Jerusalem: Not 1996, not 2001 - this week [Image Source]
When a Jerusalem bus went up in flames on Monday, causing serious injuries to passengers and damage to several vehicles, there was some question at first about whether to call it an accident, or - this being Jerusalem - to look for a terrorist behind the injuries and harm. The conclusions took time to emerge ["18-Apr-16: A Jerusalem bus has exploded"] as the security people gathered evidence and waited to interview some of the injured from the bus. But we now know.
A Palestinian militant from the occupied West Bank who was wounded when his bomb exploded on an Israeli commuter bus in Jerusalem on Monday has died, an Israeli hospital spokeswoman and a pro-Hamas website said on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the Jerusalem hospital where the wounded man was treated confirmed he had succumbed to his injuries. Israeli authorities have placed a gag order on the investigation and declined to release any details. The pro-Hamas Palestinian Information Centre identified him as Abdel-Hamid Abu Srour from the Ayda refugee camp near Bethlehem and said he was a member of the Izz el-Deen Al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas militant Islamist group... Israeli medical sources said six people wounded by the blast were still being treated in hospital, the rest had been released by late Wednesday... ["Palestinian wounded in Jerusalem bus bombing dies, Hamas claims him", Reuters, April 20, 2016]
The "militant" is reported to be 19 and has permanently ceased to be an "activist". He will however remain a terrorist and, given the theological orientation implied by the Hamas connection, a jihadist. In Palestinian Arab society, he is now upgraded to "martyr". The shahid posters [click here - we won't reproduce it here] are already on the walls of Arab villages and cities this morning. They are indispensable to the ongoing efforts in every part of Palestinian Arab society to dredge up still more murder-minded bombers, stabbers, shooters and vehicle-rammers. (Small case in point: read what the mother of this week's bomber said, and knew, and didn't do: click.)
How young men and women with unlived lives and unattained achievements ahead of them choose unfathomable hatred as their path and endanger their own lives for the prospect of killing or maiming Jews doesn't get the attention it ought to. There is a process at work, as we wrote yesterday ["20-Apr-16: After Monday's Jerusalem bus bombing, questions (again) about education, children and money"]. That process is totally disguised by analysis like that on display in the same Reuters report, where readers are told
Factors driving the violence include Palestinian bitterness over stalled statehood negotiations and the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, increased Jewish access to a disputed Jerusalem shrine and Islamist-led calls for Israel's destruction.
How differently that bloodshed would look if the news reporting industry placed it in a franker context and with a more comprehensive listing of motivations.
Perhaps editors ought to be encouraged to start with the reality that Arab-on-Israeli terrorism began decades before Israel gained statehood in 1948, and much earlier than the creation of this thing Reuters calls West Bank settlements. Yes, there are many factors, but presenting the grievances as if they were recent is a distortion of the bigotry behind the savagery.
And perhaps those editors might, from time to time, show dancing in the streets where Palestinian Arabs live - dancing for joy, chanting their appreciation for a murderer, declaiming their bigoted hatred for other people whom they don't know but who fit a certain category. Like this Arabic-language video clip from Wednesday - four and a half minutes of video focused on open, undisguised and enthusiastic celebration of murder on the streets of Bethlehem. Yes, Bethlehem.
None of this influences the essentially humane approach of Israeli society which understands why a murderous fanatic like the freshly-deceased jihadist gets treated in one of Israel's best emergency hospitals, Shaarei Zedek Medical Center. Along with Hadassah's two Jerusalem campuses, it's one of the easiest places in Israel to snap photographs of Arabs and Jews mingling with almost zero friction, if that's the sort of message a news reporter ever wanted to convey.
Handing out candies on an Arab street hours after a Jerusalem bus bombing
[Image Source]
The debris and wreckage has barely been cleared from southern Jerusalem's Moshe Baram Street in the aftermath of Monday's Egged Line 12 bus bombing and it's already possible to identify several clear lines of reaction.
