27-Jul-18: A murderous Thursday night knifing attack in suburban Jerusalem; the killer, again, is a child

Image Source: CUFI

The Israeli community of Adam (also known as Geva Binyamin, recalling the name of the site on which it stands which is mentioned in the biblical Book of Joshua), located just a few minutes drive north of Jerusalem and 45 minutes by frequent Egged bus ride from the capital's Central Bus Station, is in stunned shock this morning.

As Times of Israel reports:

The Israeli man stabbed to death in a terror attack in a West Bank settlement on Thursday night was named Friday morning as 31-year-old Yotam Ovadia. His funeral will take place at 1 p.m. on Friday at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem. According to Israeli authorities, suspect Mohammad Tareq Yousef climbed over the security fence of the West Bank settlement of Adam sometime before 9 p.m. Thursday. He walked deeper into the settlement, crossing a playground area, where he encountered [31-year-old Yotam] Ovadia, and stabbed him repeatedly in the upper torso...  father to a 2-year-old child and a 7-month-old baby. The Brinks security company announced on their Facebook page that he worked for them as a technician...
A second resident, 58, was also stabbed after arriving on the scene. He was rushed to a hospital in serious condition but it was upgraded to moderate after doctors managed to stabilize him.
A third resident, Assaf Raviv, 41, went outside to investigate the disturbance and, realizing that an attack was occurring, shot the Palestinian terrorist three times, killing him. He was stabbed and lightly injured during the incident, and on Friday morning it was announced he had been released from hospital. The settlement committee on Friday released a statement praising Raviv’s bravery... 

Haaretz captures some of the Arab world's blood-lusting reaction:

In response, the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza said it welcomes the attack, describing it as "the appropriate response to the crimes of the occupation." [PRC is aligned with Hezbollah and with the government of Iran.]

And

Hamas said in an official statement: "This is an act of heroism and a message to all the heads of the occupation that attempts to uproot the spirit of resistance from the heart of the Palestinian people have failed and today's heroic action proves the unity of the Palestinian people and its common destiny. Yesterday three fighters were killed in Gaza and today the response has come from the West Bank."

And from a different Hamas source quoted on a Jordanian news site, a supercilious, general-purpose, one-size-fits-all self-justification for the barbarism:

"The operation today is a natural response to the crimes of the occupation against our people, and an extension of the ongoing uprising of our people," said Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanoua

The terrorism-friendly editors of the Bethlehem-based Ma'an News Agency have not yet managed to report any of this in their English-language edition but it's already headline news in their Arabic version (they understand their market's needs). Via machine-translation, we see they name the killer as Ahmed Tarek Dar Yusuf Abu Ayouch, 17, and frame the news as "the death of a boy". Other reports say he was younger than that. We won't post his photo on our site, but it's over here.

Unsurprisingly Israel-hating social media posts (like this one and this) refer to the cold-blooded knifer as "martyr".

Times of Israel notes that he comes from

Khobar, a West Bank town near Ramallah. The village is the same village the killer of the Salomon family came from, exactly a year ago.

They are referring to the savagery we reported a little over a year ago in "22-Jul-17: Friday night carnage in Neve Tzuf". (Do the British citizens of the English Midlands town of Walsall understand what they got into when they entered a twinning relationship with Khobar?)

What they ought to have mentioned as well, but didn't, is that Khobar (or Kobar or Kaubar or Cobar), a dusty village of about 4,000 people located about 10 km north of the PA administrative capital Ramallah, happens also to be the pre-imprisonment home-town of another notorious murderer, Marwan Barghouti, convicted on terrorism charges and involvement in five counts of murder in a criminal trial which we attended ["21-Mar-14: Allegedly objective journalism"]. It prides itself on having 25 of its residents in Israeli prisons.

Unlike the #WeaponizedChild teen who was lethally stopped last night trying to murder Jews, the older villager ["Who is Marwan Barghouti?"] gets his op eds published in the New York Times where they disingenuously call him "a Palestinian leader and parliamentarian".

There's much more in our post "18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?", almost all of it ugly in the most serious of ways. Admirers of a certain loathsome South African churchman ["Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominates Marwan Barghouti for Nobel Peace Prize"] may be interested in the supporting role he plays.

As often happens in the wake of lethal terror attacks inside Israeli communities, it's likely the IDF will enlarge (for a time) its visible presence in the communities and on the roads of Judea and Samaria and carry out very active investigations in places like Khobar.

This morning's reports suggest the possibility that the terror in Adam involved an accomplice and that a "suspicious vehicle" was seen leaving the community shortly after the killing. Ma'an reports (again - only in Arabic for now) that three villagers have already been taken into Israeli custody this morning in Khobar and names them as Nasrallah Yousef Mishal, 17, his brother Mohammed Mishal, 21 and a 42-year-old Barghouti male named Khaldoun.

