13-Mar-17: Jerusalem and the (alleged) knife-men

The Old City and Lions' Gate [Image Source]

At about 4 this morning (Monday) there was a slightly elevated police presence in Israel's capital city because in Jerusalem it's the festive day of Purim. (Everywhere else in the world celebrated Purim a day earlier.)

An Arab assailant managed to squeeze into an occupied and cramped guard booth adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem's Lions' Gate, armed with a large butcher knife. He embarked on a frenzied stabbing attack, injuring the two Border Guard police inside.

"One of the officers fought his way out of the guard booth, loaded his weapon and shot the assailant, police said. The assailant was shot and critically wounded during the attack. He later died of his injuries." [Times of Israel today]

The Border Guard men are recovering at Hadassah Medical Center's Ein Kerem hospital where they were rushed for emergency treatment, arriving there in stable and fully conscious condition according to a hospital spokesperson.

The assailant has been named in the Arab media as Ibrahim Mahmoud Mattar, described by Israel Police as a 25-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s notorious Jabel Mukaber neighborhood from which a significant number of Arab-on-Israeli shooters, rammers and stabbers have emerged in the past two years (click to see some relevant earlier posts).

The attacker's knife [Image Source: Foreign Ministry]

Ma'an News Agency, whose work is in large measure paid for by the mostly unwitting and increasingly unwilling taxpayers of several European countries, adopted its customary alternative-reality approach to reporting on Palestinian Arab terror, starting with the headline of its tendentious report: "Witnesses: Israeli police 'execute' Palestinian in Jerusalem over alleged attack":

Israeli police shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian near the Lion’s Gate entrance to occupied East Jerusalem's Old City early Monday morning over an alleged stabbing attack that left two Israeli police officers lightly and moderately injured. The slain man was identified as Ibrahim Mahmoud Matar, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood Jabal al-Mukabbir, located south of the Old City. The shooting happened ahead of the al-fajr (dawn) prayers, as worshipers were headed to Al-Aqsa Mosque inside the Old City. Witnesses told Ma'an they saw a dispute inside an Israeli police post located near Lion’s Gate, between an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian "who was carrying a stick.” Israeli police then forced the young man outside of the enclosure and “executed” him at point blank range with with four bullets, leading to his immediate death, witnesses said. Referring to the dispute that lead up to the shooting, eyewitnesses told Ma’an that Israeli police were “controlling the situation” and could have easily detained Matar without using lethal force... Following the killing, Israeli forces were heavily deployed in and around Lion’s Gate and prevented many Palestinians from reaching Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray, with witnesses saying the lockdown lasted from 4:30 until 6:00 a.m. Later Monday morning, Israeli forces raided Matar’s home in Jabal al-Mukabbir and detained his brother, parents, and his uncle, according to locals and Israeli police.

A few words about the journalistic values on display here. We follow Ma'an's reporting more closely than most people. The reflexive use by its editors of the cowardly term "alleged" to describe most Arab-on-Israeli attacks is a constant. But the mostly outlandish claims of Arab so-called witnesses and their fanciful explanations for how knives and guns ended up in Arab hands are almost never termed "alleged". 

Taking Ma'an's Palestinian-Arab-centric reportage at face-value requires a prior commitment to a thoroughly partisan view of events. In war, that's not unusual or even in some ways unacceptable. What's outrageous is that none of this could be done without the massive ongoing funding its editors and managers have gotten since its inception in 2005 from Western sources. Most of that money is from governments which means from tax-payers. And while many of the government bureaucrats in Europe signing off on those cheques and foreign aid forms are ideologically comfortable with how the money they supply is spent, it's a certainty that many, probably most, of the people actually providing those funds have no such political leanings.

NGO-Monitor does first-rate, systematic work examining how government funding from the West often gets wasted and channeled into very dark places connected with the Arab/Israel conflict. You might want to know that it has a resource page [here] devoted to shining some light on the quiet funding that is Ma'an's life-blood. 

Most people don't realize, but NGO-Monitor documents this, that for years Ma'an - an outlet for news in several languages - has been the recipient of millions (dollars and Euros) in foreign aid. Initial funding came from the governments of Denmark and the Netherlands. 

Since then, the torrent has continued to arrive from (among others) the governments of Denmark, Sweden, the United States,  Switzerland, Netherlands, the European Union and the United Kingdom. Several human rights and humanitarian juggernauts, in particular Catholic Relief Services, UNESCO and most egregiously Save the Children, have found ways to justify sending some of their budget to the Bethlehem offices of the propaganda agency. Why donors accept this is a puzzle - assuming they know.

UPDATE Monday March 13, 2017 at 10:00 pm: Elder of Ziyon notices, on visiting Facebook, that

Naturally, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah is extolling him as a "martyr" and making sure that his act is viewed as a religious obligation. This is all to let the next terrorist know exactly how his acts will be honored.

Tragically, it usually plays out this way.

09-Jul-15: When incitement to murder is financed by foreign aid, where will the accounting come from?

Sitting in an Israeli court, the bomb maker who has murdered 66 people
until now says he wants to kill some more. Makes his father
so proud. [Image Source]

Our daughter Malki - graceful, pretty, smiley, a musical prodigy, a social activist on behalf of children with severe disabilities - will never reach her sixteenth birthday.

That privilege was stolen from her (and us) by a gang of Islamist men and women on August 9, 2001. A thunderous, sickening flash of explosives and thousands of flesh-ripping nails destroyed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria and with it the bodies and lives of fifteen innocents, the majority of them children. Malki (whose photo is over there on the right of this page) was one of them. Her best friend, the girl who lived next door and was standing at the counter with her, was another.

