03-Oct-17: Released in Shalit Deal, a pious Pal Arab murderer is going back (too late) to life in an Israeli prison

The now-widowed Hadas Mizrahi and five of her children
in much happier times, with her murdered husband
Baruch Z"L [Image Source]. A family devastated
by another Shalit Deal-driven catastrophe

Another beneficiary of the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Deal was re-sentenced yesterday by an Israeli court. This has gotten only minor media attention, even here in Israel. That's a great pity. It highlights some lessons worth learning.

First about the deal.

We're referring to the massive act of terrorist extortion that induced Israel to allow 1,027 convicted terrorists, fully half of them (by our careful count) convicted murderers or attempted murderers, to walk free in October 2011. This was done to secure the release from Hamas of an Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit.

Both of us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) put a lot of time, energy and effort into trying to persuade the public that this was a very, very bad idea. We felt strongly that one of the terrorists in particular should never have been released: See "14-Oct-11: Please sign a petition to keep this particular terrorist behind bars" and "15-Oct-11: Video: The murderer of our child says: "I don't regret anything""]

Could the terrible results of the catastrophic Shalit Deal have been avoided? It's a question that has haunted us since the terrible deed was done. Here's a relevant comment we made in a 2012 post ["18-Oct-12: The Shalit deal a year later - a personal reflection"]:

Before the release, it was hard to say, but immediately afterwards there were important revelations. A freshly-retired senior commander in IDF counter-terrorism intelligence, Colonel (res.) Ronen Cohen - most recently the intelligence officer of Central Command. - said when interviewed on the day Gilad walked free, that this constituted “a resounding failure… The IDF never took responsibility for the soldier and did not even set up a team to deal with bringing him back… Intelligence is not passive but must be activated. [In the Shalit case,] it never was.”

The specific Shalit Deal releasee about whom we write below was central to two earlier posts of ours: "15-Apr-14: Seder night shooting attack: dead and wounded Israeli victims" and "23-Jun-14: Quietly, inexorably, almost entirely unreported, the lethal consequences of the Shalit Transaction grow"

That 2014 terror attack was executed by Awad on Route 35 near the Tarqumiya-Idhna road junction near Hebron. Izzadin Awad, the son, was convicted of materially aiding the murder done by his father, and sentenced yesterday to 20 years in prison. The court ordered him to pay the Mizrahi family NIS 250,000.

Commander Mizrahi was the father of five children, aged at the time between three and thirteen. As the NY Times report says, his widow Hadas who was also shot, was pregnant at the time of her husband's murder. Their nine year old son was shot too.

Ynet says Ziad Awad the terrorist

was sentenced to two life sentences on Monday [yesterday]. The presiding judge also took into account that Awad had carried out the attack despite being one of the terrorists released as part of the Gilad Shalit deal. Baruch Mizrahi was killed on the eve of Passover while driving with his wife Hadas and five children to the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, to take part in the Passover Seder (feast). Awad, who is a resident of the Palestinian West Bank town of Idhna, opened fire on the vehicle, killing Baruch, seriously injuring Hadas and lightly wounding one of their children. ["2 life sentences for terrorist previously released in Shalit deal", Ynet, September 3, 2017]

Back in 2014 when Ziad was 45, the New York Times said he had been

freed from a life sentence for murdering Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel as part of the [Shalit] 2011... The authorities said Mr. Awad and his 18-year-old son, Izzedin Hassan Ziad Awad, were arrested May 7 [2014] for the April 14 slaying of the police commander... The authorities said that the younger Mr. Awad had produced the murder weapon, an AK-47 stained with his father’s DNA, and told interrogators that his father said his motive was religious because Islam promised paradise to anyone who kills a Jew. Mr. Mizrahi’s wife, Hadas, who was pregnant and wounded in the shooting, said Monday that his death shows the danger of releasing prisoners, an increasingly contentious issue in Israel, and called for Israel to institute the death penalty. “If they did not have a bargaining chip, my husband would have been alive today,” Ms. Mizrahi said in an interview on Army Radio... ["Palestinian Freed in 2011 Is Charged by Israel in a Killing", New York Times, June 23, 2014]

That religious piety - it's worth turning over in our minds. It was described elsewhere just after the arrests this way:

Before launching the attack, Awad confided in his son that he had religious motivation, saying that, "according to Islam, whoever kills a Jew goes to heaven." [Ynet, June 23, 2014]

So how dedicated was this killer to the creation of a Palestinian Arab homeland? To the rights of self-determination of his people? To ending the so-called occupation? Not much at all, the man himself is saying. For him, as for so many other Palestinian Arabs attracted to the extremist Islamist terror gangs, it's about religion and paradise. To us, it's fairly clear that the specifically religious passions motivating Palestinian Arab terror, and driver terror in general, don't in general get enough attention from anyone, and certainly not from the news-reporting industry. We can appreciate how much of a minefield this is for them. But not examining it is to do a major disservice to people who need to understand and expect the news media to help.

According to the go-free list issued in October 2011 in the two days before the Shalit Deal was consummated, Awad - whom it calls Awadh Ziad Awadh al-Salaima Awad, releasee number 431 - was "expelled" to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. That destination makes sense given his Hamas affiliation (described as a fact in this Arab source that says his son is a Hamas agent too).

Baruch Mizrahi, murdered by the Awads
[Image Source]

But then how did Awad leave there and become involved once again in terror in the vicinity of the Israeli communities of Judea and Samaria? He would have had to leave Gaza and that's not easy.

No one that we can find has offered an explanation. Our familiarity with the terms of the commutation-of-sentence that the Shalit Deal beneficiaries were granted (gained from first-person discussions with the public officials in charge of the commutations, and from seeing some of the relevant documents) make us think that being expelled also means they were forbidden from later returning to where they used to live before they were convicted.

So it's a real question - and for us at least, really troubling.