A Friday morning Arabic news report says the knifer's home is being prepared for demolition by the IDF. On that issue, bear in mind that the perpetually-insolvent Palestinian Authority's Rewards for Terror scheme will be providing lifetime incentive payments to the family of the dead killer.

UPDATE 3:00 pm Friday July 27, 2018: If you're familiar with the nauseating, agenda-driven editorial skills of the Ma'an people, you won't be surprised with how they approach the terrorist attack in their slow-to-arrive English-language report on last night's unspeakable savagery in Adam:

"Israeli settler shoots, kills Palestinian teen after stabbing attack" is the nauseating headline they came up with. In the body of the report, they quote Arab sources who say the boy came with an axe and that was what he used to attack his victims, and to carry out the murder of Yotam Ovadia.

And with Arab culture being flexible in the way names change form according to circumstances, they now call the killer Muhammad Tareq Youssef Abu Ayyush. Being cautious in their customary way, Ma'an's editors don't call the high-school-age killer a "martyr", at least not in this shabby Western-funded outfit's English-language version. But for the less delicate consumers of Ma'an's Arabic version, martyr is of course what they call him. Ma'an's editors know their readership and its predilections.

UPDATE August 28, 2018: Haaretz reports today ["Israeli Military Demolishes West Bank Home of Terrorist Who Stabbed Settler"] that, last night (Monday), the Israeli military demolished the home of the stabber who killed Yotam Ovadia:

The Israel Defense Forces went into the village of Kubar in the West Bank and tore down the house of Muhammed Tarek Ibrahim Dar Youssef. During the demolition violent protests took place and dozens of Palestinians threw rocks and firebombs and set tires on fire, according to the military. The military responded with riot dispersal means, the IDF said. No injuries were reported. Israeli law allows the military to demolish the homes of terrorists who have killed Israelis. The policy has been a matter of some controversy, but is carried out on the argument that it serves as a deterrent against future terrorist attacks as it affects other family members living in the household...

The terrorism-friendly Palestinian Arab news outlet Ma'an covers the demolition extensively with photographs and video, editorializing that house demolitions "against Palestinians and not against Israelis, who have committed attacks or hate crimes against Palestinians, has only fueled more anger against the decades-long Israeli occupation. Israel has come under harsh condemnation over the past several years for its response to attacks committed by Palestinians on Israelis, which rights groups have said amounted to "collective punishment" on family members and entire communities in a clear violation of international law." Ma'an needless to say makes no mention of the lifetime stipends to which the parents of the stabber have recently become entitled under the PA's grotesque policy of incentive payments for the perpetrators of terrorism and their heirs.

01-Nov-16: Again, Pal Arab armed security officer in Arab-on-Israeli terror attack

The IDF's Focus security checkpoint near Beit El, scene of last night's shooting attack [Image Source]

When prominent voices in the Palestinian Authority regime go public with extravagant praise of murderous violence directed at Israelis and Jews (which they are increasingly doing and with less restraint than in the past) it should not surprise that the Palestinian street - the rank-and-file of ordinary Palestinian Arab folk, take note and respond.

Armed attacks on Israelis by members of the various PA security apparatuses, though rarely reported that way by the mainstream news media, are also a growing reality.

Back in January, a Palestinian Arab who was employed by the PA as a security officer (here he is in official uniform) and armed bodyguard for the Ramallah District Attorney, opened fire at an IDF checkpoint near Beit El in the West Bank. As Times of Israel recounted at the time, he drove up to an IDF security checkpoint (called "Focus") by car and got out, opening fire with his handgun. His targets, all of them IDF service personnel, suffered serious gun-fire injuries before one of them shot the assailant, Amjad Sakari, 35, dead. Two of the victims were described as being in serious condition with bullet wounds to the neck and thigh. All were rushed to Jerusalem hospitals for emergency care.

What happened next is instructive. The gunman's body, draped (as another Times of Israel report says) in a Palestinian flag, was brought from the Rafidiyeh Hospital in Nablus to Jamain, a village south of Nablus, for a martyr's burial. Throngs of participants in the funeral shouted "Death to Israel" as the religious functionary - presumably also on the payroll of the PA - who conducted the ritual intoned

"It is time for the machine gun, to shoot 500 people... Muhammad’s army will return"

The Palestinian Arab media, quoted by Times of Israel, reported on the participation of high-ranking PA and Fatah officials among the thousands attending Sakari's funeral. They included Nablus governor Akram Rajoub. No one suggests the "Death to Israel" messaging was repudiated by any of the participants. In fact, to illustrate the wall-to-wall support in Palestinian Arab society for this kind of undertaking, special praise from Hamas for the shooting attack came via one of its more notorious spokespeople, Sami Abu Zuhri in a press release.

