04-Feb-18: The embarrassing violence of Ahed Tamimi and its fig-leafers

Nariman, Bassem and Ahed Tamimi of Nabi Saleh

[Image Source]

We have more than the regular amount of interest in the in-your-face bigotry and incitement-to-extreme-violence of the loathsome Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh. We have explained why over and again in past posts.

But for anyone fresh to this blog or to us - the parents of Malki Roth - or to the news industry's sickening and highly-selective fixation with the media-centric doings of the Tamimis, we suggest to start here:

• 24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey
• 19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets
• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists
• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

With the background in mind, think now about the stream of news articles during the past six weeks that have delivered up softball versions of Tamimi analysis, driven by yet another in a long series of reports of what are in reality self-engineered "clashes" with the IDF. 

The central player is, invariably and as always, Ahed Tamimi.

Today she's a young woman of seventeen (born January 31, 2001) who, as we sit here writing these lines, is being held behind bars in an Israeli prison while a phalanx of publicists, reporters, TV presenters and politically-active non-governmental organizations calls with rising urgency for her unconditional release. 

We leave to readers to figure out for themselves why she was arrested and whether and on what terms she ought to be let loose.

Our concern here is to cover matters that one high-profile news article after another in the past month and a half have simply ignored: what are her actual values? Where does she stand on the subject of real, physical Arab-on-Israeli violence of the lethal kind? (Given the obvious confusion about this in the media, the questions have surprisingly clear-cut answers.)

Our comments are prompted by an egregious case, the latest in a depressing series, of superficial and therefore second-rate reporting, this time from a serious source: "Meet 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, the new face of Palestinian resistance" [Derek Stoffel, Middle East Correspondent for CBC, the Canadian national broadcaster, February 4, 2018]. 

It's simply too painful to quote from. The link is there for anyone patient enough to read the same re-hash of Tamimi PR hand-outs.

It's not the poor reporting per se that is so enraging but the absence of two key elements that if the reporters had disclosed them would have put a fully-justified violent frame around (gritting our teeth) the charming portrait of a blonde girl with curls:

• The connection between Ahed Tamimi and her idol, Ahlam Tamimi with whom she is related closely and in multiple ways and at whose 2012 wedding (to Ahed's cousin) little Ahed danced and gazed worshipfully at the bride for the cameras.
• The terrorism-rich personal credo that the adorable Ahed recently recorded for her mother's video camera and which no reporter should ever dare to ignore in telling news-consumers the things worth knowing about this not-exactly-new "new face of Palestinian resistance".

Ahed Tamimi captured by her mother's video camera, responding to her

mother's request to share "a message to the world", December 15, 2017

[Source: YouTube]

The historian and analyst Petra Marquardt-Bigman has followed the violent Tamimi clan for some years and does an unparalleled job of providing a context to the often-context-free promoting that passes for journalism in much of the news industry.

Here's a small and highly relevant part of what she knows but CBC's man does not:

As reported by media around the world, Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager, has been charged by Israeli authorities with assault, after she was filmed by her family kicking, punching and slapping Israeli soldiers in mid-December.
Nariman Tamimi, Ahed’s mother, live-streamed the incident and its aftermath on her Facebook page. About seven minutes into the video, when the soldiers Ahed had attacked – supported by her mother and a cousin – had left, Ahed was asked by her mother to send a “message to the world.” As you can see in this subtitled clip, Ahed seemed embarrassed for a moment, but then she responded by dutifully repeating the slogans she had grown up with.
“I wish that everybody would participate in demonstrations because that is the only way for us to get results; because our strength is in our stones; and I wish that everybody all over the world would unite so we can liberate Palestine, because Trump must bear responsibility for the decision he took for any Palestinian reaction – be it stabbings, martyrdom-seeking operations [i.e. suicide bombings], throwing stones – everyone must do something. So we can unite this way, so we can get our message across in the required way and get this result, that is the liberation of Palestine, Allah willing.”
As shocking as it is to hear a girl who is just approaching her 17th birthday (on January 31) to casually list “stabbings” and “martyrdom-seeking operations” among the actions she wants others to take in support of her cause, there is no doubt that Ahed’s mother was pleased to hear her daughter express exactly the views she had been taught throughout her childhood. [From "Advocates for Terror: Why Ahed Tamimi and Her Family are No Heroes", Petra Marquardt-Bigman for The Tower, January 5, 2018] 

The entire video "message" in Arabic with English subtitles is here on YouTube.

June 16, 2012: Ahed Tamimi on stage in Amman, Jordan, gazes longingly at

her role-model cousin and Nabi Saleh's pride and joy, the boastful and

confessed murderer-who-got-away-with-it Ahlam Tamimi. The occasion

is the wedding of the Tamimi woman with another Nabi Saleh

murderer (who is also the bride's cousin as well as little Ahed's cousin),

Nizar Tamimi, the male in the photo. Everyone in the

picture is a blood-relative of everyone else. [Image Source]

There's another aspect to the journalistic wrong done by the Canadian: the absence of background. How did we get here? What caused this innocent child to develop her ideas, her attitudes, her fists?

The reality is that Ahed Tamimi has been groomed, trained, weaponized, hardened and massively exposed for years - and by the same manipulative pair of people the whole way: Mummy and Daddy. This is all a matter of the public record that remains just as public when reporters who ought to know better choose to ignore the record.

