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?

30-May-18: In Belgium, another murderous "lone-wolf" attack by a criminal already on the police watch list

Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucille Garcia, right,
the two police officers murdered in the attack [Image Source]

In Belgium, a pointless act of terror inspired by one man's religious fervor resulted in the deaths on Tuesday of several innocents and some questions that don't seem likely to be properly answered quickly.

The basic facts as gleaned from Irish Times and Standard UK:

• Benjamin Herman, a Belgian man of 36 described in reports as a petty criminal and drug dealer who was serving time in prison, was let out Monday on what some reports have called a day-release for "family leave". (Reuters calls it a two-day pass.) One source says he "was due to travel back to his home town of Rochfort, just 40 miles from Liege". But didn't.
• Instead he attacked two police officers, women of 45 and 53, from behind about at about 10.30am on a lovely late spring morning on a pleasant boulevard in the centre of Liege, Belgium’s third city. Those two victims are Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and Lucille Garcia, 45. Their work involved checking parking meters. Soraya Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters who earlier lost their father, also a police officer, and are now tragically orphaned of both parents.
• First slashing their throats from behind, he then stabbed them both and succeeded in seizing their handguns. (Evidently parking meter officers carry guns in Belgium.)
• A young man sitting in a car nearby was his next victim: he shot him dead too. He is Cyril Vangriecken, 22.
• The armed attacker then rushed into a high school building about 100 meters away and took two female employees hostage; one of them was a cleaner. He used her as a human shield in the subsequent confrontation with armed authorities. (He also, it is reported, "spared the life of the high school janitor he took hostage because she is Muslim, according to the woman, who was hailed Wednesday for her courage as she faced off with the madman.")
• Police were called. The school's children were evacuated as a gun battle erupted in which the prisoner managed to wound four of the police officers before they shot him dead.
• La Libre Belgique newspaper quoting police source says the Moslem attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” – “God is greatest” in Arabic. Irish Times says Beaupère declined to comment when asked about that.
• According to De Standaard, a Flemish-language newspaper in Belgium, police suspect he also carried out the murder a day earlier of "a criminal associate whose body was found south of Liege".
• So is he a terrorist? The authorities are being cagey. "Prime Minister Charles Michel says Herman was indirectly mentioned in state security reports on radicalization, but did not have his name on a list maintained by an anti-terror assessment group" according to USNews.

Cyril Vangriecken, 22, shot dead while sitting in a parked car
[Image Source]

Some questions that come to mind:

• According to state broadcaster RTBF Herman, who was born in 1982, had a criminal record that included a number of convictions for theft, assault and drugs offences.
• A Belgian politician, Georges Dallemagne, quoted by Irish Times, said Herman was already on a police watch-list arising from his radicalization in jail and his conversion there to Islam. So why was he freed unsupervised? How realistic was it that he would peacefully come back to his prison cell?
• There's more disturbing background according to one newspaper source. He "had been jailed numerous times"; he "appeared in national security documents"; he was "extremely violent" according to prison officers. Does this amount to a profile? Does it trigger any defensive measures on behalf of society?
• Liege police chief Christian Beaupère told a news conference “The goal of the assassin was to target the police”. Is this based on something they knew ahead of time? Were precautions taken? Did the two murdered officers know he was nearby? And is that a full and complete statement of the motivation for this cowardly, worthless explosion of lethal violence?
• The police chief was asked to confirm that the killer shouted “Allahu Akbar” in the course of his moments in the sun. M. Beaupère declined to comment on the question.
• These are not the first murders of innocents carried out by petty criminals inspired to Islamist violence while incarcerated. 
• Reuters: "The national crisis centre, on high alert since attacks by Islamic State in Paris and Brussels in recent years, said it had not raised its alert level – an indication the man was acting alone and follow-up attacks were not expected." So does Belgium have a strategy for dealing with lone-wolf attacks? They're not entirely mysterious, after all - they have some glaring factors in common. Do the authorities know this? No one ought to subscribe to the view that all members of any specific faith community are plotting to murder people, but are there any patterns worth taking into account when safe-guarding cities and populations?
• The politician Georges Dallemagne, who evidently [Irish Times] sits on several Belgian parliamentary security committees, tweeted: “The supervision of radicalised prisoners remains tragically flawed.” How concerned are Belgians to change that dangerous state of affairs?

After the murders [Image Source]

The phenomenon of the lone wolf is not a new one [click for past "Lone Wolf" posts of ours] and no more mysterious than any other aspect of criminology. Too often, public officials seem to use the term after criminal attacks have thrust them into the news by implying that if it's a "lone wolf" attack, what do you want from us? And if radicalization - to use the polite and somewhat vague term that most of the news industry does - is a factor, why aren't there more indications in the media of what's being done to identify individuals who have undergone it? 

Which is more problematic: avoiding any public discussion of it? Or burying its victims and comforting their families?

And let's agree that Belgium, with its vast problems involving terror and lone wolves acting individually as well as in large, well-organized packs, is only slightly different from most of Europe. And not only Europe.

