06-Jan-16: Perceptions and realities at the BBC

Inside the BBC newsroom in Broadcasting House, London
[Image Source: BBC]

The BBC ("the largest broadcaster in the world"; "the World's Radio Station"; home to a close-to-incredible 22,000 employees) has much for which to answer in relation to how it systematically fails to call terror "terror". 

It's a painful subject not only because of the damage the BBC's resort to aggressive euphemisms does to people's understanding of terror, but also because of the blatant hypocrisy inherent in the way it adheres to the policy sometimes and ignores it other times. To deeply concerned observers like us, it's plain that the BBC's rule book [BBC Editorial Guideline: Language when Reporting Terrorism] provides a fig-leaf for journalistic values that do no credit to BBC management.

The estimable BBC Watch today posted the kind of well-written and penetrating article that makes its work so valuable. We're referring to "More evidence of BBC News double standards on use of the word terror". There, the writers remind us of what the BBC itself and the laws under which it operates say it's supposed to do, and then expands on

the BBC's inconsistent application of those editorial guidelines and the resulting two-tier system of reporting is evidence of precisely the type of “value judgement” it supposedly seeks to avoid and indicates that the choice of language when reporting acts of terror is subject to political considerations which undermine the BBC’s claim of impartiality. If further evidence of those double standards were needed, it could be found in an article published on the BBC News website on January 3rd under the title “Israelis charged over fatal West Bankfamily arson attack”.

Those are obviously serious allegations. The chronic, systemic issues to which they relate are among the most weighty and consequential that an organization with the mission

to ensure that the BBC gives information about, and increases understanding of, the world through accurate and impartial news, other information, and analysis of current events and ideas.

ever faces.

In its reporting of arrests made this past week following the deaths of three members of a single family in a house fire in Duma, a Palestinian Arab village, the BBC's news reporters and editors used

the words “Jewish terrorists” not in quotation marks and not as quoted text. This was the BBC speaking in its own voice.

Calling the Jewish Israelis who were taken into custody over the Duma deaths “suspected terrorists” is unexceptionable. Israel's government has referred to the lethal fire at the Duma home as terror from the outset. See, as an illustration, "PM condemns ‘horrific, heinous terror attack’ on Palestinians" in Times of Israel on July 31, 2015.

BBC newsroom [Image Source: BBC]

BBC Watch reminds us that other terror attacks, some of them among the most horrifying this country has ever known, stunningly failed to reach the BBC's call-it-terror threshold:

• The almost-unimaginably horrific throat-slitting murders of five members of the Fogel family from Itamar. Three little children, the youngest only 3 months old, along with their parents, killed in their beds as they slept at home in March 2011 (BBC report);
• The murder by shooting of Na'ama and Eitam Henkin of Neria in front of their four little children (the youngest 4 months old) in October 2015 (BBC report)
• The early-morning slaughter - by men using knives, axes and meat-cleavers - in a quiet Har Nof, Jerusalem, synagogue of four worshipers and a police officer in November 2014 (BBC report)
• The shooting death of Malachi Rosenfeld in June 2015 - three other Israelis were wounded in the terrorist gunfire. That attack in fact was never reported at all by the BBC.

BBC Watch says, and we certainly agree, that in deciding not to call these acts of murder "terror", while using "terrorist" to describe the unconvicted Israeli Jews arrested in the Duma case, the BBC ought to be required to tell its funding public why. 

Its management should also be called on to justify their engaging (as we say they are) in highly-politicized decision-making whose contours are influenced more by unspoken policy considerations than by the obligations imposed on the BBC by the laws under which it operates.

Here's some further reading from past posts of ours dealing with the BBC and its terror strategy:

• 08-Aug-15: Another BBC moment
• 01-Apr-15: A question for Jeremy Bowen and his morally-challenged BBC handlers
• 20-Dec-14: BBC, unable to call him "terrorist", says French police killed an "Allahu Akbar attacker"
• 01-Sep-14: Gaza, Israel, the BBC: What children - and their parents - ought to know
• 15-Aug-13: To promote something truly hideous, can't do better than adopt the BBC's approach
• 24-Mar-13: Seed of evil: Whitewashing terror at the BBC
• 10-Jan-13: When terror is ignored by news reporting agencies, the BBC for instance, what can we learn?
• 17-Feb-12: It's final: the BBC is relieved from having to reveal the results of in-house inquiry into whether it is biased against Israel
• 16-Aug-11: When the powers at the BBC put this much effort into something, they must really care
• 15-Jun-07: Journalistic Objectivity from BBC and Other Oxymorons
• 18-Jul-06: What Is It About the BBC?
• 14-Jul-06: A word about the BBC

Finally, on a more generous note, let's a take a moment to offer congratulations to BBC management for having just won a well-deserved major award from Honest Reporting. The prize and the attainments that earned it for them are detailed here.

04-Dec-15: Two more knifers are shot dead by their intended victims. One is fifteen. Does anyone care?

Hebron rock-throwing youths in November: Who's next? [Image Source]

It's a sunny, chilly Friday morning here, the shortest Friday of the year with the Sabbath starting here in Jerusalem at 3:59 in the afternoon.

Very early this morning, a little after midnight, two young Palestinian Arab men - actually one was a boy - launched a knifing attack on IDF service personnel manning the Jilber post in Hebron's historic Tel Rumeida Jewish quarter. They managed to sink their blades into a 20-year-old soldier's face, injuring him lightly according to the Ynet account.

His IDF colleagues at the post responded with shots and killing the two attackers. The soldier was rushed to Sharei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem for emergency treatment.

