19-Sep-19 Gazan victims of a cognitive war: Who cares?

Nurses in a Gaza hospital [Image Source: Aljazeera]

Associated Press reported last night on something that happens often - much more often than even attentive followers of events in the Arab vs Israel conflict know - but that rarely gets reported even though it involves Palestinian Arab victims.

Because they're the victims of extreme Palestinian Arab malevolence, such events and their often lethal consequences go unnoticed.

We have reported on many dozens of them in this blog.We call them Fell Shorts.

Rockets fired from Gaza fall short, wound 7 Palestinians
By Associated Press
September 18 at 2:57 PM
JERUSALEM — Seven Palestinians have been wounded after a rocket barrage from the Gaza Strip exploded near a house inside the coastal enclave. Palestinian eyewitnesses said Wednesday that two of the three rockets struck outside a home in the southern city of Rafah, and a third fell near the fence separating Israel and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military said it had identified “a failed launch attempt” from the Gaza Strip, but that no projectiles entered Israel. Gaza’s health ministry said seven people were wounded, but didn’t elaborate on their condition. It wasn’t clear which Palestinian militant group in Gaza was behind the rocket fire.

The AP dateline is Jerusalem. It's worth recalling that almost everything that is reported from the Hamas-occupied Gaza Strip is based on what the Hamas regime chooses to announce. Reporters, to say it mildly, do not operate freely there.

Times of Israel bases its report of the same Fell Shorts on AP. But there are differences and they're also worth noting:

• The rocket barrage from the Gaza Strip was aimed at Israel.
• It points out that Gaza’s health ministry is Hamas-run. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Everything it does and says is meaningfully colored by that reality. The same goes for what it doesn't say.
• It provided some context not found in the AP report: "Rockets have been fired at Israeli cities and communities multiple times this month — with most intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system or landing in open areas — drawing retaliatory Israeli airstrikes."
• But while the AP version doesn't seem to know about the context and those ongoing rocket attacks directed from Gaza against any Israeli communities within firing range, the AP editors choose to inject this sanguine note which their Israeli counterparts wisely did not: "Israel and Hamas reached an informal cease-fire in May, following the worst bout of fighting since a 2014 war between them, which has largely held." Right, except when it hasn't.

What happened in the end to those "wounded" Palestinian Gazan Arabs next to whose home the  Palestinian Arabs rockets crashed? 

Hamas certainly knows. Its ministry of "health" knows too but isn't saying; that's not its job. The unfortunate family itself knows. But since they can only blame the heroes of the anti-Zionist revolution for what was done to them, their voices count literally for nothing in that blighted society. There are many such silenced voices in Gaza.

In blunt terms, without intending to sound offensive or insensitive - when it comes to Palestinian Arab victims of Palestinian Arab terrorist violence, who cares?

31-Mar-17: Tamimi, our daughter's grinning, boasting, convicted murderer, now says she's innocent

The opening scene of the March 22 interview video [Click to view]

The woman who masterminded the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001 and who was subsequently tried, convicted and sentenced after confessing to all 15 counts of homicide is now, finally, the subject of a United States warrant for her arrest and extradition to the US.

Jordan, where she has been living freely since October 2011, has had an extradition treaty with the US since 1995. But starting two weeks ago, it claims the treaty has no effect... for reasons no one should take seriously. (And which the United States does not accept.)

Ignore the specious legalities. Jordan refuses to hand her over to the US because she is a national hero to the Jordanians, 70% of whom are Palestinian Arabs.

To state that more clearly: she's a Jordanian and Arab hero not because she is innocent (no one seriously claims that) but because she did plan and she did carry out the killings of Israelis. That's what makes her many supporters so proud.

Most of the people she killed were children. All were Jewish; the majority were religiously-observant Jews. None of this is coincidental. It was central to the killer's plan.

Our daughter Malki who was 15 years old was among those blown to pieces.

The woman's name is Ahlam Tamimi. She confessed to the murders in court when charged by Israel in 2003. She then confessed again and again and again on television, on the social media, in press interviews, at every opportunity. She has never stopped confessing. It is a core element of her persona. As a person who for more than four years hosted her own prime time television program recorded in Amman, Jordan, and beamed by satellite to every part of the world where there are interested Arabic speakers, she has had unprecedented opportunities to boast of her murders in public.