UPDATE Wednesday May 30, 2018 at 11:00 pm: According to this report, ISIS, the Islamic State terror group today claimed one of its “soldiers” carried out the murder of the two policewomen and a student in Liege, quoting the jihadists' Amaq propaganda agency. “The author of the attack on the city of Liege in Belgium is a soldier of the Islamic State,” IS said in a statement published on Amaq’s Telegram account a day after the attack. It said “he led the attack in response to calls to target the countries of the US-led international coalition” which is fighting the jihadist group mainly in Syria.

22-Jul-16: Who says the BBC never calls terror terror?

Currently appearing on the BBC website (if it has changed by the time
you click, here's the archived version)

Regular readers of this blog, and of the much-more focused and excellent BBC Watch, will be aware of the infuriating and ultimately dangerous practice at the BBC to (a) Never use the word terror outside of quotation marks and (b) To use it when it suits the editors.

Then there's another option: (c) To change their minds once or twice on a single day depending on... well, in truth, we don't know on what such editorial swings depend.

But they certainly happen. We watched it and then described it in "22-Mar-16: At the BBC, they're challenged by terror in quite revealing ways" when the BBC decision-makers couldn't quite determine whether their news consumers could be entrusted with knowing that terror played a role in the Brussels Airport terror massacre.

(In the end, they decided that it did not, then that it did, and eventually, later the same day, that it did not. We documented the silliness here.)

Rule of thumb: it almost never suits the editors and has not suited them for years, to use the word terror when describing any act of savagery, no matter how transparently jihadist in nature, when such acts are directed at Israelis. Check it out.

Knowing this, and understanding how much double-talk and hypocrisy lie behind it, take a look at this morning's BBC report from Brazil and the events we ourselves mentioned yesterday ["21-Jul-16: As the Olympics approach, Brazilian jihad comes into focus"]. The screen shot above show how that BBC item is currently headlined.

Click to see how very seriously the BBC
takes its own editorial guidelines - on paper

What's obviously going on is that, while BBC editorial guidelines are one thing, the decisions taken by the editors at the BBC on a given day are frequently another. 

We tried to lay out our view of those double-standards (we're being polite) in this post: "06-Jan-16: Perceptions and realities at the BBC". It includes a revealing (though discouraging) list of our earlier comments on this important issue, all of them addressing the BBC and its terror strategy from a critical perspective.

There's also the disturbing way the BBC pays what we consider to be self-evidently inadequate attention to the frequency and nature of terror attacks (whatever the BBC chooses to call them) against Israelis compared with its comprehensive and often up-close coverage of Israeli actions against the Arab side after those terror attacks happen, 

Over at BBC Watch, they address this very matter on a monthly basis via a statistical review, and in March 2016 provided this summary chart ["Reviewing the BBC News website’s coverage of terror in Israel"]:

From BBC Watch

As you mull over BBC's editorial practices, think of its standing as a publicly-funded (to the tune of an unparalleled billions of dollars each year), globe-straddling radio/TV/web/print colossus with a mission

to ensure that the BBC gives information about, and increases understanding of, the world through accurate and impartial news, other information, and analysis of current events and ideas.

Yep: Accurate and impartial, and it's clear that many people buy that. '

But closer inspection, and some informed knowledge of what goes on in Israel, and a person realizes this is how ideology-driven journalism works. All those well-rounded vowels, the pompous self-justifications and the serious-sounding guidelines don't change that. 

We can take comfort from the fact that today's BBC headline doesn't read "Violent extremism arrests in Brazil".

15-Jul-16: The terrorist vehicle-ramming murders in France: what the media see and won't see

The BBC news home page this morning: Death by attack truck

In the wake of a vicious mass-killing perpetrated by a person (or persons) who drove a large truck at high speed in zig-zag fashion through a huge crowd for about two kilometers, France's president, François Hollande, said in a televised speech last night what only the most obtuse of observers can have failed to comprehend: that all of France is living under the threat of Islamic terrorism:

“After Paris in January 2015 and then St. Denis in November last year, and now Nice, in its turn, is touched, it is all of France that is under the threat of Islamist terrorists,” Hollande said in a pre-dawn broadcast Friday which the Elysee, the presidential palace, posted on social media. He referred to deadly mass attacks in January on a satirical weekly and a kosher supermarket in Paris and in November on a concert hall in Paris, carried out by terrorists affiliated with Islamist terrorist groups.
A truck barreled into a crowd Thursday night during celebrations marking Bastille Day, the French independence day, killing 77 people. Reports said there might have been more than one attacker, and that the truck’s cab was filled with guns, explosives and grenades, according to local authorities.
The driver, who fired a gun into the crowd, was killed by return fire. An identity card in the truck cab bore name of a French Tunisian.
There was no claim of responsibility and security authorities were not yet describing the attack as terrorist, but Hollande made clear he believed that it was.
“The attack’s terrorist character cannot be denied,” he said. [JTA, July 14, 2016]

Though he made plain what we meant, Hollande's words have been distorted, ignored or turned on their heads in certain parts of the news media. Overall, as of Friday morning, there's a conspicuous avoidance of drawing the kinds of stark conclusions that the French leader has:

