21-Sep-16: At the entrance to Alfei Menashe, another story involving a knife

View of Alfei Menashe a decade ago [Image Source]

Another bright, sunny, gorgeous morning in Israel. Another woman - we're guessing she's young but there are no published details yet - who assaulted Israeli security personnel with a knife. Guns were, of course, present and the young woman is now injured and (we're not sure since the facts are scant and fresh) getting the active help of Israeli first-responders and perhaps a hospital emergency room team.

The knifing attack happened at the entrance to the red-tiled-roof suburban community of Alfei Menashe on the eastern edge of the central Israel urban area radiating outwards from Tel Aviv. About seven thousand Israelis call the pleasant town home.

Based on past experience, it's unlikely there will be agreement between the Israeli media reports, which tend to the factual and the dry, and the Palestinian Arab media reports, which tends to highlight what they view as heroism, courage, selflessness. Either way, we can be certain even at this early stage that -

• She will not be the last knife attacker who launches a hopeless assault on Israelis. Perhaps not even the last one today.
• If she lives, she may spend years inside an Israeli prison cell. Whatever education she managed to acquire until this point in her life, along with friendships and skills, will be mostly wasted.
• If she dies, she will appear on posters for a few days and be acclaimed as a Palestinian Arab hero and martyr.
• Either way, her parents - if she has a husband, then perhaps he too - will be paid by the Mahmoud Abbas regime (which denies that it does this but it certainly does this) a monthly payment that will soon far exceed what senior employees in the essentially-bankrupt Palestinian Authority government are paid. We call this the Palestinian Arab Rewards for Terror scheme and we, along with more serious writers, have described its operation in detail and the way it gets funded. Short version: It's funded by the foreign aid grants made by the European Union, the United States, Sweden and numerous other Western governments to the PA while the politicians of those governments keep one eye completely closed and the other half-open so they can keep saying, as they have preposterously for years, "We know nothing about that."
• Eventually, whether she lives or dies, a sports-field or a beauty pageant may get named in her honor by the PA, reinforcing the message that she - meaning the knife she wielded and the hatred she expressed for Israelis in flinging herself into something close to suicide - represents exactly what Palestinian Arab society wants its loyal citizens to do. And especially its children.

None of this is meant to minimize the tragedy of a life used up and thrown away by the suited men who set the tone for the Palestinian Authority and the poor wretches whose lives they destroy daily. Despite the headline above, this morning's news is not about a knife. It's about people.

Nor is it meant to minimize the horror faced by thousands of Israelis who are deployed throughout the country to secure our bus stops, schools for the blind, pizzerias, supermarkets and public and private spaces from the lemmings and their heads filled by fantasies of glory, revenge, destruction and paradise. Thank heavens we have competent, fast-thinking, courageous security people who understand what they and we are facing.

Nor are we trying to make the case that things are especially awful here. This is a wonderful country and this is a delightful time of year.

And for readers in the United States, a reminder that while it's certainly distressing to see one terror attack after another and the massive disruptions they bring, we realize things are worrying for you too over there. Your headlines this morning are filled with reports of a man arrested for placing a New York City bomb that went off and another that did not four blocks away along with pipe bombs in Seaside Heights, NJ; plus another that exploded at a train station in Elizabeth NJ. And there's the Somali-American who stabbed nine people in St. Cloud, Minnesota on Saturday until stopped by an off-duty police officer who shot him dead.

These issues are not local. They are thoroughly global, and that's before we start noting here what's happening in Europe and Australia and across the Middle East.

Fifteen-plus years after 9/11 this is our emerging reality, an ongoing war, and we need to figure out how all of us - especially the political figures and the people who report on the news, those of us who worry about children and grandchildren, those of us who value human life and hate hatred, those of us sickened by families who allow and even encourage children to fall victim to the death-cult madness of the preachers and the presidents - are going to deal with it.

UPDATE Wednesday September 21, 2016 at 9:00 am: Not a bad guess. The "young woman" turns out, according to the Jerusalem Post, to be a fourteen year old Palestinian Arab girl, a child:

An initial investigation shows a 14-year-old Palestinian girl arrive to the Eliyahu checkpoint by foot carrying a bag. Checkpoint security ordered her to stop and fired warning shots in the air. The girl continued and was shot in the leg by security guards in order to stop her when she put her hand into her shirt. The girl was lightly wounded and treated at the scene and no Israeli injuries were initially reported. The checkpoint has been reopened to traffic. [Jerusalem Post, today]

And at 10:00 this morning from Times of Israel:

"Security guards at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who did not heed their calls to halt on Wednesday morning, in what appears to have been a suicide attempt, the Defense Ministry said. The incident was initially misreported as an attempted stabbing attack. However, upon searching her possessions, a sapper “did not find anything,” the ministry said in a statement. “The girl approached the vehicle crossing by foot, holding a bag,” arousing the suspicion of the security guards, the statement said. They “ordered her to stop and even fired warning shots into the air,” the ministry said, but when the teenager continued approaching despite the calls to halt, the guards “shot her in the legs in order to stop her.” During an initial investigation of the incident, the teenager said, “I came to die,” according to the ministry. The girl was lightly injured and taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

 She's alive though it appears that's not the outcome this child wished for.

UPDATE Wednesday September 21, 2015 at 4:00 pm: Here's the Wall Street Journal's version - under the stark headline "Palestinian Shot, Wounded at Israeli Checkpoint" - of the extraordinary narrative about this morning's shooting of a child at an IDF security checkpoint:

Israeli security forces shot and wounded a Palestinian teenager on Wednesday after she refused to stop at a checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel, Israel’s Defense Ministry said. The ministry said the 13-year-old Palestinian wasn’t carrying a weapon and didn’t appear intent on attacking Israeli security forces as she neared the Eliyahu checkpoint. After she failed to heed orders to stop and several warning shots were fired, she was hit in the leg by a single bullet, it said. “I came here to die,” the ministry quoted the young woman as saying after she was shot and hospitalized.

What kind of processes, internal and external, could bring a child of that age to do that?

