03-Oct-17: Released in Shalit Deal, a pious Pal Arab murderer is going back (too late) to life in an Israeli prison

The now-widowed Hadas Mizrahi and five of her children
in much happier times, with her murdered husband
Baruch Z"L [Image Source]. A family devastated
by another Shalit Deal-driven catastrophe

Another beneficiary of the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Deal was re-sentenced yesterday by an Israeli court. This has gotten only minor media attention, even here in Israel. That's a great pity. It highlights some lessons worth learning.

First about the deal.

We're referring to the massive act of terrorist extortion that induced Israel to allow 1,027 convicted terrorists, fully half of them (by our careful count) convicted murderers or attempted murderers, to walk free in October 2011. This was done to secure the release from Hamas of an Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit.

Both of us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) put a lot of time, energy and effort into trying to persuade the public that this was a very, very bad idea. We felt strongly that one of the terrorists in particular should never have been released: See "14-Oct-11: Please sign a petition to keep this particular terrorist behind bars" and "15-Oct-11: Video: The murderer of our child says: "I don't regret anything""]

Could the terrible results of the catastrophic Shalit Deal have been avoided? It's a question that has haunted us since the terrible deed was done. Here's a relevant comment we made in a 2012 post ["18-Oct-12: The Shalit deal a year later - a personal reflection"]:

Before the release, it was hard to say, but immediately afterwards there were important revelations. A freshly-retired senior commander in IDF counter-terrorism intelligence, Colonel (res.) Ronen Cohen - most recently the intelligence officer of Central Command. - said when interviewed on the day Gilad walked free, that this constituted “a resounding failure… The IDF never took responsibility for the soldier and did not even set up a team to deal with bringing him back… Intelligence is not passive but must be activated. [In the Shalit case,] it never was.”

The specific Shalit Deal releasee about whom we write below was central to two earlier posts of ours: "15-Apr-14: Seder night shooting attack: dead and wounded Israeli victims" and "23-Jun-14: Quietly, inexorably, almost entirely unreported, the lethal consequences of the Shalit Transaction grow"

That 2014 terror attack was executed by Awad on Route 35 near the Tarqumiya-Idhna road junction near Hebron. Izzadin Awad, the son, was convicted of materially aiding the murder done by his father, and sentenced yesterday to 20 years in prison. The court ordered him to pay the Mizrahi family NIS 250,000.

Commander Mizrahi was the father of five children, aged at the time between three and thirteen. As the NY Times report says, his widow Hadas who was also shot, was pregnant at the time of her husband's murder. Their nine year old son was shot too.

Ynet says Ziad Awad the terrorist

was sentenced to two life sentences on Monday [yesterday]. The presiding judge also took into account that Awad had carried out the attack despite being one of the terrorists released as part of the Gilad Shalit deal. Baruch Mizrahi was killed on the eve of Passover while driving with his wife Hadas and five children to the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, to take part in the Passover Seder (feast). Awad, who is a resident of the Palestinian West Bank town of Idhna, opened fire on the vehicle, killing Baruch, seriously injuring Hadas and lightly wounding one of their children. ["2 life sentences for terrorist previously released in Shalit deal", Ynet, September 3, 2017]

Back in 2014 when Ziad was 45, the New York Times said he had been

freed from a life sentence for murdering Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel as part of the [Shalit] 2011... The authorities said Mr. Awad and his 18-year-old son, Izzedin Hassan Ziad Awad, were arrested May 7 [2014] for the April 14 slaying of the police commander... The authorities said that the younger Mr. Awad had produced the murder weapon, an AK-47 stained with his father’s DNA, and told interrogators that his father said his motive was religious because Islam promised paradise to anyone who kills a Jew. Mr. Mizrahi’s wife, Hadas, who was pregnant and wounded in the shooting, said Monday that his death shows the danger of releasing prisoners, an increasingly contentious issue in Israel, and called for Israel to institute the death penalty. “If they did not have a bargaining chip, my husband would have been alive today,” Ms. Mizrahi said in an interview on Army Radio... ["Palestinian Freed in 2011 Is Charged by Israel in a Killing", New York Times, June 23, 2014]

That religious piety - it's worth turning over in our minds. It was described elsewhere just after the arrests this way:

Before launching the attack, Awad confided in his son that he had religious motivation, saying that, "according to Islam, whoever kills a Jew goes to heaven." [Ynet, June 23, 2014]

So how dedicated was this killer to the creation of a Palestinian Arab homeland? To the rights of self-determination of his people? To ending the so-called occupation? Not much at all, the man himself is saying. For him, as for so many other Palestinian Arabs attracted to the extremist Islamist terror gangs, it's about religion and paradise. To us, it's fairly clear that the specifically religious passions motivating Palestinian Arab terror, and driver terror in general, don't in general get enough attention from anyone, and certainly not from the news-reporting industry. We can appreciate how much of a minefield this is for them. But not examining it is to do a major disservice to people who need to understand and expect the news media to help.

