27-Aug-21: Peace, terror and Jordan's under-reported attachment to anti-Jewish bigotry

Jordan's King Abdullah is received in President Joseph R. Biden's Oval Office, July 19, 2021

We anticipated the fawning reception King Abdullah II of Jordan would receive during his three week tour of the US in July. 

We were ready for the high-intensity five days of meetings he had with President Joseph R. Biden in the Oval Office, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and with a long list of Washington insiders both in the Congress and around it, very few of whom have shown the smallest interest in engaging with us. (Details to follow.)

Everything was more or less predictable,

Less expected and seriously unwelcome was how the Washington media remained, almost entirely without exception, docile to the point of self-parody, lacking all desire to seize on the obvious issues thrown up by the King Abdullah royal tour. 

This was noted in a critical comment over at MediaIte.com. See: "White House Press Corps Whiffs By Not Asking Biden About Jordan Harboring a Wanted Terrorist During King Abdubllah’s WH Visit" [Jackson Richman, July 19, 2021] 

The issues from which the intrepid reporters shy away as they have for years are dramatic, involving murdered American young women, a killer who boasts of the lives she destroyed, and brazen efforts to evade a long-standing treaty obligation. 

It's startling to us how wide a consensus there appears to be among reporters and their editors in America's news industry that Jordan's role in harboring the admitted bomber of a busy pizzeria filled with children (and targeted for that very reason) is untouchable. 

Turkish news report from 2016

We hoped right to the end that the Ahlam Tamimi case would get some degree of analytical attention in the public parts of July's unusually long and extensively reported Royal Hashemite state visit. But it got approximately none.

Those factors among others are behind an opinion piece Arnold Roth co-wrote with Dr Sharon S. Nazarian of the Anti-Defamation League that is published today on the Forward website ["Jordan has a public antisemitism problem. Why isn’t the U.S. holding them accountable?"].

It's hard for us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) to deny our perspective is subjective and affected by our personal experiences. We are the parents of one of the two American nationals murdered by Jordanian terrorist Ahlam Tamimi in the Sbarro massacre. Starting in 2012, we pressed for the fugitive to be charged under US law. And once that happened, we kept asking the US to explain to Jordan what it needed to do next; to extradite Tamimi to stand trial on those charges in Washington as the 1995 Jordan/US treaty requires.

This process has put us on a steep learning curve. 

Once Jordan - a country of 10 million inhabitants of whom almost none are Jewish - defied the US extradition request ["23-Mar-17: Looking for justice in Jordan, Jerusalem and Washington"], we began being treated to a long line of senior officials in three US administrations - Obama, Trump, Biden - practically falling over themselves to keep the whole mess under wraps. 

No less troubling, a strangely uncurious media failed - and continues to fail - to question what was going on. The failure is on show and damning right up until today. 

Being treated contemptibly by powerful officials, finding that all our questions go unanswered or get mechanical, thoroughly meaningless mantra-like responses has been for us a chilling experience.

Meanwhile we, a bereaved couple armed with few tanks and even fewer battleships, felt we were perceived, and still are, as some kind of hostile force. 

We recognize the principles of realpolitik that underlie the US-Jordan relationship. But what we understand a lot less well is why those charged with pretending they don't exist think that they alone can see the big picture that eludes grieving parents. We tried making that point in July as Jordan's king sailed through Washington's halls of power ["25-Jul-21: What we said in the media about King Abdullah's visit"]

But there's a flip side. The diplomatic seers seem blinded to a companion reality that is all too apparent to us and it's this: Jordan, despite the peace treaty with Israel, remains a hotbed of vicious Jew-hatred.

To be clear: Like most of our neighbors and friends, we want to see good and better relations with Jordan. It's a goal with which we totally identify. But justice is a powerful goal too. And it's clear to us Jordan has for decades been in the grip of a powerful hatred that will define the future unless its leadership takes determined steps to change direction. 

We have searched and we would welcome bring told how wrong we are. But there is simply no evidence that King Abdullah either intends those changes or has ever acknowledged the vast problem exists.

So we will be blunt. The ongoing Tamimi travesty illustrates Jordan's continued commitment to a culture of deep bigotry towards Jews. Its brazen breach of a strategic treaty with its most important ally and supporter is not a special case but an example of a much broader mind-set and systemic policy failure. 

Here are three more.

► Making serious trouble on the Temple Mount

Jordan secretly maintains its own “incitement force” on the Old City of Jerusalem's Temple Mount as part of a kingdom-driven policy of Israel-focused calculated violence and overt trouble-making. This emerges from a research paper published August 6, 2021 by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (known as the BESA Center), a think tank doing policy-relevant research on Middle Eastern and global strategic affairs and based at Israel's Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. 

In "Jordan’s “Incitement Force” on the Temple Mount", the author, Dr. Edy Cohen, an Israel intelligence service veteran, quotes Jordan's current Minister of Religions revealing that some 850 Jordanians are working at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on behalf of Jordan’s Ministry of Religion. 

Here's why this is startling. Jordan is an economic basket case that is the world's third-largest recipient of US foreign aid amounting to billions of dollars in US tax-payer-funded contributions each year. Yet it manages to find some NIS 56 million (roughly US $17.5 million) annually to keep this ugly strategy going, according to the BESA analysis. 

What underpins this madness is the little-publicized rivalry between Hashemite Jordan and Saudi Arabia which rules the desert kingdom from which the Hashemites were forced to flee a century ago. The Saudi/Jordanian rivalry centers on Jerusalem's sacred Islamic sites as a kind of counter-balance to the control the hold the Saudis have over Mecca and Medina as their 'guardians'. 

