10-Nov-18: In Melbourne, the stabber is called "lone wolf" but with connections to Islamic State

Image Source: Video capture

I am traveling [this is Arnold Roth] and am spending a few days in Melbourne, Australia.

Here's a summary of the terrorist attack that turned the downtown area here into a murder scene during this past Friday afternoon's peak hour.

• A man drove his utility vehicle - a Holden Rodeo - onto the sidewalk of the central business district's Bourke Street, near the busy corner with Swanston Street where around 4:20 pm Friday it exploded in flames. It later emerged that he had loaded it up with gas cylinders. A large explosion was evidently his plan.
• A man, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, aged about 30, exited the vehicle armed with a large knife. He attacked several pedestrians in an evidently random way, stabbing 74-year-old Sisto Malaspina. According to one Australian source, the man yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the attack "but [police] Commissioner Ashton said this had not been confirmed."
• Malaspina is the well-known co-owner of Pellegrini's Espresso Bar, a Melbourne icon. 
• Two other men were next: Rodney Patterson, 58, suffered head injuries; a male security guard aged 24 is injured in the neck, evidently from being stabbed. Both of them are in stable condition as of Saturday night as we write this.
• Transit police arrived at the scene. The attacker punched one of them through the window of their vehicle.Many more police quickly arrived as the two transit police engaged with the attacker. The knifer then lunged at them with his weapon. A bystander tried to assist police by ramming a shopping trolley between them and the suspect.
• At about this point, a police officer fired at the attacker. He was hit in the chest and fell to the ground. He was rushed to hospital in critical condition and later died.
• In the words of The Age, a Melbourne daily, "Police have said it was a lone-person terror attack, and that the threat has been mitigated."
• All streets in the vicinity remained closed to traffic and pedestrians until 8 on Saturday morning as police examined the attack scene.
• The knifer, a child migrant who arrived in Australia with his parents from Somalia and now dead, is widely described tonight as "known to counter terrorism agencies... and 
  known to have radical views
  ... 
  His passport was seized in 2015  when he made plans to travel to Syria". Though he "had links" to ISIS, he was "not actively monitored". 
• Australia's national broadcaster, ABC, reported that "his family is well known and respected within the Somali community in Melbourne."
• They attended the Virgin Mary Mosque in Hoppers Crossing, west of Melbourne.
• His wife, parents and siblings have been questioned by police in the past day and his home raided and combed for evidence.
• The Age again: "The police have been given the green light for the first time to use preventative detention, where they may detain terror suspects for four days without a court order."

Lots of questions to be answered here.

30-May-18: In Belgium, another murderous "lone-wolf" attack by a criminal already on the police watch list

Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucille Garcia, right,
the two police officers murdered in the attack [Image Source]

In Belgium, a pointless act of terror inspired by one man's religious fervor resulted in the deaths on Tuesday of several innocents and some questions that don't seem likely to be properly answered quickly.

The basic facts as gleaned from Irish Times and Standard UK:

• Benjamin Herman, a Belgian man of 36 described in reports as a petty criminal and drug dealer who was serving time in prison, was let out Monday on what some reports have called a day-release for "family leave". (Reuters calls it a two-day pass.) One source says he "was due to travel back to his home town of Rochfort, just 40 miles from Liege". But didn't.
• Instead he attacked two police officers, women of 45 and 53, from behind about at about 10.30am on a lovely late spring morning on a pleasant boulevard in the centre of Liege, Belgium’s third city. Those two victims are Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and Lucille Garcia, 45. Their work involved checking parking meters. Soraya Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters who earlier lost their father, also a police officer, and are now tragically orphaned of both parents.
• First slashing their throats from behind, he then stabbed them both and succeeded in seizing their handguns. (Evidently parking meter officers carry guns in Belgium.)
• A young man sitting in a car nearby was his next victim: he shot him dead too. He is Cyril Vangriecken, 22.
• The armed attacker then rushed into a high school building about 100 meters away and took two female employees hostage; one of them was a cleaner. He used her as a human shield in the subsequent confrontation with armed authorities. (He also, it is reported, "spared the life of the high school janitor he took hostage because she is Muslim, according to the woman, who was hailed Wednesday for her courage as she faced off with the madman.")
• Police were called. The school's children were evacuated as a gun battle erupted in which the prisoner managed to wound four of the police officers before they shot him dead.
• La Libre Belgique newspaper quoting police source says the Moslem attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” – “God is greatest” in Arabic. Irish Times says Beaupère declined to comment when asked about that.
• According to De Standaard, a Flemish-language newspaper in Belgium, police suspect he also carried out the murder a day earlier of "a criminal associate whose body was found south of Liege".
• So is he a terrorist? The authorities are being cagey. "Prime Minister Charles Michel says Herman was indirectly mentioned in state security reports on radicalization, but did not have his name on a list maintained by an anti-terror assessment group" according to USNews.

