17-Jul-18: Prayers for the dead, prayers for the living

There's going to be a public discussion this evening in London about the events we mention below. What we write in this blog post will, we hope, reach the people gathered at JW3 and be understood as a constructive contribution to a fraught but important dialogue:

Devastation at Sbarro pizzeria, Jerusalem, August 9, 2001

We’re living in morally confused times.

The handful of young British Jews, a few dozen according to reports, who assembled in Parliament Square in mid-May and solemnly said Kaddish for 62 dead Palestinian Arab Gazans, surely didn’t see themselves as compromising any principles or betraying any values.

They likely felt they were on moral high ground by being in solidarity with unfortunate, peaceful, unarmed, aggrieved protesters who clashed with Israeli army bullets on Gaza’s side of the Hamas/Israel border.

Our fifteen year old daughter Malki was murdered in Jerusalem by a woman foot soldier in the Hamas fighting forces. This happened in the Battle of Sbarro Pizzeria. That female terrorist saw herself as unarmed too - as a protestor, as aggrieved.

This she expressed by planting a bomb – a walking, breathing human bomb – in the pizza place.

After the massacre was done, she said she chose that site because at two in the afternoon it attracted children. She needed dead children. Lots of dead Jewish children.

We now know that just a few hours before the London Kaddish, a Hamas insider owned up to how at least 50 of the 62 deceased “protestors” were in reality Hamas fighters. Another Gazan terror group immediately piped up and claimed several more of the dead as their fighters. Most, maybe all, of the Gazans who passed on in that ‘demo’ were there to fight. And - at almost any price - to bring extreme harm to Israelis.

Hamas’s Salah Bardawil acknowledges 50 Hamas fatalities among the
62 killed on Israel-Gaza border, May 16, 2018 (Screenshot) [Source: MEMRI]

It’s unfair to blame the Kaddish-sayers for not knowing the truth about them - those rioting, murder-minded Gazan jihadists. The news professionals at the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian evidently didn’t know either. Some still don’t know it even now.

But we can ask those youngsters, some of whom had had some instruction in the basics of Judaism, if they know what Kaddish means. 

Beyond the fact that it’s said for the dead, do they recognize these words?

May there be abundant peace from heaven. And life for us and for all Israel. And say, Amen. May the Maker of peace in His celestial heights make peace for us and for all Israel and say, Amen.

Kaddish doesn’t mention the dead at all – not even once. It’s a central Jewish prayer for goodness. An expression of gratitude for Heaven’s power to bring peace and beneficence into our lives and into the world.

At the heart of the Kaddish is something that has been at the top of my mind constantly since Malki’s life was stolen from us. It’s not peace. Heaven knows, we haven’t had much of that.

No. It’s the importance of us, of our side: Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu – May He make peace for us. 

Losing a child to triumphant, barbarous murder is an experience – I can tell you from first-hand knowledge – that fiercely concentrates a person’s mind. It forces you to look very closely at what the enemy wants. And then to decide what our side wants. 

I don’t believe we Jews are better than other people. I don’t suggest for a moment that peace is something only we, our side, ought to have. On the contrary.

Malki Z"L, on her way to

a Passover hike when she was 14

Some of us knew before the Hamas thug admitted it that the Gaza mob was there at the fence to do as much harm to us as humanly possible. Those who didn’t know it then must surely know it now, even as the BBC and its ilk conceal this reality. 

The Gazan side want to win, to triumph. And to destroy us. Peace isn’t on their minds at all.

The moral confusion I mentioned just now is what causes some young Jews to lose their sense of us. Feeling part of us doesn’t, mustn’t, mean wishing bad to the other side. But it does mean understanding that if we want good – for us and also for them – we have to protect our own side first: our own homes, our own children, our own lives.

And be vigilant because we face a real, shooting, incinerating, bombing foe who means to wreak the greatest possible harm on us.

If the shocking display of Jews saying Kaddish was meant in the same way we say it for our deceased grandparents and family members, then it signifies a failure by all of us in preparing young Jews for a life that sadly includes unwanted confrontation with an unfathomable evil that targets us – all of us.

But if it was intended as a cry for more peace, then I wish those young people knew, and maybe they do, that on the Israeli side, the passion for peace is real and easy to find.

If we want a passion for peace to take root among the Gazans, we owe it to ourselves to first acknowledge that calls for peace – as opposed to calls for victory, self-sacrifice and triumph – have completely gone from Gaza and not only from Gaza. And for now at least, they don't seem to be coming back soon.

That’s something worth praying for.


Postscript: The families of Malki Roth הי"ד and Michal Raziel  הי"ד invite friends of the two girls, murdered together in the Sbarro massacre on the 20th day of Av, seventeen years ago, to pray with us at their gravesides in Jerusalem's Har Tamir cemetery (part of the Har Menuchot complex) on Wednesday August 1, 2018 starting at 5:30 pm. We will be glad to provide more specific details [click].

18-Mar-18: Unanswered questions about terrorists hiding in plain sight

Ahmad Hassan [Image Source]

This past Friday in London, a criminal court convicted a young man, just 18, of attempted murder.

This arose from his planting a bomb on a busy London Underground train carriage whose detonation at Parsons Green station injured 51 people. His name is Ahmed Hassan. The judge, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave, is reported to have told Hassan that his conviction by the jury was on the basis of "overwhelming evidence". He is going to be sentenced this week.

The Guardian's report of the trial's outcome sets the tone for a somewhat familiar scenario:

Small, shy and undoubtedly damaged, Ahmed Hassan attracted no end of kindness and sympathy when he arrived in Britain in the back of a cross-Channel lorry in October 2015, saying he was Iraqi and 16 years old... ["'A duty to hate Britain': the anger of tube bomber Ahmed Hassan", March 16, 2018]

From the brief reports, it seems life in England was not so terrible for the refugee. He won an Amazon voucher for becoming "student of the year"; he then used it buy one of the key chemicals for the explosive device. Just before executing his plan, he texted to a woman described in reports as his college mentor: "It's almost better to be back in Iraq. It's better to die because you have heaven."