According to the go-free list issued in October 2011 in the two days before the Shalit Deal was consummated, Awad - whom it calls Awadh Ziad Awadh al-Salaima Awad, releasee number 431 - was "expelled" to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. That destination makes sense given his Hamas affiliation (described as a fact in this Arab source that says his son is a Hamas agent too).

Baruch Mizrahi, murdered by the Awads
[Image Source]

But then how did Awad leave there and become involved once again in terror in the vicinity of the Israeli communities of Judea and Samaria? He would have had to leave Gaza and that's not easy.

No one that we can find has offered an explanation. Our familiarity with the terms of the commutation-of-sentence that the Shalit Deal beneficiaries were granted (gained from first-person discussions with the public officials in charge of the commutations, and from seeing some of the relevant documents) make us think that being expelled also means they were forbidden from later returning to where they used to live before they were convicted.

So it's a real question - and for us at least, really troubling.

Awad had been arrested in 1993 on serious charges and convicted of murdering fellow Arabs, attempted murder, membership of a banned organization (we presume Hamas) and hurling fire-bombs at people (presumably Jewish people). He was sentenced to life imprisonment. But in the end he served only a small part of that.

His 2014 victim, Baruch Mizrahi, made a significant contribution to the well-being of Israelis in a tragically-shortened but strikingly productive life (and that's before we get into his role as husband and devoted father of five children between the ages of 3 and 13).

The official memorial page posted by the government of Israel says he

served in the IDF and the Israel Police for nearly three decades. For 25 years he served in various roles in the IDF, the last of which was as lieutenant colonel in the elite 8200 intelligence unit. After retiring from the army in June 2011, Mizrahi joined Israel Police, and for the past three years held a senior intelligence position in the Israel Police and was in charge of tracking organized crime. He was posthumously promoted to the rank of commander. 

Then there's the painful question of the other family: the killer's family.

Baruch Mizrahi's widow was quoted last night [here] observing with full justice that Palestinian Arab terrorists who are taken into Israeli custody

"receive grant money from the Palestinian Authority, supplies from the Red Cross and living conditions that many Israeli families in need can only dream of. We need to put an end to the terrorists' celebrations." 

The PA money that has already been coming to the Awads - and will continue to come to the end of their days tax-free - puts them well above the household earnings level of ordinary Palestinian Arabs. And way above the salary class of senior members of the Palestinian Authority's civil service.

That's of course, deliberate. The more Israelis the prisoner kills, and the longer the prison sentence he or she gets, the higher the monthly payment that reaches him/her and the family. It's a cruel reality that the relative few - we among them - aware of the human price of catastrophic releases of unrepentant terrorists need to keep in our minds.

It isn't only that Palestinian Arab society puts vicious shooters like the Awads on a pedestal. It's that foreign aid, provided by unwitting taxpayers in European, American and other Western countries whose governments pretend goes to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinian Arabs, is the indispensable fuel for the Abbas' regime's unspeakable and well-lubricated ["25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing"] incitement and encouragement of the murder of Jews.

And as payment schemes go, it's been proven to get relatively law-abiding Palestinian Arabs to consider killing one of their Israeli neighbours for the sake of... their families ["11-Jul-17: Incitement to terror: Sometimes it really is all about the money"] and/or their credit scores. It's a chilling phenomenon.

The Rewards for Terror scheme (the PA calls it something else but our name is more accurate) is an indefensible, immoral and entirely counter-productive reality that is long overdue for being stopped. Even people who see themselves as friends of Israel don't seem to appreciate that this can be stopped and easily. Those with the power to stop it are the funders. Many of them, we know, are reading this post but simply don't realize their elected and appointed officials can allow it to continue because analyses like the one we have just written in this post never get into their local mainstream media.

Maybe they should.

UPDATE October 4, 2017: Over at the always-incisive BBC Watch, they pay special attention today to how the Ziad murder was covered by the world's largest broadcasting organization:

The BBC initially reported that attack in a belated thirty-four word paragraph and subsequent reporting failed to clarify that the incident was a terror attack. The terrorist’s arrest and indictment did not receive any BBC coverage and so audiences did not receive any information concerning the motive behind the murder.

