19-Jul-16: With ISIS involved, the refugee and the knifer/axer get some media attention; the victims, not so much

The 17 year-old slasher: German security officials chased him
and shot him dead, bringing last night's attack to an end [Image Source]

We now know more about the minor who carried out the knifing/axing attack on innocent travelers aboard a German train last night that we reported here earlier today.

Bavaria's interior minister Joachim Herrmann said the teen — who came to Germany over a year ago as an unaccompanied minor and had lived with a foster family for about two weeks — appeared to have acted alone. He told a press conference that the handpainted ISIS flag was found in the teen's room along with texts discussing the life of Muslims and how they "have to stand up and fight." A note found also suggested the teen may have written a farewell letter, Herrmann added. The ISIS-affiliated Amaq Agency issued a statement saying a "soldier" responding to the militant group's call to target the West was responsible for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. The statement did not indicate that ISIS had any role in directing or organizing the attack. Herrmann, however, said the motive for the attack still needed to be investigated and that authorities were trying to find out more about about the suspect's background and route to Germany. "I cannot say if this is the result of a network," he told the press conference.

Over at the website of i24news.tv, they are reporting that the attacker was in the service of ISIS when he carried out the slashing rampage - and they seem to be relying on the very same source as the report above:

The Islamic State group on Tuesday claimed responsibility for an axe and knife attack carried out on a German train by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee the night before, according to the IS affiliated Amaq agency. The "individual who carried out the axe attack in Germany was a soldier of the Islamic State who executed the operation in response to calls to target nations in the coalition fighting the Islamic State," said the statement.

Israel National News has this:

In the footage released by ISIS's al-Amaq propaganda outlet, 17-year-old Afghan national Mohammed Riyad can be seen delivering a speech in the Pashto language, while brandishing a knife. He is described in the video as "a soldier of the Islamic State who carried out the Wurzburg attack."

For the record, here is how the German national broadcaster Deutsche Welle is currently (in the past hour) reporting this latest development:

Afghan migrants fear backlash after Würzburg attack | Afghan asylum seekers in Germany say the recent terror attack in Würzburg could further delay their asylum applications and trigger a backlash against them. They urge not to be painted with the same brush... Germany saw an influx of over 1.1 million asylum seekers in 2015, more than any other European country. The highest number of asylum seekers came from Syria, followed by Afghanistan. Many of them were underage, unaccompanied boys and girls fleeing their countries in search of a better life in Europe.

We checked to see what Deutsche Welle had reported in the past 18 hours on the victims of the slashing attack. So far all we could find was this:

Four passengers were injured. Two of them are still in mortal danger. [Source: Axe attack on German train]

and

"Hong Kong's government condemns Würzburg train attack"

Being a victim was never much good, but it's especially true about being a victim of a terrorist attack. Basically, no one in the media is that interested. It's the perpetrators that tend to get the lion's share of the attention.

UPDATE Wednesday July 20, 2016: It's now evident that the murder-minded axe/knife attacker in Monday night's slashing of passengers on a German train (a) has a name different from the one the German authorities reported; (b) is not from Afghanistan but a different country; (c) while yesterday he was neither a radical nor a fanatic today he appears to have been both; (d) there was no evidence tying him to the global jihadists on Tuesday but on Wednesday it's fairly overwhelming; and (e) the authorities in Germany, which will have taken in about a million more refugees and asylum seekers by the time 2016 is over, are completely on top of things and the situation could hardly be better, more or less. This is from today via AFP:

"Sources close to the German security services now think he might have pretended to be Afghan on arrival in Germany in 2015 in order to have a better chance at securing asylum, television station ZDF reported. In the IS video the youth uses phrases of a dialect of Pashto spoken in Pakistan and not Afghanistan and experts have indicated that his accent is also clearly Pakistani, ZDF said. A Pakistani document was also found in his room. The name he used in the video, “Mohammed Riyadh,” does not match the name under which he registered in Germany, Riaz Kahn, the station added... Locals described the assailant, identified in media reports as Riaz A., as “calm and even-keeled” and a “devout Muslim who did not appear to be radical or a fanatic,” according to Joachim Herrmann, interior minister of Bavaria state.
“According to the investigation thus far, there was no evidence on site to point to him belonging to the Islamist network,” Herrmann said. Police however later found a farewell letter he apparently left for his father in which he said the world’s Muslims “must defend themselves.”
“Now pray for me that I can take revenge on non-believers, pray for me that I can get to heaven,” the note said. Prosecutors said he shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) three times as he made his way through the carriage. An eyewitness told DPA news agency that the train, which had been carrying around 25 people, looked “like a slaughterhouse.”

19-Jul-16: Tentacles in Germany: Again, a train, an axe, a religious war-cry, innocent victims and a search for motives

Sadly familiar: Disingenuous reporting from
Aljazeera where the "real" victim gets
mentioned in the headline and motive is always
a deep mystery [Source]

From Associated Press this morning:

A man armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany | Police kill attacker who slashed passengers on German train
Monday, July 18, 2016 | BERLIN (AP) — A man armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled. Wuerzburg police said on their Facebook page that three of the victims suffered serious injuries and one was slightly injured. Another 14 people were being treated for shock. Police said there was not yet any information on the motive behind the attack, nor details on the identity of the attacker. The train was on its way from the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen to Wuerzburg, which is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Nuremberg.

Certainly not the first such recent attack on a European train [background]. And reminiscent of an attack in May 2016 when a man shouting "Allahu Akbar" stabbed one innocent victim to death and slashed three others at a railway station near Munich. That act of evident jihad "raised fears that Germany... was now being targeted by Islamist extremists". That's a dramatic revelation.

And did we mention the role of "Allahu Akbar" in last night's attempted murder-by-slashing? Though it does not get mentioned at all in AP's report or in the vast majority of newspapers this morning, one British source says

Police have confirmed that 18 people have been injured in the horrifying attack - which began in a train this evening. Four are understood to be seriously injured. A 17-year-old Afghan refugee believed to be behind the attack was shot dead by police as he reportedly charged at them following the incident at Würzburg-Heidingsfeld station. The boy is reported to have shouted "Allahu Akbar" before the attack... The Bavarian Interior Ministry has now confirmed the attacker shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great) before hacking at passengers... An official has said the incident was ‘probably’ linked to Islamic extremism.

Aljazeera manages to avoid touching on any issues of religion or the theological war cries in telling what happened. It's sadly typical of a certain kind of disingenuous reporting in which they specialize there. See "Afghan refugee shot dead after train attack in Germany" and note whose victimhood is mentioned in the carefully-phrased headline.

Here's how German's state broadcaster recounts what happened:

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann confirmed in a television interview that the teenager boarded the train in Ochsenfurt, where he had been staying with a foster family after traveling unaccompanied to Germany to seek asylum. "The attacker appears to have been a 17-year-old Afghan who has been living in Ochsenfurt for some time," Herrmann said. "He suddenly attacked passengers with a knife and an axe, critically injuring several. Some of them may now be fighting for their lives." The Afghan national reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" before launching the attack, wielding a knife and axe. "The perpetrator was able to leave the train, police left in pursuit and as part of this pursuit, they shot the attacker and killed him," a police spokesman said. The motive of the attack was not immediately clear.

The BBC says

Although the motive has not been established, the BBC's Damien McGuinness in Berlin says there is nervousness in Germany about attacks by Islamist extremists following the attacks across the border in France.

Yes, we can fully understand the nervousness.

But among the questions we're left to ponder: don't they do careful checks of passengers on public transport in Germany to see if they happen to be carrying axes? Or knives? Perhaps they should.

And at what point, under what circumstances, does the motive of a young man with a knife and an axe and an urge to kill people by slashing them to death while invoking an only-too-familiar religious war cry become "immediately clear"? If ever?

