07-Dec-17: Gazan rockets fired at southern Israel this evening may have crashed into Gaza

The whipping up of furies among Palestinian Arabs and those who stand with them continues apace in the wake of the decision by the White House to finally take formal notice of Jerusalem being the capital city of Israel these past seventy years.

It's still early evening and the reports are somewhat contradictory. Israel National News says this about the rocket attack that happened around 6:15 this evening (Thursday):

Two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip landed in Israel Thursday evening. Warning sirens [Tzeva Adom] were sounded in the Shaar Hanegev and Hof Ashkelon (Ashkelon Coast) regional councils in the western Negev Thursday evening. Shortly after the sirens were sounded, an IDF spokesperson reported that two rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel. Both of the rockets landed in open spaces. There are have been no reports of injuries or of damage. The rocket fire comes after the Hamas terror organization which rules the Gaza Strip warned that the “gates of hell” would be opened in the region following President Trump’s announcement Wednesday that the US recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

But other sources, including the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and this Australian source quoting the IDF say the two rockets fell short - meaning they crashed ob the Gaza side of the border. This happens frequently and the injuries to Gazan Arabs along with the property damage are often hushed up. We will adjust this report once we know for sure.

Reuters says of Gaza that

dozens of protesters gathered near the border fence with Israel and threw rocks at soldiers on the other side. Seven protesters were wounded by live fire, one was in a critical condition, the [Hamas-controlled] health ministry said... Member of armed groups including from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, appeared at a news conference in Gaza, their faces hidden by masks and called for a resumption of armed resistance in the West Bank.

Xinhua, reporting from Gaza, said around 7:15 pm that not two but six Gazan rockets were fired at Israel in the previous hour. It also focused on the public statements of the Islamists:

The Islamic Hamas movement called on Thursday for a Palestinian "popular uprising" against U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital... "Tomorrow [Friday] will be a day of public anger and the launching of an uprising under the name of Intifada of Jerusalem Freedom," said Hamas Chief Ismail Haniyeh during a public speech. He reaffirmed that Friday would be "the beginning of a new movement" to fight Israel's plan of occupation of West Bank and Jerusalem. "Trump will regret this decision," said Haniyeh... Describing Trump's recognition as "a turning point in the history of the Palestinian cause," the Hamas leader stressed that Jerusalem "has always been the source of victory, the beginning of revolutions and the starting point of uprisings."

Most people with whom we talk here think we're likely to experience less calm in the hours and days ahead.

UPDATE Saturday night, December 9, 2017: Times of Israel reported late last night (Friday) that "the Tawhid al-Jihad group claimed responsibility for the attack on social media. The small, radical group is affiliated with al-Qaeda." The Wikipedia entry for the the group claiming to have fired the rockets says

Jahafil Al-Tawhid Wal-Jihad fi Filastin (Arabic: جحافل التوحيد والجهاد في فلسطين‎, "The Armies of Monotheism and Jihad in Palestine") is a Sunni Islamist Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula, and is the branch of al-Qaeda in Gaza. The establishment of the group was publicly announced on 6 November 2008, with communiqués vowing loyalty to al-Qaeda, after having "received the messages of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri." Various forms of the "Tawhid al-Jihad" label have appeared in relation to developments in the Gaza Strip. The size of the group is not publicly known.

A group of the same name claimed to be behind the kidnapping and murder in 2011 of Vittorio Arrigoni, a high-profile foe of Israel described in various sources as a pacifist supporter of the Palestinian cause, a member of the Palestinian-aligned International Solidarity Movement, and a blogger reporting from the Gaza Strip. He had been living there after sailing in on one of the flotillas to Gaza in 2008. The terrorist regime of Hamas blamed his murder on Israel, unsurprisingly. Some time later, it became evident that this same offshoot of Al Qaeda - or a group using the same name - were actually responsible. We wrote about the tragic affair in three past posts: "14-Apr-11: Gazan jihadists grab Italian journalist, threaten to murder him in name of glorious revolution"; "15-Apr-11: For the record, Hamas is blaming Israel for the murder of the Italian hostage" and "20-Feb-13: Following up a 2011 Gaza murder".

30-Sep-15: With Amnesty at his side, why would so-called smear campaigns faze this child-abuser?

Bassem Tamimi visits an upstate NY school class to address

8 year old children on the Palestinian Arab view of the Arab vs

Israel conflict; gets warm reception from local political

activist [Background]

Amnesty is pushing back in classic Amnesty fashion after a small storm erupted in the wake of the abhorrent Bassem Tamimi's official visit to a third grade school class in Ithaca NY. 

There's some background to the ruckus in Washington Free Beacon, Legal Insurrection and via the contemporary historian Petra Marquardt-Bigman who has written several well-researched pieces on the Tamimi clan and what makes it so (ahem) special. 

There's also a published apology to parents from the Ithaca school district superintendent in the wake of the Tamimi visit.