UPDATE Wednesday September 21, 2015 at 4:20 pm: Ma'an News Agency has two versions of what happened. In English [here], it's close to what we wrote above. In Arabic [here] the part about the child admitting she came to the security point "to die" is absent. The Arabic version gives the child's name as Aoasa Ramadan Musa, age 12, from Qalqilya.

11-Sep-16: Fixing a plaque to a Jerusalem wall

Frimet Roth delivers a speech at the unveiling of the plaque 

outside the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria, September 23, 2003
[Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

It's September 11, the fifteenth anniversary of what the world calls 9/11, an event so evocative of hatred, bigotry and senseless carnage that it has become a by-word for the increasingly terror-infested era in which we live.

Fifteen years ago to the day, on September 11, 2001, a thousand or so residents of the Jerusalem neighbourhood where we live gathered in a public park at nightfall to remember two girls - one sixteen, one fifteen - who were among the victims of another massacre, brazenly carried out in the very center of Jerusalem, the nation's capital, a month earlier. 

The site of that attack was the local Sbarro pizzeria. Those two victims, among the 15 murdered and 130 maimed and injured on August 9, 2001, were our next-door neighbour's daughter Michal and our own daughter, Malki. The lovely girls had been the closest of friends.

In the year that followed, we fought an unpleasant and mean-spirited battle with the leadership of the Jerusalem municipality. The mayor at the time was Ehud Olmert. His career later brought him to the highest political position in the country and then after that to prison. He's there now.

What we sought to achieve was something simple: a plaque on the outside wall of the pizzeria, memorializing what had happened there at 2 o'clock on a hot summer's afternoon, with the names of the innocents killed in that Hamas massacre.

As with most of the battles we have felt obliged to conduct in Israel over the years, we saw this as a moral issue with deep resonance in Jewish tradition. We also saw it in personal terms; we sought no one's help in taking the fight to the authorities, and we got none. This battle, like most of the others, ended up providing us with mostly-unwanted insights into how power can be used and abused by the people who have their hands on the steering wheel of the city or the country.

At the end of this particular fight, we achieved a sort of pale victory.

Frimet Roth speaks [Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

On one hand, the mayor's office decided that a plaque would be placed on the outside wall of Sbarro, and a ceremony was scheduled.  

But on a closely related matter - we had also requested that Jerusalem, which had already announced it was going to erect a monument to the memory of the 9/11 victims, should put up a memorial to Jerusalem's own, many victims of Arab-on-Israeli terror - we were given a run-around. 

That run-around actually never came to an end.

In the course of the following year, several bogus announcements were made by the municipality about plans to designate a specific site for a Jerusalem terror victims memorial. 

A public committee for making decisions about a Jerusalem memorial was announced. But if it ever met, we never heard about it. 

Another announcement said a site in the Camp Allenby plot (named for what it used to be decades earlier) near the corner of Hevron Road and Yanovsky Street on Jerusalem's south side had been designated for a memorial to Jerusalem's terror victims and work was underway. 

Of course, nothing ever came of that either.

Frimet Roth eventually published an angry complaint in the Jerusalem Post on July 30, 2003 ["No memorial, not even a plaque"] in which she mentioned some of the evasions we had heard from city officials. 

Here's the main argument: that Jerusalem was faced with having to put up some 30 terror memorial plaques, and that doing so would "interfere with the city's character and appeal" and chase away the tourists. There's no reason for us to comment on the stupidity of what we heard. 

Also this argument - that the building owner objected. That sounded strange and unlikely to us.

The simple plaque bears the names of

the 15 people murdered inside the Sbarro pizzeria and the

Hebrew word for "To remember" [Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

A few weeks after Frimet's article was published in the Jerusalem Post, and without any other reaction having come to us from the municipality's many officials and leaders, a notice out of the blue: we were notified that a Sbarro plaque had finally been allowed. And that a mid-afternoon ceremony was going to be scheduled at the site. 

Frimet was invited to be one of the speakers and she accepted.

The text below is a translation of what Frimet, Malki Roth's mother, said in Hebrew. 

The date was September 23, 2003. The plaque is still there today though the Sbarro pizzeria is long gone and replaced with another business.

And the need to remember and not forget continues to be axiomatic - and disputed.

Why We Need This Plaque 

By Frimet Roth 

(First published in an article we posted on the Malki Foundation website thirteen years ago)

The path leading to the erection of this memorial plaque was neither short nor smooth. When we faced the obstacles, we asked ourselves whether it was really necessary at all.
There were times when the municipality made clear their feeling that a plaque would actually be detrimental - that it was bound to alter the character of the city of Jerusalem, even chase away tourists.

But we persevered - we, the bereaved families, along with the staff of the Municipality's Protocol Department - and we overcame those obstacles, even managing to have the plaque erected in time for the second "yahrzeit".

But the question, a legitimate one, remains What is the purpose of this memorial? It's safe to presume that we, the relatives of the victims, will not visit it and undoubtedly our pain will not abate, now that it is there. Our intense longing will continue - every day, every hour.

As I see it, the plaque's real significance is for others for those who never knew the victims personally, who never heard of their deaths, who heard but may have already forgotten. When these people pass by and chance upon the names of these martyrs, the collective memory of this horrendous war will be deepened.

And I believe this nation badly needs to work on its capacity to remember. To contend with constant fear, this nation has found it necessary to forget each terror attack and its victims as quickly as it can. Demolished business premises are speedily rebuilt; they're filled with customers looking for a fun time out.

I heard a television correspondent not long ago reporting from the site of a suicide bombing that had claimed six lives. He was speaking early on the following morning. He pointed to the heavy traffic and commented "Apparently the urge for routine is more powerful that everything else."

If he was correct, then the Jewish nation is paying too high a price for its normalcy. Remembering our victims a little more would not indicate weakness. Nor would it empower the enemy, or hinder our ability to cope. Remembering the outrages done to us is simply a normal, sensitive and positive reaction.

Jewish tradition encourages this approach. With the holiday of Rosh Hashana, also known as "Remembrance Day", drawing close, this is a most appropriate moment to emphasize the need to remember these victims. The men, the women and the many children who perished here were righteous, every one of them. Both in life, as we their loved ones can affirm, and in death, having died as martyrs - in sanctifying G-d's name.

