08-Jan-19: In the wake of multiple murders, this violent Pal Arab village's economy just grew

Kobar [Image Source]

Providers of foreign aid to the always-insolvent Palestinian Authority - and the ordinary citizens who unwittingly contribute to the funding via their taxes - acquired yet another new beneficiary earlier today.

Assem Barghouti suspected of participating in the murder of 4 day old Amiad Ish-Ran and IDF soldiers Staff Sergeant Yuval Mor Yosef and Sergeant Yosef Cohen, and the injury of numerous others, was arrested this morning. According to Palestinian Authority law and regulations, since he was arrested by Israel for his "participation in the struggle against the occupation", Barghouti is entitled to a monthly salary from the PA of 6,000 shekels [at today's exchange rate, about US$1,637 - TOW]. According to PA law, his salary will increase over time to 12,000 shekels per month 
[at today's exchange rate, about US$3,274 - TOW]. Barghouti's starting salary is higher than most other terrorist prisoners, since he has already spent 11 years in prison for past involvement in terrorism. During his first term in prison, Barghouti received an estimated cumulative sum of 447,000 shekels [at today's exchange rate, roughly US$122,000 - TOW]. Additionally, according the PA law and regulations, upon his release, Barghouti was also entitled to a $6,000 one-time release grant and a guaranteed salary paid by the PA even if he did not work... ["Another baby murderer to receive fat salary from the PA", Palestinian Media Watch, January 8, 2019]

We have written several times concerning the tragic events leading up to today's arrest: "09-Dec-18: A shooter in a passing vehicle seriously injures several Israelis tonight near Ofra, north of Jerusalem"; "13-Dec-18: Another lethal Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack Thursday" and "21-Dec-18: After the terror attacks, the focus moves on as the quiet struggle of the victims continues".

Barghouti's younger brother, 29 year old Saleh Omar Barghouti

shot and injured seven Israeli civilians at a bus stop outside of the Ofra settlement on December 9. Among the wounded was a pregnant woman who gave birth prematurely. Her baby boy died three days later... [The two are the sons] of West Bank Hamas leader Omar Barghouti, from the village of Kobar... [Jerusalem Post, December 20, 2018]

That younger brother who was the subject of an intense manhunt for several days was arrested on December 12, 2018 when IDF soldiers, conducting a manhunt, intercepted a cab he was riding in. Saleh died in the subsequent shootout with IDF forces. A second Palestinian Arab suspect also from Kobar, Wa’ed Barghouti, was arrested separately shortly afterward.

Image Source

The Barghouti's home village of Kobar (also written Cobar, Kaubar and Khobar), controlled by the Palestinian Authority and located about 10 km north of its seat of government, Ramallah, has a population about 3,500 (as of  2007). 

Almost all of them belong to one of eight family-clans of which the most prominent is the Barghoutis. 

For a thinly-populated Palestinian Arab place, it possesses a rich and strikingly repellent charge-sheet:

• Kobar prides itself (when we checked last July) on having no fewer than 25 of its townspeople incarcerated in Israeli prisons. 
• The murderous Barghoutis are close clansmen of, and from the same village (Kobar) as, Marwan Barghouti: convicted murderer, former acolyte of Yasser Arafat and Bishop Desmond Tutu's favored candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. See "04-Apr-17: Something you rarely read about Marwan Barghouti the killer"; and "18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?". 
• In relation to Marwan Barghouti, we feel we have a personal account. He personally laid out $500 [archived source quoting a 2004 Jerusalem Post report] for the making of the explosive-filled guitar case that was brought to, and exploded inside, Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria destroying it on August 9, 2001 and killing fifteen innocent people including our daughter Malki. 
• When another clansman from Kobar, Bilal Barghouti, a senior Hamas operative, was on the run from the Israeli security forces because of his involvement in the massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria (he was later convicted for his part), Marwan Barghouti sheltered him for a time in his home. Bilal Barghouti said for the record that, during his stay there, "he saw a number of weapons, and when he left the house Barghouti armed him with a gun for his use." [Source: CAMERA] Marwan Barghouti is an unindicted accessory after the fact to the Sbarro murders. 
• (The Sbarro bombmaker was Abdullah Barghouti, yet another a clansman though we don't think this native of Kuwait ever lived in Kobar. Some background: "20-Jun-13: Abdullah Barghouti, terrorist, bomb-maker, killer of 66 innocents, has some demands".) 
• Another clansman from Kobar: Na'el Barghouti whose background is here: "23-Feb-17: The fate of another Shalit Deal murderer and what this means for peace". Starting his career in terror with Fatah back in 1978, he converted as a prisoner to become a religious extremist and now owes his allegiance to the Islamist terrorists of Hamas. 
• Kobar is located close to the Israeli community of Halamish (also known as Neve Tuf) where three members of one family, the Salomons, were slaughtered as they sat down to their Sabbath evening meal two summers ago. The attacker was from the Barghouti's home town: 

