12-Oct-16: Fake passports and Iranians again

Welcome back to everyone who has been engaged in the rituals and introspection of Yom Kipur which ended at sundown today (Wednesday).

Israel's Channel 2 News reported tonight that Italian authorities notified their Israeli counterparts on the deportation from Italy of three Iranians who were caught with evidently-forged Israeli passports. In reporting this, Times of Israel says un-named security officials

are looking into possible connections between the three and attempts to carry out terror attacks against Israelis throughout the world.

We wrote about an earlier incident ["20-Sep-14: Iran is not commenting but Kenya may have just thwarted another Iranian terror attack"] in which two Iranians were arrested in Nairobi attempting to enter Kenya using fake Israeli passports. Our post refers to other incidents involving Iranians and false passports, sometimes Israeli, sometimes not. Worth noting who employs them and the general sense of foreboding in the air.

Why would a blog like ours, with a sharp focus on terror, be writing about Italians, Iranians and passports? Perhaps it would be a good idea to click on that 2014 link.

13-Nov-15: Outside an Italian kosher pizzeria, a reminder of what being Jewish in Europe now means

Yesterday's Milan knifing attack victim [Image Source]

Those of us whose appearance fits people's idea of how Jews look, or who wear recognizably Jewish garb or head-coverings, already know pretty well how this works in today's multi-cultural Europe:

A Jewish man was stabbed multiple times in the face outside of a pizza shop this evening in Milan, Italy. The victim was identified as Natan Graf, a husband and father in his 40s... The attack happened at 8:20 p.m. local time outside the Carmel Kosher Pizzeria in the heart of Milan’s Jewish neighborhood, mere meters away from a Jewish school... According to [a local source] a number of young Israeli students standing not far from the scene heard the victim’s screams and came to his aid while the assailant, who they said appeared to be Arab, fled with a waiting accomplice. The attacker has not yet been apprehended. “There is always police protection outside the community school, the Chabad school, synagogues and other Jewish institutions, and there is also a local Jewish protection group,” explained [the source] “We all hope and pray nothing like this happens again” [and] while there’s no general feeling that the Italian Jewish community will have to face circumstances similar to ones in nearby France or Denmark, “we have to be extra careful.” The victim’s family has requested that people say Psalms on behalf of Natan ben Chaya Sarah. [Chabad News, November 12, 2015]

IBT says the assailant attacked from behind, repeating "I kill you" twice in Italian, before leaving without uttering more words. The victim suffered a 7 cm slash across the face and three additional slashes to the back. The suspicions in Milan are that the attacker was an Arab female. No suspect has been apprehended at the time we write this.

An analysis in The Guardian last year ["Antisemitism on rise across Europe 'in worst times since the Nazis'", Jon Henley, August 7, 2014] touched on how things are looking lately for Jews in Italy where

the Jewish owners of dozens of shops and other businesses in Rome arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on shutters and windows. One slogan read: "Every Palestinian is like a comrade. Same enemy. Same barricade"; another: "Jews, your end is near." Abd al-Barr al-Rawdhi, an imam from the north eastern town of San Donà di Piave, is to be deported after being video-recorded giving a sermon calling for the extermination of the Jews... [The Guardian]

Desecrated tombstones in the Jewish cemetery of Cronenbourg
near Strasbourg, France - 2013 [Image Source: The Telegraph UK]

An example of that Moslem religious leader's hateful sermons is the focus of a MEMI video clip here.

The US-based Anti-Defamation League's global audit, a widely-watched survey of attitudes and events, showed that in 2015, some 29% of Italians, about 15 million people, harbored views that ADL interprets as antisemitic. (The ADL 2015 Update is here. Our post about its 2014 results, when Italy's antisemitism index stood at a mere 20%, is here: "13-May-14: Understanding who hates us".)

Italy, compared with other European states, is in about the middle of the pack. Based on the 2015 data, Italy is much less afflicted with anti-Jewish bigotry than either Greece (67%) or Turkey (71%) are. But Belgium (21%), France (17%), the UK (12%) and Denmark (8%) all do much better. 

The issue is not only (and not mostly) a matter of surveys and attitudes, though. A report this past summer ["Attacks On France's Jews Surge Amid Concerns Of Rising Anti-Semitism in Europe", International Business Times, July 13, 2015] notes that

The number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in France increased exponentially during the first quarter of 2015, compared to the corresponding period the year before, a French watchdog group found. The country has seen an 84 percent uptick in anti-Semitic hate crimes since four Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris were killed by an Islamist gunman [in January 2015]... Almost a quarter of those attacks were classified by the organization as violent. Most of the other incidents were reportedly death threats... CRIF, an umbrella of Jewish organizations in France, issued a statement saying that the... findings represent just a sliver of the full extent of incidents. ''Nothing seems to stop the dramatic increase of anti-Semitism in France, which today reached appalling levels"... A growing number of Jews have been moving to Israel from European countries in recent years. France, a country with 500,000 Jewish people, saw some 7,000 leave their country for Israel last year...[IBT]

A European Union office called the Fundamental Rights Agency, created in 2007, provides Brussels with data on "access to justice; victims of crime; information society; Roma integration; judicial co-operation; rights of the child; discrimination; immigration and integration of migrants; and racism and xenophobia". It issued a report on European "manifestations" of antisemitism this month (PDF online here). It defines those as

"verbal and physical attacks, threats, harassment, property damage, graffiti or other forms of text, including on the internet."

The video clip [here] from which this frame was grabbed shows a Moslem
preacher, Abd Al-Barr Al-Rawdhi, delivering a viciously anti-Jewish
Friday sermon at the Al-Rahma Mosque in San Donà di Piave,
near Venice, Italy, July 2014. 