So Mr Stoffel, and the CBC people who oversee your work-product, please thumb through what we published here: "24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey" And the excellent piece by Shoshana Keats Jaskoll that Forward published a month ago: "Why Is No One Talking About Ahed Tamimi’s Call For Stabbings?"

Articles like these and like the post you are browsing now are unlikely to get you to see things more clearly or very differently. But ignoring them turns your article into a shallow piece of cheap, amoral flim-flammery.

08-Nov-17: Violent non-violence on the road to peace

Outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Israeli Border Guard officers
check arriving Arabs - June 2017 [Image Source] 

The man who was America's most senior diplomat between 2013 and 2017 and before that a failed candidate for the highest elected office in the land, has some surprisingly naive views, it turns out, about the Palestinian Arabs.

In a recording broadcast last night by Israel's Channel 10 News, John Kerry is heard telling an unspecified conference in Dubai "in the past year attended by Middle East leaders" including the head of Israel’s Joint (Arab) List (a Knesset/parliamentary party), that he

blamed the Israeli government’s resistance to the establishment of a Palestinian state for harming the prospects of a peace deal

and foresaw a "violent Palestinian uprising if there was no progress in peace talks" ["In recording, John Kerry says Israeli government doesn’t want peace", Times of Israel, November 7, 2017]. We can only guess which peace talks he means. Kerry warned

that frustrations among Palestinians could boil over into violence and that the current status quo cannot last.

This must have been a welcome message for the entirely-Arab audience, as we assume was his summing up of the Palestinian Arab role:

“The Palestinians have done an extraordinary job of remaining committed to nonviolence. And in fact when the [knife] intifada took place they delivered non-violence in the West Bank,” Kerry is heard saying in the recording. “This is overlooked by the general [Israeli] population because it is not a topic of discussion. Why? Because the majority of the cabinet currently in the current Israeli government has publicly declared they are not ever for a Palestinian state”...

He's echoing Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president-for-life who has repeatedly gone public with explicit messages of incitement to violence directed at young Palestinian Arabs while asserting - pretty much at the same time - that the hundreds of stabbing, shooting and vehicle-ramming Arab-on-Israeli attacks of the past two years are representative of an alleged Palestinian Authority devotion to non-violence.

Kerry was a headline speaker ("The path ahead for the Middle East") at
the Credit Suisse Salon in Dubai, May 09, 2017 [Image Source]

As a sort of reality check, some of that "non-violence" was on display today.

Israel National News says a young Arab male was intercepted by Israeli security around 7:30 this this morning (Wednesday) on his way into the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron:

Border Police officers stationed at the entrance to the holy site spotted the suspect attempting to circumvent the security checkpoint and avoid passing through the metal detectors. Officers ordered the suspect to return to the entrance and pass through a metal detector, which indicated that he was carrying metal object he had neglected to remove from his person before passing through the checkpoint. When officers checked the suspect, they found a knife concealed in one of his socks. A Border Police spokesperson identified the suspect as a 17 year old local. The suspect was taken into custody for questioning. [Israel National News today]

In the Hebrew social media, there are images of the would-be attacker's seized knife [here].

It's only the latest in a long string of thwarted attacks by typically-young Arabs making their way to the religious shrine with a knife concealed on their bodies or in their clothing. A very quick scan of 2017 media reports just now shows similar intercepts at more-or-less the same location on September 12, 2017; September 8, 2017; July 22, 2017; June 13, 2017; May 17, 2017; May 13, 2017; March 4, 2017. A good thing we have alert security.

15-Sep-17: Women, children, parliamentarians, editors and terror

Busy members of the Palestinian Legislative Council [the image is
from 2007 - Source]

The Palestinian Arab terrorist enterprise occasionally drops its guard and allows some of its semi-concealed lethal malevolence to be exposed to the light of day.

Here's an extract from a media report of a heavily-promoted publicity release issued yesterday (Thursday) by several NGOs that agitate for the rights of Palestinian Arab prisoners:

Throughout the month of August, Israeli forces arrested 522 Palestinians, including 130 children, according to a Palestinian human rights organization reported on Thursday. The scores of minors, as well as 16 women, were arrested across the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem, a report jointly issued by the Palestinian Prisoners Club, Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association (Addameer) and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs (CDA) said. Since the beginning of 2017, nearly 3,800 Palestinians have been arrested and 6,400 Palestinian prisoners are currently being held in Israeli jails. This number includes MPs, women and children. [Daily Sabah, published in Turkey, September 14, 2017]

(Wikipedia says Daily Sabah - the word means morning - is regarded as a propaganda outlet for Turkey's media-tough government and Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In March 2017, after investigating complaints that the paper had an editorial agenda of "spreading hate", the president of the European Parliament banned its distribution there.)

Video grab from a Pal Arab source

The focus of the report and the message of its promoters in obviously concerned with arousing outrage at the notion that barbaric Israelis would consider imprisoning children, women and (gasp) members of parliament.

Do they want readers to know the background? Evidently not.