“Before launching the attack, Awad confided in his son that he had religious motivation, saying that, “according to Islam, whoever kills a Jew goes to heaven.””

Such cases do not of course fit into the BBC’s chosen narrative of Palestinian terrorism caused by “frustration” at “decades of Israeli occupation” and audiences therefore do not get to hear about them. ["A terrorist defies the BBC’s narrative", BBC Watch, October 4, 2017]

Of course, BBC is not the only part of the news-reporting world that ignores the terrorist's explanation for why he murdered Baruch Mizrahi. Or his sentencing this week. Al-Araby Al-Jadeed does report on the conviction and sentencing but is silent on Awad's version of his own motive. And a syndicated Agence France-Press report [here] also reports the sentence and is also silent on the "Islam-made-me-do-it" aspect. But it does say concerning two of the most notorious terrorist organizations in the world, both of them outlawed under European - and therefore French - law, that "Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, and its radical ally Islamic Jihad both hailed the attack on the policeman as “heroic”"

The "heroism" of concealed, heavily-armed gunmen firing on vehicles filled with Israeli families driving to a family event is tragically something we know only too well in Israel.

--

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Uwolniony w umowie o Shalita pobożny Arab palestyński, morderca, wraca (zbyt późno) do więziennej celi") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Polish-language Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

2-Apr-12: When you march for the rights of prisoners, what does it mean for the rights of their past and future victims?

Source: PMW

A friend has alerted us to the fact that political rallies are being organized in Europe (including Paris) and elsewhere this week in support of yet another UN-sponsored conference about the“plight” of the Palestinian Arabs being held in Israeli prisons.

We want those who march for them and against administrative detention and imprisonment to ask themselves and the organizers some tough and perhaps unpleasant questions - about these prisoners, about what brought them there - before they turn to good, liberal-minded people for support.

When they march, are they marching for the young cousins Amjad and Hakim Awad?

These boys are mere teenagers. And in the world in which most Europeans and Americans live, we know that boys in their teenage years are prone to getting into mischief. As an enlightened society, we treat them a little more gently so that we can encourage them to grow to mature manhood and become constructive members of our societies.

But this is not Europe or America. Yes, the Awad cousins are young. Amjad Mahmad Awad is 19, and was a student at Al-Quds Open University. Hakim Mazen Awad is 18. The Awad clan makes up about half of the population of Awarta, the village to which they fled after they carried out the crime for which they were convicted in an Israeli court. Last year, when they were arrested, Hakim Mazen Awad was a high school student whose father, Mazen, is active in the PFLP terrorist organization and had served a five-year prison sentence, imposed by the Palestinian National Authority, for murdering his female cousin and cremating her body.

It’s a family with some history. The boys had an uncle Jibril, also a PFLP terrorist. This Awad uncle participated in an earlier attack on the neighbouring community of Itamar back in 2002. A mother called Rachel Shabo and three of her children, Neria (16), Zvi (13), and Avishai (5) were shot to death inside their home, and the head of the neighborhood preparedness team, Yosef Twito (31), was also shot to death. Uncle Jibril’s career in terrorism came to a premature and fatal end in a 2003 clash with Israeli forces.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Awad clan had elaborate and quite complete arguments why their beautiful young sons had nothing to do with the horrible crime of which they were convicted last year. (Note also that several early media reports said the perpetrator might have been a Thai agricultural worker, though their services are generally not used in that part of Israel.) The crime was cold-blooded and horrifying even to observers who are hardened by the difficult acts of terror that happen in Israel with sickening frequency. Wikipedia’s report [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_attack] says:

After crossing the fence, Amjad and Hakim walked 400 meters into the settlement. The perpetrators first broke into a house of the Chai family who were on vacation, searching all the rooms. They stole an M-16 assault rifle, ammunition, a helmet, and a kevlar vest. They waited an hour and entered the Fogels' house at around 10:30 pm. According to the indictment, the two entered the children's room, told eleven year old Yoav, who had been awakened by their entry, not to be afraid, then took him to a nearby room, slashed his throat, and stabbed him in the chest. Hakim Awad then strangled four-year-old Elad with Amjad Awad stabbing him twice in the chest. The two next entered the parents' room, and turned on the light, waking them up. The parents then struggled with the attackers. Ehud Fogel was repeatedly stabbed in the neck, and Ruth Fogel was stabbed in the neck and back and then shot when the suspects saw that she was not dead. The suspects then left the house… The two then argued over whether to withdraw or carry out attacks in other homes, with Hakim insisting that they return immediately to Awarta, and Amjad arguing that they should return to the home and steal another weapon. Amjad then re-entered the Fogel home. When 3-month old Hadas began crying, Amjad stabbed her… According to several accounts, the infant was decapitated, though one source says that although her throat was deeply slit, she was only "nearly decapitated". The attackers did not notice two other children asleep in the house at the time. In their confessions they said that they would not have hesitated to kill them if they had noticed them.

