25-May-20: Monday: Two Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attacks

Image Source: NYTimes

Ramadan, culminating in Eid al Fitr which was marked by Moslems on Saturday and Sunday, has ended and the head of the Palestinian Authority has notified the world that security co-operation with the Israelis is now ended.

There are signs that the Palestinian Arab street has taken note.

A report broke this morning around 10:30 am of a thwarted Arab-on-=Israeli stabbing attack. Eight Palestinian Arabs are reported [JNS] this morning to have approached a group of soldiers on patrol near Amichai, a small new Jewish community of some 200 inhabitants, first populated in early 2018 and located northeast of the Palestinian Arab administrative capital, Ramallah. 

Two of the Arabs, said to be residents of nearby al-Mughayyir village (Times of Israel said they were brothers), assaulted the soldiers attempting to injure them with what the IDF called “sharp agricultural instruments.” The soldiers fired back at the assailants, reportedly hitting them in the lower extremities and injuring them. They subsequently received medical attention at a hospital in Ramallah, according to the IDF. 

The Palestinian Authority’s WAFA news agency offered no details about the extent of their injuries. The Israeli soldiers suffered no injuris in the course of the attack.

Later today (Monday around 4:15 pm), an Arab said to be about 30 and armed with a box cuttter knife [pictured here] as well as tear gas (according to Times of Israel) charged at a Border Guard police officer on on Meir Necker Street in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. The location of the attack close to Jabel Mukaber, an Arab quarter. The attacker was reportedly shouting “Allah Akbar” as he hurled himself on his target.

He was shot by other officers at the scene and according to JNS was being ttreat at Hadassah Ein Karem medical center where he was said to be in serious condition.

An Israeli police officer was injured in the attack.

22-Feb-20: In Jerusalem, two thwarted Arab-on-Israeli stabbings

Screen capture [Source]

Earlier today (Sabbath morning) around 11, a knife-wielding Arab male ran towards Israel Border Police officers on duty near the Lions Gate of Jerusalem's Old City.

Israel National News says the officers

called to the terrorist, asking him to stop, but he turned towards them instead. The officers fired at the terrorist, neutralizing him. He later died of his wounds.

A passer-by, a woman of 42, suffered a leg injury which, according to i24News, resulted from the shooting, and was taken to Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment. Haaretz says she was inadvertently hurt when the attacker was shot "probably by a ricochet of the bullet fired at the him".

Times of Israel quotes Israel's Channel 13 TV news naming the attacker as Maher Ibrahim Za’atara, 33. of East Jerusalem’s Jabel Mukaber neighborhood.

Security camera video footage [here and in Yisrael Medad's tweet below incorporating material for Israel Police] shows him clearly waving his knife as he rushes towards the scene of the attack. Not so surprisingly, his family, according to the Haaretz report, "say they don't accept the Israeli police's account of the events".

ttps://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-attacker-shot-dead-in-suspected-stabbing-attack-in-jerusalem-s-old-city-1.8564432

"Palestinian Shot Dead in Suspected Stabbing Attack in Jerusalem's Old City"

Suspected?

The video clip pic.twitter.com/RzVojJj39d

— ymedad (@ymedad) February 23, 2020

Aljazeera's report on the thwarted stabbing ["Israeli forces kill Palestinian in Jerusalem after alleged attack"] quotes the official Palestinian Authority news agency Wafa saying "the man was shot several times and left on the ground bleeding near the Lions' Gate (also known as Bab al-Asbat) before Israeli paramedics arrived at the scene". Presumably the Israelis were supposed to do something else.

Image Source

A Palestinian Arab news source [here] has the thwarted attacker's picture and describes him as the father of three children. It also reports that "Israeli forces raided [the attacker's] home and detained his father and two of his brothers, Palestinian news agency WAFA reports."

Based on past experience, the orphans and widow of the attacker's family can now expect to have a well-funded life at the expense of the PA's program of financial incentives for terrorists and their heirs. The foreign taxpayers (mostly European) who keep providing misguided foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority are financing this, whether they want to or not.

Another terror attack was thwarted in Jerusalem yesterday (Friday).

By way of background, the promenade in Armon Hanatziv, a southern suburb of Jerusalem, offers one of the most impressive views of the city as a whole and in particular the Old City and the Temple Mount. That it attracts large numbers of visitors, both locals and tourists, every day is part of what also makes it a favored site for terror attacks by knife-wielding or vehicle-ramming assailants, intent on their moment of fame - and victims. In January 2017, an Arab resident of East Jerusalem aimed his truck at a group of IDF soldiers in the car park area of the promenade ["08-Jan-17: Where the World Council of Churches stands as Israelis are rammed to death"] and killed four of them.

Times of Israel says a woman attempted to stab passers-by at the popular promenade on Friday morning. Said to be a Palestinian Arab from East Jerusalem, she made several stabbing attempts with her knife while screaming Allahu Akbar (according to Ynet) before being wrestled to the ground by civilians. Police then took her into custody. One man was mildly injured by the assailant.

13-Mar-17: Jerusalem and the (alleged) knife-men

The Old City and Lions' Gate [Image Source]

At about 4 this morning (Monday) there was a slightly elevated police presence in Israel's capital city because in Jerusalem it's the festive day of Purim. (Everywhere else in the world celebrated Purim a day earlier.)

An Arab assailant managed to squeeze into an occupied and cramped guard booth adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem's Lions' Gate, armed with a large butcher knife. He embarked on a frenzied stabbing attack, injuring the two Border Guard police inside.

"One of the officers fought his way out of the guard booth, loaded his weapon and shot the assailant, police said. The assailant was shot and critically wounded during the attack. He later died of his injuries." [Times of Israel today]

The Border Guard men are recovering at Hadassah Medical Center's Ein Kerem hospital where they were rushed for emergency treatment, arriving there in stable and fully conscious condition according to a hospital spokesperson.

The assailant has been named in the Arab media as Ibrahim Mahmoud Mattar, described by Israel Police as a 25-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s notorious Jabel Mukaber neighborhood from which a significant number of Arab-on-Israeli shooters, rammers and stabbers have emerged in the past two years (click to see some relevant earlier posts).