• Members of Parliament? Goodness, how do those busy MPs manage to tear themselves away from the daily gruel of parliamentary law-making and oversight for the benefit of those who elected them? Terrorism can be so time-consuming. But they do! We may never know how since the Palestinian Authority parliament has been inactive for more than decade after being formed in 1996. (For some valuable insight from an Arab perspective, see "How Palestine's parliament is squandering millions of dollars", Ahmad Melhem - Al Monitor, February 10, 2016). An announcement was made this past December ["Palestinian parliament to hold first session in a decade"] that those overworked, publicly-funded officials were going to take part in the Palestinian Legislative Council's "first session in a decade". As far as we know, it never happened. It has been more than a decade since its last session. MP's salaries, of course, continue to be paid. None of this, obviously, is mentioned in the Daily Sabah article.
• Women prisoners? As people who pay more than the usual degree of attention to Palestinian Arab terror, it's evident to us that some of the most vicious sociopaths to have been detained and accommodated inside Israel's security prisons are females. Can't think of a more egregious example than the woman - aged only 21 when she embarked on a life of homicide and terror - who murdered our daughter Malki and the other fourteen humans whose lives were stolen in the bombing attack on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. Ahlam Tamimi, who now lives in total freedom in Amman, Jordan, with her husband and toddler son, masterminded that massacre and has never stopped boasting publicly about it. It's propelled her to the status of celebrity jihadist and a figure of wide Jordanian admiration. If and when the FBI eventually catches up with her (she features on its Most Wanted Terrorists list), will those Turkish editors try again to arouse anguish at the way woman terrorists are treated? And what do they say about women victims like our Malki, who was murdered at the age of 15?
• Child prisoners? The active incitement to kill and be killed that emanates from the highest echelons of the Palestinian Arab power pyramid has long been channeled in the specific direction of children [Palestinian Media Watch offers an exhaustive and ongoing overview.] And if we're already addressing this most shameful of inexcusable offences by the rich and manipulative geriatrics who run the Palestinian Authority, let's clarify that very young children, even toddlers, are a major target of the PA propaganda machine: see for instance "On PA televison, young kids incite to violence against Israelis", Times of Israel, February 1, 2017. Daily Sabah could have focused, but didn't, on the unique enabling role in this disgrace that's taken by one man: PA president-for-life Mahmoud Abbas ["Abbas: ‘We Welcome Every Drop of Blood Spilled in Jerusalem’", Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2015]

The pain of the imprisonment of MPs, women and children falls much more heavily on the Palestinian Arab side than on ours. But then so does the responsibility for trivializing the awful deeds that create a society-wide culture of terrorism. Do the editors at Daily Sabah understand the small enabling role they play in that? Are they bothered?

25-Jun-17: A voice of lethal, bigoted hatred is silenced... for a while

We're pleased to see that Twitter last night (Saturday) shut down the hateful account of the FBI fugitive who masterminded the bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Our daughter Malki, 15, was one of her many victims.

Our very sincere thanks to all the good people who helped us in publicizing the existence of the account and in bringing it to the attention of Twitter.

The background is here: "23-Jun-17: Murder by social media (is anyone at Twitter reading this?)"

The woman will certainly open up additional Twitter and other social media accounts (if she has not already) in this unpleasant cat-and-mouse game.

That's because, beyond being a confessed, proud and unrepentant murderer, she appears to be deeply committed ideologically to inciting others to emulate what she did and to kill Jews. She has been engaged in this since even before her unwarranted and deeply ill-conceived and regrettable release from an Israeli prison cell in October 2011 as part of the catastrophic Shalit Deal.

And since being released and returning to Jordan where she was born and has lived almost all of her non-prison life, she has operated a very well-funded, self-focused propaganda machine. She uses it to whip up support for more violence, more deaths, more Islamist ideological purity. She has a global following.

And - not so incidentally - in Jordan she enjoys protection from the US Department of Justice and the FBI which, since March, have been anxious to arrest her and put her on trial in a US Federal Court. She has expressed heartfelt gratitude to His Majesty King Abdullah II and his family and his law courts for what they have done to keep her safe and far away from her day in court. (Did you know Jordan and the US signed a two-way extradition treaty in 1995? The US says it's fully and completely in effect. The Jordanians have a new and somewhat different view. Read about that here.)

The world is a far better place for however long her messages of savage intolerance are silenced.

23-Jun-17: Murder by social media (is anyone at Twitter reading this?)

In January 2015, Tamimi addressed the students at the Al Islah Islamic High School in Tripoli, Lebanon. Bringing her message of hatred and extreme violence to children throughout the Arabic-speaking world has been central to her self-imposed mission since even before she walked free from her Israeli prison cell in October 2011. She is a propaganda machine for Islamist jihad.

Ahlam Tamimi, our daughter Malki's confessed murderer, has a Twitter account.

She has had one for years. Actually more than one. The latest Tamimi Twitter account replaces the one about which we - and many other people responding to a campaign we spearheaded in April 2017 - complained to Twitter. After an intense effort, that Twitter account was shut down. So too was her Facebook page.

As we wrote in a blog post here about ten weeks ago:

We think this means the many requests we and our followers... filed with Twitter were heard. Whatever the case, the world is a better and safer place with Ahlam Tamimi's voice lowered by several notches... ["12-Apr-17: A modest step toward justice: Twitter today suspended the account of our daughter's murderer"]

But now, as we said a moment ago, she has another Twitter account. For now, we're not publicizing its address. We don't want to contribute to her gaining any more followers; not even one more. She created it in May.

We found it just yesterday and within a few minutes we filed a complaint using Twitter's standard forms and on-line procedure. It works in a frustrating way because it doesn't easily allow for any background or explanation or commentary. And once having filed it, we received this ambivalent, somewhat anaemic and entirely unsatisfying response:

If we take further action? And what if you don't?