Another clue to the personality throbbing inside the young jihadist is (as ITV nooted that he "got off the train one stop before the bomb partially exploded on the floor of the carriage" and "fled London with more than £2,000 in cash but was picked up by police at the Port of Dover the next day."

Also that he filled the bomb with shrapnel, including five knives, two screwdrivers, and nails and screws. This is what you do when you want to maximize carnage and agony, as the man who made the bomb that destroyed the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 did.

Some details from ITV's report:

• The court was told Hassan told Home Office officials he was trained by Islamic State "to kill" after he arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry in 2015. He was taken in by foster parents Penny and Ron Jones MBE, and studied media and photography at Brooklands College in Weybridge.
• The Iraqi-born teenager is said to have prepared the attack while his foster parents were away on holiday between September 1 and September 8 last year... The Old Bailey heard he wanted to cause "maximum" carnage to avenge the death of his father, who was blown up in Iraq more than 10 years before.
• One woman, known only as Miss S, giving evidence from behind a screen said she had been horribly scarred and burnt. Through tears she described hearing the bomb, seeing a giant flame and then realising her body and clothes were burning.
• Another victim, Ann Stuart told jurors: "What I saw was this flash and whoosh that came up from my side. My hair was smoking. I patted myself out and got off the train and this man picked me up and held me."
• Some 23 passengers suffered burns, with some describing their hair catching fire and their clothes melting in the blast. Another 28 suffered cracked ribs and other crush injuries in the stampede to get out of the platform via a narrow stairway.
• Commander Dean Haydon, head of Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command, said: "I describe Hassan as an intelligent and articulate individual that is devious and cunning in equal measures... On the one hand he was appearing to engage with the (Prevent) programme but he kept secret what he was planning and plotting. We describe him as a lone actor... It was only through good fortune that it only partially exploded. If it had, without a doubt we would have been dealing with many fatalities."

Here's how the UK's Security Minister at the Home Office, Ben Wallace, greeted Friday's verdict.

"I welcome the conviction of Hassan who sought to spread terror in this country and murder innocent people. This case is a bleak reminder of the devastating consequences of radicalisation... It is clear that there are some lessons to be learned in this particular case... However we should not allow this to undermine all the good work taking place across the country to stop terrorism and our work to help those who are legitimately in need. Ultimately, no one should be in doubt that those who bear responsibility for the atrocious attacks we have seen in the past year are the terrorists themselves."

The shrapnel

There is another way to look at this. It's well expressed in a leading article in today's Times of London. Some excerpts:

More than a century ago, in his book The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton introduced us to the idea of the terrorist hiding in plain sight... 

Ahmed Hassan, a teenage Iraqi asylum seeker, who in 2015 arrived in Britain illegally on a lorry going through the Channel tunnel, could hardly have done more to show he was serious about his terrorism... 

When it was discovered by staff at his sixth-form college that he seemed to be raising funds for Isis, he said it was his duty to hate Britain. He was referred to the government’s Prevent programme and its Channel project, which has the aim of mentoring young people and steering them away from radicalisation. It failed.

When he received a prize of an Amazon voucher for his studies at the college, he bought bomb-making equipment.

When he was placed with Ron and Penny Jones, foster parents appointed MBEs for their work, they were not told about his claims of Isis links or fears that he was being radicalised. But his behaviour did lead them to think he was suffering from a “mental deterioration”. They are now said to have stopped fostering.

There are so many things wrong with the Hassan case that it goes beyond what Ben Wallace, the security minister, has described as “some lessons to be learnt”. The collective failure of the security services, Surrey county council and other bodies could easily have resulted in a devastating loss of life... Many of those who were injured at the time are still affected. More questions need to be asked about Prevent, supposedly a deradicalisation programme.

Above all, why was Hassan here at all? At a time when this country has problems enough neutralising the danger from returning British Isis fighters, providing asylum to an Iraqi who claimed he had been trained to kill by Isis seems perverse in the extreme. His story, that he had been kidnapped and trained against his will, was hokum. He should have been put on the next plane out of Britain. Where terrorists are concerned we can never afford to be a soft touch. This time we were. ["Britain was a soft touch for this terrorist", The Sunday Times, March 18, 2018]

If these questions posed by Time of London's editorial people aren't asked in the right places, and the right places are not only in London or the UK, then it's a certainty that luck is going to run out at some point. The next seething, zealous, well-trained would-be mass-murderers are almost certainly located right now already inside the countries they lust to attack. It's insanity to ignore, in the name of political-correctness, the life-and-death dangers they respresent.

And if you're a senior politician doing the ignoring, that's irresponsible recklessness of a kind that has no expiation.

07-Jul-15: A decade after British Islamists murder dozens in London, not much room for optimism

Devastated London bus, July 7, ten years ago today [Image Source]

As the UK today marks the tenth anniversary of "the terrorist attacks that killed 52 people in London... the worst single terrorist atrocity on British soil", some of the more sober commentary has a pessimistic tone.

The key words in that last sentence come from a BBC report today. Given how the BBC has institutionalized a near-allergic avoidance of the word "terror" in its journalism, it's a welcome - though rare - resort to plain speaking.

The anniversary, to be marked by a minute's silence at 11:30 this morning, recalls a series of attacks on July 7, 2005 in which 52 people were murdered and 750 injured when human bomb attackers , all of them born, raised and educated in the UK, exploded three tube trains and a bus in London. The commemoration has provoked what The Guardian calls "soul searching about Britain’s progress in fighting terrorism".

Few cities can make the claim London can and does to being a cosmopolitan urban centre, tuned to the spirit of the times. What it says about itself and the experiences through which it has passed make it worth stopping to read and absorb.