• "Nice attack: 80 dead as truck ploughs into crowd, France says" [Melbourne Age, where they know about the Hollande speech that we mentioned above but boil down his blunt words to this absurd and cowardly circumlocution: "Mr Hollande said the truck attack was of a "terrorist character" and extended the national state of emergency by three months."]
• "TRUCK ATTACK ON FRENCH CROWD; SCORES DIE" in the print edition; then "Scores Reported Dead in Nice, France, as Truck Plows Into Bastille Day Crowd" online [both in the New York Times]
• "THE WORST MOMENT IN NICE'S HISTORY: AT LEAST 80 DEAD AFTER TRUCK PLOUGHS INTO CROWD CELEBRATING BASTILLE DAY", [The Journal, Irish Republic, where they cannot even bring themselves to see this as an attack, let alone terror]
• "At least 80 dead in Nice truck attack" [Front page of BBC website at this hour - see screenshot above]
• "Screams, flying debris as truck ploughs into Nice crowd" [Agence France-Presse]
• "Many dead as lorry hits crowd in Nice" [BBC some hours ago]
• Euronews now: "Bastille Day attack: 84 deaths now confirmed after terrorist drove truck through crowds in southern French city of Nice" versus the same Euronews story at 7:00 this morning: "Up to '60 dead' after truck ploughs into crowds in Nice"
• At Reuters, the editors are still sitting on the fence: "Truck 'terrorist' kills 80 in attack on Nice Bastille Day crowd". But with or without quote marks, the word "terrorist" is at least in their headline. We can be thankful they are not calling it an instance of "violent extremism".
• Thankfully, there's the Wall Street Journal: "Deadly Truck Attack in Nice Tests a Terror-Scarred France"

The terror weapon [Image Source]

But in certain parts of the Arab world, there's neither avoidance nor doubt:

...[A]s in the hours immediately after the Paris, Brussels and Orlando attacks, there was a now familiar celebration on channels run by groups that support the Islamic State, as well as on at least one channel affiliated with the group, also known as ISIS and ISIL. They cheered the carnage. On a channel created Thursday, called the United Cyber Caliphate, run by a group that has previously tried to carry out cyberattacks in the Islamic State’s name, a message included a single word — France — followed by a smiley face. The channel of an Islamic State member, Aswarti Media, which has repeatedly been shut down and claims 1,987 members, was posting the phrase “Allahu akbar.” Yet another suspected pro-ISIS channel showed an image of the Eiffel Tower going up in flames. [New York Times, July 15, 2016]

In the UK, the Telegraph via its live-blogging, shares some of what ordinary people, particularly in France, already seem to know [all direct quotes from Telegraph]:

• The truck driver who rammed his vehicle into a massive crowd in Nice fired a pistol several times before being shot dead by police, a local official said Friday. 
• The truck driver was said to have shouted 'Allahu Akbar' — God is greatest — before being shot dead by police.
• [H]e drove a heavy truck at high speed into a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city of Nice late on Thursday. The driver was shot dead after barrelling the truck two kilometres (1.3 miles) through the festive crowd on the palm-lined Promenade des Anglais, sending hundreds fleeing in terror and leaving the area strewn with bodies.
• Authorities said they found identity papers belonging to a 31-year-old French-Tunisian citizen in the truck, as well as "guns" and "larger weapons".
• The truck driver was known to French police for common law crimes such as theft and violence, according to police sources, but not to the intelligence services.
• ...French President Francois Hollande has vowed to strengthen his country's role in the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria after a deadly attack on Nice, which has not been claimed by any group. "Nothing will make us yield in our will to fight terrorism. We will further strengthen our actions in Iraq and in Syria. We will continue striking those who attack us on our own soil," he said, in reference to the Islamic State group.

Some observations from the Wall Street Journal:

The carnage in Nice marks the latest in a string of attacks against France over the last 18 months, traumatizing the country just as the government was preparing to relax its antiterror posture. If confirmed as a terror attack, it would represent a breakdown of the vast security dragnet France erected after the November’s Islamic State-sponsored assault that left 130 dead in Paris. It would also point to the country’s vulnerability in the face of extremist groups such as Islamic State, which has called for sympathizers to strike soft targets such as Thursday’s Bastille Day fireworks display celebrating the French Revolution.

Not only France's vulnerability, but that of every other city and country in the world. This is a war, and it will be won only after that's comprehended.

And this:

The French public and the government had just started to breathe easier eight months after the November attacks. The country had been on high alert as it hosted the European soccer championship, which ended this month without incident. “In the life of a nation there are tests—and we have been tested in the last year, and doubtless will be again. But in the life of a nation there are also moments of exhalation and collective joy,” Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said earlier this week. “The Euro (tournament) was one of those special moments.” [Wall Street Journal]

The practitioners of terror are not acting on spur-of-the-moment impulses but see this as a process with a long path ahead and a distant horizon. Each killing, every outrage and massacre, represents for them a marker towards the victory they so clearly seek. The name we chose for this blog embodies the view we take of the period in which every country on earth now finds itself.

Here in Israel, terror by vehicle ramming is only too familiar to ordinary citizens and to the security forces. Click here for some of the dozens of vehicle ramming terror attacks we have reported in the past ten months.

The president of the Palestinian Authority, who we can be confident will be urged by his advisers to quickly denounce the carnage in France, has explicitly and repeatedly praised the vehicle-ramming attackers when the victims have been Jews and Israelis. We can be quite sure Mahmoud Abbas will refrain from calling the Nice terrorist "a martyr who quenched the land" with his "pure soul". But that's exactly what he did from Ramallah just four months ago. Does anyone think this is going to be mentioned in the mainstream media?