Jordan is known to fear moves that might end its term as guardian of the Jerusalem sites. The kingdom's minister of religion, Dr. Muhammad Khalaila, told a parliamentary committee that those 850 workers are registered as employees of Jordan's Ministry of Religion. Dr Cohen notes that this strikes an odd note for people tuned in to events in the Old City: 

"As anyone visiting the mosque can attest, no more than a few dozen Jordanian Waqf security guards are visible—not hundreds, and certainly nowhere near 850. So who are the others, where are they, and what are they doing? The most likely hypothesis is that those workers are used as mercenaries of a sort in times of crisis. Many significant gatherings have sprung up almost instantly on the Temple Mount in recent years whenever the site deteriorated into violence—during the recent Gaza war, during the magnetometer riots (July 2017), during the Mercy Gate crisis (March 2019), and in many other violent outbursts. The Jordanian workers might serve as a “rapid incitement force” that increases the volume of the event, stirs up the crowd, and stimulates it to conduct riots, or joins with the crowd to create a sense of “togetherness” against the “occupation.” If each of those Jordanians brings along one or two young men, in a short time thousands of rioters can be expected. This allows the organizers of the riots to put tremendous pressure on the Israeli authorities and render it difficult for them to calm the situation. The road from there to surrender is short."

Given the current fog of confusion and doubt that characterizes Israel's Jordan relations, the worrying questions these revelations throw up are unlikely to get any useful answers.

► Antisemitism in Jordanian Textbooks?

A carefully-argued report by the Anti Defamation League published four months ago (and almost totally ignored by the media) says that an ADL review of Jordanian middle school and high school textbooks finds the kingdom's textbooks fuel and foster antisemitism. Those books are official parts of today's educational curriculum.

The report's author, David Andrew Weinberg, ADL’s Washington Director for International Affairs, focuses his research and writing on antisemitic incitement in the Middle East. 

Among the messages injected into the minds of Jordanian school-children, he quotes these:

• "The Israelites who did not believe in Jesus, peace be upon him, wanted to be rid of him and eliminate his call, so they tried to kill him" but because of a divine intervention "they grabbed someone who resembled him from among the people, and they killed and crucified the lookalike..."
• A textbook that teaches “the historical roots of the Palestinian issue” presents an array of civilizations that inhabited the area but makes no mention of Jews or Israelites until the 19th century, at which point it notes the emergence of “Zionist greed in Palestine,” in league with imperialist powers.  
• The Zionist movement is defined as “a racist, settler political movement aimed at establishing a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine, founded on historical claims without basis in truth.” 
• Jewish links to Jerusalem are “founded on historical and religious claims without any actual grounds on which to base them”.
• Treachery is a characteristic Jewish trait,
• The deadly riots of 1929 were because of Jewish actions and religious claims. The riots “broke out because of the Zionists’ claim that the Buraq Wall [better known as the Kotel or Western Wall] led to "transgression on the Islamic holy sites, so they [the Arabs] attacked groups of participating Jews at the Buraq Wall”
• Totally inverting the 1969 attempted arson attack by a mentally-unwell Australia Christian visitor on an Islamic holy site on the Temple Mount, a Jordanian text says "Israelis had the audacity to burn the al-Aqsa Mosque". The unsuccessful arson attack is listed under "Israeli Occupation assaults on the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque". 
• It teaches that current Israeli archeological sites “seek to link everything discovered to fake Talmudic narratives... to claim that they have extended historical roots in Jerusalem and Palestine” and therefore to “forge historical facts.” 
• Israeli excavations in Jerusalem "intentionally aim" to harm the Arab economy and to “secure the Jewish settlers who come to Jerusalem to practice their Talmudic rituals.”  
• Treason and the breaking of pacts are among the characteristics of the Jews and the hypocrites.

There's a special irony in how the breaking of pacts is ascribed to Jews. Since March 2017, it has been Jordan itself ["26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions"] that spins a disingenuous tale about a narrow and highly technical flaw in the way its 1995 extradition treaty with the US. That alleged flaw is the sole basis on which Jordan fails to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, who confesses to the the bombing massacre of the Sbarro pizzeria where our daughter's life ended. Jordan argues it isn't a breach at all because the treaty was never ratified, We now hold documentary proof that that this is untrue. 

The US has very quietly continued since 2017 to say the treaty is valid and in force. Throughout the years since then, it has incomprehensibly failed to make a single public call for Jordan to honor it.

The author of the ADL report in a summing up that to us sounds remarkably restrained says that

if Jordan keeps publishing official textbooks that demonize Israel, Jews, and Judaism in such a manner, the next generation may be less likely to support this relationship, nor the desirability of peace with Israel more generally. 

► Jordan is a hotbed of seriously antisemitic views. What if anything is its government doing to change that?

Some findings again from the ADL. No one comes close to its statistics-driven insights into the current state of antisemitic sentiment worldwide and the dynamics behind that make it possible. And while it's certainly an issue that deserves careful thought and wide attention, it's the Jordan aspect that we feel the need to highlight here and now.

On a published index they call the ADL GLOBAL 100: AN INDEX OF ANTI-SEMITISM®, the ADL's researchers ascribe a score to most of the world's countries. Their methodology is laid out in clear terms. It's a respected analysis.

Jordan, the last time the study was done there in 2014, weighs in with an index score of 81%. This isn't something to ignore. For comparison purposes, that puts Jordanians - relative to other Muslim and Arab countries - as more antisemitic than Morocco, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. 

If you don't find this startling, you might not realize how much support Jordan gets in Washington.

Jordanians as a society are also substantially more antisemitic than the Middle East and North African countries taken as a whole (average index score of 74%). 

And Jordanians are between two and three times more antisemitic than (ranking them in order from most antisemitic to least) Eastern Europe, then Sub-Saharan Africa, then Asia as a whole, then the Americas and finally Oceania.

This blog post isn't meant to encourage hatred or criticism of Jordan or Jordanians. 

Source

But when its ruler spends most of the month of July traveling around the United States, being received with uncommon courtesy and often with striking enthusiasm by political leaders at the very highest level - and certainly including America's Jewish leaders - we wish they would pause before they launch into gushing praise. Something is seriously wrong with the current reality.

They could and should ask the man who owns and runs the Hashemite Kingdom. In our words:

Your Majesty, is this the way to bring peace? When will you acknowledge publicly that the devotion to hatred and violent extremism (by which we of course mean terrorism) among your subjects and institutions at every level of the society over which you preside is an embarrassment and a serious impediment to everything your friends want to help you achieve?

