19-Feb-16: Outside Damascus Gate this morning: another Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack

Security outside Damascus Gate [Image Source]

It's a delightful late-winter Friday here in Jerusalem: blue skies, balmy breezes, unseasonably warm air, the Muslim Sabbath, the eve of the Jewish Day of Rest.

A perfect morning for today's sixth annual Menachem Begin Run which has gone off without a hitch. Also an ideal time for certain kinds of people to attempt murder. 

At Damascus Gate, one of the two major entry points to Jerusalem's Old City and known to Israelis by its Hebrew name Sha'ar Shechem or the Nablus Gate, a man armed with a knife, attacked a pair of Israeli Border Guard officers providing security for the entering and exiting throngs. The attacker struck from behind the backs of his victims, according to AFP. A video clip is being shown at this hour on the Aljazeera Arabic-language network and YouTube.

Times of Israel says he's a 20-year-old Arab male from Kafr 'Aqab [كفر عقب‎], regarded as one of East Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods even though it is located far closer to Ramallah where the PA sits than it is to the rest of Israel's capital city. Ynet gives the attacker's name as Mohammed Abu Khalaf, The attack happened at about 9:00 am. The knife man was stopped by police shots and died of his wounds. He was the holder of an Israeli ID card.

Both officers are injured. One suffered blows to the upper body; the other has an injured arm. 

Both are in their early 20s, and both are being treated for their wounds at Jerusalem’s Shaarei Zedek Medical Center hospital.

The Times of Israel report notes that the area around Damascus Gate

is especially tense on Fridays when thousands of Muslim worshipers pass through the gate to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City’s Temple Mount.

Ma'an News Agency says this is the Israeli identification
card of the stabber [Source]

It might have said, but did not, that the throngs of Muslim faithful continued their comings and goings unimpeded in any meaningful sense. An article posted just yesterday on the website of Al-Monitor ["Why the Damascus Gate is more important than ever", Shlomi Eldar, February 19, 2016] says Damascus Gate has emerged as

"a holy site. Young Palestinians post images of it, with and without photos of dead assailants, to which they add verses from the Quran or from contemporary poetry. These verses praise the “gate of bravery,” which will herald salvation and redemption, that is, the end of the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital... The Israel Defense Forces and security establishment are well aware that Damascus Gate has become a pilgrimage site for assailants from across the West Bank... Since the attack that killed [Hadar Cohen, 19, shot dead by three Arab assailants just two weeks ago] on who had just finished basic training, only experienced officers are being deployed in that area... Following a recent assessment of the situation by the defense establishment, and especially after the attack in which Cohen was killed, it was decided to pursue a strategy of “containment.” In other words, so long as the stabbing attacks are being perpetrated by young, unaffiliated and inexperienced assailants, all that is required is the deployment of trained and qualified troops. There is no need to further beef up security at Damascus Gate. Setting up roadblocks and electronic checkpoints would not only severely damage tourism in Jerusalem, but would also have diplomatic and psychological ramifications. Separation roadblocks in the Old City in general and at Damascus Gate in particular could be construed as the de facto partition of the city.At this stage, as long as the intifada largely remains knife attacks by lone attackers, the defense establishment prefers to take calculated risks, harsh as the price being paid might be."

Our sense is that if Eldar at Al-Monitor is right in his assessment, most Israelis would be shocked to know of the mortal risks being taken by the authorities over their heads and on their backs.

19-Feb-16: Remembering the savages, forgetting the victims

Tuvia Yanai Weissman הי"ד, in the photo with his wife and baby,

was murdered tonight. The "achievement" of the Palestinian 

Arab children who killed him  is being celebrated, literally,
as an act of heroism. [Image Source]

There's a significant number of people who, faced with the sight of Palestinian Arab children being weaponized by the terrorism-obsessed society in which they live, demand sympathy for those children and their release from Israeli custody if that's where they happen to be. 

Campaigns of that sort - this one for instance - have become commonplace as the savagery continues. 