Our Sages teach us that the righteous are considered alive even in death. For us, their parents, children, brothers and sisters, they truly live on in our hearts and memories. My hope is that they will now also live on in the thoughts of others, thanks to this plaque. Even if only briefly.

And the promise of our Sages be fulfilled, as it says "Just as Yom Kippur atones, so too do the deaths of the righteous."

After the ceremony [Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

Earlier today, the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, we saw a featured op ed in the Financial Times which included this striking claim:

The real tragedy of terror is what it makes us do to each other. We start fearing people just because of how they look: the colour of their skin, the way they dress. 

We Tweeted this response:

If terror's "real tragedy" is fear of the other, do the dead, injured and survivors count?

Astoundingly, depressingly, that question still needs to be asked, and for many the answer is likely to be: "Well, it sort of depends."

It's not only in Jerusalem, but also in Jerusalem, that people need constantly to be reminded of the sanctity of human life, of the imperative of remembering and never forgetting the innocent victims, and of fighting the terrorists with total determination in order to defeat them.

25-Jan-15: Summing up the life of an absolute monarch in the mainstream media

Union Jack at half mast over Westminster Abbey
expresses British mourning at passing of
Saudi 'reformer' [Image Source]

This is not a blog post about Saudi Arabia or about its recently deceased absolute ruler. It's about how the people who own, operate and manage the news media sometimes deal with uncomfortable realities.

First, let's set the tone with some comments from VOX ['The obscenity of calling Saudi King Abdullah a “reformer”' | Zack Beauchamp | January 23, 2015]

• Saudi Arabia's deceased King Abdullah, according to just about every obituary in major Western publications, was a reformer. The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, and NPR all describe Abdullah as a ruler committed to reforming Saudi Arabia's notoriously repressive practices. Sen. John McCain called Abdullah an advocate for peace; IMF head Christine Lagarde called him a "strong advocate for women"...
• The Saudi political system, a blend of absolute monarchy and Islamic extremism, has one of the world's worst human rights records. There is no democracy and basic freedoms are limited… It punishes dissidents, including currently with multiple rounds of publicly lashing a blogger, amputates hands and legs for robbery, and enforces a system of gender restrictions that make women not just second-class citizens, but in many ways the property of men.
• Abdullah did not, in fact, make any fundamental reforms to the Saudi state, which remains one of the most oppressive and inhumane on earth... Abdullah's reputation as a reformer comes from some relatively limited policy shifts he made.
• Praising Abdullah as a reformer, in addition to being misleading, seems to imply that Saudi Arabia should be held to a lesser standard than the rest of humanity, and that its citizens should be somehow grateful for Abdullah's minor adjustments to a system that remains cruelly unjust… 

Now bearing in mind that the flags fluttering above London's Westminister Abbey, Buckingham Palace and Whitehall are all "flying at half mast as a mark of respect", let's survey how this man's life and achievements were summed up this week in the headlines of the major media outlets.

• CNN: "Saudi Arabia's 'reformer' King Abdullah dies"
• Reuters: "Saudi King Abdullah was a cautious reformer"
• Los Angeles Times: "Saudi King Abdullah's legacy praised by U.S. leaders" "Secretary of State John F. Kerry eulogized the Saudi leader as a "a man of wisdom and vision" and a "partner in fighting violent extremism who proved just as important as a proponent of peace"... Former President George H.W. Bush said in a statement that he was “deeply saddened to learn of the passing of my dear friend and partner.” Bush recalled how the U.S. and Saudi Arabia “stood together against a common foe” after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, calling it a “moment of unparalleled cooperation.” “I found His Majesty always to be a wise and reliable ally,” Bush said. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Abdullah was an “important voice for reform in Saudi Arabia” who pushed to modernize the nation’s education system and brought women the right to vote and run for office. McCain... also called Abdullah a “vocal advocate of peace” and a “critical partner in the war on terror.”
• Globe and Mail, Toronto: "Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the careful reformer, dies at 90"
• Christian Science Monitor: "Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah was incremental reformer, US ally"
• Express Tribune Pakistan: "Saudi King Abdullah: patient reformer who battled hardliners"
• New York Times ["Powerful Saudi Arabia King Abdullah Dies at Age 90"] "...powerful U.S. ally who fought against al-Qaida and sought to modernize the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom, including by nudging open greater opportunities for women has died... His aim at home was to modernize the kingdom to face the future. One of the world's largest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia is fabulously wealthy... For Abdullah, that meant building a more skilled workforce and opening up greater room for women to participate. He was a strong supporter of education, building universities at home and increasing scholarships abroad for Saudi students. Abdullah for the first time gave women seats on the Shura Council, an unelected body that advises the king and government. He promised women would be able to vote and run in 2015 elections for municipal councils... Two Saudi female athletes competed in the Olympics for the first time in 2012, and a small handful of women were granted licenses to work as lawyers during his rule..."
• New Yorker ["Postscript: King Abdullah, 1924-2015"] "Compared to the country’s conservative princes and ultra-conservative Wahhabi clerics, Abdullah was considered a savvy and plainspoken modernizer, if not a reformer..."
• The Independent UK ["King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz dead: What did he do for Saudi Arabia?"] "The king, who reportedly refused to be addressed as "your majesty", was seen by many as a gentle reformer, and was credited with trying to balance traditions with modernity... King Abdullah enjoyed a "genuine and warm friendship" with Barack Obama, and was described as the most pro-Western Arab leader yet. Prime Minister David Cameron said he was "deeply saddened" to hear of his death... King Abdullah permitted gentle criticism of himself and his family to be printed, and oversaw the creation of a Facebook page, which allowed citizens to submit their grievances."
• Financial Times, London ["Obituaries"] "A cautious reformer whose ascent to the throne helped restore some popular legitimacy to the al-Saud family, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud steered the world’s largest oil exporter through some of its most fraught times... The delicate balancing act between liberal and conservative voices was to define his rule... A man who wanted both his dynasty and his country to move with the times..."
• Al-Arabiya (Saudi Arabia): "A ‘King of Hearts:’ Saudis mourn Abdullah bin Abdulaziz" 
• Arab News (Saudi Arabia): "Global media hail Abdullah’s legacy": "Newspapers all over the world were unanimous in praising the legacy of reforms and peace-making efforts by the late King Abdullah... 
• Asharq Al Awsat, London: "A charismatic and groundbreaking leader", and "We lost a loving father"

The king's personal net wealth was estimated [Wikipedia] at $21 billion. Most of the ministries of the Saudi government are headed by members of his family. And his replacement as head of state is rumored (according to an item in Friday's New York Times) "to be senile, but similar rumors swirled about Abdullah and he was still hailed as a heroic statesman around the world".  (And here's a link to a December 2013 article in the New York Post, "Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup".)