Ahlam Tamimi needs to be extradited now as the treaty made by the father of today's king with his American allies in 1995 demands. 

Changing course, handing her over to US law enforcement without further unconscionable delay, will be one step, but an important one, in the direction of addressing issues that sadly and avoidably push peace further away rather than draw it closer.

05-Feb-20: What do Palestinian Arabs think?

Abbas in better times [Image Source]

The opinions of Palestinian Arabs are, to a great extent, a puzzle.

By that, we don't mean what their elites say they think. Or what outside reporters guess are their opinions. It's not a free or open society. It doesn't have unrestricted media - quite the opposite. And it hasn't had elections for well over a decade.

So, as we keep saying in this blog, what Palestinian Arabs tell trusted fellow Palestinian Arabs who are professional opinion pollsters about the things they actually believe is a subject always worth revisiting. (The last time we did that was here: "04-Jun-19: What do Palestinian Arabs think?")

Our previous poll-centered posts have centered on the published data of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) headed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki. Click here to go to those previous posts - we started analyzing and reporting on  them in 2011. 

We're doing that again now based on PSR's most recent Public Opinion Poll, number 74, which was published [here] on December 26, 2019. 

The polling was done both in the Fatah/PLO-controlled West Bank and in the Hamas-occupied Gaza Strip in the period December 11 to 14. Total size of sample: 1,200 adults interviewed face to face in 120 randomly selected locations. Margin of error +/-3%.

‣ President Abbas?

Mahmoud Abbas became president of the Palestinian Authority in the January 2005 elections. That was a four-year term that has famously just 'celebrated' its fifteenth birthday. Hard to avoid the conclusion that elections are not so popular among the mostly-elderly, mostly-wealthy Palestinian Arab insiders who control the operation.

Abbas' power is broad. Beyond the PA role, he holds these additional titles in parallel:

• Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since November 2004
• President of "State of Palestine" since May 2005
• Chairman of Fatah since 2009, conferring bonus leadership of Fatah's proliferating de facto terrorism wings: al-'Asifah, Force 17, Black September Organization, the Fatah Hawks, the Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades.

The data show that the people he rules don't seem to like him much. 

As of this past December, 61% of the Palestinian Arab public wanted Abbas to resign, exactly the same percentage as three months earlier. This is split between the 52% of West Bank Arabs who hold that view (higher than the percentage 90 days earlier) and the no-less-than-73% of Gazans who want to see Abbas leave office immediately.

‣ A Two-State Solution?

How much support is there among Palestinian Arabs for the concept of a two-state solution? Just 42%. Now ponder this: Fully two-thirds of all Palestinian Arabs say it's the US "declaration of the legality of Israeli settlements according to international law" that blocks the two-state solution.

It evidently doesn't occur to them that their own pretty strong opposition is, let's say, part of the problem. Not for the first time, we get the sense that in Palestinian Arab society, the population don't see themselves as causing things to happen. Rather, they're a people to whom things are done by others.

‣ War or peace?

What's their "most preferred way out of the current status quo":

• "Armed struggle": 39% (which is slightly up on the number of three months earlier)
• "Reaching a peace agreement with Israel": 29%
• "Waging a non-violent resistance" (what they mean by this is unspecified): 14%
• "Keep the status quo": 15%. 

Identify "the most effective means of ending the Israeli occupation":

• "Armed struggle": 47% (three points higher than three months ago)
• "Popular resistance": 20%
• "Negotiations": 26%

In view of how "the peace negotiations are suspended", which alternative directions (more than one is acceptable) do they support?: 

• "Popular non-violent resistance": 60%
• "A return to an armed intifada": 52%
• "Dissolving the PA": 42%
• "Abandoning the two-state solution and demanding the establishment of one state for Palestinians and Israelis": 28%

‣ Their society's most vital goals?

• Option 1: "To end Israeli occupation in the areas occupied in 1967 and build a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital": 44%
• Option 2: "To obtain the right of return of refugees to their 1948 towns and villages": 33%
• Option 3: "To build a pious or moral individual and a religious society, one that applies all Islamic teachings": 13%
• Option 4: "To establish a democratic political system that respects freedoms and rights of Palestinians": 9%

‣ The most serious problem confronting Palestinian society today?

• "The continuation of occupation and settlement activities": 28%
• Poverty and unemployment: 26%
• "The spread of corruption in public institutions": 26%
• "The siege of the Gaza Strip": 17%

A final note. In polling to see how they view the future of Palestinian Arab society, the words "child" and "children" don't appear in either the questions or the responses. That's sad.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Co myślą palestyńscy Arabowie?") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

11-Mar-18: Why do so many thwarted Arab-on-Israeli terrorists survive?

The IDF Samaria Military Court compound [Image Source]

If you're a regular visitor to this blog, you won't need reminding that when it comes to the deaths of Palestinian Arabs in circumstances that involve the Israeli military, there's rarely just a single agreed version of the facts. Our question in this post is: why are such deaths so rare?

Bear with us.

The Palestinian Arab side are currently - as they have periodically for years - urging news readers to accept that an innocent fisherman ["High Court delays release of Gaza fisherman’s body", Times of Israel, March 8, 2018] was killed in cold blood by Israeli naval forces. That he's dead is sadly beyond dispute, but the circumstances are not:

“We are sure that the wounded are fishermen who went out to sea to make a living – and nothing else,” the head of the union told Haaretz daily... Incidents involving IDF using excessive or deadly force against the Palestinians have been on the rise since US President Donald Trump announced his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the US embassy there." [RT, February 25, 2018]

Another Gazan fisherman was shot dead by Egyptian forces [Al Araby, January 13, 2018] a few weeks earlier. But for reasons that most readers can intuit, considerably less media attention has been paid to that.