As the case of the 14 year-old boy who participated in a vicious knifing attack in Pisgat Zeev ["12-Nov-15: What about Palestinian Arab terror gives it that unique savagery?"] a few months ago shows, this is true even when the children have carried out acts of extreme violence that have ended up costing Israeli lives. Murder, in other words.

This is a reflection of attitudes that we think are not well understood and that cause huge damage to those doing it and to the societies in which they operate. 

Consider what we wrote in previous posts including "19-Jan-16: Children with knives and what they destroy", 11-Nov-15: When child abuse is a national mission" and "11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children".

The people behind those campaigns claim they do it in the name of human rights. With straight faces, they assert that they stand for the rights of children who ought to be allowed to live their lives because children are by nature innocent and charming.

This is ludicrous.

Palestinian Arab society - at all levels - is doing something hideous to its own children, as we keep noting in this blog. The right response is condemnation and rejection of their bigoted politics masquerading as something higher and nobler.

Tonight's murderous attack by a pair of knife-armed Arab boys ended in the death of one of their victims. Those boys already appear tonight, a few hours after the horror they brought into an Israeli supermarket, on widely distributed posters proclaiming their heroism in Arabic and across the social media.

As sick as this is, the focus on the killers is only part of the story. It's the part we and other civilized people can influence the least.

The other part is the way the Israeli victims are forgotten, consigned to be mere statistics and quickly discarded by the relentless news cycle and by terror-fatigued, apathetic onlookers.

About this, we can do something.

For them, and for ourselves, we want people to see the young man of 21 - a husband and father - whose life and the promising future of his young family were brutally stolen tonight by two manipulated Palestinian Arab youths. (The wedding video of the young couple was posted to YouTube two years ago, and has been widely viewed in the past hours.) We know it's unlikely the mainstream news-reporting media will pay attention to Tuvia Yanai Weissman's life and his death. That's why we must.

We want people for whom human rights are a genuine value to observe how the "achievement" of the killers is already being celebrated tonight in Palestinian Arab villages and mosques via a myriad of different forms of incitement. It's going on in full force as we write these words: the marketing of murder; the cynical camouflaging of vile hatred; the ongoing brain-washing.

We pray that this becomes understood for the sake of those other Arab children who have not yet taken up a knife or a meat cleaver or a gun.

And also for the sake of our own lives and communities.

UPDATE February 21, 2016: We are grateful, and not for the first time, to Malgorzata Koraszewska and the editorial team at the influential Polish website Listy z naszego sadu (literally "Letters from our orchard") where a Polish-language translation of "Remembering the savages, forgetting the victims" appears today. Ms Koraszewska writes:

We added (from the editor) a short note about the total amount of Israelis killed in this horrible "knife intifada" with a picture of Dafne Meir and information who she was and how she died defending her children. The Israeli victims of this terror are almost never mentioned in Polish mainstream media.

Sadly, Poland is not the only place where that is true.

18-Feb-16: A Palestinian Arab reminder this afternoon of what, in their eyes, children are good for

Time for people to better understand who provides
the knives, the encouragement and the inspiration
that is destroying the lives of  poorly-educated,
highly motivated Pal Arab youths

Not for the first time [refer back to December 2014 and November 2015], a branch of the Rami Levy supermarket chain, known for its open and welcoming approach to Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the shopping transaction, has become the scene of a violent Arab-on-Israeli terror attack.

First reports came around 4:45 pm this afternoon, near dusk. From Times of Israel in the past hour:

Two Israelis were wounded, one of them seriously, in a suspected terror stabbing in an industrial zone north of Jerusalem Thursday afternoon. The stabbing occurred in a supermarket belonging to the Rami Levy chain in the Sha’ar Binyamin industrial zone, located southeast of Ramallah in the West Bank. One of the victims, a 17-year-old, was said to be in moderate condition, while the second, 35, was in moderate-to-serious condition. Two Palestinian stabbers were shot by a civilian. They were reported to be in serious condition and were described by an eyewitness as “very young children.”