As of now, the French death toll has passed 80, and at least 100 others are injured. We will be updating this post during the day.

01-Jun-15: What's in a name?

Source

A friend pointed us to a slightly surprising, but smart-sounding, op ed that appeared in a major Arab news publication yesterday. He emailed it to us with the subject line "Arab journalist asks why we can't call terrorism terrorism". Great question.

It's an article by Faisal J. Abbas, the editor-in-chief of Al Arabiya English, and

a renowned blogger and an award-winning journalist... [who] blogs for The Huffington Post since 2008, and is a recipient of many media awards and a member of the British Society of Authors, National Union of Journalists, the John Adams Society as well as an associate member of the Cambridge Union Society

Call us impressed. He starts this way:

The two recent attacks on mosques in eastern Saudi Arabia can’t be labeled as anything but evil acts of terrorism. Now, such a classification seems obvious to most of us, as there isn’t a term that is more expressive to describe these ideologically-driven, murderous attacks on a group of innocent people who were simply practicing their basic right of observing Friday prayers. However, having just attended brain-storming sessions at the regional World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in the Dead Sea, I fear there might be some confusion as to what is defined as terrorism and what isn’t.

We agree. It's concerns like those that get us to blog here every day. We outlined our concerns ["18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms" and "27-Feb-15: CVE revisited"] some months back.

We felt, though, that his seriousness warranted some prior validating. We get exposed to too many voices from the Arab world complaining that too often terrorism is not being called what it really is. But then too often it turns out they actually mean something very different from what we do when they say "terror".

Jordan's parliament is a good instance. It approved an amendment to the Kingdom's anti-terror legislation in December 2013 to exclude what it termed "resistance actions" against one specific party - Israel - from the jurisdiction of its State Security Court and from its law against terror. As the Jordan Times put it. the legislators "agreed that any actions against Israel cannot be "terrorism" at all" by definition.

So we browsed over to the home page of his Saudi Arabia-based Al Arabiya English website,

In the search bar at the top of the page, we entered the name of the woman who engineered the terrorist massacre in which our fifteen year-old daughter Malki was murdered. If anyone's a terrorist, that person is. It's a matter of public record that she confessed to all the terrorism charges at her trial, and has spoken on YouTube and many other public places dozens of times, explaining that the killings she engineered were done in the name of Hamas for ideological reasons. Not only that but she says proudly, smiling as she does so, that she went looking for religious Jewish children that day, and that she has never had any regrets.

A terrorist? Believe it.

Entering her name in the search bar got us four hits. (You can check by clicking here.) We visited each link and counted up the total number of times the string "terror" appeared in the article. Here are the results.

• Israel publishes names of Palestinian prisoners to be released in Shalit deal | October 16, 2011 | 1 hit
• Palestinian female prisoners resist deportation to Gaza | October 18, 2011 | 0 hits
• Palestinian Prisoners Arrive in Turkey and Syria | October 19, 2011 | 0 hits
• Palestinians released in Shalit prisoner swap face challenges | June 13, 2012 | 0 hits

The one time 'terror' does appear in the four articles is when an Israeli terror-victim organization opposed to the Shalit deal is quoted and named. The Shalit deal is the act of extortion in which 1,027 killers and other terrorists, our daughter's murderer among them, walked free.

So now we turn to Faisal J. Abbas, editor-in-chief, and ask: Is this because

murderous attacks on a group of innocent people who were simply practicing their basic right of observing Friday prayers [Mr Abbas' words]

are terror? 

But murderous attacks on a group of innocent people, most of them children simply practicing their basic right of buying lunch in a pizzeria, are not terror?

And if they are terror (and we of course all know perfectly well they are) even though those innocent victims are Jewish, Israeli and/or Zionist, why does Al Arabiya English call the murderer a prisoner, a Jordanian, in fact almost anything but a terrorist? 

Why are the crimes of terrorism to which she proudly confessed never mentioned? But irrelevant and euphemistic descriptors are?

Is this, too, because of confusion, Mr Abbas? If so, we might be able to help. After all, you yourself put it so well:

Now, more than ever, is the time to act and rid the world of terrorism and the poisonous, deadly doctrines tearing the region apart. [Al Arabiya, yesterday]

Please be in touch [email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com] and let's start a dialogue.

27-Feb-15: CVE revisited

Who was not at the "Countering Violent Extremism" conference
is almost as interesting as who was [Image Source]

Some non-mainstream analysis here ["Islamists Featured at Countering Violent Extremism Summit", Ryan Mauro of Clarion Project, February 24, 2015] on how last week's Obama White House summit "featured Islamists known for preaching those same themes that the White House cited as the cause of terrorism".

Bearing in mind the media gave (and got) very little information about who participated (and who didn't), the article offers up some startling profiles, leading to this conclusion:

President Obama rightly stated that these threats emanate from destructive themes and worldviews, but the answer isn’t to deny that that there is an extremist interpretation of Islam that is the source of these destructive worldviews. And the answer isn’t to give a platform to gradualist Islamists whose final goal is the establishment of a global caliphate and forceful implementation of sharia law, just like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The answer is to exalt those who offer an alternative narrative altogether.

Let's hope the analyst, and others too, follows up with a look at the post-Summit messages these invited White House guests deliver to those in their spheres of influence.

