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

The IDF Samaria Military Court compound [Image Source]

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

Bear with us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

09-Jun-16: The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize

Convicted murderer Barghouti: Man of peace? [Image Source]

Twelve years ago, the career of an ambitious Palestinian Arab gang leader, a member of Arafat's inner circle, ended when he was convicted in Tel Aviv District Court in relation to the deaths of five innocent people.

There were other charges as well: attempted murder, membership of a terror organization and conspiracy to commit a crime; he was convicted of those as well. He was acquitted on technical grounds in relation to 33 additional counts of murder. 

Our impression (we were personally present in the court room for part of the trial) was that the prosecution could have pressed those extra charges. Evidently a decision was taken that the accused would be imprisoned for a long-enough term if convicted on those charges where technical factors did not play a role. 

And indeed, that's what happened.

At the conclusion of Marwan Barghouti's trial in May 2004, the prosecution sought a sentence of one life term for each murdered victim and he was sentenced to - and is currently serving - five life terms behind bars:

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's 

orders in 2001: Father George Tsibouktsakis

The court said in its verdict that "the defendant most of the time did not have direct contact with the field operatives who carried out the attacks. That connection was maintained through associates close to the defendant. Barghouti was responsible for providing the field units with money and arms via these associates..." The judges said Barghouti's orders for terror attacks were sometimes "based on instructions" from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. "Arafat would never give explicit instructions for attacks but he let it be known when the timing was right," the judges said. "He made sure his subordinates understood very well when he was interested in a cease-fire and when he was interested in terror attacks against Israel," the verdict said.
["Barghouti Convicted in Deaths of Five People", Haaretz, May 20, 2004] 

Barghouti was one of those Arafat subordinates. And when we wrote above that his career ended, we were engaging in what seems more and more to be wishful thinking. We'll get to that in a moment.

A few brief words about his victims, none of whom has been honored with even a tiny fraction of the often-fawning media coverage of their convicted killer:

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's orders 

in 2002: Yoela Chen, mother of 2, 

shot dead at a gas station on her way
to a Jerusalem family celebration

• The court ruled that Barghouti was directly responsible for a January 2002 terror attack on a gas station in Givat Zeev in which an Israeli woman, Yoela Chen, 45 and a mother of two, was murdered. The attack, the judges said, was carried out at his direct order in revenge for the assassination of another Palestinian Arab terrorist called Carmi who had been responsible for a long list of murderous attacks on Israeli civilians. Barghouti admitted his responsibility for Yoela Cohen's killing.
• The killing of a Jewish-looking, traditionally bearded man, driving his car in the early summer of 2001 along one of Judea's intercity desert roads was carried out on Barghouti's orders, the judges said. That man was in reality not Jewish. Shot dead from a distance by Barghouti's sharp-shooters and a volley of 13 bullets, he was in fact a young, bearded Greek Orthodox monk, George Tsibouktsakis, also known as Father Herman, a religious devotee, one of two monks who lived in, and maintained, the ancient St. George Monastery perched on the edge of Wadi Kelt. Tragically, shot dead while looking Jewish.
• The court found that Barghouti explicitly approved the murderous March 2002 shooting and hand-grenade terror attack at Tel Aviv's Seafood Market restaurant where three people were murdered in a frenzied assault just after 2 in the morning. The victims were Police Sergeant-Major Salim Barakat, 33, from the Israeli-Druze community of Yarka - killed by one of the attackers who fled the restaurant; and Yosef Haybi, 52, of Herzliya and Eliyahu Dahan, 53, of Lod - both of them killed inside the restaurant.
• He was convicted as well for masterminding a car bomb attack in Jerusalem.

The 2004 Barghouti trial in Tel Aviv District Court was public,

transparent, and definitive: the accused was convicted on multiple

charges of murder and sentenced to five terms of life

imprisonment [Image Source]

None of these convictions in a non-military court and in front of an overflowing and often unruly crowd of witnesses, many of them Arabs, and overseas observers who flew in especially for the trial, prevented tendentious media coverage before, during and after Barghouti's conviction. Much of it is just as tendentious today.

Of all the many distortions, inaccuracies and open lies connected with that coverage, none is as galling as the way this vicious, violent man is routinely - and dishonestly - called a "political prisoner", and sometimes a "detainee". He has never been either. 

As a matter of objective reality, he ought to be called convicted murderer. And taking into account his undisputed role as head of the Tanzim shooting-and-bombing division of Fatah, he fully qualifies to be termed a terrorist.

