06-Nov-14: The killers among us

Poster of the "blessed martyr" Mu'taz Hijazi, praising the
attempted murderer for his life of "jihad and sacrifice", appears
on the Arabic-language website of the "Rachel Corrie
Palestinian Center for Human Rights" here

From today's Jerusalem Post, a startling report that highlights glaring gaps in the approach taken by Israeli law enforcement officials to the growing threat from jihad-minded terrorists living and working inside Israeli society:

Almagor Terror Victims Association is preparing a database of released terrorists so businesses can look up potential employees, accusing the Justice Ministry and Israel Police of negligence for not doing so themselves.
The initiative comes a week after Mu’taz Hijazi, a terrorist released from Israeli prison, attempted to assassinate Temple Mount activist Rabbi Yehuda Glick, outside the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. Hijazi worked in Terasa, the restaurant in the museum, where Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Reuven Rivlin and other senior officials have dined. Terasa's management said after the attack that they did not know Hijazi had been in Israeli prison for multiple stabbings and murder attempts. "We checked, and the police and Justice Ministry do not have any system of warning workplaces," Almagor director Lt.-Col. Meir Indor explained, demanding that [they] establish one to limit terrorists' easy access to Israelis.
Families of terror victims have already begun voluntarily providing the organization with details about the terrorists and who they killed or injured, and requested that the Justice Ministry provide them with information about the terrorists' locations. Indor pointed out that the Justice Minister does give information about pedophiles freed from jail...

More here.

30-Aug-12: Who killed Rachel Corrie?

[Image Source]

An Israeli court ruled yesterday in a civil case brought by the family of Rachel Corrie that the government of Israel bears no responsibility for her death in 2003. Seeing the large number of angry columns that appeared in the last 24 hours arguing one side or the other, we felt no need to join the shouting match.

Then we read a slick, subjective, sneering and thoroughly sickening advocacy piece that appears today on the website of TIME Magazine. Concealing much more than it reveals about yesterday's judicial decision, it is authored by the magazine's Jerusalem correspondent Karl Vick. Vick is the husband of the woman who manages press relations for the Corries. We'll leave it to others to comment on the ethical dimensions.

Once we read the TIME piece, we realized we need to say something. So it's the trigger for our republishing here a brief extract from a factual, moderate-toned and modest contribution to the Corrie controversy written by Lenny Ben David. It's published on the Times of Israel's website [here]. If you read nothing else about the Corrie decision, read this one and pass the contents around.

From Lenny Ben David's article:

Numerous pictures of Corrie standing defiantly in front of an Israeli bulldozer appeared in the media, but upon investigation it transpired that not a single one was from the incident that killed her. Some were taken hours before the fatal incident with a different bulldozer; others were sloppy photoshopped forgeries. Why were there photos after she was injured and not before?Corrie was not the only member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who was nearly crushed beneath the bulldozer’s maw that day. Indeed, at least two – “Will and Jenny” – were pulled away by their colleagues at the last second.Immediately after Corrie’s death, several leaders of ISM were interviewed. They didn’t express horror or even sorrow. They spoke of peace soldiers’ sacrifices in battle and the PR benefits of an American woman dying at hands of Israel’s army. [More]

The life and death (by deliberate act of murder) of our daughter Malki deserves, but certainly has never gotten, at least a tiny fraction of the worshipful attention paid by journalists to the Corries and their daughter's accidental death. We're content that Malki's memory is honored by a foundation bearing her name that we created and that, daily, does measurable, concrete and quite unique good for families of special-needs children in Israel, whether they are Christian, Moslem, Jews or of any other faith. 

Thousands of them in the last ten years.

30-Aug-12: How close to hell is Gaza? Depends whom you want to believe

Image from "Hungry in Gaza, More and More"

Gaza will no longer be “liveable” by 2020 unless urgent action is taken to improve water supply, power, health, and schooling, the United Nations’ most comprehensive report on the Palestinian enclave said on Monday.

