14-Aug-18: Chasing (some) terrorists in Jordan

Image Source: Twitter account of Jordan's royal court

A significant clash between the forces of the king and what are being called a terrorist force happened on Saturday across the valley from us over in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

It all started, as far as we know, with an explosion at a Jordanian music festival on Friday. First reports - like this one from an English-language Arab source, were careful to tiptoe around the possibility of terror:

A vehicle belonging to the Jordanian gendarmerie was hit by an explosion on Friday evening, leaving one sergeant dead and wounding six other security personnel, an official at the General Directorate of the Gendarmerie has said. The blast happened just outside the capital Amman, where the unit was tasked with guarding a cultural festival held in the western outskirt of the city. Local news media quoted government sources denying the blast was linked to terrorism, however, investigations are continuing... Local media quoted security sources as saying that "a gas bomb exploded near the fuel tank, causing the explosion of the vehicle". The Fuheis festival is an annually held event in Jordan and is considered the second largest festival in the country after the Jerash Festival... Fuheis is a Christian-majority town, around 20km northwest of the capital Amman. [The New Arab (UK), August 11, 2018]

Pretty soon, the story got darker: turns out it was a bomb that 

was planted under a police vehicle providing security at [the festival]... No group immediately took responsibility... Prime Minister Omar Razzaz portrayed Friday's bombing as a "terrorist attack"... Jordan is a close Western ally in a turbulent region, and has largely been spared from the conflicts in neighboring Syria and Iraq. However, the kingdom has also been targeted by Islamic militants, both domestic and foreign who have carried out a series of attacks... [Associated Press]

Fuheis (or Fuhais or Al Fuheis) is about 20 kilometers north-west of the capital Amman. The Fuheis Festival has been held annually for the past 25 years and is considered Jordan's second-largest cultural festival. Wikipedia says the town has 20,000 residents, 60% of them Greek Orthodox Christians. It's in the Wadi Shueib (Valley of Jethro) area, between Salt and Amman.

A place with a historical heritage ["Is Al-Salt Set to be Jordan’s Next UNESCO World Heritage Site?"] Salt, also called Al-Salt, happens to be where the security forces made up of "special forces", police and the army carried out a raid on Saturday. And where things seem to have gotten badly out of control. Salt had 97,000 inhabitants in 2006: 65% of them are Muslim and the remainder Christians.

Image Source: Where the ISIS people had their base - till Sunday

Newly appointed government spokeswoman Jumana Ghneimat said the security forces we just mentioned were pursuing a "terrorist cell". Here's a summary of what Agence France-Presse reported ["4 security force members, 3 'terrorists' killed in Jordan raid"] on Sunday:

• Quoting not its own reporters but the Jordanian government, it says: "Four members of the Jordanian security forces and three "terrorists" have been killed during a raid on a militant hideout after an officer died in a bomb blast near the capital..."
• Making clear Jordan now tied the raid to what had happened in Fuheis on Friday, it said "Five suspects were also arrested during Saturday's raid in connection with the home-made bomb that exploded under a patrol car at a music festival."
• According to Ms Ghneimat, "The suspects refused to surrender and opened heavy fire toward a joint security force". They "blew up the building in which they were hiding, and which they had booby-trapped earlier".
• The three security forces who were killed died in the shootout with the gunmen. A fourth died later of his injuries.
• The bodies of three terrorists (AFP puts that word in quotation marks) were found in the rubble of the exploded building as were some automatic weapons. Five militants (AFP's word) were arrested in the operation.
• AFP quotes "medical sources" saying 11 people "were wounded during the raid, including members of the security forces and civilians who were residents of the building where the militants were hiding". They included women and children. The AFP report has no details of who thhey were, their ages, or the extent of their injuries.
• Now this interesting direct quote based on something said by a "security official who asked not to be named": "All the terrorists who were killed or arrested were Jordanians and residents of Salt."
• The king, Abdullah II, is quoted saying Jordan would "strike mercilessly and forcefully" against whoever they are blaming which is not yet specified. "This cowardly terrorist act, and any act that targets the security of Jordan, will only add to our unity, strength and determination to wipe out terrorism and its criminal gangs". 
• And this intriguing comment from the recently appointed (see "New Jordanian cabinet has fresh faces but same old problems", The National, June 14, 2018) prime minister Omar al-Razzaz: Jordan will "not be complacent in the hunt for terrorists".

How firmly does King Abdullah actually run things in the kingdom? You get a sense of this from a recent comment by the sober and generally respected Deutschewelle news service:

Since the king calls the shots on all policy issues, it is unclear what mandate Razzaz will have to take measures to pacify the protesters ["Jordan's king appoints Omar Razzaz as new prime minister to defuse protests", DW, June 5, 2018]

On the other hand, how well that's going can be surmised by how many prime ministers the king has appointed and then replaced. Since he was crowned on June 9, 1999, Abdullah II has hired and fired 12 prime ministers, not including the new man, Mr Razzaz. They have served, on average, for less than a year and a half each. (We did the calculations from public records.) The economy is perhaps the most visible sign of how much of a challenge Jordan's managerial class have on their hands: see "'We simply can't take this': Jordanians vow to continue protests after PM resigns" [Middle East Eye, June 5, 2018]

Monday night brought this update:

Jordan said Monday that a terror cell targeted in a deadly weekend raid by security forces was composed of supporters of the Islamic State terror group and shared its extremist views. Saturday’s raid, during which three jihadists were killed and five arrested, revealed that they were preparing a series of attacks in Jordan, Interior Minister Samir Mubaideen said... The suspects “were not part of an organization but followed its takfiri (Sunni Muslim extremist) ideology and supported Daesh... All of them were Jordanians... The raid also foiled other plots to carry out a series of terrorist operations against security installations and public gatherings,” he said. ["Jordan says jihadists killed in raid were Islamic State supporters", AFP, August 14, 2018]

Reuters added:

• Also quoting al-Mobaideen, it says the "militants... did not belong to a specific group but subscribed to Islamic State ideology... There were plots to wage a series of terror attacks that sought security points and popular gatherings. We know the targets but we won’t tell them so people won’t get terrified”... 
• [T]here were no signs so far they had foreign links, Mobaideen said, refusing to give names of suspects. “The investigations are secret and ongoing,” he told a news conference
• Alongside automatic weapons in the suspect’s possession, the authorities found a location where chemical ingredients for manufacturing explosives were buried, Mobaideen added.
• The militant cell was recently set up and there were indications its members had embraced radical ideology. “What is dangerous is that these new recruits are more impulsive than those with experience in executing operations that harm Jordan’s security,” [head of the Gendarmerie] Hawatmeh told reporters.
• "Intelligence officials and some experts believe widening social disparities and a perception of official corruption are fuelling a rise in radicalization among disaffected youths in a country with high unemployment and growing poverty."