Image Source: "03-Aug-15: The triumph and the 

silence: A killer's fame and what it reveals about her world"

We think there might never have been another person anywhere in the history of mankind who has boasted as much as she has to so many onlookers and listeners and readers about being the mass murderer of innocent people.

But this week she stopped, at least for a moment. She has decided she's innocent.

Here's what happened.

Associated Press sent a team to interview Tamimi in her home in Amman last week. (The details we leave for another time. We have lodged a bitter complaint with AP.)

AP has just posted to YouTube the raw video of that Tamimi interview here. They did it quietly and with no announcement, certainly not to us, and almost no one has noticed. It has gotten fewer than 50 views as of now (4:00 pm Friday Israel time).

Look at just the first two minutes. There's no English translation in the raw video. But with the help of native-Arabic speakers, we're told this is what the FBI fugitive is saying:

"The court ruled for not extraditing me to the US. Of course I'm happy, that was my first reaction, because I didn't do anything, and the charges filed against me by the US are not true, I know nothing about them and I never did that. The Jordanian decision [not to extradite] was true, because the court in Jordan asked the US to send the whole file of the lawsuit but it didn't do that." [Tamimi, interviewed by AP on March 22, 2017]

Shortly after that, she says:

"When we carry out defensive operations in Palestine we don't target children, but they are there normally, I will never ever kill a child deliberately, but they are there." [Tamimi, interviewed by AP on March 22, 2017]

Image Source: Video: Released Hamas Terrorist Ahlam 

Tamimi on Palestinian Public's Delight at Suicide Bombings

So to be clear: she clearly now wants to thought of as innocent, she didn't do anything and she knows nothing about the charges against her. You can see her saying that literally in a major interview published a week ago by Al Jazeera. We reported and criticized it here: 24-Mar-17: Our daughter's smiling killer: "Shocked" that US "decided to go after her for no obvious reason".

On the other hand, there's no shortage of videos showing Tamimi boasting of systematically selecting a site (i.e. Sbarro) that attracts crowds of children; of the joy she felt at learning how many lives she had extinguished; about the rising pleasure of the people sitting with her as she fled the scene in a Jerusalem-to-Ramallah Arab taxi who were thrilled at the news of a growing death toll coming in over the radio about the massacre... and what a battle she faced to not admit to them that she was the bomber.

Since early 2012, we have been trying to get her behind American bars (our daughter Malki was one of the two US citizens killed in the Sbarro attack), we have grown familiar with how the truth gets bent into unrecognizable shapes and how this gets enabled. Tamimi's new denials, which we assume she intended as an answer the FBI's charges against her and not about the actual murders, will cause some part of the global public to have doubts about her culpability. That's of course especially true in her home base, the Arab world. We've learned such things don't just happen. They're made to happen. It's an aspect of cognitive warfare.

Why do we allow this to be so easy for them? Can anyone recall a previous instance of a convicted murderer, an FBI fugitive, being granted a global media platform to spread poisonous, self-justifying views? Is there something about Islamist terror or the generations-long Arab-on-Israeli warfare that explains it?

[For our previous posts about Tamimi, click.]

UPDATE Sunday, April 2, 2017: See Frimet Roth's take, via her blog: "Falling victim to the media's "most ethical" behavior"

06-Sep-15: The making of a pigtailed provocateur

There's a reason she has such stage presence. 

The Tamimi clan child who featured in the staged clash ["02-Sep-15: Lights, action, camera, bite: Scenes from a cognitive war"] in a town a little north of Jerusalem ten days ago brings years of experience and practice to the role. But her determined parents get a large part of the credit, along with the PA education system via which she is acquiring life skills.

She is a mere ten year old moppet in the pictures below. They come from a YouTube video dated July 2, 2010. It was filmed in Nabi Saleh, the Palestinian Arab town which earned itself a New York Times Magazine cover two and a half years ago. We responded to that cover story here: "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns". 