That opening sentence is a direct and vebatim quote from a Reuters syndicated report issued two days ago. You can see it in a large number of places on the Web; here's one from Gulf News, an Arab newspaper that gave it considerable prominence.

Many, many news channels are focused on its grim and pessimistic message - one that plays well with the energetically marketed image of Gaza as "the world's largest prison", a "big concentration camp", "stressed, desperate and in poverty". Characterizations like those go hand-in-glove with the shameless apologetics of Hamas and the terrorism-friendly ideologues with whom it travels.

The paragraphs below, by contrast, come from an article written by an unusually authoritative expert on the subject, an Arab. The chances that it will appear in the Gulf News or Reuters or other news channels of global significance are next to none. The writer is Khaled Abu Toameh. We have frequently reprinted here things he has published over the past six years.

How Many Millionaires Live in the "Impoverished" Gaza Strip? | Khaled Abu Toameh / August 30, 2012

The world often thinks of the Gaza Strip, home to 1.4 million Palestinians, as one of the poorest places on earth, where people live in misery and squalor. But according to an investigative report published in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, there are at least 600 millionaires living in the Gaza Strip. The newspaper report also refutes the claim that the Gaza Strip has been facing a humanitarian crisis because of an Israeli blockade. Mohammed Dahlan, the former Palestinian Authority security commander of the Gaza Strip, further said last week that Hamas was the only party that was laying siege to the Gaza Strip; that it is Hamas, and not Israel or Egypt, that is strangling and punishing the people there. The Palestinian millionaires, according to the report, have made their wealth thanks to the hundreds of underground tunnels along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Informed Palestinian sources revealed that every day, in addition to weapons, thousands of tons of fuel, medicine, various types of merchandise, vehicles, electrical appliances, drugs, medicine and cigarettes are smuggled into the Gaza Strip through more than 400 tunnels. A former Sudanese government official who visited the Gaza Strip lately was quoted as saying that he found basic goods that were not available in Sudan. Almost all the tunnels are controlled by the Hamas government, which has established a special commission to oversee the smuggling business, which makes the Hamas government the biggest benefactor of the smuggling industry. Palestinians estimate that 25% of the Hamas government's budget comes from taxes imposed on the owners of the underground tunnels. For example, Hamas has imposed a 25% tax and a $2000 fee on every car that is smuggled into the Gaza Strip. Hamas also charges $15 dollars for each ton of cement, eight cents for a pack of cigarettes and 50 cents for each liter of fuel smuggled through the tunnels.

You can't arrive at a solution to the conflict through understanding what Abu Toameh reveals here. But his contributions and analyses certainly go some way towards understanding the never-ending torrents of hatred and aggression emanating from the ruling clique in Gaza.

Khaled Abu Toameh's article today also throws some light on those oceans of ink expended on attempting to beatify Rachel Corrie, the idealistic young American woman whose parents have devoted the last nine years seeking to pin her superfluous, tragic death at the age of 23 on Israel and Israelis. It would be unthinkable for them to have to connect their loss to a process that has enriched and continues to enrich a kleptocratic thugocracy in Gaza City and in other dark corners of the Hamas underworld.

So don't expect the Gazan millionaire class to get headline coverage anytime soon.

11-Jul-11: Suggesting some context for the media's focus on the Corries

Malki, our daughter, spent the last week 

of her life in the summer of 2001 as a 

volunteer counselor at a camp for

cognitively-challenged special-needs

children on the shores of the Sea

of Galilee. She was murdered in the 

Hamas massacre deliberately targeting
women and children at Jerusalem's
Sbarro restaurant two days later.

The CiF Watch blog is "dedicated to monitoring antisemitism and combating the assault on Israel’s legitimacy in the Guardian newspaper’s ‘Comment is Free’ blog".

‘Comment is Free’ is the online home of the Guardian and Observer newspapers that carries articles designed to engender debate and discussion through a post-moderated comment thread. The Guardian is one of the most influential media outlets in the world and the ‘Comment is Free’ blog is among the most popular blogs on the internet.

