14-Apr-17: The urge to stab erupts again: In Jerusalem, a young woman is knifed on a tram

Paramedics at the scene [Image Source]

As busy, bustling and full of life as Israel's capital is today during the Passover festival, there is a serious incident to report.

The deep strategic reserves of explosive hatred, in evidence for generations in the form of Arab-on-Israeli terror, erupted again a short time ago, Friday a little after noon, in Jerusalem.

A young woman is reported (at about 1:40 pm Friday) to be in critical condition after becoming the latest victim of a stabbing attack, this time while on board the Jerusalem Light Rail. As we write this, the latest report says first-responder medics from the Magen David Adom ambulance service gave her emergency treatment at the scene of the attack. She was then rushed to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Mount Scopus hospital unconscious and in critical condition with multiple stab wounds to the upper body. Times of Israel is estimating she is in her mid-twenties.

There are additional victims. A pregnant woman suffered an injury to the stomach when the tram came to a sudden halt as a consequence of the terror attack. A man said to be in his 50s suffered an injured leg in trying to run from the scene. Both were brought to Shaarei Zedek Medical Center hospital for emergency treatment.

The scene of the stabbing is close to Zahal Square where Jerusalem's principal thoroughfare comes as close as it ever does to the Old City Walls and nearby Jaffa Gate. Damscus Gate of the Old City, a favored locale for Arab violence, is a couple of hundred meters further along the tram tracks. Officers of the Border Guard police sealed Damascus Gate as they often do when terrorist activity takes place in its vicinity.

At this stage, we have no information about the attacker other than he is reported to be alive and well.

UPDATE 1:55 pm: A Hebrew social media report quotes a senior police source saying the attacker is a male in his fifties, thought to be suffering from mental problems (vague and unspecified at this stage). Times of Israel reports that the victim is British, and the attacker is an East Jerusalem resident - probably meaning a Palestinian Arab.

UPDATE 2:15 pm Friday: Ynet says the stabbing victim, a young British woman of 22, a student, has died of her wounds. What a terrible tragedy.

UPDATE 2:40 pm Friday: The stabber is named by Ynet: Jamil Tamimi, 57, from the Jerusalem Arab neighborhood of Ras al-Amud. That name Tamimi has strong resonances for us. The Arab Ma'an News Agency says he "has a prior criminal police record for domestic violence".

11-Mar-16: A Jew is stabbed near Jerusalem's Jaffa Gate

UPDATE: The alleged stabber is now in the hands of police
[Image Source]

There is a police chase underway in Jerusalem as we write these words.

An Israeli male dressed in the distinctive garb of the Haredim, said to be about 29 years old, was stabbed in the back by a suspect believed to be an Arab. No indication yet whether the assailant is male or female, old or young. The attacker fled the scene of the attack, which took place in the in an alleyway known (in Hebrew) as Ma’alot Chaldiyah, close to busy Jaffa Gate, the busiest of the entrance points into Jerusalem's Old City.

The victim's knifing injuries are said (according to Times of Israel) to be moderate. He was rushed from the scene by ambulance and is in a Jerusalem hospital for emergency treatment right now.

The knife used in the stabbing was found on the ground nearby by police.

In its Arabic edition (but not in the English, which its publishers know gets scrutinized by critics), Ma'an News Agency calls the Jewish victim not a Jew and not an Israeli (which is what the English-language version calls him) but a "settler".

The Arabic-speaking editors at Ma'an, from their desks several kilometers away, are extraordinarily clever at identifying settlers - a term of denigration in their lexicon. The acuity of their vision is hugely improved by the bank accounts, filled with funds provided by unwitting tax-payers in Europe who finance their countries' foreign aid programs, on top of which they sit as they tap their stories into their computers. Such clever Ma'an people.

UPDATE 2:45 pm Friday, March 11, 2016: According to Ynet, the stabber is a 19-year-old male from somewhere unidentified in the Judea and Samaria area. He had escaped after plunging the knife into his victim "but was found hiding in one of the nearby alleys shortly thereafter by police and Border Police with the help of the police's Mabat 2000 unit, which has security cameras all over the city." On a social media site, a photo of his Israel-issued identity card appeared [here].

27-Dec-15: Saturday's violence

Some background on two more Arab-on-Israeli attacks that marred the Sabbath day that ended last night.