In the past hour, we filed a fresh complaint. This time, though, we answered one of the questions accurately (of course) but differently. As a result, we were then presented with a form we hadn't seen before. It allowed us to enter some free text instead of just clicking on fixed-option buttons. 

Here's what we wrote:

This is the latest account of Ahlam Tamimi, a convicted Hamas terrorist who was added to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list in March 2017, and is currently living in Jordan and on the run from the FBI and from US Federal charges. She is a notorious inciter of violence, a booster of murderous terrorism and the confessed murderer of our fifteen year old daughter and 15 other people.
After complaints from us as well as many others who responded to our Twitter campaign, her previous Twitter account [https://twitter.com/dreamsnnn] was suspended by Twitter in April 2017. By Twitter's own rules, the mere fact of her opening a replacement Twitter account ought to be enough for you to shut the new one down right away.
Her Twitter tweets are replete with expressions of solidarity with other terrorists and with hatred, lethal bigotry and calls for physical attacks against Israel, Zionists and Jews. She favours murder and encourages people - especially school-children - to follow her example and kill certain kinds of people in order to receive blessings from above.
I am puzzled at the slow response to my complaint. Are there any doubts on your part that Twitter needs to steer as far away as possible from this kind of abuse of social media?
I reported this account yesterday - about 18 hours ago - and received a formal acknowledgement. But no action.
The killer's Twitter account is still operating as of 2 minutes ago. It is now 12 noon Friday here in Jerusalem.

There has been no response in the half hour since we sent that off.

Some may ask why we find it so important to shut down this dangerous and hateful woman's social media output. The question has many answers but for the moment we offer an answer that the Islamist murderer herself wrote. In one of her tweets of the past two weeks, she said

which translates to

"We live at a time when the media are stronger than guns"

Given how jihad-minded killers have been emerging, ready for murderous action, in practically every corner of the world in the past handful of years, how can anyone doubt that this cold-blooded savage is right?

Meanwhile her Twitter account is alive and active.

Is anyone at Twitter paying any attention?

UPDATE Saturday night, June 24, 2017 at 11:30 pm: We have just now gotten notified by Twitter Support, after another round of complaints filed by us and emailed to Twitter's senior management, that the murderer's account has been shut down.  Thank you for all who have been supporting our efforts.

15-Dec-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?

As Abbas starts the thirteenth year of his four-year
term as president, nearly two-thirds of all Palestinian Arabs say
it's time for him to go home [Image Source]

We're keenly interested in knowing what the Palestinian Arabs think.

If you rely on newspapers or pay attention to electronic media coverage of their attitudes and expectations, you are likely to be getting someone's wishful projections rather than data-based analysis. The difference between the two is vast and unbridgeable.

So what is reality when we're discussing people's attitudes?

In the case of the Palestinian Arabs, we think it's what they tell serious polling organizations that are themselves Palestinian Arab. That's why we have published several posts here in the past couple of years that are based on the published findings of the pre-eminent Palestinian Arab opinion polling organization, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research or PSR [website] headed by a respected figure, Prof. Khalil Shikaki.

Not for the first time, we say that understanding the feelings, expectations and aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs is fundamental to having a sense of what's ahead. If you agree, you might want to review one or two (or all) of these earlier posts of ours:

• 18-Oct-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think and feel now?
• 15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 16-May-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?
• 22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 10-Dec-14: What else do Palestinian Arabs want, beyond the 80% who say killing of ordinary Israelis is a good thing?

Let's now look at the latest PSR poll which was announced via a press release [here] two days ago.

The parts that get the greatest prominence concern the political leadership of the Palestinian Authority and the outcome of the Fatah movement's recent Seventh Convention. Both of those matters provide an opportunity for the people polled to express broad and growing unhappiness with the performance of Mahmoud Abbas. In the previous poll three months ago, 61% said they wanted him to resign as president. That urgent Palestinian Arab dissatisfaction has now risen to 64%. This has vast implications for how and with whom and along what lines a living relationship can be negotiated by Israelis with the side he ostensibly leads.

The last time Palestinian Arabs were given the chance to vote for a president was in January 2005 when Abbas won; he has held tenaciously on to power ever since. The only previous presidential election, dominated by Yasser Arafat, was in 1996.

Frankly, we're much less interested in those issues and far more in what's revealed about Palestinian Arab thinking on violence and terrorism. Here's what we see, adopting verbatim (for the most part) the language of the PSR press release:

• "A majority in favor of armed attacks and a return to armed intifada." 
• "The overwhelming majority of the public sees nothing but incitement against Arabs in Netanyahu’s claim that some of the recent fires in Israel were initiated by Palestinians." 
• "An increase in the percentage of those who favor the abandonment of the Oslo agreement." 
• "Almost a consensus among the public that the decision by the Israeli government to ban the use of loudspeakers in the mosques’ call for prayer is tantamount to declaring war against Islam."