A report from a Palestinian Arab source ["Jordanian King Abdullah II vows to eliminate terrorism", Ma'an News Agency, August 12, 2018] datelined Amman says:

The Jordanian King Abdullah II released a statement on Sunday, vowed to end the existence of terrorism, following a deadly terror attack in the town of al-Salt, Jordan. [He] stressed that this cowardly act of terrorism and any action aimed at the security of Jordan "will only increase unity, strength, and determination to eradicate terrorism and its criminal gangs."

What's actually going on behind the official statements and media releases? It's genuinely hard to know. Jordan doesn't have a free and enquiring media and much of what emanates from official sources is spin. A Jordan Times article yesterday shows (probably inadvertently) how that works:

Spokesperson of the Ministry of Political and Parliamentary Affairs Sami Mahasneh told The Jordan Times over the phone that a meeting with the minister and heads of political parties had been concluded with "unanimous agreement upon the government’s media strategy". He announced that a new platform dubbed “It’s Your Right to Know” is being developed by the government to issue around-the-clock news, which he said "will hopefully put an end to all false news and deal with sensitive ones in a delicate manner"...
Bayan Tal, senior advisor at the Jordan Media Institute, told The Jordan Times that this approach is "indeed noticeable" in the new Razzaz government. "There is a gap of trust between the government and the citizens when it comes to news. This is a result of the past governments’ way of dealing with the media and it is what leads citizens to often turn to rumours or unofficial news outlets for information, rather than the government's press release, as proven by studies,” Tal said... The competition between news agencies should not push them to commit immoral and disgraceful acts just to get views, likes, and comments, as those are “not the values of a true journalist”... ["Officials warn against false news ‘igniting national fear’", Jordan Times, August 13, 2018]

We actually do have things to say about how the "values of a true journalist" operate in Jordan. See

• 27-Apr-18: If it really means to tackle radicalism, the Kingdom of Jordan should extradite Ahlam Tamimi to the US
• 23-Jan-15: What's said in London stays in London: Jordan's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't war on terror
• 10-Dec-14: In the Arab world's most promising new journalism school, a passion for murder and hatred

and especially

• 11-Dec-14: Is it newsworthy when journalists make a terror-addicted murdering colleague their role-model?

Now seems like a perfect time for the Jordanians to show how firmly they oppose Islamist terror by handing high-profile Islamist terrorist and Jordanian media celebrity Ahlam Tamimi over to US law enforcement authorities as they are obliged to do under the 1995 Extradition Treaty between the two countries.

22-Jun-18: Jordan's king heading back to Washington. Is extradition on the agenda?

White House - April 5, 2017 [Image Source: Video]

From AFP last night

AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s King Abdullah II set off for the United States on Thursday for talks with US President Donald Trump on Middle East issues including the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the palace said. Accompanied by his wife Rania, the monarch is also scheduled to meet with senior officials from the Trump administration and members of Congress, the palace said in a statement. His meeting with Trump is expected to take place at the White House on Monday. The White House said in a statement that they would “discuss issues of mutual concern, including terrorism, the threat from Iran and the crisis in Syria, and working towards a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” ["Jordan king heads to US to discuss peace plan with Trump", June 21, 2018]

Reuters says President Donald Trump "will welcome King Abdullah of Jordan to the White House on June 25", quoting the White House announcement.

Trump has hosted Abdullah at least three previous times since becoming president:

• On February 2, 2017 in Washington DC on the sidelines of the National Prayer Breakfast ["Jordan's King Abdullah to be first Arab world leader to visit Donald Trump", The Independent UK] During the same visit, Abdullah met with Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis and senior members of Congress.
• April 5, 2017 at the White House, including a full formal press joint conference [YouTube]
• September 20, 2017 at a New York City hotel [White House press release]

They seem to have developed some chemistry. Perhaps, if one or the other is listening, even a common language. 

Was the subject of the fugitive Jordan-resident terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, whom Jordan is obliged under its 1995 Extradition Treaty to send to the Washington DC, publicly mentioned at any of their previous get-togethers. As far as we know, no. (See "09-Feb-18: Acting slowly in Jordan and the United States?")

Is this deeply disturbing in terms of the determination of the US to defeat violent extremism - the State Department's preferred term for terrorism? Certainly. (See "18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms").

Since Tamimi, who boasts of killing Israeli children of whom one is our daughter Malki, is an unrepentant Hamas agent who hosted a terrorism-inciting television program in Amman for a worldwide Arabic-speaking audience for five years, and benefits from extraordinary protection from King Abdullah, it's strange to us to note that "issues of mutual concern, including terrorism" are on the agenda.

So can we assume Tamimi's extradition is going to be discussed?

09-Nov-15: Death of a knife attacker and the lethally selective way it's reported

The photo above, unrelated to the events at the Eliyahu security checkpoint, 
is what the editors at AFP chose to illustrate the report of today's 
knife attack by an unsuccessful Arab stabber [Source]

Here's the opening line of a major news report appearing at this moment on an English-language Palestinian Arab news site:

A Palestinian woman was shot-dead by Israeli soldiers this morning under the pretext that she tried to stab a border guard, at the Eliyahu military checkpoint in Qalqilya, northern West Bank. ["22-year-old woman shot-dead by soldiers at Eliyahu checkpoint, Qalqilya", Palestine News Network, November 8, 2015]. 

Under the pretext, they say. Pretext.