The attacker's knife [Image Source: Foreign Ministry]

Ma'an News Agency, whose work is in large measure paid for by the mostly unwitting and increasingly unwilling taxpayers of several European countries, adopted its customary alternative-reality approach to reporting on Palestinian Arab terror, starting with the headline of its tendentious report: "Witnesses: Israeli police 'execute' Palestinian in Jerusalem over alleged attack":

Israeli police shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian near the Lion’s Gate entrance to occupied East Jerusalem's Old City early Monday morning over an alleged stabbing attack that left two Israeli police officers lightly and moderately injured. The slain man was identified as Ibrahim Mahmoud Matar, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood Jabal al-Mukabbir, located south of the Old City. The shooting happened ahead of the al-fajr (dawn) prayers, as worshipers were headed to Al-Aqsa Mosque inside the Old City. Witnesses told Ma'an they saw a dispute inside an Israeli police post located near Lion’s Gate, between an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian "who was carrying a stick.” Israeli police then forced the young man outside of the enclosure and “executed” him at point blank range with with four bullets, leading to his immediate death, witnesses said. Referring to the dispute that lead up to the shooting, eyewitnesses told Ma’an that Israeli police were “controlling the situation” and could have easily detained Matar without using lethal force... Following the killing, Israeli forces were heavily deployed in and around Lion’s Gate and prevented many Palestinians from reaching Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray, with witnesses saying the lockdown lasted from 4:30 until 6:00 a.m. Later Monday morning, Israeli forces raided Matar’s home in Jabal al-Mukabbir and detained his brother, parents, and his uncle, according to locals and Israeli police.

A few words about the journalistic values on display here. We follow Ma'an's reporting more closely than most people. The reflexive use by its editors of the cowardly term "alleged" to describe most Arab-on-Israeli attacks is a constant. But the mostly outlandish claims of Arab so-called witnesses and their fanciful explanations for how knives and guns ended up in Arab hands are almost never termed "alleged". 

Taking Ma'an's Palestinian-Arab-centric reportage at face-value requires a prior commitment to a thoroughly partisan view of events. In war, that's not unusual or even in some ways unacceptable. What's outrageous is that none of this could be done without the massive ongoing funding its editors and managers have gotten since its inception in 2005 from Western sources. Most of that money is from governments which means from tax-payers. And while many of the government bureaucrats in Europe signing off on those cheques and foreign aid forms are ideologically comfortable with how the money they supply is spent, it's a certainty that many, probably most, of the people actually providing those funds have no such political leanings.

NGO-Monitor does first-rate, systematic work examining how government funding from the West often gets wasted and channeled into very dark places connected with the Arab/Israel conflict. You might want to know that it has a resource page [here] devoted to shining some light on the quiet funding that is Ma'an's life-blood. 

Most people don't realize, but NGO-Monitor documents this, that for years Ma'an - an outlet for news in several languages - has been the recipient of millions (dollars and Euros) in foreign aid. Initial funding came from the governments of Denmark and the Netherlands. 

Since then, the torrent has continued to arrive from (among others) the governments of Denmark, Sweden, the United States,  Switzerland, Netherlands, the European Union and the United Kingdom. Several human rights and humanitarian juggernauts, in particular Catholic Relief Services, UNESCO and most egregiously Save the Children, have found ways to justify sending some of their budget to the Bethlehem offices of the propaganda agency. Why donors accept this is a puzzle - assuming they know.

UPDATE Monday March 13, 2017 at 10:00 pm: Elder of Ziyon notices, on visiting Facebook, that

Naturally, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah is extolling him as a "martyr" and making sure that his act is viewed as a religious obligation. This is all to let the next terrorist know exactly how his acts will be honored.

Tragically, it usually plays out this way.

02-Aug-16: Rat poison, bruised religious sensitivities and a July bombing assault in Jerusalem

Scene of the July 17, 2016 attempted bombing outrage in the center of Jerusalem [Image Source]

We reported here a little over two weeks ago ["17-Jul-16: At a Jerusalem corner with a tragic history, a human bomb is intercepted this morning"] about the thwarting of an Arab-on-Israeli bomb attack on a Jerusalem Light Rail stop located a few meters from where our daughter Malki was murdered - with fourteen other people - by Hamas terrorists some years earlier.

Today (Tuesday), key details were revealed about the July attack. Times of Israel says Ali Abu Hassan, a student civil engineering at Hebron University, aged 21, was charged with "attempted murder, creating a weapon and conspiracy to commit a crime". Slipping into Jerusalem via the Arab neighbourhoods of Tsur Baher and Jabel Mukaber, he shaved off his beard and changed into shorts and a T-shirt "to better blend in with the Jerusalem population" and embarked on an act of intended revenge to pay Israel back for the ghastly offense to the religious sensitivities of certain kinds of Muslims: "visits by tourists and Israeli Jews to the Temple Mount”, according to a police statement given to the court.

(We checked. The Hebron University website makes no claims of offering civil engineering courses or indeed courses in any other branch of engineering. In the circumstances, it's a small issue. Perhaps he was actually enrolled in the school's Islamic Studies program - here - and preferred not to say that. Or perhaps we didn't check carefully enough.)

His weapons are worth a few moments' reflection. The alleged assailant:

was armed with three pipe bombs he had linked together into one large explosive and had covered with nails and screws dipped in rat poison. “In his bag there were also two knives and a cellphone,” police said Tuesday. Hassan researched how to make a pipe bomb that would “cause the most, and most effective, damage” on the internet and “even carried out test explosions with a number of bombs in order to check them before entering Israel,” according to a joint Shin Bet-Israel Police investigation.