Among Israelis, there's concern for the victims, several of whom are still hospitalized and wondering at what hit them and their loved ones: "11 still hospitalized, 1 critical, after Jerusalem bombing", Times of Israel, April 19, 2016; "Bus bomb survivor: I looked for my daughter, found her ‘all burned’", JTA, April 19, 2016; "Bus attack victim survived 2001 Sbarro's bombing", Israel National News, April 19, 2016. The current speculation, but not backed any official statements, is that the most severely injured of the victims now being treated intensively in a Jerusalem hospital, is the person who carried the bomb.
There's also growing Israeli anxiety at the prospect that bombings, and the hideous things that generally accompany them, are going to be come a larger part of our lives in the coming days and months. The Arab-on-Israeli violence of the past seven months has been rich in shootings, vehicle-rammings and stabbings with multiple murders and many maimings as a result, It's been clear from the outset that things will get more serious when the Arab leaders want them to.
From a page full of similar photos capturing the celebrations, marked by candies,
of Arabs in Jerusalem this past Monday [Image Source: Alquds News]
So how have the Arabs responded?
From the Islamist savages of Hamas in Gaza, they don't claim to have been behind it (though no one on the counter-terror side thinks bombings of this sort are beyond Hamas' capabilities or agenda), but they are perfectly comfortable with sitting back and watching it unfold. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, quoted here by Hamas, portentously described the attempt at a massacre of Jews as a “natural response to the Israeli crimes and in particular the executions and defiling of the Al-Aqsa Mosque”. Near-identical language is attributed to a Palestinian Arab "human rights" figure, speaking [here via an Iranian news site] seven months ago. We strongly believe statements of this sort ought to be believed. Nothing, given their education and cultural and ethical values, is more natural to terror-addicted Palestinian Arab "militants" than killing Israeli civilians in public places.
Hamas "welcomes the Jerusalem operation", while warning that exploding the bus is “just the beginning”. But in reality, it's just another chapter. The beginning was generations ago, and the interruptions have been few and short.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad called the terror attack "a qualitative development in form and substance of the blessed intifada" [here, via Khaled Abu Toameh]. Fatah, headed by the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and the largest faction in today's PLO, called it [here in Arabic] a "Nabil Massoud martyrdom operation" though no one appears to have been martyred, and even though Fatah calls itself secular as opposed to the Islamists for whom martyrdom is a supreme religious value. But who are we to judge other people's theologies? Fatah called the bus bombing attack
"a new focal point in the history of the conflict with the occupation, and the beginning of a new phase of confrontation with him six months after the outbreak of the Jerusalem uprising... Martyrdom operations are the military option supported by all the Palestinian people and its different components... among our strategies to defend our people... It is a confirmation of the victory of the resistance option and the failure of the settlement project, a painful blow to (PA/Israel) security coordination,.." [Al Resalah (Arabic), April 19, 2016]
Video of the first dramatic minutes after the explosion were captured by Arik Abuloff, a firefighter of the Israel Fire and Rescue Service, via his helmet-mounted wearable video camera
Towards the end, we see Abuloff entering the destroyed hulks of the two buses, searching for victims and to see if the cause of the explosion could be identified. The official count of injured people is 21 , two of them seriously, and that the conflagration was caused by a bomb detonating on board one of the two buses, setting the adjacent bus on fire. A third bus near by, and a car, also went up in flames.
We mentioned Khaled Abu Toameh a moment ago. He has an overview of the Arab reaction to Monday's barbarism ["Celebrating Terrorism, Palestinian Style"], Khaled Abu Toameh on Gatestone Institute website, April 19, 2016] which, like most of his published analysis, is among the most valuable things a person wanting to understand the Arab perspective from an Arab cultural standpoint - but free of any addiction to jihadist thinking.