The explosive device was concealed inside a guitar case carried on the back of a man. He was a human bomb, brought to the center of our city - Israel's capital, Jerusalem - by the engineer of the massacre ["17-Nov-11: A monster walks the streets and she has many accomplices"]. He is of course dead, but the planner of the massacre is not. She hosts a TV program that is produced in Amman, Jordan, and since 2012 has gone to air on Fridays to an eager global audience of Arabic speakers.

Rejoicing in streets of Lebanon as news of the
massacre in Jerusalem is announced, August 9, 2001 [Image Source]

The man who constructed the diabolical guitar-case bomb, and several others similar to it, has haunted our thoughts through the years since we first learned of his monstrous savagery. Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti with Jordanian citizenship, sits in an Israeli prison cell today, serving 67 life terms to which he was sentenced in a 2004 trial. 

From inside, Barghouti has reminded every possible audience of the bestiality that underpins his murderous nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough, he declares - explicitly. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world, Barghouti notoriously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

The panel of judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. (The only time a death penalty has been carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman in 1962.)

What he did was horrifying. But hardly less horrifying are the reactions of wide parts of Arab society who stood solidly with the killers, rejoicing at the deaths. Major news services carried photos that day of macho men expressing their joy in Arab streets (like the one above). Children were provided with platters of candies to hand out in celebration of the massacre of Jewish youngsters. 

Every last member of that gang of jihadists became a celebrity in the societies in which they live. And the Mahmoud Abbas-controlled Palestinian Authority ("chronically short of funds... perpetually requesting handouts") has been paying the bomb-maker, along with all the others in the gang, a rich salary since at least April 2011 ["20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?"]

Having researched this, we know of not a single article in the Arab language published anywhere in the world that condemns the perpetrators and their act, or bemoans their corrosive impact on Arab and Moslem societies. If anyone among our readers can point us to even a single instance (an offer we have made numerous times already), we would showcase it here and let people know. 

CBS promo for the still-online 60 Minutes platform it gave
our child's killer in 2006. The voice, the pain, the anger of victims 
like us interests them much less [Image Source]

We pointed out eight years ago ["10-Apr-07: Regarding Abdullah Barghouti"] that he pleaded guilty to all charges at his trial on 66 counts of terror-inspired murder. He told the court he "did this to kill as many Israelis as possible".

Reporter Bob Simon fronted a segment called Terror Behind Bars on the CBS "60 Minutes" television program in 2006 which did much to elevate Barghouti to celebrity-dom outside the Arab world (he was already a global Arab hero).

"I get my best piece, the guitar. I have it, I like it, I respect it... I open it, make a bomb inside it, close it, send it with the guy. And he make the bomb. And it's done." [Abdullah Barghouti boasting on CBS News' 60 Minutes program, April 2006]

We wrote an open letter at the time to his TV network, CBS, in New York (published here) expressing our deep pain and fierce anger in calm and fairly reasonable terms. CBS ignored us.

There is no room for doubt about this: the massacre at Sbarro, along with the untold number of similar acts of murderous barbarism carried out against Israelis and Jews in the past decade and a half in the name of Palestinian Arab 'resistance' have had the widest support right across the Arab world. We offered some evidence here, referring to Barghouti: "1-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?"

We learned of another public display of this today.

The self-styled 'independent' Palestinian Arab news network Ma'an broadcast a television program in June focused on Barghouti. Ma'an TV broadcasts its content live via the web [here] and by satellite throughout the Arabic-speaking world. The tone of this particular Ma'an show is plain from the text, rendered into English by Palestinian Media Watch.

PMW's report begins with this brief introduction:

The independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an, on the TV program In a Prisoner’s Home, interviewed the father of the terrorist in his home. Both the TV host and the father referred to the killer of 67 as a “hero.” Barghouti’s father added he was “proud” of his son, who he sees as a “noble fighter” who acted “generously” for “Palestine.” He encouraged “every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem”:

The convicted, confessed, proud, hungry murderer has a father
with a message [Image Source: Video clip via PMW]

The original Arabic of the interview, as rendered by PMW's translators into English:

• Independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an’s TV host: “We are now in the home of the heroic prisoner Abdallah Barghouti, in the month of the blessed Ramadan.”
• Father of bomb maker Abdallah Barghouti: “Abdallah Barghouti, I am proud of him, because everyone knows of Abdallah Barghouti and what he generously did for Palestine. I am proud of him and I say: Praise Allah who gave me this hero, noble fighter for Palestine and its cause. I say: Praise Allah, Lord of the Universes, Abdallah fought for Palestine and left his family, his father and mother, and left behind three children, two girls and a boy, and sacrificed everything for the Palestinian cause. I ask every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem.”

We feel no need to say anything to the father or to the host. They are what they are. The message they intend to convey via the interview is about as clear as messages get: Barghouti the son murdered dozens of Jews, and Barghouti the father says it's something noble to do the same, again, now. 

Barghouti: Serving 67 life terms in an Israeli
prison. His advocates call him a 'detainee' and want him
freed. The 66 murders? No big deal.

Incitement to murder, and glorification of the killer, rarely come much clearer than this.