Which brings us to events that unfolded in Israel's Gaza-envelope communities this morning:

Gaza resident arrested after crossing into Israel with grenade, knife | Times of Israel | March 11, 2018, 10:04 am | The IDF arrested two Palestinians early Sunday after they separately crossed the border fence from the Gaza Strip into Israel, one of them carrying weapons. The military said in a statement that troops apprehended the two Gazans shortly after they had crossed the fence. One was found carrying a grenade and a knife. The army said he is suspected of planning to carry out a terror attack in Israel. One of the suspects is from the north of the Strip while the other was from the south. The army said the two incidents appeared unrelated due to the different locations. The two were transferred to security forces for interrogation, likely by the Shin Bet security service. Gazans are apprehended crossing into Israel fairly regularly, many of them apparently seeking to escape an increasingly difficult humanitarian situation in the Strip. Suspects are believed to sometimes carry weapons in the hopes of being sent to Israeli prison rather than back to the Palestinian enclave.

It's too soon to categorize today's two Gazan Arab arrivals. Are they terrorists? Social climbers? Economic refugees?

But it's not too soon to absorb the fact that both are alive. And that at least one of them came equipped with weapons. And that Gazans entering Israel always arrive without badges stuck to their foreheads announcing that they are on jihadist missions and looking to create mayhem. That assessment has to be made in the heat of the pursuit by IDF service personnel.

Given the blood-curdling ideology which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other like-minded terror organizations successfully pump into the heads of their followers and subjects, it's usually strategically wise to assume the most malevolent interpretation.

The intercepted pipe-bomb from the February 13, 2018 attack. The metal
ball bearings are there to rip apart the flesh of the victims [Image Source]

Just to reinforce that point, all of these incidents of terror-centered Arab-on-Israeli violence were recorded in the past 14 hours - and all were almost certainly intended to produce deaths:

• Three Palestinian Arabs armed with Molotov cocktails were apprehended by IDF forces near Route 90, one of Israel's most strategic arteries, running from the northern border all the way to Eilat in the south. It's Israel's longest road. Israel National News says: "The possibility that they are members of a terror cell that threw Molotov cocktails along central roads over the past month is being investigated."
• Around 10:55 pm last night, an IDF post located just outside Psagot, an Israeli community of about 2,000 residents, came under shooting attack.
• Then near midnight, shots were fired at soldiers manning the busy Beitunia Crossing, a short distance north of Jerusalem and close to Givat Ze'ev (no injuries, no serious damage). A manhunt is underway in both cases. The distance between the sites of the two shootings is only about 30 km.
• Police, quoted by Times of Israel, say two Palestinian Arab children, both of them 16 years old and living in Jenin, were stopped this morning by Border Police guards at the security checkpoint next to the entrance to the Samaria Military Court. It's in northern Israel in the village of Salem and close to Megiddo (called Armageddon in the Bible). They were found to be carrying pipe bombs - one per boy - concealed on their bodies. Each one also had a lighter "with which officers suspect they intended to ignite the bombs. The entrance to the court was temporarily blocked while a sapper inspected the devices, which contained explosives, and neutralized them." The background is extraordinary: though it may come as a surprise to even dedicated followers of news from our area, this morning's weaponized children were carrying out the seventh thwarted attempt at pipe-bombing that same court complex in the past four months. Previous intercepts happened on February 14, 2018 (three Palestinian Arabs arrested); February 13, 2018 (single attacker, his pipe bomb packed with metal shards); February 7, 2018 (single Palestinian Arab male attacker);  December 28, 2017 - again, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy with a pipe bomb); December 17, 2017 (a Palestinian Arab with two pipe bombs - one attached to his body under his clothing, and a second one in his coat pocket); October 15, 2017 (single attacker, one pipe bomb). Again - all aiming at the same target.

Motives don't get enough attention in this part of the world. Perhaps that's because the urgency of the task at hand and the potential price of the security people failing to act quickly enough. The result is  that there's always a premium on decisiveness and on certain prevention.

Fortunately for those Gazan infiltrators who come across the border for the personal benefits of the experience, and for the pipe-bombers turning up like lemmings at the doors of the Samaria Military Court compound, the IDF usually doesn't shoot first and ask questions later, at least when circumstances permit. If they acted differently, the number of dead thwarted terror-attackers would be substantially greater.

Let us know if you ever see a mainstream news article that reaches the same conclusion.

04-May-17: When Mahmoud met Donald: Thinking about the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme

In the White House yesterday [Image Source]

We had a welcome opportunity yesterday to publicly express some things about the Palestinian Authority's blood-soaked Rewards for Terror scheme. That's not its official name but it does describe what actually goes on.

The occasion was a formal visit by PA president Mahmoud Abbas to the White House, and a perceptive article by Ben Cohen: "As Trump Meets Abbas, Victim Families Press Issue of Financial Rewards for Palestinian Terrorists" [Ben Cohen | The Algemeiner | May 3, 2017]

Some excerpts (and Arnold Roth is quoted):

The PA currently spends $300 million annually on the payments – close to 8 percent of its budget. Critics say that the PA actively incentivizes terrorism, by promising financial rewards and national glory for those who participate...
“There are some small indications that ‘concern’ was expressed in the name of the United States during the Trump/Abbas encounter concerning the ongoing PA payments scheme that rewards Palestinian Arabs for engaging in terror,” noted Arnold Roth, whose 15 year old daughter, Malki, was murdered in the suicide bombing of Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizza restaurant in August 2001.
“The passions that the prisoner payments scheme arouses in Palestinian Arab society seem never to be adequately captured in mainstream news reports – I worry that they are not well-enough understood by the people now exercising power in Washington,” Roth told The Algemeiner.
Roth argued that western governments enjoy leverage over the PA which they are reluctant to exercise.  “Mahmoud Abbas’ perpetually insolvent administration stays in business only because of massive hand-outs of foreign aid,” he stated. “In a sane world, the providers of those donations – the US and the European Union in particular – would be attaching real conditions to them. But mystifyingly they don’t.”
Stephen Flatow, whose 20 year old daughter Alisa was murdered in the 1995 suicide bombing of an Israeli bus by Islamic Jihad, asserted that “raising the issue for discussion is just not enough.”
...Neither Trump nor Abbas mentioned the issue of the prisoner payments at their joint appearance on Wednesday. “If the issue is not raised, I wouldn’t understand the rationale for the US position and I’d be extremely disappointed,” Flatow said. “The PA’s payments to terrorists –on  a sliding scale no less, based on the number of Jews killed or injured – serves to encourage others to commit terror.” [Read the whole article here]