From the start, the report presents in a surprisingly candid way the limits on its value as a tool for addressing the problem:

• Few EU Member States operate official data collection mechanisms that record antisemitic incidents in detail, leading to "gross underreporting of the nature and characteristics of antisemitic incidents" and restrictions on the "ability of policy makers and other relevant stakeholders at national and international levels to take measures and implement courses of action to combat antisemitism effectively and decisively, and to assess the effectiveness of existing policies" 
• So what if incidents are not reported? Well, this means they are also "not investigated and prosecuted, allowing offenders to think that they can carry out such attacks with relative impunity".
• Where the data do exist, "they are generally not comparable, not least because they are collected using different methodologies and sources across EU Member States". 
• Police and criminal justice data "do not always categorise incidents motivated by antisemitism under that heading". 
• Italy's official system for tracking crime-related data (Sistema di Indagine) lacks the ability to break out antisemitic events. No official data therefore exists (and the same is true in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta and Portugal - all of them EU member states). On the basis of the available unofficial data noted in the FRA document, there was a doubling of Italian antisemitic attacks between 2005 and 2014.

On that not-so-promising basis, FRA finds that

antisemitism remains an issue of serious concern which demands decisive and targeted policy responses to tackle this phenomenon. The effective implementation of these responses would not only afford Jewish communities better protection against antisemitism, but it would also give a clear signal that across the EU the fundamental rights of all people are protected and safeguarded...

But as an FRA critic, Manfred Gerstenfeld, points out in "Europe’s feeble fight against anti-Semitism" [Jerusalem Post, October 14, 2015], there's a systemic reluctance to reach some obvious conclusions:

This Associated Press syndicated photo appears
 in a BBC online article about Muslim protests 
in London, and has remained online there for almost
a decade. It's evidently authentic. 

The FRA report mentions the main perpetrators of anti-Semitic incidents in the following order: “neo-Nazis, sympathizers of the far right and far left, Muslim fundamentalists and the younger generation, including school children. There are also incidents of public anti-Semitic discourse on university campuses.”
The order of the perpetrators as presented by the FRA is suspect. Those familiar with European anti-Semitism know that on an overall European basis Muslims should be placed at the top of the list. The murders of Jews because they were Jews in the current century in France, Belgium and Denmark have all been perpetrated by Muslims.
In view of the social climate in Western Europe only a few Jewish experts have dared to point out that the majority of anti-Semitic incidents in their country are caused by Muslims...

For the record, we checked and found that apart from that solitary reference to "Muslim fundamentalists", the 70-odd pages of the FRA examination of Europan antisemitism mentions Moslems or Muslims or Islam four times in total: (1) "...dialogue bringing together members of Jewish and Muslim communities"; (2) "anti-Muslim hostility"; (3) "Representatives of Jewish and Muslim communities"; (4) "...anti-Muslim hatred".

Europe, it turns out, is not so different from the rest of the world.

30-Jun-15: Towards a clearer understanding of how and where they hate us in Europe

Many of the Jews we know feel there is much about which to worry when it comes to the general state of people's attitudes to the Jews among whom they live and, to an astonishing degree, the Jews whom they don't know at all.

The Anti-Defamation League, whose largest-ever study of anti-Semitic attitudes (more than 53,000 people in 102 countries) we covered here ["13-May-14: Understanding who hates us"] has today announced a follow-up. In summarizing the results today [press release here], the ADL's statement sets the stage by referring to current events:

In the aftermath of the shocking violence against Jews in Western Europe the past year, the level of anti-Semitic attitudes among the general population in France showed a dramatic decline, while Germany and Belgium registered significant reductions...

Then in exquisitely careful language it moves on to add a new quantitative layer to the existing analysis, touching on an issue that gets discussed a great deal but almost always on the basis of anecdotal evidence only: attitudes to Jews among Europe's Moslems:

For the first time, the ADL poll measured Muslim attitudes toward Jews in six countries in Western Europe finding that acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes by Muslims in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K was substantially higher than among the national population in each country.

This is a report that is likely to trigger widespread discussions for some time to come. The key findings (in our words):

• The propensity towards racist hatred of Jews among Europe's Moslems is much higher, multiples higher, than among non-Moslem Europeans. There is no room for doubt about the width of the gap, and no reason to look at sampling errors. It's a yawning chasm.
• Western Europeans who "harbor antisemitic attitudes" compared with Moslems in the same country who "harbor antisemitic attitudes" follow a depressingly clear trajectory: 21% of all Belgians versus 68% of Belgian Moslems; 16% of all Germans versus 56% of German Moslems; Italy 29% versus 56%; France 17% versus 49%; Spain 29% versus 62%; United Kingdom 12% versus 54%.
• Overall, the numbers average out (our rough calculation) at 20% across all 6 countries for their populations taken as a whole, versus 58%, or about three times as hateful, when you consider their Moslem residents as a distinct and separate demographic.

It's going to be interesting to see the sense that people make of these insights.

The numbers emanating from Greece (where what remains of an ancient and historic Jewish community is a tiny remnant - about 5,000 in the entire country) are noteworthy, given the extreme, self-inflicted instability that has set in there:

Greece continues to show extremely high levels of anti-Semitism, scoring significantly higher than any other European country. In Greece, 67 percent of the population was found to harbor anti-Semitic attitudes (essentially unchanged from 69 percent in 2014).

22-May-15: Tough, crucial questions at Europe's borders

Nice Moroccan boy wanting to spend more time with immigrant mother
in Italy? Or murder-minded gunman with no problem shooting
dozens of tourists in the back? [Image Source]

Go back and take a look at our comments on the most recent random murder attack on people in Tunisia ["19-Mar-15: In Tunisia, terrorists target tourists... again"] and you can see that there were all manner of speculations about what triggered the terror attack on a busload of foreign tourists (from Italy, Japan, France, Spain, Colombia, Australia, Britain, Belgium, Poland and Russia) exiting a bus to visit a museum in Tunis. Two dozen victims lay dead, most of them shot in the back by two masked gunmen, before the shooters were done.