14-Apr-16: Apart from jihad-minded children with knives and an axe-wielding attacker, peace and calm prevail

The aftermath of today's axe attack on Israelis [Image Source]

There has been an outbreak of local news stories reporting on a decline in the number of attempted terror attacks [for instance "Surge in Palestinian attacks waning" from Deutsche Welle; "All Indications Are That the Intifada Is Waning" from Haaretz; "How The ‘Stabbing Intifada’ Wound Down" from an Australian journal.

So not surprisingly...

An IDF serviceman came under axe attack this afternoon (Thursday) afternoon near the Al-Aroub refugee camp, south of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Thanks to quick defensive thinking, the attacker was shot dead and no injuries are reported on the Israeli side; the helmet of the Israeli soldier fortunately protected his head from the kind of thing that is ordinarily done by a swinging axe.

Times of Israel identifies the axe-man as Ibrahim Brad’aih, a resident of Al-Aroub in his mid-fifties, The Palestinian Arab media report the attack in customary fashion. The European-funded Ma'an News Agency, in its Arabic-language edition [here], though not in the English version, refers to the death of the attacker as an act of martyrdom, ensuring (which is the whole point) someone somewhere will seek to avenge him and keep the blood-letting cycle going.

Reuters' account helpfully explains why this happened:

"Palestinian leaders say attackers have acted out of desperation in the absence of movement toward creation of an independent Palestinian state in territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war..."

An informed news consumer might wonder why they said so little about that "absence of movement" but explaining it might have required some analysis of the Arab position and their vociferous rejection of General Assembly Resolution 181, the 1947 UN proposal to create a Palestinian state alongside the newly-reborn Israel, and what followed over the next seventy years. The Arab states went to war with tiny and impoverished Israel back then to demonstrate how much they meant it, but they lost the battle comprehensively.

The rest is too long, complicated and frankly unsympathetic to the Arabs for us to expect Reuters' editors to say more than they did... unless, of course, they wanted their readers to actually understand what rubbish it is to blame an axe attack against Israeli security personnel on frustrated dreams of yet another Arab country.

Two Arab pre-teen boys, three concealed slashing
weapons: From the Twitter account of
the Israel Police spokesperson [here]

Haaretz reports that Israel Police personnel thwarted an additional terror attack on Israelis today when they found a pair of knives and a meat cleaver concealed inside the clothing of two young Palestinian Arabs they stopped for questioning in Jerusalem's Old City.

Superintendent Micky Rosenfeld, Israel Police Foreign Press Spokesman, uploaded a photo of the weapons to his Twitter account. That's them in the photo on the right.

Tragically, and not for the first time, today's would-be jihadists are about 12 years old. In the atmosphere created by the Palestinian Authority's ongoing descent into barbarism, even pre-teen children are stopped and questioned when suspicions are aroused, and for awfully good reasons.

The Haaretz account says one of the boys was found to be carrying a farewell letter to his parents, according to the police spokesperson. We're guessing it did not include juvenile thoughts about "the absence of movement toward creation of an independent Palestinian state".

With much greater confidence, we can say this pair of boys will now become poster children for the hopes and passions of a Palestinian Arab culture that cherishes the shedding of infidel blood, and glorifies violence directed at foes whom they demonize in their school books, places of worship and public spaces.

15-Dec-15: Speeding car, Israeli victims: a terrorist's fast path to martyrdom

Looking down at the scene of Monday's terror attack in Jerusalem

A video clip posted to YouTube overnight by an Arabic news agency [here] calls yesterday's deliberate running down of ordinary Israelis waiting for a bus by a young man sitting inside his speeding car a "heroic operation".

It's not an aberration: the passion for terror has erased all the remaining red lines in Palestinian Arab society.