It's worth noting that Wednesday's Abbas state visit came as the US Congress is weighing legislation (described here: "Senators introduce Taylor Force Act to cut Palestinian funding over terror rewards", JNS, September 30, 2016)

to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA) if they continue their policy of paying monetary rewards for terrorism. U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC.), Dan Coats (R-IN.) and Roy Blunt (R-MO.) introduced the Taylor Force Act, which would require the U.S. secretary of state to certify the Palestinian Authority has ended its policy of paying monetary rewards to terrorist and their surviving family members. The bill also calls on the PA to publicly condemn terror attacks and to take steps to bring the perpetrators to justice.

We wrote about Taylor Allen Force [here] about 14 months ago. An American visitor to Israel as part of a Vanderbilt University school trip and a graduate of West Point Military Academy, he was stabbed to death by a Palestinian Arab terrorist who also injured 10 others in an attack on the seashore at Jaffa.

Poster at a British protest against the incitement of the PA
[Image Source]

The legislation that bears his name is not yet US law. It was referred to the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs in February [source] and is currently working its way through the system.

Whatever the outcome, the name of the murdered young US veteran will get considerably more respect there than it did when the "moderate" Arab-operated-but-European-financed Ma'an News Agency turned its attention, so to speak, to what was done to him:

Ma'an says the attacker is a 22-year-old from a village, al-Zawiya, near Qalqiliya. It gives his name as Bashar Masalha. What does Ma'an tell its readers about the man who was murdered by the villager? Not his name, not his age, not his background or anything about his life; just that he was "an American tourist". Nor do they mention how an Israeli musician, sitting near the beach and strumming on his guitar, gave the fleeing knife-man a massive whack on the head, destroying his musical instrument but slowing the murderer down so that the armed security people in pursuit could catch up with him and eventually stop him,
Not surprisingly, the Arabic version of the Ma'an report, the one which the editors assume will not be read by people outside the Arab world, honors the knife-man in a sub-heading as "shaheed", or "martyr". Mr Force is not mentioned at all. Hamas, whether because it's true or because they wish it were, issued a Tweet [here] saying the killer came from its ranks. The American man he murdered is dismissed as "a Zionist"... ["09-Mar-16: News reporting and how it ensures more terror"]

(By the way, people concerned with the pursuit of peace and a much better future for children on our side and on the Arab side as well certainly ought to know more about Ma'an and the hideous values it disseminates. We try to do our bit.) 

Ben Cohen's Algemeiner article ends with a quote worth emphasizing from Grant Rumley, a Palestinian affairs expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noting 

the centrality of the prisoner payments issue to Palestinian internal politics. “Any change on the payments policy will cost Abbas dearly at home,” Rumley said.

Yes, changing the Rewards for Terror scheme will be expensive for Abbas.

But we think the question for non-Palestinian Arabs is: so what? Should we be worrying about the political future of this 82 year-old kleptocrat, this inveterate inciter to hatred, this career politician now in the thirteenth year of his four-year term as president and continuing to hold tight for more?

No.

Abbas parading with freshly-freed terrorists, all of them killers,
in 2014. In the days after this rally took place, very one of the ex-prisoners
enjoyed a Rewards for Terror payday beyond anything of which they
dreamed - all of it funded by the foreign aid budgets of EU states and the US. 

We should care instead whether the payments - funded mainly by ordinary and unwitting taxpayers in the United States and Europe under the guise of international foreign aid - that serve to perpetuate a culture of lethal bigotry and the weaponizing of Palestinian Arab children can be stopped as a matter of urgency.

We should care about what it will take to cultivate a new and completely different kind of leadership among the Palestinian Arabs, one that will focus on reshuffling the core values of their own people so that building them a better future takes precedence over stealing ours.

It could be that Abbas agrees. In yesterday's meeting, he said (according this source):

We are coming into a new opportunity a new horizon that would enable us to bring about peace... [Associated Press, May 3, 2017]

Can someone urgently show him and his entourage the way to the exit? That new horizon is needed desperately.

26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future

What UNRWA hath wrought in Jerusalem: From a documentary film made by the Center for Near East Policy Research [Click YouTube to view it now]

(UPDATE: After reading this post, you may be interested in this follow-up piece of ours: "27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover...")

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Nowi przywódcy Hamasu w Gazie i co to oznacza dla edukacji ku coraz gorszej przyszłości") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

One of the ugliest dimensions of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel is the tight, bear-hug relationship that exists between the oddest of United Nations agencies - UNRWA - and the Islamist terrorist group Hamas. There's fresh and disturbing evidence today for those willing to look, as opposed to those who systematically look away, preferring not to know.

The United Nations has a major stake in taking care of the world's refugees. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is based in Geneva and has won two Nobel Peace Prizes (1954 and 1981). Its origins were not so auspicious. It began life as a creature of UN General Assembly Resolution 319 (IV) in December 1949 with a mandate to operate for three years. That was later broadened by additional UNGA resolutions until today. Its mission is

to provide, on a non-political and humanitarian basis, international protection to refugees and to seek permanent solutions for them... [source]

A person would have to be especially mean to object to goals like those. Giving support on a humanitarian, non-political basis - what could be more appropriate? Providing them with protection, and especially for their children - the most helpless of the helpless - is often the thing that fragile, dispossessed people most lack. And seeking a solution? Well - obviously.

Which brings us to the Palestinian Arabs who, uniquely among all people of the world classified as refugees, are not served at all by UNHCR.