A few more insights into the mindset of the neighbours with whom we are engaged in a generations-long conflict:

• Asked about "the most effective means of building a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel", 37% vote for "armed action". Three months ago, that had the support of slightly fewer Palestinian Arabs - just 34%. 
• "62% support non-violent popular resistance, 53% support a return to an armed intifada..." [How to reconcile those two points? We won't try.] Three months ago, support for a return to an armed intifada stood at 48%..." 
• What do they not want president-elect Donald Trump to do when he takes office in January? According to 53% of them, he should keep out of the "peace" process. 
• About the PA leadership decision to send fire fighting vehicles and men to combat the recent wildfires in Israel, 50% say it was the wrong thing to do; they should not have been sent. And if their own houses or lands would have been destroyed? That wasn't asked, but we did notice that twice as many Arabs from the West Bank were in favour of Palestinian Arabs joining in the fire-fighting Arab compared with Gazan Arabs. (The fires did not threaten Gaza.) 
• "An overwhelming majority (87%) believes that the Israeli government decision to legislate a law that would ban the use of loudspeakers when calling for prayer at mosques is an indication of a war against Islam waged by the government while only 9% believe that the Israeli government is simply trying to protect the Israeli public." The pollsters evidently failed to check whether the respondents knew anything about similar measures adopted in other places. For instance the use of loudspeakers by mosques is (according to Wikipedia) banned outright in Mumbai, India; Lagos, Nigeria; certain cities in Michigan; and in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Limitation on calls of prayers by muezzins exist in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Austria, Norway and Belgium. 
• Only 32% think the two-state solution to the Palestinian Arab versus Israel conflict is "viable". In our October 2016 blog post on the previous PSR poll, 49% of Palestinian Arabs supported it, while among Israelis - via an unrelated poll we quoted then - 59% supported a two-state solution. 
• 54% of Palestinian Arabs say they believe that "Israel’s long term aspiration is to annex the lands occupied in 1967 and expel their population". 
• Roughly the same number, 52%, believe Israel intends to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and replace them with a Jewish temple (that proportion is essentially unchanged from three months ago).

There's not much here that's uplifting or forward-looking. 

But that's how it is with public opinion polls. You can ignore them, you can be angered by them, you can adopt them for the purpose of crafting new strategies. What you can't do is deny their meaning just because you find the conclusions unpalatable.

18-Oct-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think and feel now?

A Palestinian Arab leader [Image Source]

There are people who try to understand the Palestinian Arabs by watching CNN or reading the New York Times. For us, it makes far more sense to reach for Palestinian Arab sources and work from there.

Once again, we're looking in this post at what the Palestinian Arabs think, based on what they tell the pre-eminent Palestinian Arab opinion polling organization, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research [website] headed by a respected figure, Prof. Khalil Shikaki.

In a report published three weeks ago, PSR reported these findings (the wording is ours - the PSR's published summary, a 21-page document, is here):

• Some trends that are mentioned in the last PSR report ninety days earlier (reported in our post: "15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?") have gotten stronger. For instance, Palestinian Arab opinion is slightly less inclined to back armed action; the so-called French Initiative is slightly more popular; and the feeling that Mahmoud Abbas - the "moderate" head of the Palestinian Authority - should stop being president one way or another has gotten stronger. 
• Ismail Haniyeh, the likely Hamas candidate for president, would defeat Abbas if an election had been held in September. 
• But Marwan Barghouti, a convicted multiple murderer who, before being arrested, tried (in open court) and imprisoned by the Israelis more than a decade ago, was the commander of the Tanzim armed wing of Fatah, would defeat Haniyeh. All those lives murdered by him and his men speak loudly in Palestinian Arab society: in blunt terms, they're a political asset. And don't overlook that Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1984, thinks Jew-killing Barghouti ought to have been given this year's Nobel Peace Prize ["25-Jul-16: More on Tutu, Barghouti, terror, peace and prizes"]. We're fairly sure Barghouti is much more popular than Tutu among the Palestinian Arabs, but in politics, every source of electoral support counts.
• Palestinian Arab support for what the poll calls "an armed intifada" is currently high, as it has been for a long time. Three months ago, it stood at 54%. In this latest poll, it's down all the way to 48% - which still means every second Palestinian Arab favours the continuation of a shooting/stabbing/ramming campaign against Israeli civilians. Think about that for a moment, and consider what it means for those of us who come into contact with them every day.
• While it gets their support (55%), the Palestinian Arab public is "highly pessimistic" that the French Initiative has any chance of succeeding.  
• A Palestinian Authority court recently ordered the postponement of local elections. But if they had been held in late September, the Pal Arab public was certain Hamas would win in the Gaza Strip. They expect Fatah - the party headed by Abbas - to take the West Bank. (Clarification: Presidential and parliamentary elections have not been held anywhere in the two Palestinian Arab statelets for more than a decade. They are not likely to happen soon. The elections in this note are for local representatives. Abbas' four year term as president which started on January 9, 2005, is likely to keep going for the rest of his life. The Fatah–Hamas Gaza Agreement of April 2014 provided for presidential and parliamentary elections by no later than October 2014. It's questionable whether many thought it was going to happen at that time and no such elections are currently in view.) 
• This past summer saw numerous news reports of water shortages in Palestinian Arab cities and towns. Parts of the activist news reporting media knew whom to blame [for instance "Israel: Water as a tool to dominate Palestinians", Aljazeera, June 23, 2016], because there's rarely any downside in their circles to pointing the finger at Israel. The Israeli view is, not surprisingly, a little different ["Israel blames Palestinians for West Bank water shortage", Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2016]. So what are the Arab consumers of scarce water thinking and whom are they blaming? PSR found that 45% of Palestinian Arabs pin the responsibility for a shortage of water on Israel but a larger percentage (49%) says the Palestinian Arab side is to blame. (When did you last read or hear that in the mainstream news?) 
• The Palestinian Arab public are concerned about what the PSR terms "internal security breakdowns" and connects those with three main factors, all of them Arab: The PA security services' "weak and inconsistent performance"; a "weak" justice system, including the courts; and "a surge in family and societal conflicts". It's an issue that is rarely discussed in the world's media.
• There is very little faith among Palestinian Arabs in their own government. Indication: how many of them believe the PA suffers from corruption? 79%.
• There is even less faith in the freedom of the news reporting media. On the Fatah/PA side, only 16% of respondents feel there is press freedom. In Gaza where Hamas rules the roost, faith in freedom of the local press is even lower: just 14%.
• A two-state solution to the Palestinian Arab versus Israel conflict has the support of just 49% of Palestinian Arabs. A different poll conducted in August 2016 found that 59% of Israelis supported a two-state solution - and an additional 26% would agree if a peace agreement were to be made not only with the Palestinian Arabs but with the other hostile Arab states.
• There's strong support (55%) among Palestinian Arabs for abandoning the Oslo Accords of 1993-1995. (That requires a separate post of its own.)
• Concerning the Temple Mount, on which UNESCO is going to be voting again today, more than half of all Palestinian Arabs believe (and this is a direct quote from the PSR report) that of "the long-term aspirations or plans of the Israeli government for al Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem", the one considered most likely by most respondents by far is "Destroy Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock Mosques and build a synagogue in their place". That's the view of 52% of all Palestinian Arabs. And while it's a view that only 33% of Gazans hold, in the Abbas-controlled West Bank, 62% believe it to be true.