2-Apr-14: Charm, offense and antagonism-avoidance

BHO in Arabia [Image Source: Official White House Photo]

Following on from our blog post of a few days ago ["27-Mar-14: Shouldn't this creative approach to terrorism get a little more exposure?"], here's a little more about Saudi Arabia's (ahem) contribution to the global struggle against the terrorists.

The Independent [UK], in an April 1 article ["Saudi Arabia declares all atheists are terrorists in new law to crack down on political dissidents"] about a new law entitled Royal Decree 44 describes how it criminalises

"participating in hostilities outside the kingdom" with prison sentences of between three and 20 years... Article one of the new provisions defines terrorism as "calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based".

(The Independent ran a piece called "April Fools' Day 2014 round-up: Best spoofs and fake articles from around the world" in the same edition. Unfortunately for those living in Saudi Arabia, the atheism article was not one of those spoofs, nor intended to be humorous.)

With President Barack Obama having paid an official visit to Saudi Arabia this past weekend, it's fair to assume the hyper-analytic, politically-sensitive mainstream media would have paid pretty close attention to what it must be like to live in a state where the ruler can unilaterally proclaim into the law-books a criminal provision that makes an act of terror out of "calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based". 

Fair to assume - but unfortunately not so accurate. 

Too much of the past few days' very thin reporting of the Obama visit takes the approach in evidence on the Politico website. There, its senior White House reporter, in an article titled "My Arabian Night: How an Obama pool stop went viral", publishes some truly striking images plus this penetrating view into life under the rule of the House of Saud:

What we found inside was something straight off a movie set. Tall bowls with wrapped chocolates stacked in precise rows. Fresh flowers on every coffee table. A massive gold clock the size of an armoire. Satin upholstery, crystal chandeliers, oriental rugs and luxurious couches with perfectly placed pillows. Photos of the king hung on the walls, including one of him almost touching noses with a horse. [Politico, March 30, 2014]

How bothered ought we to be by the superficiality of the Obama-in-Arabia news coverage? Some parts of the media were very bothered: see for instance "Watchdog Asks Why Obama Failed to Talk Religious Freedom With Saudi King", published on the Christian Post website. On the other hand, consider what the far-far-more influential The Economist Intelligence Unit had to say yesterday:

Soothing Saudi angst was the main aim of Mr Obama's visit, and in this regard it will have been at least a partial success. Mr Obama was fulsome in his comments about the two countries' 80‑year relationship, which he described as "strong", and he avoided antagonising the Saudi leadership by bringing up the kingdom's poor human rights record... It is not clear if the two leaders talked about the attempts by the US secretary of state, John Kerry, to energise the Middle East peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The issue is not high up Saudi Arabia's list of priorities... The Obama administration is already considering the impact that a new Saudi leader would have on the bilateral relationship... Mr Obama's visit may become the prelude to a bigger charm offensive once King Abdullah's successors ascend to the throne.

For us, that's the take-away line. The country most closely identified with the 9/11 terrorists gets a flying visit from the world's most powerful political figure because America's policy makers see themselves in a charm offensive directed at a regime that calls its atheists terrorists.

We're not sure about how much charm it generated. But offensive? Surely.

11-Sep-13: Remembering, failing to remember, denying the obligation to remember

Jerusalem's 9/11 memorial site. We plan to attend the ceremony there
later today. [Image Source]

As people who have felt, and continue to feel, the pain of losing a loved one to the cynical hatred of the terrorists and those who sustain them, we feel a permanent connection to the memorial events marking 9/11.

September 11, 2001 also happens to be the day on which the Malki Foundation was formally established. The registration papers were issued that morning by the Israeli government office that takes care of registering not-for-profits. Later that day, we learned to our horror how widely the experience we had undergone a month before had spread. It has continued to spread much more widely since those fateful 2001 days.

For the past decade, we have mounted a struggle here in Jerusalem for what we see as the failures of a headless bureacuracy (in truth, it may be even worse than that) to remember, to honour, to respect the lives of victims of the terrorists.

We did it first in relation to the location right in the heart of Jerusalem where Malki and so many others were murdered that awful day. [For example, this article published by Frimet Roth in 2003.] And we did it later in relation to the hundreds of people murdered by terrorists in Jerusalem since the September 2000 outbreak of the Arafat War (some call it Second Intifada).

We eventually succeeded in getting a plaque affixed to the wall of what had been the Sbarro restaurant building at the intersection of King George Avenue and Jaffa Road in central Jerusalem. To see how we described this mostly-unpleasant struggle at the time, click on "A plaque at Sbarro". We posted some related photographic images and other items there too.

As to the larger challenge of having the leadership of the great city of Jerusalem, currently roiling its way through an election, recognize the obligation to memorialize those murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists in its streets and restaurant and on its buses, Frimet Roth's article below, from 2006, provides some insight into another frustrating and ultimately dis-spiriting struggle.

Bottom line: today there is a respectful and distinguished memorial in Jerusalem, located on municipal land in the Arazim Valley on the city's north side (see the photo above). It honors those killed in New York and Washington in September 2001, and incorporates a 30-foot bronze sculpture of a waving American flag that morphs into a memorial flame. As for Jerusalem's own victims, nothing.

(As it happens, we had the opportunity to raise this with city's current mayor just a few weeks ago in his office. Readers interested in knowing how that went are welcome to contact us.)

Partners in 'Project Amnesia'
With Memorial Day over, the Jerusalem Municipality must have breathed a sigh of relief.
FRIMET ROTH
Published in Haaretz on May 16, 2008

With Memorial Day over, the Jerusalem Municipality must have breathed a sigh of relief. We, the victims of terror attacks on the home front - attacks our leaders failed to thwart - have Memorial Day throughout the year. But City Hall, it seems, would prefer for the memories of our loved ones to fade.