In case you missed our take on the conference, written before it convened, check out "18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms" and "20-Feb-15: US fears and our nightmares". For a more robust criticism than ours, see "10 Troubling Aspects of President Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Summit".

20-Feb-15: US fears and our nightmares

Obama addresses CVE audience this week [Reuters screen shot]

Whether it's called a Violent Extremism problem ["18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms"] or a global war to defend our societies against ideologically-driven terrorists, we're in the middle of something important enough for the United States to have convened a three-day White House summit conference this week. And to have asked leaders of 60-some invited countries to attend.

According to several media reports, the first of the principles enunciated by President Barack Obama was this:

Governments can and must act to dry up radical groups’ sources of funding [in Christian Science Monitor, "No religion is responsible for terror", today]

Among several worrying messages coming out of the White House gathering, we're concerned by the way the US is said to be fearful for the well-being of the Palestinian Authority according to an AFP report issued in the past hour:

US fears for cash-strapped Palestine | Agence France Presse | February 20, 2015 8:51 AM | The United States voiced fears that the Palestinian Authority may be teetering on the brink of collapse because of a lack of funding, as Israel withholds taxes and donor aid stalls. Washington has been in urgent talks with regional leaders as well as other stakeholders in the frozen Middle East peace process in a bid to try to release more funds. "It's true we're very concerned about the continued viability of the Palestinian Authority if they do not receive funds soon," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters. Such funds would include the resumption of monthly Israeli transfers of Palestinian tax revenues, or additional donor assistance, she said... But the Palestinian economy has also been hit by a slowing of aid funds, as donors have failed to make good on $5.4-billion promised at a Cairo conference in October to help rebuild the impoverished Gaza Strip after last year's 50-day war... Psaki warned that if the Palestinian Authority ceased security cooperation with Israel "or even decides to disband, as they have said they may do as early as the first week of March," it could trigger a dire situation.,, "Hundreds of thousands of students could be without teachers, hospitals could cease to function... The cost to both Palestinians and Israelis could be immense in both financial and human terms."

Not a word about how officials of the Palestinian Arab government under Mahmoud Abbas systematically compute and arrange payment of financial rewards for terrorists captured or killed by Israel - among a long list of other forms of foreign aid mismanagement. We posted on that here: "08-Feb-15: Foreign money and the Palestinian Arab terror it buys". Not for the first time, we referred to the colossal sums of foreign aid money that have been funneled into bottomless Palestinian Arab regime accounts (and almost never discussed publicly by diplomats and politicians of the countries supplying it) even while serious unchecked improprieties like those found in a recent European Union audit go on.

While Europe is the source of most of the cash that washes around in the ecosphere populated by Palestinian Authority insiders, it's not just Europe. The United States (as we pointed out here) shows unbearable and incomprehensible tolerance for the Abbas regime's passion (and Arafat's before it) for lionizing convicted murderers of Jews and placing them on pedestals. Anyone in doubt about that can click here: "14-Aug-13: Are the Palestinian Arab murderers who are being released at this moment, freedom fighters or terrorists? Let's check with the State Department".

We dream of the day when an indictment is issued connecting the organizations and the people - their names, their shames - with the evil that makes the Palestinian Arab empire of terror possible. 

Meanwhile we're preoccupied with a nightmarish scenario in which the spokesperson for the State Department says 

the long-term solution for dealing with Islamic State terrorists is to help them with economic opportunities — help them get jobs — saying that those who criticized that notion were perhaps not smart enough to understand [Washington Times]

and still has her job.

18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms

It's troubling to see the gyrations being performed by the US government as it convenes a serious-sounding gathering of policy makers and others on a subject for which they have chosen a strikingly context-free title.

White House Prepares for Summit on Countering Violent Extremism | Maya Rhodan | Time Magazine | February 16, 2015 | The White House will host a long-awaited summit on countering the behavior that leads marginalized groups and individuals to join terrorist groups starting Tuesday... The White House was careful to not single out any particular group as the main culprit of extremism at home and abroad, but Muslim leaders have already expressed concern that the event will lead more Americans to express fear and hatred toward the community...

President Obama has an editorial in connection with this CVE ("Counter Violent Extremism") in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times ["Our fight against violent extremism"] in which it's hard not to notice that the word Islam appears just three times - and each time in a way that conveys a distinctly defensive connotation: (1) "peaceful nature of Islam", (2) "how terrorists betray Islam". and (3) "the lie that the United States is at war with Islam". (Naturally those are all direct quotes.)

If you're anxious to find a robust engagement with the realities of Islamist terror, then the bad news you are going to need to look for it elsewhere,

But don't bother searching on the State Department website's announcement of the same event:

On Thursday, February 19, 2015, the Department of State will host Ministers and foreign leaders, senior officials from the UN and regional organizations, and private and civil society representatives to discuss a broad range of challenges facing nations working to prevent and counter violent extremism. 

The word terror is not mentioned once on State's new CVE page. Nor are the words Islam, Islamist, Jihad, Arab, Moslem or Muslim,

It happens that the State Department and we have some shared history on terror and semantic distinctions. It's something we have mentioned here quite a few times (here's a summary with links). 