Hakim Awad's mother, Nawef, claimed that her son was at home the night of the murder and never left the house, claiming that "five months ago Hakim underwent a surgery in his stomach and I'm sure he was tortured and forced into confessing."  Amjad's family also claimed that he was in the village at the time of the event. One relative said that Hakim and Amjad did not know each other, as "one went to university, the other is in high school". He also claimed that if they had been guilty, they would have been captured within days, as "the whole world knows about Israel's advanced investigation abilities and its use of sophisticated means". 

What the whole world knows is actually something else. The Awads, who confessed and recreated the killings for the police, are now being claimed as heroes in the perverted world of the Palestinian Arab media and its friends and supporters. They are praised on government-owned television which played a song containing this revealing line: “That is what the homeland asked of me”.

Click to view the English-sub-titled PMW video clip

Here is where the story becomes decidedly un-American and non-European. We Israelis are confronted with an enemy that believes its very highest values are served by encouraging its young men to become heroes in the very specific sense of slicing the throats of sleeping Jewish children because “that is what the homeland asked” of them.

One of the most notorious of the killers created by the terrorism-adoring Islamist Arab society is Ahlam Tamimi. She planned the 2001 massacre in which fifteen Israelis, most of them children, were blown apart in a pizza restaurant. She planted the bomb – who happens to have been a human being – and then fled for her own safety. Later that day, she personally, herself, read the evening news report on PA Television about the successful killings in central Jerusalem without so much as a cynical smile to acknowledge that this horrifying crime was in fact hers. (Is there a historical precedent for this? Could Hollywood invent a credible scenario that includes such a scene?)

Tamimi, explicitly unrepentant, was released in October 2011 as part of the Shalit Transaction and has become a genuine media star with her own weekly program on the Al-Quds satellite television channel that is broadcast throughout the Arabic speaking world. Her presence as a fiery religious speaker, finger pointing  heavenwards, encouraging copycat acts of terror against Jews, has become ubiquitous in Islamist rallies in Jordan, Tunisia and parts in between.

Tamimi, speaking to an Islamist rally in Amman a month ago [Arabic source here], revealed that hunger strikes by Palestinian Arabs in Israeli prisons are what she called a “tactical move” that will continue for at least the next two months. And on April 17th, which is termed "Palestinian Prisoners' Day," something is going to happen. As the most well-known spokesperson for the claims of the imprisoned Islamists, she – perhaps more than anyone else on earth – exemplifies the cynical manipulation by the Islamists of liberal sympathy for the victims of alleged human rights offences. And more than anyone else’s actions, hers exemplify where that manipulation leads.

To those planning to take to the streets tomorrow in Paris and elsewhere, we ask: Are you for Tamimi or against the lethal hatred and the pathological racism which she embodies. Are you for the teenage perpetrators of last year’s Itamar massacre, or do you insist that something even worse is done when we hold them behind bars.

It may seem to you that getting this right or wrong does not matter so much because the killers are far away and not threatening your children. But what if you are wrong about that?

It might be interesting to ask the people of Toulouse for their opinion.

19-Apr-11: What happened that awful Sabbath night in Itamar?

Itamar, population 1,000

On Monday, two Palestinian Arabs from the Samarian village of Awarta, Hakim Maazan Niad Awad and Amjad Mahmud Fauzi Awad, were arrested by the Israeli police and charged with the massacre of five members of the Fogel family in the small Jewish community of Itamar.

The Jerusalem Post's account says the Awads confessed and reconstructed the steps before and after the killings. Their fellow villagers and clansmen, in the time-honored way, say the confessions are false, the murders were done by disgruntled foreign laborers, the Awads are "children", as pure as the driven snow and innocent of any wrong-doing. And what proof is there that a murder happened anyway?