A key suspect has been arrested. Here's what's known today:

• He was arrested in Gaggiano, Italy, a few kilometers south of Milan. His mother and two siblings have lived there legally for "many years". It's a known tourist town.
• His name is Abdel Majid Touil. He's a Moroccan national, age 22. How much he actually appreciates tourism and tourists is now an open question.
• Italian police are saying he arrived in Italy on a so-called "migrant boat" loaded with 90 others, that set sale for Italy from somewhere in North Africa in February. Photographs of the freshly arrived migrants are above and below.
• How did a "migrant", desperate enough to sail across the Mediterranean to rejoin his mother and siblings (who have been residing in Italy for years at that point), manage to then leave Italy within a few weeks, go back to north Africa, take part in a shooting attack on unarmed people, killing nearly two dozen of them, then slip (march?, parachute?) back into Italy in time to be arrested there for terrorism and murder? The Wall Street Journal asked officials at Italy's Interior Ministry: they say they don't know. [Source: "Tunis Attack Suspect Arrested with Migrants", Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2015]
• AFP says Touil is wanted "for premeditated murder, kidnapping and terrorism" on an international warrant. The arrest was executed by Italy’s counter-terrorism DIGOS police.

Other people are probably asking larger questions, like: if there are boatloads of "migrants" arriving on Europe's shores and it turns out one or more of them has terror, murder and mayhem on his mind, what ought to be done? Who checks them? How cautious ought European society to be?

An Italian newspaper report from yesterday drills down on the outlook and attitudes of people living in Gaggiano ["a characterless series of streets, buildings, and link roads"], and their views of what has been going on in the "four-storey 1960s building of 16 apartments at 14 Via Pitagora... inhabited by pensioners and blue-collar workers" where the suspect lived. For neighbours:

judgment has already been passed. For them, the Moroccan is guilty, no doubt about it. What they remember about the Touil family is “€32,000 of unpaid condominium charges,” and rubbish, including nappies and sanitary towels, “thrown out of the window”. They had to call in a special cleaning firm, “not once, but twice”, to “deal with the pigsty on the top floor” inhabited by the family. Six people are crammed into a 60-m² apartment, with a living room, kitchenette, bedroom and bathroom: the mother, Fatima, the eldest son with his partner and daughter, one of Fatima’s two daughters, and lastly, Abdel Majid... In Via Pitagora, neighbours say that the Touil family are squatters, who broke down the door to take possession of their house...  [Corriere della Serra, May 21, 2015]

As for the suspect himself

Instead of going to the mosque, he spent his time in the local bars, such as Novella 73, frequented by pensioners, with whom he used to spend the evenings chatting. When he went further afield, it was only to attend Italian lessons in Trezzano sul Naviglio, which is where he was the week of the attack in Tunis; according to the school’s teachers and principal, Abdel Majid was in class. However, the youth had not been seen for the last two weeks. According to his mother, there was nothing strange in this, since “he had been ill.” Apart from Novella 73 and the school, Abdel Majid Touilin seems to have led a quiet life. His brother has a criminal record for drug pushing, but since becoming a father may have changed his ways. [Same Italian source]

And the plot?

Early in February, his father and sister, who lived with him in Morocco, near Casablanca, are reported to have taken him to the airport. On this first leg of his journey, Abdel Majid allegedly flew to Tunisia with a low-cost airline. In Tunis, he is thought to have stayed for three days in a hotel, and from there to have moved on to Libya, where he boarded a boat of migrants heading for Sicily, to be subsequently rescued on 15th or 16th February. He may be the victim of a terrible mistake by the Tunisian authorities, or perhaps has been confused with somebody else with the same name. Alternatively, Abdel Majid Touil may be a well-trained terrorist, who first of all deceived his own mother, or even “enlisted” her, getting her to cover for him and provide an alibi. It was in fact his mother who failed to report the disappearance of her son’s passport to the police until two months after the event. The idea of enrolling in an Italian course may also have been a bluff, aimed at showing his willingness to integrate. [Same Italian source]

There's more. According to the occasionally-reputable Daily Mail UK

Touil arrived in Porto Empedocle in Sicily on February 17 using the alias Abdullah after being rescued by Italian authorities on a migrant boat in the Mediterranean. But he received an expulsion order demanding he leave Italy within 15 days.

They publish these photos today leaving readers to wonder whether the face and attitude belong to a skillful traveling-shooting-murdering terrorist thug they call "ISIS fanatic" or just a well-meaning son wanting more time with his mother:

The suspect [Image Source]

 Little doubt they're pleased - but about what, exactly? [Image Source]

Not surprisingly, there are those focusing on the smirks and the triumphant V-for-Victory raised hands and trying to interpret the mindsets behind them. 

But there are larger and serious issues at work here. Should European authorities be driven by the notion that some unknown proportion of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs making their way into Europe by sea on open boats and avoiding conventional migration channels (like the 900 or so received on Wednesday) have terrorism on their minds?

Or should they be considered hard-luck cases looking for a better life until proven otherwise? 

Whatever they conclude, there's no room for doubting any more that Europe is in the cross-hairs of some highly ideological killers and planners. Getting this wrong is going to come at a very high price. The issues are anything but theoretical, even if arriving at the answers calls for some unpleasant checking, thinking and acting. Either way, there are concrete consequences.

05-Sep-14: How much does it really matter if the news reporting from here is done wrong?

Murdered journalist Steven Sotloff

Over at Israellycool.com, Brian of London comments on the oddly unprofessional - and, in our view, morally bankrupt - journalistic practice of calling people who decapitate human prisoners "militants" and "fighters".

His anger is provoked by this past week's news coverage of the cold-blooded murder of a captive journalist, Steven J. Sotloff. If you pay close to attention to news reporting from the Middle East, you don't need much more persuading to see how the editors at Associated Press routinely engage in this idiotic "we wouldn't want to take sides" silliness, preferring to use pseudo-neutral names for people whose actions fully qualify them to be called terrorist savages.

But AP is far from alone in the practice, and it has some exceptionally shabby history. For instance (h/t Richard Landes - and please check out his most recent essay) some readers might remember an incident a decade ago involving one of the other global news syndication giants ["Reuters Asks a Chain to Remove Its Bylines", New York Times, September 20, 2004]:

...Reuters has asked Canada's largest newspaper chain to remove its writers' names from some articles. The dispute centers on a policy adopted earlier this year by CanWest Global Communications - the publisher of 13 daily newspapers including The National Post in Toronto and The Calgary Herald, which both use Reuters dispatches - to substitute the word "terrorist" in articles for terms like "insurgents" and "rebels."