Omar al-Abed, 19, from a Palestinian Arab settlement called Kobar - the home village of the notorious convicted Palestinian Arab terrorist Marwan Barghouti - jumped the fence in the dark and made his way to one of the nearby, brightly-lit houses. He burst into the home around 9:30 pm brandishing a kitchen knife he had purchased earlier in the day for what he admitted to be an intended knife attack on Jews... Times of Israel says the Salomons were celebrating the birth of a baby boy in the family. Also that El'ad's wife, Michal, managed to flee from the carnage and protect their five children behind a locked door in the house from where she called police. That same report quotes the 19 year-old murderer saying he was driven to carry out the killings by the incitement of "the imams on the Temple Mount". This statement ought to be getting much media amplification but almost certainly will not... ["22-Jul-17: Friday night carnage in Neve Tzuf"]

• Also from Kobar: Muhammed Tarek Ibrahim Dar Youssef whom we profiled in "27-Jul-18: A murderous Thursday night knifing attack in suburban Jerusalem; the killer, again, is a child". It's believed Kobar is where the arsonists who set the fires that destroyed a depressingly large number of Neve Tzuf's homes came from ["27-Nov-16: What lies behind the conflagration"].

For reasons best known to certain kinds of Brits, the English West Midlands industrial town of Walsall in Staffordshire chose to establish a twinning relationship with Kobar which is still in operation. What each side gets from this borders on the frankly disturbing.

Kobar's economic basis was bleak as of 2011 which is when some detailed analysis was published. Some 62.5% of its population were categorized at the time as "not economically active". The village was reported to have (and this is the whole list) an olive oil-press and two stone quarries, 14 grocery stores, one fruit and veg store, five "professional workshops", three service stores, and one shop for agricultural tools [source].

We have not yet found published data to show what share of daily life in this violent place is sustained by lifetime Pay-to-Slay stipends from the Palestinian Authority. Whatever it is, it grew larger today.

Thanks, Europe.

22-Jul-17: Friday night carnage in Neve Tzuf

Elad Salomon Z"L, pictured with his wife Michal, was murdered at his parents'
Sabbath table on Friday night [Image Source]

The Friday night news from Neve Tzuf (often called Halamish which is the Hebrew word for flint) is devastating.
A man, Omar al-Abed, 19, from a Palestinian Arab settlement called Kobar - the home village of the notorious convicted Palestinian Arab terrorist Marwan Barghouti - jumped the fence in the dark and made his way to one of the nearby, brightly-lit houses. He burst into the home around 9:30 pm brandishing a kitchen knife he had purchased earlier in the day for what he admitted to be an intended knife attack on Jews.

Finding a family seated at their Shabbat dinner, he launched a frenzied attack and managed to stab four family members. We know now that they are Yosef Zvi Salomon, 70: his wife Tova, 68; their daughter Haya Esther Salomon, 46; and their son El'ad Menachem Salomon, 36 and the father of five young children.

Tova is seriously injured and underwent emergency surgery in Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center last night. After surgery, she was told that her husband and two of their children had succumbed to their injuries. The older Salomons have three other children.