We don't know for sure at this stage whether that is true or not. We do note that the Palestinian Arab media are describing the attackers as aged 17 and 35. See Ma'an News Agency's report here. This is almost certainly wrong.

Ma'an News Agency, a Palestinian Arab source (screen shot). Note how old Ma'an,
but almost no one else, thinks the attackers are

In characteristic fashion, the Ma'an article spins some self-serving context by writing: "A wave of small-scale attacks carried out by Palestinian individuals in the occupied Palestinian territory -- predominantly on Israeli military targets -- have increasing targeting illegal settlements this month... International bodies have attempted to quell the ongoing violence through urging restraint by both Israeli and Palestinian leadership." Most of that is factually plain wrong including, we are fairly certain, the ages of the Arab attackers.

We know now [6:30 pm Thursday] that a 21-year-old Israeli is seriously wounded (now receiving emergency treatment at Shaarei Zedek in Jerusalem) and a 36-year-old Israeli is moderately injured (now in the emergency room at Hadassah). People who pray have been asked to have in mind the names of טובי׳ה ינאי בן אורלי and אברהם בן חמדה (Tuvia Yanai ben Orly, and Avraham Ben Hemda) for a Refuah Shleimah, a full recovery.

Haaretz says "The attackers were both are said to be alive and en route to an Israeli hospital."

The supermarket where this evening's attack was carried out [Image Source]

This seems a good time to point to the highly-political campaign being waged right now by supporters of Palestinian Arab terror in the social media under the hashtag @FreeAhmadManasrah. That name belongs to a child of 13 who was part of a two-child stabbing spree (along with a cousin a mere two years older who died in the effort) in Pisgat Ze'ev, a northern Jerusalem neighbourhood a few minutes drive from the scene of this afternoon's stabbing. We explored some of the issues in a post ["12-Nov-15: What about Palestinian Arab terror gives it that unique savagery?"] at the time.

Those behind that morality-deficient campaign to free the child (immediately) and to absurdly blame the Israelis for the freedom-limiting changes that have come over his life can legitimately be thought of as among the authors of today's knifings.

When those social activists and "human rights" protestors starting giving thought to the dozens of victims of child-enacted Palestinian Arab lethal violence - on both sides - we can start assessing their claims in different tones.

We can put numbers to the scale of the disaster. A report published yesterday [Ynet, February 17, 2016] based on data collected by the Shin Bet and the Israeli military, finds that about half of the 200+ perpetrators of terrorist attacks against Israelis in the past five months are under the age of 20, About ten percent are under the age of 16.

We are witnesses to a massive loss of moral compass in which children - as young as 11 - are encouraged by the instrumentalities of Palestinian Arab society to see stabbings, shootings, car rammings and bombings as acts of redemption, justified by a sense of feverishly-cultivated victimhood and sense of oppression, validated by the most powerful voices in Palestinian Arab society. The lethal incitement comes non-stop from (among others) the prime minister, the president, the religious establishment, the schools. Describing their society as being in the grip of a death cult seems a fair description to us.

Inside the store this evening [Social media source]

Back to this past hour's events, an attack during the week's busiest supermarket hours when Israeli families stock up for the upcoming Sabbath:

Paramedics treated the wounded at the scene of the attack and took the victims to Jerusalem hospitals. A large number of security forces were at the scene. An eyewitness identified as Uziel told Army Radio the supermarket was packed at the time of the attack. “I was in the middle of selecting vegetables inside when suddenly we heard screaming. Everyone immediately knew it was a terror attack.
“Within a matter of seconds soldiers and civilians with weapons rushed over…they shot the first terrorist and after 10 seconds or so they shot the second terrorist as well.”
[...A] military medic who was doing his shopping at the time ran over and gave the victims initial medical assistance. [The stabbers]  "both looked very young, children…everyone was in shock that these were kids — at least, they looked very young." The supermarket is located in an industrial zone frequented by Israeli settlers as well as Palestinian shoppers. Several attacks have taken place there in recent months... [Times of Israel]