This became an issue because Associated Press had just put out a report that spoke of several Palestinian Arabs killed by IDF action as "fugitives". At the Canadian papers, they had changed "fugitives" to "terrorists".

The NY Times piece at the time quoted a senior Reuters manager, David A. Schlesinger, saying there was a reason to prefer those soft-and-gushy descriptors so beloved by far-away editors:

"My goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial integrity..." [and] he was concerned that changes like those made at CanWest could lead to "confusion" about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations... "If a paper wants to change our copy that way, we would be more comfortable if they remove the byline."

At CanWest, they had harsh words for the Reuters policy and its implications:

Reuters' rejection of his company's definition of terrorism undermined journalistic principles. "If you're couching language to protect people, are you telling the truth?" asked Mr. Anderson, who is also editor in chief of The Ottawa Citizen. "I understand their motives. But issues like this are why newspapers have editors." Mr. Anderson said the central definition in the policy was that "terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians in pursuit of a political goal."

The same NY Times piece gives the Associated Press view which is no less fatally flawed than that of Reuters:

"We do not endorse changes that make an A.P. story unbalanced, unfair or inaccurate."

Which prompted the Canadian editors to explain that calling terrorists by idiotically mild names and using other

"...euphemisms merely serves to apply a misleading gloss of political correctness. And we believe we owe it to our readers to remove it before they see their newspaper every morning."

The tragedy of Steven Sotloff is another reminder that journalism attracts courageous, risk-taking individuals who are ready to put everything they have on the line to ensure the truth of what is happening out there reaches consumers of the news.

The tragedy of the moral decay on display throughout the news reporting industry is that so few of us get to see or understand the issues for the simple reason that those causing it are the very same people as those responsible for being objective about it. And objective is certainly not what they are. Couple that with how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (among others) routinely, with no evident compunctions, intimidate news reporters, photographers and their editors and the capacity for causing serious harm is clear. Members of the working media, lacking any string push-back from their editors and owners back home and far from the dangerous streets and villages, quicly learn how to get on, get by and stay safe.

Lynch mob exulting in the murder of two unarmed
Israeli men inside a Palestinian Arab police station
in Ramallah, October 2000

Here's another illustration - quite a famous one, though surprisingly not well known among ordinary consumers of the media's products - from the early weeks of the Arafat War, sometimes misleadingly called the Second Intifadeh.

In October 2000, a television news crew from Italy captured extremely graphic footage of a Palestinian Arab lynch mob dismembering and killing two Israeli reservists who had lost their way and driven into Ramallah, just on the northern edge of Jerusalem. The video goes to air, and its images travel quickly and widely, conveying a horrifying picture of mob barbarism. They also substantiate Israel's bitter complaints that the Palestinian police not only failed to protect the two men - who were murdered while in police custody in the PA's Ramallah police station - but also sought to prevent other journalists from filming the mob.

Comes along Ricardo Cristiano, deputy chief of the local media bureau of RAI, Italy's national media network and owned by the government. Evidently pursuing a corporate mission from his Rome-based masters, Cristiano writes an open letter of obsequious apology to Arafat [English version here] that is published in Al Hayat al Jadida, a PA house organ.

Writing in his network's name, he delivers a "Special Clarification" addressed to "My dear friends in Palestine"

We congratulate you and think that it is our duty to put you in the picture (of the events) of what happened on October 12 in Ramallah. One of the private Italian television stations which competes with us (and not the official Italian television station RAI) filmed the events; that station filmed the events. Afterwards Israeli Television broadcast the pictures, as taken from one of the Italian stations, and thus the public impression was created as if we (RAI) took these pictures. We emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect (will continue to respect) the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for (journalistic) work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work. We thank you for your trust, and you can be sure that this is not our way of acting. We do not (will not) do such a thing. Please accept our dear blessings. [Source]

More offensive and frightening than the message itself by far is the equanimity with which it is greeted by RAI's colleagues and competitors in the news business. Apologize to the Palestinian Arabs for revealing some of the pathology that characterizes its life? Sure, no sweat, got to stay close to events and report the news, right? But (to remind us of the Canadian story above) is it the truth?

Fast forward now to the latest chapter of this ongoing war and the seven weeks of rocket attacks from Gaza and what's changed?

As Matti Friedman explains in a well-documented and compelling analysis "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth | A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters" [Tablet, August 256, 2014], not much. And certainly not enough.

The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues. ["An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth"]

As the title says, Friedman spent some years working inside Associated Press. This is a long piece by magazine standards. But it's filled with the kind of well-framed nuggets that people sickened by media dishonesty and lethal journalism - the sort that leads to people having their heads cut off, for instance - find stunningly illuminating.

One small example of a nugget:

It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. 

Each of those is an instance that we covered here: the Indian news report, an Italian reporter and the Finnish reporter, and others. But Friedman offers much more. Then under the sub-heading "Who Cares If the World Gets the Israel Story Wrong?", he gets to an especially crucial point, and expresses what we have tried to do for some years now:

Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots. Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.

And ends with this:

Journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.

Or in simpler terms: a large part of the damage caused in those conflicts in which the reporting is done by people with ideological concerns on their minds is not on the battlefields but in the editing suites and the media conference rooms, and in people's homes far from the rockets and the tunnels.

10-Jun-13: Will appeasing Hezbollah work better now than it did with Nazi Germany?

Britain's pre-war prime minister Neville Chamberlin, engaging
in a catastrophic policy that made sense at the time
to many observers [Image Source: NY Times]

Death tolls don't attract readers. Unless you have a strategic stake in an ongoing war, you will likely avert your eyes (especially if you're mainly on the dying side, as opposed to the killing side) when the tally of dead in this conflict or that appears in the news.

Syria has been the site of an appalling state-sanctioned bloodbath for more than two years. When the UN stopped conducting its own death count there in January 2012, the senior UN human rights official Navi Pillay said the toll was more than 5,000. We went to the website of the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights earlier today. There [this page] they offer these heart-stopping updated numbers:

• People killed since the start of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad: 83,598
• Of whom the number of civilians killed is 74,993.
• Of that number of civilians, 8,393 are children and 7,686 are women. 
• The number tortured to death: 2,441.