Rat poison as an element in Palestinian Arab terrorists' arsenal has been pooh-pooh-ed for years by certain kinds of Western commentators (see for instance a July 2002 piece in Slate, entitled "Rat Poison Bombs Revisited: The Middle East story that refuses to die"). For the record, rat poison

...is an especially nasty bio-terror weapon.  Most rat poisons are made up of chemicals called anti-coagulants with trade names like warfarin, fumarin, diphacinone and bromadiolone.  Some also contain poisons such as strychnine. All work more or less the same way. A small mammal eats the poison and soon gets sick and dies from internal hemorrhaging. This happens because a mammalian needs to constantly manufacture coagulants to manage internal body functions.  When the coagulant is blocked, uncontrolled internal bleeding occurs... ["Bio-Terrorism in Israel", Dr Stephen Bryen, December 12, 2001] 

The thwarted bomber is said, according to police testimony at this morning's hearing, to have left what he called a final testament at the university along with a request that this be handed to his parents when the intended savagery was done. He didn't die, but all is not lost. As we noted in our original report:

Assuming he's convicted, [the] thwarted human bomb starts earning Rewards for Terror cash from the Palestinian Authority via its malevolent, ever-so-slightly-disguised prisoner payments authority. The funding all comes from European and American foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, as government officials of all the relevant countries know well - but in large measure deny. As for the man in underwear in the photo [in our earlier post - the] would-be human bomb, his financial future, and that of his dependents, is suddenly secure... [From our July 17, 2016 post]

We can't help thinking back to the terrorist and her (human) bomb who blew up the Sbarro pizzeria 15 years ago. There are strong similarities in the way Abu Hassan approached his target, according to the Times of Israel account:

On July 17, Hassan took a bus to the center of the capital and walked along Jerusalem’s popular Jaffa Road to find a target for his bombing, before stopping near the intersection with King George Street. According to investigators, he originally intended to attack a restaurant on Jaffa Road and scoped out the area to prepare for his assault. However, when he noticed the large number of passengers boarding the light rail that runs through downtown, Hassan changed his target. When he attempted to board the tram, he was stopped after he raised the suspicions of a security guard. When the guard asked to examine the contents of the bag, he noticed the bomb and called the police.

Our daughter's murderer accompanied the human bomb on a bus and taxi journey into Jerusalem from Ramallah on August 9, 2001. Both were dressed to look like Israelis and fool the security people. Tragically, this worked.

The explosives were packed with thousands of small, nasty black nails, designed to rip through human flesh and to inflict massive injuries on those lucky enough to escape death. Several of those were embedded in the cell phone case that had once been Malki's and that was handed back to us by the police after the massacre.

Once they reached the center of Jerusalem, the female terrorist, a woman of 21 who was the engineer of the massacre on behalf of Hamas, told her bomb, a young man called Al-Masri, to walk to the same intersection where the July 2016 attempt was made and, after waiting several minutes to give her enough time to flee to safety, to explode in the middle of the four-way pedestrian crossing.

But that's not what he did. He, the bomb, evidently realized that more Jewish children were inside the pizzeria than in the intersection. So he kept walking and was standing at the Sbarro pizzeria counter, right next to two pretty teens - our Malki and her friend Michal - when he ignited the explosive package concealed in the guitar case on his back. No quick thinking security man was there that day.

Like the July 17, 2016 bomber, the woman who engineered the Sbarro pizzeria massacre also became a beneficiary of the PA's loathsome Rewards for Terror scheme. She has been living in total freedom in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan since October 2011. She has received and, we assume, spent many thousands of dollars of funds that originated with gullible taxpayers in the Western countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Germany and the European Union). 

It's those payments that make that abominable safety-net for more terror possible. 

30-May-16: Barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust: What a UN-provided education delivers

Palestinian Arab girls being educated UN-style in an UNRWA school
in Jerusalem [Image Source]

If you have not already viewed the video clip we showcased in another post of ours ["30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]"] earlier today, doing that now may help you make sense of the report that now follows.

It was released for publication this morning (Monday) that Israel Police have cracked the stabbing attack that took place in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighbourhood on the evening of Remembrance Day, May 10, 2016. Here's part of what we wrote about that notably savage (even by the standards that apply in our part of the world) and cowardly attack three weeks ago:

The victims, according to Haaretz, are a pair of "elderly women", reported to be "aged in their 70s"who "had gone for a walk in the neighborhood, also known as East Talpiot, on Tuesday morning when they were attacked by two masked individuals." Their injuries would be serious enough for younger, more robust people but they sound quite worrying, knowing what we know of their ages: "One of the women sustained stab wounds to her limbs and upper body, while the other sustained wounds to her upper body." Ynet reports that they described their attackers as two masked Palestinians wearing jeans and black shirts. The two women, described by hospital staff in the Ynet report as aged 86 and 80, were walking with three other friends when they were attacked from behind. This is frequently how "resistance" operations are done, reflecting on the inherent courage required by such acts. [From our blog post "10-May-16: Practitioners of "resistance" inflict serious stabbing injuries on two elderly Jerusalem women"]

Those earlier suspicions were well-founded: the attackers now under arrest all live in Jabel Mukaber, a Palestinian Arab community with a well-deserved reputation for savagery, nestled in the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. All three of the arrestees are minors, aged 16-17. Children.

Ynet gives this background:

Jabel Mukaber as it appears in a Times of Israel article here

The three decided to meet at a small supermarket in Jabel Mukaber. Armed with knives and an ax which they took from their homes, the three proceeded in the direction of the promenade where they waited for their Jewish victims. A third suspect left the scene after becoming afraid that the attack would lead to the demolition of his parents’ home. As the women passed the two boys, they began stabbing them and striking them with the wooden handle of the ax. The two then fled the scene in the direction of their village while throwing and hiding their weapons on the way. One made it home and the other took refuge in his school...

Times of Israel adds:

After the attack,the suspects are believed to have stashed the weapons nearby before one went home and the second went to school. Later on, one of them returned to the scene, retrieved the knives and cudgel, and hid them in Jabel Mukaber... Throughout the day, the two suspects “spoke with one another through WhatsApp and Facebook messages and planned to carry out another stabbing attack in light of the ‘success’ of the Peace Forest attack,” the police said. However, the pair were arrested before they could carry out such an attack, a police spokesperson said.