Awad had been arrested in 1993 on serious charges and convicted of murdering fellow Arabs, attempted murder, membership of a banned organization (we presume Hamas) and hurling fire-bombs at people (presumably Jewish people). He was sentenced to life imprisonment. But in the end he served only a small part of that.

His 2014 victim, Baruch Mizrahi, made a significant contribution to the well-being of Israelis in a tragically-shortened but strikingly productive life (and that's before we get into his role as husband and devoted father of five children between the ages of 3 and 13).

The official memorial page posted by the government of Israel says he

served in the IDF and the Israel Police for nearly three decades. For 25 years he served in various roles in the IDF, the last of which was as lieutenant colonel in the elite 8200 intelligence unit. After retiring from the army in June 2011, Mizrahi joined Israel Police, and for the past three years held a senior intelligence position in the Israel Police and was in charge of tracking organized crime. He was posthumously promoted to the rank of commander. 

Then there's the painful question of the other family: the killer's family.

Baruch Mizrahi's widow was quoted last night [here] observing with full justice that Palestinian Arab terrorists who are taken into Israeli custody

"receive grant money from the Palestinian Authority, supplies from the Red Cross and living conditions that many Israeli families in need can only dream of. We need to put an end to the terrorists' celebrations." 

The PA money that has already been coming to the Awads - and will continue to come to the end of their days tax-free - puts them well above the household earnings level of ordinary Palestinian Arabs. And way above the salary class of senior members of the Palestinian Authority's civil service.

That's of course, deliberate. The more Israelis the prisoner kills, and the longer the prison sentence he or she gets, the higher the monthly payment that reaches him/her and the family. It's a cruel reality that the relative few - we among them - aware of the human price of catastrophic releases of unrepentant terrorists need to keep in our minds.

It isn't only that Palestinian Arab society puts vicious shooters like the Awads on a pedestal. It's that foreign aid, provided by unwitting taxpayers in European, American and other Western countries whose governments pretend goes to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinian Arabs, is the indispensable fuel for the Abbas' regime's unspeakable and well-lubricated ["25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing"] incitement and encouragement of the murder of Jews.

And as payment schemes go, it's been proven to get relatively law-abiding Palestinian Arabs to consider killing one of their Israeli neighbours for the sake of... their families ["11-Jul-17: Incitement to terror: Sometimes it really is all about the money"] and/or their credit scores. It's a chilling phenomenon.

The Rewards for Terror scheme (the PA calls it something else but our name is more accurate) is an indefensible, immoral and entirely counter-productive reality that is long overdue for being stopped. Even people who see themselves as friends of Israel don't seem to appreciate that this can be stopped and easily. Those with the power to stop it are the funders. Many of them, we know, are reading this post but simply don't realize their elected and appointed officials can allow it to continue because analyses like the one we have just written in this post never get into their local mainstream media.

Maybe they should.

UPDATE October 4, 2017: Over at the always-incisive BBC Watch, they pay special attention today to how the Ziad murder was covered by the world's largest broadcasting organization:

The BBC initially reported that attack in a belated thirty-four word paragraph and subsequent reporting failed to clarify that the incident was a terror attack. The terrorist’s arrest and indictment did not receive any BBC coverage and so audiences did not receive any information concerning the motive behind the murder.

“Before launching the attack, Awad confided in his son that he had religious motivation, saying that, “according to Islam, whoever kills a Jew goes to heaven.””

Such cases do not of course fit into the BBC’s chosen narrative of Palestinian terrorism caused by “frustration” at “decades of Israeli occupation” and audiences therefore do not get to hear about them. ["A terrorist defies the BBC’s narrative", BBC Watch, October 4, 2017]

Of course, BBC is not the only part of the news-reporting world that ignores the terrorist's explanation for why he murdered Baruch Mizrahi. Or his sentencing this week. Al-Araby Al-Jadeed does report on the conviction and sentencing but is silent on Awad's version of his own motive. And a syndicated Agence France-Press report [here] also reports the sentence and is also silent on the "Islam-made-me-do-it" aspect. But it does say concerning two of the most notorious terrorist organizations in the world, both of them outlawed under European - and therefore French - law, that "Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, and its radical ally Islamic Jihad both hailed the attack on the policeman as “heroic”"

The "heroism" of concealed, heavily-armed gunmen firing on vehicles filled with Israeli families driving to a family event is tragically something we know only too well in Israel.

--

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Uwolniony w umowie o Shalita pobożny Arab palestyński, morderca, wraca (zbyt późno) do więziennej celi") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Polish-language Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

21-Jun-17: An explosion in a Belgian train station: Do the news agencies realize this was not someone trying to kill himself?

Brussels: The attacker (in the background) and Tuesday's
explosion [Image Source]

Belgium, which has more reason than most other parts of Europe to be deeply concerned about terror-minded Islamists, is trying today to make sense of an explosion in its most important train station yesterday (Tuesday).

Here's how the events were depicted by one of the world's most influential news packagers:

Belgian soldiers have shot a man suspected of being a would-be suicide bomber at Brussels Central Station, officials say. He was shot after reportedly setting off a small explosion and no-one else is believed to have been injured. Prosecutors later said the man had died. They are treating the incident as a terrorist attack. According to Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique, quoting prosecutors, the man who was shot was wearing a rucksack and a bomb belt. He detonated a device when he attracted the attention of soldiers in the station, the paper says. ["Suspected suicide bomber shot at Brussels railway station", BBC, June 20, 2017]

They're careful, the BBC people. But careful readers will be left wondering about what isn't stated.