The short version: on August 14, 2013, we wrote (here)

A persistent reporter tackled the State Department's deputy spokesperson Marie Harf [earlier today] on whether the murderers being bused tonight into the waiting arms of the two Palestinian Arab regimes are (a) freedom fighters or (b) terrorists.

Most people will think this is pretty easy to answer. But most people are not the spokesperson for the State Department. Here's an edited extract of the bizarre exchange that ensued (source: Washington Free Beacon; it's also captured in this video clip):

Persistent reporter: Do you have any thoughts or position on whether these people who are going to be released [today] are political prisoners or are they terrorists?
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: I do not have a position on that.
Persistent reporter: Do you object to the Palestinians referring to them as political prisoners?
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: I don’t have a position on that...
Persistent reporter: ...Most of these people [in fact all of them - TOW] have been convicted of murder, of killing people. And the Israelis are very clear on the fact that they think that these people are terrorists, even though they’re releasing them. The Palestinians say that they are political prisoners and... have instructed their ambassadors, all their representatives around the world to refer to them as freedom fighters, political prisoners. And I want to know, if you don’t have a position... if there isn’t anything that you call them, do you object to the Palestinians referring to them as freedom fighters?
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: The answer is, I don’t know and I will endeavor to get an answer for you on that as well. 

As we said then and believe now, something seriously wrong is going on here. This was a paradigm, a teaching moment, even if few people watching realized it. The Obama Administration State Department's spokesperson was being asked to react to the release of Palestinian Arab terrorists, all of them convicted of murder, all of them having spent many years in prison. More specifically, she was also being asked to react to a letter sent to Secretary Kerry by a group of Israeli families whose children had been murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists and who were astounded that the United States was pressuring Israel to free the homicidal convicts, not one of whom had served out a complete sentence. 

We (the couple behind this blog) drafted and sent that letter a day earlier to the State Department on behalf of the other families.So naturally we paid close attention to what Marie Harf, speaking for John Kerry, said about it: 

Roth signed a letter sent Tuesday to Kerry asking him for a meeting. “Meet with us,” wrote Roth and 16 other family members of victims. “Let us explain why being complicit in turning the killers of our children into heroes and ‘freedom fighters’ must not be part of any policy befitting a great nation and moral exemplar like the United States...” Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, told The Daily Beast, “We’ve received the letter today, and we’re reviewing it.” [Eli Lake, writing in The Daily Beast, August 14, 2013]

They are almost certainly still "reviewing" it. We barraged them with emails and Tweets in the hours and months that followed but, against all the laws of physics, politics and simple good sense, no one from State ever did answer.

It's possible we erred in asking Ms Harf and her boss whether the US sees those convicted and still unrepentant Palestinian Arab killers of unarmed Jews as terrorists. Maybe we should have let them say violent extremists. That might have pushed the State Department people into conceding that they have no idea what those words mean.

Nor do most people, which is probably why that's how they chose to characterize this week's Washington gathering.

18-Sep-14: Is it activism when they say they need to behead you?

Once, in a more innocent era, beheading was
dismissed as just a word. Placard-carrying
youth at a Sydney Moslem protest, 2012
[Image Source]

It's right and appropriate that Australia's ABC use the word terror in connection with today's reporting of the country's largest counter-terror activity in history. But for how long?

When Islamist sociopaths in the Sydney 'burbs threaten to murder and/or behead Australians, that's terror, and the people doing it are terrorists. But when they or their cousins in their Middle East villages threaten the very same to Israelis or to Arabs who pray in a different direction or whose view of their shared religion is different in some big or small way, why are they then called militants or activists?

The head of Reuters in the days right after 9/11 said the reason is "that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" [Sydney Morning Herald, 2004]. But we, and that includes the media, have to get this right. There is a way to know terror, to define terror, to classify certain actions and people as terrorist. Getting this wrong has huge life-and-death consequences. The senior people at the BBC don't agree, and say instead that using the word "terrorist" "can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding":

...we don't change the word "terrorist" when quoting other people, but we try to avoid the word ourselves; not because we are morally neutral towards terrorism, nor because we have any sympathy for the perpetrators of the inhuman atrocities which all too often we have to report, but because terrorism is a difficult and emotive subject with significant political overtones. [BBC: Language when Reporting Terrorism]

That's one of the reasons people who think the way we do have for years tried to publicly shame the BBC's policy guidelines [full text online here] on how and when to use "terror".

If Australian news reports this evening referred to the people who threaten to behead other Australians by calling them militants or activists, most members of their Australian audience would be outraged.

But as Israelis, we have gotten used to the reality of reporters and their editors engaging in walking-on-eggshells terminological acrobatics in order to disgracefully avoid using the one accurate descriptor: terrorist.  

Same protest, same Sydney public park, even
younger supporter of beheading for the sake
of Islam [Image Source]

A seminal article by Daniel Pipes in the New York Sun ten years ago surveyed the state of the euphemisms-for-terrorism art. His listing included activists (Pakistan Times).assailants (National Public Radio), attackers (Economist), bombers (The Guardian), commandos (Agence France-Presse which also called them "membres du commando"), criminals (Times of London), extremists (United Press International), fighters (Washington Post), group (The Australian), guerrillas (New York Post in an editorial), gunmen (Reuters), hostage-takers (Los Angeles Times), insurgents (a New York Times headline), kidnappers (The Observer), militants (Chicago Tribune), perpetrators (New York Times), radicals (BBC), rebels (Sydney Morning Herald), separatists (Christian Science Monitor), 

(A good thing suicide bomber is not on his list: if we had our way, no one would ever use that term. Those people are human bombs.)