Smaller, more human-scale numbers, are easier for some to visualize. So the same organization's home page gives these numbers for the deaths of just the past few days: Thursday June 6: 84. Wednesday June 5: 69. Tuesday June 4: 91.

Just numbers, true. But signifying dead humans and lost lives.

It's horrifying. But now please note that the leaders of Hezbollah, the Shi'ite Islamist terrorists based in Lebanon, want those numbers to become bigger and better. A Lebanese news source says its leaders vowed today

to continue to help Syrian President Bashar Assad in his two-year-old civil war against rebels, while insisting the party be involved in national government decisions... "We will not change our position on protecting our people and the backbone of the resistance [Syria] regardless of intensified pressure locally, regionally and internationally,” Hezbollah’s Sheikh Nabil Qaouk said... "The more the threats and the more the pressures are exerted on us, the more the spirit of the resistance and enthusiasm has flared..."

The bogus claim to be at the heart of something called 'resistance' has served Hezbollah well. It gets very substantial military training, weapons, explosives and money, as well as political, diplomatic and organizational aid, from Iran (Wikipedia). In fact, for all practical purposes it serves as an arm of the Iranian leadership. It gets additional cash, and support, from Shi'ites living in West Africa, the United States and the tri-border South American area where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet.

Hezbollah has not always been as open about the murderous role it is playing in the Syrian killing fields. Its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, admitted to that role in a May 25, 2013 address that MEMRI also translated to English. Hezbollah "cannot stand idly by" he said, while the Syrian regime is embroiled in civil war. It was an admission that caused outrage in the non-Shi'ite parts of the Arab world, particularly in the Arab/Persian Gulf (we don't take sides in that naming battle), with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), convening in Saudi Arabia last Sunday, deciding (see Al-Watan newspaper) "to examine taking measures against Hizbullah's interests". As with most of Nasrallah's pronouncements, it was deliberate and calculated.

Hezbollah has become a so-called 'state within a state' in its native Lebanon, but has grown lethally active in other places too, particularly in Europe. Reuters pointed out a few days ago that while there are increasingly focused efforts to outlaw Hezbollah in Europe, this

would mark a major policy shift for the European Union, which has resisted pressure from Israel and Washington to do so for years. [Reuters]

One of the factors behind the push to blacklist the Shi'ites is a terror attack carried out this past summer in a Black Sea vacation resort called Burgas. A Bulgarian bus driver was killed, along with 5 Israeli tourists. 32 more were injured. A bomb exploded on their bus at Burgas airport, minutes after they flew in on an Israeli charter flight. Two Hezbollah "activists" were fingered along with an unfortunate third man who died while putting the bomb inside the bus. The intelligence forces of Bulgaria, Israeli and the US, as well as Europol, have said Hezbollah carried out the cold-blooded atrocity. They also believe Hezbollah's Iran-driven terrorism is on the move, spreading out to other parts of the world.

Though sober voices in Europe choose to deny this enlargement of the Hezbollah terror footprint, people closer to the action know better. As we noted here, the parliament of Bahrain, for instance, decided two months ago

to label the Lebanese militia a terrorist organization, the Lebanon-based news outlet Now Lebanon reported. Tensions have been high since Bahrain accused Hezbollah of seeking to overthrow its government in 2011 ["26-Mar-13: Hezbollah is declared "terrorist group" by Bahrain's parliament"]

Also in March, a criminal court in Cyprus convicted a Hezbollah man on terrorism charges ["21-Mar-13: First conviction of Hezbollah terrorist in a European court"].

And last week, the editorial writers at (wait for this) the Saudi Gazette, said

Hezbollah needs to be seen for the ruthless terrorist organization that it really is

which we think wraps things up quite accurately.

But, sadly, not for the Europeans. A few days ago

A British request to blacklist the armed wing of Hezbollah ran into opposition in the European Union on Tuesday, with several governments expressing concern that such a move would increase instability in the Middle East [Reuters].

It goes on to say that "several EU governments questioned whether there was sufficient evidence to link Hezbollah to the attack in Bulgaria" and that there were 

"concerns that such a move would complicate the EU's contacts with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is part of the coalition government, and could increase turmoil in a country already suffering a spillover of civil war from Syria... More discussions on the issue will be held in Brussels in the next two weeks, with a decision possibly taken by the end of the month, diplomats said.

Italy's Foreign Minister Emma Bonino says her government needs more evidence from Bulgaria. Also, that it is concerned for "the fragility of Lebanon", which may surprise some Italians. According to Herb Keinon at the Jerusalem Post, Israeli officials said last week that the Irish are playing a dominant role in the effort to protect Hezbollah. Ireland currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency. In last Tuesday's working group discussion, the Irish pro-Hezbollah position was backed by Sweden and Finland.

Note that France, which has for years been one of the group covering Hezbollah's back in these efforts to outlaw the terrorists, has lately stopped objecting to blacklisting them. The French have said (presumably because they see the reports that many others do, including the Lebanese report we quoted above) that thousands of Hezbollah men are fighting alongside the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They are up to their arm-pits in gore and murder.

As for the Bulgarians, Jonathan Tobin writing in Commentary Magazine a few days ago ["Hezbollah’s European Appeasers"], says

The new Bulgarian government, which is led by the country’s former Communist party, is now claiming they are no longer certain that Hezbollah was responsible for the Burgas attack. It should be noted that the Bulgarian switch is not the result of the emergence of new evidence about the attack or even a change of heart by Hezbollah, whose terrorist cadres are now fighting in Syria to try and save the faltering Bashar Assad regime, another Iranian ally. There is no more doubt today that Burgas was the work of Hezbollah than there was in the days after the attack when the identities of the terrorists were revealed. It is simply the result of a political party coming to power that is hostile to the United States and friendlier to Russia and therefore determined to undermine any effort to forge a united European response to Middle East-based Islamist terror.