• If the man was going to commit suicide, why in a public place? Could it be that suicide was not actually his goal? Was he actually a murderer? Or a murder-minded terrorist? If so, why confuse and mislead by saying he was committing suicide? He made himself into a human bomb and that is what we owe to ourselves and victims past and future to call him and those like him. We explain the thinking here: "30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs".
• And by the way, the bomb's effect appears to have been enhanced by nails, making it "similar to the bombs used in the attacks at Brussels airport and on the city's metro that killed 32 people in March 2016." That's from Reuters mid-Wednesday morning (here). Those nails, in our view, are far more relevant and important to characterizing the killer than calling him "suicide bomber", a term we utterly abhor. They are put into bombs so as to cruelly rip apart the flesh of  the innocent victims. Our daughter was murdered by terrorists who attacked the patrons of a pizzeria in Jerusalem with a nail-and-shrapnel-enhanced bomb.
• The Brussels killer caused a small explosion, and then "later" he died. Did the explosion do him in? Or was it the Belgian soldiers who, at some point in these presumably fast-moving events, opened fire and shot him? The BBC report doesn't say. But clearly once he was shot dead, no one else was going to be hurt by him. That's a very good thing.
• The word "terrorist" gets into this BBC report only because the BBC was able to quote Belgian "prosecutors" who called it that. Does the BBC lack the discernment to be able to characterize terrorists as terrorists? No, of course not; it's self-imposed "know-nothing"-ness as a careful reading read of the politically-hyper-correct BBC "Editorial Guidelines: Language when Reporting Terrorism" shows. The BBC editors have far less difficulty or reluctance reaching conclusions on how to characterize a million and one other things; that's why we think of them as a news-reporting source.

This morning (Wednesday) there are additional details to ponder.

Numerous sources report that the fast-acting Belgians "neutralized" the attacker; it's a word that when Israel uses it (to mean killing or stopping an attacker in the course of a terror attack) attracts criticism of Israel.

The unnamed attacker, called "a Moroccan national who was not wanted for terror offences" [here] , is reported to have been yelling "Allahu Akbar" as he ran towards a soldier.

Reuters, around day-break today. reported that Belgium's counter-terrorism police are "probing the identity" of the man shot dead yesterday by "troops guarding a Brussels railway station after he set off explosives that failed to injure anyone":

• "We consider this a terrorist attack," prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told reporters, declining comment on witness accounts that the man had shouted Islamist slogans before detonating what witnesses said were one or two devices in luggage...
• The Belgian capital, home to the headquarters of Nato and the European Union, has been on high alert since a Brussels-based Islamic State cell organised the attack that killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015. Four months later, associates of those attackers killed 32 people in their home city. Since then, attacks in France, but also in Germany, Sweden and, most recently, in Britain, have been carried out in the name of the Syria-based Islamist militant group by other young men, many of them locals, raising fears of more violence in a city where almost a quarter of the population of 1.2 million are Muslim...
• [S]moke pouring through Central Station and a shared awareness of Islamic State attacks in the city last year and more recently in Britain, France and elsewhere, sent evening commuters racing for cover...
• Witnesses spoke of a man who shouted Islamist slogans, including "Allahu akbar" - God is greater - in Arabic, in an underground area of the station still busy with commuters making their way home and seemed to set off one or two small blasts...
• Rail worker Nicolas Van Herrewegen told Reuters that he was heading downstairs toward the underground platforms that serve long-distance and suburban lines running under the city center. "There was a man shouting, and shouting and shouting," he said. "He was talking about the jihadists and all that and then at some point he shouted: 'Allahu akbar' and blew up the little suitcase he had next to him. People just took off."
• ...As Prime Minister Charles Michel consulted his security advisers, the national alert was maintained at its second highest level. Michel, who convened a National Security Council meeting for 9 a.m. (0700 GMT) on Wednesday, tweeted his thanks to the security forces and railway staff for their professionalism and courage. Mainline trains were running through the station by the morning rush hour, but not stopping. The adjacent metro station was open as normal, the transport authorities said. ["Belgium investigates station bomber fatally shot by soldiers", Reuters, June 21, 2017]

We agree with Belgium's prime minister: it's good that his country's security personnel opened fire promptly and, acting with "professionalism and courage", killed the man and neutralized the immediate danger.

We hope Israeli diplomats remind Mr Michel of his welcome plain-spokenness the next time Belgium joins with Israel's critics in absurdly - cheaply - accusing the IDF and Israel's other security forces of "extra-judicial execution" and "disproportionate force". The Belgians don't think they engaged in those problematic behaviours yesterday, and they're right. And so is Israel when its security people put the highest immediate priority on stopping an attacker in the shortest time before he achieves his barbaric goal.

Which, to remind ourselves, is never suicide.

The politically-inspired squeamishness of the BBC notwithstanding, everyone with brains in her head understands that attackers like yesterday's in the Brussels train station and Monday's would-be bomber on Paris' Champs-Elysees (killed when he rammed his car, filled with explosive and weapons, into a French police convoy - no innocent people were injured) are motivated by religious doctrine.

And whether they are genuine lone wolves or working in packs, the inspiration, incitement and encouragement for acts of terror in the most-public places possible overwhelmingly comes from Islamic preachers.

Whether this means terrorism does or does not have something to do with Islam is a non-trivial question if we seriously want to defeat the savages and the dangers they pose to our children and our societies. We're convinced the answer is obvious for anyone thinking outside the blinkers of political correctness about those threats.

20-Apr-16: Actions, words and honor in the dangerously complicated Middle East

The Getty Images photo from this morning in Riyadh shows the US president
shaking hands with Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Abdelaziz al-Saud,
Governor of Riyadh, as he arrives at King Khalid International Airport
in the Saudi capital

The president of the United States flew into Saudi Arabia today (Wednesday) for a brief visit. Mostly, it's about a one-on-one meeting with Saudi's absolute ruler, King Salman. But there's something else at work here for those sufficiently astute to notice it.

The background, rather well known in this part of the world, is the matter of stresses, strains and surprising changes in the relations that prevail between the US and the Saudis.

The triggers for the tensions are (a) Obama's stunning redesign on how Washington sees Iran, with massively negative reverberations for Israel and (b) the zig-zagging US policy in relation to the country formerly known as Syria -but today who knows?