Now we have some questions for those who fund Ma'an, an organization entirely dependent on its foreign supporters. They include (according to NGO-Monitor and to the Ma'an website):

• The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
• European Commission Technical Assistance Office (ECTAO) 
• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
• The Danish Representative Office to the Palestinian Authority (PA) 
• The Netherlands Representative Office to the PA

None of these bodies ever spends private money. In every case, it comes from taxpayers - by far the easiest form of money for ideologically-motivated people to spend (as we have observed here over and again). Our questions:

• Do Danish, Dutch and other European tax-payers know that civil servants funded by them are passing along serious money, millions of Euros and of dollars, also funded by them, to encourage murder? For turning a confessed killer of 67 innocent people into a figure to emulate?
• Does this shock them? 
• Do those civil servants and public officials have anything they would like us - the parents of a victim of the beastial killer at the heart of the interview above - to know about their complicity in Ma'an's incitement to ongoing and new acts of murder? 
• Do they need to know our email address? Here it is. We're waiting.

27-Feb-15: Being a Jew on Europe's streets

Belgium, 2015 [Image Source: The Guardian]

Sirens are sounding throughout Europe. Increasingly, the warnings they express are encountering willful deafness.

The analysis below from Jonathan Tobin in Commentary Magazine ought to be read far and wide - if not by Europeans of every kind then at least by Europe's Jews and those who care for their well-being.

Contentions | If European Jews Must Live in Fear, Why Was Netanyahu Wrong?
Jonathan S. Tobin | Commentary Magazine, February 26, 2015

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu took a pasting from pundits and even some Jewish leaders when he reacted to the attack on Copenhagen synagogue by repeating his call for European Jews to “come home” to Israel. Many people were uncomfortable with the prime minister’s open advocacy for Zionism. But the problem goes deeper than that. Despite the recent violence against Jews in Paris and Copenhagen, denial about what even the U.S. State Department has termed a “rising tide” of anti-Semitism still exists. But yesterday’s comments by a German Jewish leader advising fellow Jews not to identify themselves by wearing yarmulkes while walking in certain sections of the country is yet more confirmation that what Europe is experiencing is a revival of Jew hatred that can’t be ignored. If Jews must live in fear even in a country that supposedly has learned the lessons of the Holocaust, then what hope is there for Jews on the Continent other than to seek protection elsewhere.

A new Pew Research Center study shows that Jews were harassed or oppressed by their governments in 77 of the 198 countries covered by the survey. That includes a frightening total of 34 out of 45 countries in Europe. Yet the problem with accepting the reality of European anti-Semitism arises from a reluctance to place the blame for this prejudice on the haters rather than the victims.

One example came this week from “Science Guy” Bill Nye, the popular science educator and television star. On Bill Maher’s HBO show Real Time, Nye said that the problems of European Jews stem from their reluctance to make friends with those who hated them. Attacking Netanyahu’s Zionist stand, Nye said the answer was that Jews should do more “to get to know their neighbors,” as if the roots of centuries of European anti-Semitism was the unwillingness of the victims to undertake outreach to anti-Semites.

That was offensive enough, but an even better example of the mentality that tolerates this new wave of anti-Semitism came from a British Jew. Harry Potter Actress Miriam Margolyes told the Guardian, “I don’t think people like Jews” but blamed the current outbreak on Israel since it gave Britons an excuse to vent their true feelings because of anger about the Gaza war. Like most British artists Margolyes blamed Israel for defending itself against Hamas terrorism and said the backlash against Jews was therefore somehow understandable, if deplorable. Her stance was both uninformed and illogical but it reflects the attitudes of English and other European elites who have, in a strange confluence of opinion, come to share the prejudices of Muslim immigrants who have helped revive traditional Jew hatred on the continent.

Blaming the Jews for being clannish (the conceit of Nye’s bizarre comments) sounds more like 19th century anti-Semitism, but even if we only focus on the way anti-Zionism has allowed traditional hatred to undergo a revival, there is no longer much doubt about the fact that it is becoming open season on Jews on the streets of Europe. A viral video of a Jewish journalist strolling through Paris wearing a kippah being abused by passersby is one more confirmation of a trend that can only be denied by those with ulterior motives.

European Jews may still prefer to think of themselves as safe, free, and prosperous and the political leaders of their countries may often say the right thing about anti-Semitism. But if Jews can no longer walk the streets of Europe’s capitals while identifying themselves with their faith or fear to speak out in defense of Israel lest they face opprobrium, then they cannot pretend to be truly free. The choice whether to stay or to go is personal, and it is difficult for anyone to pick up and leave their homes even under duress.

But, as it did throughout the 20th century, history continues to vindicate the cause of Zionism. The Jews of Europe cannot pretend to be secure or to be confident that worse is not in store for them. Netanyahu was right to speak up about them having a haven where they will be able to defend themselves. Those inclined to denigrate his remarks should stroll about Europe’s streets while identifying themselves as Jews before they speak.

17-Feb-15: In Denmark, some changes to the way life has been lived till now

Grimhøj Mosque, Aarhus, Denmark [Image Source]

From The Copenhagen Post, a Danish English-language daily, this morning:

Jewish community radio station shuts down in wake of terror attacks | Radio Shalom advised by PET to take a break while Jews across Europe demand more protection | The Copenhagen Post | February 17, 2015 | Ray Weaver | For the first time in the station’s history, Radio Shalom did not broadcast its usual blend of programs about Jewish culture, music and history on Monday evening. The control board located in a basement in Nørrebro was silenced for what host Abraham Kopenhagen called "security reasons". “PET says it's too dangerous,” Kopenhagen told DR Nyheder. “We do not feel that it is too dangerous, but we respect the information we are given.” Kopenhagen said that Radio Shalom will be back on the air when PET tells them that it is safe. The security agency offered to protect the station while it was on air, but Kopenhagen turned them down. “We must do as instructed, but we will not have police standing outside the door,” he said. "We would rather close down until it is quiet again. I do not know how long that will take.” The radio station was not the only Jewish institution in Copenhagen that chose to shut its doors following the weekend's attacks, which included the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Dan Uzan, a guard standing in front of the synagogue on Krystalgade by Omar Abdel El-Hussein. The Jewish school Carolineskolen was also closed yesterday.