Monday's attacker, a young man with a life of promise and (we assume with confidence) a Jerusalem-resident Israeli ID card, was shot by several armed by-standers, including security personnel, before he could get out of the smashed vehicle and do more harm with the axe and knife he brought along evidently for that purpose. The car's license plates were standard black-on-yellow Israeli [as this photo shows].

His funeral and the family's mourning tent in the coming few days (in Hebron, not Jerusalem) will probably provide further opportunities for elevating his wasted life to the kind of transcendental status that Palestinian Arab society so loves to honor.

As happens so often, the terrorist/ attacker, a 21 year old [عبد المحسن حسونة] from the Hassouna clan and a resident of a Jerusalem neighborhood, already features in a terror-promoting "martyr" poster, this one issued by a Hamas-aligned group in Hebron. (We don't know whether he was connected to Hamas, but in their society, failure is often an orphan while success, measured in injuries and deaths, has many fathers.)

"Martyr" poster celebrating the violent death of the young Arab
who drove his car into a cluster of Israelis on Monday [Image Source]

His victims, given that we are as much in a cognitive war as in a physical one, are termed "settlers" in parts of the Arabic media [see Alquds for instance, which is the most widely read of the Palestinian Arab daily newspapers]. Demonstrably, the notion that mothers and children standing in the cold, waiting for a bus, can be legitimate targets for a man equipped with a car, an axe, a knife and a brain-full of fervid, bigoted race-based hatred, is more effective when you demonize the victims. That's why they call Israelis "settlers" whether or not they know, whether or not it's true. The evidence for this is all over the Arabic, terror-glorifying parts of the on-line social media.

Not really comprehending the ethics and values of Palestinian Arab society, we can only say one thing with real confidence about the life and death of yesterday's bogus "martyr": the promoters of the hatred he embodied will make sure - via posters, news articles, YouTube and Twitter - that he will be emulated by others.

14-Dec-15: Jerusalem transit hub again the target of vehicle-armed terrorist

Jerusalem's Herzl Boulevard via Google Maps/Street View: The attack was launched at people standing on the right, behind the buses. The Central Bus Station is 200 meters straight ahead

A Palestinian Arab identified as being from Jerusalem this afternoon plowed the car he was driving, a white Mazda sedan, into a crowd of commuters at a cluster of bus stops near the city's Central Bus Station and a hundred meters from the landmark Bridge of Chords at Jerusalem's main entrance.

It's reported that fourteen people are injured in this latest in a lengthy string of Arab-on-Israeli vehicle-ramming terror attacks, almost all them (like today's) directed specifically at civilians. This afternoon's Jerusalem victims include a toddler of 15 months, and a female in her seventies. Three victims are described as suffering moderate injuries; the injuries of the remainder are said to be light.

Though the toddler is reported as having injuries defined as moderate, they're not so moderate:

A one and a half-year-old baby [sic - we now know he is only 15 months old], who was moderately wounded and suffering an injury to his leg, was initially taken to Sha'are Zedek and later transferred to Hadassah in an effort to save his leg, where his condition deteriorated. [Ynet, December 14, 2015]

Times of Israel, in an evening update ["Doctors fight to save foot of baby hurt in terror attack"], says

Doctors at two main Jerusalem hospitals fought Monday afternoon to save the foot of a baby boy wounded a short time earlier... Speaking to Channel 2 television from Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where the boy was initially treated, one of the doctors there said there was a small chance of saving the 18-month-old baby’s foot. [Times of Israel, December 14, 2015]

The attacker, Abed el-Muhsen Hassuna [عبد المحسن حسونة], was 21 years old, and lived in the Beit Hanina neighbourhood of north Jerusalem. (Haaretz transliterates his name as Abed Almohsin Hassoneh.) Acting quickly in the spirit of these difficult, terror-infected times, and in accordance with orders that have wide support in this beleagured country, security personnel stationed nearby, as well as at least one armed civilian, shot him dead as he tried to exit the car.