Tobin makes articulately a point that we wish we had written:

International unity on terrorism is illusory. The willingness of some Europeans, whether acting out of sympathy for the Islamists or antipathy for Israel and the Untied States, to treat Hezbollah terrorists as somehow belonging to a different, less awful category of criminal than those who might primarily target other Westerners is a victory for the Islamists... The effort to appease Hezbollah is not only a sign of Russian influence but also a signal to Iran that many in Europe are untroubled by its terrorist campaign against Israel. That alone is worrisome. But, as history teaches us, the costs of appeasement are far-reaching. Those who are untroubled by Hezbollah’s murders of Jews in Bulgaria or Cyprus may soon find that the vipers they seek to ignore will one day bite them too.

Or to paraphrase Chamberlain's successor as prime minister, Winston Churchill: Europe has a choice between terrorism and shame. Choosing shame, it is likely to get terrorism too.

20-Feb-13: Following up a 2011 Gaza murder

Some of our readers will remember the name Vittorio Arriogoni. We wrote about him here ["14-Apr-11: Gazan jihadists grab Italian journalist, threaten to murder him in name of glorious revolution"] nearly two years ago, on the day that he was snatched while on a visit to Gaza and hustled away by unknown parties. 

Arrigoni's anti-Israel writings were and still are all over the web. Perhaps for this reason, a Palestinian Arab newsagency (in Arabic but click to get the English translation) we quoted at the time blamed his kidnapping on (whom else?) the Israelis.

In the end, of course, the evil on Gaza's streets turned out not to have been done by Israelis but by (whom else?) Gazans. And a day after his kidnapping, Arriogini was found dead. He had been hanged. 

Now to the follow-up.

AFP reported yesterday that two Gazan "police officers" called Mahmud al-Salfiti and Tamer al-Husasna were convicted in 2012 for the kidnap and murder of the Italian "activist" who was a member of the notorious terrorism-friendly International Solidarity Movement. They had been sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour, but yesterday (Tuesday) an entity by the name of the "High Military Court" announced it had accepted their appeal and reduced the convicted murderers' prison terms to a mere 15 years.

AFP appears not to have noted this but a cluster of human rights groups immediately issued a demand that the High Military Court 

publish the reasoning of its decision to reduce the sentence as soon as possible, in order to clarify its motive despite the seriousness of the crime.

Al Jazeera expresses the indignation well (see "Gaza court cuts sentence in Italian murder", published yesterday).

Arrigoni's death shocked Gaza and the community of international aid workers in the territory where he had lived and worked for around three years leading up to his death. It was the first time a foreign national had been murdered since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007. 

Imagine: Gaza enters into a state of pandemonium because its terrorists carry out a killing on their own home turf instead of in the infidel Zionist domain. We can only imagine what such unthinkable conduct must be doing to the high moral standards and the fundamental life-affirming decency of the Hamas-dominated enclave and its jihadist hordes.

4-Oct-11: Both sides of the lens

Here's what Ruben Salvadori says about himself:

I'm an Italian student currently dual majoring in International Relations and Anthropology/Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. I'm planning to get my MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography in 2011/12 at the London University of Arts, College of Communication, UK.

What brought this perceptive young man to our attention is a brief video that's online in various places (and now here, below) that thoughtfully examines the interplay between photographers and their subjects. In his words, it's "an auto-critical photo essay showing the paradoxes of conflict-image production and considering the role of the photographer in the events."

We've written often about the power of imagery in telling the stories of the complex Arab/Israel conflict. There's no lie greater than the old cliche "the camera never lies". In reality, the camera lies almost every time the shutter clicks. And when the photographer herself is animated by a political, activist agenda, the lies can be especially articulate.

Salvadori is not concerned with exposing lies. He takes no political or ideological position in his project. It's enough that he raises some important questions. We'd paraphrase it this way: Why are most people so unaware that photographers play a role in the news, and not only by reporting it? Their role is little noticed, rarely remarked upon or analyzed, and frequently manipulative. How dangerous is this?

Several of his images are below. Others can be seen at Ruben Salvadori Photography Blog – Open Your Eyes: Presenting Photojournalism Behind the Scenes.

He points out that the iconic imagery above of a young and (by obvious implication) angry Palestinian Arab is something of a co-production in which the assembled media professionals (below) are active and knowing collaborators.

Here's the action behind another iconic image: the child rock-thrower at the flaming barricades - Little David vs Zionist Goliath:

An especially evocative image below captures the reality that some (from our experience many, and some say most) of the media professionals capturing and marketing the imagery of Palestinian Arabs conducting a confrontation with Israeli society are themselves drawn from the same society. This picture below shows the videographer laying aside his tools of trade and praying alongside the subjects of his photography.

The video below includes some commentary by the young photographer himself.

Photojournalism Behind the Scenes [ITA-ENG subs] from Ruben Salvadori on Vimeo.

A picture is worth a thousand words. And as with words, it's important to know something about the author and the circumstances and never to suspend one's critical faculties.

15-Apr-11: For the record, Hamas is blaming Israel for the murder of the Italian hostage

As if this sad, bizarre, ironic affair were not already mind-numbingly upsetting enough in all its aspects, the Jerusalem Post has the story: "Hamas claims Israel killed Italian to stop Gaza flotilla". And if you're ready to view pictures posted by or about the victim, Aussie Dave has re-posted them on his IsraellyCool site.

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

The SKY News article is here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16-Aug-07: Quick, let's talk to these moderates

Despite a sudden shortage of manure in its Gazan domain, things are not entirely bad in Hamas-land. Diplomatically, you could say the world is waking up to the possibilities of a constructive engagement with the forward-looking nation-building statesmen of the Hamas Movement.

Just consider these events of the past week:

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi called for negotiating with Hamas to help the movement "develop politically."

The Norwegian government annnounced it intends to maintain contact with Hamas at the envoy level. This in response to earlier mistaken reports that Norway had cut off ties with Hamas after the June massacres of Fatah forces in Gaza.

The British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee released a non-partisan report on Monday recommending that Westminster lawmakers "urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas."

The UK committee appealed to former prime minister Tony Blair to join the effort to reunite Hamas with Abbas's Fatah faction. "The international community must bear in mind that Hamas came to power as a result of a democratic and free election," helpfully adds Dr. Mohamed Al-Madhoun, who heads the bureau of Hamas strong-man Ismail Haniya. (His words are echoed by many otherwise respectable, democracy-loving politicians in western countries like this British labor spokesperson quoted in the pages of the Guardian.)