Two weeks later, on February 14, 2016, another PA security man, this time a PA police officer acting with a companion, opened fire on a group of Border Police officers at Jerusalem's Damascus Gate:

The policeman and his companion, carrying automatic weapons, shot at a group of Border Police officers who were receiving their nightly briefing before beginning patrols in the Old City’s Damascus Gate area. The Israeli officers fired back, hitting one assailant instantly and setting off in pursuit of the second, who was still shooting at the officers, police said. The second attacker was soon hit and killed by police fire as well. There were no injuries among the Israeli officers or bystanders. Both attackers were residents of the West Bank, police said. The Palestinian policeman was named as Omar Ahmed Amru, and the other as Mansur Yasser Shawamra. ["One of shooters at Damascus Gate was Palestinian policeman", Times of Israel, February 15, 2016]

Which brings us to yesterday, and another lethal Arab-on-Israeli attack launched by a policeman in the service of the Palestinian Authority. This attack, too, earned praise from Hamas

“We welcome the heroic operation carried out by the martyr officer Muhammad Turkman. We consider [the attack] a strong message in the face of Israeli crimes.” [Times of Israel, October 31, 2016]

And it took place at the same security checkpoint as the one from January 2016:

Three Israeli soldiers were wounded, one of them seriously, in a shooting attack when a Palestinian police officer opened fire on them at a checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday, officials said. The gunman approached the Focus checkpoint, near the Jewish settlement of Beit El, and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle at the troops stationed there, the army said... The gunman was named as Muhammad Turkman, a police officer from Qabatiya... [The PA says] Turkman served in a “special forces unit... In a statement, the Hamas terrorist organization lauded the attack and encouraged other members of the Palestinian security services to carry out similar attacks ["Palestinian cop wounds 3 IDF soldiers in a shooting attack", October 31, 2016 | Judah Ari Gross in Times of Israel]

All of the injured IDF soldiers are around 20. All suffered gunshot injuries. One remains in serious condition at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Mount Scopus hospital. And since Ma'an News Agency gets lavish financial backing from several European countries, allow us to mention that its Arabic report of the attack at the Focus checkpoint (but not the English-language version) says Turkman, the shooter, was executed by the Israelis in cold blood.

Chief Palestinian "peace" negotiator Saeb Erekat
illustrating "the distance between the Israeli and Palestinian sides"
without, as far as we know, taking  actual credit for how wide and
growing it is [Image Source: Abir Sultan / Flash90]

How do the highest-level PA insiders, and especially the "peace-makers" among them, view wanton violence of the sort in which their security people engage?

For example: the PA regime's high-profile chief negotiator for "peace" (that's the word he and his team use), Saeb Erekat was quoted [here] in the PA's official mouthpiece news channel, a week and a half ago calling the murderous actions of terrorists "sacrifices... acts of heroism, [an] ongoing battle with the occupation".

This is the same peace-making Erekat who last year published recommendations for how the PA ought to go about achieving its strategic goals. They're worth thinking about. An excellent but little-noticed analysis by Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi, a respected Israeli commentator ["The Palestinian Leadership’s Regression in the Peace Process"] lays them out. Peace-man Erekat called for

• Strategic cooperation with the terrorists of Hamas and of Palestinian Islamic Jihad by means of integrating them into the PLO’s institutions.
• The waging of an all-out “peaceful popular struggle” against Israel. "Peaceful" is defined by the Palestinian Arab leadership as referring to local terror attacks.
• The rejection of all proposals for a settlement of issues - whether temporary or even partial - with Israel
• A escalating legal battle against Israel in international organizations and courts arena aimed at constraining Israel’s ability to defend itself against Palestinian Arab terror.

The list goes on and is worth a few minutes' reading. [UPDATE: See also "03-Nov-16: Saeb Erekat's heroes"]

For some of the terror-encouraging quotes and speeches of Erekat's boss, PA president Mahmoud Abbas, we refer you to Palestinian Media Watch which devotes several departments [here] to his ongoing public acts of incitement.

Lest anyone out there believes Palestinian Arab public opinion is somehow immune to round-the-clock exhortations to violence, bigotry and murder like those coming from the highest-levels of the PA ruling clique, take a look at what ordinary Palestinian Arabs say to pollsters from their own Palestinian Arab community. Here's a good, recent starting point: "18-Oct-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think and feel now?"

19-Oct-16: At Tapuah Junction today, a young woman, a knife and a familiar narrative

At the scene [Image Source]

The entire country is on vacation for the week of Sukkot (Tabernacles). But there's no vacation from the threat of terror attacks..

From Ynet today:

An attempted stabbing attack took place at Tapuah Junction in the West Bank on Wednesday afternoon. A female attacker approached the Border Police at the junction and attempted to stab them. They responded by firing, and the attacker was neutralized. No Border Police were injured.

Via social media sources, it appears the meaning of "the attacker was neutralized" is that the armed assailant, a young woman estimated to be 19 years old, was shot and killed at the scene. The attack took place around 12:50 pm this afternoon. Tapuah Junction [click] has seen many such attacks.