Cyril Vangriecken, 22, shot dead while sitting in a parked car
[Image Source]

Some questions that come to mind:

• According to state broadcaster RTBF Herman, who was born in 1982, had a criminal record that included a number of convictions for theft, assault and drugs offences.
• A Belgian politician, Georges Dallemagne, quoted by Irish Times, said Herman was already on a police watch-list arising from his radicalization in jail and his conversion there to Islam. So why was he freed unsupervised? How realistic was it that he would peacefully come back to his prison cell?
• There's more disturbing background according to one newspaper source. He "had been jailed numerous times"; he "appeared in national security documents"; he was "extremely violent" according to prison officers. Does this amount to a profile? Does it trigger any defensive measures on behalf of society?
• Liege police chief Christian Beaupère told a news conference “The goal of the assassin was to target the police”. Is this based on something they knew ahead of time? Were precautions taken? Did the two murdered officers know he was nearby? And is that a full and complete statement of the motivation for this cowardly, worthless explosion of lethal violence?
• The police chief was asked to confirm that the killer shouted “Allahu Akbar” in the course of his moments in the sun. M. Beaupère declined to comment on the question.
• These are not the first murders of innocents carried out by petty criminals inspired to Islamist violence while incarcerated. 
• Reuters: "The national crisis centre, on high alert since attacks by Islamic State in Paris and Brussels in recent years, said it had not raised its alert level – an indication the man was acting alone and follow-up attacks were not expected." So does Belgium have a strategy for dealing with lone-wolf attacks? They're not entirely mysterious, after all - they have some glaring factors in common. Do the authorities know this? No one ought to subscribe to the view that all members of any specific faith community are plotting to murder people, but are there any patterns worth taking into account when safe-guarding cities and populations?
• The politician Georges Dallemagne, who evidently [Irish Times] sits on several Belgian parliamentary security committees, tweeted: “The supervision of radicalised prisoners remains tragically flawed.” How concerned are Belgians to change that dangerous state of affairs?

After the murders [Image Source]

The phenomenon of the lone wolf is not a new one [click for past "Lone Wolf" posts of ours] and no more mysterious than any other aspect of criminology. Too often, public officials seem to use the term after criminal attacks have thrust them into the news by implying that if it's a "lone wolf" attack, what do you want from us? And if radicalization - to use the polite and somewhat vague term that most of the news industry does - is a factor, why aren't there more indications in the media of what's being done to identify individuals who have undergone it? 

Which is more problematic: avoiding any public discussion of it? Or burying its victims and comforting their families?

And let's agree that Belgium, with its vast problems involving terror and lone wolves acting individually as well as in large, well-organized packs, is only slightly different from most of Europe. And not only Europe.

UPDATE Wednesday May 30, 2018 at 11:00 pm: According to this report, ISIS, the Islamic State terror group today claimed one of its “soldiers” carried out the murder of the two policewomen and a student in Liege, quoting the jihadists' Amaq propaganda agency. “The author of the attack on the city of Liege in Belgium is a soldier of the Islamic State,” IS said in a statement published on Amaq’s Telegram account a day after the attack. It said “he led the attack in response to calls to target the countries of the US-led international coalition” which is fighting the jihadist group mainly in Syria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The patterns and understandings they extracted include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He quotes a startling take-away:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which, to remind ourselves, is never suicide.

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

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

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

15-Mar-17: A vehicle ramming attack in Gush Etzion is thwarted... by bollards

After the attack vehicle came to a halt [Image Source]

Time to give thanks for the basic, low-tech security devices that save Israeli lives.

Around 3:45 this afternoon (Wednesday) south of Jerusalem at busy Gush Etzion Junction, a young Arab woman - really a girl - of 16 from Beit Fajjar was behind the wheel of a late model Ford Mondeo sedan with white Palestinian Authority license plates which swerved violently across the traffic divider from the opposite side of the highway and smashed at high speed into a group of civilians and soldiers standing at a public bus stop.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, this was one of the many Israeli stops where metal posts - bollards - had been installed to protect travelers waiting for a bus and to prevent what today's evident attacker had in mind. Her vehicle crashed into the posts, and the injuries to the Israelis watching in horror were limited to shock and abrasions.