UPDATE February 18, 2016 at 7:15 pm: Channel 10's correspondent Alon Ben David has tweeted that the attackers are aged 14 and 15, and one is now dead. Times of Israel says the knifers are children of 14 and 15 from the West Bank village of Beitunia, near Ramallah. Ma'an has now changed its report by deleting the bogus ages they quoted earlier, and that we screen-shot a few paragraphs above this. Times of Israel also reports that the younger of the two Israelis stabbed in the attack has now unfortunately succumbed to his wounds and died. His name is Tuvia Yanai Weissman.

17-Feb-16: On the search for terror at Haaretz

Route 443 [Image Source]

Over at Haaretz, they have another example of Amira Hass agit-prop disguised as a "news report" today ["Army terror against the Palestinians that journalists only yawn at", Haaretz, February 17, 2016]

It runs through a list of non-lethal actions taken by the IDF and security forces and ends with these words:

[I]n the dictionary of the residents (and mine), destruction of cisterns, theft of land and livelihood, and invasions of homes are acts of terror.

That Hass "dictionary of terror" is a strange and malevolent thing. 

Military actions designed to defensively safeguard the second-busiest artery serving the nation's capital qualify for a prominent appearance in it. 

But it fails to even hint at the numerous attacks, including murders, done in recent weeks by Arabs living nearby. [Google Search]. The very recent killing for instance [about which we wrote: "26-Jan-16: Two attackers stab women at neighborhood grocery store; instantly become figures of emulation"] of a lovely young woman, Shlomit Krigman, 24, stabbed to death on January 26 [her editors at Haaretz reported it, even as she ignores it] on a street in Beit Horon. 

That's a community located an easy stroll away from Beit Ur Al Tahta (the subject of the Amira Hass story) and the adjoining Beit Ur Al Fuqah. Translated to English, the names of those villages are Lower House of Straw, and Upper House of Straw. 

Note also that, as Wikipedia points out, they are built on the ruins of the Biblical... Beit Horon. (Who are settlers here, and who is native? It's rarely as black-and-white in this conflicted part of the world as people like Hass like to portray.)

Hass manages to tell her story without mentioning the rash of murderous stabbings at the Arab-owned Dor Alon gas station on Route 443, an easy hike away from the Beit Ur villages. And other recent Arab-on-Israeli assaults launched on or close to the busy route. And the long history of stabbings, shootings and rammings that have characterized the relationship of our neighbours with this key road. On November 23, 2015, as her editors at Haaretz reported, an Israeli, Ziv Mizrahi, just 18, was stabbed to death there. Numerous other Israelis have escaped with their lives but injured and maimed. [Click here for some of our posts about attacks on Israelis on and near Route 443.] 

There's something depressingly fitting in Hass, recipient of the World Press Freedom Hero award 16 years ago by her peers in the news industry, delivering a bogus slapdown of Israeli "terror" that focuses on a hamlet populated by straw men.

15-Feb-16: Uniformed PA police officer by day; furtive, terror-minded gunman at night

PA police perform at a graduation event [File Photo - Source]

One of the gunmen in Sunday night's terror attack ["15-Feb-16: Capping a long day of extreme violence, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack in Jerusalem"] may have been an officer in the Palestinian Authority police. Unless you get your news from a handful of Israeli and Palestinian Arab sources, you would never know. And there's a reason for that.

Israel National News gives the name of one of the Sunday night shooters as Omar Mohammed Omar. It says he is from Hebron, and the third Palestinian Arab policeman involved in a violent terrorist attack on Israelis since the beginning of what the report calls "the current escalated wave of terrorism". They mean the period since the start of October 2015. (No one is ready to give it a name at this stage.)