Times of Israel says the Salomons were celebrating the birth of a baby boy in the family. Also that El'ad's wife, Michal, managed to flee from the carnage and protect their five children behind a locked door in the house from where she called police.

That same report quotes the 19 year-old murderer saying he was driven to carry out the killings by the incitement of "the imams on the Temple Mount". This statement ought to be getting much media amplification but almost certainly will not.

And from another source, it appears he had been under recent suspicion of terrorist plans and was arrested three months ago by PA security forces, spending the next two weeks in PA detention where he was "violently interrogated about alleged plans to attack Israelis before he was released." His father described the son's motivation - that he:

was upset over the loss of Palestinian lives following violent clashes over escalating tensions at the Temple Mount and wanted to protect the “honor” of the Jerusalem holy site. “The honor of Muslims is only the Haram,” Mohammed al-Abed said. “If it’s gone, the Muslims’ honor is gone. This was the motive for my son.”

Honor. It's a value that underlies a colossal amount of bloodshed in their culture.

In a Facebook post prior to the attack, the knifer said

he expected to be killed in the attack. He wrote that he wanted his body to be covered by a banner of the Hamas terror group and a photo of Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat... [Times of Israel]

The Islamist terror movement in Gaza wasted no time aligning itself with the murderer:

Hamas issued a statement this evening welcoming the attack, which they called "heroic." According to Hamas, the attack followed "Israel's violation of the rights of our people in Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque." [Ynet]

It's been a big weekend for the stabber's family. Ismail Haniyeh, who became the head of the Hamas terrorists in May 2017, phoned the father and, quoted here, said "Your son brought pride to the nation."

Fatah, desperate not to fall too far behind in the terrorism stakes, issued its own statement [here] praising the Arab-on-Israeli killings. Mahmoud Abbas who heads Fatah in addition to being the PA's President-for-Life may yet condemn the stabbing-killings because... well, because he can. And doing that, in a cruel, superficial and hypocritical world, has its uses. But also because the mainstream news media routinely avoid pointing out the brazen, chronic contradictions in the man's stance on terror: advocates for it in his Arabic messaging, while claiming to be against it when talking to the non-Arabic media. This works.

It's a hard neighbourhood in which to live: all of Neve Tzuf's residents had to briefly abandon their community eight months ago ["27-Nov-16: What lies behind the conflagration"] when wild fires destroyed a depressingly large number of the community's homes.

Neve Tzuf is located across the highway and an easy stroll from Nabi Saleh, the Tamimi clan's base of operations about which we wrote "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"; "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters"; and "01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists".

23-Feb-17: The fate of another Shalit Deal murderer and what this means for peace

New Yorkers standing up for the rights of another unrepentant, convicted
Islamist murderer/"political prisoner" - January 2017 [Image Source}

A Ma'an News Agency report ["Longest-serving Palestinian prisoner resentenced to life in prison plus 18 years", February 23, 2017] throws some light on how the catastrophic Shalit Deal is viewed in Palestinian Arab circles.

It starts by focusing on Nael Barghouthi, 59, whom it terms "the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner". It says he was sentenced yesterday by an Israeli court to life in prison with an additional 18-year sentence, and quotes the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society as its source.

PPS said in a statement that the court had ruled that Barghouthi, 59, was to serve the remainder of his previous sentence received prior to his short-lived release in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap deal between Israel and the Hamas movement. Israeli forces first detained Barghouthi, who is from the village of Kobar in the central occupied West Bank district of Ramallah, in 1978 when he was 20 years old for alleged membership in an armed resistance group. After being released as part of a prisoner swap exchanging Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit with more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, he was redetained in June 2014 when Israeli authorities claimed that he had broken the terms of his release, and was sentenced to 30 months in prison... However, he remained in Israeli custody after a military court rejected an appeal to release him in January... [Ma'an]

It then offers this piece of unsubstantiated analysis:

Since the Shalit deal, Israel has initiated mass detention campaigns to bring hundreds of former prisoners released in the exchange back into Israeli custody, in violation of the agreement.