Associated Press, as we wrote in an earlier blog post ["21-Mar-14: Allegedly objective journalism"] produced one of these distorted, politically-spun articles two years ago. That AP piece, entitled "Jailed militant key to Mideast talk" (March 19, 2014), sought to depict Marwan Barghouti as a Mandela-like man of peace who, if only he were sprung from jail, would take his natural place in the pantheon of Palestinian Arab statespersons and blaze a path to whatever peaceful destination they believe the Palestinian Arabs are heading. (UKMediawatch documented similar news-media efforts in an excellent analysis in 2013.) 

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Yosef Haybi

Here's some of what we wrote two years ago:

We personally sat through the [2004] murder trial of Marwan Barghouti... The hearing was in Tel Aviv, in the Magistrates Court complex that rarely gets the kind of lavish media attention in evidence that week. Aljazeera's TV crew were there along with reporters from all over. A motley assemblage of lawyers from Israel, the PA and overseas were too, intent on defending the 'great' man from the lowly offenses of which he was charged. Some of the most entertaining moments on the trial's first day involved one of those would-be advocates, an unusually boorish individual intent on making a splash, being physically picked up by the security people and thrown out the door of the court room and onto the floor of the adjacent lobby. (You dream of moments like that.) 

Two main factors (among many) persuaded us to be there. One: Marwan Barghouti had personally given post-massacre shelter and money to members of the Hamas gang that planned and carried out the bombing of the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in which our teenage daughter was murdered three years earlier. He was, in legal terms, an accessory after the fact to the terrorism...  

For us as recently bereaved Israelis, grieving for the lost life of a fifteen year-old daughter with such goodness and potential, it was almost unbearably painful to observe the lengths to which Israel's organs of justice bent over backwards to give this prominent member of the loathsome Palestinian political 'elite', a first-degree Arafat inner-circle insider, the fairest and most transparent of trials.  

One of lawyers in the defense counsel team was the self-parodying (and subsequently disgraced) Shamai Leibowitz, grandson of one of modern Israel's great religious philosophers. Leibowitz proposed to the court, with chutzpah that brought some of us to point of choking with rage, that the cold-blooded Barghouti with those deeply blood-drenched hands ought to be viewed as a warrior in the service of freedom, challenging the Pharaohs of his time. The court ought to think of him as being like Moses, Israel's great Law Giver. There were less bizarre moments too. 

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Police Sgt Major Salim

Barakat, 33, an Israeli Druze, father of a

3 year old daughter

It appears we are now facing a fresh round of bizarre Barghouti moments, the theological equivalent of fashioning a silk purse out of a female pig's aural orifice. 

As reported by a church news site a few hours ago [Episcopal Digital Network] 

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has endorsed the nomination of Palestinian political prisoner, Marwan Barghouthi, for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the nomination letter sent by the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, he said, “I decided to support this campaign alongside seven other Nobel Peace Prize laureates as a reflection of our belief that freedom was the only path to peace… I hope the Nobel Committee will take a bold decision bringing us closer to the day this holy land, charged with unique symbolic value, can stop being a living testimony of injustice and impunity, occupation and apartheid, and can finally be a beacon of freedom, hope and peace.”

Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, is, to put it mildly, not one of our favourite church-people - or people of any kind - on the basis of his years of explicit support for Palestinian Arab terror and for Barghouti. He has been a member of the modestly-named International High Level Committee of the Campaign for the Freedom of Marwan Barghouti and all Palestinian Prisoners, launched in October 2013.

Nine years ago we noted [here] what he said when Gaza erupted in an Arab-on-Arab bloodbath with Hamas and Fatah battling it out for winner-takes-all control of the rich-in-absolutely-nothing enclave: Tutu, watching the thuggery and the slaughter from a safe distance, said he was "in despair over these events", though he claimed to understand why the rival factions were at each other's throats:

"When you are oppressed, it is so very easy to turn on yourselves," he said.

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Eli Dahan, 53

And so easy, we reminded ourselves at the time, to blow up innocent women, children, men, schools, hospitals, restaurants. 

So easy. And to have church leaders slobber their sympathy all over your poor oppressed heads.

The only thing more appalling about what the Palestinian Arabs have done to themselves is the unforgivable forgiveness, the incomprehensible understanding emanating from such ill-informed, theologically-addled, hand-wringing, high-profile individuals as the pious church-man quoted above. Without him and the many others like him, the devastation and misery of the Pal-Arabs could have ended decades ago. [Our June 2007 blog post]

Painful as this is, Barghouti and his terrorist handlers must be quietly confident the crimes of the bigoted, violent Fatah apparatchik will recede into the past as a groundswell of support builds for the frankly absurd notion that he is a peacemaker - perhaps the peacemaker - who can bring the Palestinian Arabs into a meaningful dialogue with the despised Israelis. 