The child now better known as Shirley Temper, as a 10 year old, playing ball
inches away from a cluster of armed soldiers of the IDF. Experience has given the well-prepared 
Nabi Saleh children an uncommon sense of what to fear and what not. Hence their apparent
lack of fear of the Israeli soldiers. [Source: A Nabi Saleh video dated July 2, 2010 (at 7m 01s)

Screaming on demand as the cameras roll to capture the "clash" as the well-armed
IDF servicemen stand by impassively. Syria this certainly isn't, as the children know.
Source: A Nabi Saleh video dated July 2, 2010 (at 2 m 20 s)

Shirley Temper (Ahed Tamimi), ten and as angry as she needs to be,
screaming on demand again. Great YouTube fodder
Source: A Nabi Saleh video dated July 2, 2010 at 2m 40s

Barely ten years old (her right arm is raised) and already "fearless",
and aware of the lengths to which IDF soldiers  will go to avoid falling victim to
the provocations engineered by the Palestinian Arab parents of these children.
Source: A Nabi Saleh video dated July 2, 2010 (at  1m 4 s)

Here she is (below) this past Friday, September 3, 2015, now 15 and in the clutches of an important visitor to Nabi Saleh.

The Syrian-born political figure in the dark suit and with a roughly, more-or-less sort-of-fatherly arm over her shoulders is famous in Palestinian Arab circles because he used to be the Fatah Revolutionary Council's Deputy Secretary General.

The PA being what it is, the distance between revolution and school-children is never very great. So now Dr. Sabri Saidam is making a name as His Excellency Minister of Education and Higher Education in the Abbas regime.

It's not difficult to figure why the person responsible for Palestinian Arab education would want to be at the center of a photo opp in that particular village at this particular time. The sympathetic media coverage in certain quarters must be a huge temptation to someone with his hands-on approach to the emerging generation of activist Palestinian Arab boys and girls.

Shirley Temper and the PA Minister of Education
Source: Facebook image from Nabi Saleh, September 3, 2015 

Below, His Excellency the minister, with the Tamimi girl and her brother (see the boy with the plaster cast), alongside Bassem Tamimi, proud father and performance director:

Tamimis with the Minister | Source: Facebook image from Nabi Saleh, September 3, 2015

Additional background:

• 04-Sep-15: Mr. Human Rights Defender, a question if we may
• 02-Sep-15: Lights, action, camera, bite: Scenes from a cognitive war
• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists 
• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters 
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

02-Sep-15: Lights, action, camera, bite: Scenes from a cognitive war

Iconic image: The Tamimi clan and last Friday's battle for Nabi Saleh [Image Source]
Knowing where the father and husband is at this exact moment is the key
to understanding what actually happened 

A reader of this blog has been on a personal odyssey for the past year. In a letter she sent us today, Pam, who lives in New York State, describes how she got to the point of feeling compelled to engage in some personal research on Israel and the challenges it faces. 

The process was triggered during the tumultuous days of last summer’s Operation Protective Edge when she found herself in discussion with a Palestinian friend on Facebook. Her friend's claims were so damning of Israel that she felt the need to personally dig into sources and separate out what was truthful from what was not.

Some days ago, she was invited to a local event. It looked innocuous enough - in her words “perhaps even worthy”. She looked a little more carefully into the cause promoted by the hosts of the gathering, and then she sat down to reply to them earlier today. Pam has kindly allowed us to share her letter here.

Subject: Bassem's Speaking Engagement in Woodstock
Date: September 2, 2015  

Hi Ellen and Ariel, 

I am going to decline this invite. I thought this speaker would be at a public venue, and not breaking bread with us on Rosh Hashanah. I don't break bread with patriarchs of a terrorist clan, nor do I break bread with people who engage in child abuse. Yes, I believe indoctrinating your children with hate and encouraging them to commit crimes, including orchestrating suicide bombs to kill innocent people is indeed child abuse.   Bassem's beloved daughter did just this. I understand that he is very proud of her. And well, I think we can surmise which direction his daughter "Shirley Temper" is headed. People are not born with hate in their heart; they are taught this. 

One of the victims of the Sbarro massacre was Malka Roth. She was 15 years old, and her only crime was eating pizza. Her father and mother have had to live with this tragedy for the last 14 years - their daughter taken from them in such a horrific way.

Do you have children? The loss of a child is indescribable. By having this man to dinner, one could infer that you condone these behaviours. I certainly don't. 