Here's the description of today's Salman/Obama encounter as reported by an American network, ABC News:

Under crystal chandeliers, the Saudi monarch greeted Obama in a grand foyer at Erga Palace, where the two walked slowly to a reception room as the small of incense wafted. The two offered polite smiles as they sat down side by side for pictures at the start of their two-hour private meeting. "The American people send their greetings and we are very grateful for your hospitality, not just for this meeting but for hosting the GCC-U.S. summit that's taking place tomorrow," Obama said, referring to the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council summit. King Salman offered similarly gracious words for the president, who is paying his fourth trip here for face-to-face meetings and photos with royal rulers since becoming president. "The feeling is mutual between us and the American people," the king said through a translator.
The president was slated to spend little more than 24 hours in the Saudi capital before heading on to visits to London and Hannover, Germany.

Notice anything unusual there? No, neither did we until we saw a memo from Dr Harold Rhode a few hours ago.

We first quoted Dr Rhode in this blog two years ago ["06-Oct-14: Oh Jerusalem"] when he noticed what most others didn't about the backsides of Muslim worshipers praying outdoors on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. We won't quote his observation here but please click to see what he wrote. His insightful comments may add to your day. They did to ours.

Dr Rhode is an astute and uncommonly well-informed observer of life in the Islamic world, Serving as a professor of Islamic history at the University of Delaware in the early eighties, his career evolved into being an expert on the Islamic world for the US government. Between 1994 and 2010, he advised on Islamic Affairs in the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's think-tank.

Dr Rhode evidently saw reports of the Obama visit to the Saudis earlier today, including these unobtrusive lines:

Dressed in a grey suit, Obama emerged at 1:14 pm (10:14 GMT) and descended the steps of Air Force One onto a red carpet at the Saudi capital’s King Khalid International Airport. Prince Faisal bin Abdulaziz, the governor of Riyadh, greeted him. Unusually, Saudi state news channel Al-Ekhbaria did not broadcast Obama’s arrival, as it had done during his last visit – more than a year ago – to pay respects after the death of King Salman’s predecessor King Abdullah... [Agence-France Press, today]

Dr Rhode's observations (unpublished, as far as we know) are:

In the Middle East, actions speak louder than words. Direct verbal confrontation is frowned upon, so we must look to actions to understand what message people wish to convey. It is in this context that we must understand how deeply the Saudis humiliated Obama today by sending a lower-ranking official. Protocol would demand that the King to greet Obama, because Obama is a fellow Head of State. Thus, the Saudis signaled that they are humiliating Obama, both to the Middle East and the Muslim world in general. No words are necessary. Everyone there got the message.

Everyone got the message? Dr Rhode again:

I wonder whether the American officials responsible for Saudi Affairs understood this as a insult.  After all so much seems to go over their heads.

Later today, the Obama/Salman
get-together [Image Source]

AFP's reporting today focuses on the fence-mending character of today's tete-a-tete. They remind readers that the White House is emphasising "the strength of an alliance that has endured more than 70 years... [and] seeking to minimise the frictions."

But there's another side to this as Dr Rhode noted. AFP chooses to explain that via Mustafa Alani, a senior adviser to the Gulf Research Center. whom they quote today saying the Obama presidency has been “100 percent negative” for the region, a legacy of “keeping his distance.”

Obama met with Salman in Saudi Arabia  ["Obama Seeks to Bolster Ties With Saudi Arabia", Voice of America, January 27, 2015] at the state funeral of the previous ruler, the present king's half-brother, 15 months ago. At that distant time, King Salman

led an honor guard of senior Saudi princes and officials to greet the Obamas as they disembarked, including the crown prince and deputy crown prince and the kingdom's veteran oil minister Ali al-Naimi... 

Today's meeting of the two is likely to be the last formal meeting of the two heads of state during the Obama presidency. Given the difficulties the American side seem to be having with reading the map, this might not be so bad.

15-Nov-15: Before anything else, call the enemy by its name

As it did last January, the Eiffel Tower again today
symbolizes the French condition [Image Source]

Here's the first part of a David Horovitz op ed in Times of Israel today. It's called "A three-step plan for facing down Islamist terrorism".

Holding mass solidarity marches, and vowing, stern-faced, to fight back against Islamic State just isn’t going to do it. Islamic extremist terror groups, and the states that sponsor them, are seeking to destroy open, democratic, egalitarian Western society and impose their bleak, bloody, perverted version of Islam. 

Facing them down will obviously not be simple. But it will be impossible unless the reality of the threat is genuinely internalized and the fight back mounted in earnest.
If the West continues to delude itself about the scale of the challenge, those who delight in the divine gift of life will find themselves becoming increasingly constrained and terrified by those who assert an imperative to kill and be killed in the name of God. 

The struggle to maintain fundamental Western freedoms involves a three-step process. 

First, name and acknowledge the enemy. 

The killers who struck in Paris — like those who brought down a Russian civilian airliner in the Sinai, and who carried out suicide bombings in Beirut last week, and who struck at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher in Paris in January, and in London on July 7, 2005, and on September 11, 2001, in New York, and who blew up the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, and, yes, who killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings in the Second Intifada, and on and on and on through an endless list of outrages worldwide — are not vague “militants.” They are Islamic extremists, adherents of that toxic kill-and-be-killed Islamist ideology. 

And their actions are not mere “violence” but terrorism — killing in order to terrorize, in order to weaken and cow their opposition, the better to impose that rapacious ideology. Islamic State is an exponent of particular depravity.

He goes on [here] to propose two additional steps. It's an excellent basis for the discussions that ought to be going on in every place where terror is a moral threat. That, as events keep making clear, is everywhere.

17-Sep-15: Rocks, rockets, riots, religion, risks

When we pray, Jews face in the direction of Jerusalem, and within Jerusalem
towards the site of the no-longer-standing Temple. This is true no matter where
in the world we are at that moment. Moslems, as this image shows, when in
Jerusalem, turn their backs to the Temple Mount. This photo appeared in a blog
post we published a year ago here 

Here's one small peek into what it means, in practical day-to-day-living terms, to have neighbors for whom terrorism and violence directed both at us and at their own populations, have zero downside.