Reminders of the hundreds who have been murdered by terrorists in this city poison the ambience. Negative ambience equals unhappy tourists, and unhappy tourists deplete the city's coffers - so goes the logic. This, at least, was the off-the-record explanation given to me last month by the unnamed staffer who answers the phone in the office of Jerusalem's spokesman, Gidi Schmerling. She was responding to my inquiry as to why, seven years after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, there is still no central memorial to this city's terror victims.

The municipality was actually the first to raise the idea. In 2002 it made a promise to victims' families that a memorial park would be erected in Jerusalem. The city's official policy for years has been to place a plaque wherever a terrorist murder happened. The reality is that only a few such memorial plaques have gone up. There is one on the outside wall of the building that was formerly the Sbarro restaurant. The plaque, 50 cm x 80 cm, lists the names of the 15 men, women and children massacred there. One is my daughter, Malki.

The plaque is up only because of many months of unrelenting pressure by my husband and me. My questions to Jerusalem's official representatives this year about what happened to the plan for a central memorial have been met with a resounding silence. Despite several months of calls and e-mails to the spokesman's office and other officials, some of them elected, no formal response has ever been forthcoming. My approaches were ignored or referred elsewhere, or I was given empty assurances that they would be dealt with in the near future. They never were.

Nobody deserves such disgraceful treatment from a municipality, least of all those of us who have paid the supreme price for this city to keep flourishing. The municipality has a partner in its de facto "Project Amnesia": The government of Israel has seemed no less keen to banish reminders of our terror victims. Shortly after the election of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), our prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, laying the groundwork for the disengagement, told Israelis that we "must forget our pain."

Evidently our current prime minister shares that view. In his public addresses, Ehud Olmert routinely avoids mentioning the more than 1,100 Israeli civilians murdered in the Al-Aqsa Intifada - and with good reason. Dredging up those casualties would hamper his efforts to pass Fatah off as a moderate "partner for peace." Concessions to Abbas - prisoner releases, new weapons, closing roadblocks - would go down much less smoothly with the Israeli public if the enormity of our recent losses were highlighted.

There is a third partner eager to distract the public from the wounds inflicted by terrorism: our own news media. In a recent television discussion, two veteran Israeli newscasters, Ben Caspit and Yigal Ravid, bemoaned the inordinate amount of time and ink that Israel's media have devoted to covering terror attacks during the last intifada.

According to this view, now that the tsunami of tragedy has passed, memorials are unwelcome. But apparently that rule carries a proviso: If the victims are non-Israelis and if the attacks took place outside Israel, then commemorating them is fine.

How else can one explain the decision of the Interior Ministry's Urban Planning and Construction Committee in February to approve the construction of a monument to the memory of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks? That memorial will be erected by none other than the Jerusalem Municipality - in a city park in the Arazim Valley, on Jerusalem's northern side. The choice of site will ensure its exposure to the traveling public; a bridge for the new light-rail train is slated to pass right alongside it. Somehow, concerns about depressing our tourists with such a monument were not an issue here.

This will not be the first 9/11 memorial in Israel. Nine have already been erected. As a bereaved mother, I feel a bond with victims everywhere, including non-Israelis, over the loss of loved ones murdered by terrorists. And as someone who grew up in New York, that bond is particularly strong toward my compatriots. Nevertheless, it is unconscionable for Israel to accord foreign victims, even those of our most loyal ally, the United States, preferential treatment over our own victims.

Six years ago, in a private meeting requested by my husband and me, Oved Yehezkel, the personal assistant to then-mayor Ehud Olmert, confirmed for us that Jerusalem had allocated an existing but rarely-frequented park as the location of a memorial to Jerusalem's victims of terror. That site, at the Allenby Compound, is a safe 15-minute drive from the city's center. It was thus unlikely to feature on many tourists' routes. The idea of such a park was initiated by the municipality, not by the victims; we were simply urging its planners to respect our sentiments in its execution. Yehezkel, now cabinet secretary, assured my husband and me that we would be consulted frequently during the process of its erection.

The bone that was tossed to us (a park that is not close to the city center, in a place rarely visited) remains an unfulfilled promise. Not even the tiniest steps have been taken at the site and we've received no requests for our input. Municipal officials know they need not lose sleep worrying about a backlash from the victims' families. We are a sector that can be counted on to swallow its anger and suffer humiliation in silence. Grief tends to have that effect on us.

But it is not only the offense toward the hundreds of victims that is disturbing. As Israel conducts serious cease-fire negotiations with Hamas, recalling that group's commitment to bloodshed is crucial. It would inject the caution and wariness that often seem absent from our leaders' mindset. And as for the city's precious ambience and the feared drop in tourism? Somehow we can find a way to survive the diversion of a few prospective tourists to Greece or Turkey. But we cannot survive the consequences of forgetting our terror victims.

26-Feb-13: What we learned, twenty years ago today, in the first attack on the Twin Towers

February 26, 1993 outside the World Trade Center, New York City [Image Source]

Twenty years ago today, one of this site's two bloggers was in New York City on a business trip. 

On February 26, 1993, a Friday, he was standing in a phone booth in Lower Manhattan, waiting for several associates to show up for a meeting they had set for 12 noon. A short time before the rendezvous, they asked to move it from the lobby of one of the World Trade Center towers, which was meant to be the meeting point, to a less well-known nearby location, the old AT&T headquarters building on Broadway. And they were running late. 

It was already around 12:15 pm and they had not shown up, so we called them again. Standing there in the phone booth on the ground floor, we became aware that something odd was happening: the building's lights flickered off for a moment and there was a distinct sense that the ground was shaking. Then it stopped. And soon after, the people showed up. 

We sat for a few moments and talked, and then we headed out into the traffic and bedlam of the city and took a taxi to where we were all heading: an office building in New Jersey directly across the river from the Twin Towers. What we saw from the NJ side, looking back, was a surreal sight whose memory still makes our blood run cold today: helicopters buzzing around the WTC buildings as smoke billowed upwards and outwards. 