The article below appeared yesterday on the CIF Watch site.

If Arnold Roth held a news conference at the American Colony Hotel, would the Guardian cover it?

CIF Watch July 10, 2011
On the heels of her CiF essay, (US collusion in the Gaza blockade is an affront to human rights, July 8th), the mother of slain International Solidarity Movement activist Rachel Corrie, Cindy, held a news conference at Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel today to discuss the conclusion of testimonies in her family’s civil case against the State of Israel for their daughter’s death.

While I hope I never have to know the pain of losing a child, and plain decency demands that Cindy’s loss not be minimized, demeaned, or sanitized, it is equally fair to ask, in the context of the extraordinary amount of press the story has received, that some perspective be provided and some degree of fairness honored.

While I’ve never met Cindy Corrie, I have met Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malka was murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber at the Sbarrro bombing in Jerusalem.

On August 9, 2001 a resident of the village of Aqaba, north of Tulkarm, Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri, son of a well-to-do land-owning family, entered the busy Sbarro restaurant at the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road at lunchtime on a school vacation day in Jerusalem. The restaurant was filled with customers, most of them children and mothers. 15 Jews, including Arnold’s daughter Malka, were killed, and 131 were injured in various serious degrees when the explosive device – containing screws and nails added to maximize the carnage - al-Masri was carrying (in a guitar case) was detonated.

The massacre was coordinated and planned by Hamas’s Ramallah branch.

Six weeks later, a triumphal exhibit at Al Najah University, the largest in the West Bank, featured a mock-up of the Sbarro restaurant including gnawed pizza crusts and bloody plastic body parts suspended from the ceiling as if they were blasting through the air.

The accident which led to Corrie’s death was indeed tragic, and while the facts of the civil trial haven’t all been revealed some things are clear.

Though the ISM, the group Rachel Corrie was working with at the time of her death, tries to maintain the veneer of a “peace group,” they have a  history of actively aiding terrorist movements.

The bulldozers Rachel and her fellow “internationals” were trying to stop on March 16, 2003 in Rafah were working to uncover part of the underground  tunnel network used to smuggle explosives from Egypt, into Gaza. These tunnels had been built under civilian Arab homes and structures in order to smuggle weapons and explosives into Israel. What Rachel and many of her “international” companions did not likely consider, and were not told by their ISM handlers, was that for every tunnel they succeeded in saving many more Israelis and Palestinians would suffer due to increased terrorism and Israeli military responses.

The ISM intentionally placed Rachel and other “internationals” between 50 ton bulldozers and Rafah homes and so, along with the Hamas terrorist movement they were protecting, would seem to bear a large measure of moral responsibility for her death.

When you search for Rachel Corrie in the Guardian’s search engine you get over 150 results, some referencing the play which toured internationally named, “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

When you search for Malka Chana Roth, you get two – one in 2002 dryly noting her death in the context of a list of Palestinian and Israeli children killed during the Intifada till that time, and the other containing a partial list of the victims in the aftermath of the Sbarro attack, which noted:

“Malka Roth, 15, from Ramot, on the western edges of Jerusalem, was the 15th victim to be identified yesterday morning.”

That’s it.  A mere twenty words.

There were no plays and no international media interest in the innocent teenage girl murdered by a movement so cruel as to venerate the murderer as a Shahid, a righteous martyr for the cause.

I don’t think it exploitative, nor insensitive, to simply ask if, under any circumstances, the Guardian would ever offer Arnold Roth, or his wife Frimet, the chance to express their grief, describe their family’s unimaginable pain, or pay tribute to their daughter’s memory in a manner similar to what they continue to provide for the family of Rachel Corrie.

We're not planning any news conferences, and if we were then frankly the American Colony in East Jerusalem would not be top of the list of possible venues. That aside, we support Adam Levick's thesis.

UPDATE Monday 11-Jul-11 at 9pm: A Polish-language translation of this article is posted on the website of Racjonalista.