To illustrate the direction the anniversary-driven introspection is taking, The Guardian's editors have chosen to publish an interview ["Ex-head of counter-terror: UK should lay on charter flights to Syria for jihadis"] with the man who was head of special operations for Scotland Yard in 2008-09, serving in that role as Britain’s "most senior counter-terrorism officer". The core message he conveys is stark:

Quick gave a bleak assessment about the danger Britain faced – a sense of pessimism shared by others who have served at a senior level in Britain’s counter-terrorism struggle. He said: “We’re in a worse place, in a more precarious place than ever. Ten years ago, we were dealing with relatively small numbers, who travelled mainly to Pakistan. They were engaged in conspiracies that were quite elaborate, involving plotting and communications that could be intercepted. “Now we are dealing with large numbers, who have travelled to Syria – we don’t know how many will come back with horrible intent – and the homegrown extremists who are here. We are in a less safe position than we were then, because the world outside our borders is less safe than 10 years ago. There are more people who are motivated, inspired or encouraged to mount these attacks. “Our understanding of radicalisation, what is at the heart of dissatisfaction with UK society, is very little understood.”

Other influential British voices are sounding a similar note:

Britain is at a greater threat from terror attack now than it was at the time of the 7/7 bombings a decade ago, according to an expert from a leading UK security think-tank. The national terror threat level was not public knowledge at the time of the attacks, when British youths killed 52 and injured more than 700 by detonating four bombs across London’s transport network. With the level now standing at “severe”, meaning an attack is “highly likely”, experts at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said the threat had only grown in the past decade... Margaret Gilmore, a senior associate fellow specialising in national security at RUSI and a former BBC home affairs correspondent at the time of the attack, said that the rise of Isis and the ongoing threat of al-Qaeda made the dangers of a terror attack on home soil “more intense”. [Independent UK, today]

Underlining how much less safe life is for Londoners today, this report from three days ago:

Three men have been arrested on suspicion of plotting terror attacks in London on the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings. Security forces arrested the men on Thursday after Isil and Taliban propaganda and maps of London were allegedly found on their computers. They were found with four laptops and computers in the raid near Peshawar in Pakistan... [Telegraph UK, July 4, 2015]

British targets have been sought and savagely attacked outside the UK as well, of course: "Tunisia terror attack: 30 of 38 people killed are British, UK says", CNN, July 2, 2015]

What can be done to make life better and safer? Former Chief Superintendent Quick has a concrete suggestion, quite different from current policy in every Western society as far as we can tell:

[T]hose wanting to go to Isis-controlled territory in the two countries should have to hand their British passports in as they leave. The condition of them being allowed to travel to join Isis could be they would never be allowed to return to Britain. He said: “You have to think how do you confront it, if you have hundreds or thousands who want to go there and live that life? We should try and convince them not to go. If they want to go, you have to ask the question, are we better off, if they surrender their passports and go? It’s better than them festering away here... Quick said an extremist Islamist pathology and British values were irreconcilable. [The Guardian, yesterday]

It's evident that jihad-based terrorism is going to be endlessly perplexing for Western societies. It helps to start with a large dose of openness to new views and humility about the things we seem to know and not know. Quick's admission above is just the sort of thing people need to hear: British understanding of what turns people like the 7/7 plotters into mass murderers is poorly understood.

The Economist, which does a good job of explaining complex issues, wrote this in an editorial after the terrorism of a decade ago:

More legislation may make Britons feel safer, but it will not tell them what they most want to know: who supplied the bombers with equipment and trained them to use it? And how many more British citizens are queuing up to martyr themselves beneath the streets of London? [Economist, July 14, 2005]

The honest answer is no one knows, a decade later. We will be scouring their website today to see if they revisit those questions.

A non-trivial voice in Britain's public discourse on lessons learned over the past decade comes from the UK's organized Moslem communities. One of the groups outspoken in propounding the case that it's actually Islamophobia - and not terror - that needs society's major attention, is Islamic Human Rights Commission ("set up in 1997... independent, not-for-profit, campaign, research and advocacy organization based in London"). For them, the recent Islamist massacres teach a specific kind of lesson:

Today's terrorist attacks in Kuwait, Tunisia and France provide further evidence, if any was still needed, that Muslims are the biggest victims of the extremism manifested in groups like Daesh (ISIS) and that is wrong to hold them collectively responsible for the actions of a morally depraved minority [IHRC press release, June 26, 2015]

Leaving aside its explicit hostility to Israel (which certainly illuminates what they mean and don't mean by "rights"), IHRC is outspokenly against anti-terrorism legislation; has been for at least the past decade. The Islamist massacres in London a decade ago appear to have provoked no condemnation or protest from its human rights-focused activists (at least, as far as we could tell from searching their site - and we would love to be corrected). An IHRC press release issued on July 22, 2015, a fortnight after the bombings, focuses on "the complete absence of sympathy and condemnation from both the media and the government... Such inaction indirectly legitimises the backlash attacks themselves." Sympathy not for Britain or the people murdered and maimed, but for the victims of post-7/7 British hostility to Moslems as Moslems. It will be interesting to see if they issue a press release on today's tenth anniversary.

Today is another appropriate moment to ask ["30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs"] that using the false and misleading term "suicide bomber" should end.

29-Oct-14: Could an opinion editor at the NYTimes have blown their cover?

NYT resource portal [Image Source]

Matt Seaton was a comment editor at The Guardian for seven years before leaving (in a kind of job swap) to do a similar job at the New York Times. In that role, he proudly announced an op ed today with (in our opinion) a bitter and twisted view of the lives lived in Israel by Arabs.