Among the things we did not know until much later: a group of Islamist terrorists had detonated about 1,200 pounds of explosives concealed inside a rented van that they drove unhindered into the World Trade Center's underground parking garage. They fled for their lives shortly before the bomb went off. The explosion - at the exact moment we were in that phone booth - blasted a five-storey crater beneath the towers, killing six people, injuring more than 1,000 people including 88 firefighters, 35 police officers, and an emergency medical services worker. Some 50,000 people had to be evacuated from the WTC, and chaos reined over all of southern Manhattan. 

On 9/11, some eight and a half years later, we were in Israel. 

That was a difficult day for us already before the horrific crash of two aircraft into the Twin Towers and another into the Pentagon. The life of our greatly-loved fifteen year old daughter had ended in a restaurant massacre in our country's capital city just a month earlier. September 11, 2001 happened to be the date on which our local community here in Jerusalem held a shloshim memorial service in honour of the murdered lives of two children: Malki, our daughter, and her friend Michal, the daughter of our neighbours. 

By the time we all gathered in a neighborhood park that evening, the events of 9/11 in far-off New York had happened during the afternoon, Israel time. The world would never again be the same. 

Here is the full text of Jonathan Tobin's essay, "The Day the War on America Began", which appears today on the Commentary website, and deserves a wide audience.

Exactly 20 years ago on this date, a terrorist attack at the World Trade Center took the lives of six people and injured more than a thousand others. The tragedy shocked the nation but, as with other al-Qaeda attacks in the years that followed, the WTC bombing did not alter the country’s basic approach to Islamist terrorism. 

For the next eight and a half years, the United States carried on with a business-as-usual attitude toward the subject. The lack of urgency applied to the subject, as well as the disorganized and sometimes slap-dash nature of the security establishment’s counter-terrorist operations, led to the far greater tragedy of September 11, 2001 when al-Qaeda managed to accomplish what it failed to do in 1993: knock down the towers and slaughter thousands. 

All these years after 9/11 and the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden, are there any further lessons to be drawn from that initial tragedy? To listen to the chattering classes, you would think the answer is a definitive no. Few are marking this anniversary and even fewer seem to think there is anything more to be said about what we no longer call the war on terror. But as much as many of us may wish to consign this anniversary to the realm of the history books, the lessons of the day the war on America began still need to be heeded.   

It should be acknowledged that the United States has come a long way in the last 20 years when it comes to awareness of the forces that launched that first attack. The 9/11 attacks changed the government’s priorities and forced those in charge of the security apparatus to make fighting al-Qaeda a priority, which was something that was nowhere on the country’s radar screen even after the atrocity that took place on February 26, 1993. The death of bin Laden in 2011 seemed to signal that the long battle against the Islamists had been fought and won by the U.S., allowing Americans to go back to sleep about terror–or at least to put it in our collective rear-view mirrors. 

But as the 9/11/2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya demonstrated once again, the forces that launched the attacks on America are by no means as dead as bin Laden. Indeed, they continue to be a potent force throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East. The Taliban, al-Qaeda’s old allies and hosts, are poised for a comeback in Afghanistan as the United States gradually abandons what President Obama and the Democrats once called the “good war.”   

Even more ominously, al-Qaeda’s ideological allies in the Muslim Brotherhood now rule Egypt in place of a secular regime, which, though undemocratic, was a vital ally in the global war on Islamist terror. Here in the U.S., cases of home-grown Islamist terror continue to crop up as a new generation of Islamists continue to sow the seeds of an unending war against the “Great Satan” of the United States as well as its Israeli ally.  

Unlike in 1993, the problem is no longer whether our intelligence and security establishment is serious about fighting terror, but rather whether we as a nation have the will and the patience to go on doing so. The willingness of the Obama administration to embrace the Brotherhood and to go on, as it did after Benghazi, pretending that the war on terror is over, is a sign that our will may be faltering. 

It is no small thing that the Islamist government of Egypt that the U.S. has embraced has called for the freeing of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “blind sheik” who was the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack. As we think back on the 20 years since six Americans died as a prelude to the murder of thousands more by the same group, the sympathy for their killer ought to remind us that the fight against Islamism is far from over. 

You might find this interesting too: "The 1993 World Trade Center bombers: Where are they now?", from the CBS News website. 

And this: "The Online Presence Of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman: The Blind Sheikh" which describes the thriving social media network - including Twitter, Facebook and online videos garnering thousands of views - that today serves as an ongoing tribute to the achievements of the man convicted by a federal jury of planning to wage a "war of urban terrorism" against the United States, including blowing up the United Nations building, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the main federal office building in Manhattan, and the George Washington Bridge.

31-Oct-12: US confirms convictions of white-collar terrorists

Lingering doubts that remained about the criminality of the organization frequently called the United States' "largest Islamic charity" [NY Times] ended on Monday. That's when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that it would not overturn an earlier appeal that went against five officials from Holy Land Foundation convicted of illegally funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. That appears to be the final legal avenue open to the convicted men and concludes the case.

For years, in a pattern which to some of us is already familiar, the supporters of the convicts and their lawyers cast the Holy Land Foundation as being, at minimum, the victim of the extreme angst that afflicted the US after the events of September 11, 2001, as well as "an important case for religious freedom, and for civil rights" [The American Muslim]. The group "merely raised money for needy Palestinians", it has been argued, and was never connected to any violence.

America's tribunals of law and fact, one after another, came to a different conclusion. As a result, Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh were convicted on 108 counts in 2008 and will remain in prison serving sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years. 

Just in passing, a reminder that Mufid Abdulqader is the brother of arch-terrorist Khaled Mashaal, "the main leader" [Wikipedia] of Hamas' terrorist operations since 2004.

The fragrantly-named Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development started life as the Occupied Land Fund [US Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List", updated to October 18, 2012], from offices in Richardson, Texas. In 2007, US federal prosecutors charged the organization and its key leaders with funding Hamas and what it termed other "Islamic terrorist organizations". Soon afterwards, the assets of the "charity" were frozen by the EU and the US, and it was forced to shut down. AFP's November 2008 report of the criminal trial [AFP] said the group and its leaders were found to be "acting as a front for Palestinian militants" and called the trial "largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history".