Violation? Here's what really happened.

In October and November of 2011, some 1,027 convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists were released from their Israeli prison cells as part of the Hamas-driven extortion of the government of Israel to have a hostage, Gilad Shalit, freed. We know this as the Shalid Deal and have expressed our outrage repeatedly at the violation of fundamental principles of justice that this catastrophic transaction represents [see "13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone" and our previous posts listed there]. The Arabs have recently taken to avoiding the Shalit label and instead call it the Wafa al-Ahrar prisoner exchange. (Orwell would have appreciated the double-speak of applying "exchange" to an act of cold-blooded and illegal extortion based on the holding of a hostage in an underground cellar for five years.)

All of them were let loose on explicit conditions. In some cases, the prisoners signed a document acknowledging those conditions which we know (from personally inspecting some of the documents) varied from convict to convict. (Na'el Barghouti's sentence commutation was certainly subject to conditions as an October 2011 Christian Science Monitor article made clear.) In many cases, for instance, the conditions included a restriction on where the terrorists could and could not live.

In every case, the commutations of sentence - note carefully: not pardons - were conditioned on the terrorists not returning to do more terror. Breaching that condition rendered the terrorists automatically liable to being returned to their cells and serving the remainder of the sentence. No fresh hearing, no parole, no flexibility.

In the Israel Prison Service table of prisoners walking free in the Shalit Deal, the name of prisoner 959266958 is given as Na'al Salah Abdullah Barghuti (in Hebrew: נאאל ברגותי סאלח עבדללה). The Ma'an editors say he was behind bars for

alleged membership in an armed resistance group.

That's the sort of disingenuous nonsense in which they routinely engage, along with calling every act of Arab-on-Israel terror "alleged" and most convicted murderers of Israelis "political prisoners". A Ynet report at the time conveys what anyone who looked up the prisoner's name in the widely-circulating IPS papers (or Wikipedia) would have known: that 

Nael al-Barghouthi, the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner... was sentenced to life in prison in 1978, for murdering an Israeli security officer... [Ynet]

Other Arab sources have hinted a little more broadly at the homicidal activity that earned him a life sentence. A Pal Arab advocacy site [here] says he was arrested after

carrying out a commando operation in which one Israeli was killed.

Aljazeera adds that the

"commando operation" which killed one Israeli [was] near the West Bank settlement of Halamish... "After 30 years in captivity, we are just soldiers returning to our bases," he told the Palestinian newspaper Falastin.

(Israelis know Halamish better as Neve Tzuf, the Jewish community that most closely abuts a notoriously violent Arab settlement about which we have written several times [see "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns" and "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters".]

MEMO said he

joined an operation in June 1978 against military targets. Following their arrest, he and his brother were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Since the Arab media is famously free and loose with its facts, it's not surprising that a different article on the very same site [here] says he was

arrested at his family home in the village of Kubar on 4th April 1978 and sentenced to life imprisonment

which if true would mean he was arrested two months before the murder of which he was convicted. (The UN Security Council may yet be asked to get involved.) As for Ma'an, even saying he was arrested would be giving too much credit to the Israelis. They consistently write of him [here] and other terrorists that they were "detained".

Why was the freed murderer, let loose in 2011 despite his uncompleted life sentence, re-arrested in June 2014. Ma'an simply says

Israeli authorities claimed that he had broken the terms of his release... [Ma'an]

And as we noted above, it claims re-arresting those freed terrorists was

in violation of the agreement [Ma'an]

between Israel and the outlawed terrorists of Hamas. But it was in fact very much in accordance with the conditions of the commutation of sentence and therefore the terms agreed. (Haaretz refers to a hearing which considered his involvement with Hamas and with financing terror activities.) Ma'an then quotes a Hamas spokesperson saying

the Israeli decision to resentence Barghouthi was "another crime added to the criminal record of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people." He added that the decision was a "futile attempt to break the will of our people and stop their endeavor to gain freedom." [Ma'an]