And this small postscript:

During the investigation, it also emerged that the mother of one of the suspects was arrested one week ago [meaning after her son had been arrested for the Peace Forest attacks] for attempting to carry out a stabbing attack at the Zeitim Checkpoint at the entrance to Jerusalem... [Ynet]

What does it take to turn teenage Jerusalem Arabs into stabbers, plotters and would-be murderers? Of Jabel Mukaber and its predominantly-Jewish neighbours in Armon Hanatziv, an article a year and a half ago ("Arabs and Jews at odds in East Talpiot", Times of Israel, August 3, 2014) said this:

The main entrance to the neighborhood is adjacent to the Armon Hanatziv Promenade, the terraced park popular with locals and tourists for its views of the Old City, including Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, the Kidron Valley, the City of David and the Mount of Olives. Relations are generally good between the neighborhood residents and the villagers, say locals. The Arab residents are often visible in East Talpiot, shopping in the local Co-op supermarket, stopping in at the local bank branch and using the local medical clinics.

Since that time, a long list of terror attacks, including several mind-numbingly savage instances of extreme Arab-on-Israeli violence, have been executed by residents of Jabel Mukaber. They include the November 2014 attack on men at prayer in a Har Nof synagogue ["20-Nov-14: In the face of savagery, what do you do?"] in which four worshipers and a security guard were hacked to death. And, less than a year later ["13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it"], the murders on a city bus of Haviv Haim, 78; Alon Govberg, 51; and Richard Lakin, 76. (Click here to view some other of our previous Jabel Mukaber terrorism posts.)

As the postscript above shows, another thing that can turn a teenager into a murderer is a mother who seeks to do the same herself.

But the major factor - the one that, year after year, delivers barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust directly into the veins of Arab children, the one that instills life-changing attitudes - is education.

Which is why we want to point out, in the wake of the Jabel Mukaber murder bust revealed this morning, that every single one of the sweet-faced Arab schoolchildren being educated in UNRWA schools and interviewed in the simply-shocking video we mentioned above, lives in Jerusalem where we do, and is educated here.

Mr Gunness, UNRWA spokesperson, on the right, from a YouTube posting
entitled "UNRWA's Chris Gunness Embarrasses
Himself on 'The Kelly File'", August 5, 2014

Not in Gaza. Not in Hebron or Jenin, but in the precincts of Israel's capital city, and by means of an annual budget provided by the United Nations and its UNRWA arm, of which a third is funded by taxpayers of the United States and most of the rest by Western, non-Arab countries.

Can nothing be done? Never say never.

We offered a practical suggestion not long ago, and urge our readers to look at it (again) now: "06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal".

We sent it off last summer to UNRWA's official spokesperson and were pleased that he responded right away with what seemed like some politely mild, though appropriate, enthusiasm. Then, for reasons that are beyond us even now, he inexplicably went silent on us. If you're reading this, Chris Gunness, we hope you still plan to give us a call.

Holding our breaths, we're not.

18-May-16: Does Pal Arab hate-culture education leave room for messages of tolerance and kindness? Let's see.

Honored guests: Family members of jihadist murderers take part in

a Jerusalem elementary school ceremony a month ago 

[From the Facebook page of the Jabel Mukaber school - but 

taken down once people started talking about it; background here. ]

We wrote here a few weeks ago ["24-Apr-16: Weaponizing children: Here's one way it's done in Jerusalem"] about the barely-reported, intense and sickening process fostered by the Palestinian Authority to inject hatred and a passion for murder into the minds and lives of the children whose welfare they are charged with protecting. 

We see catastrophic Arab education and the Palestinian Arab lust for weaponizing their children as critical factors in the generations-long struggle to establish and protect a Jewish homeland.

There are lots of bad people in the story. They include no shortage of square-headed Israeli bureaucrats whose passivity (which we describe in that post) in the face of this outrageous dimension of Palestinian Arab life helps, perhaps in a small way but surely in a real way, to keep it going. That's unforgivable.

It's important to focus on the good people too, and there are plenty of those. (But we will not be tempted into the silly practice of pretending that good and bad are found in roughly equal proportions on both sides of the Arab/Israel divide. They simply are not; wishing for a different reality won't change that. For a sense of our position on this, see "03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?" and "6-May-14: In search of appalled, sickened Palestinian Arabs".)

We want to share a moving and meaningful opinion piece published last night and written by the very articulate son of Richard Lakin, a passionate and good man whose life was forfeited to the practitioners of this Arab education process we call catastrophic.

The Anti-Israel Poisoning Starts Young | Palestinian schools honor the killers of my father, a teacher. This would break his heart | Micah Lakin Avni | Wall Street Journal - May 17, 2016 

My father, Richard Lakin, a 76-year-old retired elementary-school principal from Connecticut, was on a bus in Jerusalem last October when two young Palestinian men boarded and began shooting and stabbing passengers indiscriminately. Two passengers were killed that awful day and 16 injured, including my father. Despite the efforts of first responders and the nurses and doctors at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, my father died two weeks later. He had been shot in the head and stabbed multiple times in the head, face, chest and stomach. 

Over the past seven months I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what would cause two educated Palestinian men in their early 20s to board a public bus and butcher a group of innocent civilians, many of them senior citizens. I’m sorry to report that the Palestinian reaction to the attack has led me to believe that the “peace process” is more one-sided than ever. 

My father grew up a fighter for civil rights in America. He took those values with him in 1984 when he emigrated to Jerusalem, where he taught English to Arabs and Jews. He was a kind, gentle-hearted man who dedicated his life to education and promoting peaceful coexistence. 

Yet Palestinian newspapers praised Baha Alyan, one of the terrorists who murdered my father, as a “martyr and intellectual.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has met with the families of the attackers and praised them as “martyrs.” A Palestinian scout leader said Baha Alyan, who was shot and killed by a security guard before he could kill more innocent passengers, was “an example for every scout.” 