The bus stops at Gush Etzion - a cluster of Israeli communities located roughly half way between the capital Jerusalem and Hebron - have been frequent targets during the past two years of (inaccurately named) lone-wolf terror attacks, many of them drive-by shootings and vehicle rammings directed at Israeli pedestrians and commuters. That's why there is a heavy military and security presence there round the clock.

In the words of a Ynet report:

The girl, from Beit Fajjar, rammed her car into a bus stop at the Gush Etzion junction, where several people were waiting, raising the soldiers' suspicions... IDF troops shot and seriously wounded [the driver] who attempted to carry out a terror attack... [Ynet, March 15, 2017]

The driver/assailant was taken to hospital by ambulance in critical condition. Early reports said she died of her injuries - whether from bullets or high-speed impact is unclear. Other Israeli reports from later in the afternoon said she was in fact alive and recovering.

Arabic-language news media name her as Fatima Jibrin Taqatqa. Beit Fajjar is located south of Bethlehem and adjacent to Gush Etzion. The head of its local municipal authority is also a Taqatqa. A quick Google scan shows numerous Taqatqas from Beit Fajjar who have been involved in violent Arab-on-Israeli activities. Here on this blog. we reported on another Taqatqa woman from Beit Fajjar who carried out a stabbing ["02-Dec-14: Yesterday's knifing attack at Gush Etzion Junction: prologue and epilogue"] and on a 19 year-old Taqatqa male who carried out a stabbing a year ago [here].

The version of events published by Ma'an News Agency follows the propaganda outlet's customary template. Headlined "Palestinian girl shot, injured at Gush Etzion junction after alleged vehicular attack", it includes the same video clip as the one embedded above, but describes the events a little differently:

Security camera footage of the events showed a car seemingly losing control at the junction, going over a median strip, and hitting posts near a bus station... Palestinian Red Crescent spokeswoman told Ma'an that the organization was unable to ascertain the health condition of the Palestinian woman, as she was taken away by Israeli ambulance services before Red Crescent ambulances reached the scene. Israeli news outlet Ynet had initially reported that the woman was killed, however the report later indicated that the woman survived the shooting, but was in a critical condition... [Ma'an]

Sixteen is below the age for holding a drivers license in Israel. A Wikipedia source says the minimum age for holding a drivers license in the Palestinian Authority is 18. Clearly this driver was not licensed to be wielding this afternoon's weapon.

17-Mar-16: This morning's Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack went by the book

The scene of this morning's stabbing attack [Image Source]

A young Israeli woman, about 20 years old according to initial reports, was stabbed a little after 11 this morning (Thursday) at a bus stop on the highway just outside the Israeli community of Ariel (population, almost 20,000).

Times of Israel says she was left in serious condition. Haaretz says she was rushed to Beilinson Hospital at the Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva, and that her attackers were shot and killed. Israel National News says she was stabbed in the throat. The Palestinian Arab news channel Ma'an, whose work product is almost entirely paid for by the EU and other Western funders, says her injuries come from an attack that is "alleged".

Though terror attacks probably sound pretty much the same as each other, there are a handful of aspects worth keeping in mind this time:

• The victim is a young woman. It is highly likely there were men at the same stop. Something about making women their victims holds a despicable kind of appeal to the people doing Palestinian Arab terror, and to those who send them.
• The attackers worked as a team of two. That has been the new standard configuration for these absurdly mis-named lone-wolf attacks for the past month or more, but rarely before. The attackers receive guidance and very likely more than that. The current guidance is: do it in pairs. It works better, more deadly, that way. There's some background in an Avi Issacharoff article: "No longer ‘lone wolves,’ Palestinian attackers pair up" [Times of Israel, March 2, 2016]. In his words, those behind the Arab-on-Israeli terror wave now believe "doing so with a partner or two at their side offers the possibility of causing far greater harm [and] helping to sustain the motivation to attack until the moment of action". 
• Issacharoff also believes Arab-on-Israeli terror number of attacks now mainly take place "from Thursday to Sunday". Today is Thursday.
• The target of the stabbing was the unfortunate young woman's neck. Stabbing Jews in the neck holds a special appeal too. For background, see "Videos teach would-be Palestinian attackers ‘how to stab’", [Times of Israel, October 15, 2015]
• Wondering how in tune with Palestinian Arab popular sentiment the stabbing, shooting and car-ramming attacks in general, and today's knifing assault on a young woman, are? As we reported some weeks ago ["14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"], and despite some bogus optimism we have seen in some corners of the Israeli media in the past two weeks, terrorism has the Palestinian Arabs firmly in its grip. We said this in that post: "The numbers show clear, unambiguous and widespread support for a violent, armed intifada against the Israelis: 60% support it today, up from 57% in the PSR September 2015 poll... The cohort most opposed to a two-state solution and most supportive of "an armed intifada and stabbings" is the one aged between 18 and 22. Two-thirds of Palestinian Arabs say they are in favour of stabbing attacks on Israelis." 