Far from being an innocent conduit for relieving the poverty of starving children in Gaza, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis who presided over the criminal trial said it plainly: 

"The purpose of creating the Holy Land Foundation was as a fundraising arm for Hamas". The men charged and convicted were no mere givers of charity but knowing organizers of a conduit whose end-point was deliberate and well-chosen. The indictment said HLF and its promotors took steps to hide its terrorist-financing purpose from law-enforcement agencies by making a few token donations to harmless, non-Palestinian Arab entities. The bulk of it went to terror. A quote from one of the convicted men, Shukri Abu Baker: “We can give $100,000 to the Islamists and $5,000 to the others.”

Parts of the media in the US and outside it continue to frame this shabby tale in ways that seem calculated to sow doubt about the motivations of the convicted men and to hint at hidden agendas. In a Salon article this past Thursday, the popular website's "assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing" writes ["SCOTUS to consider fate of jailed Muslim charity leaders"] on what was done to the group formerly known as Occupied Land Fund:

"The Bush administration shut it down following reports that the group had donated a portion of their foundation funds to schools and hospitals in Gaza through a “Zakat” (charity-giving) Committee that allegedly had connections to Hamas."

Their case has made it all the way up the almost endless legal chain for which the US is rightly famous. Yet she and her editors see no problem in insinuating that this was about "alleged" connections to Hamas; that "portion" of the money was channeled to Hamas; that the US government acted on "reports". This is shamefully inadequate reporting from a source that describes itself as a "pioneering, award-winning news site... with an audience of 10 million monthly unique visitors".

We're less offended by the coverage given to the decision by one of the Iranian government's most prominent mouthpieces, PressTV. Its report ["US Supreme Court spurns justice"] describes the convicted men as 

"Five extraordinary human beings... wrongfully convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. They’re doing hard time in America’s gulag. They learned the hard way about being Muslims in America at the wrong time."

As Wikipedia describes, a large number of other parties - are they also "extraordinary"? - are caught up in the Hamas financing net, including prominent American Islamist groups: 

In May 2007, the U.S. filed an action against the Holy Land Foundation (the largest Muslim charity in the United States at the time for providing funds to Hamas, and federal prosecutors filed pleadings. Along with 300 other organizations, they listed CAIR (and its chairman emeritus, Omar Ahmad), Islamic Society of North America (largest Muslim umbrella organization in the United States), Muslim American Society and North American Islamic Trust as unindicted co-conspirators, a legal designation that can be employed for a variety of reasons including grants of immunity, pragmatic considerations, and evidentiary concerns. While being listed as co-conspirator does not mean that CAIR has been charged with anything...

From here, the evidence appears to show the existence of an active and thriving Moslem Brotherhood hinterland in the United States delivering political and financial support to the terrorists.

20-Jul-12: Home truths from a US diplomat: "What happened in the US on September 11 can happen in any country..."

The bombed bus is towed away from the airport and chapter one has ended.
But like all acts of terror, it remains a work in progress

America's ambassador to Bulgaria delivered some comments this morning (Friday) that deserve a wider audience than the Bulgarians alone. The report below comes from the Sofia News Agency.

If terrorists can hit the US, they can strike anywhere, the American Ambassador in Sofia, James Warlick, says. Speaking Friday, in an interview for the Bulgarian National Television, BNT, the diplomat explained that no country is safe from terrorism, which is a threat for everyone across the globe. "Terrorists can strike anywhere. What happened in the US on September 11 can happen in any country. This is what happened in your country," he stressed. According to him, terrorist plots are unpredictable. Regarding the terrorist attack at the airport of the Black Sea city of Burgas, Warlick stated that it aimed at Israeli citizens, who were vulnerable in Bulgaria. "There is no country that can be 100% prepared for such situation," the Ambassador commented, adding the reaction of Bulgarian authorities has been adequate... 

Without a doubt, Bulgarians are now facing issues they would much rather not have to face. Since we believe it's a process that many other nations are going to be confronting in the foreseeable future, we want to share (for the first time in this blog's history) a Bulgarian op ed written in very accessible and cogent English-language terms. 

The article, also published this morning, is called "Bulgaria Will Never Be The Same", and the writer's name is Maxim Behar:

Terror doesn't have two faces, or any more than that. It has one face only – the face of death, horror, tragedy. To that, I would add pointlessness. Absolute pointlessness... There is nothing more savage, more inexplicable, and more shocking than terror. That is why Bulgaria will never be the same.

The full op ed is here. Our sympathy and support are offered to Bulgaria.

15-May-11: Tentacles: Terrorism charges and arrests in New York City, Florida

From yesterday's New York Daily News [link]

The Wall Street Journal today describes how Justice Department officials are busy trying to gain the trust of Muslim communities around the US while guarding against possible reprisal attacks following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But it isn't going so well for them.

Saturday, six perfectly ordinary people, good neighbours all, were arrested in Florida by federal authorities and charged with being part of the Taliban terrorist organization. The six "are charged with conspiracy and providing material support to murder, maim and kidnap" and include

"two imams at mosques in Florida, have been indicted on charges that include providing support to Pakistani Taliban terror plots, federal prosecutors said Saturday. Miami U.S. Attorney Wilfredo Ferrer announced the charges following the arrests of Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, 76-year-old imam of the Miami Mosque; his son Izhar Khan, 24 years old, an imam at Jamaat al-Mu'mineen Mosque in Margate, Fla., a nearby suburb; and another son, Irfan Khan, 37 years old. All three are U.S. citizens of Pakistani rigin and residents of south Florida. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Hafiz Khan after early morning services outside his Miami mosque and Izhar Khan was arrested in the parking lot of his mosque around the same time early Saturday, said John Gillies, special agent in charge of the FBI's Miami office. Irfan Khan was arrested at a hotel in Los Angeles, he said. Also charged are Amina Khan, her son Alam Zeb, and Ali Rehman, all residents of Pakistan. They haven't been arrested. Ms. Khan is a daughter of Hafiz Khan, and Mr. Zeb a grandson." 

A law enforcement official is quoted saying:

"Despite being an imam, or spiritual leader, Hafiz Khan was by no means a man of peace. Instead, as today's charges show, he acted with others to support terrorists to further acts of murder, kidnapping and maiming."