Muhammad Alyan, the father of Baha Alyan, has been invited to speak at Palestinian schools and universities about his son the “martyr.” He recently spoke to children at Jabel Mukaber Elementary School in East Jerusalem, about a half a mile from where my father lived. Tragically, many Palestinian children, perhaps most, are still taught to honor terrorists and fight for the destruction of Israel. 

All of this would break my father’s heart. In 2007 he published a book called “Teaching as an Act of Love” summarizing his life’s work and educational philosophy. The message of his book is that every child is a miracle that should be nurtured with love. After Baha Alyan’s father visited Jabel Mukaber Elementary School, I asked school officials if I could come and share my father’s message of peace and coexistence. My offer was rejected. 

As long as Palestinian leaders nurture a culture of hate, encouraging school children to go out and kill, more violence is inevitable. By encouraging hatred, they distance all of us from the love and belief in peaceful coexistence for which my father stood. 

My father’s book begins with a quote from William Penn: “I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.” 

My father lived by those words. If only his murderers had as well.

There are many NGOs active in Israel who loudly declaim co-existence and peace but too-often turn out to be ordinary political activists arguing that it's Israel, only Israel, that needs to be blamed. How constructive it might be if they got behind Micah Avni's cry against the poison being injected daily into the Palestinian Arab bloodstream.

We're thinking of one particular such group, based in Israel but funded (lavishly) mainly by churches, NGOs, governments and other non-Israeli sources, and which has claimed for fifteen years to be making thousands of peace-building presentations annually to Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab school groups. We make no secret of our feelings of deep disdain (as we explain here) for their fanciful and politically-spun claims.

Still, it's appropriate to call on them now and insist they shine a critical light on the people at Jabel Mukaber Elementary School who rejected Mr Avni's offer to go there and speak of his murdered father's legacy.

While they're considering this, they might also tell us about their experiences talking peace to the Jabel Mukaber children and how that has gone for them - and for the rest of us. Perhaps there is even a teachable moment here.

10-May-16: Practitioners of "resistance" inflict serious stabbing injuries on two elderly Jerusalem women

Forgive the deep cynicism, but there has been yet another Arab-on-Israeli "resistance" operation in Jerusalem this morning. This time the victims are a pair of Zionists whose "occupation" of the attackers' historical space made it essential that they be stabbed.

The victims, according to Haaretz, are a pair of "elderly women", reported to be "aged in their 70s"who "had gone for a walk in the neighborhood, also known as East Talpiot, on Tuesday morning when they were attacked by two masked individuals." Their injuries would be serious enough for younger, more robust people but they sound quite worrying, knowing what we know of their ages: "One of the women sustained stab wounds to her limbs and upper body, while the other sustained wounds to her upper body." Ynet reports that they described their attackers as two masked Palestinians wearing jeans and black shirts. The two women, described by hospital staff in the Ynet report as aged 86 and 80, were walking with three other friends when they were attacked from behind. This is frequently how "resistance" operations are done, reflecting on the inherent courage required by such acts.

They were rushed by ambulance to Shaarei Zedek Medical Center hospital.

The assailants are reported to have fled the scene in the direction of Jabal Mukaber, just a short stroll away. Click here for some of our previous posts on shootings, stabbings and vehicle-rammings carried out by the people of that jihadist enclave.

Police are carrying out widespread searches, including the throwing up of road blocks in Jerusalem. Haaretz says two suspects have been arrested, but the search goes on for others at this hour (now early Tuesday afternoon).

UPDATE Tuesday May 10, 2016 at 6:00pm The two suspects mentioned in the Haaretz report above have been released, says Times of Israel. Several hours after they were arrested, the Israel Police spokesperson, Luba Samri, issued a statement saying that “after a thorough investigation of the suspects who were arrested in sweeps after the attack, the suspicion of their involvement in the attack was removed and they were released.” Police are continuing to locate and arrest the stabbers.

26-Apr-16: A terror attack about which few people are likely to hear

Israeli security personnel at work in Jabel Mukaber after previous terror
attacks emanating from the neighbourhood, October 2015 [Image Source]

No victims were injured or killed. So a terror attack directed at civilians in the Israeli capital, Jerusalem, during one of its two busiest weeks for visitors in the year, is almost certain to go lightly reported if it has any impact at all on the global news cycle.

That's because it was stopped in time. And take a look (below) at who's involved.

The Times of Israel reported the developments in the past hour this way:

Three Palestinians from Nablus suspected of plotting a terrorist attack against Israelis were arrested overnight in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, the Shin Bet said Tuesday. The joint police and Shin Bet sting operation nabbed the three, who were allegedly planning a terror attack in Jerusalem over the Passover holiday. The Shin Bet said that the three had no weapons on their person at the time of their arrest, but “expressed the intention to carry out a terror attack in the immediate future.” The three were all residents of the West Bank city of Nablus, but were located in an East Jerusalem apartment at the time of their arrest. It was not immediately clear if they were simply passing through the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood or had been illegally living there for some time. “The three were arrested and handed over to security forces for questioning,” the Shin Bet said in a statement. The suspects reportedly did not have an arrest record nor were they known members of a terrorist organization... Police have beefed up security around Jerusalem’s Old City and on the Temple Mount in a bid to prevent disturbances at the flashpoint sites during Passover, when thousands of Jewish and foreign tourists visit.

(For more on the malign influence of the Jabel Mukaber neighbourhood in south-eastern Jerusalem, see our post from two days ago focusing on one small aspect of the lethal evil emanating from there: "24-Apr-16: Weaponizing children: Here's one way it's done in Jerusalem").

The Jerusalem Post adds several chilling details:

The three detainees have been transferred to the custody of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) for further questioning... Two of the suspects are minors – age 15 and 16 – and the other is a 23-year-old man. The three Palestinians were detained after the security forces obtained a tip indicating that an attack was imminent. The authorities say that the Palestinians planned on committing a combined assault against civilians involving an explosive device as well as gunfire. The attack was said to have been planned for the Passover holiday and was to be executed in a crowded area. The explosive device was slated to be provided by an unidentified co-conspirator and the weapon to be used for firing at civilians was an improvised assault rifle built in one of the Palestinian makeshift factories. After their arrest, the three Palestinians confessed to the plot, according to security services. The suspects said that they were inspired by last week’s bombing of a bus in Jerusalem which left 19 people wounded and one person – the bomber – dead.