The decision to open the valve a little or a lot - encouraging or allowing street violence, rocket fire, petrol bombs, stabbings - comes at close to zero cost. Worse, the outbursts of Palestinian Arab violence almost always pay dividends.

Why this works is something few people outside the region understand. But work it most assuredly does, in the satanic terms of the political and social culture embraced by those in charge of those places.

As we have been writing here ["16-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Not-so-new New Year violence"], there is currently a state of serious high tension in Jerusalem. Thuggish young men, and not so young women, have clearly been given the signal to make maximum trouble. Their media, and especially cartoons, are in full incitement mode. Some of their Islamic holy sites are chief among the places where trouble and violence are designed - by them - to erupt.

No mainstream Western journalist, as far as we know, has raised the question this week that Israelis ponder all the time: if these mosques and other religion-rich sites have such holy status to Islamic believers, why do they treat them with what seems to us like naked contempt? Not just piling up rocks inside their mosques and ripping out fixtures to create stockpiles for hurling at Israeli soldiers, but even such prosaic matters as playing football inside and around the place they want us to call the Noble Sanctuary. (When did anyone ever see soccer played by observant Catholics, or anyone else, on the smooth flat surface of St Peter's Square in Vatican City?) There are some startling examples and pictures in a post of ours from a year ago: "06-Oct-14: Oh Jerusalem"

So when Hamas and the Fatah leadership of the Palestinian Authority again threaten to deliver more trouble, more violence, more "anger", it's worrying because we know they pay no price at all for this hold-me-back irresponsibility. And no Western media and very few Western political figures have ever shown an appetite to reign them in.

There is a price, however, that has to be paid. And it's generally paid by Israelis. Here's a clear example. From the Jerusalem Post today:

The Israeli military has deployed the Iron Dome rocket interceptor on the outskirts of the southern city of Ashdod in anticipation of more rioting in Jerusalem, Channel 10 reported on Thursday morning. Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, has declared Friday "a day of rage" in response to recent developments on Temple Mount.
Palestinian and Arab anger has percolated in recent days over claims that Israel is provoking Muslims on Temple Mount.

Holy Islamic site of vast significance to the Arab people in
general and Palestinian Arabs in particular. Ignore the
football playing - mainstream news reporters surely do. [Image Source]

Note that the pathetically mis-labeled "moderate" PA leadership is right at the center of the rable-rousing, replete with insulting remarks about Jewish souls and Jewish soles:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas vowed on Wednesday that his countrymen won’t allow Israelis to “desecrate” Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem.
“Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem,” Abbas said in his Ramallah office during a meeting with east Jerusalem activists.
Abbas said the Palestinians were determined to prevent Israel from passing its scheme to “divide” the Aksa Mosque compound.
“There will be no Palestinian state without Jerusalem,” he stressed. “We are in Jerusalem and we will stay in it to defend our Islamic and Christian holy sites. We’re not going to leave our country.”
He praised Muslim male and female worshipers whose job it is to harass Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount.
“Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid (martyr) will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will.” [Jerusalem Post, September 17, 2015] 

What are the chances that rocket fire directed at anything Israeli in southern Israel is going to happen in the next 24 hours? Your answer will likely depend on how high a price you believe the Palestinian Arabs making the decision to let those rockets blast will be paying. In this neighbourhood, the price is close to zero, which is why an Iron Dome battery is being deployed there at this moment.

12-Jun-15: Citizenship: is it becoming a counter-terrorism tool?

Bahraini passport [Image Source]

Last month, we noted here ["22-May-15: Yet another Australian "normal guy" joins barbarians as government announces passport-driven counter-strategy"] how Australia is evaluating a counter-terrorism strategy that involves passports.

The plan (detailed here) addresses "the growing threat of homegrown jihadi­sts" by threatening to strip "second-generation Australians involved in terrorism", as well as what are being called "dual nationals", in order "to tighten national security laws":

National security agencies are watching a large number of radic­alised second-generation Australians... [T]he government is examining ways to revoke or suspend the ­citizenship of hate preachers and foreign fighters, including Australians who have one or both parents born overseas, in a bid to tackle the growing threat of homegrown jihadists... Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said... "It is a privilege to be an Australian citizen even by birth and if people are involved in terrorist activities the government is examining what options might be available in terms of suspension of privileges..."  [The Australian, May 21, 2015]

There's been Australian criticism of the proposal:

Revoking citizenship is pointless and absurd | Andrew Zammit ("a researcher at Monash University's Global Terrorism Research Centre") | The Age, Melbourne | May 28, 2015 | "There may be many terrorist suspects currently in Lebanon who hold Australian citizenship. Australia would not appreciate it if the Lebanese government said "not our problem", revoked their citizenship and deported them. But this is effectively what Australia could end up doing to other countries. Currently only a few countries, such as Britain, take this approach. If more countries adopt it, it could undermine the international counter-terrorism co-operation that is needed to tackle this global threat and that Australia itself benefits from...