The moral gymnastics involved in seeing things in that upside-down, black-is-white fashion are reality in this part of the world, and explain why we find it necessary to spend so much time reminding audiences of the catastrophic Shalit Deal and the ongoing suffering it has delivered.

The idea that Barghouti is now a serious contender for the same award that the Nobel Committee gave to Tutu - and with Tutu's enthusiastic endorsement - is an indictment of Tutu's twisted values and the values of the ideologues promoting this ugly initiative.

30-Jan-16: Givat Ze'ev stabbing victim recovering slowly but well

We happened to be at the Givat Ze'ev shopping
complex the morning after the attack and snapped this view.  

This past Thursday, we posted here about another unprovoked Arab-on-Israeli knifing attack in Givat Ze'ev, a community located just a short distance past the Ramot neighbourhood of northern Jerusalem.

We had no information at the time about the identity of the victim. Victims of terror should never, ever be treated as statistics. So here's what we can now share about the victim of that attack.

His name is Menachem Mendel Rivkin and according to a Times of Israel report from Friday, he is a resident of Givat Ze'ev. As of yesterday, he was being treated in the intensive care unit of Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center for multiple stab wounds to the upper part of his body. Thankfully his condition has improved. He can now breathe unaided and is conscious and communicating with those around him.

Bir Nabala, the knifer's home-town
[Wikipedia]

His wife Brachi, interviewed on Israel's Channel 2 news:

“We left the car, we walked for maybe a meter. We parked right by the burger place, and suddenly my husband tells me ‘I’ve been stabbed’. I looked around and didn’t see anyone. It all happened in a few seconds... Everyone ran out to chase the terrorist, and so I stayed with [my husband], not quite sure what to do. I sensed he was losing blood and was not with me...”

The moments before and after the knifing, showing the attacker stalking the Rivkins, were captured on a security camera [here].

The stabber was chased and overpowered by civilian bystanders and then handed over to the authorities for interrogation. As we wrote on Thursday, he is a youth of 17, Abada Abu Ras, from the nearby Arab town of Bir Nabala. At Ma'an News Agency, they name him as "Obada Aziz Abu Ras, although the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said they could not confirm the young man's identity or where he was being detained." The only-too-familiar process of turning this thug into a hero deserving of emulation in Arab society is already well underway: see Alwatan Voice, Palestine News Network, PAnet and probably many more by now.

28-Jan-16: Another Arab-on-Israeli knifing attack tonight at a gas station on Jerusalem's northern edge

An Israeli male, variously described in reports as being in his thirties, forties and fifties, is the latest victim of the Palestinian Arab stabbing season.

He suffered serious injuries tonight around 11:00 pm when a knife-wielding Palestinian Arab male teen attacked him at a food shop - from the description it sounds to us like the Nehama Bakery - adjacent to a well-known gas station on the main highway leading from the northern Jerusalem neighbourhood of Ramot towards Givat Ze'ev, a community of some 15,000 residents.

He is being treated at this hour in the emergency room of Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center where, according to Times of Israel, he is in moderate to severe condition.

Twitter, whose ability to showcase killers and jihadists en route to fame and martyrdom exceeds that of the news-reporting industry by far, has already identified him: Abada Abu Ras, 17, from a Palestinian Arab town, Bir Nabala.

Ynet says the attacker entered the restaurant and stabbed the man, evidently without knowing him, several times in the upper body. He then fled, dropping the knife, and was pursued by civilians incensed by the brazen act of terror. They caught up with him some 200 meters south of the gas stop. A second knife was found on his person, and this along with the robustly physical attentions of the five or six men who caught up with him, resulted in him being slightly hurt.

What happens next is knowable in advance. In that perverse society in the grip of rampant blood-lust, Abu Ras will be proclaimed a hero for plunging a blade into a Jewish chest or back, His name and face, along with the trade mark of the political group who claim him as their own, will be rapidly emblazoned across the Arabic social media, and on posters hung up in kindergartens, schools, supermarkets and places of moderate religious worship throughout the PA realm, and perhaps in Gaza too if it turns out he is affiliated with the Islamists of Hamas. He will then quickly be forgotten (replaced in Palestinian Arab public affections and attention by the next stabber, the latest car-rammer or human bomb) unless he then engages in prolonged self-imposed fasting in his prison cell, in which case his stocks as a hero will rise yet higher. He may then be freed in some deal.

We pray that the still-unnamed victim will receive the best of emergency care and achieve a speedy and complete recovery.