(About that "inspirational" bombing, we posted this: "21-Apr-16: The Hamas jihadists claim the Jerusalem bus bombing as one of their own".)

Though armed attacks were thwarted this time, no one in this part of the world is under any illusions about the ongoing threats being blunted or even slowed down. We also don't yet know who else is involved - and there are always plenty of additional people involved when complex plots of this nature get uncovered and, thankfully, stopped before serious violence is done.

24-Apr-16: Weaponizing children: Here's one way it's done in Jerusalem

Honored guests at the Jebel Mukaber school in March: the man in the center
is the very proud father of a murderer whose victims we name here
[From the Facebook page of the Jabel Mukaber school]

In understanding what happened about two weeks ago in an elementary school in an Arab neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, it will help to know that an incredible proportion of Palestinian Arabs profess to be opposed to terrorism while at the same time saying (as we pointed out in "03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?") that massacres of innocent civilians, and especially of Jews, aren't even terrorist acts to begin with.

Keep the mental gymnastics in mind as we take a look at what happened there about a month ago - but has only just now been reported.

The Jabel Mukaber elementary school [Facebook] is located in a part of Jerusalem that has that same name, immediately adjacent to the flourishing neighborhood of East Talpiot/Armon Hanatziv.

Family members of the honored jihadists at a Jerusalem elementary
school ceremony  [From the Facebook page of the Jabel Mukaber school]

For centuries, this was part of Turkey's Ottoman Empire holdings. It fell within the British Mandate from the early twenties until 1948. The name Armon Hanatziv is Hebrew for Governor's Palace, where the reference is to the head of the British occupation which took power after the Turks were defeated in World War One and chased away. Then it fell under Jordanian military occupation from 1948, when Jordanian forces invaded the infant state of Israel. The Jordanians ruled until June 1967 when the Jordanian monarch's military was repelled after launching another unsuccessful shot at conquering the Jewish state, Israel has been in charge since 1967.

The Jabel Mukaber school, for Arab children between kindergarten and grade 9, is funded, according to Ynet, by what it terms "Islamic officials". On the school's Facebook site, a series of photographs posted March 22 and March 24, 2016 [here and here - but we think both were removed within an hour of our uploading this post] mark a ceremonial visit to the school and its children by various family members of two young men, Baha Aliyan and Mohammed Ali.

A practical illustration of how the weaponization of children is
done: Jabel Mukaber school yard, March 2016, as children are taught
to pay homage to two dead jihadists, one who murdered 3 Jews and
one who was stopped in time [From the Facebook
page of the Jabel Mukaber school]

Who were they? Aliyan was a central player in the murderous attack on Israelis traveling on a Jerusalem city bus six months ago ["13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it"]. He and an accomplice boarded the crowded Egged 78 line bus in Armon Hanaziv, wildly shooting and stabbing passengers.

They murdered Haviv Haim, 78; Alon Govberg, 51; and Richard Lakin, a 76-year-old former American school principal and civil rights activist, who was shot in the head and stabbed in the chest and died after a two-week struggle with his critical injuries.

Mr Lakin's son Micha Avni was later quoted referring to the hideous Palestinian Arab incitement that is found on the Facebook platform, saying of his father that “He died as a result of the same incitement and hatred he fought against his entire life.” Some days after the murders, Micha Avni was among 20,000 other plaintiffs who brought

a class-action lawsuit... in New York State Supreme Court...  against Facebook accusing the social media platform of ignoring widespread Palestinian posts calling for violence against Jews, which was filed Monday [and claiming] that Facebook posts have inspired many recent terror attacks and that “Facebook’s algorithms and platform connects inciters to terrorists who are further encouraged to perpetrate stabbings and other violence attacks against Israelis [Times of Israel, October 27, 2015]

The Islamic school in Jabel Mukaber
honors the life of the thug who murdered
the author of this book [Image Source]

Mr Lakin, one of Aliyan's innocent victims, was the author of a book titled “Teaching as an Act of Love”? Subtitled "Thoughts and Recollections of a Former Teacher, Principal and Kid", it's still available from Amazon.

Did the Jabel Mukaber ceremony note this, and the tragic irony of the circumstances in which Mr Lakin met death? Not exactly. According to Ynet ["Families of Palestinian terrorists visit East Jerusalem school", April 24, 2016],

After his son's attack, Mohammad Aliyan launched a commemoration campaign in honor of his son, which included among other things encouraging children to read. During an event held in memory of the terrorist at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, Aliyan explained that "if the nation isn't educated, it won't be able to confront the occupation. Baha is an idea, and an idea will never die. Today, I have more than 1,000 Bahas. The students will carry out his legacy."

If Aliyan senior condemned the vicious orgy of violence which was his son's final act in life, or suggested the late Mr Lakin's book as something work reading, there's not a word of that in the Arabic text on the school's Facebook or in any of the several reports we have seen online about the ceremonial visit to the school. 

Aliyan's son was a killer, and the father - at a ceremony for elementary school children honoring him - speaks of his life as an idea that will never die. Idea? Of course: the Jabel Mukaber school's Facebook page praises the terrorists and their families, and thanks the families for their visit. The idea is clear.

Another jihadist was honored in the same event. Family members of Mohammed Ali, shot by Israeli forces after he carried out a knifing attack at the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem's Old City, also took part. (We think he's the 19 year-old stabber in the video and photos here.) We don't know if anyone call Ali's life or death an idea. But we do know he was killed while carrying out an attempted murder.

Last and certainly not least, several representatives of the Palestinian Ministry of Education took part in the homage to a pair of terrorist thugs.