If all of this were not sufficiently dis-spiriting (and let's be frank - it really is and it mostly has been for at least five generations now), consider what the people on the far side of the fence want to happen after a State of Palestine has been established and after all (repeat: all) the "issues in dispute" (that's a quote) are resolved. 

Will there then be mutual recognition of Israel as the state of "the Jewish people" and Palestine as the state of "the Palestinian people" (those are the terms the poll report uses)?

The answer of 59% of West Bank Palestinian Arabs is "no". And that's what the Arabs of the Gaza Strip also say: 63% of them. 

We're for peaceful relations. And like most of the Israelis that we know, we're open to talk about compromise and to bargain in good faith. But what are people who hold views like ours to do once we internalize the Arab opinion reflected in that last statistic? It's also impossible to ignore the daily incitement to yet more hatred, bigotry, violence and conflict emanating from elite circles in the two Palestinian Arab statelets (the schools, the mosques, the political corridors) that certainly makes the situation steadily worse.

Postscript:

We're convinced that understanding the feelings, expectations and aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs is fundamental to comprehending them and to having a sense of what's ahead. If you agree, you might want to review these earlier posts:

• 15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 16-May-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?
• 22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 10-Dec-14: What else do Palestinian Arabs want, beyond the 80% who say killing of ordinary Israelis is a good thing?

30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]

From the video

Someone ought to send a Whatsapp to the diplomats who deliver high-sounding pronouncements in those endless United Nations debates searching for peace and enhanced human dignity and refer them to the video clip below. It's produced by The Center for Near East Policy Research (there's more background on the YouTube page that hosts the clip).

It's new and focuses on a UN agency that is actually doing far more in relation to peace than all those speeches put together.

Trouble is, what the UN agency in question is doing in relation to peace is the exact opposite of seeking peace or making peace happen. It may, in fact, be the single most effective organization in the world for ensuring that deaths and extreme misery on both sides of the Arab conflict with Israel keep happening.

That agency, funded almost exclusively by Western countries to the tune of $1,200 million annually, is called UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Its continued existence, nearly seventy years after it was set up as a temporary fix for a relatively small problem, is part of a bizarre narrative in which a legion of UN insiders keep marketing it as part of the solution when in reality it is a core and essential component of the problem.



Anyone sincerely concerned to save the lives of the children who appear in this video will immediately appreciate that something is seriously, lethally wrong with the entire UNRWA operation. The fact that its official spokesperson has a penchant for ad hominem attacks on its critics (including nasty and largely misleading dismissals of the individuals behind the making of the video itself) is part of the problem. A non-trivial part, but just a part. This plot has many villains.

Diplomats and public officials of every one of the countries that pay lip service to what UNRWA does without facing up to the ongoing catastrophe that it perpetuates are as culpable as UNRWA's spokesperson and its 30,000 (yes) school principals, teachers and staff people.

That's just one of the factors that brought us to write this:

"19-Jun-13: We actually do understand why Arab states put almost no money in the Palestinian Arab "refugee" fund pot. We just don't get why the US does." 

And this:

"03-Jul-15: Misery, terrorism and money-making: a cynics' guide".

There is no hope for peace - absolutely none - until what UNRWA does daily is understood and stopped.

24-Feb-16: Incitement and its harvest: What the numbers do and don't tell

Cause and effect [From a Palestinian Authority
government-controlled television broadcast]

Data from the Israel Security Agency (aka Shin Bet) published yesterday shows that this beleaguered country of 8 million saw an almost three-fold increase in people injured in acts of terror during the year just ended, compared with a year earlier.

Statistics, as families of the victims of terror know much too well, are a cruel and dehumanizing way to think about the losses that a society suffers when terrorists do their savagery. The bloodless numbers inevitably mask the complexity, drama and detail of the horror that has impacted the lives being reported - and not only of the victims but of those who shared lives with them.