A year ago, we wrote here about how

George Carlin, the great and late, joked that people once used to get old and die but not any more. Nowadays they become pre-elderly; then turn into senior citizens; then pass away in a terminal episode or following a negative patient care outcome or in response to a therapeutic misadventure. The world is poorer with him gone. But with the greatest of respect (non-euphemistically, that would be: recognizing the utter foolishness of what people routinely do), it's not at all humorous when the authorities hijack our language in order to advance policies which, if they had to explain them, would be offensive, repugnant and unacceptable.

The terrorists are a serious threat to just about everyone, and it's ludicrous to think "we" have "them" on the run. The terrorists can do immense harm, turn people's lives upside down, inflict huge pain and destruction. But unless we let them, they cannot change the shape of society. Those euphemisms and the fuzzy, agenda-driven thinking behind them, however, can do immense harm to the ability of civilized countries to keep their people and their achievements safe. What we do with words really does make a difference.

29-Aug-13: Violence in the workplace, violence in the lexicon

US Medical Corps Officer, Major Nidal M. Hasan,
and the flag he swore to honor

Calling things by factual and appropriate names is such a basic part of life that you have to wonder what's really at stake when people and institutions stop doing it. The reason sometimes has to do with wanting to make people feel better and do better. We used to call municipal employees who do the essential work of removing refuse from the vicinity of our homes, offices and factories by basic and honest names like garbage collectors and waste men. Today, who doesn't call them sanitation engineers?

But we're not dealing here with constructive euphemisms. Our subject relates to what is happening in societies afflicted by acts of religiously-inspired hatred and terror. Yesterday's decision by a US military court to impose the death penalty on Major Nidal Malik Hasan puts the issue on our radar. 

The facts of the crime are not especially in doubt. Long before the guilty verdict, Hasan had admitted he shot dead 13 unarmed people at the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Processing Center, among them three women including a 21-year old pregnant private whose unborn child also died. He wounded more than 30 others. Shouting “Allahu ­akbar!”, and directing his high-powered, high-capacity, laser-sight-guided handgun at soldiers undergoing medical checkups prior to deploying to Afghanistan, he fired off about 200 rounds before being stopped by military police. If not violently stopped, he would have kept firing and killing.

The shooter is a US-born army psychiatrist, the son of Palestinian Arabs who immigrated to the US from El Bireh. Today that's a city of some 40,000 people, located ten miles north of Jerusalem and a short drive from our home. Serving as his own legal counsel, Hasan confessed to being the gunman, presented no witnesses and declined to make a closing argument to the jury. 

What should we be calling the cold-blooded killings that he justified "as a way to protect Islamic and Taliban leaders from U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq" [source: USA Today]? For those parts of the news-reporting industry who have problems with the word terrorism - the precise and accurate way of describing the process in which Hasan engaged - there are less loaded descriptors and they are widely used in this story. "Rampage" [BBC, yesterday] for instance, and "shooting spree" [MSNBC yesterday]. 

Hasan: Convicted workplace murderer, and
Taliban flag

The Department of Defence and the Army have a definite view of what this was. They have persisted in describing the massacre at Ft Hood as an act of workplace violence. They are making considerable efforts to keep the word 'terrorism' far from the discourse. Why?

The official reasoning is that it would jeopardize the case because, as stated in a Pentagon memo, “defense counsel will argue that Major Hasan cannot receive a fair trial because a branch of government has indirectly declared that Major Hasan is a terrorist—that he is criminally culpable." That [however] has not stopped the government from calling the 9/11 attacks anything but terrorism. The 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon has on display the Purple Heart, the medal awarded to all the soldiers who were killed or injured there that day. [Michael Daley, in The Daily Beast, August 6, 2013]

This matters in more ways than one. A major Texas newspaper notes that the shootings are termed a an act of terrorism by the National Counterterrorism Center, the State Department and CIA director, among others. But when DoD and the Army call it workplace violence then, from the standpoint of the victims, that:

is an “irresponsible, indefensible breach” of our nation’s pledge to service members. It denies these victims cost-free VA health care for five years, as they would receive for combat injuries. It denies them cost-free counseling and critical mental health services. It denies them tax-free disability benefits and Combat-Related Special Compensation. It denies them eligibility for the Purple Heart and its related benefits. ["Editorial: Nidal Hasan's victims fell in combat, not mere workplace violence", Dallas Morning News, Aug 13, 2013]

Justice is denied more widely than that. The presiding judge ordered that prosecutors must not refer to the case of another American Moslem soldier, Sgt. Hasan Akbar. Akbar had attacked and killed his US military colleagues in a tent in Kuwait during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was court-martialed and is awaiting execution. Prosecutors wanted to depict Nidal Hasan's shooting attack as a "copycat". Doing so might provide a useful argument in future prosecutions of Islamist-minded members of the American forces who carry out future outrages against their colleagues (not that we think such things could or would ever happen again). But the judge held, according to Associated Press, that such material would cause "confusion of issues, unfair prejudice, waste of time and undue delay". Got that?