DVD "Muslims in Australia Since the 1600s"
[Image Source]

And critical voices are being heard from leaders of Australia's Muslim community:

Silma Ihram, of the Australian Muslim Women’s Association, has also warned that some Muslim Australians could end up like the Rohingya people of Burma, left stateless or “shipped off to Cambodia”. She has joined the growing chorus of criticism by some government ministers and backbenchers, legal experts and community groups, over attempts to increase executive powers to revoke citizenship of suspected terrorists... "What the government is doing is to make this whole scenario of fear. Yes we have potential for [a terrorist] problem, no one is denying that. But the debate is had like the ‘reds under the bed’ so that [Abbott] can come out with solution and be voted back in"... Ihram said young Muslims were already contributing to Australian society with high levels of tertiary entrance rates and community participation but the government’s unhelpful rhetoric, such as Tony Abbott singling out the community, was isolating. "When the government suggests Muslims don’t have the same values Australians do – which is rubbish, [Isis] will say over social media to young Muslims, ‘they will never understand you, they will always fight against you’ and it all feeds straight into their rhetoric," Ihram said... "Everyone is going to lose so many freedoms under these laws." ["Tony Abbott using citizenship debate to win next election, Muslim leader says", The Guardian, June 8, 2015]

We quoted the same Australian lady three months ago ["26-Mar-15: Australia's rising pre-occupation with its death-cultists"] when she offered a stupefyingly simplistic cause-and-effect view of Australia's growing pre-occupation with terror:

Silma Ihram, a member of the Australian Muslim Women’s Association based in Sydney, says youths are drawn to IS because the Australian government "continues to create an us versus them" mentality... Ms Ihram, born Anne Frances Beaumont, is an articulate advocate for racial tolerance and the notion that it isn't Moslems but just some angry peripheral people that give Islam a bad name. A 2006 Australian movie review called her "Erin Brockovich in a hijab". 

At the time, we noted that, if she's right, this will all end up peacefully but it might all get a lot more serious if she's wrong.

A little closer to where we live, there's recent evidence that countering terrorism via citizenship and passports has some powerful advocates. This report appeared yesterday in Gulf Daily News, a newspaper published in the Kingdom of Bahrain:

"Terror cell 57 jailed for blasts" | Noor Zahra | June 12, 2015 | FIFTY-SEVEN men have been handed jail sentences ranging from 10 to 25 years after being convicted of being part of an Iranian-backed terrorist cell that orchestrated a bombing campaign in Bahrain. They were found guilty of arms smuggling and plotting a string of attacks on security personnel and landmark structures, including the Saudi Embassy and King Fahad Causeway, by Bahrain's High Criminal Court yesterday. The court heard that members of the cell received militia training in Iraq and Iran... Four of the 61 defendants were acquitted due to lack of evidence by judges, who revoked the Bahraini citizenships of all of those found guilty... Eighteen defendants found guilty are still at large and have been on the run since police first launched a series of raids targeting the group in May 2013. [The text of the verdict includes this:] "They tried to establish terrorist groups by recruiting Bahraini youth and using their connections with the Sadr movement in Iraq and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They then sent Bahraini youth to receive militia training in Iran and Iraq to carry out terrorists attacks in Bahrain and to overthrow the government..." In addition to life sentences for five defendants, judges sentenced 22 others to 15 years behind bars and handed 10-year sentences to another 30 defendants.

Though the Bahraini paper does not mention it, most if not all of the accused are Shi'ites, the branch of Islam espoused by 10-15% of Moslems worldwide and by the majority of people in Bahrain (and backed by Iran, a Shi'ite-majority country). A solid majority of Bahrain's Moslems, about 70%, are Shia. However the tiny island state of 742,600 (2006 official estimate) of whom nearly 300,000 are non-citizens to begin with, has been controlled since the 18th century by the al-Khalifa family. It's a self-declared monarchy, like most of the statelets in the oil-drenched Persian Gulf. The al-Khalifa clan are Sunni Moslems. Hence the instability, particularly since 2011.

From a website that helps aliens acquire US citizenship

What are other states doing?

• In Canada, The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act 2014 includes "new grounds to revoke Canadian citizenship from dual citizens who are convicted of terrorism, high treason, treason or spying offences, depending on the sentence... The majority of revocation cases will be decided by the citizenship and immigration minister, or his delegate", according to the Canadian government's backgrounder on the legislation. "This includes cases of convictions of terrorism, treason and spying offences."
• The United States (according to this source) has not recently passed any laws that would penalise foreign fighters by revoking their citizenship. The United States Constitution makes change difficult though current US legislation does allow citizenship to be revoked if a citizen displays an "intent to relinquish their citizenship". Fighting in a foreign army may be deemed an indicator of such intent and thus lead to loss of US citizenship.
• Under French law, the government may strip citizenship from dual nationals if a person has been convicted of terrorism within 15 years of becoming a French citizen. This past January, France's Constitutional Court upheld the law in a case involving a French Moroccan dual national convicted of terrorism offences… the court ruled the removal of his citizenship was permitted (and not a prohibited form of discrimination) if and only if that person had held French citizenship for more than 15 years. If less than 15 years, the principle of equality would be violated. Le Monde says there have been eight cases of dual citizens being stripped of French citizenship since 1973.

01-May-15: Turkish mayor's rudeness provokes US ambassador to change hair color but the background is far uglier

Ankara's mayor, Melih Gökçek
Funny-strange more than funny-ha-ha, and a conspiracist
to boot

Reports are circulating in the media today about the long-time mayor of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, and the juvenile rudeness he has just directed against Obama administration officials in Washington. The Guardian reports it this way today:

The mayor of Turkey’s capital city has been accused of hypocrisy after tweeting a string of sexist and anti-American comments against a US official – but launching hundreds of lawsuits against people who use Twitter to criticise him. Melih Gökçek directed his remarks at Marie Harf, the acting spokeswoman for the US State Department, after a Turkish pro-government newspaper criticised her for being “silent” on unrest in Baltimore despite repeated US government criticism of Turkey during the violent crackdown on Gezi Park protestors in the summer of 2013. One of Gökçek’s tweets included pictures of Baltimore police tackling a protester, alongside an image of Harf, above the words: “Where are you stupid blonde, who accused Turkish police of using disproportionate force?” Above the image, Gökçek wrote: “Come on blonde, answer now!”

The Guardian's editors go on to recite some of the history of this "notoriously Ankara mayor". It also notes that he's a hypocrite and something of a coward who

"regularly lashes out at his opponents on Twitter [but] is less happy to be the subject of online criticism... Mayor of Ankara since 1994 and a veteran member of the ruling Justice and Development party (AK), Gökçek is one of the most polarising figures in Turkish politics."