The French news agency AFP reports the same event today a little differently - and please take note of the photo above which accompanies their article:

A Palestinian woman attempted to attack Israeli security guards with a knife at a checkpoint in the north of the occupied West Bank on Monday before being shot dead, officials said. Two letters found in her bag indicated plans for a suicide attack, according to the ministry. Palestinian police identified her as Rasha Uweisseh, 23 and from Qalqilya... ["Palestinian woman attempts stabbing, shot dead: officials", AFP, November 8, 2015]

The rasha's suicide note [Source:
Jerusalem Post today]

That matter of letters in her bag indicating what AFP calls a "suicide attack" seems significant to us. The Jerusalem Post says the woman called Rasha set out to kill people in order "to defend the homeland and the youth". (Non-Hebrew speakers might be interested to know that the stabber's first name, "Rasha", is the Hebrew word for "evil person".)

Her letters are all over the Arabic-language social media today (Twitter tweets here, for example).

Knowing about the letters, more accurate terms to describe the events at the crossing this morning might be lethal attack, murderous attack, knifing attack, stabbing attack, or even just attack. Because one thing is perfectly clear in this case as in so many others: Miss Uweisseh of Qalqilya came to the checkpoint in order to kill someone. That she was indifferent to what might happen to her is probably true but not the point. This attack was about killing Jews, Israelis. The connection to suicide is incidental, secondary and misleading.

So on what basis does PNN claim the killing of the young woman was done on a "pretext"? Probably on the same basis that brings certain other parts of the media to frame the attempted murder of Israelis via a focus on the attacker's failure and death.

• "Israeli occupation forces on Monday shot dead a Palestinian woman at a checkpoint in the north of the occupied West Bank." [Opening line of news report by Lebanon's Al-Manar]
• "Palestinian woman allegedly attempts stabbing, shot dead" [Al Arabiya's headline]
• "Shot at a checkpoint in the West Bank" [Headline of a report on the attack in the Icelandic news channel Morgunbladid]
• "Palestinian girl shot by Israelis" [Headline of a Persian-language report on the PressTV, Iran, website]
• "Palestinian woman killed after alleged attack at Qalqiliya checkpoint http://bit.ly/1SbsgJj  #palestine" [Tweeted by the Pal Arab Ma'an News Agency, here]
• And entirely predictably, the propagandists of Hamas via their Twitter account say: "#IOF forces execute Palestinian lady Rasha Al Ewasi, 23, at a military checkpoint east of #Qalqilya city. #WestBank"
• BBC Arabic's report [here] of the attacker's death is mysteriously silent about the letters she left behind. No mention of them at all. 

To the surprise of no informed observer, the dead woman has already been proclaimed a "martyr" by the Palestinian Arab media machine [here] whose accounts of how she was "shot dead in cold blood" will ensure a steady flow of more such attacks and deaths. Mission accomplished.

The selective reporting of the manner of her death and what brought her to carry out the attack are critical components of the incitement and brain-washing that make this possible. It's part of a process that deserves to be called what it is: lethal journalism.

07-Mar-15: For some, but only some, Friday's Jerusalem ramming/slashing was yet another terror attack

The Jerusalem Arab who rammed his car into
Israeli pedestrians on Friday [Image Source: Ynet]

We now know that the dramatic events we described on Friday morning ["06-Mar-15: Jerusalem, Purim and terror... once again"] were a classic terror attack. They involved an ideologically committed jihadist who signaled ahead of time that he planned to do it; a loving mother (a genre with which we are only too familiar) who beams with pride at her son's murderous passions; a car driven into a group of pedestrians; and a thwarted attempt to seriously maim and kill people via a butcher knife that failed only because alert people with guns sized up the situation and popped the attacker, leaving him lying in a pool of his own blood, but alive.

Here's what we now know happened.

First, yes, it was certainly a terror attack, executed by a Jerusalem Arab. Several news sources (this Times of Israel story for instance) say he advertised his intentions via Facebook a day before. His mother supports the son's 'heroic' ploughing down of defenseless pedestrians.

Of course, the state of journalism being what it is, major newsagencies like Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported Friday's attack without once mentioning the words "terror", "terrorism" or "terrorists". The closest AFP came was to say

The car ramming on Friday bore the hallmarks of a series of "lone wolf" attacks by Palestinians in Jerusalem last year. [AFP as carried by Telegraph UK yesterday]

As for the BBC with its notoriously selective see-no-terrorism policy, see BBC Watch for another fine example of its usual penetrating critical analysis.

The attacker is Mohammed Salaymeh from the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Ras al-Amud, according to family members. (The Jerusalem Post has his name as Mohammed Mahmoud Abdel Razek Salaima.) His portrait above shows a proclivity for wrapping Palestinian Arab flags around his torso.

His 'resistance' activity involved pointing his Honda sedan at a group of young Israelis standing on the sidewalk in the vicinity of a Jerusalem Light Rail tram stop on the city's Route 1. At about 10:00 am, Friday morning, Purim in Jerusalem and thus a day on which many Jerusalemites were on the streets, he managed to strike five people. Four were young women, all serving in the Border Police, all in their twenties, all standing near the entrance to the Border Police centre.

He then drove several hundred meters further along the road where he then struck a bicycle rider said to be in his fifties. All five victims suffered light-to-moderate injuries.

Same terrorist, immediately
after his attack was forcefully stopped
by alert security personnel
[Screen shot from eye-witness
video]

The terrorists was armed with
this butcher knife [Image Source]

After smashing his car into the people, the terrorist jumped out, brandishing a butcher’s knife that he used to slash at passersby. Fortunately, before he caused more injuries, the terrorist was shot and neutralized, though not killed, by an alert Border Policeman and a Jerusalem Light Rail security guard at the scene. He is in a Jerusalem hospital now, getting Israeli medical care.

No one here thinks for a moment that this terrorist attack was the last of its kind.

01-Mar-15: Facts, dam facts, and non-factual inventions aimed at the gullible

Friday's revised AFP report on that Gaza flooding
[Screen capture from this source]

A number of news channels reported this past Monday ["23-Feb-15: Dam!"] about a malicious Israeli "attack dam" strategy. With Hamas regime spokespeople in Gaza as their sole source, they dutifully parroted serious charges about Israel deliberately opening the gates of dams in southern Israel so that floodwaters would pour into the teeming communities of the wretched Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. 