Often overlooked, an insight into the life of the one-fifth of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian. By @rulajebreal: http://t.co/QJGFeMfMiX
— Matt Seaton (@mattseaton) October 27, 2014

This caught Tamar Sternthal's attention. She's with CAMERA ("the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America... a media-monitoring, research and membership organization") which follows the excesses at the New York Times - especially what we would term the agenda-driven hostility it exhibits towards Israel - closely:

@mattseaton @rulajebreal no kidding! @nytopinion hasn't devoted a piece to Israeli racism in a whole month! @MairavZ
— Tamar Sternthal (@TamarSternthal) October 28, 2014

A fatuous response from NYTimes' Seaton:

@TamarSternthal @rulajebreal @nytopinion @MairavZ it's equal opportunity opinion here; aim to give voice to all sides of a debate over time
— Matt Seaton (@mattseaton) October 28, 2014

Next, Tamar's riposte

@mattseaton @rulajebreal @nytopinion @andyrNYT So we can expect two hit pieces in the next month about Palestinian racism?
— Tamar Sternthal (@TamarSternthal) October 28, 2014

Seaton drops the bomb

@TamarSternthal Sure, soon as they have sovereign state to discriminate with. Meanwhile, expect piece from cabinet min. on why they won't
— Matt Seaton (@mattseaton) October 29, 2014

Uh, did we hear that right?

@mattseaton so no @nytopinion scrutiny on Palestinian racism until they have a state? Thx for clarifying
— Tamar Sternthal (@TamarSternthal) October 29, 2014

As far as we know, Seaton has stayed silent. We politely enquired

@TamarSternthal @nytopinion Pray tell, @mattseaton: Do other aspects of "all the news that fits" not apply to "stateless" Pal Arabs? Which?
— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) October 29, 2014

and got no answer.

So we directed our question to the people who put the NYTimes together

Att: @nytimes: Does @mattseaton 's disclosure of hitherto secret policy to cocoon Pal Arabs also apply to news reporting? [@TamarSternthal]
— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) October 29, 2014

It's not so common for the facade to be dropped as Seaton of the NYTimes did today. You would think that management at the great metropolitan newspaper would want to clear up any possible misunderstandings. Their objectivity in the reporting of Middle East events is right at the top of the list that keeps many of its readers subscribing. But no, no clarifying statements have issued forth from them so far,

And if - as we think Seaton's slip confirms - they are not being objective at all, does anyone imagine the NY Times is the only mainstream news source that is okay with holding the Palestinian Arabs - for whatever idiotic, artificial or imagined reason - to a lower standard [here, for instance] when it comes to matters of racist hatred, malice and prejudice?

We can hardly wait to find out.

15-Jul-14: Tuesday and the battle against the jihadists of Hamas goes on

• 05:40 pm: The ceasefire of this morning, rejected immediately by Hamas while accepted - and observed - by Israel until the middle of this afternoon, is over. Hamas rockets kept on appearing throughout those hours in the skies above many Israeli cities. Now the IDF is again attacking Gaza, and the rockets are continuing as before.
  The IDF announced this around 3:00 pm this afternoon. That's about when one of its spokespersons tweeted this:

Here's how the Guardian conveyed the failure of the ceasefire to its fans:

So for a large part of the ,educated, classes, the conviction that "Israel army resumes attack" is the whole story. That the terrorist forces of Hamas didn't even bother to stop shooting at any stage is somehow of marginal interest to The Guardian's editors. That's how things work in parts of the ideology-driven news media.

• 06:15 pm: As distorted as UNRWA's representations of fact frequently are, you can't help but get a sense of the devastation that has somehow fallen out of the sky and struck the Palestinian Arabs of the Gaza Strip. A syndicated AFP report ["UNRWA: Gaza destruction 'immense'"] published in the past hour dwells on much of the human suffering while being strangely short of the sort of context that might help explain how this mess came about. Some highlights:

• "The level of human losses and destruction in Gaza is really immense," said UNWRA spokesman Sami Mshasha. "According to our latest figure, we are talking about 174 killed and well over 1,100 injured. This number will increase. The numbers are increasing by hours," he told reporters. 

• "A good number of those killed and injured are women and children. That is a cause of concern for UNRWA," he added. The death toll Tuesday had risen to 192, according to local officials in Gaza. 

• Mshasha said that 560 homes had been totally destroyed, while thousands of buildings had suffered damage. Mshasha said that 47 UNRWA facilities had also been damaged by bombing... He called on the warring sides to respect U.N. buildings. 

• A total of 17,000 people had found refuge in 20 schools run by the U.N. agency, which has sent their GPS coordinates to Israeli authorities. 

• In a separate statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the bombing had devastated Gaza's water supply. "Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are now without water. Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water," said Jacques de Maio, who heads ICRC operations in Israel and the Palestinian territories. "Water and electrical services are also affected as a result of the current hostilities. If they do not stop, the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis," he said in a statement.

• 06:25 pm: US Secretary of State John Kerry, of whom we have written repeatedly in this blog, spent today in Vienna. This morning, he spoke to the media there, making a statement [via jpost.com] worth reprinting: "I cannot condemn strongly enough the actions of Hamas in so brazenly firing rockets in multiple numbers in the face of a goodwill effort to offer a ceasefire, in which Egypt and Israel worked together, that the international community strongly supports..." Hamas is "purposely playing politics" by continuing the rocket fire, using innocents as "human shields... against the laws of war." "And that is why they are a terrorist organization," Kerry added. Unquote. 
• 06:30 pm: As the fighting between the Hamas regime and Israel continues, here's an indication of where US public opinion stands. Herb Keinon, the Jerusalem Post's diplomatic correspondent, has just tweeted [@HerbKeinon] this:

• 06:50 pm: Some more about that Pew survey: "As violence between Israel and Hamas shows no signs of abating, the sympathies of the American public continue to lie with Israel rather than the Palestinians. And dating back to the late 1970s, the partisan gap in Mideast sympathies has never been wider. Currently, 51% of Americans say that in the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, they sympathize more with Israel. Just 14% sympathize more with the Palestinians, while 15% volunteer that they sympathize with neither side and 3% sympathize with both. These views are little changed from April, before the recent outbreak of Mideast violence. However, the share of Republicans who sympathize more with Israel has risen from 68% to 73%; 44% of Democrats express more sympathy for Israel than the Palestinians, which is largely unchanged from April (46%). The share of independents siding more with Israel than the Palestinians has slipped from 51% to 45%.
  Just 17% of Democrats, 17% of independents and 6% of Republicans sympathize more with the Palestinians than Israel. These numbers have changed little since April... White evangelical Protestants remain more likely than members of other religious groups to sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians (70%). White evangelical Protestants make up nearly a third of Republicans (31% of all Republicans and Republican leaners), so this accounts for at least some of the partisan gap in sympathies. However, even among Republicans who are not white evangelicals, two-thirds (66%) sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians. This compares with 78% of white evangelical Republicans." [source]
• 06:55 pm: Since 6:00 pm, there have been rocket warnings in these communities:  Hof Ashkelon region; Netivot - where Iron Dome intercepted two rockets over the city, and two more fell in open land; Beersheba (several times) - two rockets crashed without causing serious harm; Nevatim; Sderot; Sdot Negev region; Sha'ar Hanegev region.
• 6:58 pm: And in many communities around the country right now, including the Greater Tel Aviv area.
• 07:00 pm: Australia's ambassador to Israel, Dave Sharma drove down to Beersheba today to visit two Bedouin Arab girls injured on Monday in a Hamas rocket attack on their village. He brought with him a toy koala. Mar’am Alwakili, 10, remains unconscious at Soroka Medical Center. Her sister Atil is in moderate condition. “The destroyed home and the fate of the Bedouin children encapsulate the indiscriminate nature of rocket fire, which continues to emanate from Gaza,” Ambassador Sharma wrote in a statement quoted by Times of Israel. Good on ya, mate.
• 07:15 pm: A mortar attack on the Erez Checkpoint has resulted in an Israeli civilian, age 37, being injured critically [Jerusalem Post]. Quoting Channel 2 TV News, they say the man was a volunteer visiting soldiers near Gaza to deliver food to soldiers. UPDATE 07:30 pm: Ynet says he has died from his injuries.
• 07:45 pm: There are multiple Gazan rocket attacks going on right across the land at this moment. Times of Israel says they number 36, and that warning sirens are being heard in Ashkelon, Sderot, and the Shaar Hanegev region. Two buildings in Ashkelon have taken direct hits in the past few minutes.  
• 07:50 pm: The BBC's Jeremy Bowen observed what we call here a Fell Short and tweeted about it in the past hour: "@BowenBBC: Just saw one rocket that seemed to fail in flight, dropping back into Gaza”. Do you imagine he has any idea how very common these Gazan-rockets-fall-on-Gazan-heads are? Has he reported on it?

19-May-14: Will momentary focus on UNRWA throw any light on PA and Hamas abuse of their own people?

How a person feels about the vast and sprawling UNRWA organization - the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - is a kind of proxy for how open he or she is towards understanding what actually happens in this part of the world as distinct from what people wish were happening. 

If you think UNRWA is just great, deserves all the support we can give it, one of the mankind's major humanitarian achievements, then you may be part of a hugely uninformed majority. A blog with the modest title "Call to Humanity" (just as one small example among many) reflects that standpoint, calling UNRWA "the oldest, most-established and perhaps the most successful international humanitarian operation in the world".

It's nothing of the sort as, for instance, the Red Cross (established in 1863) might point out. As for successful, there's room for thinking very differently.

When UNRWA got started on December 8, 1949, it defined a Palestinian refugee as someone whose "normal place of residence" had been Palestine during the 23 month period ending in May 1948. Yes, that's 23 months, not years. 

In 1965, the class was widened dramatically by an UNRWA decision to extend coverage to third-generation refugees i.e. the children of parents who were themselves born after 14 May 1948, the day Israel came into formal existence and was massively attacked by all the Arab states. 

This must have gone over well in certain quarters because in 1982, eligibility was extended to all subsequent generations of descendents, without any limitation. This chain of events is described in a recent monograph, "UNRWA: Blurring the Lines between Humanitarianism and Politics", authored for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs by Dr. Rephael Ben-Ari. 

What's more, those “refugees” remain refugees even after they become citizens of other countries.

Given UNRWA’s broad definitions, it is therefore no wonder that the current number of Palestinian refugees, according to the Agency’s figures, amounts to nearly 5 million – half of the number of refugees in the entire world - whereas the formal number of original refugees who fled Palestine in 1948 was around 700,000 – 750,000 out of whom only 8 percent are still alive. [Ben Ari]

UNRWA has evolved into one of the largest programs of the United Nations. Its 30,000 employees are part of a structure that delivers services to its beneficiaries in ways that, elsewhere, would be considered government-like. But in the Middle East, government-like can be a fairly loose and unhelpful definer. For instance, though polio has erupted in the region, the government operated by the Hamas regime in Gaza is said to be refraining from spending any of its hard-earned military-equipment budget on anti-polio vaccine. 

How effective is UNRWA? A different refugee agency (the Office of UN High Commission for Refugees) set up in the same year to serve the remainder of the world's displaced innocents

has helped tens of millions of people restart their lives. Today, a staff of some 8,600 people in more than 125 countries continues to help some 33.9 million persons [UNHCR website].

Yet people like the blogger we just mentioned keep putting UNRWA at the top of the heap.