I take it upon myself to educate my fellow humans on the truths about Israel and the lies of many Palestinians, a narrative that gets oft repeated but clearly violates any semblance of reality. I also learn a lot from people like Bassem Eid, a true human rights advocate. Or Mudar Zahran, who is also Palestinian who speaks about one of the core issues of the Palestinians, all calls for violence must end and the right of return for descendants of refugees to the State of Israel will not happen. Palestinians have a unique definition for "refugee" that is not used by any other ethnic group on the planet - none. 

Bassem's urging of Pallywood charades do no service to his family either. His cute little son can't even remember which arm to wear his cast on as it keeps floating from one arm to the other. What kind of man, what kind of father encourages his child to engage in this behavior? Or should we conclude that this poor child has had multiple bones broken, in both arms, thereby requiring him to always wear a cast. If so, how horrid is this and shouldn't someone be looking into this? 

Peace will only come when Palestinians can elect a government that does not encourage violence towards its neighbours, in the form of rockets, stabbings, cars running over innocent people, or "by any means possible". They need to stop spreading lies that Israel wants to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque which is a complete fabrication. You do know that none of us here can even pray on the Temple Mount, yes? That sure sounds like religious discrimination to me, as a Jew. 

They need to stop wishing for a Judenfrei land, because that is their wish. Arabs that stayed in Israel after the war and are Israeli citizens are some of the best cared for Arabs in the entire Middle East, with full citizenship and all that it entails in any democratic society. The ones that left and "settled" in other ME countries such as Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan cannot say that about their own plight which is truly the tragedy. Israel ethnically cleansed thousands of Jews out of Gaza only to be thanked with suicide bombings and more rockets. My people have been virtually expelled out of the entire MENA area but that is not good enough for them. They want all of the Jews gone. Great, Muslim majority countries are doing such a bang up job with the countries they already have.  

Thank G-d for Israel's existence. Never again means that Jews from all over the world know that if circumstances were to change violently, as we are starting to see in many countries - they will always have a safe haven and Israel will protect them. Israel does more for its own people than any Arab country has ever done for their own, such as the Palestinians. 

So in conclusion, I am shocked that this man is allowed to fly freely into my country, as clearly child abuse is a crime. Encouraging and inciting violence is also a crime. However, what is important to note, is that Israel does allow him to fly. Sure sounds like oppression to me, said no one sane ever.

I can continue to educate humanity about the truth behind this conflict and G-d takes care of the rest.

You enjoy your Rosh Hashanah as I will enjoy mine, as I continue to pray for innocent people being killed for being Jews. 

Never forget. Never again. 
Pam

* * *

The guest speaker whom Pam was invited to hear is Bassem Tamimi. It's his family and clan that feature in the “clash” with IDF soldiers described in our previous posts:

• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists 
• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters 
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

We hear that Tamimi is going to be speaking at locations across the US in the next two weeks. We wonder whether he's going to explain in a frank and honest way the things that can be seen in the following photos. Let's call them the Nabi Saleh Photographer Swarm.

Image Source

Image Source

Image Source

These photos were taken from just behind where the now-famous boy-in-the-headlock scenes were captured in the little village of Nabi Saleh this past Friday. We became aware of them only today. They can be seen at a French site here.  

The man in the green shirt above is Bassem Tamimi, proprietor of Tamimi Press and arguably the producer/director/screenwriter of the entire show, a weekly production as many know but which the working media rarely reveal. Green-shirted Tamimi can be seen leading the march towards the staged "clash" with the IDF forces at the start of the Tamimi Press video of the Friday performance (here).

Those pictures above show the camera men pointing their lenses at a couple of children, plus women, who are shrieking, screaming and wrestling with an armed IDF soldier about, let's guess, eight feet from Bassem's face. 

Here's the thing: the little boy is his. The shrieking and cool-as-a-cucumber girl ("Shirley Temper") is his. One of the women is his wife. And what does Bassem, the father, do in the face of the violence that seems to have been inflicted on his family out of the blue and for no reason whatsoever, at all?