Not a single reporter saw anything to confirm the claims. The dams were never named or located or photographed. 

None of this, however, prevented some of the most respected names in journalism from reporting that Israel's actions were malicious and calculated to increase Gazan suffering.

We followed up a day later ["24-Feb-15: The mess that the receding flood waters reveal"] with some observations about how some of the silly media people were dealing with having been conned: 

• Ma'an, the self-styled "independent" Palestinian Arab news source that had run the story (here) as its main lead during last Sunday's evening hours, left it online, unchanged (you can see that it's still unchanged today). Headlined "Hundreds of Palestinians flee as Israel opens dams into Gaza Valley", the piece reports as fact that "Israeli authorities opened a number of dams near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley in the wake of a recent severe winter storm."
• The influential Chinese newsagency, Xinhua, reported it too, and made no change once the facts got clearer. It too has left the story as it was, unmoved by the actual facts even today.
• Egypt's Al Akhbar reported it on the first day ("Israel's Open Dams Flood Gaza, Hundreds Evacuated"), and it too found no need to update it, to modify the charges, or to investigate the facts as received from the Hamas-controlled ministry that announced them. The same is true as of today: Sunday's bogus Al Akhbar story still stands.
• Aljazeera's version changed its version of the story, to their credit, quoting Israeli sources and presenting a more balanced version while repeating the made-up Hamas claims.
• The Russian RT news agency editors also ran with the Hamas claims, but a day later tried to clean their act up by modifying the original headline and some of the contents too, to project a "he said/she said" narrative. As we noted, RT's editors didn't claim to conduct any actual investigation into the facts. Getting it from Hamas was evidently sufficient validation for them.

There are others as well. But the most interesting of the list is Agence France-Presse ("...the oldest news agency in the world and one of the largest", according to its Wikipedia entry). They published and syndicated the Hamas whopper on Day One to their huge subscriber base. But by the following day the story had already been removed. Clicking on the story's original link [http://news.yahoo.com/video/gaza-village-floods-israel-opens-163038474.html] produced an AFP error message. 

On Friday, the French agency issued a completely-changed version of its tune.

"For the residents [of Gaza], there was no doubt: Israel was responsible after deliberately opening "a dam" to flood the enclave. But an examination of the facts on the Israeli side tells another story, shattering a long-held Palestinian myth... [AFP]

(There's a video version of AFP's February 27, 2015 shattering-the-myth report here.)

Here's what AFP's new take on the attack-dams story does not do:

• Does not make any mention of its disgraceful original report
• Does not acknowledge that its gullible reporters and editors accepted at face value a string of Hamas claims about Israeli malfeasance, and did so without making the smallest effort at checking the facts until it ran into a torrent of criticism from readers and media watchdogs
• Does not apologize for its role in creating the Hamas myth and then spreading it as "news" throughout its subscriber base
• Does not name and shame the Hamas individuals who fed it the original story
• Does not name and shame the AFP stringers, AFP reporters, AFP news editors, AFP fact-checkers and AFP syndication editors who had only one job to do (report and disseminate the facts on an objective and verifiable basis) and failed miserably.

Affairs like the attack-dam myth get propagated widely because, for the professionals of the news reporting industry, their anti-Israel character is enough to overcome the absence of a factual basis and the nonsense logic underpinning them. For those of us who depend on them (to whatever extent) for information and ideas, we have much to fear from today's industrialized mainstream news channels.

24-Feb-15: The mess that the receding flood waters reveal

The Anadolu (Turkish news agency) caption reads:
"Hundreds of Palestinians were evacuated from
their homes Sunday morning after Israeli
authorities opened a number of dams
near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley
in the wake of a recent severe winter storm.
Anadolu/Ashraf Amra"

Here's some follow-up to a post ["23-Feb-15: Dam!"] we published yesterday about the uncritical, lazy and irresponsible way some news agencies carry stories, often originating from notoriously partisan sources, that pin damaging allegations against Israel without bothering themselves to check whether they're true or made-up.

First, a clear and unambiguous assertion: yesterday's widely published news reports about Israel opening up dams in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip are in the made-up category.

The story, based on allegations that no reporter claims to have investigated or to have proven, exists in order to validate perpetual claims from the Palestinian Arab power structure - in this case, from Hamas - of Palestinian Arab victimhood and Israeli malevolence.

Once invented and handed to gullible reporters and editors, stories like the one about Israel's "attack dams" go public and become part of the news cycle. Their anti-Israel character, it seems, is enough to overcome the absence of a factual basis and the nonsense logic underpinning them.

The most direct version of the libelous story can be found in Ma'an, the self-styled "independent" Palestinian Arab news source about which we posted critical comments on Sunday. It ran this story as its main lead during Sunday's evening hours; the article remains online and unchanged as of today:

Hundreds of Palestinians flee as Israel opens dams into Gaza Valley | Hundreds of Palestinians were evacuated from their homes Sunday morning after Israeli authorities opened a number of dams near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley in the wake of a recent severe winter storm.

The Chinese newsagency, Xinhua, reported it too, and has made no change since then:

Israel opens dams, floods Gaza | Mufid al-Hasaynah, minister of Housing and Public Works in the Palestinian unity government, told Xinhua that Israel deliberately increases the suffering of the Gazans.

Egypt's Al Akhbar reported it yesterday ("Israel's Open Dams Flood Gaza, Hundreds Evacuated"), and has found no need to update it or modify the charges. Or to investigate the facts as received from the Hamas-controlled ministry that announced them.

The major French news agency Agence France-Presse ("...the oldest news agency in the world and one of the largest", according to its Wikipedia entry) published it too. But click on its link now [here] and you get an error message:

The nonsense article has been removed by the AFP editors, leaving behind this text: "Hmmm... the page you're looking for isn't here. Try searching above". Perhaps it should read:

"Hmmm, you discovered we trusted Hamas with predictable consequences. In future, try searching at a more reliable source".