US ambassador Bass and today's Instagram image
[Image Source]

An AFP report this afternoon ["US envoy hits back at Ankara mayor: ‘We’re all blonde’"] makes some similar points while reporting on a novel kind of push-back from the US ambassador to Turkey:

The US ambassador to Turkey on Friday hit back at sexist remarks by Ankara’s maverick mayor to the US State Department spokeswoman in unusual style, posting a picture of himself with blond hair. Ankara Mayor Melih Gokcek, a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had on Wednesday fired off an extraordinary diatribe on Twitter over the Baltimore rioting, telling the US State Department acting spokeswoman Marie Harf to “come on blonde, answer now.”...Harf herself had refused to rise to the bait of the comments, saying in Washington: “I really don’t think I’m going to dignify them with a response.” But US ambassador to Turkey John Bass took to Instagram to make his response, posting a picture of himself with his normally brown hair turned blond. “American diplomats: we’re all blonde,” he wrote in English and Turkish. [AFP, May 1, 2015]

Trouble is, both articles fail to point out that the Turkish politician, a close ally of Turkey's rather difficult president, is a lot worse than just a fat-mouthed crank. There's considerable malevolence in the man and his career, as we wrote some months ago ["14-Jan-15: A reminder that hateful conspiracy theories are not only found in dark corners"] in a post focusing on him. 

We quoted a news report from a serious Turkish source that eventually got almost zero news coverage, though it was tied to the tragic terror killings of French Jews in Paris this past January. Here it is again:

Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek has alleged that last week's deadly attacks on a French satirical magazine and a kosher supermarket in Paris that left 17 people dead are the result of France expressing support for Palestine, and that Israeli intelligence is behind the attacks, the semi-official Anadolu news agency reported... Gökçek attended the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) Gölbaşı youth branch fourth ordinary district congress on Sunday and mentioned the terrorist attacks in France. He said Israel was annoyed with the lower house of French parliament for voting for the recognition of a Palestinian state and with France's vote in favor of a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for the same recognition. “Israel certainly doesn't want this sentiment to expand in Europe. That's why it is certain that Mossad is behind these kinds of incidents. Mossad enflames Islamophobia by causing such incidents,” Gökçek said. He claimed that after the Paris attacks, around 50 mosques and some Muslim individuals had been targeted but such incidents were not reported on by the international media. “Palestine being recognized as a state is why these [attacks] have taken place,” he concluded. [Today's Zaman, a major Turkish newspaper, January 12, 2015 - as quoted in our earlier blog post]

Half a year earlier, in July 2014 Gökçek supported the antisemitic tweet made by Turkish singer Yıldız Tilbe: "God bless Hitler, it was even too few what he did to the Jews, he was right" and "The Jews will be destroyed by Muslims, in the name of Allah, not much time left for it be done". [Source: Wikipedia]

When public figures, especially those in ambitious, aspirational states of the Middle East, take the lead in propagating anti-Jewish conspiracies against a background of murdered Jews. we don't have much of a sense of humour. 

We wish the news-reporting industry took a little more trouble in the profiles they publish of jackasses like Gökçek. He's not a mere buffoon, and taunting him with dyed hair is missing the point: this is a rabble-rousing antisemite whose dignified public office provides him with cover to sow the seeds of anti-Jewish sentiment - as if there were not enough already - in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. 

10-Jan-15: An unusually sharp Israeli look from within at Europe's Moslem communities

Starting at the 1h17m05s mark, Zvi Yehezkeli
visits the Charlie Hebdo offices and speaks with the editor
and his colleagues

In August 2014, we published a blog post here about a television documentary in four parts that was about to go to air on Israel's Channel 10. It's an incisive and, in some ways, quite unique documentary series that looks closely - from right inside - at some aspects of Europe's Islamic communities. Here is a reprise of what we said then. (We also wrote about it in September and 

October 2012 when it first appeared on Israeli screens.)

The series is called "Allah Islam" in Hebrew, and "Muslims in Europe" in the English-sub-titles version. It is a collaboration between Israeli film director and journalist David Deri, and Zvi Yehezkeli who is Israeli Channel 10's senior news reporter on Arab affairs. 

Made principally for an Israeli audience, the narration and subtitles are in Hebrew. So is the general viewpoint; the makers are clearly addressing an Israeli audience and examining concerns that Israelis have about Europe. Don't be put off by the thought that this is an examination of Israel-specific issues. Mostly, it's not. 

As we wrote two years ago, the series deals in an extremely effective way with the mutual interaction of European society and a very particular immigrant group. Our sense is that as important as this issue is for many, and especially for Europeans, it gets too much of the wrong sort of attention.

The fact that Yehezkeli, a fluent speaker of Palestinian-accented Arabic, succeeds in passing himself of as a non-Jewish Palestinian Arab is key to its success, and we think to its uniqueness. We cannot imagine a made-in-USA documentary that could penetrate as deeply and cleverly into the very loaded subject matter.

Final scene in the series was filmed in Malmo, Sweden

To be sure, it does not pretend to take an encyclopaedic view, preferring to focus on the challenges thrown up by the interaction - and to a great extent the clash - between Europe's liberal outlook and those of the large Moslem migrant communities in the UK, Netherlands, France, Belgium and Sweden. Yes, terrorism is examined but so too are many other dimensions of this complex matter.

An English-subtitled version, blending all four parts into a single file of nearly 3 hours, can be viewed online via YouTube. The searing events in Paris of the past three days are echoed in a brief segment where Yehezkeli visits the editorial offices of the Charlie Hebdo in Paris and interviews Stéphane Charbonnier who was murdered this past Wednesday.