He stays out of sight and as inconspicuous as possible, away from where the cameras are pointing, on the perimeter, as these little-publicized photos show. Not intervening for a moment, he's evidently making sure - as a director should - that the images are captured to plan. And then once captured, fired out into the battlefields of the newspapers, TVs and web screens of US and Europe and beyond, because for him this is cognitive war. 

He and his family are soldiers. Europe and the US are the strategic goals.

Why should he intervene? It's fairly clear that, knowing what Bassem Tamimi knows from years of weekly charades like this one, he remains calm and unflustered throughout because he's well aware his family members are in no serious danger of anything other than slip-and-fall injuries. Syria, this is not. It's not even Ramallah. 

What this is, friends, is a minimum-risk operation, with a huge return on modest investment, underwritten via the willing collaboration of a host of camera-operators, reporters, headline writers and cable news presenters. 

People are going to be studying the lessons of this shabby, child-abuse-rich affair for years to come.

01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists

The Tamimi boy from Nabi Saleh with his arm in a plaster caste, being
energetic and mobile in a screen-capture taken just moments before
he was photographed headlocked by an IDF soldier. 
The source is this video clip.

The events about which we wrote here on Sunday ["29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters"] have triggered starkly contrasting reactions.

In one corner are those who see the villagers of Nabi Saleh as peace-loving, non-violent nobility, battling to preserve dignity and fields.

In the other, those who are left dumbfounded by the brazen manipulation of women and girls, naked child-abuse, and contrived exploitation of public opinion via the villagers' use of calculated provocations, staged clashes and strategically-placed photographers. Without the presence of those camera men, none of the drama would be happening.

Even if this were not the hamlet that spawned, encouraged, celebrated and then idolized the woman who planted a bomb (a human bomb) in a Jerusalem pizzeria in order to kill as many Jewish children as possible, and succeeded, we would surely have been in that first corner. 

Same boy, different circumstances some minutes later

We explained our rationale in a March 2013 post ["A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]. We wrote it in response to a cover story in the New York Times Magazine whose distortions, tendentiousness and adoration of murderous violence literally sickened us. We expressed our criticism in a letter to the editors at the New York Times who ignored us. We then found our own way to show our disgust; you can read about that here. We remain appalled and infuriated by some of the journalism we see them practice there.

Those who see only giants and heroes in that hateful little Palestinian Arab town probably share the view, typical of its kind, that asserts

the village is struggling for humanity, justice, peace and dignity, and... they need their freedom [via a far-left Israeli publication, yesterday]

But there are Arabic-language sources that tell us with far greater candor and clarity what really drives Nabi Saleh's Tamimis. Those Arabic texts naturally were never intended to be seen by people like us and those who read our posts. But web tools make them easy to find.

* * * 

Take for example Wikipedia's Arabic-language entry on Nabi Saleh. As we wrote here on Saturday night, someone doctored the Wikipedia text shortly after we first publicized it. Every reference to the village people's adoration of jihad, martyrdom and death to the Israelis was erased. But this past weekend, we found the original Arabic text as it had appeared on Wikipedia in May 2013. We saved the original Arabic text to here, and a partial English translation to here. They are archived now thanks to the wonders of the Internet, and safe (we think) from the destructive attentions of those who feel compelled to re-invent the past. 

That deleted Wikipedia text is the village of Nabi Saleh paying tribute to its own viciously violent true self: to its warriors, to its killers, to its dead fighters, and above all to its favourite daughter, the one who smiles on-camera when she recalls how many innocent Jewish children she blew to pieces in the Sbarro pizzeria, our daughter Malki among them.

Virtually everyone in Nabi Saleh is a member of the Tamimi clan. That includes our daughter's murderer and the murderer's husband who is also her cousin - and also a convicted murder of Jews. And also freed in the catastrophic Shalit Deal four years ago. (They now live in Amman, Jordan). And also a hero of those self-proclaimed peace-loving, non-violent villagers.