UPDATE 3:00 pm: Over at Ma'an News Agency, there's the customary spin-filled reporting, with "alleged" being the prevailing sentiment (the word appears five times in a short news report):

Israeli forces shot and killed a young Palestinian woman at the Zaatara military checkpoint in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus on Wednesday after she allegedly attempted to stab Israeli border police. The slain woman was identified by local sources as 23-year-old Raheeq Shajee Birawi from the village of Asira al-Shamaliya north of Nablus city...

The Arabic version of the Ma'an report [here] calls the girl (named رحيق شجيع بيراوي in Arabic) a "martyr", as do Arabic-language Twitter messages [here]. Ma'an's English version does not. That's the usual approach that this European-funded news packager takes in reports of thwarted Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks.

21-Jun-16: Martyrs, rocks and firebombs: Scenes from an Israeli highway

When a rock hits a fast-moving car, the damage is certainly serious
enough to be lethal: Aftermath of last night's assault on Israeli
vehicles on Route 443 [Image Source: Haaretz this morning]

There are two major highways that connect Jerusalem with the coastal plain, Ben Gurion Airport and the Tel Aviv area. One is Highway One, currently undergoing a multi-billion shekel enlargement and refurbishment. The other is Route 443.

In the early hours of this morning. according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report quoting Israeli security officials, a gang of Palestinian Arabs hurled bottles, rocks and incendiary Molotov Cocktails at fast-moving vehicles on Route 443.

"An initial review suggests that as the mob continued, nearby forces acted in order to protect the additional passing vehicles from immediate danger and fired towards the assailants," a military statement said. "Forces confirmed hits resulting in the death of one of the attackers. At the moment I am aware of one other attacker that was wounded and treated by medical forces and later evacuated to hospital. Two additional suspects were arrested." [AFP via Times of India - today]

Though the AFP reporter says this happened "near the village of Beit Sira", the description suggests to us it happened where the highway passes just below the village of Beit Ur El Fauqua, population around 1,000 people. (An Israel National News report reaches the same conclusion this morning.) We ourselves have been hit by rocks while driving past that spot, as have many of our friends in the neighbourhood. It has a reputation as a source of lethal violence.

Palestinian Arab "security officials" told AFP the dead person is Mahmoud Badran, 20. Times of Israel ["Palestinian firebombs Israeli cars, is shot dead by IDF"] says he is a resident of Kafr Qadum, east of Qalqilya. It adds that two other Palestinian Arabs were "seriously injured", quoting the same Palestinian Arab source. 

Several vehicles driving in the early hours of Tuesday morning were damaged as a result of the Arab attack. Ynet's report says of the victims:

An Israeli and two foreigners in their twenties were lightly injured and taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center overnight Monday when rocks and Molotov Cocktails were hurled at a passing vehicle on Route 443. The terrorists also poured oil on the main road... IDF forces were called to the scene and shot at the terrorists, killing one of them and moderately-seriously wounding four others. Three were evacuated to a government hospital in Ramallah while the other was taken to Hadassah Ein Karem. Two suspects were arrested and taken in by the security forces for investigation.

Associated Press, unwisely (having regard to decades of Arab news-reporting history - this sort of partial and biased journalism didn't exactly begin yesterday) basing itself on an Arab version of events, says

"A Palestinian official says a 14-year-old Palestinian boy has been shot dead by Israeli troops. Wagie Ahmad, head of the Beit Our local council in the West Bank, says Mahmoud Badran was killed and four others were wounded early on Tuesday when their car was fired upon by a military patrol. The Ramallah hospital says another person was moderately wounded and three were lightly wounded. The Israeli military had no immediate response. Israeli media says the shooting took place after rocks were hurled at Israeli vehicles, wounding three."

Haaretz, no stranger to bizarre manipulation of facts if there's a greater need, offers this headline: "Two Tourists, One Israeli Wounded in Stone-throwing Incident Near Major Highway". The vehicles that were hit and damaged were on the major highway. So were the victims. The only part of this that was near the major highway was the gang of thugs with the firebombs, bucket of oil, rocks and evil murderous intentions. That's an odd reason to choose that way of describing where this attack happened.

The editors and reporters at the Palestinian Ma'an news service, not so surprisingly, have a substantially different version of who did what to whom.

"Israeli forces shot and killed a 15-year-old Palestinian [they offer a photo] and injured four other Palestinian teens early Tuesday morning in the village of Beit Ur al-Tahta in the central occupied West Bank, after they reportedly threw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli settlers, lightly injuring them.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed the death of Mahmoud Raafat Badran, and added that three of the Palestinian minors sustained serious injuries after being shot by Israeli forces in the head and chest, and were evacuated to Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah City.
Initial reports said the fourth teen was taken to an unidentified Israeli hospital, but it was revealed later by Palestinian medical sources that he was detained by Israeli forces for interrogation.
Local sources in Beit Ur al-Tahta identified the three being treated in Ramallah as Dawood Isam Kharroub, his brother Muhammad, and Ahd Ikram Suleiman.
Local Palestinian sources said five teenage Palestinians were travelling in a car between Beit Ur al-Tahta and the nearby village of Beit Sira west of Ramallah when Israeli forces “showered” the vehicle with live fire, killing one and injuring four."