Is this a screaming injustice? No. That's because they, and only they, among all the world's unhappy people with a deep grievance, have a "refugee" agency all their own. And, as we noted in an earlier blog post ["14-Aug-16: Who actually cares that foreign aid is diverted from needy Gazans to terror? Not who most people think"], what an agency it is. Just to highlight some key points:

• The odd distinction: UNHCR deals with all the world's refugees except for those addressed by UNRWA. UNHCR has by far the larger work load but a staff (of about 9,700) that's only about one third the size of UNRWA's.
• The astounding disparity in resoources: "UNHCR has one staff member for every 5,500 refugees and other persons of concern. UNRWA has one staff person for every 182 people registered by UNRWA." [Source, March 2015]
• The sheer vastness of the UNRWA payroll: UNRWA's latest headcount was "over 30,000... most of them Palestine refugees and a small number of international staff, in two headquarter offices (Gaza and Amman), five field offices (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and West Bank), and in four Representative/Liaison Offices (New York, Geneva, Brussels and Cairo)" ["Working at UNRWA" - accessed this morning]. It's an open secret that many, probably most, of those on the UNRWA payroll do essentially nothing. It's a welfare scheme designed to subsidize Palestinian Arab indolence and lack of productivity - on the West's nickle. Until this decade, almost no Arab money ever arrived at UNRWA.
• Calculated opacity: Almost all other U.N. agencies report to an executive board, allowing at least some chance of functional oversight. UNRWA reports directly to the entire 193-member General Assembly, where responsibility is broadly dispersed and easily avoided. According to a paper in 2010 by the agency's own chief of legal affairs, Lance Bartholomeusz, UNRWA enjoys the added flexibility of having no clearly defined mission: "its mandate is not conveniently stated in one place and must be derived from all other relevant resolutions and requests."
• Perpetual non-motion: Thus unencumbered, UNRWA has ensured its own survival by transforming itself into the patron of Palestinian grievance, conferring refugee status down the generations... ["The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas", Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal, August 07, 2014] 

Beyond all the anomalies and the waste, corruption and inefficiency in this truly grotesque picture, there's also the matter of the identity of interests shared by (a) UNRWA and (b) the Islamist terrrorists of Hamas. This again is something about which we have written in numerous past blog posts. See for instance "30-Jul-14: Is Europe's uncritical funding connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?" and the references there to UNRWA's official spokesperson, the unlovely Chris Gunness, who

frequently echoes Hamas messaging in the mainstream media, and European officials then amplify his talking points in their capitals. His Twitter account and interviews are replete with indictments of Israeli actions in Gaza, but his condemnations of Hamas rocketing of Israeli civilians are muted, if they are issued at all.

Gunness comes in for well-deserved excoriation in an important 2014 review by researcher David Bedein in the Jerusalem Post analyzing what UNRWA's schools actually impart to the Gazan Arab children who suffer the misfortune of falling into their clutches:

UNRWA’s 30,000 employees make no pretense of neutrality. UNRWA employees are organized in professional unions without any affinity to organizations that advocate peace. In Gaza, the UNRWA workers union and the UNRWA teachers union have elected Hamas in successive elections to lead their unions since 1999, with 93 percent voting for Hamas in the 2012 elections. A mantra that [UNRWA spokesperson Chris] Gunness repeats frequently, most recently on Fox News, is that “there is no evidence that Hamas terrorists are on the payroll of the UN.” However, the European Parliament funded a study that documented Hamas takeover of the UNRWA unions in March 2009... ["One for the Gunness Book of Records: The myth of an UNRWA policy of peace that does not exist", Jerusalem Post, December 25, 2014]

Now for some new revelations, courtesy of a bulletin issued this past Thursday by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center in Tel Aviv.

It refers to elections recently held for the Hamas politbureau, Hamas' peak institution in the Gaza Strip. We wrote ["13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone: Four terms of life imprisonment but this murdering jihadist now heads Hamas in Gaza"] about the identity of the jihadist who emerged as Hamas' new head of operations in that process.

Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan Al-Hindi addresses a protest rally directed
against UNRWA in Gaza, October 2016. The subsequent strike led to
a settlement with UNRWA management. Al-Hindi is flanked
by other Hamas figures [Image Source]

The Amit Report notes that Sinwar was one of fifteen people elected to lead Hamas, and that their ranks are

dominated by members who hold extremist views.

One of those newly-elected extremists, Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan al-Hindi, has for the past five years been chairman of UNRWA's staff union in the Gaza Strip - a union controlled by Hamas, and one that has demanded, and gotten via sanctions, strikes, riots and shutdowns, major concessions from UNRWA's management.

Confronting UNRWA on resource issues, budgets and salaries amounts to confronting the donors who fund it. UNRWA's funding throughout its seven decade-long history has been overwhelmingly - almost exclusively - provided by the governments of Western countries, led by the United States. [For background: "05-Jun-16: Where does the money for the ongoing decades-long UNRWA fiasco come from?"]

In the most recent such round of demands against UNRWA management in October 2016, Al-Hindi - flanked by key Hamas figures - announced a series of demands including a general strike [see Alreselah (Arabic) October 25, 2016]. That confrontation eventually resulted in a December 2016 "fundamental understanding with UNRWA [that] ended its protests and sanctions" [Amit Report quoting gazaonline.net, December 20, 2016]

The reality of Hamas infiltration of UNRWA gets some minor degree of media attention from time to time, but generally is resolved by the Hamas side being bellicose and noisy and the UNRWA side backing down. In 2009, for instance, John Ging, an Irish lawyer serving as director at the time of UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip, threatened to fire UNRWA employees who belonged to Hamas or organizations with similar terrorist agendas [background here] after those affiliations emerged and got some attention. The threat was never carried out and he left the position. (He has been at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York since February 2011.)