Imam Abu Bilal Ismail
[Image Source: MEMRI]

The same article in the same paper, evidently exploring the toxic environment behind the murderous events in Copenhagen on Saturday and Sunday, provides a link to a July 22, 2014 report entitled "Danish imam encourages followers to kill Jews". Embedded within that is a MEMRI Arabic-to-English video capturing Imam Abu Bilal Ismail, an Islamic preacher described by the Danish paper as

a regular speaker at the Grimhøj Mosque in Aarhus, and accused of encouraging young Muslims to travel to Syria to fight in the bloodbath there.

The Grimhøj mosque in Denmark's second-largest city Aarhus has been in the news often. In "Aarhus: The Danish town where Syria’s jihadist fighters are welcomed home" [The Independent UK, October 20, 2014], for instance, it's pointed out that

In Denmark, not one returned fighter [from the Syrian killing fields] has been locked up. Instead officials here are providing free psychological counselling while finding returnees jobs and spots in schools and universities. Officials credit a new effort to reach out to a radical mosque with staunching the flow of recruits... “I know how some people think. They are afraid of us, the ones coming back,” says Talha, a name he adopted to protect his identity because he never told his father he went to fight. “Look, we are really not dangerous.”

Not dangerous is a relative expression in today's Europe.

In a Danish article, "Head of Grimhøj mosque supports IS" [DR.dk, January 15, 2015], the same Aarhus-based house of prayer is said to be

known in the media as a hotbed for radicalised young Muslims. Numerous youth from the region who have attended the mosque have subsequently travelled to Syria to fight in the conflict. The mosque is now making waves once again. In the documentary “Den Fordømte Moské” (“The Condemned Mosque”), shown on DR1 on Tuesday evening, Oussama El Saadi, head of the mosque, declared his support of Islamic State. “I hope that IS wins and that we one day will have an Islamic state in the world,” said El Saadi in the documentary... [He] believes that the western world’s declaration of war against IS is not a war against terror, but rather against the entire Muslim world. Therefore, he says, it also hurts when the Danish state is at war against people in the Middle East.

Evidently it also hurts the Danish state and its fair-minded people to see one of their own shot down by Danish police, even though the shooter was a cruel murderer of innocent and unarmed strangers, and was holding a powerful weapon at the time:

Numerous bouquets had been laid at the killing site of the suspected Copenhagen gunman, 22-year-old Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein. The flowers were laid in solidarity with the alleged terrorist’s family, locals told reporters... Masked young men, describing themselves as “brothers” of the suspected gunman behind attacks in Copenhagen, removed flowers and candles from the site where he was fatally shot by police. The young men said they removed the flowers because it is not a Muslim tradition to lay flowers for the dead. [Sputnik News, February 16, 2015]

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen, a beloved theme of our childhood, seems to be rapidly receding into the distance, never to appear again.

17-Feb-15: In defeating the terrorists, condemnation is essential but never enough

Mass protest rally in Copenhagen  February 16, 2015 [Image Source]

As parents of a child murdered in a terrorist outrage, we have received a great many letters and cards (and their electronic equivalents) expressing sympathy and support. Coming from places and people not always known to us personally, they provided comfort especially in the earliest part of our experience of loss. We learned to appreciate the bonds of humanity and shared decency that sometimes get overlooked in ordinary life.

Dealing with grief's multi-layered impact on our lives, we have also grown familiar with expressions of Solidarity (with a capital S) directed at us by politicians and government officials... and the disappointment they can bring on.

Everyone knows, of course, that people in public positions tend to express themselves in formulaic ways. Most of us accept there are limits to how sincere and creative a busy person can be. But it's also because what they say sometimes reflects a superficial, even wrong, understanding of what it means to lose a loved one to violent hatred. But if you have no personal experience of it, how can you know? And it’s a hard subject about which to learn from books. Far too little has been written, or even said, about coping with the death of a child or partner at the hands of terrorists.

The most disturbing aspect however has been the chasm between the clichéd slogans offered to terror victims like us in the immediate aftermath of the attack and the little/nothing that is done later. No public figure wants to sound indecisive on something as headline-grabbing as terror. Our experience is it’s rare for them to back up those supportive statements with policy decisions and actions later. And later, in public life, is when it really counts.

A powerful leader in yesterday’s The Times of London, reflecting on lessons to be learned from the lethal events in Copenhagen this week ["15-Feb-15: In Denmark, they may be thinking hard about Charlie Hebdo this morning"], resonates for us with the bitterness of our experiences. The title starts in Danish:

Vi er Jøder: Jews in Denmark have been targeted with lethal violence. Western governments need to declare their unreserved solidarity

An extract (it’s unfortunately behind a paywall):

...In the heart of civilised, democratic and tolerant western Europe, Jews are under lethal assault. They need not just sympathy but solidarity and support. A month after the terrorist attacks in Paris, a gunman in Copenhagen fired shots at an event discussing freedom of speech and then at a synagogue on Saturday night. He killed two men and wounded five police officers, and was himself shot dead as he began firing on police who were trying to apprehend him. These barbarous murders exemplify a sickness and a stubborn social pathology whose virulence is easy to overlook. Faced with such barbarism, there is a serious risk that European governments will underreact. They must not; not this time. It is not enough to condemn them as savagery, bigotry and barbarism, though they are all of those things. Antisemitism, it has been often remarked, is a light sleeper. Western democracies have a moral obligation and a pragmatic interest in declaring their solidarity and not only sympathy with Danish Jews. Western leaders should have no hesitation in declaring: Vi er jøder (We are Jews). [Times UK, February 16, 2015]

The message that we expect governments and public figures to do more than condemn terrorism for the savagery, bigotry and barbarism that it is has concrete ramifications. As egregious as the violations of freedom of expression in Copenhagen and Paris are, the ongoing assaults on the most fundamental of human rights - the right to stay alive - are no less crucial for policy makers and the people who protect our societies, families and lives. Hatred of Jews - yes, specifically Jews - is a fundamental part of the challenge. This does not turn it into a narrower battle but a broader one. The willingness of terrorists, propelled by Islamist messaging, to slaughter Moslem in their own villages and continents, along with victims of every other sort, is a reality that shows how the war now upon us transcends mere politics and prejudices. 