No it wasn't another crime. It wasn't any crime. It was the straight-forward result of him breaching the terms of the disgraceful, unconscionable deal which got him his freedom. A Palestinian Arab source, Samidoun, says several dozen Shalit Deal beneficiaries have been sent back to Israeli prisons, some (we assume) fated to complete their original sentences. It names them as

Nidal Zaloum; Abd El-Men’em Othman To’meh; Majdi Atieh Suleiman ‘Ajouli; Ayed Khalil; Samer El-Mahroum; Alaa El-Bazyan; Adnan Maragha; Nasser Abedrabbo; Safwan Oweiwi; Rabee’ Barghouthi; Suleiman Abu Eid; Ibrahim Shalash; Ibrahim Al-Masri; Zuheir Sakafi; Ahmad Al-‘awawdeh; Bassam Na’im Al-Natsheh Abu Eid; Mahmoud Al-Swaiti; Mu’amar Al-Ja’bari; Khaled Makhamra; Abbas Shabaneh; Rasmi Maharik; Nayef Shawamreh; Na’eem Masalmeh; Mu’az Abu Rmouz; Amer Moqbel; Ashraf Al-Wawi; Muhamad Barakat; Ya’koub Al-Kilani; Aref Fakhouri; Waheeb Abu Al-Rob; Muhamad Saleh El-Rishek; Mu’amar Ghawadra; Imad Mussa; Abdelrahman Salah; Ashraf Abu El-Rob; Wael Jalboush; Nidal Abdelhaq; Taha Al-Shakhsheer; Zaher Khatatbeh; Hamza Abu Arkoub; Mahdi El-Assi; Shadi Zayed Odeh; Jamal Abu Saleh; Ismail Hijazi; Rajab Tahan; Samer Issawi; Khader Radee; Imad Fatouni; Muhamad Issa Awad; Suleiman Abu Seif; Ahmad Hamad; Khaled Ghizan; Ismail Musalam; Yousri Joulani; Nael Barghouthi; Imad Abdul-Rahim; Fahd Sharaya.

(We have not yet compared them with the names in the Israeli records. Stand by. On the IDF's law site in Hebrew [here] there's useful discussion about how the military viewed these prisoners and the rationale for why they were deemed liable to be sent back behind bars.)

Barghouti is a hero today, not despite the murder that Ma'an is too coy to mention but because of it.

Palestinian Arab society demonizes those who speak of peace and reconciliation, and makes heroes of those who kill and perpetuate the hatred. There is no chance of better times as long as this is true. Na'el Barghouti started out as a terrorist with Fatah back in 1978. As a prisoner, he converted to become a religious extremist and, according to Ma'an, now owes his allegiance to the Islamists of Hamas.

The world would not be a better place - not our world, not the Palestinian Arab world - if men like these were handed back their freedom. Basic notions of justice (10-Jun-12: "Prime Minister Netanyahu: Honor the principles of justice and decency on which our nation is based.") dictate that not one of them ought to have gotten free via the kidnapping and ransom demands that were integral to the Shalit Deal.

The deaths and destruction that have followed have demonstrated via blood and tears how well-founded the outrage and anger at the catastrophic Shalit Deal were and are.

27-Nov-16: What lies behind the conflagration?

Haifa on Friday [Image Source: Bloomberg/AFP/Getty]

The New York Times' assessment of the massive fires that had erupted all over Israel in the previous 48 hours was summed up in these striking opening sentences of Isabel Kershner's report this past Friday:

Parts of the port city of Haifa in northern Israel were ablaze on Thursday as wildfires raged through the country for a third day, devouring forests, damaging homes and prompting the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
Asked how long Haifa was likely to be battling the blazes, Mayor Yona Yahav told reporters, “This is a question that has to be referred to God.”
Israeli officials said the fires had been fanned by unusually strong winds and made worse by a dry atmosphere, but they also said they suspected that many of them had been caused by arson and negligence. Dozens of people have been slightly affected by smoke inhalation, but no serious injuries or fatalities have been reported.
["As Wildfires Rage, Israel Suggests Arson and Asks for Foreign Help", New York Times, November 24, 2016]

For us, the tone of that piece was set by "Israel Suggests Arson" in the headline and the words we have bolded above: "slightly affected by smoke inhalation, but no serious injuries..." Knowing the scale of the massive blazes and which places were - and which were not - affected makes the wording appear especially shabby. It goes on to make mention of Israeli concerns, articulated by the government minister in charge of public security, Gilad Erdan, that

"the professional assessment was that almost half the fires were the result of arson."

