whether or not it's true. The evidence for this is all over the Arabic, terror-glorifying parts of the on-line social media.

Not really comprehending the ethics and values of Palestinian Arab society, we can only say one thing with real confidence about the life and death of yesterday's bogus "martyr": the promoters of the hatred he embodied will make sure - via posters, news articles, YouTube and Twitter - that he will be emulated by others.