To win in war, you must know who the enemy is, and the steps that need to be taken to prevent further losses and to achieve the other side's defeat. Defending freedom of expression is part of this - among numerous human rights that our societies absolutely must safeguard. But no right takes greater precedence than the right to not be murdered - the right to live. 

As difficult as this is to protect, relegating it to a secondary goal plays into the hands of those who dispatch the human bombs and the men and women armed with meat cleavers.

15-Feb-15: From the warzones: an update

Copenhagen after the overnight killings [Image Source]

A handful of reminders, part of an ongoing theme, for those who still believe terrorism is shriveling up and dying. Or that our side is winning. Or that lone wolf attacks mean it's all about stopping one person.

Germany: The popular annual carnival parade in Braunschweig, northern Germany's largest, was cancelled this morning (Sunday) on 90 minutes notice, due to a "specific threat of an Islamist attack" identified by state security sources [BBC, today]. Mayor Ulrich Markurth (SPD) and parade marshal Gerhard Baller canceled the parade at short notice shortly before 11.a.m. (1000 UTC) on Sunday. The spectacle had been due to begin at 12.20 p.m. local time. Local Braunschweig police said the Karneval parade had been called off after reliable state sources became aware of a "concrete threat" of an attack with an "Islamist background". Police asked all visitors to not visit the planned parade route. [Deutsche Welle, today]

France and Germany were explicitly named as targets in a video threatening new attacks against people in those countries and released by the terrorist organization ISIS yesterday (Saturday). "The nine-minute video in Arabic and French entitled “A Message to France” claims that Islamic State operatives are deployed throughout both European countries and await orders to commit additional attacks, specifically in Paris and Brussels..." It includes two French-speaking Islamic State fighters wearing military fatigues implored Muslims throughout France to kill non-believers. “I call on my brothers who live among the infidels in France: If you can not emigrate, act within the country. Kill them with the weapons that you have available to you. Spit on them, burn their cars, burn police stations; don’t take pity on them,” one of the men said." [Times of Israel] The video, which includes an explicit threat of car bombs in Paris and Brussels, was distributed via "official" ISIS channels in in Salah al-Din, Iraq [Vocativ, today]

Gaza: The Hamas terrorist regime that presided over daily barrages of rockets directed at anything Israeli in the weeks leading up to the devastating push-back by Israel in July/August 2014, has new rockets to test. It fired two more of them into the Mediterranean Sea today. Times of Israel says today's launches were "likely a test of the rocket systems... fired by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military branch of the Hamas group that rules the Gaza Strip. A rocket was fired from Gaza into the sea last week in another apparent test. In last summer’s war between Israel and Hamas, Palestinian groups fired almost 5,000 rockets and over 1,500 mortar shells toward Israeli towns and villages. The Israel Defense Forces said at the time that the 50-day conflict had depleted as much as 80% of Hamas’s rocket stockpiles, but the group is believed to be working to rebuild its arsenal." Money for rockets and for the rocket-men who design, manufacture and fire them is never in short supply. But strangely, those media outlets who decline to report on fresh rockets and fresh launches are careful to let news consumers know that the ordinary people of Gaza are in deep trouble, and money is at the core of the problems: "Political bickering stalls Gaza rebuilding" [Aljazeera, January 18, 2015]; "UN halts Gaza reconstruction works as donors renege on vow" [PressTV Iran, January 27, 2015]; "UN, Palestine govt launch humanitarian plan, calling for $705 million in aid" [Al Ahram, Egypt, February 12, 2015]; "Life in Gaza is worse than ever | Thousands still sleeping on floors of UN-run schools, in tents, or bombed-out apartments" [Gulf News, today]. Time we pointed back to a post we wrote here a mere three months ago ["23-Nov-14: Gaza's wealth and where it is - and is not - going"] which started this way:

A flurry of recent reports, like this one from Haaretz and a post of ours ["16-Nov-14: Gazan money, Gazan terror"], say that Hamas is now the world's second wealthiest terror organization. It has income on the order of a billion US dollars per year. And it's not just the organization: among its kleptocratic leadership are some newly-super-wealthy career-terrorists, prominent among them Mousa Abu Marzouk and Khaled Mashaal, Arafat would have admired their cynical brazenness.

Keep in mind, too, that the International Donor Conference in Cairo on October 12, 2014 ended with pledges to the homeless, jobless, hopeless victims of the Hamas Islamist regime in Gaza of about $5.4bn (£3.4bn) [BBC]. That, and the phenomenal wealth washing around the Arab states, ought to persuade people that whatever the urgency of Gaza's needs, it is considerably more complex than a lack-of-cash problem.