In any event, no apology from AFP and no explanation for the article or its removal.

Aljazeera's version of the bogus story has been changed, and now carries this doctored headline: "Israel denies causing Gaza floods by opening dams". We should have archived the original version but did not. However the URL gives a clear indication of the headline it used to have:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/02/gazans-flee-floods-caused-israel-dams-opening-150222115950849.html

To their credit, Aljazeera's editors now open their account with what they ought to have reported a day earlier:

Israel has rejected allegations by government officials in the Gaza strip that authorities were responsible for released storm waters flooding parts of the besieged area.
"The claim is entirely false, and southern Israel does not have any dams," said a statement from the Coordinator of Government Activites in the Territorities (COGAT).
"Due to the recent rain, streams were flooded throughout the region with no connection to actions taken by the State of Israel."

Over at the Russian RT news agency, the editors have tried to clean their act up by modifying the original headline and some of the contents too. Yesterday their story was entitled "Israel opens dams forcing hundreds of Gazans out of flooded houses", and asserted as fact that "In the wake of a recent severe winter storm in the region, Israeli authorities opened the floodgates to discharge the accumulated water." Today at the same URL it's called "Palestine accuses Israel of opening dams, flooding Gaza, forcing evacuations". Not much better, but in the face of the criticism directed at their editorial foolishness, it's a concession. And in the body of the piece, they now add:

In a letter to RT regarding the issue, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) maintained that “the claim is entirely false."

As for RT actual investigation into the facts, their editors evidently don't feel the need. Getting it from Hamas is apparently sufficient validation for them.

No one was killed. But the affair gives a useful - if depressing - insight into how packaged news on the Arab/Israel conflict (and many other matters) gets its character and makes its way into our living rooms and heads. There is much to fear from today's industrialized mainstream news channels.

23-Feb-15: Dam!

Flooding in a Gazan urban street: Not this week, and not because of any
Israeli dams (there are none in the area) but because of heavy rain in November 2014
and chronic Hamas municipal malfeasance [Image Source]

The "independent" Palestinian Arab news agency Ma'an (about whom we had some comments just a few hours ago) ran this story as its main lead during the evening hours yesterday (Sunday):

Hundreds of Palestinians were evacuated from their homes Sunday morning after Israeli authorities opened a number of dams near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley in the wake of a recent severe winter storm.

Aljazeera ran with a similar report, as did Agence France-Presse, the Chinese Xinhua news agency, Russia's RT and Egypt's al-Akhbar. All quoted Gaza ministries as their source. None of them named or located the dams. Not one of them said a reporter of theirs saw anything to confirm the central claim. But all were able to report that this was malicious and intended to increase Gazan suffering.

It's not the first year we are hearing of un-named Zionist dams that are opened at precisely the same time as torrential rains wash through Gaza's under-invested, sewer-deficient communities bringing havoc in their wake. See "How Hamas used the weather to defame Israel" from last winter, as an instance.

There were also torrential rains in the area at the start of the winter, just a few weeks ago. The reliably hostile UNRWA published reports [here] about the damage at that time, along with appeals for more help, without once mentioning an Israeli hand in the disaster. That's because there was none. Of course, it might have been helpful if they had said what they know about Hamas' chronic and deliberate failure to improve infrastructure, facilities and life for the unfortunate Gazan population living under their rule. But that kind of thing is not in UNRWA's charter.

As for the notorious "Gaza Valley", does anyone out there know where in the narrow coastal plain it's located? And if we can ask that question, why can't the lazy editors at those news outlets? They are at least as culpable as the thugs inside Hamas are.

For the record, Honest Reporting sought and got a relevant quote this morning from a respectable Israeli source, the Spokesperson’s Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT):

The claim is entirely false, and southern Israel does not have any dams. Due to the recent rain, streams were flooded throughout the region with no connection to actions taken by the State of Israel. Prior to the storm, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories allowed the transfer of four water pumps belonging to the Palestinian Water Authority from Israel into Gaza to supplement the 13 pumps already in the Gaza Strip in dealing with any potential flooding throughout the area.

Stand by to see those newsagencies listed above promptly issue a prominent correction, and express thanks to COGAT for relieving widespread regional concerns about malicious Zionist use of attack-dams.

Kidding aside, shouldn't they?

10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed

Gaza: one of the flocked children [Image Source]

Many of us are not fully sensitive to the way our emotional reaction to news stories is a function of how it is reported. The tone of news articles - critical, supportive, cynical, angry, amused, whatever - is something that editors, writers and the people who write the headlines and add the pictures understand well.

Consumers of the news? Not so much.

Agence France Presse, one of the world's major packagers and syndicators of news reporting and imagery, and the oldest (founded in 1835), provides news outlets throughout the world with many of the stories they publish. From conversations, we sense that the role of the large packagers - including Reuters, Associated Press and Xinhua - is barely comprehended by end-users. But their influence, as newspapers lack the profitability and cash to employ their own reporters in the many (often troubled) locations where news is made, is vast.

So a person might think that with a heavy and growing responsibility for getting those stories right, AFP (which is still entirely owned by the French government) and the others would make efforts to present things in a balanced, objective way, free of editorializing and bias.

Which brings us to a story that AFP syndicated out to its news customers in the last 24 hours.

It's datelined Gaza, and describes systematic child abuse carried out yet again, on a colossal scale, by the thugs of certain outlawed terrorist organizations operating in dark Islamist/Moslem Brotherhood-controlled corners of the world, and the outrage from the many organizations, those with the huge budgets and the heart-rending websites and a mandate to speak for the urgent need to protect innocent children, loudly condemning the facts presented in the article.

Actually we're being sarcastic. Today's AFP report, headlined "Gaza youngsters flock to Hamas training camps", does no such thing, though the facts describe a humanitarian disaster of global significance.

(The syndicated story's title appears in different forms, and with changes to the text, in several different versions published around the world today. In Malaysian for instance it carries this headline: "Gaza conundrum with the youth: Hamas training for war or social well-being?" And as an aside: how appropriate is it, given what we know about the violent, authoritarian hand of Hamas, that this describes children flocking? How much freedom of action do the parents have under Hamas rule, let alone the school-children? The reporter surely knows the truth: she lives in Gaza from where she has worked for AFP since 2008.)