For many, the details of that professional assessment might have been something worth knowing. But even though Erdan is quoted further down, none of his views as to how or why the government's people formed the view that arson has played a serious role are stated.

What is stated, in a style that we have come to expect from news channels that share the New York Times approach to the Arab/Israeli conflict, is a restatement of the familiar Palestinian-Arabs-as-victims refrain:

Arab leaders in Israel protested the widespread allegations that Palestinian nationalists were behind many of the fires, saying their land was burning, too, and they condemned what they viewed as unfair accusations against Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of the population. Ahmad Tibi, a veteran Arab lawmaker in the Israeli Parliament, wrote on Twitter: “I called Yona Yahav. Our homes are open to the evacuees. Sad and painful. Let’s join hands to overcome the fire and let’s also douse the flames of incitement. [NYT]

(Israeli allegations about "Palestinian nationalists"?!)

It's now early Sunday morning, and those fires and the price paid by Israeli society are very much in the news here. Much less reported are the very widespread sounds of celebration from right across the Arab world, particularly via the social media.

Click to view our tweet

On Friday we Tweeted [here] a link to a Twitter search of the Arabic words for "Israel burns", calling the many ugly posts a "glimpse into the hatred at the core of the generations-long confrontation of the Arab world with Israel". We also noted [here] that although the search results were all in a language most of our readers probably don't understand, "No Arabic language skill needed to absorb what's in the air".

Here's a situation update [Sunday November 27, 2016 at 2:30 am], with direct quotes from various sources. Note that the New York Times' choice of descriptor - the word "slightly" - somehow doesn't appear even once in any of these reports:

• As of Saturday night, security forces had arrested more than 35 people suspected of either arson or encouraging others to commit arson since Tuesday... Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) said Saturday that most of those arrested in connection with the fires are Palestinian residents of the West Bank. A “small minority” of the suspects are Arab Israelis, he added... He called the cases of arson “a new kind of terror,” and said that whereas in the past there was incitement on social media that “encouraged people to go out and stab and car-ram” Israelis, this new version “now encourages them to go out and burn people alive, burn communities alive.” [Times of Israel]
• The IDF and police captured a suspect that was sighted by a Nature and Parks Authority worker starting a fire in the north-western Etzion region. The suspect was handed over to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) for investigation. The IDF spokesperson's unit stated that during the night an IDF force near Dir Kaddis in the Ephraim region captured three suspects in a vehicle that had two full bottles of fuel, one empty bottle of fuel, a sack with fabric, gloves and lighters... [Jerusalem Post]
• The wildfires that have raged across Israel over five days have left at least 133 people injured, rendered hundreds of homes unlivable and consumed tens of thousands of dunams of protected parks and nature reserves. The Magen David Adom rescue service reported Saturday that among the 133 people treated by the organization for fire-related injuries, one was seriously hurt and three others were moderately injured. The overall tally is likely higher, officials said, as some people – one estimate suggested as many as 50 – may have gone to hospitals on their own for injuries such as smoke inhalation. [Times of Israel]
• Some 2,000 firefighters battled the fires since Tuesday, many of them working in grueling 24-hour shifts alongside 450 soldiers from the Home Front Command and 69 Cypriot firefighters... The battle to push back the flames marked among the most difficult operations ever undertaken by Israel’s firefighters. [Times of Israel]
• Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Croatia, Russia, and the Palestinian Authority have sent planes, helicopters, trucks, and ground crews to assist the some 250 Israeli firefighters and soldiers who have been working for days to extinguish fires in areas surrounding Beit Shemesh, Modi'in, and Jerusalem, as well as in Haifa, Hadera, Zichron Yaakov, Umm al-Fachm, Lachish, Nesher, the Etzion settlement bloc, and outside the northern town of Kfar Vradim... [i24news]
• Haifa was the worst-hit city from the blazes, with 527 homes completely destroyed, according to a Ynet News tally. Other reports have indicated a lower number, more than 400 homes, that were rendered unlivable in the northern city. Some 1,700 Haifa residents are not able to return home by late Saturday, Channel 2 said, because their homes are unlivable... Haifa city officials said Saturday that the fires ravaged some 28,000 dunams (6,900 acres) of land in the city since Thursday. The evacuation of some 60,000 Haifa residents from about a dozen fire-threatened neighborhoods on Thursday was said by Mayor Yona Yahav to have been the biggest such operation in Israeli history... [Times of Israel]
• In all, as much as 130,000 dunams (32,000 acres) of natural forests and bushes were destroyed, about 30 percent more than the territory affected by the Carmel Forest fire of 2010. A great deal of the Judean Hills National Park and the Kfir Nature Reserve were burned... [Times of Israel]