The Palestinian jubilation over yesterday's terror bombing in Jerusalem, the first of its kind since the suicide bombings during the Second Intifada more than a decade ago, is yet another reminder of the growing radicalization among Palestinians... The public statements of the Palestinian leaders and groups after the Jerusalem terror attack are yet another sign of how they continue to incite their people against Israel. These are the type of statements that prompt Palestinian men and women to grab a knife (or in this case an explosive device) and set out to kill the first Jew they run into... The major obstacle to peace with Israel remains the absence of education for peace with Israel. In fact, it is safe to say that there never was a real attempt on the part of Palestinian leaders and factions to prepare their people for peace with Israel. On the contrary, the message they send to their people remains extremely anti-Israel. [Abu Toameh, yesterday]
Caption in Arabic informs that these happy campers living in
Nahr al-Bared, a Lebanese "refugee" camp are celebrating the news of
a bus filled with Jews being bombed in Jerusalem [Image Source]
In his customarily mild way, Abu Toameh notes that the public manifestations he mentioned call into doubt
the Palestinian leadership's and people's willingness to move toward peace and coexistence with Israel... Within hours of the attack, Palestinian factions seemed to be competing with each other over who would issue the most supportive statement of the terror explosion... Palestinian factions rushed to issue statements applauding the "heroic operation" and urging Palestinians to pursue the path of armed struggle against Israel. The Palestinian jubilation over the terror attack, the first of its kind since the suicide bombings during the Second Intifada more than a decade ago, is yet another reminder of the growing radicalization among Palestinians. This radicalization is mostly attributed to the ongoing anti-Israel incitement and indoctrination by various Palestinian factions and leaders... Hamas leader, Hussar Badran, also praised the terror attack. He said his movement was determined to pursue the resistance to "expel the occupation from our Palestinian lands." When Hamas leaders talk about "expelling the occupation from the Palestinian lands," they mean that Israel should be eliminated and replaced with an Islamist empire. [Abu Toameh, yesterday]
That last point is little appreciated or understood outside of the neighbourhood where we live. Occupation is a code word for these people. Again: "The major obstacle to peace with Israel remains the absence of education for peace with Israel". Education means not only, but mainly, children. It's a constant wonder to us that the very-well-funded children's rights industry, a classification that includes multi-million dollar/euro global behemoths 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 remain unmoved, and uncriticized, in the face of their complete failure to address what Abu Toameh has just mentioned. The news media look the other way, the funders keep giving without pausing to think what they are enabling, and the managements go merrily down the path of ignoring - and therefore de facto supporting - a process we have called the Palestinian Arab weaponization of their own children. What will it take for this scandal to be addressed in a responsible and child-sensitive, education-focused way? Why does nothing constructive continue to get done about it for decade after decade? Anyone seriously suggesting these things are unknown is blowing smoke. They're known, and they're ignored. Are you paying attention, UNICEF?
Hamas praised the attack on the bus in Jerusalem but doesn't claim responsibility in a tweet from the official Hamas twitter account, The tweet in Arabic said "Hamas praises the operation in Jerusalem, and regards it as a natural reaction to Zionist crimes, specifically for the extrajudicial killings and the desecration of Al-Aqsa mosque." ["Hamas praises Jerusalem attack", Ynet. April 18, 2016]
Hamas' bashfulness is a little too disingenuous for its own blood-soaked history and track-record of savagery.
For instance, just six weeks ago, Hamas began promoting a music video [online here] in which a group of its singing-and-dancing all-stars parade in front of a bus made up (poorly) to look like it belongs to Egged, the veteran Israeli co-operative that operates most of Jerusalem's city buses. The Hamas mock-up is smoking and is meant to look it has been freshly exploded.
The Hamas video clip was first shown to an eager Palestinian Arab audience on the Hamas-operated Al-Aqsa satellite television network on February 6, 2016, and then beamed throughout the Arabic-speaking world via a multitude of streaming-video websites and cable networks that carry the terrorism-steeped Al-Aqsa programming.
Not a mock-up: The aftermath of today's bus attack on southern Jerusalem's Moshe Baram Street [Image Source]
Via Palestinian Media Watch [here], here's a taste of what the lyrics mean:
O bearer of good news, strap on an explosive belt
Nothing will be told about the Intifada except for the roof of the bus that flew off
O Martyrdom seeker, respond to Al-Aqsa’s call
Make the bomb even more powerful
Bring Netanyahu down
And the losses should be too many for him to count
Scatter them in all directions, terrorize their families...