The Palestinian Arab newsagency Ma'an tells it differently. Like the Israeli report, they say one of the attackers was indeed a Palestinian Authority "security officer". But they identify him as Mansour Yasser Abdul-Aziz Shawamrah, aged 20. They then give a name for the second of the shooters that sounds similar but not the same as the Israeli article: Omar Ahmad Omar, also 20. Ma'an says the two of them come from the same town - al-Qubeiba - and they are both now dead.

Whatever the right names and identities, what's clear is that the mainstream news reporting companies see no compelling reason to report the fact that freelance gunmen who open fire on Israelis late at night with high-powered weapons are salaried members of the Abbas regime's security apparatus. The shooters may even (though we don't know this) have gotten weapons training from US experts, as so many of their colleagues have over the years since the Arafat regime was established [for background: "United States security assistance to the Palestinian National Authority", via Wikipedia]. But that goes unreported too.

We have checked with Google and, while we can't be certain yet, it seems to us that no other news service - other than in Israel and parts of the Palestinian Arab media - seems to have picked up on the question of whose fingers were on the triggers of the automatic guns that fired at Israelis on Sunday. And on the connection between those fingers and the salaried men of the PA armed forces.

Why's that? Perhaps because publishing evidence of the black-and-white involvement of PA personnel and resources in clear acts of terrorism does not fit so well with the customary mainstream media narrative of Palestinians being ready for statehood and Nobel Prizes.

That and the fact that the Abbas regime, totally dependent on outside funding from providers of foreign aid, is already twitchy enough - along with the Europeans and Americans who hand those millions over - about the criticism they get for being the enablers of the PA's appalling "cash for terror" rewards scheme.

It's a vastly under-reported issue that we (via Arnold Roth's testimony before a US Congress oversight committee two weeks ago) hope is going to become more widely known and its implications better understood. The fact that this has not yet happened is not because the facts are hard to find. They are a matter of open record. But they are consciously ignored by those who ought to be focusing on them. They have been for years.

Just to give one stark, but little-known, illustration:

When the [so-called Second] Intifada broke out, it turned out that 70% of the martyrs, and of the people who carried out attacks against the occupation, were members of the Palestinian security forces. 

That's a verbatim sound-bite from a television interview that we references in a blog post three years ago: "21-Oct-13: An insider's insight into who carried out most of those Palestinian Arab terror attacks over the past decade". The man being quoted was the Palestinian Authority's ambassador to post-Qadaffi Libya - in other words, a regime inner-circle insider. The interview was carried on an Al-Jazeera television talk program on September 27, 2013. But you would be hard-pressed to find any brand-name Western journalists or their editors ready to say it in their media. Many of them certainly know it. They just don't want you to know.

Finally, for readers wanting to drill down, a short selection of relevant articles from among those we have written on this painful and very dangerous matter:

• 08-Feb-16: Terror is now a legitimate career option in Pal Arab society but its enablers barely notice
• 01-Jan-16: Storms ahead? Not everyone notices
• 08-Oct-15: Jerusalem Watch | Thursday noon stabbing (yes, another one)
• 02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists
• 28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism
• 28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.
• 20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?

15-Feb-16: Weaponizing of Pal Arab children goes on as major news media pretend not to see

"Israel shoots dead..." is the entire message
Today's Melbourne Age [source]

A tragedy is being made worse by those who report it. Or better: fail to accurately report it.

Those of us following with horror the ongoing and escalating weaponization of children by the Palestinian Arab leadership will not be surprised to find corners of the mainstream media for whom the telling of the events entails a reflexive laying of principal blame at the feet of the Israelis.

Reuters, for instance.

Here [link] is how a syndicated report they issued on Sunday night [link] is being megaphoned via news channels across the global news landscape today. It's their take on the violence and bloodletting we reported here yesterday ["15-Feb-16: Capping a long day of extreme violence, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack in Jerusalem", and "14-Feb-16: Sunday bloody Sunday"]. But at a deeper and more worrying level, it's an instance of agit-prop packaged up to advance a shallow, misleading and eventually dangerous re-telling of the Palestinian Arab descent into self-destruction.