Ma'an, the Palestinian Arab news source we often quote because it owes its existence to European government money (thereby reflecting on the low threshold European governments apply to acceptable return-on-investment when it comes to advancing the Palestinian Arab cause), puts its customary spin on events. Its report starts with

Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian teenagers in Hebron overnight Friday... 

making clear where the emphasis needs to be: on yet another case of death-by-Israeli. It continues

after an alleged stabbing attack on an Israeli soldier, Israel's army and locals said.

That's almost certainly untrue. If Ma'an is quoting the Israeli account, then the IDF certainly did not use the word "alleged". But "alleged" is a fixture in Ma'an's reporting on the terrorism directed against Israelis. Its editors seem to be addicted to the useful term; it allows them to pay lip-service to the facts while casting doubt on how factual they are. Perfect.

It's an especially effective strategy when - as has been the case on almost every day of attacks for the past two months - the attackers are children, below voting age (imagining for a moment that voting is a regular activity in Palestinian Arab society - and it certainly is not). This morning's attackers have never voted, and now certainly never will. Dead as of this morning, they are both being elevated to the ranks of PA martyrs (the posters may already be hanging in the alleys and markets).

They are cousins, says Ma'an. quoting Palestinian Arab sources who say their identities are:

Taher Faysal Fannoun, 19, a student at Hebron University, and Faysal Abd al-Minem Fannoun, 15.

(For the record, at least one other Arab news source says the 19 year old was 17. And it gives the 15 year old's name as Mustafa Fadel Fannoun, The Iranian government mouthpiece, PressTV, identifies them as Teher Faisal Funun, 22, and Abdul-Monem Funun, 15.)

It's more than likely they belong to the same clan as Mahmoud Fannoun, described [here] as the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which operates from a stronghold in nearby D'heisheh. The PFLP claimed credit a year ago for the savage murder (again, by knives and axes) of five unsuspecting Jewish worshipers at prayer in a Har Nof, Jerusalem, synagogue. They also claimed to have carried out a shooting attack on a car-full of Israelis, injuring four, near the community of Shvut Rachel in June 2015. There's room to think they are trying to put themselves back on the bloodshed-by-terror map after being somewhat quiet for two decades.

Palestinian Arab culture, and the Mahmoud Abbas regime in particular, trumpet the involvement of children among the stabbing/shooting/ramming Pal Arab dead as a matter worthy of celebration (literally). They are what they are, no outside influence is going to bring them to recognize the horror of the systematic child abuse raging in their ranks, and their masses are totally at peace with it. It's an ongoing tragedy about which we have written several times. The fact that it keeps costing lives, almost daily at this point, should not be lulling people on the outside into accepting this horrifying reality. And the numbers are not small: one Arab source says that of the 112 Palestinian Arabs killed by Israeli fire since October 1 (understandably without explaining what those dead people were doing in their last moments of life), 26 are children. From our informal record keeping, every one of those Arab children was killed with a knife or other killing implement in his or in her hand.

But how to explain that not a single one of the many, very well-funded children's-rights industry organizations active in the Palestinian Arab territories or Jordan (where a vast number of Pal Arabs live) has ever, as far as we can tell, drawn attention to the blood lust that Pal Arab society focuses on its own children? (We're of course ignoring for the moment the barbarism they reserve for us and ours.)

To name (once again) just some of the silent co-conspirators: UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development, UNRWA,

How long before the next Palestinian Arab child is shot dead trying to murder an Israeli? 

19-Jan-15: EU will appeal court decision to take Hamas off the terrorist list

Hamas front man, groper, smuggler of banknotes and promoter of
axe-murder attacks Abu Zuhri explains that Europeans are taking
immoral steps [Image Source]

The Council of the European Union decided today (Monday) that the EU is going to appeal a December 17 decision by the General Court of the European Union that says Hamas ought to be removed from the official EU blacklist for technical reasons only a lawyer or politician could love.

The short-term effect, according to this source, is that Hamas’s European assets, which had been in a state of temporary freeze for the past three weeks, are going to remain frozen till the judgement is handed down.

Hamas is not happy with being frozen:

"The European Union’s insistence on keeping Hamas on the list of terrorist organizations is an immoral step, and reflects the EU’s total bias in favor of the Israeli occupation,” 

says Sami Abu Zuhri, Hamas spokesman and one-time mule, quoted by Aljazeera.

Meanwhile, nothing is certain and until that European court hears the appeal, the question of whether or not Hamas is a terrorist organization in the eyes of Official Europe remains (astonishingly) open.

It's quite something to hear a crude thug like Abu Zuhri mouth the words "immoral step" without having reporters laugh directly into his face. The man has some background which, in a civilized context, would have ensured he was given plenty of free time alone to entertain himself:

• He was arrested by Palestinian Authority security forces in Gaza (before Hamas seized control by force) in 2007 for placing his hand on the thigh of a person sitting next to him in a car. He admitted the charges. The person was a woman, which in sociopathic societies of a certain kind means the consequences are mild.
• A July 2014 video [here] captures him speaking to a Hamas-friendly TV presenter, arguing that the Hamas strategy of pushing its people to endanger their lives, their homes and their children by being human shields is "effective". This is one of the myriad reasons why Hamas is globally outlawed as a terrorist entity. 
• He was investigated, and then suspended, by the Hamas leadership a month ago [source] for sexually harassing a foreign reporter. The reporter was again a female, so that the damage, if any, to his standing was liveable in the specific context of the society in which operates and whose sexual and moral values tend to the extremely flexible (depending natuirally on specifically who is doing what to whom).
• And a month before that, in November 2014, Abu Zuhri publicly (as spokesperson for the thugs of Hamas) praised the terrorist killing of unarmed worshipers at prayer in a Har Nof, Jerusalem, synagogue. Hamas, said this especially loathsome man, called for more "operations" like it. 