Twenty-two years ago, almost to the day, in April 1994, Hamas carried out two bombing attacks on Israeli buses, one in the northern city of Afula(8 murdered, 55 victims injured) and another in the northern coastal city of Hadera, a week later (six killed, 30 injured). Murderous Hamas bombings of people traveling on Israeli buses evolved into an especially effective mode of jihadist warfare in the years that followed [table].
Malchei Yisrael Street, Geula, Jerusalem - aftermath of this morning's
murderous car-ramming of people standing innocently at a bus stop
It's been an incredibly stressful day here in Jerusalem, and throughout Israel.
Strikingly, four major attacks - and they were by no means all of today's attacks - took place at almost the exact same moment this morning.
All have been widely reported so we will not delve into details, and the smartphone videos of Palestinian Arabs engaged in terror have been posted and seen by those who can bear to look at them.
Videos like this one (be warned - it's explicit and very clear) of Alaa Abu Jamal, an East Jerusalem Arab employed as a service technician by Bezeq, Israel's dominant telecoms company, driving a work-supplied Bezeq-logo'ed van that he crashes deliberately at murderously high speed directly into a small group of Israelis standing at a bus stop on Jerusalem's busy Malchei Yisrael Street. And then, emerging from his smashed vehicle, he slashes furiously - with a meat cleaver - at an injured Jew lying prone on the ground, killing him, before being shot by a passing armed security man. It's all on the video. One of his victims - Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky, 60 - died in the remorseless attack and was buried this afternoon. Several more are seriously injured. The principal attacker, Abu Jamal (who will doubtless be termed "lone wolf" in parts of the media who avert their gaze when non-stop PA incitement to kill is shown) is now dead.
UPDATE February 4, 2016: File this enraging comment away for when the know-nothing reporters and editors of Big Media next serve up a portion of "Abbas the moderate" counter-factual nonsense: "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday hosted the families of Palestinian terrorists involved in Jerusalem attacks, just hours after three Palestinians killed an Israeli Border Police officer and injured a second in Jerusalem. Abbas met with the families of 11 terrorists in Ramallah who carried out attacks against Israelis in the past four months and whose bodies remain in Israeli custody, Ynet reported... Also present were the relatives of Alaa Abu Jamal, also of Jebel Mukkaber, who in October careened his car into Israeli pedestrians, exited the vehicle and stabbed the victims. The families of the terrorists called upon Abbas to act to secure the release of their bodies from Israel. Abbas said that the Palestinian leadership is making great efforts to do so in order to ease the pain for the families. “Your sons are martyrs,” the Palestinian Authority president told the families. [Source: Times of Israel]
And like this one of the aftermath of an assault on the city's Egged 78 bus in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv (Governor's Mansion) neighborhood. Two victims are dead; 16 are injured, some of them very seriously. This was an attack in which the outcome could have easily been much, much worse: the goal of the two terrorists, one armed with a gun and the other with a knife, was evidently to take control of the bus by force and use it to do even more serious harm.
One terrorist is Baha Aliyan, 22, from Jabel Mukaber. The second is Bilal Ghanem, from the same neighborhood, an "activist" in the Islamist Bloc at Al-Quds University who had a record as a Hamas terrorist [source] and was released from 14 months imprisonment just a year ago [source - Arabic]. Tom Gross, the distinguished media analyst who follows the Al-Quds school closely (it has a violent and hateful history) points out in a despatch today that the university's Fatah student faction published a tribute to the dead killer in Arabic on a university-affiliated website: our translation of the Arabic
جامعة القدس تزف شهيدها الثالث احد منفذي عملية اطلاق النار اليوم في
الباص في مدينة القدس الشهيد بلال غانم ...
makes plain that (no surprise here) the students call their former colleague a martyr. Such is the deplorable value system of the better-educated of the Palestinian Arabs. (Fatah's head is the current PA president, Abu Mazen or Mahmoud Abbas.)