An arsonist evidently caught in the act on Saturday [Image Source]

• On Friday night, all the residents - 350 families - of the town of Neve Tzuf (Halamish) in Samaria were forced to leave their homes after arsonists set fire to 3 different locations throughout the town. Fifteen houses were completely destroyed and collapsed, while 25 other houses were seriously damaged from the flames. Four civilians were lightly injured, including two firefighters... [Israel National News]
• The fires that devastated Halamish were “apparently the result of arson by a gang of Palestinians,” Channel 10 reported on Saturday night. Security officials were quoted as saying that petrol bombs had been found at the scene... [Times of Israel] [NOTE: Halamish, known also as Neve Tzuf, is the Israeli community located immediately adjacent to the notorious Arab village of Nabi Saleh, about which we refer readers to "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]

And entirely as expected

• Israeli-Arab politicians said that the government was taking advantage of situation to incite against Arabs and the Palestinians... [National Post quoting the Washington Post]

Those "Israeli-Arab politicians" don't refer to a past history of arson as a tool of Palestinian Arab terror. But Elder of Ziyon does: see his excellent commentary along with newspaper clippings in a Friday post [here]. 

17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

Today's New York Times Magazine [Image Source]

If you want to affect how people think about an issue, putting your case onto the cover of the New York Times Magazine must be one of the most effective ways to go. 

And, given the intense competition, one of the hardest.

So if the editors of the NYT (108 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization; 30 million unique visitors per month to its website; the largest local metropolitan newspaper in the United States – according to Wikipedia) give you the cover of the prestigious Magazine, it’s a massive vote of confidence, a huge privilege, a platform of the most effective kind that (we're assuming) can't be bought for money.

Friends have pointed us to this week’s New York Times Magazine cover story, published today. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. 

It's a place the author calls “spirited”, where “on warm summer evenings, life… could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone.” He says “a pilgrimage” to this magical place “has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s”.

How can you not be captivated? 

* * *

But there is much wrong with the picture he conjures up. We know because for years we've been tracking the media’s romance with the community called Nabi Saleh. Sitting here and looking over the online version of it, we are livid with anger about what the article says. And what the writer and his editors carefully avoid saying.

Start with some background. The Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh describes the village of some 550 people in notably gentle terms. Centred on an old religious shrine to the prophet Shelah whom we encounter in Genesis as the son of Judah and grandson of the patriarch Jacob, it was a hamlet of a mere five houses in the late nineteenth century when the Turks ruled the area. It grew slowly under the Jordanian military occupation that started in 1948; then declined when Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967, and flourished and multiplied in the past two decades. 

Today, it’s the scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s English-language version, a place where things are done to passive inhabitants and for no apparent reason.

But when you go to the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia, you see a strikingly different emphasis. And note that it's not at all a direct translation of the English version. 

