04-Aug-17: The unmaking of Palestinian Arab losers

Amos Harel writing in Haaretz today ["'Revenge of the Rejects': The Real Reason Young Palestinians Commit Lone-wolf Attacks"] puts a pin in the "look-for-root-causes" balloon.

The IDF believes there have been more than 300 Palestinian-Arab-on-Israeli "lone-wolf terror attacks and copycat attacks", as they refer to them, since October 2015.

Harel says that when first confronted by the emerging reality, the military's intelligence organizations were at a loss to make sense of the waves of stabbings and vehicle-rammings. They systematically addressed their lack of insight and preparedness by turning to the data.

The chief focus was intelligence monitoring of Palestinian Arab social media. As he describes it, they began with

an Excel sheet in which all the available information on the first 80 terrorists was entered. Clear patterns were spotted, with imitation the most prominent: 40 percent of the terrorists who struck in those first months came from the same seven West Bank villages and neighborhoods. Half of the attacks occurred at a small number of locations, with one attacker following in the footsteps of another. Based on this information, the Central Command tailored special security arrangements for the attack-prone sites, with the Gush Etzion junction being number one. 

So while the role of incitement is clearly important, and invoking “Al-Aqsa is in danger” as the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel - essentially Hamas - is an exceptionally potent trigger, the underlying personal and psychological problems of certain parts of their society make them wide open and receptive.

The patterns and understandings they extracted include:

• The current crop of attackers are on the whole not religiously devout and for the most part have no history of involvement in any terrorist group. 
• Far from being "desperate" and "deprived", most - like the young human bomb who exploded in the Sbarro pizzeria back in 2001, murdering fifteen including our daughter - belonged to the center of the socioeconomic spectrum. A relative few came from the highrise ramshackle neighborhoods and dusty villages that reporters love to call refugee camps. 
• Most were identified as "relative outsiders" in their own society, and many had identifiable personal problems. Especially noticeable was the number abused at home (especially true of the girls) and impacted by family crises and dysfunction.
• Many belonged to a personality type that the Central Command intelligence team called, and Harel quotes: “the Revenge of the Rejects”. 
• Egged on by round-the-clock incitement from multiple parts of Palestinian Arab society from the president on down, the mere picking up a knife transformed these troubled young Arabs into what Harel calls "Palestinian Supermen and Superwomen". Carrying out an attack on Israelis connected the assailant "to a narrative larger than himself or herself, one that imbued the attacker with bravery, with no need for any kind of organizational umbrella". 
• The role of the social media - Facebook, Twitter, the new generation Palestinian Arab on-line "news sites" among others - was and is especially impactful. 
• Being declared a martyr, even in cases where the attack was thwarted by the IDF and no Israeli was injured in the process, conferred high status on the attacker post-mortem. 
• Attacking Israelis, dying as a martyr, becoming the subject of acclaim and perhaps an admiring speech from highly-placed Palestinian Arab personages - all these are an escape from the problems at home or in the town or village. And they bring honor and money - yes, money in large licks - to the family.

When it came to finding immediate triggers, immediate is what they turned out to be:

• One stabber set out to attack an Israeli after getting into a humiliating argument with his father that resulted in his iPad being smashed.
• Another, from a middle-class family, reacted to learning that his parents intended to hand control of the family business to one of his brothers and not to him. He did what Palestinian Arab society prepared him for: grabbed the keys of his father's Mercedes sedan and took off to find Israelis he could ram and kill.

And longer-term triggers - what we here call the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme:

A junior Palestinian police officer earns an average of 1,700-2,000 shekels (around $500) per month; a young terrorist will receive a little more than that from the PA, from the very first day of his arrest in Israel. A long-term prisoner can receive about 12,000 shekels (around $3400) a month, a fortune in West Bank terms. Anyone who serves five years in prison is also eligible for a pension – and the army has already arrested some Palestinians who showed up at checkpoints with knives, and later explained that they were six months of prison time away from obtaining the coveted pension.

This aspect is hugely influential. In the world of the Palestinian Arabs, it has long been beyond doubt that money buys martyrs.

There's a flip-side: not for the faint of heart but certainly something that belongs in the counter terror toolkit:

Israel believes the terrorists hesitate when they think their family will pay a price. Hence, the return to the policy of home demolitions (still a subject of fierce debate among security professionals), but also to a wider effort to confiscate funds and illegal vehicles – cars that were stolen or taken off the road in Israel due to technical faults.  

Armed with insights derived from data analysis, some tremendous advantages emerged for the Israeli side which found that

the number of declarations of readiness to commit terror attacks has risen by hundreds of percentage points. The Israeli response relies to a large extent on monitoring the internet and requires close coordination with the forces in the field, who are responsible for making arrests. Recently, a new record was set: Just 24 minutes passed between the time an alert was declared and when the terrorist was arrested en route to the attack. In many other cases, arrests are made within an hour or two. 

He quotes a startling take-away:

The bottom line is that these moves have helped to intercept 90 percent of the lone wolf attacks. 

If that's right, people in other places ought to be paying really close attention too.

11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children

Haredi Jew climbing stairs from Jerusalem's Damascus Gate towards the
Nevi'im neighbourhood [Image Source: File photo]

The boy in the images below is the stabber who was shot to death on Saturday morning in Jerusalem soon after plunging his knife into the upper bodies of a pair of Israeli worshipers, both in their sixties, both heading home after Sabbath morning prayers in a synagogue near where they live - which happens to be close to Jerusalem's Old City. We described the circumstances earlier [10-Oct-15: Bloody Saturday and Hamas says "we intend to join in"].