Amid the conflicting claims, we can safely express total confidence that the dead Palestinian Arab is either already a designated "martyr" or being upgraded to one at this very minute.

UPDATE Tuesday at 12:30 pm: Haaretz has an updated report now.

Palestinian Killed in Stone-throwing Incident Near Major Highway Was Likely a Bystander, IDF Says | 15-year-old Palestinian was killed and four were Palestinians wounded, three seriously, after two tourists and one Israeli were wounded along Israel's Route 443 | The 15-year-old Palestinian killed by Israeli military fire during a stone-throwing incident along a major highway was apparently a bystander near the site of the original incident, according to an IDF press release. According to the army, he was traveling by car with his family, according to an initial report conducted by the army that was released Tuesday morning. The investigation reported that stones and a firebomb were thrown at the highway leading from Jerusalem to Modi’in, near the village of Beit Sira, around 1 A.M. Oil was also spilled on the highway. The stones injured an Israeli citizen travelling on a bus as well as two tourists travelling by car. An officer and some soldiers from the Kfir Brigade serving in the vicinity were passing through. They noticed the injured and launched a hunt for the stone throwers. Gunfire was errantly shot at the car, in which the boy was a passenger, killing him, according to the report. Others wounded by gunfire were evacuated to a Ramallah hospital. The army still has been unable to say whether the injured include passers-by shot by accident or people connected to the stone throwing. The army said the investigation into the incident would continue in the Binyamin regional battalion serving in the Ramallah area. 

The Palestinian Authority identified the slain Palestinian as Mahmoud Rafat Mahmoud, a 15-year-old from the village of Beir Ur al-Tahta, west of Ramallah.  Abdul Karim Kassem, head of the village's local council of the Palestinian village of Beit Ore-Tahta, told Reuters that the wounded Palestinians were in a car "returning from a pool in a village near us when they came under fire." According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, four Palestinians were wounded by Israeli fire, three of them seriously. Three of the wounded Palestinians were taken to a medical center in Ramallah, while the other remains hospitalized at Ein Karem. Two of the wounded are brothers, according to sources in the village. [Archived at 12:40 pm, June 21, 2016] 

UPDATE Tuesday June 21, 2016 at 1:00 pm:

From Reuters: "Israeli troops mistakenly killed a Palestinian bystander on Tuesday while responding with gunfire to a petrol bomb and rock attack on Israeli vehicles in the occupied West Bank, the military said. An earlier statement from the military had identified the Palestinian as an assailant. The mayor of his village said he was a 15-year-old. The military said several Palestinians threw petrol bombs and stones at vehicles, injuring three civilians, on a highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that traverses the West Bank... Troops gave chase and "after an initial inquiry, it appears that uninvolved bystanders were mistakenly hit during the pursuit," a military spokeswoman said, identifying one of them as the Palestinian killed in the incident. She said the military had opened an investigation... Abdul Karim Kassem, head of the local council of the Palestinian village of Beit Ore-Tahta, told Reuters that Mahmoud Badran, the teenager killed in the incident on Highway 443, was in a car with other passengers "returning from a pool in a village near us when they came under fire". Another Palestinian was wounded by Israeli gunfire and taken to hospital in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The military said two additional suspects were arrested.

Who is the dead 20-year old mentioned in the AFP report above? At this point, anyone's guess.

24-May-16: Yet another knife-wielding Pal Arab teenage girl and her pointless, terror-driven death

Dead Pal Arab children are the logical culmination of a process that
starts in their schools and homes. Scene from the wildly successful
Pal Arab video "Birds of Paradise" [Image Source]

Monday afternoon and the pattern of Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks appears to be in one of its quieter phases. But it's a deceptive quiet.

On Jerusalem's northern edge, where the Arab villages of Biddu and Beit Iksa meet the security barrier, a woman approaches a security checkpoint. Police of the Mishmar Hagvul (Border Guard) watch her warily and when she pulls a knife out of some hidden recess and brandishes it at them, they are probably thinking back - fast - to the training which seeks to prepare them for attacks of this sort.

As Times of Israel reports it, one of them calls to her to stop; she keeps coming. One of them fires into the air to be sure the message is clear enough; she keeps coming. It's evident to the security personnel that she means to thrust her knife into any available Jewish flesh. So one of them fires directly at her and she stops.

As of today (Tuesday), it's not known what brought the woman to the scene. Her name and other personal information remained unknown until hours later. No identifying documents were found on her dead body. The Palestinian Health Ministry issued a news release last night saying the knife-wielding attacker is a seventeen year old female, and gives the English form of her name as Sawsan Ali Dawud Mansur. She's from Bidu. Her picture, which we will not publish, is online via this Arabic TV channel.