Not so incidentally: a young woman with the same surname was killed by fast-reacting IDF shooters two weeks ago ["01-Dec-15: Tuesday's Arab-on-Israeli violence continued"] at a checkpoint next to the Einav community in the Samaria district. She was stopped in the act of carrying out a terror attack against Israelis. Times of Israel named her at the time as Maram Ramiz Hassouna, aged just 19, from Nablus.

Moments after the bus-stop vehicle-ramming terror attack [Image Source]

Inside today's attack vehicle, security people found an unused axe and a new screwdriver. Observers are in little doubt as to the would-be killer's lethal intentions:

Jerusalem District Police Chief Moshe Edri hailed the three shooters who brought the incident to an end. “Their quick and accurate action, which neutralized the terrorist, prevented a more serious attack,” he said. [Times of Israel, December 14, 2015] 

It's possible security cameras will have captured the attack which happened at the start of the afternoon rush hour, around 3:00 pm. For now, we know this, that Hassuna drove his car at high speed and very deliberately onto the sidewalk, smashing into pedestrians at one of several side-by-side bus stops on busy Herzl Boulevard just before the point where it meets the Central Bus Station and beside the city's International Conference Center (known locally as Binyanei Ha'uma). The attack car smashed a fire hydrant, sending a plume of water shooting into the air.

The Transport Ministry announced just yesterday that because of

the ongoing threat of terrorism in the nation’s capital, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz on Sunday approved the deployment of 300 additional security guards for Jerusalem’s public transport... The guards and a number of security vehicles will be sent out to bus stops and Jerusalem Light Rail stops throughout the city. “The very deployment and correct use of the guards can bring the threat to a minimum and even prevent it,” Katz said. In the first few weeks of the ongoing violence, a similar group of guards and IDF soldiers were sent to protect Jerusalem’s public transportation system, but they were eventually taken off that duty. Now, however, they will return. The guards, all former combat soldiers, will be given uniforms, pistols and radios in order to protect passengers. They will also be given legal permission to conduct searches of those they determine to be potential security risks... [Times of Israel, December 13, 2015]

The European-funded Ma'an News Agency reporting from Bethlehem neatly prioritizes the victimhood of the cowardly vehicle-on-people attack via a headline that continues Ma'an's practice of self-parody:

"Palestinian shot dead, 11 injured in Jerusalem car ramming attack" [Ma'an, December 14, 2015].

The Arabic version of the same Ma'an story uses the word "martyr" to describe the man who drive his car into a defenseless crowd. But note that the English version cleverly adds this:

PLO Central Council member Muhammad Eshteyyah in a press conference last week said that 85 percent of Palestinian deaths to take place since Oct. 1 could have been prevented if the [Israeli] “shoot-to-kill” policy was not implemented.

Ma'an's highly ideological editors however are characteristically silent about how many lives might have been saved on both the attacker side and the victim side if the murder-lusting Palestinian Authority leadership discontinued its practice of praising the rammers, shooters and stabbers and stopped elevating them to "martyr" status.

The family and connections of Abed el-Muhsen Hassuna can be confident tonight that, as we write these lines, his promotion to the Palestinian Arab Hall of Fame is assured. If we see some of the expected wall posters praising his "bravery" and "national achievement", we will add them here.

UPDATE Tuesday December 15, 2015: The Jerusalem Post, quoting an un-named official source this morning, says the efforts to save the leg of the hospitalized fifteen month old victim we mentioned above have failed. And Hamas has claimed the attacker as one of theirs. The martyr posters are already up.

25-Oct-14: The hatchet attack on New York cops and its previously unstated Islamic terror background

Seconds after the axe-attack in Jamaica, Queens [Image
Source: NY Daily News]

We wrote yesterday ["24-Oct-14: Attacks on security personnel and what we do and don't know"] about several almost simultaneous attacks on law enforcement officials in the US and Canada that happened this past Wednesday and Thursday. One of them involved a non-verbal axe-wielding man who tried to kill several policemen, a man whom a friend (interviewed on television here) called "a great guy".