Mr. Tamimi's goal must have seemed innocent enough - for someone as deeply dedicated as he to providing camouflage for murderous terrorism. He was there, in a program funded and organized (disgracefully) by Amnesty International and a small raft of off-the-edge extremist grouplets [see "13-Sep-15: A roadshow and its groupies"] to initiate the upstate NY town's eight year olds (a demographic for which Mr Tamimi has a demonstrated passion) into the secret arts of resistance and their bizarre brand of non-violence. 

We can only speculate that whoever had the idea of putting him in front of impressionable children must really believe the man from Nabi Saleh in the hills north of Jerusalem is an expert source of best practices in elementary school messaging. 

Whatever, like many in the dark netherworld of Palestinian Arab violence, terror and cynical abuse of their own communities, Bassem Tamimi has demonstrated that he's adept at squeezing the most out of children. 

Also highly relevant (though concealed from view, at least for those not wanting to see): the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh have murdered a startling number of innocent victims. Most of their victims were, of course, Jewish.

Amnesty's "Country Specialist - Israel/OPT/State of Palestine", Edith "Edie" Garwood, published a press release on Monday which we have just spotted. Backed by the full power and credibility of the global Amnesty enterprise and its astonishing $94M annual budget, it's subtly entitled "Beverly J. Martin Elementary School receives undeserved backlash". 

Campaigning: Bassem Tamimi and local activist exchange views

on "resistance" with Grade 3 scholars in Ithaca classroom [Background]

(NGO-Monitor has a detailed dossier on Amnesty International, an organization that began nearly half a century ago with fine principles but which has lost its way - and its moral compass - in serious fashion. There's also some relevant background on Amnesty's Country Specialist here.)

In a note published on the extreme-left Kibush website, the Amnesty functionary writes that the 'rights'-group's pushback is being published

in response to a smear campaign and some bad publicity surrounding an event during Bassem Tamimi’s US speaking tour. Amnesty International USA is one of a coalition of groups sponsoring the tour. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are future attacks or challenges during the remaining stops of his tour as his village of Nabi Saleh is starting to get the attention of international media and there are some who don’t like it. [The added bolding is ours.] 

Tamimi is in the Bay Area today, moving on to several other California towns, then back to Boston and Washington at the end of 6 maximum-impact weeks. More details here: "29-Sep-15: In the Bay Area? Boston? Washington DC? Help us claim back the real meaning of human rights". We hope people with a genuine regard for human rights (that's rights without quotation marks - there are such things) will take the opportunity to protest the abusive misuse of Amnesty's public standing and help to expose the hatefulness on show when Tamimi is given a platform.

Finally, not for the first time, we repeat yet again the so-far ignored questions we began posing some weeks ago ["04-Sep-15: Mr. Human Rights Defender, a question if we may"] to Tamimi and his handlers, who have so far avoided answering them:

Bassem Tamimi, tell us in simple words: are you as delighted by your cousin Ahlam Tamimi's massacre of Jewish children as she is? Have you criticized it ever, anywhere? Will you condemn it here and now?

Perhaps some kind reporters, or attendees at the Tamimi worship sessions, might ask on our behalf, and let us know the response. (To be candid, we're not holding our breaths.)

The massacre we mention is described here. It's where the life of our precious fifteen year-old daughter Malki ended. Bassem Tamimi and the mother of his abused children are the stuff of our nightmares. If people understood them better, they would probably have the same problem we do.

11-Jul-11: Suggesting some context for the media's focus on the Corries

Malki, our daughter, spent the last week 

of her life in the summer of 2001 as a 

volunteer counselor at a camp for

cognitively-challenged special-needs

children on the shores of the Sea

of Galilee. She was murdered in the 

Hamas massacre deliberately targeting
women and children at Jerusalem's
Sbarro restaurant two days later.

The CiF Watch blog is "dedicated to monitoring antisemitism and combating the assault on Israel’s legitimacy in the Guardian newspaper’s ‘Comment is Free’ blog".

‘Comment is Free’ is the online home of the Guardian and Observer newspapers that carries articles designed to engender debate and discussion through a post-moderated comment thread. The Guardian is one of the most influential media outlets in the world and the ‘Comment is Free’ blog is among the most popular blogs on the internet.

The article below appeared yesterday on the CIF Watch site.

If Arnold Roth held a news conference at the American Colony Hotel, would the Guardian cover it?

CIF Watch July 10, 2011
On the heels of her CiF essay, (US collusion in the Gaza blockade is an affront to human rights, July 8th), the mother of slain International Solidarity Movement activist Rachel Corrie, Cindy, held a news conference at Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel today to discuss the conclusion of testimonies in her family’s civil case against the State of Israel for their daughter’s death.

While I hope I never have to know the pain of losing a child, and plain decency demands that Cindy’s loss not be minimized, demeaned, or sanitized, it is equally fair to ask, in the context of the extraordinary amount of press the story has received, that some perspective be provided and some degree of fairness honored.

While I’ve never met Cindy Corrie, I have met Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malka was murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber at the Sbarrro bombing in Jerusalem.