The four separate original parts and their titles:

Part 1: Isolation [from the start] [Hebrew-only version here]  

Part 2: Sharia law or State law [starts at 0:44:02] [Hebrew-only version here] 

Part 3: Terror [starts at 1:23:23] [Hebrew-only version here] 

Part 4: Europe's Jews [starts at 2:06:55] [Hebrew-only version here]

Even before this week's violence in Paris, we would have given the experience of viewing this our highest recommendation. Today, it's more important than that.

09-Jan-15: Moderates, murderers and jihad

Trocadero Square, with a view towards Paris' Eiffel Tower
[Image Source: Reuters]

For reasons that range from admirable to appalling, there's a great deal of focusing today in the global news and commentary on the idea of Islamophobia, "a term for prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam, Muslims, or of ethnic groups perceived to be Muslim".

Wednesday's massacre at the offices of a French satirical magazine is the immediate trigger, naturally enough. (See the BBC today, for instance: "Could Charlie Hebdo attack fuel tensions over Islam?") But a perception that widely-dispersed violence - mild, extreme or murderous - waged in the name of Islam and as likely to target practitioners of Islam as non-Muslims - is rising in volume and intensity is clearly part of the picture too.

Ben-Dror Yemini, a respected Israeli columnist whose public appearances and writings we have enjoyed, has an article ["France attacks are jihad's doing, not Islam's"] on Ynet today in which he shares some cogent observations about where the problems are and are not:

Millions of Muslims have nothing to do with terror but, according to surveys, hundreds of thousands support jihad, suicide bombings and even the Islamic State. Thousands of them actively join global jihad. And there are few who carry out terror attacks in France. So what can Europe do? How does it cope with this? ...The Muslim community in Drancy, a Paris suburb less than a 30-minute drive from the scene of Wednesday's attack, is led by Imam Hassan Chalghoumi, who combats any expression of radicalism. In the past few years, he has been repeatedly warning against what is happening in mosques in France. The French Muslim Council has ostracized him. All his appeals to the French establishment have been rejected. He has to walk around with bodyguards following a series of attempts to hurt him and his family members.

Imam Chalghoumi [Image Source: Le Figaro]

Imam Chalghoumi is little known outside the world of French speakers. The Wikipedia entry about his life and works suggests that's a lost opportunity:

He has good relations with Jewish organisations in France, which sometimes caused demonstrations and clashes in Drancy mosque... He studied in Syria and Pakistan in fundamentalists medersa before coming to France in 1996... In 2006, he made a speech in front of the deportation memorial in Drancy. His house was vandalized a few days later... At the beginning of 2009, he was invited to the Elysée and the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF), a French Jewish organisation... Some of his opponents call him "Imam of the Jews" for his activism... He is naturalised as a French citizen in 2005. [Wikipedia English - the much more comprehensive Wikipedia French entry is here]

Why do the messages of Islamic political moderates go so unheeded in their own ranks? Why is there so little interest - among Moslems but not only - in Moslems who speak in calm and reasonable tones? Why are such men and women the target of often-violent hatred among parts of their own community? Why does Islamophobia get so much attention (about 3 million hits in this Google search). And why does it become such a hot subject when Moslem terrorists carry out a terror attack in the name (explicitly) of their religious outlook?

Factor into the analysis that certain prominent Islamic voices reject the very idea that "moderate" and "Moslem" can legitimately appear side by side in the same phrase. For instance

Speaking at Kanal D TV’s Arena program, PM Erdogan commented on the term “moderate Islam”, often used in the West to describe AKP and said, ‘These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” [Source: Milliyet, Turkey, August 21, 2007, via MEMRI, a specialist translation-to-English service]

The same Turkish politician restated the same core idea two years later at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in a speech he entitled "Alliance of Civilizations and Turkey's Role". Hurriyet, a leading Turkish newspaper, published extracts at the time (April 2009); here are three:

• Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rejected attempts to call Turkey the representative of moderate Islam. "It is unacceptable for us to agree with such a definition. Turkey has never been a country to represent such a concept. Moreover, Islam cannot be classified as moderate or not..."
• "The animosity [of different religions and cultures] unfortunately, strengthens the scenarios that there is a so-called clash of civilizations in the world. Those, who defend such speculations, may go further to identify the terrorism with Islam which is based on peace"...adding that the situation helps those who try to globalize Islamophobia. 
• "It should be known that adopting a malicious and offending approach toward the sensitive issues of Islamic world by hiding behind some democratic freedoms like freedom of speech and right of free publication is unacceptable"

That last comment raises the matter of how Erdogan would have classified Wednesday's systematic murders at the Charlie Hebdo office.

How Wednesday's gunmen felt about "sensitive issues of Islamic world", about "freedom of speech" and about "right of free publication" is less of a puzzle since we have news reports [via the BBC, for instance] that witness

heard the gunmen shouting "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad" and "God is Great" in Arabic ("Allahu Akbar").

Today, though, Erdogan's are not the views that are uppermost in people's minds. Yemini's article offers considerably more wisdom than the Turkish politician does anyway:

• "This terror attack was written on the wall... France is helpless. It's hard to monitor a creeping radicalization which is taking place in thousands of mosques, but all the funding sources could have been blocked, especially the capital which arrived from Qatar. Money is not the only problem, but it's definitely a problem.
• "This is a painful attack, which is connected to the very heart of free France. The targeted magazine is not the most popular or most circulated newspaper in the country – far from that – but it has positioned itself at the front of the battle for freedom of expression and has clarified that it would not give in to threats.
• "It would be sad to see the far right, which is usually racist and anti-Semitic, gaining political power as a result of this attack. And it would be encouraging if the free world starts taking the Muslims from Chalghoumi's school more seriously and showing them more sympathy. There is no need for Islamophobia, it's time for jihadophobia. [Ynet, today]

That last line is critical. As comforting as it is for many people to sink into melancholic reverie about the clear and present threats to freedom of expression in today's Europe (not only Europe, and not only from the Islamists), the real story here is not that. It's jihad. And the dangers are considerably more physical, personal and immediate than the (undoubtedly real) assault on democratic freedoms.