The Arabic-language edition of Ma'an, a European-funded Palestinian Arab news service, in characteristic fashion calls her "martyr", ensuring the pointless, useless steps she took that brought about her death will be retold in ways that guarantee yet more Palestinian Arab children will follow her example and very likely die. (In its English-language edition report, read by outsiders and not by villagers, Ma'an avoids the use of "martyr" today and in general.) In Arab parts of Twitter, she's described as "executed in cold blood". Martyrdom posters are almost certainly being tacked to walls throughout the PA's domain this morning.

For the girl with the knife, the
end of the road [Image Source]

It's unlikely the people doing the tacking will give thought to the process by which high school-age Arab youngsters - not a handful but many - are led to derive meaning from suicidal attacks on Israelis. It's simply their culture, and a matter about which, when the subject comes up, they are proud.

The rest of us, at least some of us, can't shake from our minds the thought of a society living among us and right next to us that literally weaponizes its children, hijacking their education [see "18-May-16: Does Pal Arab hate-culture education leave room for messages of tolerance and kindness? Let's see."] and wiping thoughts of a better future from their young brains, replacing them with a diabolical vision of the redemptive power of martyrdom.

14-Mar-16: Back-to-back vehicle-ramming attacks in Kiryat Arba this morning

Scene of one of this morning's attacks

A windy, chilly, stormy morning and there have been two vehicle-ramming attacks against Israelis in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli community with a population of about 8,000 on the edge of Hebron.

Today's terror assaults, though unlikely to have much impact in the West, encompass three of the four major weapon groups that have featured in the raging Palestinian Arab violence of the past half year: rammings, knifings and shootings.

Times of Israel says one person was injured in the first when the driver, a Palestinian Arab, "apparently attempted to run over a hitchhiker" shortly before 7:00 am at a hitchhiking post at the Elias Junction outside Kiryat Arba. Soldiers at the scene opened fire on the attackers and hit them. One soldier was lightly hurt by shrapnel.

Weapons were found in the car. According to Jerusalem Post, there were two "would-be assailants" in the vehicle, each equipped with Carl Gustav rifles. That's a name given locally to locally-produced, relatively cheap, widely-available automatic weapons modeled on a standard 9mm submachine gun used by Sweden's military in the twenty years after the end of World War II.

An Israel National News report - and a report on the Rotter social media site - says two Israelis were then injured in a second vehicle-ramming attack very close to the first and very shortly after it. The attacker there is said to have been "neutralized".

The theologically-inspired martyr count, so beloved of the many parties doing the inciting to murder within Palestinian Arab society, will have grown by several more "heroes" this morning. Each such canonization - via the Arabic media (check out the ever-reliable, martyrdom-promoting Ma'an News Agency report that's already leading their news today), via the work of village and mosque preachers and via the disgraceful abuse of political leadership on constant view in Mahmoud Abbas' office - ensures more dead and more suffering on both sides.

It's been barely two hours, and Ma'an's Arabic-language report already identifies today's thwarted terrorists this way:

The martyrs are: Kasim Farid Abu Odeh Jaber from Hebron, Amir Fouad Junaidi of Hebron, Mustafa Yusuf Taraarh 18 years of the town of Bani Naim.

For self-evident reasons, Ma'an's English-language report can be expected to demurely skip the "martyr" labeling when it eventually appears. But they will surely more than make up for that by the obsessive use of "alleged" in describing what their deceased "heroes" were doing just prior to the explosive violence that abbreviated their lives.

UPDATE: Here's what Reuters is reporting now [9:00 am Monday]:

Three Palestinians attack Israeli troops in West Bank, shot dead: army
Kiryat Arba, West Bank: Three Palestinians carried out back-to-back gun and car-ramming attacks on Israelis near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on Monday and were shot dead by the army, it said. Two of the Palestinians, armed with a handgun and an improvised machine-pistol, were killed after opening fire on a bus stop at the entrance to Kiryat Arba, the army said. A soldier was wounded in that incident. Minutes later, the third Palestinian rammed a car into an army vehicle at the scene and was shot, the army said. Two soldiers were hurt in the second incident, the army said, adding that two knives were found on the motorist's body.

24-Feb-16: Incitement and its harvest: What the numbers do and don't tell

Cause and effect [From a Palestinian Authority
government-controlled television broadcast]

Data from the Israel Security Agency (aka Shin Bet) published yesterday shows that this beleaguered country of 8 million saw an almost three-fold increase in people injured in acts of terror during the year just ended, compared with a year earlier.

Statistics, as families of the victims of terror know much too well, are a cruel and dehumanizing way to think about the losses that a society suffers when terrorists do their savagery. The bloodless numbers inevitably mask the complexity, drama and detail of the horror that has impacted the lives being reported - and not only of the victims but of those who shared lives with them.