(In the interests of balance, let's add that a senior un-named Palestinian Arab official in Ramallah says he is "disgusted" to hear that some Europeans were calling for negotiations with Hamas. "Those in Italy and Britain who want to talk to Hamas are undermining moderate Palestinians and emboldening the radicals. We hope that the Europeans will wake up and refrain from committing such a huge mistake.")

From Gaza, already awake, Hamas expressed its wish for a dialogue with the west in response to Prodi's call. "Such a statement by Prodi and other Western officials reflects the West's understanding that the policy of ignoring Hamas has failed," senior Hamas spokesman and part-time mule Sami Abu Zuhri said in a press statement.

Fair enough. Let's assume Abu Zuhri is right and that isolating Hamas has failed. If so, it may be time to take another look at what Hamas stands for - at the issues it believes divide Palestinian Arabs from us Israelis, and the possible basis for two people to live together in future in harmony and constructive neighborliness.

The following are the words of the official Hamas representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan. Hamdan's name may be less than a household word in Europe. But Google supplies more than 18,000 links to the man and his words, speaking in the name of Hamas and expressing what are clearly mainstream Hamas viewpoints.

Hamdan's statements below aired a week ago on Al-Kawthar TV (despite the unfamiliar name, a genuine and influential media entity - you can watch its live video stream here).

Interviewer: Do you consider all the Jews in Palestine to be combatants who have plundered the land? We've witnessed martyrdom operations that targeted buses and restaurants.

Osama Hamdan: First of all, let me clarify something very important. What is the ruling regarding those who live in Palestine, in the so-called Israel, and who are aggressors and plunderers of the land? The way we see it, they all came to Palestine from abroad, whether before the declaration of the Zionist entity or after it. If you were to conduct statistics within the Zionist entity, you would find that all these people have their origins in other countries - they came from Europe, Eastern Europe, from America, South America, or other places.

Interviewer: In other words, there were no Palestinian Jews?

Osama Hamdan: No, there were no Palestinian Jews. When the British Mandate began in 1917, there was only one settlement on Palestinian land, which included several dozen Jews, who were living there in violation of the law at the time. I would like to mention that under the Ottoman state - regardless of the many reservations we have about it - there was a law that prohibited the Jews from staying in Palestine for over a month. Their passports and personal documents were taken away from them, and they were given an Ottoman permit at the border, which allowed them to stay for a month on Palestinian land. The only group that can be called Jewish was the one in Nablus. They still live there to this day. The Palestinians regard them as part of the makeup of Palestinian society, and they number no more than several hundred. As for those who immigrated from various countries - they are not Jews.
Anyone who comes to live in a war zone is a combatant, regardless of whether he wears a uniform.
Secondly, neither Hamas nor the Palestinian resistance force intentionally killed civilians.
You mentioned the buses. What's an easier target - a bus, which is protected by various security measures, or a school [or] a theater, or a stadium, for example? These civilian targets - in which the killing of women and children is intentional - were not targeted by the resistance.
Why were buses targeted? Because they are the means of transport used by the soldiers as well. The Zionist soldiers, who go from their homes to their bases and back, use public transportation, because it is free or almost free. In my opinion, the occupation soldiers also have a security motive in using public transport: They shield themselves behind the so-called 'civilians' within the Zionist entity.
Therefore, the way I see it, they need to stop using public transportation, or else society should prevent them from using it, because it is the soldiers who are targeted. Just to prove it, in the dozens of operations that were carried out, the Zionists never announced, for example, that 20 children were killed, or that 50 women were killed. On the contrary, if you were to examine who was killed in martyrdom operations that targeted buses, you would find that 70% were occupation soldiers, and they may even have been in uniform at the time of the operation.
We are making the preparations for a confrontation.... The final goal of the resistance is to wipe this entity off the face of the Earth. This goal necessitates the development of the capabilities of the resistance, until this entity is wiped out."

This important speech is online, in streaming video, courtesy of MEMRI TV. View the clip here.

It only remains for us non-European non-politicians to point out that every word of the Hamas representative above is a knowing lie, pumped out like those before it to an ill-informed global audience.

Hate-filled nonsense like Hamdan's, together with the naive and foolish pronouncements of parliamentarians and politicians in countries far from the scene, fuel the massacres in restaurants and the deliberate and willful targeting of innocent civilians - especially women and children - like our daughter.

18-Sep-06: Rare Moslem Voice: "Islamic Moderates Have Given In... They Will Be The Primary Victims"

As we said earlier, we're waiting for your invited contributions quoting Moslem leaders' calls for tolerance, forebearance, non-violence, understanding. Hello, is this mike working? Hello? Hello? Maybe our email is down.

Ah, here's one... and a very powerful and articulate one at that: Magdi Allam (pictured right) is an Egyptian-born Moslem, raised in Italy, and one of the leading journalists in Italy today. Deputy Editor of Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's leading newspapers, and an Arab and Islamic affairs commentator, he's an author as well as a prolific journalist and editor. Allam has consistently spoken out against extremism and in favour of tolerance and is one of the leaders in the fight for coexistence between civilizations. He has said: "A positive dialogue with moderate Islam is both possible and necessary". How tragic that he's so notable for having said such an obvious thing.

The Historical Truth

By Magdi Allam in the Corriere della Sera (September 15, 2006)

It is sad and worrying that Muslims have given birth to an international united front to attack the Pope and ask for public apologies. From Bin Laden to the Muslim Brotherhood, from Pakistan to Turkey, from al-Jazeera to al-Arabiya, the transversal and universal alliance, which has already come into being following the Danish cartoons affair, has reappeared, reaffirming very clearly that the root of evil is like a blind and prevailing ideology which outrages the faith and darkens the minds of many Muslims.

Why do not Muslims, especially the so-called moderates, react with such strength and intensity against the real and eternal desecrators of Islam ­ that is, the Islamic terrorists who kill other Muslims in the name of the same God, radical Muslims who legitimize the destruction of Israel and brainwash ordinary Muslims into martyrdom? Why do they now believe they must start a kind of Islamic "holy war" against the head of the [Catholic] Church who has the right to respectfully express his views about Islam, all the while with clarity on the evident difference between the two religions?