Quite a piece of work.

26-Dec-14: The ongoing search for Arabic-language outrage at the men with the meat-cleavers and knives

Body of a victim of the Har Nof savagery is taken
from the scene, November 18, 2014 [Image Source]

In the long and bitter history of Arab, and in particular Arab Islamist, murderous hatred of their Jewish neighbours, the cold-blooded killings on the morning of November 18, 2014 of four Jewish men at prayer in the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem, along with a non-Jewish security officer who died trying to subdue the frenzied attackers, stand out.

This is not because the Har Nof Synagogue attack exacted an unusually large number of innocent victims: tragically, there have been many Arab terrorist attacks that killed and injured more people at a single time.

For many, the idea of an attack by men brandishing butcher knives, axes and a gun on unarmed individuals wrapped in prayer shawls, quietly swaying in their daily worship, will make concrete a horror that will have seemed incomprehensible. That horror is magnified by the evident clarity that accompanies the published Palestinian Arab reactions. If there is some ongoing process of moral doubt and profound soul-searching in their ranks, it's impossibly hard to find.

This past Wednesday evening, the bodies of the perpetrators, two cousins from an Arab clan called Abu Jamal, were buried in a graveyard on the fringes of Jerusalem. [Photos here.] An English-language report from the Palestinian Arab (and European-funded) news agency Ma'an says

Israeli authorities on Wednesday evening returned the bodies of two Palestinian attackers who killed five Israelis at a Jerusalem synagogue in November. Israel notified the families of Uday and Ghassan Abu Jamal that their bodies must by buried within 90 minutes of being returned at the cemetery of al-Sawahira al-Sharqiyya, lawyer Muhammad Mahmoud told Ma'an. Only 40 relatives were to be allowed at the funeral, he added. [Ma'an]

Attackers is what Ma'an calls them in English. Regular readers of Ma'an and of our blog will not be terribly surprised to note that the Arabic version of the same Ma'an story [here] calls them "martyrs". 

If readers are looking for Arab expressions of revulsion, rejection, even humiliation at the idea that Arab nationalistic yearnings produce such savagery, this is not the news event to be scouring. The messages broadcast to the Arabic-speaking world focus on the 'victimhood' of the two Arab men with meat cleavers, and their 'heroism':

• Video footage of Wednesday night's funeral [here and here] shows men shouting calls for more Abu Jamal action amid the familiar cries of "Alahu Akbar" ("Allah is greater"). Palestine News Network says "Despite the conditions and restrictions, about 300 mourners joined the funeral procession, raising Palestinian flags and chanting patriotic slogans."
• The mother of one of the murderers (who is also the aunt of the second one), is captured [here on video. with English sub-titles thanks to the diligent work of Palestinian Media Watch] chanting 48 hours after the Har Nof synagogue barbarism: "Blessed be the womb that bore you, blessed be the breasts that nurtured you... The Martyrs' blood was not spilled in vain... I am wearing the embroidered gown. How beautiful is your Martyrdom. You have placed a crown [upon my head] and a star upon my shoulders."
• Gazan Palestinian Arabs holding knives and axes paraded for news photographers in Rafah in the hours after the killings as they celebrated the attack on the Jerusalem worshipers. Said Khatib, taking photographs for AFP, caught the action here. Candies were handed out in the streets [photo].
• The immediate post-killings response of the terrorism-addicted Hamas organization, via its spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri: praise for the attack, and via a Facebook post, calls for more such savagery against Israelis. The theme was echoed by another Hamas shill, Mushir al-Masri, also a spokesman for Hamas, who not-so-surprisingly called it a “heroic action”. Husam Badran, who speaks for Hamas’ foreign relations, called the Har Nof massacre at the time a “quality action”. He wrote: “A message to all members of [Palestinian Arab] national security in the West Bank. You are trained and you have the weapons and the ability to act... Some of you can make a significant change in the resistance. Turn your weapons against your enemies and ours. Write your names in the true list of honor.”
• As for the killer's clan-members and neighbours, the praise and honour were just as we had learned to expect: "Residents of the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, the hometown of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s synagogue attack, celebrated the attack and expressed pride in the actions of their native sons... “We are proud of what they did,” said one family member of the terrorists. “They are heroic martyrs.” The celebrations in Jabel Mukaber quickly turned into violent disturbances, with rioters throwing stones and other objects at police stationed in the area." [Terrorists’ Hometown Celebrates Jerusalem Synagogue Massacre, Algemeiner, November 19, 2014]

And among the morally-addled ranks of certain English-language commentators, there's criticism of the Israeli side who, as usual, cannot be forgiven for Arab acts of bestiality:

• "Israel is refusing to return the bodies of the perpetrators of Tuesday's Jerusalem terror attack to their families, a move that may be without precedent even in the long history of Israeli-Palestinian hostility." [Ben Mathis-Lilley writing in Salon, November 20, 2014. He was formerly with New York magazine and BuzzFeed]

What is not without precedent is the absence of self-critical outrage in the Arab world. The death-cult worship goes on. Those in the West who claim to serve as moral compasses are silent. 