IDF Square Jerusalem [Image Source: Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons]

In Jerusalem, at Kikar Zahal (IDF Square) close to the Old City's Jaffa Gate and a couple of minutes' walk from Safra Square, the compound where the municipality is headquartered, a Palestinian Arab aroused suspicions on the part of police officers who, in the words of Israel National News,

"approached him to investigate... At that point the terrorist whipped out a knife and tried to stab one of them, but the officers beat him to the draw and shot him, killing him at the site."

Haaretz adds that the would-be knife attacker "is mentally disabled" in the words of family members. It identifies him as

26-year-old Mussab Mahmoud Al-Razali from East Jerusalem. His uncle told Palestinian news agency WAFA that his nephew suffered from severe mental disabilities and even studied at the Nur Special Needs School.

The Huwara attack vehicle (via social media)

He attracted attention because "police noticed him following a pair of Jewish worshippers". Saturday morning is a time when thousands of Israeli Jews, as well as visitors, walk through Jaffa Gate to the Old City's Western Wall plaza. It's a route that gets heavy police attention because of the attraction it seems to hold for murder-minded jihadists.

Later in the day, a cluster of soldiers manning at a checkpoint near the Arab village of Huwara in Samaria came under vehicle-ramming attack. One, a young serviceperson of 20, was injured in the attack and taken to hospital with a suspected broken leg. Others opened fired and hit the Palestinian Arab attacker who later died of his injuries. Haaretz says his name is Maher al-Jabi, a male of 56.

News consumers who rely on the Arab news media will get the story more or less back-to-front as the headlines of two reports typical of the genre ["Palestinian dies from injuries in car ramming near Nablus" - Al Bawaba; "Another Palestinian shot dead by Israelis at Nablus checkpoint" - Press TV Iran] make clear. Ditto The Columbus Despatch which spins a syndicated Associated Press report with its own creative headline ["2 Palestinians killed in clashes"]

23-Dec-15: At Jerusalem's Jaffa Gate, two knife-attackers, three victims

The promenade leading to Jaffa Gate is the scene of this afternoon's
co-ordinated stabbing attacks [Image Source]

There has been a stabbing attack at Jaffa Gate, the major entrance to Jerusalem's Old City. Three Israelis are injured; one is in critical condition, evidently after being inadvertently hit by Border Guard fire; two others with knife injuries defined as serious.

[UPDATE: 7:00 pm Times of Israel reports that the Israeli, a man of 40, unintentionally shot by Border Guard fire, has died of his injuries. Ofer Ben-Ari, 40, of Jerusalem, is survived by his wife and two children. A second Israeli victim, Argentine-born Rabbi Re'uven Biermacher from Kiryat Ye'arim, a teacher of Torah at Aish HaTorah, father of 7, died of knife-attack injuries.]

It's reported [Times of Israel, December 23, 2015] that the attackers were a pair of Palestinian Arabs. One of the victims is reported to have struggled with his stabber and was stabbed multiple times. Both of the knifers were shot by Border Guard fire at the scene. Both are dead.

In the Arab media, they are named as Anan Abu Habsah Hamad, 20, and Issa Assaf, 19, both from Qalandiya. There's no confirmation of this from official Israeli sources since the pair were not carrying ID or other documents, according to the police. How likely is it that they are already elevated to the Palestinian Arab pantheon of murdering "martyrs"? Quite. (And for those anxious to see what the savages looked like, here's a Twitter photo.) Israel National News says both spent time in Israeli prisons in the past for terrorism offences.

Our most recent mentions of Qalandiya were here:

• 18-Dec-15: Vehicle ramming attack on Jerusalem's northern edge
• 23-Nov-15: Central Jerusalem's shuk - two slashers attack and are stopped
• 17-Oct-15: Bloody Saturday
• 17-Oct-15: Knife attack at Qalandiya Crossing tonight

Two of today's victims were rushed to Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, where the individual who had been shot was taken directly to the operating room. The other two victims were sent by ambulance to Shaarei Zedek and to Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital.

As of today's stabbings, Arab-on-Israeli attacks have cost the lives of 23 victims since the current wave of extreme violence began during the Jewish New Year festival period in September 2015. With that in mind, let's recall what the prime minister of Sweden, Stefan Lofven, said in an interview with the Swedish news agency TT in early December:

“There is an international classification regarding what constitutes or does not constitute [terror]. As far as I know, the [knife attacks in Israel] are not defined as terror.” [Source]

His Minister of Foreign Affairs Margot Wallstrom was quoted a few days before that saying Israel

was conducting “extrajudicial executions” of Palestinian stabbers, calling the Israeli response to the terrorist attacks “disproportionate.” [Source]

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.