The Arabic version of the Ma'an news report about the attack an hour ago already confers "martyr" status on the two evidently young Palestinian Arabs who carried it out, and prominently displays their dead bodies in a photo accompanying the piece. A Hamas-aligned Arabic-language news agency calls the now-deceased attackers "youths".

UPDATE 8:30 pm on Thursday, March 17, 2016: Arab sources say the knife-attackers from this morning's assault are Ali Jamal Muhammad Taqatqa, 19, and Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Kar Thawabta, 20, both from Beit Fajjar, a village of 11,000, located just south of Bethlehem and whose chief economic activity is agriculture and stone cutting. Several dozen residents of the town were arrested two years ago on charges of involvement in shooting and firebomb attacks on Israelis.

UPDATE 11:30 pm Saturday, March 19, 2016: Please pray for the full recovery of Ofir Bat (daughter of) Einat who still has some way to go.

03-Mar-16: Behind the camouflage: more barely-reported Arab-on-Israeli violence

Characteristic of the genre, Palestinian Arab incitement posters
like this one feed into the self-perception of a David-vs-Goliath struggle,
disguising the armed nature of most of the lethal Arab-on-Israeli terror

Those sling-shot warriors appearing on self-congratulatory Palestinian Arab incitement posters have been doing more of their vicious and cowardly terror work.

(And yes, we are being facetious. As photogenic as slingshots and their users sometimes look, when it's terror that's on the minds of the attackers, they reach for axes, meat-cleavers, motor vehicles for ramming pedestrians, as well as knives, guns and explosive devices. The poster images are pure psychological warfare. Their effectiveness on people with poor understanding of events in our part of the world is significant.)

It's hard, in fact, not to notice how the pace of those attacks is rising. Here's a number of relevant attack reports from the past few hours. Most of what appears below has gotten scant news coverage in the news media other than in Israel.

• A knifing/clubbing attack in the Israeli community of Eli (we wrote about it here) some 24 hours ago: the victim has now been released from Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, and the two armed assailants, a pair of Arab males, high school students aged 17 are, as we said yesterday, no longer alive.
• At the perimeter gate leading into the small Israeli community of Har Bracha, two IDF guards manning the security booth were the targets of a knifing attack by a pair of Arabs around 7:00 pm Wednesday evening. The village is home to a small but thriving winery and to some 2,100 residents, mainly religiously observant Jews. Ambulances evacuated the soldiers to Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva. One was stabbed in the shoulder and is in moderate condition, according to a Jerusalem Post report. The second has wounds to the face. Residents had to remain in their homes as the search for the attackers got underway, who have not yet been caught. Reports say the attackers made off with the soldiers' guns.
• Early this morning (Thursday), responding to the collapse of a tree felled in heavy winds and rain onto Highway 90, a major north-south traffic artery, an officer of the Israel Police arrived to direct traffic safely around the obstacle. This happened in the Arab village of Uja, near Jericho. The village, also known as Al-Awja, straddles the highway. The police officer, a male in his forties, was then stabbed in the shoulder by a female. We have no details of her identity at this stage, though on social media we see claims that she is fourteen years old. (Not confirmed, as far as we know.) Times of Israel says she was promptly arrested "without incident", and will live to tell of her exploit. The victim was taken by ambulance to Ha'emek Medical Center for treatment of his injuries.
• In the wake of the police pursuit of the Har Bracha attackers (above), a police vehicle came under gunfire attack at Rehelim Junction, near Ariel and south of Nablus, overnight. A police officer is injured. His vehicle sustained damage. The site of the attack has a long history of Arab-on-Israeli violence [Google listing] including shootings, stabbings and bombings. Perhaps sling-shot attacks too, but they tend to have small impact except in poster form.

Reality [See this October 2015 post for more]

An analysis by Avi Issacharoff in Times of Israel today ["No longer ‘lone wolves,’ Palestinian attackers pair up"] looks at how a growing number of those misleadingly-labeled "lone wolf" Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks are being carried out by cells of two or three. He refers to other patterns that he has identified - no need for us to publicize them - and to the enabling role of the social media, and Facebook in particular. 

But he oddly fails to note, which we think is the key characteristic, that many, probably most, of these armed attacks are done by Arab children and teens. That's not a random observation but a reflection of the role played by religious and political leaders in weaponizing the most vulnerable segment of their populations. We view this as a plague that is costing Palestinian Arab society more dearly than seems to be recognized in the public discourse that we get to see. There's very little sign of self-awareness or of where they are being led.