On August 9, 2001 a resident of the village of Aqaba, north of Tulkarm, Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri, son of a well-to-do land-owning family, entered the busy Sbarro restaurant at the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road at lunchtime on a school vacation day in Jerusalem. The restaurant was filled with customers, most of them children and mothers. 15 Jews, including Arnold’s daughter Malka, were killed, and 131 were injured in various serious degrees when the explosive device – containing screws and nails added to maximize the carnage - al-Masri was carrying (in a guitar case) was detonated.

The massacre was coordinated and planned by Hamas’s Ramallah branch.

Six weeks later, a triumphal exhibit at Al Najah University, the largest in the West Bank, featured a mock-up of the Sbarro restaurant including gnawed pizza crusts and bloody plastic body parts suspended from the ceiling as if they were blasting through the air.

The accident which led to Corrie’s death was indeed tragic, and while the facts of the civil trial haven’t all been revealed some things are clear.

Though the ISM, the group Rachel Corrie was working with at the time of her death, tries to maintain the veneer of a “peace group,” they have a  history of actively aiding terrorist movements.

The bulldozers Rachel and her fellow “internationals” were trying to stop on March 16, 2003 in Rafah were working to uncover part of the underground  tunnel network used to smuggle explosives from Egypt, into Gaza. These tunnels had been built under civilian Arab homes and structures in order to smuggle weapons and explosives into Israel. What Rachel and many of her “international” companions did not likely consider, and were not told by their ISM handlers, was that for every tunnel they succeeded in saving many more Israelis and Palestinians would suffer due to increased terrorism and Israeli military responses.

The ISM intentionally placed Rachel and other “internationals” between 50 ton bulldozers and Rafah homes and so, along with the Hamas terrorist movement they were protecting, would seem to bear a large measure of moral responsibility for her death.

When you search for Rachel Corrie in the Guardian’s search engine you get over 150 results, some referencing the play which toured internationally named, “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

When you search for Malka Chana Roth, you get two – one in 2002 dryly noting her death in the context of a list of Palestinian and Israeli children killed during the Intifada till that time, and the other containing a partial list of the victims in the aftermath of the Sbarro attack, which noted:

“Malka Roth, 15, from Ramot, on the western edges of Jerusalem, was the 15th victim to be identified yesterday morning.”

That’s it.  A mere twenty words.

There were no plays and no international media interest in the innocent teenage girl murdered by a movement so cruel as to venerate the murderer as a Shahid, a righteous martyr for the cause.

I don’t think it exploitative, nor insensitive, to simply ask if, under any circumstances, the Guardian would ever offer Arnold Roth, or his wife Frimet, the chance to express their grief, describe their family’s unimaginable pain, or pay tribute to their daughter’s memory in a manner similar to what they continue to provide for the family of Rachel Corrie.

We're not planning any news conferences, and if we were then frankly the American Colony in East Jerusalem would not be top of the list of possible venues. That aside, we support Adam Levick's thesis.

UPDATE Monday 11-Jul-11 at 9pm: A Polish-language translation of this article is posted on the website of Racjonalista.

14-Apr-11: Gazan jihadists grab Italian journalist, threaten to murder him in name of glorious revolution

The SKY News article is here

Reports are emerging this evening (Thursday) that "Islamist extremists in Gaza" have kidnapped an Italian journalist they call Vittorio Arriogoni and say they are going to kill him within 30 hours if the Hamas terrorist regime that controls Gaza does not release a number of prisoners. Palestinian Arab prisoners, that is.

SKY News has a picture of a beaten-up face here in a report that connects the kidnapping to what it calls "a Salafist organisation, inspired by al Qaeda". It's a screen grab taken from a video in which, it says, there are demands for the release of "mujahideen" who have been arrested by Hamas and are being held in jails in Gaza and in particular a sheikh who was arrested last week. SKY News says this Italian journalist arrived in Gaza as part of an "aid" convoy in 2008 and he has become famous - in Italy, at least - for what it calls "his passionate defence of Palestinians under Israeli occupation".

An AP wire story this evening quotes one of the founders of the appalling ISM organization saying the man who was kidnapped is one of its activists and that his name should be withheld.

The journalist's name sounds like it might be a mis-spelled version of Vittorio Arrigoni whose anti-Israel writings are all over the web. Our impression is that there are details missing from this story that might emerge in the coming hours and days.

UPDATE Thursday 9:40 pm: Aussie Dave of IsraellyCool has posted some videos of the/a Italian journalist who seems to be the central figure in this. And he quotes this Palestinian Arab newsagency (in Arabic but click to get the English translation) blaming the kidnapping on - whom else? - the Israelis.

UPDATE Thursday 10:40 pm: Honest Reporting points out the irony of

"...Hamas refusing to negotiate a prisoner swap with terrorists – even as they still deny Red Cross access to Gilad Shalit and play mind-games to pressure Israel – is even more so. But irony aside, let’s hope Arrigoni emerges from captivity quickly and safely."

UPDATE Friday 07:00 am: The jihadists have killed him.