Here's how it opens:

Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Hatem is only 14 but has already lived through three wars with Israel. Now the young Gazan says he is making sure he'll be ready to fight in the next one. "The Israelis killed my niece last summer. Now I want to kill them," he told AFP after completing a week-long youth training camp with militants from the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamist Hamas movement. "I will become a resistance fighter," the boy said proudly during a graduation ceremony in Gaza.

If you read it through, you might notice that words like jihad, Moslem, terror, terrorist, terrorism, child-abuse, are missing. They don't appear once. The word Islamist, which is central to the facts recounted in the article, gets a single mention. But that's only because it is part of the name of the regime under whose auspices the whole disgraceful affair is being carried out.

AFP's report describes how

"17,000 youngsters... graduated late last month from two military training camps where Hamas - the de facto power in Gaza - said it was preparing the next generation to fight against Israel... With the humanitarian situation in post-war Gaza growing steadily worse, a fresh flare-up with Israel seems likely. And with many schools being used to shelter the displaced and unemployment standing at 41 percent, it was not difficult to convince youngsters to join the camps.

Alert readers might be wondering why "the humanitarian situation in post-war Gaza" is "growing steadily worse", and whether the local authorities are acting to prevent that or to exacerbate it. When the reporter says "a fresh flare-up with Israel seems likely", is this because Israel is encouraging it? Or does the Gaza regime seek to bring it on? A careful reading convey the joys of an approaching war and the passions that two camps for 17,000 children can arouse. But the logical next step - do they want war? or do they fear it? - is not taken by AFP or its reporter. Why is this? And how manipulated is the voice of a 14 year-old ("I want to kill them") like "Hatem" in a society where everything is watched and controlled?

To their (small) credit, AFP's news gatherers concede that

Hamas has been running summer camps for youngsters for years, but this week-long session was a much more serious affair. Run for the first time by militants from the Qassam Brigades, there were no "fun" sessions - and no mid-week visits to Gaza's zoo... Hamas has rushed to defend the military training... "What have we gained from 20 years of futile negotiations?"

(Hamas negotiated? When? Where? With whom? It's propaganda and nonsense. AFP knows that. Most of its readers don't.)

And right at the very bottom of the piece, it quotes a solitary voice invoking human rights from inside Gaza:

Issam Yunis, head of Gaza-based human rights group Al-Mezan, said the camps were a dangerous development in a territory where more than half of the population is under 15. "Gazan children are traumatised by the violence, so some are attracted by the military training," he said. "But the priority today should be to take care of their social and physical well-being."

The social and physical well-being of children? Now there's a subject worth exploring. But not for AFP. Those are the very last words of the news report; an opportunity to ask the worthy groups who seek the well-being of children everywhere else is lost. We're thinking of groups like UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development and others. 

A year ago ["15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?"] we asked here whether there is some sort of explanation for why those NGOs are silent:

If there is a reason, let them say it. It's inconceivable that they are unaware of this horror. The real story is not the military-style training and the pledges by children to die for the values of those hideous, terror-addicted Hamas insiders. It's this: where is the outrage of the civilized world? We especially want to know what UNRWA plans to do about the Hamas death-cultism. With an enormous footprint in the Gaza Strip, this has to become UNRWA's issue. Its website, the front end of the perpetual global UNRWA fund-raising, asserts this lofty set of aspirations: "We are committed to fostering the human development of Palestine refugees by helping them to: Acquire knowledge and skills; Lead long and healthy lives; Achieve decent standards of living; Enjoy human rights to the fullest possible extent." [UNRWA | Our priorities] ...[H]ow acceptable [is] it to them that six year old Gazan children (or for that matter 16 year olds) are given training in the lethal use of AK47s that are bigger than some of the children holding them [see Daily Mail UK]. Let them drop the charade and admit they have no problem with it, if that's the reality. We know the Palestinian Arab Islamists have no problem with this at all... Who is going to save these children? It certainly is not going to be Hamas and their co-conspirators.

AFP seems unwilling or unable to do it, but other parts of the mainstream media have occasionally poked gingerly at stories of massive Gazan child-abuse. For our part, and in view of our agenda, we have tried to get the issue discussed and thought about - for instance

• 5-Jul-12: Needed: Bridge over troubled Gazan waters
• 24-Jan-13: Sacrificing the lives of an entire generation of adolescents on their altar of hatred, the thugs of Hamas boast of plans to create a children's army
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns
• 29-Apr-13: Hamas demonstrates importance of solid education. Stand by for vigorous response from Amnesty, UNICEF et al
• 18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions
• 3-Jul-13: Educating the next generation: an early-summer reflection on asymmetry
• 8-Oct-13: Children and their indispensable role in the conflict
• 15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?
• 27-Jan-14: In Gaza, a death cult celebrates its graduating class
• 14-Feb-14: As its children face major new threat, Hamas leadership in Gaza gears up for another crisis
• 24-Nov-14: Destroying their own children's lives is not the worst option for the terrorists. In their eyes, it may even be the best

LIFE, June 1970 [Image Source]

Something hideous is being done to the children of Gaza. Those doing it declare it's what Islam demands. As far as we can tell, Islam's adherents in other places are largely silent. This cannot be because they don't know it's happening. It cannot be that the guardians of children's rights - or human rights - don't know. Could it be they don't want to know? Or want us to understand?

What chance is there that Reuters, Associated Press and Xinhua will pick up that aspect of the story and take it where it should go by demanding meaningful responses - condemnation? fury? - from the child-rights industry? Meanwhile who are the real losers?

Perhaps the children in the famous LIFE magazine cover on the right. Reminding us that this tragic abuse of human potential is not new, it comes from June 1970, two generations ago. If they are still alive, the boys in the photograph would be in at least their mid-fifties today. What kind of life did that vaunted "new pride and unity" bestow on them? How do its contours and achievements compare with those of boys and men in other parts of the world? In Israel? Now that might be a news story worth writing and reading.