We made a similar point here seven months ago. After the ceremonial funeral, rich in Palestinian Arab pomp and circumstance, of the human bomb who attacked the Sbarro Jerusalem pizzeria, killing 15, most of them children and one of them our daughter, we wrote ["6-May-14: In search of appalled, sickened Palestinian Arabs"]:

We received some feedback suggesting this characterization was unfair. They said there are voices in the Palestinian Arab world that are as sickened as people like us are by the unconcealed blood-lust of Hamas, of Islamic Jihad, of Fatah, of the Palestinian Authority and of Mahmoud Abbas. We're doubtful. But we're willing to investigate. So here's an invitation for anyone who has such evidence to send us public, published statements in Arabic - statements in which Palestinian Arab voices condemn what sickens the rest of the world: the process of turning psychopaths like the human bomb who murdered our daughter into martyrs, heroes, figures to be emulated. Over to you. Send what you have to thisongoingwar@gmail.com or add them to the comments below. We'll publish what we receive here. (Remember - in Arabic. We'll take care of the translating into English.)

We had thought to hear clear words of Christian denunciation of the lethal passion that leads to children and worshipers being murdered by men who are acclaimed as heroes in their own camp. But they never arrived.

Nor have they been heard in the wake of Wednesday night's Abu Jamal funeral.

As for the World Council of Churches, busy with seasonal celebrations of brotherly love and goodwill to all men or at least most of them, the furious comments we directed at them earlier this year ["17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?"] remain, in our view at least, sadly appropriate.

So is this other comment of ours:

"A peace process in which committed murderers are deliberately and repeatedly turned by one of the parties in the conflict into heroes whose homicidal exploits are celebrated as examples for others to follow, is no peace process at all but a march towards victory. ["22-Apr-14: Attention World Council of Churches: Will you now follow your own advice and speak up for the Arabs tortured and imprisoned by the PA?"] 

For the record, the only substantive reaction we have ever gotten from the World Council of Churches came in the form of a personal email from its Director of Communication, Mark Beach, in an email from Geneva dated June 5, 2014, in which he wrote:

Yes, I believe we would have nothing further to say.

The background is here ["6-Jun-14: Fear and loathing at the World Council of Churches"]. It's quite something when the person paid to speak for a global organization claiming hundreds of millions of affiliated members says his employer has nothing more to say.

And please don't think the otherwise silent (to us at least) World Council of Churches lacks a viewpoint on such matters. It's on display in Geneva at this very moment:

"Experiences of death and expulsion faced by some 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 are the subject of an exhibition titled 'The Nakba' and hosted by the World Council of Churches (WCC) at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. The Arabic word Nakba means 'catastrophe'... “Nakba marks a brutal reality that most of the world ignored as Palestinians languished in crowded camps throughout the Middle East over the years,” said the Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, WCC General Secretary, in his written message for the conference... Tveit called the exhibition a remembrance of the history and reality of the Palestinians under occupation. He said sharing of such historical facts is an “attempt to say the truth in love, so that the world will find real solutions that lead to peace and justice.” ["Palestinian dispossession is focus of WCC exhibition and conference", yesterday]

Meanwhile our search for Arabic-language voices of outrage against what is being done in their names goes on.

27-Nov-14: When things are said about terror from both sides of one mouth, it pays to listen carefully

Even in an Internet-rich age, television continues to strongly influence what we know and think. And in places where access to a range of varying ideas and opinions is greatly limited, its role is even larger. The villages, towns and cities of the Palestinian Authority are a good example.

Here's a video clip (translated to English by the invaluable Palestinian Media Watch team) from their version of Good Morning, America (and Good Morning Australia, and Good Morning Tanganyika etc), the typical sort of light-hearted fare that people watch while grabbing some breakfast and heading out to face the day and its challenges. 

Only it's light-hearted in a very specific way that prevails in places where the values of terror and its attractions have become central to the way ordinary lives are lived.



The presenter in this show is Mai Abu Asab. Her program goes to air every Friday (weekend) morning under the name Good Morning Jerusalem. If we were fed a daily diet of this sort of messaging, we might not have the views about hatred, racism and terror that we do; many other rational and emotionally healthy people might react like us.

The channel is the one owned, operated and marketed by the government that runs the Palestinian Authority. The PA is the terror-friendly regime headed by Mahmoud Abbas, currently in the tenth year of his four-year presidential term. Abbas has our attention this week because of his gymnastic approach to juggling his public views on terror: unreservedly against it in English and strongly for it in Arabic.

Quoted (in Arabic) by Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. the PA's mouthpiece newspaper, on November 3, 2014, Mahmoud Abbas said

that Martyr Mutaz [who fired four bullets straight into the chest of Rabbi Yehuda Glick on a Jerusalem street in late October] from at point rose to Heaven while defending our people’s rights and holy places. In addition, he condemned this barbaric act, which is added to the occupation’s crimes against our people since the Nakba ("catastrophe", the preferred Palestinian Arabic term for the establishment of the State of Israel), as well as the continuation of the historic injustice being committed against it wherever it is present.” [source]

Quoted (in Arabic) again by Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on November 24, 2014,

It is a moral, national and religious right to defend Al-Aqsa and the places holy to Islam and Christianity. Our people oppose the thieving attackers who are supported by the government of Israel – the same [government] that has sabotaged the efforts to attain peace and is leading the wild campaign in Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, seeking to strike any chance of obtaining security and peace between the two peoples on the basis of the two-state [solution]. I congratulate our people for their steadfastness in defending Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa. We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for Al-Aqsa and for Jerusalem. [source]

Quoted in English by Haaretz on November 18, 2014, there's what appears to be a whole different approach:

Abbas' office said in a statement that "The presidency condemns the attack on Jewish worshippers in their place of prayer and condemns the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it" [but] "While we condemn this incident, we also condemn the aggression toward Al-Aqsa Mosque and other holy places and torching of mosques and churches," Abbas said at the start of a meeting of the Palestinian security services in Ramallah. Such attacks, according to Abbas, "violate all religious principles and do not serve the common interest we are trying to promote – establishing a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel." [source]

It's worth noting, as Khaled Abu Toameh did the same day, the background:

Abbas was forced to condemn the Har Nof synagogue attack after facing pressure from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who had phoned the PA president twice over the past few days to demand that the Palestinians stop anti-Israel incitement. On Tuesday, Kerry issued a call to the PA leadership to condemn the Har Nof attack. Kerry’s pressure prompted Abbas to issue two condemnations of the incident. The first came in the form of a terse statement published by official PA news agency Wafa, in which the Palestinian leadership condemned the “killing of worshipers in a synagogue and all acts of violence regardless of their source.” The statement also called for an end to “incursions and provocations by settlers against the Aksa Mosque...” In both statements, the PA leader sought to establish a direct link between the recent spate of terrorist attacks and visits by Jewish groups to the Temple Mount. [source] 

The latest phase in this peekaboo now-you-see-it-now-you-don't performance by Abbas' government comes with a PA TV program on Tuesday that declares the axe men of the Har Nof synagogue killings as heroes for the cause, referring to "the death of 2 Palestinians as martyrs from occupation police fire", conveniently and despicably ignoring the knives, axes and guns in the hands of the two Abu Jamals as they launched a ferocious attack on unarmed men at prayer.

To their great credit, many ordinary people in today's Palestinian Arab society continue - against all the pressures from their religious and secular leaders - to hold somewhat-independent views and to remain rooted in values that give hope... to them and us.

Here are some of those, based on a little-noticed (outside Israel) public opinion poll carried out for Israel's Channel 10 television station by Statnet (motto: "Discovering things you never expected"), an Israel-based research center headed by Yousef Makladeh (there's a self-promoting business video here for Arabic and Hebrew speakers).

Statnet focuses its attention on Arabs in the PA and Israel and unfortunately seems to publish almost nothing in the English language which, given the insights they have, is a pity.

The Jerusalem Post and a small handful of other Israel-based sources reported in the last few days on the poll's findings. Selected highlights appear in a number of other Israel-focused publications but take the results way out of their context, in our view. The survey, conducted in Arabic by phone a week ago, polled 405 Israeli Arabs from all parts of Israel but not east Jerusalem. 39% of respondents are men; 61% are women:

• 68% of Israeli Arabs opposes the ongoing "recent wave of terrorist attacks". The language of the Jerusalem Post report on the following breakdown is not clear (and we have not seen the original findings), but we think they go on to say that 88% of Druse oppose the terror; 80% of Christian Arabs, and 64% of Muslim Arabs.
• 77% of Israeli Arabs when asked to choose between two options said they prefer to live under Israeli rule rather than Palestinian Arab. Again, the Jerusalem Port report's language is not well expressed, but it seems to be saying that support among Israeli Arabs for living in an Israeli state is at the 70% level among Druse, 57% among Christian Arabs, and 49% among Muslim Arabs. But if that's right, then we have a problem understanding how the overall percentage gets to 77%.
• (This finding meshes with another by Prof. Sammy Smooha Haifa University whose annual survey, the Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel showed in 2013 63.5% of Arabs said Israel is a good place to live, while 20.9% were "willing to move" to "a Palestinian state".)
• As for preferring to live under the Palestinian Authority: 2% of Druse held that view; 5% of Israeli Christian Arabs, and 18% of Israeli Muslim Arabs.
• 84% of Israeli Arabs "support Knesset members who condemned the attacks in Jerusalem" and "16% opposed the condemnation of the attacks by Arab MKs"
• 81% of them believe Israel "is trying to harm the status quo on the Temple Mount".
• Again the language of the report is problematic, but it seems to say something emphatic about the sense Israeli Arabs have of living in a racist society: 42% say they suffer from "strong racism"; 44% from "moderate racism"; 14% from "light racism". Since those numbers add up to exactly 100%, it means there is not a single Arab living in Israel, including the majority who says he/she prefers living in Israel compared with the PA alternative, feels there is no racism. That might be, but it sounds suspect to us, especially when we take into account their attitude to how the State (not clear exactly what that means beyond the obvious) treats them: 9% say it "treats them equally"; 52% "semi-equally"; 39% "not equally at all". That also comes to a neat 100%. So if 9% feel they are being treated equally, are they also among the 100% who suffer from racism? Perhaps yes, but on this, the JPost report's language and formulation bothers us.
• 65% of Israeli Arabs blamed the conflict on "the Jews"
• And finally, a clear sign of the positive effect living in Israel has on its citizens: 63% of Israeli Arabs "do not trust Arab leaders in Israel". Unfortunately the survey report does not say whether the respondents were asked if they don't trust Israel's Jewish leaders. Or non-Israel-based Arab leaders.

Image: "Real Jerusalem Streets"

Readers wanting to do their own polling might consider standing in the center of Jerusalem, say at the busy intersection of King George Avenue and Jaffa Road (we know the corner only too well). 

As Jerusalemites know, since the Jerusalem Light Rail began running from Jerusalem's eastern neighbourhoods into the center and out to Mt Herzl, the number of Arab shoppers and pedestrians walking around, enjoying the cafes and the pedestrian malls, has risen substantially to levels that might surprise people from far away.

The image at right (young Arab females wandering around in the center of town) from the excellent Real Jerusalem Streets photo blog [here] illustrates the story.