This is relevant to Dr. al-Hindi. In addition to his labor relations position at UNRWA, he holds down a day job as principal of an UNRWA education facility, Palestine Boys' Elementary School. An October 5, 2011 report on the English-language Ma'an News Agency website mentions his key role

Al-Hindi stands outside UNRWA headquarters in
Gaza on October 5, 2011 as he leads a teachers'
strike against the UN agency  [Image Source]

Thousands of teachers on Wednesday protested at UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City over the dismissal of a union official, a Ma'an correspondent reported. The Local Staff Union called for the general strike on Wednesday, the second such action in a week, to protest at UNRWA's suspension of the head of the union, Suhail al-Hindi. Hamas sources said the UN agency had accused Hindi of meeting with Hamas political officials. Buses took some 7,000 teachers employed at UNRWA-run schools to UN headquarters in Gaza city where they held a sit-in, calling for an end to "UNRWA political punishment of employees." "Death rather than humiliation" read a banner held by striking teachers. "Deception, lying and hypocrisy have become the core values of UNRWA," read another.
The strike affected all of UNRWA's 243 schools in Gaza. Hindi told the teachers he would stand against "oppression and injustice" but added that Palestinians saw UNRWA as a symbol of the cause of refugees and that its role should be preserved "until the Israeli occupation is removed" ...Chris Gunness, UNRWA's chief spokesman in Jerusalem, said disputes should be resolved internally and not through actions that undermine agency operations and services to refugees in Gaza.

Pretty clearly, Gunness and UNRWA were aware then, six years ago, that Al-Hindi was a leading Hamas figure. But they had no problems taking him off suspension, and retaining his services in all the years since then.

Al-Hindi's name appears on the list of the members of Hamas' newly-elected political bureau published this month in the Palestinian media. The Amit Report calls this mention "reliable" (attributed to a "senior Hamas source" and quotes the Quds Press news agency in support), which says the same thing. But look what happened:

After his election had been publicly announced, Dr. al-Hindi issued a series of vigorous denials, claiming he had not been elected to the bureau. He even claimed he planned to sue those responsible for the reports. So far, Hamas has not formally related to the issue of his election... His vigorous denials may be the result of the fact that publicizing his election will make difficulties for him (and Hamas) in dealing with UNRWA. In the past UNRWA objected to its staff belonging to Hamas or other organizations, although the agency never took decisive action to enforce its objections. [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

The report makes some important observations about what this means in terms of the future of Gaza's children:

The election of Dr. Suhail al-Hindi to Hamas' political bureau in the Gaza Strip is another illustration of Hamas' deep penetration into the Gaza Strip's educational system and of the great power of its activists in UNRWA institutions in the Strip. That allows Hamas to systematically indoctrinate Gazan school children with its extremist Islamist ideology. In addition, Hamas' great influence on the educational system in the Gaza Strip enables it to hold paramilitary activities within schools, training young children to join Hamas and the ranks of its military wing. Since Hamas is the power ruling the Gaza Strip, its ideological and military activities in the educational system are not curbed either by UNRWA... or by the Palestinian Authority(which is formally responsible for the educational system in the Gaza Strip, but as in many other governmental areas, its actual influence is limited). [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

UNRWA itself declares proudly that it operates 252 schools in the Gaza Strip, serving more than 240,400 school students:

These children grow up in bleak conditions, frequently surrounded by poverty and violence. School provides them with one place where they are able to learn the skills for a better future.

We believe the numbers but the "better future" claim is preposterous as we have noted over and again when referring to the culture of terrorism, murder and suicide that is now deeply and very evidently ingrained in the lives of Gaza's children. See "27-Oct-16: Who put those knives into the hands of these two little Palestinian Arab boys?" and "10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed" and "15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?"

UNRWA, ostensibly an agency that exists to ameliorate the suffering of Arab refugees in reality serves as a cornerstone of the seven-decades-long Arab strategy to keep the Palestinian Arabs displaced, as miserable as possible and in the news. By their own reckoning, UNRWA's people and budget play a huge role in the education of Palestinian Arab children. They are certainly part of the problem and not of the solution.

As misconceived, camouflaged and fraudulent as UNRWA's role in the disaster happening daily in Gaza's education system is, UNRWA does not deserve all the blame for the horror. Other contributors, including UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development deserve long-overdue attention for the unforgivable and complicit silence and apathy that serve as their indictment.

21-Feb-17: Planning a trip got these British children arrested

No need to get overly concerned: it's just a
"drama/documentary" [Image Source]

Today is another of those fleeting moments when a Western country is again presented with evidence of something deeply malevolent festering in its midst.

Is this news going to get serious attention? Will it be reported in vague terms that carefully step around salient aspects? Will reasonable consumers of current events reporting come away with an actionable sense of a process underway that is gathering momentum?

From a variety of British sources, it emerges that police in the UK yesterday made a cluster of arrests of children on what sound like serious charges. In summary:

• Five teenagers were arrested by Met Police in London on Monday. 
• The suspicion is they were planning a trip "to join a banned terror group" [Daily Mail]. Their ages range from 15 to 19. All are males.
• Prior to the Monday arrests, police had carried out raids at four different homes on January 14, 2017. It's said that the raids were the prelude to yesterday's arrests.
• The police doing the arresting are all from the (London) Metropolitan Police Service Counter Terrorism Command. Internally, it's known as SO15 and defined on the London Metropolitan police website in these not-so-very-clear terms: "The Operations Strand comprises of those units who directly deliver disruptions through both proactive and reactive operations, as well as direct engagements with communities and partners. The strand comprises of five sections: Investigations, Specialist Investigations, Local Operations, Ports and International Operations."
• It was formed in October 2006 with the merger of two predecessor units; the Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13) and Special Branch (SO12) [source].
• Quote: "Scotland Yard did not elaborate on which organisation the teenagers were attempting to join..." Naturally, the news reports we saw don't engage in idle speculation. 
• Those arrested are a 17-year-old male living in south London; a 16-year-old male living in a different south London location; a 17-year-old male living in west London; a 19-year-old male also living in west London but at a different address; and a 15-year-old male arrested in east London at a residence that, from the context, appears not to have been searched last month but which was searched yesterday. Another home, this one in Lambeth (a neighbourhood right in the middle of London) was also searched on Monday "in connection with the investigation".
• The five arrested individuals are said early this morning to have been detained under TACT, the name commonly given to the United Kingdom's Terrorism Act 2000. All five were being held as of a few hours ago in "a central London police station pending further enquiries" into their alleged "plans to travel to join a proscribed organisation". 