But numbers play an important role and the trends they reveal demand to be understood.

Start with the number of Israeli deaths by terror: 20 in 2014, 28 in 2015. Year-on-year comparisons hide a lot of detail, but an increase of 40% is significant on any view. So is the breakdown of where the victims were found: by far, most were civilians: 25, comprising 22 Israelis, 2 foreign nationals, one Palestinian Arab). Members of the security forces killed in terror attacks: 3. Understand now why the apologists for the Palestinian Arab side call it resistance?

Hamodia notes how those victims were killed: 16 in shootings (of which 5 involved both shooting and stabbing); 8 by stabbing; 3 by vehicle attacks (car-rammings); one by rock hurling.

Injuries from acts of terror grew astonishingly: 53 in 2014, 239 in 2015. Putting some context around that, previous Shin Bet annual terror surveys showed the number of terror attacks rising steadily, then flattening this past year:

2012: 578

2013: 1,271

2014: 1,793

2015: 1,719

The "yield" of deaths and injuries per attack, the obvious purpose of all this savagery, keeps growing. In the past year, it translated into an average of five terror attacks every single day of the year including holidays and weekends, with Israelis being injured at the rate of nearly five every week.

The Times of Israel analysis ["Number of Israelis injured by terrorism jumps 284% in 2015", February 23, 2016] mentions, though barely emphasizes, that the army and police arrested some 3,100 Palestinian Arabs in connection with terror, and along with them

143 rifles, 34 handguns, dozens of pipe bombs, tens of kilograms of explosive material, and shut down three bomb-making labs...

Then it adds that a third of them were affiliated with Hamas. Since Israeli security forces don't patrol inside Gaza where Hamas is at home and fully in charge, we're speaking of a considerable presence by the Islamists of Hamas in the territory controlled by their arch rivals, Fatah, and the notoriously-immoderate "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas.

Shlomi Eldar, an Israeli analyst writing on the Al-Monitor website two years ago, said

...Shin Bet surveys determine that Hamas is attempting to build up infrastructures in the West Bank, particularly in the Jerusalem region, and that these are being based on Palestinians who were released from prison in the Shalit deal.

If Eldar is right, and the numbers bear him out, that's another unbearable outcome of the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Transaction that is, for the most part, buried in the media coverage in Israel and beyond it. He also mentions, and it's a factor worth keeping in mind, that

The involvement of Israeli Arabs in terrorist attacks was minimal this year [2013] as well.

There are two more data-points that keep going unreported or under-reported.

The president of all those Palestinian Arab girls and boys [Source video]

One is the number of posters eulogizing the terrorists who are killed in the course of doing these attacks - the so-called martyrs of the Palestinian Arabs. The anecdotal evidence from scanning Facebook, Twitter and other Arabic-speaking parts of the social media is that the rising tide of Palestinian Arab barbarism is happening against a sound track of constant incitement from the highest levels of the Mahmoud Abbas regime in Ramallah. The return on that "investment" is plain for anyone who wants to see. Not enough people do.

And two: the substantial portion of the Palestinian Arabs doing the terror who are minors and children. Click "Weaponizing Children" for more about that horrifying dimension.

18-Feb-16: A Palestinian Arab reminder this afternoon of what, in their eyes, children are good for

Time for people to better understand who provides
the knives, the encouragement and the inspiration
that is destroying the lives of  poorly-educated,
highly motivated Pal Arab youths

Not for the first time [refer back to December 2014 and November 2015], a branch of the Rami Levy supermarket chain, known for its open and welcoming approach to Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the shopping transaction, has become the scene of a violent Arab-on-Israeli terror attack.

First reports came around 4:45 pm this afternoon, near dusk. From Times of Israel in the past hour:

Two Israelis were wounded, one of them seriously, in a suspected terror stabbing in an industrial zone north of Jerusalem Thursday afternoon. The stabbing occurred in a supermarket belonging to the Rami Levy chain in the Sha’ar Binyamin industrial zone, located southeast of Ramallah in the West Bank. One of the victims, a 17-year-old, was said to be in moderate condition, while the second, 35, was in moderate-to-serious condition. Two Palestinian stabbers were shot by a civilian. They were reported to be in serious condition and were described by an eyewitness as “very young children.”

We don't know for sure at this stage whether that is true or not. We do note that the Palestinian Arab media are describing the attackers as aged 17 and 35. See Ma'an News Agency's report here. This is almost certainly wrong.

Ma'an News Agency, a Palestinian Arab source (screen shot). Note how old Ma'an,
but almost no one else, thinks the attackers are

In characteristic fashion, the Ma'an article spins some self-serving context by writing: "A wave of small-scale attacks carried out by Palestinian individuals in the occupied Palestinian territory -- predominantly on Israeli military targets -- have increasing targeting illegal settlements this month... International bodies have attempted to quell the ongoing violence through urging restraint by both Israeli and Palestinian leadership." Most of that is factually plain wrong including, we are fairly certain, the ages of the Arab attackers.

We know now [6:30 pm Thursday] that a 21-year-old Israeli is seriously wounded (now receiving emergency treatment at Shaarei Zedek in Jerusalem) and a 36-year-old Israeli is moderately injured (now in the emergency room at Hadassah). People who pray have been asked to have in mind the names of טובי׳ה ינאי בן אורלי and אברהם בן חמדה (Tuvia Yanai ben Orly, and Avraham Ben Hemda) for a Refuah Shleimah, a full recovery.