There's no rush among Israeli authorities to address the naked incitement-to-murder that's being drilled into the heads of many thousands of Palestinian Arab children in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Ynet asked the authorities what they were planning to about what we have just described:

The Jerusalem municipality responded by saying that the event took place at a private school that isn't regulated by the municipality or the Israeli Ministry of Education. Therefore, they don't have the ability to interfere with what is being taught there. There are many private schools in East Jerusalem which are not under the purview of the Israeli Ministry of Education, and they receive no funding from the ministry or from the municipality... School officials refused to comment. "Families of Palestinian terrorists visit East Jerusalem school", Ynet, April 24, 2016]

Sorry to have to point it out but that head-in-the-stand attitude is deadly, indefensible, and costs lives. Here, from a very brief scan of our own blog, are some recent acts of terrorist Arab-on-Israel murders in which the perpetrators were all residents of Jabel Mukaber - perhaps even graduates of the same school (we don't know):

• 16-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Not-so-new New Year violence
• 19-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Yet more rage
• 13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it
• 17-Oct-15: Bloody Saturday
• 23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror

For those with a mind for remembering such things, the vile killers of several rabbis in a synagogue in Jerusalem's Har Nof section came from Jabel Mukaber, a massacre of unarmed men at prayer that caused an eruption of celebration there in its immediate aftermath ["26-Dec-14: The ongoing search for Arabic-language outrage at the men with the meat-cleavers and knives"]. 

And zero condemnation.

04-Nov-15: Facts, lies and viral video clips

Screenshot from video embedded in the Facebook page of
the Hamas media agency, Shehab

Nearly 400,000 people have turned a video clip of a violent clash in Jerusalem viral over the past two days (hat-tip to Elder of Ziyon for focusing on this). 

Posted on the Facebook page of Shehab News Agency (taken down by Facebook in February 2015, but plainly back in business now), its content is summed up in this caption

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) brutally attack unarmed Palestinian young man for his refusal to take off his trousers

This makes sense. 

In other words, for people who believe the Islamist terrorists of Hamas captured an Israeli "spy dolphin" in the sea off Gaza this past summer, and found that it had been "stripped of its will" and turned into "a murderer" by Israel's security services [BBC], it makes sense.

It makes sense in the same way the Egyptian "discovery" [Wikipedia] that Israel's Mossad spy agency had sent a killer shark to attack tourists in the waters off the Sinai Peninsula makes sense.

And in the same way that Israel weaponized a flying vulture [ABC].

Shehab, based in Gaza, is an affiliate of Hamas - a deeply-cultist religion-driven regime that shoots its foes in public streets in broad daylight and drags their bodies behind motor cycles; throws members of non-Islamist Palestinian Arab groups off the rooftops of tall buildings to their deaths; sends agents equipped with exploding guitar cases into pizzerias; and on and on - so that, on any reasonable view, the charges it makes about Israeli deeds ought to be viewed with a degree of skepticism.

Nonetheless, it keeps attracting viewers and fans by the millions, and the evidence suggests those fans lap up the conspiracy theories, the hate-messages and the anti-Israel war-crime allegations with relish. In the face of such massive don't-confuse-my-deep-prejudice-with-facts, what's a person to do? Not much other than try to show how unfactual Shehab's "news" is.

First, an admission.

The man in the video certainly was involved in a brutal attack on Monday as Hamas alleges. Only he was the brute doing the attacking. As we posted here two days ago ["02-Nov-15: The violence continues"]: 

Meanwhile in Jerusalem, yet another reminder of the wanton ordinariness of the violence on the minds of an untold number of our neighbours. An Israeli woman in her forties, guiding a group of visitors in the vicinity of the Old City's Jaffa Gate, was assaulted this morning by a Palestinian Arab attacker. Like several other perpetrators of acts of terror in and around the capital, this one was a resident of the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood. He fled on foot after smashing her over the head with a bottle, and police and Border Guard personnel gave chase, catching up with him at Kikar Zahal (IDF Square, next to Jerusalem's City Hall). The assailant is 22 years old. His victim suffered light injuries and was taken by Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulance for emergency treatment of head injuries at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. Here's an extract from a security video clip that captured yet another resistance hero defending (excuse the deep cynicism) the "Al Aqsa mosque compound"...

Same "Palestinian young man" a few minutes earlier,
not so unarmed [click to see security cam video]

The video showing the cowardly attack embedded in that post is here. His name is Omar Alfrouk Abidaya. Like so many of the thugs engaging in recent acts of extreme malice, he is - as we noted above - a resident of the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Jabel Mukaber.

The social media, chiefly Twitter and Facebook, provide potent platforms for disseminating libelous "news" coverage like the video clip of an innocent, unfortunate Palestinian Arab getting abused because of not wanting his trousers to be pulled down. And hundreds of thousands of minds all over the world get instantly polluted and befuddled by this sort of counter-factual propaganda, emerging with a deeper understanding of why men, women and teenage children would grab a kitchen knife and go get themselves some revenge.

A shame that the lethal passions on show here aren't matched by an equally fierce desire to learn the facts behind the claims - the often-complicated realities behind the viral videos. Keep in mind that results like these are precisely what propagandists like Shehab/Hamas exist to achieve.

23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror

The "moderate" Abbas in front of poster
of his mentor, the arch-terrorist and Nobel Prize
laureate Yasser Arafat

A month ago, and several weeks before arranging for his wife's brother to be admitted to Israel's best private hospital as a VIP patient ["23-Oct-15: When the people inciting the knifings/rammings/shootings need really good doctors, where do they turn?"], the highly-immoderate "moderate" president of the Palestinian Authority, made some public statements that ignited a firestorm.

"Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They [the Jews] 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... 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." [Abbas quoted in Jerusalem Post, September 16, 2015]

Thoughts of pure blood, of filthy feet, of heaven and of being rewarded for the spilling of blood have propelled an onslaught of Palestinian Arab savagery against Israelis, overwhelmingly against non-uniformed Israelis and visitors, since Mahmoud Abbas uttered those words.