Denmark's prime minister sounds optimistic, the morning after three fatal terror-centric events in her nation's capital, after her intelligence people concede the deceased "suspect" is "someone who had been on the agency's "radar"" [Newsday, today] and before the funerals and hospital visits to the wounded: "We've tasted the ugly taste of fear and impotence that terror wants to create," Thorning-Schmidt told reporters. "But as a society, we have answered back..." [Reuters] Answered back? What in the name of all that is decent can she be thinking?

15-Feb-15: A question from December 2010 that never received a satisfying answer

Copenhagen, 2006 [Image Source: AP]

We responded more than four years ago, here, to Danish reports of a thwarted scheme to "kill as many people as possible" with several questions. In light of events in Copenhagen in the past 18 hours, here is one of them again, verbatim:

Is the essence of this frightening story really the struggle to defend free speech and liberal values, as the Danish prime minister said today? Or (which we believe) is it actually about the enormous life-and-death risks of hosting a militant minority within a democracy-minded, mild-mannered and liberal majority society while growing to understand (slowly, ever so slowly) that the hate-based values being incubated in their midst are not growing more moderate but rather are becoming sharper, more brazen, more toxic and more deadly with time?

15-Feb-15: In Denmark, they may be thinking hard about Charlie Hebdo this morning

Copenhagen overnight [Image Source]

The authorities in Denmark have declared their country to be on high alert. It's too soon for the rest of us, supplied with updates via online news sources and Twitter flashes, to actually know all the facts. But what's known seems to fit with what we knew till now about Europe's ever-sharpening hatred problems.

What we know:

• There was a shooting attack around 3:40 pm Saturday afternoon on the Krudttønden cafe in Østerbro, near the centre of Copenhagen. An event entitled "Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression" was taking place inside. Several people, among them police who were guarding the place and the participants, were injured. One person was killed but no names have been published yet. Inside the cafe, the ambassador to Denmark of France, M Francois Zimeray whom we personally know as an outspoken advocate of human rights, was among the speakers in a forum organized by the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks. Vilks has been the target of death threats for caricatures depicting Muhammad the prophet as an animal, and said yesterday "he believed he was the intended target of the attack. He was unhurt" [BBC] The threats to Vilks over the years have come not only from un-named individuals but from governments including those of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Jordan [The Guardian UK]. The shooter fled.
• Soon afterwards, Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said Denmark was on high alert.
• Then Saturday night, a gunman opened fire on Copenhagen's Krystalgade street, about 5km (three miles) from the scene of the first attack. Reports say this was at the location of a synagogue, and that one person is dead from a shot to the head and several are injured. The shooter fled.
• It appears [according to a report on Israel radio's 8 am news bulletin] the person shot dead outside the synagogue was a member of the Jewish community doing volunteer guard duty (as has become the practice throughout the world during these tense and dangerous days) while inside a bat mitzvah (coming of age) party was underway with dozens of guests attending. 
• Are the police in Denmark securing Jewish communal events and premises? We don't know but we do recall that a month ago (according to this January 14, 2015 Associated Press report] "Denmark's Jewish community has asked for a police presence outside the Copenhagen synagogue during services and when students arrive and leave the city's Jewish school following the terror attacks in Paris."
• In the night and early hours of this morning, the Danish capital was "abuzz with sirens and helicopters, amid fears that other attacks could be imminent. Police have warned residents that it is not safe to be in the city centre." [BBC].
• At Copenhagen's Noerrebro train station, Danish police said they shot dead a man who opened fire on them [ABC News]. "The police are now investigating if the person could be behind the shootings at Krudttoenden and the synagogue in Krystalgade," according to a police statement.

Assuming the three shooting attacks share a connection and that the first two are not instances of random victims being assaulted for random reasons by random individuals, there may be some conclusions worth writing about.

Meanwhile, in the interests of throwing light on how events of such significance rarely occur in a vacuum, and while keeping our minds open, some comments we published here about Danish events in the past:

• 29-Dec-10: Five questions prompted by a cartoon, several riots and a thwarted massacre
• 13-Dec-12: Europe's ongoing moral collapse: the next chapter
• 27-Feb-13: In Denmark, they have been thinking for a decade about how to deal with racial intolerance. And gotten nowhere.

21-Oct-14: Trivialization pursuits

Denmark's iconic Little Mermaid statue, draped in a hijab (background
is here via Al Arabiya)

The New York Metropolitan Opera, in a co-production with the English National Opera, began a run of John Adams' 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer last night in Manhattan with a standing ovation and mixed reviews. Death is an artistic interpretation of the actual murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly Jew confined to a wheelchair, who took a cruise with his wife in 1985 on the Achille Lauro in celebration of their wedding anniversary. Armed Palestinian Arab terrorists in the service of the Palestine Liberation Organization hijacked the ship as it sailed between Alexandria and Port Said, Egypt. In pursuit of their Palestinian liberation, the Arabs shot the disabled Jew at point blank range in the forehead and in the chest. Then they hurled the body, along with the wheelchair, into the Mediterranean. Wikipedia  provides a useful summary of the opera's culturally-uplifting contents, its entertaining narrative and its so-delightful musical innovations.

Five years after Klinghoffer's murder, Mahmoud Abbas who succeeded Yasser Arafat as head of the PLO, explained that

the seizing of the cruise ship in 1985 was a mistake, and apologized for the killing of disabled U.S. passenger Klinghoffer. [CNN, April 24, 1996]

The US State Department immediately rejected the Abbas statement. The creators of the opera on the other hand neither apologized nor ever seemed to quite understand why so many people told them their theatrical event was a mistake.

An angry crowd, mainly of Jews, assembled outside the performance's opening last night at the Lincoln Center in New York City, holding placards and chanting messages reflecting fury at the glorification of terrorists and the trivialization of the murder of a helpless man. The late Mr Klinghoffer's children joined their voices to those of the protesters decrying the cruel and cynical exploitation of their father's murder.

The cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1987 [Image Source]

This surprised the man who wrote it who offered this rather disingenuous comment to an interviewer:

“I expected there would be some pushback,” Mr. Adams said by phone recently. “But to see posters saying the opera is pro-terrorist, it’s really kind of shocking.” ["An Opera Under Fire", New York Times, October 16, 2014]

So lots of shock to go round. But really he's not that shocked. The opera has attracted criticism from the outset, most particularly because of the way it normalizes terrorists and attempts to understand them better. Or in the words of Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, the way its creator "rationalizes, romanticizes and legitimizes" their father's killing. The show runs, by the way, until November 15.

There's a great deal of silliness on display about the protests (from this twit, for instance), much of it revealing something we learned to our sorrow more than a decade ago: most people (by far) fail completely to comprehend (a) how terror differs from other forms of sociopathic behaviour and (b) how real the danger that it constitutes is to their own lives.

Outside the Met last night [Image Source]

We were going to offer some words of condemnation of the chain of decisions that led to the show going on. But they are already all over the web today. Instead, we want to point out how the trivialization of terror and terrorists works and where it takes us.

Sunday's edition of the Washington Post (and The Independent UK too) carries a stunning piece of reporting from Scandinavia, headlined "Denmark tries a soft-handed approach to returned Islamist fighters". Here's how it starts:

AARHUS, Denmark — The rush of morning shoppers parted to make way for Talha, a lanky 21-year-old in desert camouflage and a long, religious beard. He strode through the local mall with a fighter’s gait picked up on the battlefields of Syria. Streams of young Muslim men greeted him like a returning king. As-salamu alaykum. Wa alaikum assalaam. In other countries, Talha — one of hundreds of young jihadists from the West who has fought in Syria and Iraq — might be barred from return or thrown in jail. But in Denmark, a country that has spawned more foreign fighters per capita than almost anywhere else, the port city of Aarhus is taking a novel approach by rolling out a welcome mat. In Denmark, not one returned fighter has been locked up. Instead, taking the view that discrimination at home is as criminal as Islamic State recruiting, officials here are providing free psychological counseling while finding returnees jobs and spots in schools and universities. Officials credit a new effort to reach out to a radical mosque with stanching the flow of recruits. Some progressives say Aarhus should become a model for other communities in the United States and Europe that are trying to cope with the question of what to do when the jihad generation comes back to town... “I know how some people think. They are afraid of us, the ones coming back,” says Talha, a name he adopted to protect his identity because he never told his father he went to fight. “Look, we are really not dangerous”...

As we said, that's how it starts. How it ends is unlikely to be operatic or artistic.

There are no replacement moral compasses for those, like the town elders of Aarhus, who have lost theirs. When it's called discrimination to view jihadist savages as threats to the peace and lives of the public, and when that 'offence' is placed on the same level as the signing up of fresh foot soldiers for the killing fields of Syria and Iraq (at least), we are reaching the end of the show.

09-Sep-14: If terrorist savagery has a West Point, it's probably in Syria

Among the aspiring jihad-minded killers - European women
[Image Source: Deutsche Welle]

The impact of thousands of blood-lusting Islamists getting unparalleled hands-on experience in the killing fields of Syria is only starting to be guessed at.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, a Jordanian prince who took up his new role yesterday (Monday) as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, called Syria "a slaughterhouse" in his maiden speech. It's not hard to agree with him. But as we usually do, we are also thinking about the inevitable consequences for people living far from Syria.

Over 12,000 foreign fighters said to be in Syria | Associated Press | September 9, 2014 | More than 12,000 foreigners from 74 countries have gone to fight with rebels in Syria, 60 to 70 percent from other Middle Eastern countries and about 20 to 25 percent from Western nations, a leading expert on terrorism said Monday.
Prof. Peter Neumann, who directs the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, said the Syrian conflict has sparked the most significant mobilization of foreign fighters since the 1980s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, where up to 20,000 foreigners participated over the course of a decade. With over 12,000 foreigners taking up arms in Syria in just three years, he said, “that conflict is well on track to becoming the most significant mobilization of foreign fighters that has ever taken place in living memory”...

Prof. Neumann's analysis goes on to suggest the origins of at least some of those foreigners (alphabetically) - though his data don't come close to explaining the "12,000 foreigners" figure:

Belgium: 300 ▪ Denmark: 50-100 ▪ France: About 700 ▪ Germany: 400 ▪ Jordan: About 1,500 ▪ Morocco: About 1,500 ▪ Norway: 50-100 ▪ Saudi Arabia: Its government estimates between 1,200 and 2,500 ▪ Sweden: 50-100 ▪ Tunisia: "Up to 3,000" ▪ UK: "More than 500" ▪ United States: 100

He makes these additional observations:

• "In some European countries, which he didn’t identify, between 10 percent and 20 percent of those going to Syria to join the Islamic State group are women. 
• A key motivator: "Building the caliphate that the Islamic State group has declared."
• Yet another motivator: "The Islamic State group’s highly publicized beheadings of two American journalists" which have caused “more and more foreign fighters [to get] talking about fighting against the West and fighting against America."

And the overwhelmingly-Arab-on-Arab impact of all this energy and motivation? According to the latest data relating to the month of August 2014 alone [Source: Syrian Observatory for Human Rights]

• 2,015 civilians "including 281 children and 138 women"
• 1,448 "Rebels and Islamist fighters"
• 1,351 "Non-Syrian fighters from IS, al Nusra Front, Jund al aqsa and al Muhajereen wal Ansra Army"
• 1,405 "Regular regime soldiers and officers"
• 23 "Hezbollah"

and on and on. (The same report goes on to explain why what it calls "the real number" is actually larger by about a thousand dead people.)