21-Nov-14: Why Har Nof is different but also the same

Har Nof's Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue is housed
in this building on Agassi Street Jerusalem [Image Source] 

It's become an easy cop-out for the mainstream media to blame Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks on a handful of background grievances that any "reasonable" person would see as understandable even if a tad unfortunate. 

But the savagery in the Har Nof prayer chapel attack is different. It exposes the empty falseness of the motivations used in media reports in the past to casually fig-leaf the terrorists and to convey "understanding" of their lethal ways. 

One by one, the usual factors fall away:

• The massacre in the Har Nof Bnei Torah synagogue had nothing to do with bogus grievances about Haram al-Sharif because Jews of the kind targeted in Har Nof don't subscribe to the view that Jews ought to be visiting the holy Temple Mount, a legitimate controversy within Jewish law.
• Nothing to do with occupation: Har Nof is well behind any frontiers or the 1949 ceasefire lines (those lines now misleadingly called the 1967 borders)
• Nothing to do with settlements: No Arab ever made his home where Har Nof stands. We watched it being built in the eighties, carved out of barren hillside and rocks.
• Nothing to do with oppressing Arabs: at least one of the two murdering Abu Jamal cousins is reported to have worked in a neighbourhood grocery just down the street from the synagogue, supporting himself and probably others from there.
• Certainly no dimension here of getting back at the Israeli military: the victims were men engaged full-time in learning and Torah, and of the demographic whose members Israel routinely exempts from national service or reserves duty. In Jerusalem, the killers had no shortage of soldiers, police and other security personnel to target. They made their decision: men in prayer shawls, eyes closed and in fervent prayer.
• Yes, it might be because of the somewhat unexplained death of an Egged bus driver two days earlier. If that's the motivation for a massacre with knives and axes on unarmed men at prayer, it definitely helps us understand the attackers' mindset. Of course, it's now clear that the family of that Egged bus driver, an Arab from East Jerusalem, were invited to have their own pathologist, an Arab, present at the autopsy and those present say he agreed with the conclusion that the Egged bus driver hanged himself for reasons we might never learn. (And only afterwards revised his view for whatever reason, and said the Israelis killed the man.) But let's buy that for this discussion. Let's say that an unsolved death of a driver whose body was found inside a bus belonging to the co-operative that had employed him, and employs hundreds more Arabs, is the reason behind the barbarism of the Har Nof terror. Clear moral equivalence.
• The site of the killings, a Haredi synagogue, is not emblematic of what Israel stands for in the Arab mind. It is emblematic of what Jews represent, especially in the torrent of Jew-hating sermons, news reports, cartoons, video-clips that are central to the Palestinian Arab discourse on their grievances. An example from today: an Iranian news site, controlled by the Iranian government, embodies the pathology well. (The Elder of Ziyon blog pointed this out some hours ago.) If you go there now, Friday morning, to this page (and featured on their home page), you can see a headline that captures the Jew-hating depravity in all its counter-factual glory: "Nazis with beards..." The beards are of course the beards of the men slaughtered on Tuesday morning. But the examples that the article gives of these wicked people are all of non-Israeli Jews, mostly Americans ["It’s not important whether these Israelis and several others are still alive or hold key positions in the American and European governments. What is important is...] In the lexicon of the jihadists, Jews are Israelis and Israelis are Jews. It's not so hard to understand why the Western media hesitate before shining a light on that form of logic which we know is so pervasive in the Middle East.

From this morning's news [Source: FARS News Agency, Iran]

A handful of liberal thinkers and writers have spoken out about what the Har Nof killings really do represent. But there is certainly not enough exposure or fury, given the way it throws a light on the nature of the true nature of the passions in this part of the world. (And it has to be said that by far the largest part of the analysis and coverage is from within Israel and the Jewish world.)

Then again, given how the facts undermine some of the shibboleths of the media, that's not so surprising.

20-Nov-14: In the face of savagery, what do you do?

What do you do in the face of truly evil actions?

It's not a rhetorical question. When men and women do acts of beastial evil, and it happens just down the street or even closer, and to people you know, and when it appears to escalate in intensity, scope and frequency with time... what do you do? Not "what does one do" in the passive sense. But what do you do? What do I do?

The closer you live to Jerusalem, the more you will understand that these questions pertain to the horror that unfolded just two mornings ago: an attack by determined, well-armed men on a place of worship and the people inside preoccupied with prayer and learning. The victims, the targets of the attack, had no form of physical protection and the attackers had zero mercy; not the slightest hesitation in shooting, slashing, stabbing unarmed people with their eyes closed at point blank range.

The killings and maimings in Jerusalem's Har Nof quarter on Tuesday have barely been absorbed here. This will take time. Initial shock will give way to longer-term reactions on the part of the families directly impacted. Some of this will be visible to their neighbours and friends. Much of it will not. It will not be over and done quickly - or in many cases ever. On a single street of a small neighbourhood of this small city, there are now four new widows, more than two dozen orphaned children, and a pervasive air of horror, fear, anger, deep puzzlement, powerlessness.

How should we be thinking about the men with the knives, the meat-cleavers, the guns and the axes? How saddened should we be by the sight of their bereaved family members? By the deaths of two young men, both members of the Abu Jamal clan, both in their twenties, both with their lives ahead of them?