10-Dec-14: In the Arab world's most promising new journalism school, a passion for murder and hatred

The Jordan Media Institute campus, Amman [Image: Sahar.Ahmed - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

How did a promising initiative, funded and supported by Western governments and NGOs and designed to produce world-class journalism in the Arabic world, end up creating a pedestal for one of Hamas' ugliest achievements, the 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria?

A major Arab media conference  took place this past weekend in the Jordanian capital, Amman. A published opinion piece authored by a senior member of the organizing team opens with these words:

"The lights of free speech are being steadily extinguished across the Arab world, heralding a new era of ignorance, intolerance and repression..."

As bad as this is, aspects of the news reporting industry in the Arab world are even more profoundly disturbing than she and her professional colleagues seem to realize. Allow us to explain.

Jordan, like the rest of the Arab world, lacks a free press. The respected human rights watchdog organization Freedom House in its 2014 update calls the Hashemite Kingdom “Not Free” and gives it a score of 6 on a scale of one to seven for freedom of the press. (Seven is the worst score.) It notes “a marked increase in the number of incidents of intimidation and physical attacks” on members of the media during 2013. Reporters Without Frontiers, which also tracks press freedom, says Jordan’s authorities further tightened their existing grip on its media in the past year.

Princess Rym Ali is a former CNN reporter who married King Abdullah II's half-brother in 2004 and thereby became part of Jordan's royal family. She is the daughter of Lakhdar Brahimi, once Algeria's Minister for Foreign Affairs and a senior UN official. She was raised in Great Britain and Algeria; educated in France and the United States.

A high-performing professional, she is the prime mover behind the establishment of an Arabic-language graduate school of journalism, Jordan Media Institute, which opened its doors in Amman in 2010. Its mission was to “raise professional standards and become a regional beacon” on the model of the princess' alma mater, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Sitting on the JMI board of directors are prominent individuals from journalism, law, publishing, the royal family of Jordan and the long-time head of the Agence France-Press bureau in Amman.

To judge from the JMI website and its use of all the right-sounding phrases, its arrival heralds something uplifting and positive. Its professed values and mission statement echo those of the best global journalism schools: “media freedom and human rights”, an “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”, “innovative curricula”, “world-class facilities”, “highest international standards”, “emphasizing accuracy and ethical journalistic procedures” in order to “provide the public with increased access to fair and balanced news”. Lovely.

All of this, while acknowledging "the distinctiveness of Arab culture and philosophy".

An impressive list of funders and strategic partners are providing “in-kind, financial or technical assistance” to make it happen: Anna Lindh Foundation, Sweden; Australia via its International Development Aid agency; Canada via its International Development Aid agency; EU via the European Commission Delegation in Jordan; the German government; Journalists for Human Rights; Netherlands government; Norwegian Institute of Journalism; Reporters Without Borders; Saatchi and Saatchi, the global ad agency; The Swedish Institute; the UK government; UNESCO, and some others.

The button links to the jmijournalists.com site

Visit the homepage of the JMI website and you see a button that links to a related website hosting the work-product of JMI’s own cadre of young journalists. It's in Arabic only, naturally enough; these contents are not meant for the Western sponsors and international partners. They're the work product of JMI's insiders. 

But intentionally or not, it is these pages – along with the invaluable help of Google Translate’s Arabic-to-English service - that shine a revealing light for non-Arabic speakers like us on what all that NGO and government money, inspiration and support is enabling for this “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”.  

On every page of the site, under the headline “Success Models”, a journalist called Tamimi is profiled. She is the murderer of our daughter, Malki.

They provide a large photograph of Tamimi and certain biographical details concerning her journalistic background. But important things about the “success model” offered up by this new centre of journalistic “excellence” are omitted:

• Tamimi brought a human bomb to the center of Jerusalem on August 9, 2001 to destroy the busy Sbarro pizzeria. She was instrumental in planning this major terrorist attack.
• Fifteen people were blown to pieces that day and 130 injured, many of them children and infants.   
• The sixteenth victim – a young mother with her two year-old daughter – has never regained consciousness.
• The people traveling on the bus with Tamimi from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the hour after the explosion beamed with delight as the scale of the carnage was reported on the radio.
• Tamimi was barely able to contain her own happiness [video], the joy that came from secretly being the one responsible for the massacre and no one on the bus knew.

We first published this image four years ago

Tamimi is a convicted killer, a psychopath who boasts on YouTube that she selected the site of her massacre so that the dead would include as many young religious Jews as possible. She famously smiled broadly with perverse pleasure [video] when informed of how many children’s lives were extinguished in the attack she masterminded.

JMI tells its English-speaking sponsors what it wants them to hear – that JMI embraces the “highest international standards” and “ethical journalistic procedures” – and the financial support flows. Yet in Arabic, the language of its Jordanian audience, JMI embraces a much darker narrative, one in which it glorifies a mass murderer. Do the Western funders understand this?

If we are wrong about JMI’s embrace of Tamimi, we would expect an urgent outburst of Arab rage at the affront to the honor of their society. 

But bitter experience tells us not to hold our breaths.

The JMI outrage does not exist in isolation. Consider the distinctive way Jordan’s legal system views terror. It might not be what most people think:

The Lower House [of Jordan’s parliament] on Wednesday endorsed draft amendments to the State Security Court (SSC) Law following extensive discussions over its provisions. The deputies excluded “resistance actions” against Israel from the court’s jurisdiction, following a proposal to do so by Deputy Tareq Khoury (Zarqa, 1st District). The deputies agreed that any actions against Israel cannot be “terrorism” at all; hence, they approved a provision that excludes actions against Israel from terrorism crimes. [Jordan Times, December 11, 2013 Note that this page is no longer reachable via a regular Google search. But it remains stored on the Wayback Machine, the archive.org repository of pages that never disappear. Click to see it here.]

The repugnant - and almost totally unpublicized - manner in which they have adjusted their laws is something to keep in mind when the Jordanians next stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Europe and the US in the battle against the jihadists. The State Department, by the way, bizarrely continues to call them “a strong ally in combating terrorism and violent extremist ideology”.

