11-Aug-16: Another Jerusalem stabbing

Young Hassidim, like this afternoon's stabbing victim, are
frequent visitors to the ancient Jewish graves of the
Mount of Olives [Image Source]

Another violent Arab-on-Israeli incident is unfolding in Jerusalem as we write this.

We are working from initial reports only at this stage, but it appears an Israeli male of 18 was stabbed this afternoon (it's now Thursday 3:00 pm) in the A-Tur neighbourhood of the city about half an hour ago.

The weapon is reported to be a screwdriver and the assailant is the subject of a police manhunt. The victim's injuries at this early stage are being described as moderate which for the rest of us means serious.

At Ynet, they are reporting that he is a yeshiva student who was leaving the ancient Mount of Olives Jewish cemetery and walking in the direction of a bus stop when attacked and pushed to the ground and stabbed in the back and neck. Social media reports quoting sources at nearby Hadassah Mt Scopus emergency room confirm back and neck injuries to a young man who was visiting the thousands-of-years-old Jewish cemetery as part of a group of Slonimer Hassidim,

Arab-on-Israeli violence has, for decades, been part of the reality of visits to the thousands of hallowed graves (estimated to number 70,000) on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. A huge number of ancient Jewish tombstones were vandalized, sacked and appropriated for road-paving purposes during the Jordanian military occupation of the area between 1949 and 1967. Smashing and desecration of Jewish graves at the site by Arab youths are a daily reality [link].

None of this, you will not be surprised to know, has the slightest impact on the Palestinian Arab news reporting industry. At the European-funded Ma'an News Agency, its report on this afternoon's stabbing attack includes this zinger:

According to Israeli police spokesperson Luba al-Samri an 18-year-old Israeli was leaving a Jewish cemetery at the Mount of Olives when an unidentified youth stabbed him with a screwdriver in the neck and back before fleeing the scene. ["Israeli youth stabbed, lightly wounded in occupied East Jerusalem", Ma'an, today]

Sacred ground, and the place of final repose of tens of thousands of Jews since the days of the Second Temple, and the ideologically-obsessed reporters and editors sitting in Ma'an's Bethlehem office call it "a Jewish cemetery". That's some fine, world-class reporting, boys and girls.

(Needless to say, Ma'an's Arabic version, which in general makes little pretense at being anything other than an echo chamber for Arab-on-Israeli malice and the airbrushing out of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and Israel, reports [here] merely that "a settler" - that's how the young Hassidic Jewish victim, the location of whose home is completely unknown to the bigots of Ma'an, is described - was "stabbed Thursday".)