A little further north, two so-called "lone wolves" planned to dress up as Hasidic Jews and slaughter worshipers at city synagogues after selling guns and drugs to finance the diabolical plot, in the words of police quoted in the New York Daily News. Their goal was to hit so-far-unspecified New York City  synagogues using grenades and guns.

"Details of the mission were revealed Thursday after the Queens duo - whom neighbors called knuckleheads - were charged with terrorism and hate crimes... Cops say the ringleader, Algerian-born Ahmed Ferhani, 27, who sought asylum here with his family in 1999, also fantasized about blowing up the Empire State Building and a Queens church. Ferhani enlisted a Moroccan pal, Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, in a plan to sneak into "a major synagogue in Manhattan" disguised in Orthodox-style beards and side curls to plant a bomb. "He was committed to violent jihad, and his plan became bigger and more violent with each passing week," Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. said. [According to NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg] "New York City police officers were watching them and were in position to take them into custody before they could maim and murder innocent New Yorkers"... Ferhani, a former cosmetics salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue, had discussed avenging the treatment of Muslims. "He was fed up with the way Muslims were being treated around the world," said Kelly, quoting Ferhani telling an undercover cop... Ferhani was arrested last year on charges he tied up and robbed a woman who invited him back to her room at the Park Central Hotel in midtown, but a grand jury declined to indict. He also has prior arrests for marijuana possession, disorderly conduct and weapon possession. Mamdouh has a burglary case on his rap sheet. He's a graduate of Flushing High School, the alma mater of several suspects implicated last year in a terror plot to bomb city subways." 

Suspects have never been charged before under the New York state anti-terror laws that were passed after the 9/11 attacks. It is reported that US federal prosecutors declined to press the case, saying the plan was more aspirational than operational.

It's clear that the ongoing lessons in this ongoing war, including those of 9/11, need to be relearned and retaught in an ongoing way because the threats are not diminishing. They're growing.

4-Dec-10: Should this man be accorded the respect due to an objective, professional journalist?

Is Abdel al-Bari Atwan the kind of person who should be given
public platforms in highly prominent settings?  

As newspaper editors go, slick Abdel al-Bari Atwan gets more than the average amount of prominence.

Given the nature of his bluntly-expressed political views, he gets a surprising amount of respect from mainstream media channels including NPR, Sky News, CNN and the BBC (who call him Abdel-Bari Atwan) who host him frequently and which, for reasons which leave us wondering, present him as an objective observer on events in this part of the world.

Knowing what's on the public record (see an earlier blog article of ours: "16-Mar-08: The unindicted co-conspirators"), this might be surprising. He's far from objective as a cursory look at his output shows.

Mr. Atwan edits a London-based Arabic-language newspaper called Al-Quds Al-Arabi. The paper takes a robustly nationalistic Arab line and has several notable scoops to its name. In August 1996, it was the first to publish a fatwa, or declaration of war, "Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places". The author was Osama bin Laden.

In October 2003, after Atwan wrote that the hatred directed towards the United States by the Arab world is the fault of the United States itself, a US-based, Yemenite journalist and liberal columnist called Munir Al-Mawari who writes for another London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, made some interesting observations:

"The Abd Al-Bari Atwan [appearing] on CNN is completely different from the Abd Al-Bari Atwan on the Al-Jazeera network or in his Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily. On CNN, Atwan speaks solemnly and with total composure, presenting rational and balanced views. This is in complete contrast with his fuming appearances on Al-Jazeera and in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in which he whips up the emotions of multitudes of viewers and readers."

We have been pondering those two faces of Atwan since learning that he is going to be honored by being invited to lecture publicly at the London School of Economics this coming Monday. (Source: "Terror supporting' Arabic-daily editor to speak at LSE")

The honor extended to this rather edgy journalist has aroused some controvery. Indeed, on his own personal website (the one where he describes himself as a "highly respected author" - and he would certainly know), Atwan claims at least some the uglier quotations attributed to him are false:

"I did not say any of the things listed on the Wikipedia site... They are false allegations, part of a smear campaign against me".

So in the interests of an open public record, and in the hope that someone attending the Atwan lecture in London might get the great man to go on the record and actually repudiate them, here are some Atwan statements that can be found in various online locations.

On one hand:

"I do not endorse or in any way support al-Qa'ida's agenda… I utterly condemn the attacks on innocent citizens in the West". [Source: The Secret History of Al-Qa'ida, Abdel Bari Atwan, Abacus (2006), ISBN 978-0-34-912035-5, p1]

On the other:

"The events of 11 September will be remembered as the end of the US empire. This is because all empires collapse when they pursue the arrogance of power."
Source: BBC

Sadam Hussein (who murdered countless numbers of Arabs and Iraqi Kurds) should be honored for preserving "the unity of Iraq, its Arab and Islamic identity and the coexistence of its different communities". Source: Africa News, December 31, 2006

In the case of war, Iran will retaliate against its Arab neighbors, American bases in the Gulf and "Allah willing, it will attack Israel, as well... If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight."
Source: Wikipedia, referring to an interview in Arabic on Lebanese ANB television station, June 27, 2007 (also referred to in this Jerusalem Post article). The actual video clip (in Arabic with English subtitles) can be seen here. (Keep in mind that Atwan explicitly denies he said what is recorded in this video. He calls them "false allegations, part of a smear campaign".)

Atwan said the March 2008 point-blank, cold-blooded shooting-massacre by a Palestinian Arab gunman of eight unarmed high school students, most of them aged 15 or 16, at Jerusalem's Merkaz HaRav yeshiva "was justified." Their school is to blame, Atwan claims, by "hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists". Atwan says the celebrations in Gaza that followed the massacre symbolized "the courage of the Palestinian nation." Source: The Jerusalem Post

Depending on where you stand, justifying a terrorist massacre is not the worst of crimes. On the other hand, given what is at stake when it comes to defeating the practitioners of terror and their supporters, is Abdel al-Bari Atwan the kind of person who should be given public platforms in highly prominent settings?

Or is Abdel al-Bari Atwan simply the innocent victim of some atrocious misquoting?