In Jordan's House of Representatives yesterday
[Image Source]

Here's one way: over the river in the Kingdom of Jordan, the parliament yesterday paid formal and public tribute to them. Just a few hours ago, the Elder of Ziyon blog quoted the praise expressed in the Hashemite Kingdom's legislative chamber:

MP Mohammed Al-Qatathh of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the assembly condemning the "Zionist attack on Jerusalem and its people" in the wake of "the heroic operation" on the synagogue... The Council also read the Fatiha on the spirit of the martyrs... at the request of Khalil Attieh MP... [Alrai Newspaper, Amman, Jordan, November 19, 2014]

Should it surprise us that Al-Qatathh and Attieh were not immediately arrested and removed from the parliament and charged with conduct demeaning the honour of the kingdom? Yes, it should surprise us. Jordan has special standing in the eyes of the United States. The Jordanian leadership is routinely praised in the West for aligning with the anti-terrorist side in the huge global war now underway. Rational people might expect the leaders of its government to do everything possible to preserve that. After all, the US State Department calls Jordan

a strong ally in combating terrorism and violent extremist ideology. Jordan's geographic location renders it susceptible to a variety of regional threats, while also making it a natural regional leader in confronting them... [At p.151] On October 1, the Government of Jordan signed a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States... Jordan is a key participant in the State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance (ATA) program. [Source: The most recent edition of the State Dept's official annual  "Country Reports on Terrorism", published a few months ago]

Let there be no doubt that, in official US circles, Jordan and its political leaders are counted as being against terror and for truth, justice and the American way. In fact, on the very same day as its parliamentarians rose to their feet to praise the Abu Jamal savages, over at the United Nations Jordan trumpeted its active membership of the forces of good valiantly fighting the terrorists:

Jordan to launch initiative to curb terrorist groups’ media practices | Petra | Nov 19, 2014 | 23:04 | NEW YORK — Jordan is going to launch a regional initiative to curb terrorists’ increasing use of telecommunications and media technologies. During the UN Security Council (UNSC) session on international cooperation in combating terrorism, which convened on Wednesday, Dina Kawar, Jordan’s representative to the UNSC said Jordan intends to launch the initiative in Amman with the participation of international experts, community representatives, and concerned entities... 

The problem is that Jordan does not actually use the word "terrorists" in the way that most people hearing the diplomat's speech at the UN might have expected. Here is an authoritative Jordanian news source explaining Jordan's legislative approach to terror:

The Lower House on Wednesday endorsed draft amendments to the State Security Court (SSC) Law following extensive discussions over its provisions. The deputies excluded "resistance actions" against Israel from the court's jurisdiction, following a proposal to do so by Deputy Tareq Khoury (Zarqa, 1st District). The deputies agreed that any actions against Israel cannot be "terrorism" at all; hence, they approved a provision that excludes actions against Israel from terrorism crimes. [Jordan Times, December 11, 2013]

Other than in the Jordanian media (and they can be expected to know, right?) where else have you seen any mention of this in the mainstream news media?

Here are two more Jordan-related realities that are far too often overlooked or deliberately ignored. 

1. Jordan's army illegally occupied large swathes of Jerusalem for two decades up until they were removed by force in 1967, leaving behind massive wanton destruction of Jewish holy places, defilement of thousands-of-years-old graves and of synagogues, and the leveling of Jerusalem's ancient Jewish Quarter. No Palestinian Arab state ever existed, or was proposed, under Jordanian rule. Freedom of religious practice in one of the world's holiest cities was a nonsense so long as the Jordanians were there. 
2. Jordan is where the convicted and entirely unrepentant murderer of our daughter now lives in total freedom, free to make television programs, to speak in honour of terror and terrorists and to move about with complete safety. It is where one of the government's showcase institutions, the Family Court in Amman, played host to a gala celebration in her honour when she arrived back (she had lived most of her life in Jordan before engineering the massacre at the Jerusalem Sbarro pizza shop) in October 2011. In Jordan, they know what celebrating acts of murder means.

Thousands of Jews, Druze and others took part in the funeral of
Master Sgt Zidan Nahad Seif of the Israel Police, in  Yanuh-Jat, northern
Israel, yesterday [Image Source]

We asked: what do you do in the face of truly evil actions? We suggest

• Remember the victims; honor their innocence.
• Reduce - in whatever small measure that is possible - the impact on the world of the unspeakable hatred and evil that the jihadists executed, by means of doing simple good.
• Weap just a little.

Israelis from every walk of life honoured the memory of the five victims in funerals conducted in Jerusalem and in a Druze town in northern Israel.

A genuine hero of the bloodbath, an Israeli Druze policeman, died of the wounds inflicted by the Abu Jamals, His funeral yesterday was attended by a huge crowd of grieving strangers from every part of Israel's socio-demographic spectrum. One of those delivering a eulogy was Rabbi Mordechai Rubin the spiritual leader of the Bnei Torah synagogue community in Har Nof where the killings were done. In our opinion, he got the tone and message exactly right:

“We came from Jerusalem, from the place of the massacre... simply to be with you and to cry with you”...

(At about the same time, and for the record, Arabs in Gaza, Ramallah and other places, conducted their own tributes by handing out candies and dancing in the streets. No more details are necessary, and no more photographs; there are many of those on the websites of the various news photo syndication services, additional reminders of the active death cult at work on the far side of the barrier that divides us.)

Acts of good - given what we know about the Har Nof community, there will be many. People who choose to make their homes there know intimately the power of chesed, of doing simple good. Good for its own sake, and not for any reward. We created a foundation in our daughter's memory with that in mind. (Some background.)

