03-May-16: On a quiet lane in Jerusalem's Old City, a Monday night terror-by-knifing attack

The Jewish victim of last night's knife in the back attack is treated at
the scene before being taken by ambulance to hospital [Image Source]

There has been another Arab-on-Israeli knife attack, this time in Jerusalem's Old City last night (Monday), 

A Haredi man, a visibly Orthodox Jewish pedestrian aged about 60, was stabbed and suffered injuries to the upper part of the body in a terrorist assault in the Muslim Quarter, close to Sha'ar Harayot, Lions Gate, also known as St Stephen's Gate. (An Arab news report says he was stabbed in the back.) 

An intensive police manhunt led to the capture and arrest of an 18 year old Arab from a village not yet specified, and who, according to a Times of Israel report, confessed to the act. 

The injured victim was rushed to Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center hospital where he was reported to be conscious and in stable condition. Many, perhaps most, of the Arabic-language news reports [click] now covering the attack and the subsequent arrest, call the victim "a settler". 

(The reflexive use of the word is part of a systematic dumb-down-the-facts process in which the Palestinian Arab news media, following the lead of their society's religious and political "elite", negate any suggestion of legitimate ties between Jews and the land and city which have played the central role in Jewish life for two and a half millennia. History, for such people, is whatever they decide it should be. Thus: all Israelis and Jews are settlers; all the Arabs are indigenous and native to the land, and Jerusalem which, unfortunately for them, is mentioned in their holy scripture approximately zero times, is scared because it is where their religion's third most holy place is located. There are, naturally, more intelligent and very different views of all this.)

We noticed an Arab news report this morning that connected last night's knifing with an earlier Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack in which two Israeli victims were tragically murdered. That article says the scene of last night's assault is identical with the location of that October 2015 terror attack. When we wrote about it at the time ["28-Oct-15: The Pal Arab passion for knife attacks isn't just for social media: they sincerely mean to kill"], we noted that 

the Palestinian Authority controlled by Mahmoud Abbas has just decided to honor Muhannad Halabi by naming a street after him. Halabi is the 19-year-old murderer of two Jews killed close to the Old City's Lion's Gate on October 3, 2015 in a stabbing and shooting "operation" that took the lives of Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Benita and seriously injured Benita’s wife, Adele, and their two-year-old son. The assailant was shot dead by police at the scene. Palestinian Media Watch reported several days ago that the Palestinian Bar Association has already grotesquely bestowed an honorary law degree on the deceased stabber/shooter/attacker. Now the municipality of Surda/Abu Qash, in the suburbs of Ramallah, will name a street for him "to emphasize the national role played by Palestinian municipalities." 

The question with which we closed that October 2015 post is still very much on our minds: Can a society ever be rehabilitated from pathologies as deep and all-pervasive as theirs?