The pope's quoting the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, regarding the expansion of Islam through the sword, either during the time of Mohammed and on the Arab Peninsula and after him, elsewhere, underlines an undeniable historical truth. The Quran itself states it; furthermore, the forced conversion of the entire Byzantine Empire, to Islam in the East and South of Mediterranean, and the further expansion northwards in Europe and Eastwards in Asia, demonstrates the point made by the Byzantine Emperor.

It is foolish to deny the truth, as it can only cause deranged reaction. In the mid-Nineties one of the most prominent scholars of Islamic studies, the Egyptian Mohammed said al-Ashmawi, told me that he did not approve the Arab tribes' military conquest of Christian lands in the Mediterranean and that he would have preferred Islam to expand peacefully, like it did in South-Eastern Asia.

The Pope is threatened because he has said things that every single honest and rational Muslim should accept: the historical truth.

Time has come for both the West and Christianity to stop thinking that they are the source of all that happens ­ good or evil ­ within Islam as well as around the world. The ideology of hate is an ancestral reality at the core of Islam; it has been so since its inception, due to its' refusal to recognize and respect the plurality of religious communities ­ a natural thing since in Islam the relationship between the believer and God is personal and there is no unique spiritual guide who embodies the absolute dogmas of faith. In fact, since the defeat of the Arab armies in the June 5th, 1967 war, the situation has been worsening while Islamic extremism has been on the rise starting from Iran to Indonesia, to the point where the advance of global Islamic terrorism has turned the West into a "Kamikaze factory".

This is the tragic truth of the ideology of hate which binds all Muslims who are obsessed with anti-Americanism, anti-West and the prejudicial denial of Israel's right to exist. They are able to find many pretexts to rage ­ from Israeli occupation, to the U.S.-led coalition into Iraq, to the cartoons about Mohammed and even the Pope's words. Nevertheless the problem is at the root of Islam itself, an Islam which extremists turned from a faith in God into an ideology aiming for a theocratic and totalitarian order to impose on everyone who is not like them. And I am really scared when I realize that even the so-called moderates have given in to a "holy war" where they will be the primary victims.

The search for rational, reasonable Moslem voices goes on. But this one needs to get circulated far and wide.

11-Aug-06: Good and evil

In the midst of tragedy, violence, hatred, turbulence, death, a laconic report that most likely will never reach the mainstream media outside of Israel and Italy, and even if it does will pass without causing more than the barest ripple, has just caught our eye.

Here's the background. We wrote here last night that in the wave of extreme violence delivered to Israel's northern and southern borders, a stabbing took place in Jerusalem, part of the evolving third front courtesy of the terrorists in our midst. The victim, anonymous (in the news sense) for several hours while the family were presumably notified, turned out to be an Italian tourist. The news report said he was walking with friends in East Jerusalem near the walls of the Old City. He was 25, and the assailant escaped. He died after being stabbed. End of story.

But for the people directly involved, this is of course not the end of the story. It's only the beginning.

We now know much more, and for us, as Malki's parents, there is a connection which is hard for us to not notice or to be moved by.

Yediot reports that the victim of last night's stabbing has a name and had a life. He is Angelo Frammartino. He's 24 year, a peace activist from Monta Rotondo in Italy, who arrived in Israel at the start of August with an Italian organization, ARCI, "working to advance human rights in the world". He was due to leave for home in Italy today. His parents are away on vacation and his sister who was home alone when the terrible news came from Jerusalem says she doesn't know how they will cope.

Newspapers know to do things with lines like "he was a peace activist". We see peace activists snarling and screaming and holding signs like "kill the Israeli occupiers" all the time. Peace is a curse word in this part of the world; almost always a sword, almost never a shield. We've learned from bitter experience to avoid the people who introduce themselves as peace activists. We've met many of them, and peace is the last thing on their minds.

It's not much different with people who describe themselves as advancing human rights. The rest of us presumably push human rights backwards. But in this case, Angelo the peace activist had a specific involvement. He was here to organize summer camps for Palestinian children. Those are the human rights that make sense even when (perhaps especially when) the cannons are blazing and there is death in the air. Summer camps for children.

Our daughter Malki, whose murder five years ago we are in the midst of remembering (the civil anniversary was on Wednesday, the Hebrew calendar date is this coming Monday) spent the last week of her violently-abbreviated life as a volunteer counsellor at a summer camp for children with developmental delays and special needs. The camp takes place each summer in the north of Israel, and involves many hundreds of participants from all parts of the country. It's organized by Etgarim, an association with some lovely people running it. Malki and her friend Rachel traveled up north without being sure they would be accepted as volunteers. They were, in the end, and Malki came back from there smiling from ear to ear. She loved everything about it. She was murdered a few days afterwards, and we heard most of the stories we know about that camp from the other counsellors and the organizers.

Angelo, whose name like Malki's is connected with angels, came here to work with children, to help put smiles on their faces.

This does not interest the terrorists. This is why they are terrorists. The humanity of the victims is of zero importance to them. You see it in the way Hizbollah fires hundreds of deadly missiles a day into Israel - couldn't care less where they land, just as long as someone dies.

You see it in the way terrorist bombers walk into restaurants or onto buses. No interest in whether there are good people there, or bad people. The humanity of their victims is not on the agenda.

They deny their victims' humanity in the absolute, ultimate way a person can. By killing them without having any idea who they are. Without the slightest interest in their past or present, without any hesitation, with a total absence of humanity. The innocent victims of the terrorists are not caught up in the cross-fire. They are the objective.

Angelo, who wanted to make happy summer camps for Palestinian children, who understood the meaning of good deeds, is as dead as our child who wanted to make happy summer camps for children with special needs. The terrorists who are praised by demented religious leaders (Nasrallah is a religious leader) as martyrs, as members of a resistance, as peace activists, rejoice in these deaths.

This is why terrorists have no place in human society. Not because we hate them; we do not. But because no civilized human society can tolerate their existence without committing suicide.