Haaretz says "The attackers were both are said to be alive and en route to an Israeli hospital."

The supermarket where this evening's attack was carried out [Image Source]

This seems a good time to point to the highly-political campaign being waged right now by supporters of Palestinian Arab terror in the social media under the hashtag @FreeAhmadManasrah. That name belongs to a child of 13 who was part of a two-child stabbing spree (along with a cousin a mere two years older who died in the effort) in Pisgat Ze'ev, a northern Jerusalem neighbourhood a few minutes drive from the scene of this afternoon's stabbing. We explored some of the issues in a post ["12-Nov-15: What about Palestinian Arab terror gives it that unique savagery?"] at the time.

Those behind that morality-deficient campaign to free the child (immediately) and to absurdly blame the Israelis for the freedom-limiting changes that have come over his life can legitimately be thought of as among the authors of today's knifings.

When those social activists and "human rights" protestors starting giving thought to the dozens of victims of child-enacted Palestinian Arab lethal violence - on both sides - we can start assessing their claims in different tones.

We can put numbers to the scale of the disaster. A report published yesterday [Ynet, February 17, 2016] based on data collected by the Shin Bet and the Israeli military, finds that about half of the 200+ perpetrators of terrorist attacks against Israelis in the past five months are under the age of 20, About ten percent are under the age of 16.

We are witnesses to a massive loss of moral compass in which children - as young as 11 - are encouraged by the instrumentalities of Palestinian Arab society to see stabbings, shootings, car rammings and bombings as acts of redemption, justified by a sense of feverishly-cultivated victimhood and sense of oppression, validated by the most powerful voices in Palestinian Arab society. The lethal incitement comes non-stop from (among others) the prime minister, the president, the religious establishment, the schools. Describing their society as being in the grip of a death cult seems a fair description to us.

Inside the store this evening [Social media source]

Back to this past hour's events, an attack during the week's busiest supermarket hours when Israeli families stock up for the upcoming Sabbath:

Paramedics treated the wounded at the scene of the attack and took the victims to Jerusalem hospitals. A large number of security forces were at the scene. An eyewitness identified as Uziel told Army Radio the supermarket was packed at the time of the attack. “I was in the middle of selecting vegetables inside when suddenly we heard screaming. Everyone immediately knew it was a terror attack.
“Within a matter of seconds soldiers and civilians with weapons rushed over…they shot the first terrorist and after 10 seconds or so they shot the second terrorist as well.”
[...A] military medic who was doing his shopping at the time ran over and gave the victims initial medical assistance. [The stabbers]  "both looked very young, children…everyone was in shock that these were kids — at least, they looked very young." The supermarket is located in an industrial zone frequented by Israeli settlers as well as Palestinian shoppers. Several attacks have taken place there in recent months... [Times of Israel]

UPDATE February 18, 2016 at 7:15 pm: Channel 10's correspondent Alon Ben David has tweeted that the attackers are aged 14 and 15, and one is now dead. Times of Israel says the knifers are children of 14 and 15 from the West Bank village of Beitunia, near Ramallah. Ma'an has now changed its report by deleting the bogus ages they quoted earlier, and that we screen-shot a few paragraphs above this. Times of Israel also reports that the younger of the two Israelis stabbed in the attack has now unfortunately succumbed to his wounds and died. His name is Tuvia Yanai Weissman.

09-Oct-15: Rocks, knives, guns: Cause, effect and culprits [VIDEO]

We think those who view the violence of the past few weeks, and especially these last few days, as the "spontaneous" eruption of "lone wolf" "activism" are living a lie. 

Behind the delusions there is a cold, calculated and very real process that keeps being ignored, daily, by mainstream media editors. We owe it to the innocent victims to drill down into the industry of hatred and political narcissism that makes the pain and damage possible.

A good Sabbath to all. And may it be much, much more peaceful than the week now ending.

05-Oct-15: On safeguarding a nation

Our plea addressing the prime minister - one of numerous
such unheeded letters and articles we published prior to Israel's mass
freeing of convicted killers in October 2011 [Source]

In the flow of reports tonight about the apprehension of a terrorist gang from Nablus in relation to the murders of Naama and Rabbi Rabbi Eitam Henkin this past Thursday night, there's now this official statement by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu:

We have brought an additional four IDF battalions into Judea and Samaria, and thousands of police into Jerusalem. The police are going deeply into the Arab neighborhoods, which has not been done in the past. We will demolish terrorists' homes. We are allowing our forces to take strong action against those who throw rocks and firebombs. This is necessary in order to safeguard the security of Israeli citizens on the roads and everywhere. We are not prepared to give immunity to any rioter, inciter or terrorist anywhere; therefore, there are no restrictions on the action of our security forces. We will also lift restrictions regarding action against inciters. We will act against the Islamic Movement which, together with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, is the main source of incitement.

Sounds like the right approach. We only wish that the same prime minister, faced with the opportunity to sound as determined as this, had acted with equal purpose before these latest murders instead of after.

Perhaps a sincere-sounding apology for some of those past catastrophically bad Israeli government decisions might have been in order today.

Terrorism requires uncompromising determination, and a clear-eyed view of the people who incite and the messages of incitement they propagate. Far too many Israeli families are today paying the hugely-painful price for unforgivable, irreversible errors on these matters by officials of our government.

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.