* * * 

An expert on that form of terror, Dr Anat Berko who authored "The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers", offers some sharp and relevant observations in an interview published today in Algemeiner. Noting that Palestinian Arab society, like virtually every other part of Arab society, is patriarchal, she points out that they systematically use women and children as front-line combatants. And as so often happens with the actions of people lacking scruples and fundamental morality, it pays off:

[T]he West will always view women and children as non-combatants. This is why they are often used as shields for the men. We have seen this in violent demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza, where the men literally hide under the skirts of females. We saw it this week in the viral video of the IDF soldier being attacked by a group of females – even bitten by a girl – while he was trying to stop a Palestinian boy throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Any wounds sustained by women and children are automatically viewed in the West as war crimes committed by Israel...

which is plainly true. But in reality, what is happening is that

the crime against these women and children is being committed by the leaders of their society – who raise them to know nothing but hate – and by the terror masters, who treat them like cannon fodder. In this ongoing war, what we call non-combatants are actually combatants... and women and children are their ultimate weapons, because the West sees them as innocents. [Dr Anat Berko in Algemeiner, August 31, 2015]

In the company of men: The Tamimi child is taken to Turkey
to be praised for her 'bravery', December 2012 - and groomed for
more of the same [Image Source]

The West, but not so much the East. The Tamimi child (the one widely known today as Shirley Temper) who features prominently in this past weekend's video, and in virtually every video issuing forth for years via Tamimi Press, her father's well-funded Nabi Saleh publicity machine, received an award for 'bravery' in Turkey in December 2012. She was thirteen years old:

Tamimi said she was proud to get the Handala award which would enhance her strength... Handala Courage Award, handed out by the Basaksehir Municipality, was named after the cartoon character Handala created by Palestinian cartoonist Naji Salim al-Ali noted for the political criticism of the Arab regimes and Israel in his works. Visiting Turkey as being the guest of Basaksehir Municipality of Istanbul, 13-year-old Tamimi attended a series of events ahead of the award ceremony and opened an art exhibition titled "Being children in Palestine". She thanked Turkish children for welcoming her as she was one of them, and called on the Palestinian children to stand tall, at the ceremony. [TimeTurk, December 27, 2012]

We're not so sure the children heard her. But the many middle-aged men in the photo above did. It's their will she is doing. She evidently pleases them.

* * *

How obvious is the ongoing abuse of women and children in bucolic Nabi Saleh? The answer is pretty clear in the video clips of Friday's staged confrontation. Take this video clip for instance. It's from Tamimi Press, the propaganda business operated by Shirley Temper's father,

At the start of the "clash", we see a group of mostly men, plus two or three women and girls setting off down the road to find the soldiers:

A few minutes later, it's men only as they launch into rock-hurling and sling-shot firing at the Israelis:

Then more of the same, with no women or girls to be seen:

And then finally, the now-gone-viral iconic scene of an IDF soldier, armed with lethal weapons that remain carefully under his control, suffering a biting- and manhandling-attack by women and children along with a freelance photographer:

So where are the rock-hurling, sling-shot-firing macho fellows, the men, whose manly voices are heard singing songs of triumph at the start of the video just a few minutes earlier? The men - where are the men? 

That's a question for the camera operator. If anyone knows what sort of image the global market needs to be fed, needs to buy, it's the camera person. And men are not part of it. You do what you need to do. This is war - that sort of war.

Nabi Saleh's children jubilant as they prepare to get back several
of their beloved convicted murderers, October 2011 [Image Source]

* * *

When the convicted and unrepentant mass-murderer Ahlam Tamimi, the architect of the Sbarro massacre and already a celebrity, was about to walk free in the Shalit Deal, the joyous public celebrations in Nabi Saleh featured prominently in media coverage. 

(Three other Tamimis, all males, all convicted of the vicious 1993 murder of Chaim Mizrachi, a man with whom they had friendly relations, all sentenced to life terms, were due to be freed at the same time. Two of them - Nizar Samir Mahmud al-Tamimi and Ahmad Yusuf Mahmud al-Tamimi were in fact let loose and returned immediately to Nabi Saleh as heroes. The third, Sa’id Rushdi Mohammad At-Tamimi, was released in a separate round of US-inspired terrorist releases two years later in December 2013. The connection of these three convicted Nabi Saleh killers to non-violence, dignity and human rights is somewhat unclear to us.)