Princess Rym, interviewed before JMI opened its doors, said “Everybody talks about the media explosion in the Middle East“. She probably was not thinking of Tamimi, the budding young media student in the final year of journalism studies at Birzeit University who moonlighted as a news-reader at a West Bank television station. 

When Tamimi joined Hamas in 2001 as its first female jihadist, an explosion was what Tamimi had in mind. And on August 9, 2001, she made it happen.

The transcript of her subsequent trial on multiple murder charges shows Tamimi confessed it all to the court, and with no remorse.  She told the judges:

"The smile on my face will not be erased. I will not ask forgiveness... I will be smiling always because I won."

The impact her bloodless words had on the court can be gauged from the way the presiding judge handed down the sentence:

“It is our responsibility to distance the defendant from society forever… Let the normal pleasures of life therefore be denied the accused until the time of her death behind bars. We sentence the guilty party, unanimously, to fifteen life sentences and add to them one further life sentence for her other crimes… [and] recommend that the guilty party not be eligible for pardon by the military commander, nor to early parole by any other means.”

Justice unfortunately was not done. Less than eight years later, to our horror, Tamimi walked out of her Israeli prison cell to freedom. She was one of 1,027 undeserving beneficiaries of a successful act of terrorist extortion, the Gilad Shalit transaction that subsequently cost so many innocent Israeli lives and did so much irreversible harm to fundamental principles of justice.

On the day she was freed, Tamimi was transported immediately to Cairo for a photo op with the arch-terrorist who heads Hamas. Then, right after that, a flight to Jordan, her homeland, and a triumphant reception in her honour on the premises of her country’s Family Law Court in downtown Amman. Numerous additional gala events followed in Jordan and abroad. Soon she was given a weekly television program of her own on one of the Hamas satellite channels. Via television, cable, the social media and rallies in public places, she leveraged her status as an icon, as the incendiary unchained voice of the murder-minded terrorists still behind Israeli bars.

During Operation Protective Edge this past summer, as hundreds of rockets were being fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel’s towns and homes, Tamimi was the anchor for a series of blood-curdling, morale-boosting prime-time television programs produced by Hamas and beamed far, wide and via YouTube. She has become central to their jihadist war against the hated Jews.

But it’s her status as the poster girl, literally, for JMI, one of the Arab world’s most promising, well-resourced initiatives that ought to be causing deep dismay in the West.

Actually, it goes well beyond dismay. There’s a screaming contradiction at work here. On one hand, a politically-correct pledge to lofty journalistic values; all the right words. On the other, the marketing of Tamimi, a psychopath whose public appearances are replete with the language of religious zealotry, as the embodiment of Arab journalism’s courageous new wave. Lethal journalism personified.

This echoes aspects of the cultural encounter between Western democracies and Arab Muslim societies in which both use the same terminology but mean different things. The scandalous exploitation of video footage claiming to show a Gazan boy, Muhammad al Durah, being shot dead by Israeli soldiers in 2000 illustrates what we mean. 

(The Al Durah affair centers on a shocking video clip that went phenomenally viral 14 years ago. The Arab boy is terrified; his father is powerless; the Israeli bullets keep coming, until finally they strike home; the boy is dead. The part not screened at the time, right after the point where he is declared dead by the voice-over, shows the boy peeking out at the camera from under a raised elbow, plainly not dead. The consequences continue to exact innocent lives and are still being litigated in France’s courts.)

Jerusalem, August 9. 2001: The aftermath of the attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria,

proudly engineered by JMI's "success model"

A sound-bite [here] from a longer video interview shows a PA official who doctored the Al Durah video footage explaining that the tampering was done to fulfill the journalists’ duty “of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.” He looks satisfied as he says it, convinced he did the right thing. For audiences with a Western outlook, it exemplifies how blood libels, updated from their medieval origins, work in today’s world.

Mass murderers like Tamimi, honored by her peers for putting journalism to effective use for the benefit of their cause, evoke a similar sense of horror. Do these people seriously not understand what she did? Where did we lose each other? If Jordan’s best-educated cohort of emerging influence-builders thinks and does this when they believe no one outside the Arabic-speaking world is looking, what hope is there of a better future?

One answer is: there is hope. There is always hope. 

The beautiful, tragically short life of my daughter shows that. Malki loved life, loved making people smile, loved doing good. Her devotion to children with severe disabilities, starting with her own youngest sister, was inspirational. The work of the foundation we created in her memory  – The Malki Foundation – with families from every part of Israeli society (Christians, Druze, Moslems, the unaffiliated, Jews) who care for a child with severe disabilities is our way of creating a success model.

The 13 years since Malki was killed have been replete with reminders of how differently the people on the other side view things. For us, remembering our tragedy and honoring our child’s stolen life has involved bettering the lives of strangers, trying to affirm what we share. It’s the polar opposite of what the JMI journalists’ success model stands for. Finding a common language with them will take far more than political correctness and mission statements.

[A version of this post appears on Times of Israel today under the headline "By their role models shall ye know them"]

UPDATE December 1, 2015: Much has happened since we published this post a year ago. What we have learned about the Jordan Media Institute affair - and the involvement of Jordan's establishment including the royal family that owns and operates Jordan - is an ongoing scandal. It's compounded by an inexplicable cover-up by several major foreign governments, by some of the world's most important NGOs, and by an embarrassingly large collection of members of the media. It touches on multiple issues (funding, development, journalism, government among others) but on none more sensitive or dangerous than terrorism. 

We want readers who have gotten to this page to at least be aware of what we added to our understanding during these past 12 months:

• 11-Dec-14: Is it newsworthy when journalists make a terror-addicted murdering colleague their role-model?
• 11-Jan-15: Does the king need to fly to Paris to stand with terror victims? He can do it better back in Jordan
• 16-Jan-15: Incubating terror-minded journalists in Jordan but they have an answer to the criticisms
• 19-Jan-15: The dilemmas of funding and enabling terror
• 05-Jun-15: Beyond the politics, the business and the misunderstandings at Orange, a question of terror
• 30-Nov-15: Incitement to savagery costs lives on all sides so why doesn't everyone want to shut it down?