14-Apr-16: Apart from jihad-minded children with knives and an axe-wielding attacker, peace and calm prevail

The aftermath of today's axe attack on Israelis [Image Source]

There has been an outbreak of local news stories reporting on a decline in the number of attempted terror attacks [for instance "Surge in Palestinian attacks waning" from Deutsche Welle; "All Indications Are That the Intifada Is Waning" from Haaretz; "How The ‘Stabbing Intifada’ Wound Down" from an Australian journal.

So not surprisingly...

An IDF serviceman came under axe attack this afternoon (Thursday) afternoon near the Al-Aroub refugee camp, south of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Thanks to quick defensive thinking, the attacker was shot dead and no injuries are reported on the Israeli side; the helmet of the Israeli soldier fortunately protected his head from the kind of thing that is ordinarily done by a swinging axe.

Times of Israel identifies the axe-man as Ibrahim Brad’aih, a resident of Al-Aroub in his mid-fifties, The Palestinian Arab media report the attack in customary fashion. The European-funded Ma'an News Agency, in its Arabic-language edition [here], though not in the English version, refers to the death of the attacker as an act of martyrdom, ensuring (which is the whole point) someone somewhere will seek to avenge him and keep the blood-letting cycle going.

Reuters' account helpfully explains why this happened:

"Palestinian leaders say attackers have acted out of desperation in the absence of movement toward creation of an independent Palestinian state in territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war..."

An informed news consumer might wonder why they said so little about that "absence of movement" but explaining it might have required some analysis of the Arab position and their vociferous rejection of General Assembly Resolution 181, the 1947 UN proposal to create a Palestinian state alongside the newly-reborn Israel, and what followed over the next seventy years. The Arab states went to war with tiny and impoverished Israel back then to demonstrate how much they meant it, but they lost the battle comprehensively.

The rest is too long, complicated and frankly unsympathetic to the Arabs for us to expect Reuters' editors to say more than they did... unless, of course, they wanted their readers to actually understand what rubbish it is to blame an axe attack against Israeli security personnel on frustrated dreams of yet another Arab country.

Two Arab pre-teen boys, three concealed slashing
weapons: From the Twitter account of
the Israel Police spokesperson [here]

Haaretz reports that Israel Police personnel thwarted an additional terror attack on Israelis today when they found a pair of knives and a meat cleaver concealed inside the clothing of two young Palestinian Arabs they stopped for questioning in Jerusalem's Old City.

Superintendent Micky Rosenfeld, Israel Police Foreign Press Spokesman, uploaded a photo of the weapons to his Twitter account. That's them in the photo on the right.

Tragically, and not for the first time, today's would-be jihadists are about 12 years old. In the atmosphere created by the Palestinian Authority's ongoing descent into barbarism, even pre-teen children are stopped and questioned when suspicions are aroused, and for awfully good reasons.

The Haaretz account says one of the boys was found to be carrying a farewell letter to his parents, according to the police spokesperson. We're guessing it did not include juvenile thoughts about "the absence of movement toward creation of an independent Palestinian state".

With much greater confidence, we can say this pair of boys will now become poster children for the hopes and passions of a Palestinian Arab culture that cherishes the shedding of infidel blood, and glorifies violence directed at foes whom they demonize in their school books, places of worship and public spaces.