The two murder-minded jihadists boarded an Egged bus on Olei HaGardom Street in East Talpiot, a neighborhood also known as Armon HaNetziv. According to Ynet:
They started shooting and stabbing passengers while the bus kept moving, killing a man in his 60s and wounding 10 others. One of the wounded, a man in his 40s, was evacuated in critical condition and was declared dead at the hospital. Two others were seriously wounded - women aged around 60 and 40, who suffered stab wounds to their upper body. Two others were in moderate condition: a woman of about 60 years old with gunshot wounds to her upper body and a man in his 30s. Three were lightly wounded, and two were suffering from shock.
Today's other two major attacks were both in Ra'anana, a Tel Aviv suburb that has so far largely escaped acts of Arab terror. One was a walk-up stabbing (the perpetrator traveled from East Jerusalem for his moment in the sun) at a bus stop in Ra'anana's commercial center. One of the victims is badly injured; two others with light-to-moderate injuries. The second, again in a busy part of the city, resulted in six Israelis being injured, one seriously. The attacker is alive but in a bad way.
It's got to be observed that (a) all of today's perpetrators are the holders of Israeli identity papers; and (b) many of the Palestinian Arab stabbings of the past two weeks here in Israel have been the work of murder-minded children and teenagers.
For those who see this as a statistical blip, an issue of interest only to friends of Israel, or a matter of no particular significance (many of the reporters and editors in the mainstream media, in particular), we have nothing to say.
But for reasonably intelligent observers, it's evident that a web of interlocking influencers within the PA and Hamas regime governments - their civil services (such as they are), their mosques and youth groups and schools - has been and continues to be involved in churning out battle-field-ready young people, boys and girls, their heads filled with visions of glory and a readiness - even a passion - for death.
What is the regime of Mahmoud Abbas, the highly-immoderate, allegedly "moderate" PA leader about whom we have nothing good to say, doing about it? Let's be clear: he's encouraging it, and facilitating it via overt incitement of the most barbaric kind.
The video above [translated from Arabic by Palestinian Media Watch] captures a fire-and-brimstone, rally-the-thugs speech given by the normally phlegmatic Abbas less than a month ago. It ran on official PA TV and was also posted to his personal website. It's a personal message, an official call to the masses, and it's entirely devoted to precisely the cause that is on the lips of the stabbers, the shooters, the car-rammers, the rock hurlers and the firebombers: the ancient and renewed capital of the State of Israel, Jerusalem, and the holiest site in Jewish life, the Temple Mount:
"We bless you [referring to those carrying out Ribat, the pursuit of religious conflict and/or war to protect land claimed to be Islamic), we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr (shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah. The Al-Aqsa [mosque] is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours, and they [the Israelis, the Jews] have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, September 16, 2015]
Yes: Every drop of blood.
Now if you were a callow teenage boy or girl of 13, 14, 15, and getting bombarded in the mosque and at school and on the street where you hang with your friends, always, always about Jerusalem and its sacred state - and then the president comes along and promises you paradise and a reward from Heaven, and a free pass to do whatever harm to the Jews that you can imagine, wouldn't your mother's largest kitchen knife be the very next you go looking for?
If any of Abbas adviser's are reading this, and want to deny the claim, they're invited to please send us written evidence of the PA president's calls to his people to stop their blood-lusting violence, their overt and cold-blooded weaponization of their society's children, and their hunting for defenceless, civilian Israelis at bus stops, tram stops and shopping precincts.
And for any Europeans reading this - congratulations! None of this could have happened without the tax money you pay to your governments who in turn send millions of Euros to Ramallah to enable Abbas and his henchmen to get away with murder.
Jerusalem - Ras al-Amud last night: That's an Egged bus burning. The
driver escaped [Image Source]
In the Old City, the heightened state of alert continues to be in effect. In Ynet's words:
The turmoil in and around Al-Aqsa mosque in the past week, as well as intelligence indicating Arab youths intend to violently protest, led Jerusalem’s chief of police, Maj. Gen. Moshe Edri, to order the reinforcement... [via sending] a hefty contingent to the Temple Mount on Friday, in preparation for possible protests and riots after Muslim morning prayers conclude, as tensions in the city remain high... The entrance to the Temple Mount area on Friday will be restricted for Muslims to men over the age of 40 and women and girls of any age. [Ynet today]
During Thursday evening in and around Jerusalem:
A bus driver was injured in the city when rocks were hurled at the bus he was driving near the Hizma checkpoint. His injuries were treated by a paramedic team on the spot, and he was sent to Shaarei Zedek Medical Center for further care.