Here's how AFP summarized it:

On Saturday, morning a Palestinian teenager stabbed and wounded two ultra-Orthodox Jews, aged 62 and 65, just outside the Old City's Damascus Gate in east Jerusalem, police and medics said. Police said they shot and killed the 16-year-old assailant, identified as Ishak Badran of Kafr Aqeb in east Jerusalem.

In customary fashion, the Arabic-language media, many parts of which published the images below, praise him and what he did:  

• He was a "teen martyr" ["Zionist Police Kill Palestinian Teen in Jerusalem after Alleged Stabbing", Al Manar, Lebanon]. 
• His father, speaking to a video camera from the family's mourning tent this afternoon [via YouTube here] blames the knife-wielding son's death on - who else? - the Israelis: "...His son was the victim of the criminal Netanyahu government which stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque policy and engaged in killing in cold blood".
• On PLS48, a Palestinian Arab site, where his name is given as Ishak Qasim al-Maqdisi Badran, they quote the father saying the boy "was killed brutally and deliberately, pointing out that the occupation forces left him bleeding for more than two hours without allowing medical teams rescued him or save the rest of his life." (All the signs are that he in fact died immediately after being shot.)
• Another Palestinian Arab site, Al Haya, says the boy died Saturday "after being hit by four bullets in front of a falafel shop by Almasserarh near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem under the pretext that he stabbed one of the settlers in the face and the other in the shoulder... The martyr remained lying on the ground three and half hours". The boy was "peaceful", possessed of "high moral character", "prayed regularly and was hard-working at school".
• Silwanic, another Palestinian Arab website, says "The body of the martyr Badran remained on the ground for two hours. The occupation forces hurled stun grenades towards the citizens to keep them away from the scene."

Someone with a camera understood what was about to happen

Approaching target (person with camera does nothing to prevent what comes next)

Assailant lunges at one of his Jewish victims 

Israeli security people bring the murderous attack to a permanent close

The sixteen year-old Badran is never going to be able to tell us what had to happen in order for him to take a knife and plunge it into the chests and backs of a couple of Jews in their sixties.

Perhaps, but we have no way to know, he was given instructions by one or another of the ultra-violent death cult groups - Fatah, Hamas, PIJ, Sheikh Raed Salah's Islamic Movement in Israel - that dominate Palestinian Arab political life. Or did a senior figure in his own community, perhaps in the place where he prays or possibly at the local barber shop, whisper something meaningful into his ear? Did he tune in as Mahmoud Abbas warned the United Nations ten days ago [full text here] that the PA regime "cannot continue to be bound by these (Oslo Accords) agreements and that Israel must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power, because the status quo cannot continue" [CNN, September 30, 2015]? Clarifying Abbas' intent, Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestine Liberation Organization explains (in that same CNN article) that the Palestinian Arabs, presumably including their teenagers, "will begin using nonviolent resistance". What does that mean?

In the mind of one especially voluble member of the infamous Tamimi clan ["02-Oct-15: Truth, honesty, love, murder... and useful idiots"], it means everything from pebble-flicking to acts of mass-murder by bombing. Perhaps others think like her. Who knows? Amnesty International calls the Tamimis non-violent human rights activists. It waxes eloquent about their bucolic rural community - the one about which we wrote here: "11-Sep-15: How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really?", and which is located just a few miles from where the dead Badran boy lived.

Same youth

It's hard not to think about the influences that played with the knife-youth's mind. We wonder especially about the extent to which Badran was impacted by the incitement to terror of a different member of that same Tamimi clan, the convicted, unrepentant murderer of children, Ahlam Tamimi. She killed our daughter by placing a bomb (a human bomb) at a busy site in the center of Jerusalem. She was, in fact, the mastermind of that 2001 Sbarro pizzeria attack, and the murderer of the 15 victims who died there that day.

But her impact extends much further than that. Via a weekly TV program and the social media, hers has become a uniquely popular and influential voice for evil in the world of the Palestinian Arabs and their backers.

In Facebook and Twitter postings, both widely re-posted and pushed around the social networks, she offered this enticement (translated here from the Arabic original) in the past week:

“A point of light: Each stage has its special form of resistance and the signs of this stage have clearly appeared in the method of the individual operations. They are planned by individuals, financed by individuals, prepared by individuals, and carried out by individuals. The result is the 100% success of the mission. Do not wait for an organization to organize you, set the time for you, give you orders, politicize you. Put your life on the line and go ahead, Allah will be with you.”

It's a potent message. And especially so at a time when the storm-winds of extreme violence are raging in the Arab world. Given who she is, her history, her prominence, her role within Hamas, her exalted status in the pantheon of murderers of innocent Jews, the capacity of Ahlam Tamimi's malevolent messages of just-do-it ought to be taken very seriously.

The sixteen year old boy is dead. Whatever potential it had for constructive achievements, his future no longer exists.

In its place, a society in the grip of lethal depravity calls him hero and martyr and continues weaponizing other young men and women to follow him to oblivion. It's an appalling process of grooming and exploitation with many facilitators, contributors and (especially) enablers, certain of whom call themselves human rights organizations.