But numbers play an important role and the trends they reveal demand to be understood.

Start with the number of Israeli deaths by terror: 20 in 2014, 28 in 2015. Year-on-year comparisons hide a lot of detail, but an increase of 40% is significant on any view. So is the breakdown of where the victims were found: by far, most were civilians: 25, comprising 22 Israelis, 2 foreign nationals, one Palestinian Arab). Members of the security forces killed in terror attacks: 3. Understand now why the apologists for the Palestinian Arab side call it resistance?

Hamodia notes how those victims were killed: 16 in shootings (of which 5 involved both shooting and stabbing); 8 by stabbing; 3 by vehicle attacks (car-rammings); one by rock hurling.

Injuries from acts of terror grew astonishingly: 53 in 2014, 239 in 2015. Putting some context around that, previous Shin Bet annual terror surveys showed the number of terror attacks rising steadily, then flattening this past year:

2012: 578

2013: 1,271

2014: 1,793

2015: 1,719

The "yield" of deaths and injuries per attack, the obvious purpose of all this savagery, keeps growing. In the past year, it translated into an average of five terror attacks every single day of the year including holidays and weekends, with Israelis being injured at the rate of nearly five every week.

The Times of Israel analysis ["Number of Israelis injured by terrorism jumps 284% in 2015", February 23, 2016] mentions, though barely emphasizes, that the army and police arrested some 3,100 Palestinian Arabs in connection with terror, and along with them

143 rifles, 34 handguns, dozens of pipe bombs, tens of kilograms of explosive material, and shut down three bomb-making labs...

Then it adds that a third of them were affiliated with Hamas. Since Israeli security forces don't patrol inside Gaza where Hamas is at home and fully in charge, we're speaking of a considerable presence by the Islamists of Hamas in the territory controlled by their arch rivals, Fatah, and the notoriously-immoderate "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas.

Shlomi Eldar, an Israeli analyst writing on the Al-Monitor website two years ago, said

...Shin Bet surveys determine that Hamas is attempting to build up infrastructures in the West Bank, particularly in the Jerusalem region, and that these are being based on Palestinians who were released from prison in the Shalit deal.

If Eldar is right, and the numbers bear him out, that's another unbearable outcome of the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Transaction that is, for the most part, buried in the media coverage in Israel and beyond it. He also mentions, and it's a factor worth keeping in mind, that

The involvement of Israeli Arabs in terrorist attacks was minimal this year [2013] as well.

There are two more data-points that keep going unreported or under-reported.

The president of all those Palestinian Arab girls and boys [Source video]

One is the number of posters eulogizing the terrorists who are killed in the course of doing these attacks - the so-called martyrs of the Palestinian Arabs. The anecdotal evidence from scanning Facebook, Twitter and other Arabic-speaking parts of the social media is that the rising tide of Palestinian Arab barbarism is happening against a sound track of constant incitement from the highest levels of the Mahmoud Abbas regime in Ramallah. The return on that "investment" is plain for anyone who wants to see. Not enough people do.

And two: the substantial portion of the Palestinian Arabs doing the terror who are minors and children. Click "Weaponizing Children" for more about that horrifying dimension.

11-Mar-08: After the carnage, questions for "moderates"

In a confusing and complex world, you can learn a great deal by understanding the process of glorification of individuals in someone else's culture.

Thursday night's massacre of teenage boys in a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem is the sort of watershed event that, when you analyze the reactions it generated, helps you understand the true nature of the forces at work. We don't like the expression "root causes" because of the way it's used polemically by too many people. But if there's a root cause for terrorism, hate-based education needs to be right up there as a contender.

Media observers and some politicians have for too long presented the Abbas/Fatah/PLO part of the Palestinian-Arab world as 'moderate'. How dishonest this is can be seen from the published and highly public reaction of the official daily voice of the Abbas party.

Mahmoud Abbas heads the Palestinian Authority. The PA puts out a daily newspaper called Al Hayat Al Jadida. None of that publication's readers is today in any doubt about the official Fatah/Abbas party line regarding the Jerusalem massacre which took the lives of eight students in a library of spiritual texts.

That's because they - the readers of Al Hayat Al Jadida - read Arabic. And now thanks to the indispensable work of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Media Watch, so can we.

The headline in its front page article reads:

"Killer of eight young men is a shahid [a holy martyr]"

The holy martyr's photograph covers most of the page. We won't re-publish that sort of disgraceful propaganda here. PMW have done a service to the thinking public by reproducing the Al Hayat Al Jadida portrait of the murderer here.

In their analysis, PMW's Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook point out that

"the PA is sending its people a straightforward message of support for the terror murders and the murderer. According to the PA interpretation of Islam, there is no higher status that a human being can achieve today than that of Shahid... In response to earlier PMW reports on the widespread Palestinian honoring of terror, Congress made it illegal for the US to give money to entities that "advocate" terror... Since a society's honoring of terrorists is one of the greatest terror promotions, and as the budget for the PA newspaper comes from the PA's general budget, the incessant honoring of this and all recent terrorists by Abbas's PA as Holy Islamic Shahids should render the Palestinian Authority ineligible to receive any American money under the terms of US law."