The BBC, which notoriously steps gingerly around the word "terror" in its news reports - unless it can quote someone authoritative using the word and then puts it between quotation marks - has a brief report on these events. Surprisingly, the current version of that BBC report ["London terror arrests: Metropolitan Police hold five teenagers", BBC, February 20, 2017] uses the actual word terror in the headline. But don't be surprised if that later gets removed by BBC editors (and note that we have it archived here just in case). It opens with this line:

"Five teenagers have been arrested in London on suspicion of the preparation of terrorist acts, the Metropolitan Police said."

Another British news source which knows the facts at least as well as we do, including the ages of those arrested, describes the people arrested as "men":

Five teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of terror offences in London. The five men, all aged under 20, were arrested on Monday on suspicion of the preparation of terrorist acts, the Metropolitan Police said... [Telegraph UK, February 20, 2017]

But at least four of them are not men. The average age of the five is 16.8. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child calls anyone under the age of 18 a child. And child offenders in the vague and ill-defined field in which the British arrestees allegedly engaged is not a British-only phenomenon as we tweeted a few days ago [here] in the wake of the arrest of a sixteen year-old girl in France.

How interesting it would be if we could find a common element, some shared belief or affiliation that ties her actions with the London Five? Come to that, what do the five Londoners have in common with each other, beyond being boys and residing in the British capital? Maybe something, maybe nothing, maybe a lust for travel. It's hard to know from the reports.

Still, here's a little context: according to a British news report from early this morning quoting a UK government source:

there were 255 terrorism-related arrests in Britain for the year ending 31 March 2016. The only age group to see a rise in the number of arrests was under-18-year-olds... 

So what might it mean for the UK if certain undefined groups of under 18s show an interest in the kind of travel that gets them arrested? Well, not being British, we wouldn't know. But we can't help noticing this report of a BBC television production that is going to be aired early next month:

The Attack: Terror in the UK | This World
With a mass-casualty terror attack in the UK seen as almost inevitable, this drama documentary dramatises what terrorism experts fear is the most likely scenario for Britain's next major terror attack. Counterterrorism police believe that the greatest threat to our security comes from Marauding Terrorist Firearms Attack (MTFA), which can result in dozens of fatalities even if armed police respond within minutes. There are more than a thousand high-priority terrorism suspects in the UK, but there are only enough surveillance officers to monitor a fraction of these at any time. Based on extensive research, The Attack: Terror in the UK tells the story of an Islamic State-inspired terrorist group planning a firearms attack and follows the ongoing police investigation. It focuses on Joseph, a young man who, while in prison for drug and firearms charges, is recruited, converted and radicalised by Islamic extremists - highlighting the fear that links are being forged between Jihadists and street gangs with access to automatic weapons.

It's scheduled to be screened on BBC Two television on Thursday March 2, 2017 at 9:00 pm, UK time. We hope there's an opportunity to view it from outside the UK. Could be interesting, not least because it got the BBC to speak the word "terror" without hanging it around some other person's neck. And as today's news shows, it's surely timely.

Though on reflection, wouldn't it be better for the Brits if the BBC - masters of selectively-opaque reporting, circumlocution and wrong-headed political "correctness" - were take this kind of robust approach in its news content and not only in its docu-dramas?

30-Nov-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs *not* want?

Palestinian Authority boss among friends yesterday
in Ramallah [Image Source]

If you saw our earlier post of the day ["30-Nov-16: Remind us again just how central the conflict with Israel is to the Arab world"], you will be aware that not only did the largest and controlling faction of the Palestinian Authority - Fatah - just re-elect Mahmoud Abbas to be its leader in its first general assembly in more than seven years. But its 1,400 delegates did so unanimously.

(A Guardian piece from 2015 on extremely one-sided election results makes for some good background reading, and suggests names of politicians who might be green with envy at Abbas' attainment.)

Oh, as the New York Times report that we quoted points out, and in a hall into which journalists were not admitted. For several reasons, that's a shame (and "shame" is just what we mean). Among them is the fact that Abbas's advisor for Strategic Affairs said in the Jerusalem Post ten days ago that "the upcoming congress will be a turning point for Palestinian politics". In the Palestinian Arab context, a turning point might be very welcome. And certainly worth reading about if reporters knew what they were.

But turning point or not, it's worth considering whether re-electing the feckless, reckless, terrorism-friendly "moderate" Abbas to be its leader is something that reflects popular Palestinian Arab will. 

The answer is clearly no. 

We refer often in this blog to Palestinian Arab public opinion as measured by Palestinian Arab public opinion polls. (They're very likely the only polls worth studying in this context.) In our most recent post on polls ["18-Oct-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think and feel now?"] we provided evidence that, in terms of the latest Palestinian Arab opinion poll numbers:

two thirds demand Abbas resignation, Fatah has not gained any additional support during the last three months, and a majority of Palestinians believes that the PA has become a burden on the Palestinian people... Level of satisfaction with the performance of president Abbas stands at 34%...

And to this:

Dissatisfaction is related to the sense that Palestinian Arabs live lives mired in official corruption: 80% of them say they believe the PA's institutions are corrupt. The signs are they are astute enough to understand that press freedom is not going to make things better. Only 17% say there is press freedom in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, belief in freedom of the local press stands at 16%.

Aljazeera, November 26, 2016 [Source]

Bottom line: the Palestinian Arabs have just gotten precisely what they overwhelmingly don't want: more Abbas kleptocracy, corruption, nepotism, suppression, missed opportunities, stagnation.

Israel's hand in this? None.

The prospects of an Abbas-led regime bringing us all closer to peace? Roughly the same.

The one positive thing to come from this mess? That true to their core values as an honor/shame society and in the words of last week's Aljazeera news report [here], "Fatah will give Abbas an honourable exit".

And what, other than saving innocent lives on all sides, bringing an end to the weaponization of Palestinian Arab children and ending the reign of a massively corrupt, geriatric and manipulative regime, could be more important than that?