29-Feb-16: Unmasking what's driving those blood-lusting lone-wolf attackers

A caricature that has recently gone viral in Arab society:
"I carry in my womb the martyr-to-be"

Here's how the executive summary of a powerful cluster of analytical essays ["The Knife and the Message: The Roots of the New Palestinian Uprising"] published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs ends:

Israel will learn and adapt to this new situation as it has done in the past. The question is whether the Palestinian leadership will do the same and come around to understanding that the monster they have created, a generation of children led to believe in the culture of death, is not in their own best interest. Israel can control the damage, but only Fatah and the PA can end it, and it is they, the Palestinian leadership, who have to do so if the path to negotiation and conciliation is to be opened again, and this endless and senseless wave of violence extinguished.

It's one of the most important critiques of what's going wrong in this part of the world that most people will have read.

Please delve into it, and share it as widely as you can - particularly if you have friendly relations with journalists, reporters and editors. And if you care for the welfare of other people's children and our shared futures.

01-Jan-16: Storms ahead? Not everyone notices

Abbas and the inner circle of PA insiders [Image Source]

Soaking rain and the first significant storm of the winter season are greeting the first day of 2016 here in Jerusalem. There's a chance of snow tonight. Understandably, such are the matters on Israeli minds as people hunker down for an indoor Shabbat. 

Meanwhile in the news media, at least for those watching for such things, there are indications of approaching turbulence of a different sort. 

The Jerusalem Post this past Monday quoted a report by Gal Berger on Israel Radio's Reshet B of the same day [Hebrew audio of the Berger article here]. Berger recounts things he heard from an un-named "senior Palestinian official". In our words, here are some of them:

• Voices within the leadership of Fatah are currently calling for the resumption of 'suicide bombing' attacks. For the moment, Fatah's view is to wait before acting - in the words of the JPost report, to "see which way the wind is blowing". Fatah, in case it's forgotten, is headed by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
• The current street violence, the Arab-on-Israeli attacks carried out daily for the past three months, is "sooner or later" going to be escalated . Fatah sees itself as being "forced" to "join the current uprising".
• Those same insiders, realizing that the young people who are at the bleeding edge of the current violence directed at Israelis, see an impending collapse of the PA establishment and its power. This is, naturally, Israel's fault.
• What's likely to happen next is a rechanneling of the Arab-on-Israeli street violence into physical attacks against the Palestinian Authority regime. When that happens, the Palestinian Arab political leadership - again, out of having "no choice" in the matter - will redefine how it relates to Israel. (He gave no indication of what the Palestinian Arabs would do for water, electricity, medical care and a long list of other civil services in the wake of such a redefinition.)
• "Lone wolf attacks" will proliferate and this will be "very difficult" to control.
• It's foreseeable that internal rivalries among the numerous Palestinian Arab factions and their competing with one other for popular support will produce bad outcomes. Israel's fault, again.

We have commented several times in the last few weeks about the incitement emanating directly from the PA's Abbas. When he stands in front of foreign media and global gatherings of polite politicians, he's for peace, against terror and manifestly moderate. When speaking in Arabic to the people who groan under the burden of being led by him, it's a very different story, like when he notoriously praised the terror being done on Israel's streets by Palestinian Arabs:

We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr (shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah... The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours and they [the Jews, naturally] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." "01-Dec-15: PA president: When the subject is terror, double-talk and blatant hypocrisy work"

Incitement clearly works. We summarized an under-reported Palestinian Arab public opinion survey ["14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"] which laid this bare: 

• They unambiguously support violent, armed violence against the Israelis: 60% support it today, up from 57% in the PSR September 2015 poll.
• The cohort most supportive of "an armed intifada and stabbings" is the one aged between 18 and 22. That's also the cohort most opposed to a two-state solution. In fact, the notion of a two-state solution, so admired by peace-oriented outsiders (like the Obama administration and the EU) and by 63% of Israelis in a 2013 poll, is rejected by a growing majority of Palestinian Arabs (54% today; 51% in the September 2015 poll.)
• Fully two-thirds of all Palestinian Arabs say they are in favour of stabbing attacks on Israelis. 
• About the same proportion are of the view that Abbas, elected in January 2005 to a four-year term as PA president, holding on tenaciously to his power for the past eleven years and with no election on the horizon, must resign. This doesn't happen because, as the poll shows, if presidential elections were held today, the Hamas candidate would defeat Abbas comprehensively. 