A second bus incident: Haaretz says Palestinian Arabs "pelted the bus with stones as it was driving through East Jerusalem’s Ras al-Amud neighborhood. The driver fled, but when he returned to the spot later with the police, they found that the bus was on fire, apparently after having been torched." Haaretz might have mentioned, but did not, that the driver is himself an Arab, working for Egged, the bus co-operative that provides most of the bus service in the nation's capital.
Firebombs (Molotov cocktails) were hurled from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.at an Israel Defense Forces base on the outskirts of Jerusalem. A guard tower was damaged.
On Friday:
Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, along with a number of other Palestinian groups, has called for a "day of rage" for Friday to coincide with weekly Muslim prayers after what they call an Israeli 'assault' on Muslim worshipers at the al-Aqsa mosque... [i24news, this morning]
Also from i24news: "Israel meanwhile, has accused Turkey of being responsible for the recent violence, reported Israel's Channel 2 news. According to the report, which cited unnamed Israeli leaders, Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri, who is currently living in Turkey, is responsible for organizing the violence from afar. The onus therefore, has fallen on the Turkish government for allowing al-Arouri to funnel large amounts of money to Hamas and their armed military wing from Turkey. Turkey has rejected the claims, saying that al-Arouri is no longer in Turkey."
An Egged intercity bus from the co-operative's
website [Image Source]
We received this from a family member in the past hour:
Late last night, our son and daughter-in-law and two baby grandchildren took the bus home from a family event in central Israel to the southern Israel city where they live, located south of Beer Sheva.
The Egged bus, filled with every sort of passenger but mainly family groups returning to their homes in the desert communities, passed several temporary roadblocks on the scheduled two-hour trip. These are evidently a response to the outbreaks of violence that have erupted this week.
At one of them on a major road, the IDF people manning it said it would be better to find a different road. The driver, a Bedouin Arab (there are many who drive for Egged) took their advice, and sought an alternative route to his destination.
Very soon after the roadblock, the bus came under rock attack.
My son says it was quite terrifying - not at all the way it gets presented in the news reports. The front windshield was completely shattered, and the driver was covered in shards but, fortunately, not hurt. My son found one of the rocks and says it was the size of one and a half fists.
The bus continued on - it was late at night, and everyone wanted to be back at home - and eventually reached the destination at 2 this morning. We later learned by word of mouth that other buses serving the same southern city had come under rock attack earlier last night; injuries and property damage resulted.
If there have been media reports of these attacks, we have not seen them. And for anyone wondering, the bus was not traveling in any "occupied" territories or passing through any inappropriate neighbourhoods.
What we did happen to notice in a report on the Haaretz site just now, is this:
Around 8:00 P.M. [Sunday night], a notice was received that mosques called on the residents of Tel Sheva to arrive at the Omer Local Council's entrance at 10:00 P.M. to throw stones at passersby. Council spokesman Nissim Nir told Haaretz that when he received the information, he tried to contact police commanders in the area, but they did not answer his attempts. A few minutes later, he provided local police with the information, who told him the information would be treated as intelligence. Despite the advance notice, around 10:30 P.M. hundreds of masked rioters gathered at the entrance and began throwing stones and molotov cocktails.
Firebombs and rocks, and bear in mind all of this is happening in parts of Israel that are not disputed by anyone sane or reasonable.
(Tel Sheva is a Bedouin Arab neighbourhood of Be'er Sheva, a city of 200,000 which was hit by a terrorist GRAD rocket earlier today. Omer is right next to it. As founders of a charitable organization, we visited Tel Sheva a few months ago. We may make that the subject of a separate post.)