Prosecutors were also refused the right to introduce into evidence emails that, according to the FBI, Hasan had begun exchanging in December 2008 with the notorious Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Islamist preacher. (In fact, the FBI was aware of more than a dozen emails passing between Major Hasan and the Islamist preacher during the first half of 2009, but was reassured by a an army psychiatrist's view that Hasan’s beliefs "could be beneficial" to the military.) In fact, there are growing signs that the authorities had evidence in their hands before the murderous attack and could have done something, but did not. The Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee review, in a report well titled  “A Ticking Timebomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack”, says US authorities had enough evidence to stop Hasan before he killed, but declined to act on it.

TIME's editors are unsure: Says 
more about TIME than about the events
at Ft Hood

A report on the Breitbart.com website said earlier this week that an agent for the Defense Criminal Investigative Services, a law enforcement agency within the Pentagon that focuses on preventing fraud and crime among military personnel and contractors, was aware of the contact between Hasan and al-Awlaki. But that agent concluded that it was

for academic research and not terrorism-related. He did not bother to interview Hasan.

Naming and terminology are part of a larger and dangerous process that borders, in cases like this one, on self-delusion. Calling the attack of a highly motivated and well-armed individual an act of workplace violence ignores widespread systemic factors like incitement by preachers and a growing tolerance for certain kinds of hate speech directed at certain kinds of people. Might not other people, possessed of similarly powerful religious and ideological motivations and exposed to the same systemic influences  become, like Hasan the psychiatrist, well-armed and empowered to kill on a significant scale? Is this not something that ought to worry us? Is it an issue to ignore?

The trivializing label "workplace violence" sends a signal to society, to law enforcement officials, to those with responsibility in the workplaces of America and the world, that there is no larger picture here. So proceed with utmost caution if you plan to do something. If you view Hasan as part of something larger than himself, radical Islamism for instance, then don't (the message says). That guy went postal. One in a million. Workplace violence. It happens. Get over it.  Mark Steyn addresses this brilliantly in an essay yesterday about political correctness: "Still Nothing to See Here". Recommended. 

So here's our point. The message conveyed by the term "workplace violence" works as a lethal sedative, lulling worried citizens into a make-believe parallel universe where neighbours, colleagues, strangers on the bus and the psychiatrists among us can all be relied on to act benignly even when the evidence of something far more pathological stares us in the face.

How absurd is such Orwell-like reframing? How dangerous?

• When the official spokesperson for the US State Department says to a media briefing that Palestinian Arab terrorists, convicted of murder and serving lengthy prison sentences, might be freedom fighters and political prisoners which is what the Abbas regime leadership calls them (we posted about that here two weeks ago) but she's not sure and needs to get instructions, there's a serious problem. If we're not clear on issues as basic as this, how can sane decisions be made about how to deal with convicted terrorists and their victims?
• Calling unpleasant things by less unpleasant names is what euphemisms are about. But when they are spun by politicians and those who do their bidding, they become weapons in a cognitive war. Military spokespeople refer to “collateral damage” when non-combatants are hurt or killed in war. If they were more frank, less opaque, “civilian casualties” is what they would call them. In a world in which terrorism exacts a huge, unbearable and rising price, those victims of "collateral damage" are frequently said to have been "caught in the crossfire". This is nonsense. Terrorists want those innocent, uninvolved bystanders and passersby to be hurt or killed. No one is ever caught in the crossfire when the firing is done by terrorists.
• In the specific context of what the terrorists do when they confront Israelis, there are years, decades, of circumlocution all calculated to conceal what the terrorists really do, what they really want. They are said to be engaged in "resistance" and "struggle" (sometimes termed "armed", sometimes not), seeking to "liberate" and to achieve self-determination. It's reminiscent of how mob violence in the era of the French Revolution was called "agitation" and "effervescence" but not “massacre” or “murder”. 
• Particularly offensive to us is the term "suicide bomber". As widely used and accepted as it appears to have become, it conceals far more than it reveals, as most euphemisms do. No terrorist has ever exploded a bomb that took his own life because of a primary desire to suicide. It was always, always, about murdering other people. The expression "suicide bomber" should be thrown to the bottom of the deepest well and never recovered. It glorifies one of the most base forms of evil.
• But few media tricks are more galling than the way the word "terror" in its various forms is itself being selectively eliminated from the discourse through measures like the BBC's well-documented policy [regulations here] to simply not use it. According to the world's wealthiest and best resourced news channel, terrorist as a word "can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding... We should not adopt other people's language as our own; our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom." [BBC Editorial Guideline: Language when Reporting Terrorism]" And so on. Most of the time, they stick to it, except when they don't, which is exactly what happens when reality takes second place to actively managed perceptions.

George Carlin, the great and late, joked that people once used to get old and die but not any more. Nowadays they become pre-elderly; then turn into senior citizens; then pass away in a terminal episode or following a negative patient care outcome or in response to a therapeutic misadventure. The world is poorer with him gone. 

But with the greatest of respect (non-euphemistically, that would be: recognizing the utter foolishness of what people routinely do), it's not at all humorous when the authorities hijack our language in order to advance policies which, if they had to explain them, would be offensive, repugnant, dangerous to our well-being and unacceptable.