Here's an instance of how good-for-its-own-sake works. And how utterly different it is from the evil that has so many of our neighbours in a vice-like hold - an evil that certainly includes bogus 'opponents' of terror like Mahmoud Abbas, the president (ten years after being elected to a four year term of office) of the Palestinian Authority and still the central figure in Fatah, the PLO and a large part of the Palestinian Arab terror industry. In the past several weeks, those of us who watch closely for this kind of thing have witnessed a crescendo of Islam-based calls from the organizations over which Abbas presides, calling for blood to be spilled in pursuit of an Arab Jerusalem.

• Hassan Al-Saifi, an official in the PA Ministry of Religious Affairs condemning "the continuing Israeli desecration of Al-Aqsa" and declaring that Jerusalem "needs the religious scholars in particular to fulfill their duty, rush to Jerusalem and offer sacrifices and blood" [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the daily house newspaper published by Abbas' PA, November 14, 2014, quoting an official in the PA's Ministry of Religious Affairs, recorded by Palestinian Media Watch here]
• "They are the ones who heard the call of Yasser Arafat, while the Arab and Islamic nation ignored his call... They came out with their weapons, with their true belief that Jerusalem needs blood to purify itself of Jews." [A Fatah official, Muhammad Al-Biqa'i, invoking blessings on murderous terrorists, interviewed on the PA's wholly-owned and authoritative TV channel, November 7, 2014, and captured on video, translated into English by Palestinian Media Watch here]
• "Not a centimeter of  Jerusalem will be liberated unless every grain of Palestinian soil is soaked in the blood of its brave people... For Jerusalem doesn't need negotiations, because negotiations will not bring Jerusalem back to us." [Fatah official and member of its Central Committee Tawfiq Tirawi, speaking on camera at a public event in December 2013, translated to English by PMW here] Tirawi means it. This week, he said of the massacre in Har Nof: "I consider the Jerusalem operation to be a natural response to the occupation and the crimes of the settlers."
• "By the blood of the youth, Jerusalem will come back to us... We'll free every inch from the foreigner's clutch" - A child performing a song on government-controlled PA Television, September 8, 2012: the video clip with English subtitles is here.

Australia's ambassador to Israel, His Excellency
Mr Dave Sharma

Here is a very different take on the role of blood in today's Jerusalem. It focuses on a diplomat who we believe brings genuine honour to his country and his role. (We wrote about him back in September as well.)

Following the horrendous terrorist attack at a Synagogue during morning prayers in Har Nof, Jerusalem, some diplomats stationed in Israel expressed their countries’ condemnation. None of them however acted as quickly or as decisively as Dave Sharma, the Australian Ambassador. Wasting no time after the murders, he issued a strong statement deploring the terror outrage and then decided that something more than mere expressions of regret were called for on this occasion. The Ambassador swiftly arranged to make the one hour trip from Tel Aviv to Israel’s Capital and visit the wounded at Hadassah University, Ein Karem Campus in order to not only show solidarity with the wounded but to also express Australia’s outrage at this latest manifestation of irrational hatred against Israelis...  I caught up with him in another part of the hospital where Dave was demonstrating true Australian grit and solidarity. He was at the blood bank of the hospital, not only helping to provide badly needed blood but showing in practical ways that diplomacy can be more than just empty gestures... It gave him the opportunity to do something positive and practical in the face of fanatical evil... Groups of charedi young men, waiting to donate blood, came up to us and upon hearing that the Australian Ambassador had done the same, showered him with blessings and encouragement... [From a report by Michael Kuttner published by Jwire, an Australian online news service, today.]

What do you do? There's always something you can do.

19-Nov-14: Millions in Arab world now "know" the secret behind yesterday's massacre

Celebrations in the Arab street after reports of knifed-to-death Jews.
Think: How happy would you have to be to pick yourself up and go out onto
the street and dance. That's how happy the murders made these people.
[Image Source]

Among the various kinds of self-serving nonsense that many of the mainstream media outlets have either swallowed whole or purposefully buried in the wake of Tuesday morning's bloody assault on Jerusalem worshipers at prayer is this one from the very well-connected and almost uniquely well-informed Khaled Abu Toameh.

He Tweeted this morning that the organization claiming to be behind the knife men, the PFLP, is saying today

Attacked synagogue was being used as 'operation centre for planning attacks on Palestinians and their holy sites.'

As imbecilic as this claim is, it is certain to fit well within the self-perception in the Palestinian Arab camp that they are the aggrieved, victimized, offended side. Now wait and see which reporters and which publications pick up this news and hold it up to journalistic scrutiny. Even while it gets ignored in the West, it is sure to become yet another powerful theme - in Arabic, naturally, with which most of the world's reporters are unfamiliar in both senses of that word - that justifies the unjustifiable and ensures more of the same sickening terror.

Israeli spokespeople keep referring in their reactions to the notion of incitement. How many of your neighbours, do you think, actually know what incitement means in this context? Or understand what effect it has in societies like those where a massacre brings people out into the street to dance and pass out candies to strangers? How many mainstream media journalists are going to explain it to them? 

19-Nov-14: In the wake of Tuesday's murderous attack on Jewish worshipers in Jerusalem

Comprehending the unthinkable events that unfolded in the sanctuary of Kehilat Bnei Torah in Jerusalem's Har Nof quarter yesterday, and then in Gaza and Ramallah, and then later in the editorial offices of the BBC, the New York Times and CNN, is too important, multi-faceted and consequential a task to be wrapped up in a simple post. Here instead are images of the matters on our minds today.

Police officer Master Sgt Zidan Nahad Seif, murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists

R Kalman Levin, murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists

R Aryeh Kupinsky

R Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists

R Moshe Twersky, murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists

Honoring the victims yesterday: Har Nof funeral

Honoring the knife men yesterday: They have their ways, we have ours