Reuters professional editors and reporters - along with most of the editors at the news channels who syndicate their stories - manage not to even notice (or pretend not to) how most of yesterday's Arab-on-Israeli shootings and stabbings were done by children. The words child and children are completely absent. This takes determination and, to an extent, talent.

By looking away from the real story - the indoctrination of yet another generation of hope-deprived youngsters and equipping them with the zeal and self-negation that it takes to kill and be killed - ensures more deaths and injuries of children in the days to come. The toll is already far too great.

Click for some of our previous posts about the astonishing ways Pal Arab society relates to children's lives - not only its own, as we as bereaved parents of a murdered child know, but especially its own.

How great if the Reuters people would take to heart some words we quoted here a few months back [20-Oct-15: Children and what a soulless society can do to them]. An acclaimed leader of oppressed people who understood how this works said:

 "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." - Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, addressing the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Pretoria, South Africa, May 8, 1995 [source]

15-Feb-16: Capping a long day of extreme violence, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack in Jerusalem

From the Israeli social media, a snapshot
of one of the automatic weapons used in
tonight's shooting attack at Damascus
Gate [Image Source]

Late Sunday night, after a day of seriously violent Arab-on-Israeli attacks [see "14-Feb-16: Sunday bloody Sunday"], a pair of Palestinian Arabs armed with automatic weapons opened fire on a cluster of police officers standing at a Jerusalem Light Rail station serving the Old City of Jerusalem.

The attack, first reported around 11:00 pm, was launched at the exact spot where an earlier Palestinian Arab shooting-and-knifing attack had taken place twelve days ago. In that February 3, 2016 assault, a Border Police trainee officer, Hadar Cohen, aged just 19, was killed. [See "Palestinians Kill Israeli Officer Before Being Shot Dead", Associated Press via ABC News, February 3, 2016]

Tonight's shooting attack was directed at a group of Border Guard police officers near Damascus Gate. The gunmen had what Haaretz calls home-made Carl Gustav-style rifles.

According to Times of Israel, the officers returned fired, hitting and killing one of the gunmen immediately. They chased after the second, who fled the scene while continuing to shoot. That second attacker was soon hit and killed by police fire. There are thankfully no injuries to Israeli officers or bystanders.

The escalation in the nature and volume of Palestinian Arab attacks is a worrying development. But not necessarily for consumers of CNN's brand of news. After hundreds of knifings, vehicle rammings and shootings directed at Israeli civilians and security personnel, tonight's attack is explained this way by CNN's editors:

Israel has experienced a spate of violence since October.

Great work, guys. Analytic depth to be proud of.

14-Feb-16: Sunday bloody Sunday

Via Israeli social media, a cell phone snapshot of
the automatic weapon taken from the body
of the dead Palestinian Arab attacker from
Arake, a child of 15 [Source]

The news focus here in Israel this mild and pleasant evening has shifted dramatically away from the events of another traumatic day of Arab-on-Israeli violence to a major road accident in which an intercity Egged bus appears to have struck a parked concrete-laden semi-trailer, causing multiple deaths and many injuries ["6 killed, at least 12 hurt when crowded bus hits parked truck", Times of Israel, February 14, 2016].

The day has been difficult from the outset. And consistent with the violent messaging emanating from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, children are at the forefront of the attacks.

Jerusalem Post says an IDF unit spotted two Palestinian Arabs hurling rocks at Israelis this morning in the vicinity of the security fence near Arake, an Arab village north of Jenin. (Arab sources call it Araqah.) A Hebrew-language social media report places the attack at about 10:30 this morning (Sunday). An army unit deployed to the scene then came under live fire. In response, the soldiers traversed the security fence and engaged the Arab attackers on the Palestinian Arab side. One, it turns out, was armed with an automatic rifle; the second had a knife, according to army sources. Once they were dead, sources from the Palestinian Arab side identified them as two boys aged 15. Both are from Arake. Ma'an names them as Nihad Raed Muhammad Waqed and Fuad Marwan Khalid Waqed.