Another sign of very bad weather ahead: Hamas, according to Ynet yesterday (Thursday), has ordered its cells in the West Bank to launch "suicide" bombings against Israeli targets, and will target senior officials in the Israeli political and defence establishments. It is specifically targeting victims inside the so-called Green Line, the 1947 cease-fire line that is mischievously referred to often in the news media as the 1967 borders.

Hamas says it has "sleeper" cells in place and is now activating them. One such cell was the subject of a post here ["24-Dec-15: Another terror outrage narrowly averted - and Shalit Deal releasees are again at the heart of the darkness"] last week. Its members were discovered, interrogated and arrested in a joint Shin Bet/IDF operation in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Abu Dis, along with a sophisticated, well-stocked explosives lab that was preparing bombs for use against Israelis.

In yesterday's Ynet report, Hamas voices are quoted, saying 

the only reason the members of the cell were caught was that one of its members told a member of the Palestinian security forces of the cell's existence, asking him to obtain fake permits for him and the other cell members... [T]he other terror cells would not be exposed because their members have no record of security-related offenses that would make them suspects... ["Hamas planning suicide bombings, targeting Israeli officials", Ynet, December 31, 2015]

How separate are these Fatah/PA and Hamas efforts at ramping-up terror? Not as separate as they might appear. Times of Israel said yesterday that the reporter's unidentified source inside Hamas

claimed that it was maintaining ties with members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement... ["Hamas says it plans to resume suicide attacks in Israel"]

This ought to surprise no one. When the Abbas regime pays out millions of dollars each month in its ghastly, but mostly ignored, cash-for-terror payments scheme, who gets most of the money? Again, Reshet Bet's Gal Berger provides some clear answers via Jerusalem Post. He

managed to lay his hands on actual Palestinian Authority spreadsheets that show precisely which convicted terrorists behind Israeli bars the PA subsidizes and at what level...  Here are comprehensive statistics that illustrate exactly how the PA uses its resources – including moneys handed over monthly by Israel as well as contributions the PA solicits from international donors... Apprehended, convicted and incarcerated terrorists – including the linchpins of the ghastliest of mass murders – are paid substantial monthly stipends while they do time... The newly uncovered evidence, moreover, shows that the PA’s largesse isn’t limited to Fatah terrorists but that most of its outlays are earmarked for Hamas members... Organizational rivalries and political affiliations are no bar for PA generosity toward terrorists. This encourages bloodletting, and is part and parcel of the glorification of terrorism in the purportedly moderate Mahmoud Abbas’s Ramallah-ruled jurisdiction. The glorification – indeed near-deification – of mass murder is an integral component of incitement to terrorism by Abbas’s top hierarchy... It was never a secret that the PA financially underpinned the prisoners’ relatives, a fact that helped boost their heroic status. Now, however, we know exactly who gets what, down to such details as how much is deposited when into which particular account in which particular bank... The PA ’s own paperwork shows unambiguously that tens of millions of dollars are shelled out every month to imprisoned terrorists and their relations – at a time in which Abbas moans that Ramallah can’t make ends meet. ["PA Spreadsheets", Jerusalem Post, October 10, 2015]

Several of the terrorists convicted of their involvement in the massacre that took our daughter's life in August 2001 are included in the PA payments plan.

Berger's revelations, and the PA spreadsheets, received virtually no mainstream news coverage when they were revealed in October. Now, with much colder air and many dead on all sides, we're likely to to reap the harvest of that willful neglect.

15-Dec-15: Unwanted questions that today's European terror arrests raise

Coulibaly: How lone was he? [Image Source]

What do we know about the terrorists behind the bloody attacks in Paris on a kosher food-market in January, and on multiple Paris restaurant and concert venue targets on Friday, November 13? Less than we need to know. Less than most people think we know.

There's a wave of terror-related arrests going on in Western Europe today.

Concerning those multiple Paris massacres that cost the lives of 130, here's what the news services say today:

But three of the nine attackers have yet to be identified, including two of the three suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France stadium, who appear to have used fake passports to sneak into Europe posing as refugees... Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French citizen thought to have played a key logistical role, is still on the run and subject to an international arrest warrant... [Aljazeera, December 15, 2015]

There has been anxious debate inside Europe over the need to review its internal open border policies. Some politicians and policy-makers and plenty of observers, have been asserting that the terrorist attackers were born in the EU or had EU citizenship, which is another way of suggesting that terror-minded people sneaking into Europe posing as refugees is not the essence of the problem.