The Syrian child mentioned in the paragraph
on the left [Image Source]. Why does his
face have to be obscured digitally? Understanding
that is key to comprehending
the profound ugliness of Arab hostility to
everything constructive done for ordinary Arabs

Israel's central role in this carnage is summed up by a little-noticed Tazpit News Agency report published yesterday:

A 12-year-old Syrian boy arrived over the weekend to an Israeli hospital with injuries to his arms, leg, and eyes sustained from a mortar attack on his home near Damascus. The boy was led on a donkey by his brother up the slopes of Mt. Hermon to an IDF base on the mountain, from where Israeli forces evacuated him to Ziv Medical Center in the northern town of Safed. A spokesman for the hospital told Tazpit News Agency that the boy is the latest of 358 injured Syrians to be treated there in the last year and a half, most of them victims of the Syrian civil war... The hospital “does not ask questions” about the origin of the patients, telling Tazpit that [they take] “everyone who comes.”
“We don’t check where they’re from,” he added. “We are a hospital. If someone comes in an ambulance to us for treatment, we take them.” The hospital reported that the 12-year-old boy is currently blind, and that there was a small chance of saving one of his eyes. He arrived with serious injuries to both arms, his right hand having been amputated in a hospital in southeastern Lebanon, where the boy said that he was taken by his family for initial treatment. The boy explained that after the amputation they were prevented from returning to their Damascus-area home by the fighting, so he was sent toward the Israeli border with his brother, where he led the blind boy on a donkey to the safety of the IDF post...
The hundreds of Syrians treated at the hospital since the outbreak of the war include some 50 children and 30 women. The remainder have been adult males, at least some of which have been injured in the combat. A number of other Syrian medical refugees have been treated in hospitals in the northern Israeli cities of Nahariya, Tveria and Haifa, as well as in a field hospital in the Golan Heights run by the IDF... The patients are treated no differently than any others, with the exception of an IDF guard that the government often stations in the patients’ rooms for their protection. [And there's more about Ziv and the Syrian boy here.]

In the US, the policy makers are girding their loins. From a Wall Street Journal op ed ["Islamic State Is Getting Stronger, and It's Targeting America"] published yesterday:

Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday that an international coalition is forming to confront the terrorists of the Islamic State. President Obama plans to address the nation Wednesday night, as he said over the weekend, to get "the American people to understand the nature of the threat and how we're going to deal with it." His strategy is expected to involve an emphasis on a U.S.-led coalition and a reliance on airstrikes in a campaign that could take years, not months. Less clear is whether the president will commit to strikes inside Syria and substantially expanded special-forces deployments to Iraq and as soon as possible to Syria. We will not win unless he does. There is no time left to argue, dither and wonder what should be done about those who are butchering Americans— and anyone else they care to—across a growing portion of the Middle East. The enemy has no such doubts. They are not going away. They are getting stronger. The war, ladies and gentlemen, is truly on. We're just not a meaningful part of it yet.

But plenty of other victims certainly are. In the week that we remember 9/11, let's take a moment to reflect on how all that accumulated education in the dark barbaric arts of terror acquired in Syria by people with non-Syrian passports is looking for - and certain to find - other venues and outlets. Whatever attention this is getting, it's not enough.

07-Sep-14: Viewing Iran's stonewalling from a friendlier, more Danish, angle

Teheran, 2006 [Image Source]

Did we say "depressed"? Evidently there's a very different way to view the events about which we posted here yesterday [see "06-Sep-14: Iran, US and opening up a new path toward a more secure world: how well is that going?"]. A Danish way. 

This comes from today's edition of the English-language Teheran Times:

Danish Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard has expressed optimism that a comprehensive and lasting nuclear agreement with Iran could be reached by the November 24 deadline if there was a “political will”. In an exclusive interview with IRNA ahead of his visit to Iran, Lidegaard said, “We are very encouraged by the recent IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) report that Iran continues to meet the relevant obligations under the Joint Plan of Action. This gives grounds for optimism that a final and comprehensive deal indeed can be reached by the deadline set for 24 November.”

(IRNA is the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official government-funded and -controlled news outlet, an arm of the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The Tehran Times calls itself "Iran's Leading International Daily", and "the voice of the Islamic Revolution and the oppressed people in the world”. Wikipedia calls it "one of the outlets for the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security (Iran)".

Iran unilaterally cut trade ties with Denmark in February 2006 [BBC]. This was part of its very robust protest (including a violent assault on the Danish embassy in Teheran by rioters who chanted "Death to Denmark") at cartoons appearing in a Danish newspaper satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

But just this past week, shortly after the Lidegaard visit was announced, the semi-government-controlled (that's Wikipedia's term) Iranian FARS news agency focused briefly on Denmark, happily informing readers that

Noted Danish writers and intellectuals... denounced Israel's violations against the Palestinian people and said that its blockade and military attacks on Gaza as well as its occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank are factors preventing the achievement of peace and generating incessant violence. [FARS, September 2, 2014]

In reporting his upcoming visit yesterday, FARS shares the news that

Several European countries have seriously south [sic - we assume they meant "sought"] to expand ties with Iran after Tehran and the six major world powers cut an interim deal over the country’s nuclear program in Geneva on November 24, 2013. [FARS Iranian News, September 6, 2014]

Lidegaard will also be calling in at Saudi Arabia. His optimistic nature is bound to come in handy there too.