Now, sixty-plus years after it got started, UNRWA is about to come under some brief scrutiny within the UN, though let's quickly add that no-one expects anything good to come of it. Jonathan Tobin explains this in an article published yesterday on the Commentary Magazine website, called "Want Peace? Change UN’s Refugee Policy":

A UN panel will discuss an effort to revise the rules under which the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) operates. The pending debate is the result of an initiative pushed by the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Judges and seeks to redefine who can be considered a Palestinian refugee and therefore a recipient of UNRWA’s largesse... This discussion not only calls attention to UNRWA’s misguided policies but also highlights an issue that is one of the chief obstacles to peace. Though UNRWA is tasked with helping the Palestinians and is, for lack of a Palestinian government or groups dedicated to providing their people with a path to a better life, their primary source of sustenance, it actually plays a central role in their continued victimization... Rather than help the refugees to adjust to reality, UNRWA’s policies have dovetailed nicely with a Palestinian political identity that regards accommodation to Israel’s existence as tantamount to treason. The Palestinian belief in a “right of return” for not just the original Arabs who totaled a few hundred thousand but for the millions who claim to be their descendants is only made possible by UNRWA’s willingness to go on counting second, third, fourth, and now even fifth generations of Palestinians as refugees. [Tobin]

He goes on to refer to UNRWA

education programs that foment hate against Israel and employees who aid terrorists... But so long as the Palestinians believe they have the support of the world in their effort to undo the verdict of the war they launched in 1948, the millions who call themselves refugees will never give up their goal of eradicating Israel’s existence.

Though he mentions "the support of the world", that's not entirely true. Knowing who does support UNRWA and pays its bills, and who does not, has never been hard to figure out. Top of the list of course would be those phenomenally wealthy oil-drenched Arab fiefdoms for whom the Palestinian Arab struggle is their very reason for living and who routinely "renew" their "commitment" to, and "solidarity with", the cause, right?

Of course not right. 

As we noted in a January 2013 post, "Only one non-Western entity, the Islamic Development Bank, is in UNRWA's top twenty funders list - and that one comes in at nineteenth place with a contribution 3% the size of the hated Americans' and 3.5% of what Australia (Australia!) contributes." The numbers in the table we prepared below come from the UN's official record covering all donations for the year 2010 and ranked by size of overall contribution.

(The 2012 top-donors table is here on an UNRWA website.)

Ben Ari refers to a modest degree of push-back, with Canada ending its UNRWA funding in 2010, and the Dutch declaring their intention to “thoroughly review” their UNRWA policies in December 2011. He writes how, in recent years, a growing awareness has emerged about UNRWA's active political involvement, its lack of accountability, and what he calls "the unfettered freedom of speech enjoyed by its executive officers, defying the fundamental norms of objectivity and neutrality that oblige UN officials as international civil servants".

For us, it's the role played by UNRWA as a fig leaf for the Palestinian Arab regimes that is one of its most disturbing achievements. A recent Guardian article written by Margot Ellis, UNRWA's Deputy Commissioner-General (though her role is not mentioned in the Guardian's web version) seeks to examine "why Palestine is suffering so badly" explaining, naturally enough, that it's because of Israel. The only possible solution, she writes:

is to get rid of the underlying causes: the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and the closure of Gaza which is stifling the economy, increasing poverty and unemployment, and forcing even greater dependency on aid provided by the international community. The need for emergency interventions would diminish dramatically if Gaza was opened up for normal business and trade.

Consistent with everything we know about UNRWA and its management team, she sees no need to touch on the perpetual state of war against Israelis imposed by the jihad-minded Hamas rulers of Gaza on their principal victims, the Gazan Arabs. Nor on Hamas criticism of UNRWA schools for its inadequate focus on terror [source] as an educational goal.

But there's something else about her stated views that bothers us no less:

In the West Bank, current underfunding projections would necessitate a significant reduction in food assistance at a time when food insecurity is rising, with more and more families – especially inside refugee camps – requiring assistance to meet their basic food needs. [Ellis in The Guardian, March 12, 2014]

Think about that. UNRWA regards itself as addressing the basic food needs of thousands of Palestinian Arab families. We read those words and we're thinking: an underfunding problem that causes people to starve? In a country (the one declared recently by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority) that has sufficient budget capacity to award fat pensions, bogus senior jobs in the PA security forces, and salaries that are multiples of the national average to men freed by political extortion from life terms in prison for murdering Jews, and officially celebrated by the PA elite for that reason? This Margot Ellis cannot bring herself to mention? Because one has nothing to do with the other?

Ms Ellis obviously knows at least as much as we do about the hypocrisy and double-talk that is at heart of the two Palestinian governments and their policies. She chooses not to refer to it because attributing the problems to Israel works far better. It delivers the goods.

The puzzle for us is how the blame-Israel-first-and-last strategy elicits a supportive response year after year from the likes of Australia, Switzerland, the EU, the United Kingdom and the United States, and peanuts in cash terms from the mind-bogglingly wealthy regimes of Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Sultan of Brunei. Certainly, money can't solve every problem, but when the woman who owns the budget says there's a disaster happening in which people are starving because of "underfunding", then some extra attention to funding might be the responsible management thing to do.

And tipping people off to the shabby role played by the PA would be a good start.

Our sincere thanks to Małgorzata Koraszewska who has translated this post into Polish and published it ["Komu pomaga UNRWA?"] on the widely-read Listy z naszego sadu website. She had previously translated these articles of ours into Polish as well:  17-Feb-14: Money and the business of sustaining a culture of terror; 5-Apr-14: Home-made rockets? What damage can they possibly do?; 17-Nov-11: A monster walks the streets and she has many accomplices. Thank you, Małgorzata!

15-Feb-14: Yet again, Sabbath rocket attacks on communities of southern Israel

Just coming out of the Sabbath day and catching up on events.

During this past Friday evening, at about 7:00 pm when many Israelis are gathered at or close to their Sabbath table, the Hof Ashkelon region was once again the victim of lethal rockets fired by terrorists, as yet unidentified, flinging whatever they have (and they possess many thousands of rockets) into whatever they can reach (Israeli communities and thousands of Israeli homes are located mere seconds away as the missile flies).