Here's an update:

A hatchet attack on New York police officers was a "terrorist act" carried out by a self-radicalized Muslim convert who had been in the military and browsed Al-Qaeda websites, police said Friday.
"This was a terrorist act," police commissioner Bill Bratton told a news conference on Friday, one day after the attack, saying he was "very comfortable" describing it as a "terrorist attack." Police said Zale Thompson, who was 32, unmarried and unemployed, appeared to have acted alone and was not affiliated to a particular group, but that the investigation was ongoing. A loner who spent hours locked away in his bedroom, he had looked at websites about groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, and watched beheadings and Wednesday's deadly attack in Canada..
In an attack that lasted just seven seconds, Bratton said Thompson charged with a hatchet in his hand, striking two officers before he was shot dead by the two other officers, who were uninjured... A 29-year-old female bystander was accidentally shot and is also in hospital in a critical but stable condition, Bratton said.
Police said Thompson converted to Islam two years ago and that relatives described him as a "recluse" and "lately depressed." An axe and a large hunting knife were recovered from his home and Thompson made anti-Western, anti-government and in some cases anti-white statements on social media, police said. He visited websites that focused on terror groups such as Al-Qaeda, the IS organization and the Shebab Islamists in Somalia. [AFP, October 24, 2014]

The attacker via security camera [Image Source]

And from a different source ["NYPD chief: Hatchet attack was Islamic terror"]:

In recent postings on social media, he ranted about injustices in American society and oppression abroad, but the postings didn’t point to any affiliation with a terror group or direct influence of radical Islam, they said. In one comment posted in response to a YouTube video, however, Thompson wrote that “If the Zionists and the Crusaders had never invaded and colonized the Islamic lands after WW1, then there would be no need for Jihad!”

But evidently there is a need for jihad. And a clear and unsatisfied need for effective measures against the jihadists.

3-Dec-12 [UPDATED]: Ax-wielding Palestinian Arab is stopped by Israeli soldiers this morning

The scene [Photo credit: Gur Dotan]

There are first reports of an ax-wielding Palestinian Arab shot dead today by IDF soldiers.

Times of Israel and Ynet are both reporting that the man was driving a car on the road between the communities of Shavei Shomron and Einav in the northern Samaria region. Something about him (it's early) aroused the suspicion of the soldiers who gave chase and rammed his vehicle after he failed to stop.

According to the updated Ynet version: "The man's car crashed head on into an army vehicle transporting a Shin Bet officer and other security personnel near the Palestinian village of Deir Sharaf in the West Bank." He emerged from his vehicle and charged at the soldiers with an ax. They shot and killed him. Two soldiers were injured in the clash which caused their vehicle to flip over. It's worth noting that stoning and firebomb attacks on Israeli vehicles have significantly increased in the past month.

UPDATE Monday December 3, 2012 at 1:40 pm: The IDF issued a note around one o'clock this afternoon saying no soldiers were involved in this incident. We're awaiting further details.

UPDATE Tuesday December 4, 2012 at 8:00 am: Ma'an, a Palestinian Arab newspaper, reports the incident under the heading "Palestinian shot dead by Israeli agents near Nablus". It adds these details:

Witnesses identified the dead man as Hatem Shadid of the nearby village of Alar. His vehicle collided with an Israeli jeep near the northern West Bank village of Beit Lid, they told Ma'an... Shadid then approached the Israelis, who were already injured from the crash, hitting one in the head and the other in the shoulder with an object that he was carrying. Israeli officials said it was an axe... Shadid's brother Khaled, reached by Reuters, said he had not received any official notification of the death. He said Shadid was a 35-year-old construction worker with five children.

Consistent with the way reality is depicted in sharply different versions in this ongoing war, a pro-Palestinian Arab version is bouncing around Twitter this morning in this form: "Martyr Hatem Shadid from Illar, Tulkarm - shot dead in cold blood today by Zionist Shin Beth agents".