During the early afternoon, an Arab assailant armed with a knife hurled himself at Border Police officers manning the Mizmoriya checkpoint between the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Har Homa and Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem. According to Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, the attack occurred at about 1:30 pm: "The terrorist ran toward police at the checkpoint with a knife, and when he did not stop Border Police opened fire and killed him...” Fortunately, none of the officers was wounded in the attack." The Jerusalem Post names the dead attacker as 17 year old Naim Safi, of Bethlehem.

Later Sunday afternoon, at about 3:00 pm, Israel Police received an emergency phone call from a woman reporting that an Arab male had attempted to attack her with a knife in Talpiot, one of Jerusalem's southern neighborhoods. Police units immediately set up road blocks and searched for the suspect, but no arrests were made. The search was still going on as we write (Sunday 7:00 pm).

The Hebron attacker, a girl, was rushed
to hospital [Image Source]

Then during the early Sunday evening hours, yet another Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack in the Hebron area. The Jerusalem Post report describes this as the work of a "female terrorist", and says she was shot and subdued by security forces. Quoting the Border Police, the same source says the attacker was rushed to hospital by military medical personnel and was reported to be in critical condition. According to Times of Israel, it appears the knife attack was the work of a 14 year old Palestinian Arab girl. It quotes police saying she arrived at a checkpoint near the violence-prone ancient Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, took out a knife and attempted to stab a Border Police officer. He pushed her away and shot her, according to the police. Ynet, quoting Palestinian media sources, says the attacker is 14-year-old Jasmine Rashad al-Zaru, and that she is being treated in the Shaarei Zedek Medical Center hospital in Jerusalem.

While some commentators and political figures still seem to want to hear the Palestinian Arab leadership condemn the terror emanating from their ranks, the larger and more significant issue by far is the recruitment of Palestinian Arab citizens' children to the frontlines of their fruitless and massively self-destructive war of terror against Jews and Israelis.

This has implications that will continue to plague lives on both sides of the border long after the manipulative kleptocrats and child-abusers of the Mahmoud Abbas regime have passed on and gone to their rewards.

14-Feb-16: Islamist terror in Europe "here to stay" but what about the past?

Paris 2015 [Image Source]

Quote of the week:

More major attacks in Europe are a "certainty", French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told an audience at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. "We have entered -- we all feel it -- in a new era characterised by the lasting presence of 'hyper-terrorism'," said Valls, whose country was hit by two Islamist attacks last year. "We must be fully conscious of the threat, and react with a very great force and great lucidity. There will be attacks. Large-scale attacks. It's a certainty. This hyper-terrorism is here to stay," he said... [AFP, February 13, 2016]

It's a powerful statement from a political figure who heads a country deeply invested in the outcome of his prediction.

Surprisingly, it has gotten no mainstream news coverage so far other than via the French news-agency. But note the editorial insertion: "whose country was hit by two Islamist attacks last year". If there has been a public correction of that mis-statement, we have not yet seen it.

Is there any doubt that France suffered more than two Islamist terror attacks in 2015? A glance at Wikipedia's "List of Islamist terrorist attacks" shows seven attacks its editors define as "Islamist" and French (from among 118 recorded Islamist attacks worldwide during the year). Which of these, we wonder, are considered by AFP's editors as something other than terror or not done by Islamists, or perhaps not French? And for the record, there were clearly many more Islamist terror attacks on French targets than the seven listed here:

• January 7–9, 2015 – A series of five attacks in and around Paris kill 17 people, plus three attackers, and leave 22 other people injured.

From 11:30 CET on 7 January to 18:35 CET on 9 January 2015, a series of five attacks occurred across the Île-de-France region, particularly in Paris. The attacks killed a total of 17 people, in addition to the three perpetrators and wounded 22 others. A fifth shooting attack did not result in any fatalities. The group that claims responsibility for the attacks, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claimed that the attack had been planned for years ahead. [Wikipedia]

• January 9, 2015 - The Porte de Vincennes hostage crisis kills 4 and injures 9 people.