Times of Israel reports that, prior to crashing into open fields, the incoming rockets triggered the Red Alert siren system, causing warnings to be heard through the region, and giving Israeli families in their homes mere seconds to find shelter. (Wikipedia terms this "an early warning radar system", but the expression "early warning" fits better to a bygone age and a different place. When the rockets are fired from a handful of kilometers away, you have mere seconds. Early it is not.)

Later Friday evening, around 9, a separate rocket was fired into southern Israel, this time striking the Eshkol region and also exploding in open fields.

In both cases, there are neither human losses nor significant property damage. This, it goes without saying, is never the intention of the jihadists. They place themselves, and the people around them, at risk because in their value system the potential pay-off (dead or injured or terrified Israelis) makes it worthwhile. 

From a distance, observers aware of the cynical brutality of these entirely random, non-discriminatory attacks whose intent is to kill, maim and destroy can decide for themselves whether (a) to ignore them entirely; (b) become outraged and focus some attention on how the compact, thoroughly-controlled (by the terrorist organization Hamas) enclave can continue to get away with this, day after day, month after month, with virtually zero international attention; (c) cheer.

By far the majority of news channels outside Israel - in fact, almost without exception - adopted their customary stance, falling again into category (a).

When Israeli forces respond to the two attacks by taking out the perpetrators or their infrastructure, their viewers/readers will easily buy the claim that, yet again, the 'brutal' Israelis have launched an 'unprovoked' attack on the residents of the Gaza Strip, once again testing their "resilience and fortitude" and "crushing their spirit".  So it goes.

31-Jan-14: Those overnight rockets fired into southern Israel, barely noticed from afar, reported with so little context

Netivot  [Image Source: Panoramio]

You would need to look long and hard to find any mention in any mainstream news channel anywhere of the fact that incoming-missile sirens wailed over much of southern Israel last night (Thursday). We posted a note on Twitter at the time (see below) before the outcome was known.

This morning, we know, according to a report via Times of Israel, that a Grad rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded in an open area just outside the southern city of Netivot (population: 27,000). They haven't heard those sirens in Netivot since November 2012 and Operation Pillar of Defense.

9:40 pm: Incoming rocket warnings heard across Israel's south. Now waiting for reliable reports of what happened. #FearfulUncertainty
— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) January 30, 2014

Ynet's report says two rocket landings were subsequently detected in open areas of southern Israel in last night's attack.

What's poorly understood by people far from here is that the terrorists who mount these lethal attacks have neither the capability nor the desire to point them at specific locations. Anywhere on the Israeli side of the fence, for them, is good enough, actually. And if their prayers are answered with deaths or injury, then their many failed attempts are justified.

In simple terms, this is the face of the terror faced by Israelis within firing range of the jihadists of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Fortunately there were neither injuries nor damage this time, but that is never the outcome sought by those who do the firing, nor of the long supply chain that stands behind them.

In the wake of the terrorist rocket fire, IDF planes overnight struck several known centers of terrorist logistics and weapons storage. Times of Israel quotes Palestinian Arab sources saying two strikes targeted training sites of the Hamas-controlled Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza. For most consumers of news, those Israeli post-attack strikes are the only thing they will know about the drama overnight. Arabs firing rockets at Israeli homes long ago ceased to interest most editors.

But while there is almost never any coverage of the scale or frequency of attacks on civilian populations like last night's, the reality - for those who care to take a close look - is serious and getting worse.

Israel's director of Military Intelligence, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, whom we quoted here in 2012 and 2013, outlined the key issues to the annual Institute for National Security Studies conference this past Wednesday:

• 170,000 rockets and missiles threaten the State of Israel from all regions. 
• "Up until recently, the number was much greater and it has decreased, but it will go up again."
• Despite a drop in the number of missiles and rockets threatening Israel, their level of precision has drastically risen. 
• "The enemy has the capability to land mass amounts of arms on Israeli cities..."
• "For the first time the enemy now has the ability to hit Israeli cities hard..."
• Neighboring countries "are busy with themselves. They have less funds to start a war [but] there is no question there is a decrease in threats, but they have not given up." [UPI]

Click for The Guardian's farewell to
sunny, plucky Gaza: Where 'hope is rare' and
the training of jihadist children to kill and die
for their leaders is simply invisible

Meanwhile, as if they were entirely oblivious of the phenomenal quantities of arms held by the Hamas regime, and studiously ignoring the incoming rocket attacks and the threat they pose to the lives of an entire society, reporters and editors from the agenda-driven parts of the news media continue to relate to Gaza as if it were some sort of innocent, impoverished step-child in a children's fairy tale. There's no better instance than this week's pathetically-funny-if-it-weren't-so-serious teary-eyed farewell to Gaza by the Guardian's Middle East correspondent Harriet Sherwood. She writes of the numerous factors that

have chipped away at the resilience and fortitude of Gazans, crushing their spirit 

but remains

fascinated by the place, its people, its history and its compelling complexity

Sadly her fascination does not move her to take a thoughtful professional look at one of Gaza's truly flourishing industries, unimpeded by shortage of raw materials or opportunity: the manufacture of children's lives, hopelessly crippled by a hatred so intense that they embrace with manifest adoration the possibility - the goal! - of their own self-destruction, just so long as they can bring death and pain to their despised Jewish enemy.

She touches very lightly on the issue, very much in passing, but places it into an appropriately-Guardian-style perspective by focusing on the stories of some of her many Gazan friends. She then sums them up with this:

These and others belie the demonic image of Gazans, often promoted by Israel. Rather, they are overwhelmingly decent people who simply want food on the table, a better life for their children, dignity, respect and freedom.