Nabi Saleh, October 2011. The woman holding the portrait
of our daughter's murderer is the murderer's sister, Eftikhar
Tamimi [Image Source]

Four Nabi Saleh murderers freed long before serving out their sentences, and at the same time subverting Israeli justice - clearly a cause for celebration in villagers' eyes. The pretense of Nabi Saleh's ersatz devotion to non-violence was dumped for a while as the joy of seeing killers returned to their homes in triumph kicked in. See "The anthem of Nabi Saleh: “Release our prisoners or arrest us all”" for more background.

* * *

The repurposing of Palestinian Arab women, and especially girls, for terrorist warfare took on a new reality in the past few weeks. An Al-Monitor reports ["Hamas concludes first-ever military training camp for girls", August 1, 2015] on a summer training program that was opened up for teen-age females in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Called "First al-Quds Army Camp" it was created

to prepare academically exceptional girls aged 12-18 for the liberation battle of Palestine... Hamas has never organized a female training camp before. Around 1,000 girls attend the camp, which offered a special curriculum to resist the occupation taught by women affiliated with the Hamas movement. These women enjoy extensive military experience and know how to intellectually mobilize people against the occupation. Camp director Rajaa al-Halabi told Al-Monitor, "The goal of the First al-Quds Army camp is to prepare girls for self-defense and for future battles against the occupation." [Al-Monitor]

Dr Anat Berko naturally looks beyond the self-serving rhetoric of the Islamists who created it:

"Women in Palestinian society have always been abused; training them to become fighters along with the men is not an act of equality, but rather another form of abuse." Berko, who spent years interviewing would-be and actual terrorists in Israeli jails, has frequently pointed out that the terror masters and their dispatchers never send their own children on suicide missions. [The camp] is part of the wider campaign of Hamas and other groups to take advantage of and manipulate the population. "It is the socialization of kids through terror,” she said. “It is child abuse, plain and simple. But where is the international outrage about it?" [Algemeiner]

There's no good answer to her question. Billions of dollars flow annually into the coffers of global child-protection and children's rights organizations like UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development and others.

Strangely, the Islamist regimes and the terrorist training they inflict on the children fated to live under their boots routinely get ignored by all of them. Why? Because.

(We have written about this ongoing Arab child-abuse tragedy several times: "24-Jan-13: Sacrificing the lives of an entire generation of adolescents on their altar of hatred, the thugs of Hamas boast of plans to create a children's army"; "10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed" and "12-Feb-15: It's Red Hand Day. Do you know where the children are?" The information we pulled together is open source and available to anyone who wants to find it.]

Among the last of the photos we have of our murdered
daughter is this one from the few days she spent in
August 2001 being a camp counselor to special-needs
children 

* * *

Our daughter Malki, whose life was stolen from us when she was the same age as little Shirley Temper is today, spent most of her last week of life at a summer camp too, as

a volunteer counselor at a summer camp for children with developmental delays and special needs. The camp takes place each summer in the north of Israel, and involves many hundreds of participants from all parts of the country. It's organized by Etgarim, an association with some lovely people running it. Malki and her friend Rachel traveled up north without being sure they would be accepted as volunteers. They were, in the end, and Malki came back from there smiling from ear to ear. She loved everything about it. She was murdered a few days afterwards, and we heard most of the stories we know about that camp from the other counsellors and the organizers... ["11-Aug-06: Good and evil"]

Malki's mother Frimet wrote this nine years ago:

During the five days they were there assisting the counselors, Malki's gentle, caring way touched everyone. Many of the people associated with Etgarim travelled long distances to comfort us during the Shiva - one trekked all the way from Kiryat Shmona at Israel's northernmost edge and back in one day, a four hour drive each way-and related incredible stories to us about Malki.
One of the counsellors who had supervised her remembered the farewell chat he had conducted with the volunteers the night before their return home. When he asked each of the volunteers to stand up and tell the group what they viewed as the most important feature of their stint, they all emphasized the importance of and satisfaction gained from giving to others. Malki was the last one to speak. We were told that she was the only one who spoke of what she had gained - of the happiness she had experienced in working with the children. ["27-Nov-06: Today Would Have Been Our Daughter's 21st Birthday"]

We're thinking still of Malki's gentle smile, and struggling even now with the fact that she will never reach her sixteenth birthday. And trying to make sense of the summer camps, role-models and futures our neighbours have created for their children.

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.