Here is what is now known:

• The 11th March 2011 stabbing murders took days of advance planning.
• The Awads tried to obtain firearms from their local resident representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They did not succeed, so equipped themselves instead with wire-cutters and knives.
• They left Awarta on foot. Seeing that Itamar's periphery fence had an electric sensor, they abandoned the wire-cutter and climbed the fence instead. The alarm was not triggered.
• They walked across a forested hilltop, and arrived at a row of quiet Itamar homes. It was late Friday night - the Jewish Sabbath.
• No one was at home in the first house they entered. They found, and stole, an M-16 rifle, ammunition and body armor. Then they moved on to the house next door: the Fogel residence.
• Peering in through the window, they saw two children sleeping. These were four-year-old Elad, and 11-year-old Yoav.
• They entered and stabbed them both to death.
• They entered the parents’ bedroom, attacking with their knives. The parents fought back. Using the stolen rifle, they shot the young mother, Ruth Fogel, dead, and stabbed her husband Ehud dead.
• The murderers left the house. Then they heard a baby crying. This was three-month-old Hadas, in her crib in the parents’ bedroom.
• They did the logical, nationalistic, jihadist, religiously-inspired thing: returned to the bedroom and slashed the three-month-old baby to death.
• They now know they had overlooked two additional Fogel children. Amjad Awad says, lest there be any doubt about the matter, that they would have killed the remaining children had they realized they were in the house.
• The two murderers hiked back to their village in clothing soaked in the blood of their victims. 
• Their clansman, Salah Awad, affiliated with the PFLP, helped them dispose of the incriminating evidence. The stolen weapons were spirited away to a co-conspirator in Ramallah for hiding. He is now under arrest too.

After the fact, we know these additional things about the barbarism of that night.

• Amjad Mahmud Fauzi Awad is 19 and worked in Israel as a laborer. Hakim Maazan Niad Awad is 18 and a high school student.
• The Awads received considerable after-the-fact support from clan members in the village and other friends in the area. Six accomplices are under arrest.
• Ynet quotes sources close to the investigation saying the Awad clansmen provided the investigators with a dispassionate account of the attack, "a chilling reenactment", a "shocking, cold, remorseless and detailed description". 
• Amjad is quoted saying he went to Itamar to "die a martyr's death".
• There is massive support among Palestinian Arabs not only for the general idea of killing Israelis but specifically for the massacre of the Fogel family members. This arises from an authoritative survey conducted by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, and the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and by Prof. Khalil Shikaki, Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR).
• American Educational Trust, self-described as "a non-profit, non-partisan organization incorporated in 1982 in Washington, DC, by retired U.S. Foreign Service Officers", publishes a website called Remember these Children. This purports to objectively report on the terrible price paid in terms of children's lives in the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. Our impression it takes a highly partisan Palestine-centric view of the conflict and of the victims. It is striking that the cold-blooded, deliberate murders of the three Fogel children are not recorded at all on the site, though the deaths of Palestinian Arab children in the same month, allegedly at the hands of the IDF, are.

One final point. 

In an blog entry last month ("21-Mar-11: Why Palestinian Arab condemnations of babies being murdered in their beds are a fraud"), we referred to the mealy-mouthed condemnations by Palestinian Arab political figures of the Itamar massacre, and in particular Mahmoud Abbas who is quoted saying it was

"a despicable, immoral, and inhuman act. A human being is not capable of something like that. Scenes like these - the murder of infants and children and a woman slaughtered - cause any person endowed with humanity to hurt and to cry." 

Did he mean it? Let's see.

The day before the Fogel family were slaughtered, the official Palestinian Authority television - the mouthpiece of the Mahmoud Abbas regime - broadcast a program in honour of one of its former employees, a woman called Ahlam Tamimi. She is serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison for one of the most heinous crimes known in these troubled parts. Yet the program praises her, praises the actions that put her in prison, and unequivocally identifies with the longing of Tamimi’s family members for her and for her release. The camera focuses on a certificate awarded by Fatah, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, calling Tamimi "the heroic prisoner." Watching this, which countless Palestinian Arab families did, no one would be left in doubt as to what official Palestinian Arab society thinks of Tamimi and of the chain of events that brought this evidently heroic figure to an Israeli cell. This Tamimi is the murderer of our daughter and of fifteen other innocent Israelis. She is articulate, capable and very proud of what she did, and everyone watching the program is encouraged to share that pride. The head of the Palestinian Arab political pyramid, Abbas, is closely identified with that pride. Killing Israeli children is something to be proud of, the program teaches and Abbas confirms. Palestinian Arab society holds this Tamimi up as an example to be emulated.

Understanding how Palestinian Arab society says one thing to the outside world and an entirely other, hateful thing to its own members is key to understanding why this ongoing war is so resistant to resolution. Discerning the things that we can learn from horrifying events like the Fogel family murders is critical to getting this right, a challenge that most people - under the influence of double-talking politicians and a compliant media - fail.