She might be right. From here, it's hard to tell. We're sincere in saying we wish the positive values she projects onto the Gazans were true or would become true in our lifetimes. But with rockets being routinely fired into the homes where the children on our side sleep or go to school, and no sign - not even the smallest one - of a desire by the people of Gaza or their jihadist leadership that they understand the depths of their own barbarism, we're left with a picture of a failed society seemingly bent on deepening its own depravity.

It's a theme we feel needs to be better understood, not by the Harriet Sherwoods - they know and choose to ignore - but by those who depend on The Guardian and its like for reportage and objective analysis and are systematically failed by them.

That's one of the reasons we write posts like these

• 27-Jan-14: In Gaza, a death cult celebrates its graduating class
• 15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?
• 18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions
• 4-May-13: So you thought the people who raise children to become "the fertilizer of their land" could sink no further?
• 29-Apr-13: Hamas demonstrates importance of solid education
• 27-Jan-13: Hamas' new army of children: Will the UN's and foreign funders' role in this scandal be critiqued by the news-reporting media?

For a far more penetrating critique of Sherwood/Guardian than anything we can manage, you can't do better than read CIFwatch's excellent "Goodbye, Harriet Sherwood: Three years covering Gaza and no lessons learned." It may help place the events of this morning, last night and the past several years into perspective.

27-Jan-14: In Gaza, a death cult celebrates its graduating class

Hamas leader Hanieyeh: From the Al-Aqsa TV coverage
of the graduation event

A January 16 ceremony took place in the terror-rich atmosphere of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip marking the graduation of several thousand high-school children from a government-imposed, paramilitary indoctrination course in which the goal of self-destruction played a central role. It would have done the North Koreans proud.

But unlike in North Korea, what took place on a sports field in Gaza was based explicitly on the values of a religion with hundreds of millions of adherents throughout the world. The Hamas satellite channel Al-Aqsa TV broadcast the ceremony throughout the Arabic speaking world where it was viewed in real-time and via recordings by a global audience. This was no mere flower show or Friday morning local sermon.

The translation team at MEMRI published the English-language text of the television coverage today. From experience, it's unlikely to get much airplay in the conventional media channels. This is a shame since watching the video [online here] and reading its transcript [here] is a sobering, shocking experience.

Viewers watching it understand, in ways that reports alone rarely convey, that what is in evidence here is a failed state in the tragic grip of a massively-intrusive religious cult consuming its own children. The hatred and zeal, the recurring calls to kill and be killed (the one evidently no less praiseworthy than the other), claim to be derived from Islam. They explicitly invoke its tenets and values.

For those of us who hold by non-Islamic belief systems, we are left again wondering where the outrage from believers in a civilized, respectful Islam is. (Perhaps not all of us. Harriet Greenwood, for instance, until this week the Guardian's Middle East correspondent, inserted into her sadly credulous April 28, 2013 profile of the Gazan Futuwwa programs a malicious and misleading comparison with Israel's compulsory post-high-school national service program.)

Something hideous is happening in Gaza. Those doing it declare it's what Islam demands. As far as we can tell, Islam's adherents in other places are largely silent. This cannot be because they don't know it's happening.

Hamas minister Fathi Hammad reminds graduating high
schoolers where to place the emphasis

Some selected extracts from MEMRI's transcript of the Al-Aqsa TV coverage of the January 16, 2014 graduation ceremony in Gaza:

• Chant: "Our utmost desire..." [Announcer] "Is death for the sake of Allah!" [Graduating children]
• "Today, 13,000 youth are graduating from the Futuwwa camps.... Remain steadfast on the path. Continue the work you began in the camps... Memorize what you have learned, and implement it in the battlefield when you meet the enemy." [Osama Al-Mazini, Hamas regime's minister of "education"] [The New York Times published some background on the Futuwwa camp phenomenon in its January 14, 2014 edition]
• "To the Zionist enemy, everywhere and at any time... You shall never enjoy a pleasant life on our beloved homeland. We... will confront you on every hill, in every valley, and on every road. Nothing awaits you here but to be killed. Nothing awaits you here but to be killed or to leave. [A high-school student who graduated the Hamas training course]
• "Sons and brothers, you do not have much time to train. Study, conduct training, become experts and be inventive, with the help of Allah. The battle will be your battle. The Jihad will be your Jihad. Palestine is your land, Islam is your religion, and Allah is your God. The Messenger is your role model, and the Koran is your constitution. You have been planted by Allah, and therefore, you will harvest the enemies of Allah in the battle to come... We pray for Allah to choose martyrs and leaders from among you – and not only in Palestine, but throughout planet Earth, so that the call for Jihad will be spread all over the world, and the entire world will embrace the religion of Allah." [Fathi Hammad, Hamas regime's minister of interior. Note that when his own child needed the best possible medical care in April 2010, he had little hesitation in getting her across the border into an Israeli children's hospital ward. Though her life was saved there following a botched medical procedure in Gaza, he carefully avoid any mention of Israel when later thanking those responsible for the act of salvation.]
• "These words, which we memorize well, are uttered by the martyr who ascends to Allah. We are the vanguard to be joined by Arab and Islamic armies – from Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, and Egypt, and from every country that turns towards Jerusalem to liberate it." [Announcer]
• "The best way for us to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday is to walk in his footsteps and provide the future generations a Jihadi education. We shall walk in his footsteps in educating the future generation to love death for the sake of Allah as much as our enemies love life... This is the generation of stone, the generation of the missile, the generation of tunnels, and the generation of martyrdom operations.... I call upon my brothers, I call upon the education minister, the minister of the interior, the Al-Qassam Brigades, and the national security agencies to open courses in the Futuwwa camps for girls too..." [Ismail Hanieyeh, Hamas prime minister and another Hamas insider who has had no hesitation in sending sick family members to the best-available Israeli doctors and Israeli hospitals]

Minister Hammad delivers a theological/educational message

High schoolers show the message was delivered