Some selected scenes from the past 36 hours of this savage war of terror directed at Israelis. (And to be clear - we don't claim to be reporting all the terror attacks; nowhere near it, in fact. There are too many of them in too many parts of our beautiful country, and it's simply depressing to list them in the numbers in which they are happening.)

Irish news report about the "alleged" Beit Shemesh attack on a
Jewish school bus on Thursday morning [Source]

• From this morning (Friday) here in Jerusalem, Times of Israel says police thwarted yet another terror attack directed (as usual) at civilians, this time in Jerusalem’s Nof Zion neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Local residents noticed a suspect surveying homes in the area and called for police help. A Border Police patrol unit soon arrived and stopped the suspect, asking him to show his hands. He he kept his right hand behind his back and refused to show it. When pressed, the report says, he kept it in a fist. An officer "subdued" him, and found a knife concealed in the suspect's sleeve. He turns out to be a 21-year-old male from Jabel Mukaber, a village inside the city limits of Jerusalem, and the source of a considerable flow of hatred-driven terrorism now and in the past. Past mentions in our blog include "16-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Not-so-new New Year violence"; "19-Sep-15: Jerusalem Watch | Yet more rage"; "13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it"; "17-Oct-15: Bloody Saturday". The vile killers of several rabbis in a synagogue in Jerusalem's Har Nof section came from Jabel Mukaber, and massacre of unarmed men at prayer caused an eruption of celebration there in its immediate aftermath ["26-Dec-14: The ongoing search for Arabic-language outrage at the men with the meat-cleavers and knives"].
• It's October, which is the time for the olive harvest season in our part of the world. The IDF, alert to the tensions that often erupt during the Palestinian Arab olive harvest, provides secure coverage for the picking in selected locations. Ynet says that early this morning (Friday), at one of those spots in the Gush Etzion area a few kilometers south of Jerusalem, a company of IDF soldiers arrived, "as they do every morning during this season, to open the separation barrier near the settlement of Geva'ot to let Palestinian olive farmers cross the barrier and work their olive groves located west of the fence.  After soldiers opened the gate, a Palestinian attacked one of them, a tracker from the Etzion Regional Brigade, and stabbed him in the upper body. His fellow soldiers immediately shot the terrorist in the foot and neutralized him. The terrorist is a 16-year-old from the village of Surif." The assailant who plunged a knife into the soldier's back was shot in the leg and lightly injured. He is now being fixed in Hadassah Ein Karem Medical Center, Jerusalem. His victim is in Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center.
• Thursday afternoon, a Palestinian Arab made an unsuccessful stabbing attack on an IDF soldier close to the Hassam Shoter checkpoint in Hevron's Tel Rumeida neighborhood. He fled and a search failed to find him. The site of the attack was mentioned in a post [here] a few days ago.
• In Beit Shemesh yesterday (Thursday) morning, a terror attack plot that could easily have cost a terribly high price ended up as something less painful, though certainly worrying and with victims. In the Haaretz account, officers at the Beit Shemesh police station received an early morning report that two terror suspects had tried to board a private school bus with young children on board and had been frightened away by the yelling of nearby civilians. Police were sent to the area (according to locals, only after an unreasonable delay) and spotted the suspects just as they launched a stabbing attack on a young man standing at a bus stop on Yehezkel Hanavi Street. The police promptly opened fire in accordance with the new shoot-to-kill rules of engagement when confronting terrorists in the act.  Palestinian Arab sources now say the attackers were Mahmoud Ghanimat and Makdad Heeh, both about 20, both from the village of Tzurif, near Hebron, and both construction workers engaged at a construction site in the rapidly-developing Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimel section of town. Haaretz says: "Under their t-shirts, police found they were wearing a second t-shirt with the emblems of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The Shin Bet security service said one was a Hamas activist and the other had been imprisoned from 2012 to 2014 after being apprehended with a knife in the area of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron." One of the attackers died of his wounds; the other is injured and in a bad way. Their victim is described as "a young Haredi man, aged about 18". The police and the municipal authorities are now saying they will increase enforcement of the law regarding the presence of Palestinian Arab workers in the city: "The investigation into the attack will include determining how the two reached Beit Shemesh from the area of the southern Hebron hills, which is considered a prime place where Palestinians illegally enter Israel.  Because of various breaks in the fence in the area, many Palestinians enter Israel there daily.  The regional council has complained about this for a long time, and the daily transit of Palestinians into Israel there is well-known to the security forces, but nothing has been done.  Defense sources estimate that about 34,000 Palestinians illegally enter Israel every day through the various breaks in the fence, not only in the Hebron area."
  Notice the screen shot we posted above, taken from the website of the Irish Independent news site. We think the Palestinian Arabs must occasionally ask themselves what they did right to be on the receiving end of so much undeserved journalistic benevolence by Irish reporters, editors and analysts. It's an ongoing scandalous disgrace.
• In the very early hours of Thursday morning, just after midnight and a block away from Jerusalem's Central Bus Station on Yirmiyahu Street, a Jewish man was shot to death (Haaretz says) after he was suspected of being a terrorist and, according to testimony, tried to snatch a weapon from an Israel Defense Forces soldier. The IDF Spokesman's Unit said it was a soldier that fired at the man, and that "the security services are investigating details of the incident."
• On Wednesday, a young female soldier serving in the Home Front Command's Kedem battalion was severely wounded in a stabbing attack at Adam Junction, on Jerusalem's northern edge. Jerusalem Post says a second female soldier shot and killed the knife attacker. He is identified as Ibrahim Mu'taz Zawiya, 21, from Azarya, near Ma'ale Adumim. An additional suspect was apprehended near the scene. The injured young woman is being treated at Hadassah Ein Karem hospital, and though her injuries were critical at first, she is said to be doing better.

It's an intense and difficult time, with considerable fear in the air, as well as anger and deep resentment at the overt nature of the incitement emanating from the political leadership of the Palestinian Arabs. It's hard for ordinary Israelis to comprehend how the people on the other side - chief among them Mahmoud Abbas, the mis-named "moderate" - show such willingness to weaponize their own children and place them in the front lines of the attacks on mainly-civilian Israeli targets.