But if the hordes penetrating Europe from the Arab world - not all of them, but that's hardly the point - are more involved in terror than many want to believe, then the challenges facing governments and police are orders of magnitude more complicated. It's not a viewpoint that brings much joy. But it might be inescapable.

It was also widely publicized back in January that those Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher terrorists were "self-radicalized" (a very difficult expression to parse) and essentially lone-wolf operators. Now we learn that two of three suspected terrorists in today's news headlines are being interrogated in relation to those Hypercacher killings where the mainstream view had been of a lone wolf attack done by Amedy Coulibaly, an Islamist.

Seen via the prism of today's developments, it's possible that both core assumptions are wrong. If so, the issue of terrorists posing as refugees might have to become a bi-partisan concern, not merely a political slogan.

11-Dec-15: The price of the Shalit Deal and the countries that help it keep rising

Mutual admiration society: Hamas' Haniye, Turkey's Erdogan
[Image Source]

It was always clear that the release of 1,027 convicted and imprisoned Arab terrorists from Israeli jails in the ill-conceived Shalit Deal would lead to, and has in fact caused, the deaths of numerous innocent Israeli victims.

What is less clear even now is the enabling role provided by certain countries in empowering a cohort of Shalit Deal graduates to emerge as key figures in a campaign of anti-Israel terrorism by remote control. The note below focuses on just four: Turkey, Qatar, Jordan and Malaysia.

A small flurry of media attention in the past day indicates that the worst of the deadly consequences of the 2011 Shalit Deal are still ahead:

Palestinian prisoners released and deported to Gaza, Turkey, and Qatar as part of the Shalit deal are organizing their own terrorist cells in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, according to a report on Thursday. The deported prisoners, who are members of Hamas’ military wing, are providing guidance and funds to these cells, Hamas sources told Ynet...  The operation is being run by senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri, who is based in Turkey... The exiled Hamas members also have created their own cells in the West Bank to incite, protest and clash with Israeli security forces... The sources said, according to the report, that the Hamas leadership in Gaza is pushing for suicide bomb attacks to be carried out in the West Bank and east Jerusalem...  Israeli officials are convinced that Hamas will make every effort to execute a large-scale attack by using whatever means are available to its men in the field. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior figure in Hamas' political bureau, told an Islamist-affiliated web site in Gaza in October that he was hopeful the current violence would escalate into "an armed intifada." ["Freed Hamas prisoners from Schalit deal forming independent terror cells, says report", Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2015]

Al-Zahar, Hamas foreign minister [Image Source: Reuters]

(We would add that Mahmoud al-Zahar, mentioned above, is more than just a senior Hamas figure. He's usually identified as Hamas' foreign minister in the media. Not being part of Hamas' armed "wing" doesn't prevent him from saying he is hopeful the violence now happening here daily will evolve into "an armed intifada".)

Quoted in the little-noticed Jerusalem Post article, the Ynet report written by Elior Levy, describes a shadow organization, largely independent of both Fatah and Hamas and with an intense focus on doing terror. Members of its leadership, taking advantage of the unjustified freedom handed to them via the government of Israel and the extortion made possible by the Shalit transaction

are using the connections they made in the villages and cities of the West Bank and East Jerusalem before they were arrested. They each operate separately, working with a contact in the territories, each in a different area. The expelled prisoners provide their contacts in the territories with funding and guidance, while the contacts form the cells. The fact the communication between the expelled prisoners and their contact in the West Bank is done directly makes these military cells decentralized and compartmentalized. These operations are led and financed by the head of the Hamas military wing's West Bank Division, Saleh al-Arouri, who is located in Turkey... According to the Hamas source, an escalation of the situation in the West Bank will provide the terror organization with a way out of the crisis it faces in the Gaza Strip. [Ynet, December 10, 2015] 

This emerging branch of Palestinian Arab terror has been evident for some time. The existence of an amorphous terror structure operating from Judea and Samaria and led by released Palestinian Arab prisoners was documented this past summer in a monograph [here] published by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, directed by Dr. Reuven Erlich (it's often called ITIC). The report focuses on three men, all sentenced by Israeli courts to long prison terms for terror, all freed and all currently engaged in plotting fresh murders from the safety of other countries. Two were released in the Shalit Deal; the third was released from prison in 2010 and took an active, perhaps key, role in the Shalit negotiations.