The Porte de Vincennes siege occurred at a Hypercacher kosher superette in Porte de Vincennes (20th arrondissement of Paris) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting two days earlier, and concurrently with the Dammartin-en-Goële hostage crisis in which the two Charlie Hebdo gunmen were cornered. Amedy Coulibaly had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and was a close friend of... the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo attack... Coulibaly murdered four Jewish hostages, and held fifteen other hostages during a siege... The police ended the siege by storming the store and killing Coulibaly... [Wikipedia]

• April 19, 2015 – A 32-year Frenchwoman is murdered by a gunman whose plot to attack a church is foiled shortly after. [Wikipedia's reference is in French. Here's what we posted on this attack at the time: "07-Jun-15: In France, arrests in wake of an intended Islamist terror assault on a Paris church"]

• June 26, 2015 – Saint-Quentin-Fallavier attack – Beheading in a factory near Lyon, head marked with Arabic writing and Islamist flags. Gas canisters planted provoked a fire. 1 dead, 11 injured.

[A] French Muslim of North African descent, Yassine Salhi, decapitated his employer Hervé Cornara and drove his van into gas cylinders at a gas factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier near Lyon, France, which caused an explosion that injured two other people... The attack occurred on the same day as several other Islamist terrorist attacks, which have subsequently been named the 2015 Ramadan attacks, though any relationship between the various incidents is disputed. French authorities believe that Salhi has links with the Islamist terrorist group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)... [Wikipedia]

• August 21, 2015 – 2015 Thalys train attack | Shooting and stabbing in train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris injures 5. The incident is believed by French police to be an Islamist terrorist attack.

...The train had just crossed the border from Belgium into France and was traveling in Oignies (department of Pas-de-Calais) when the perpetrator opened fire in a train carriage before being subdued by passengers, one of whom he stabbed. Including the assailant, four people were injured, none fatally. The incident is believed by French police to be an Islamist terrorist attack, although the gunman claimed the motivation was robbery due to hunger. Several people who subdued the attacker were awarded France's highest decoration, the Legion of Honour and other awards... [Wikipedia]

• November 13, 2015 – A series of terrorist attacks in Paris kill 137, and wound 368. They involved a series of coordinated attacks which consisted of mass shootings and suicide bombings. This incident was the most fatal event on French soil since World War II. See our post "14-Nov-15: The Friday 13th terror assault on Paris".

• November 18, 2015 – A Jewish history teacher was stabbed in the arm and leg by three Islamists in Marseille. [The Wikipedia editors point to this external article for background:]

A teacher at a Jewish school in the southern French city of Marseille was stabbed Wednesday evening by three people shouting anti-Semitic obscenities and expressing support for the Islamic State group... The 57-year-old victim, who was wearing a kippa, was attacked outside his home, a short distance from the school and synagogue complex, a source close to the investigation said. The attackers who were travelling by scooter demanded he look at smartphone pictures of Toulouse jihadist Mohamed Merah, who shot dead three Jewish schoolchildren, a teacher and three soldiers in southwestern France in 2012, Marseille public prosecutor Brice Robin told AFP. They also "showed him a t-shirt with the logo of Daesh (an acronym for Islamic State)" before lunging at him with a knife, injuring him in the arms, legs and stomach... [Source]

The same Wikipedia list records two Islamist terror attacks in France already this year: the January 7, 2016 attack on a Paris police station by an Islamist from Morocco armed with a pretend explosive belt and a meat cleaver (shot dead by police) ["Paris police kill man armed with meat cleaver on Charlie Hebdo anniversary", Reuters, January 7, 2016]. And the January 11, 2016 machete assault by a 15-year old Turkish child on a teacher from a Jewish school in Marseille ["Teen jihadi ‘proud’ of attack on Jewish man in Marseille", Times of Israel, January 13, 2016].

Is inaccurate and often tendentious mainstream media coverage of Islamist acts of terrorism a part of the terror problem or of the journalism problem?