Abbas, whose doctorate (a surprisingly little-known aspect of the man's history) was earned in a study questioning whether the Holocaust of Europe's Jews happened, is no moderate. He never was.

Calling a cold-blooded murderer of innocent Jews a hero is no isolated aberration - not isolated in history (see the pre-war nazi poster above) nor in the world of the Palestinian Authority. The opposite is true. Such incitement is a matter of routine, and is done systematically and repeatedly at the highest levels of their society. It is in fact a cornerstone of the hate-based education without which such acts of terror would not be possible.

To substantiate this, following are a small selection (from a vast library of such appalling material) of theological statements about the supreme status of martyrhood by Palestinian religious leaders on official PA (Fatah) television and radio, once again courtesy of PMW:

Sheikh Yusu Abu Sneina, Al Aqsa Mosque:
"Shahada [Islamic Martyrdom] is an honor, only those who Allah desires, attain the privilege."
-Friday Sermon, Palestinian Authority Radio, Dee. 28, 2001

Dr. Isma'il al-Raduan:
"When the Shahid meets his Maker, all his sins are forgiven from the first gush of blood, and he is exempted from the torments of the grave. He sees his place in Paradise. He is shielded from the Great Shock and marries 72 dark eyed [maidens]. He is a heavenly advocate for 70 members of his family. On his head is placed a crown of honor, one stone of which is worth more than all there is in this world."
-Friday Sermon, PATV, Aug 17, 2001, several days after the Hamas Palestinian massacre that took the life of our fifteen year old daughter Malki

Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Razak:
"The believer was created to know his Lord to fulfill Islam... to be a Shahid [Islamic Martyr] or intend to be a Shahid. If the believer does not hope for Shahada he will die as in the Jahiliya [pre-Islam]... We must yearn for Shahada and request it from Allah. If we truthfully request it from Allah, he will grant us its rewards even if we die in bed."
-PA TV Friday Sermon, March 22, 2002

Sheikh Ibrahim Mudyris:
"We are not like you, because we do not desire life. If you threaten to kill President Arafat, we will pray to Allah: 'Grant the President Shahada [Islamic Martyrdom] for you."' Yes, we do not pray - like other preachers pray - for longevity for the rulers; here in Palestine we pray: "Lord, grant the President Shahada for you."
-PA TV Friday Sermon, April 30, 2004

Sheikh Imad Hamato:
"When a man sees one of his brothers being killed for Allah, a person with no head, no legs, his body completely burned. Intestines outside, fingers are gone... The most difficult thing which we fear is what the Shahids [Islamic Martyrs] wish for most of all. They ask Allah: 'Oh God, bring us back [to earth] to be killed by the Apache, so the planes will blow us up, that our heads will be cut off...' We shouldn't forget that Allah, praise him, in blessing the blood of the Shahid, He forgives him from the first gush of blood. And he sees his place in Paradise. He is shielded from the Great Shock and marries 72 Dark-Eyed Maidens (virgins)."
-PATV religious program, Nov. 3, 2006

Now to the questions.

• Did the mainstream media in your area report on this story? Their editors know about this incitement, just as we do. What does it mean when they decline to publicize it?
• The PA newspaper that did this is funded by the PA. The PA, Mahmoud Abbas' power structure, is funded by foreign donors, chief among them the government of the United States. Should the US be reacting in a practical fashion to hate-mongering of this sort? Is a slap on the wrists the response of choice?
• A week ago, the Bush Administration asked Congress to approve an allocation of $150 million to the Palestinian Authority. Are you comfortable seeing foreign aid being passed to the people who turn barbarians into national heroes?
• Will the $150 million create additional such heroes? If yes, who can then be said to have funded the process?
• Does a political party that actually glorifies the perpetrator of a massacre of school-children deserve anyone's support? Are they, on any view, moderates? Google has 4,452 news articles at this moment in which the words 'Abbas' and 'moderate' appear together. Click to see for yourself.
• If the official voice of the official power power that speaks for the Palestinian Arab people declares the murderer of innocent unarmed Jewish children learning the library of a religious seminary to be a martyr and hero, can we really say that only the extremists in their society support terrorism?
• And finally where are the Arab and Moslem voices authentically condemning - not just pretend-condemning but demanding substantive actions to stop the hatred, to end the idealization and glorification of the martyrs?

As we've observed many times here, knowing how to tell the difference between the terrorists and their victims is somehow more difficult for many people than it ought to be. But if we get this wrong, and fail to adequately understand the size of the threat posed by the terrorists and their legions of apologists and explainers in every part of the world, and then act on that understanding, we're liable to end up paying an unbearably high price.