• Turkey-based Saleh Mohammed Suleiman Al-Arouri is a founder of Hamas' so-called military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. He spent 18 years behind Israeli bars until being freed in the year before the Shalit Deal. He was then deported to Jordan, moving on from there to Syria from where he had a hand in the Shalit negotiations. When Hamas abandoned Damascus, he moved on to Turkey. He's based there now as the person in charge of Hamas terrorist operations in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. He's also a member of the Hamas political bureau. He claimed credit in a public speech last year [here] for the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens. (Hamas' strategy of having ostensibly separate political and military "wings" aims to shield its terror-spouting leaders from from responsibility for Hamas terrorism - a shabby form of plausible deniability that confers fig-leaf protection for reporters and politicians seeking a cost-free engagement with the blood-lusting Islamist terrorists.) 
• Hussam Atef Badran, released in the Shalit Deal, living and operating freely in Qatar from where he often appears in global news media as Hamas spokesman. An Islamist terror insider, he has responsibilities in the fields of terrorist network management and recruitment in Judea and Samaria. ITIC says he also spends terror-related time in Turkey.
• Ahmed al-Najjar, convicted for the terror-related shooting murders of six Israelis, was also released in the 2011 Shalit Deal. He holds US citizenship, according to ITIC quoting an Arabic-language report from March 19, 2011 on the amin.org site, shortly before being let loose. Deported to the Gaza Strip, he moved on to Jordan from where he oversees terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria. The murder of Malachi Rosenfeld in July 2015 ["19-Aug-15: The road to Malachi's death and the decisions that made it possible"] is one of them. 

Hussam Badran, Hamas's Qatar-based spokesman, appearing on
Turkey's TRT television, June 2014 [Image Source]

Many of our readers live in countries that have ongoing diplomatic and friendly ties with the states that host these terrorists and their operations. ITIC describes how those states play an invaluable role in anti-Israel terror:

Communication between the handlers and the operatives in Judea and Samaria is mainly by phone or via the Internet. Money transfers are performed by utilizing people who hold an entry permit into Israel (for example, for medical treatment) and the Palestinian Authority. In some cases, meetings are held outside Judea and Samaria by means of a courier who goes abroad. In the ITIC’s assessment, Turkey and Jordan are the two countries of choice for these meetings. This is due to their geographical proximity to Judea and Samaria and the relative ease with which one can create a suitable cover story in order to travel to them. [ITIC Report, August 4, 2015 - page 7]

Turkey also provides a congenial setting for field training of freshly-recruited terrorists

Saleh al-Arouri and additional operatives at the military headquarters in Turkey are also engaged in training operatives recruited by Hamas. Some of the terrorist operatives exposed in Judea and Samaria in August and September 2014 had received training in Turkey on planning military operations and methods for carrying out attacks against targets in Israeli territory, in Judea and Samaria, and abroad. After completing their military training, the recruits were given various tasks and assigned to squads by senior Hamas officials in Turkey... [ITIC Report, August 4, 2015 - page 11]

We noted in a blog post a year ago ["27-Nov-14: Hamas terrorist ring is busted; Israel says the handlers operate from Turkey; Qatar is involved"] that several bloody attacks - along with even more that were thwarted thanks to good Israeli intelligence - would probably have been labeled "lone wolf" terrorism if not for the now-exposed role, mostly ignored outside Israel, of these terror manipulators working unhindered from Jordan, Qatar and Turkey.

And before anyone makes holiday plans for Turkey in particular, here's a reminder of some thoughts we shared here some months ago? ["25-Feb-15: Talking Turkey on terror"]

ITIC has collected evidence that Malaysia provides the Hamas terrorists with covert support (though Malaysian sources deny this), partly based on things the Shin Bet has said. Wasim Qawasmeh, a resident of Hebron and one of numerous Qawasmehs to be mentioned in this blog over the years for their passion for murdering Jews, was recruited by Hamas in Malaysia [details here], as were numerous other Palestinian Arabs studying there. Other reports have mentioned Palestinian Arabs having undergone hang glider training in Malaysia, intended to be applied to terrorist attacks against Israelis.

When we wrote about Malaysia here some months back ["28-Apr-15: In Malaysia, years of anti-semitic exhortations along the path to anti-Israel terror"] we referred to the nauseating incitement that has emanated at intervals from the country's prominent, though it has to be said somewhat bizarre, former leader Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. He was his country's prime minister for 22 years between 1981 and 2002:

"I am glad to be labelled anti-Semitic... How can I be otherwise, when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies..."

And this from Mahathir's speech to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference summit in 2003, published in The Malaysian Insider:

"[T]he Nazis killed six million Jews out of 12 million (during the Holocaust). But today, the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them"... adding this time that any sympathy accorded to the victims of the Holocaust was "wasted and misplaced".

Worth noting that Malaysia currently occupies one of the non-permanent-member seats on the
United Nations Security Council.

We plan to come back to the roles of Jordan and Qatar shortly.