Created by different people for a different audience and different sensibilities, the Arabic Wikipedia entry depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that boasts of having taken a prominent role in two Intifadas, providing “hundreds of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the altar of freedom”. 

[August 2015 update: The link we embedded above to the Arabic Wikipedia page is to the archived version as it was on May 20, 2013. The Arabic Wikipedia page on Nabi Saleh, the village, has been substantially changed since then (see the revised version here), possibly in response to this post of ours. All references to the Tamimis and their passion for jihad, murder and martyrdom have been carefully removed. But they remain preserved in the archived version. We address this rewriting of history in a later post of ours: see "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters"]

The most prominent of the prisoners (Wikipedia's word) is a woman called Ahlam. It's a surname shared with almost every other inhabitant of the village: Tamimi. But it's Bassem Tamimi who is the focus of the article. He calls the Intifada launched by Yasser Arafat in 2000 “the big mistake… Politically, we went backward”.  

The writer helps us understand what kind of backward he means:

"Much of the international good will gained over the previous decade was squandered. Taking up arms wasn’t, for Bassem, a moral error so much as a strategic one. He and everyone else I spoke with in the village insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just don’t think it works."

Or to say it another way: they are entitled to kill the Israelis and have done so again and again, but it’s not that effective. A different kind of warfare needs to be adopted.

Half-way through today's essay, he introduces a figure who embodies that “big mistake”:

In 1993, Bassem told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh.

That's all he writes about Ahlam Tamimi. But we can tell you more. 

Ahlam Tamimi is a Jordanian who was 21 years old and the news-reader on a Palestinian Arab television program when she signed on with Hamas to become a terrorist. She engineered, planned and helped execute a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on a hot summer afternoon in 2001. She chose the target, a restaurant filled with Jewish children. And she brought the bomb to its target. 

The outcome (15 humans killed, a sixteenth still in a vegetative state today, 130 injured) was so uplifting to her that she has gone on camera again and again to say, smiling into the camera lens, how proud she is of what she did. She is entirely free of regret. A convicted felon and a mass-murderer convicted on multiple homicide charges, she has never denied the role she embraced. She justifies it fully.

Yet the only thing this New York Times piece says about Nabi Saleh’s favourite one-time resident is that she was an escort “who now lives in exile in Jordan”. Period. 

This is no mere oversight. 

* * *

The editors at the New York Times showcased this same happy murderer once before, six years ago. Then, as now, we  felt someone needed to push back. We posted two blog articles: “7-Aug-07: Hot House: Cold Truths” and “28-Jun-07: About sweet-faced young women”, and got a little attention for a while. But it was clear to us that those who thought they perceived greatness of spirit in the woman continued to think it.

One of the lives she snuffed out was that of our precious daughter Malki who was fifteen years old. Malki was the kind of young woman whose abbreviated life and its achievements ought to have entitled her to at least a fraction of the media coverage bestowed by the NYT editors and others on her killer. But that's not how things work. 

Those editors, and the author of today’s NYT Magazine piece as well, are evidently less moved by the innocent lives of the victims, lived and lost, than by the hypnotic power of symbolism. 

Of the lethal rock-hurling attacks directed at Israelis, the blood-drenched little village's Bassem Tamimi says

he didn’t worry over whether stone-throwing counted as violence. The question annoyed him… If the loincloth functioned as the sign of Gandhi’s resistance, of India’s nakedness in front of British colonial might, Bassem said, “Our sign is the stone.” The weekly clashes with the I.D.F. were hence in part symbolic. The stones were not just flinty yellow rocks, but symbols of defiance… The message they carried, he said, was “We don’t accept you.”

Creative. Stone-throwing as a symbol. People have been killed and (as recently as this past Thursday) critically injured by the rocks and cement blocks and boulders hurled by the 'stone' throwers. But we're being picky.

Perhaps "we don't accept you" is what people living far from the scene imagine goes through the minds of baby-killers and restaurant bombers. But from the vantage point of where we live, such innocent-sounding turns of phrase leave us dumbfounded.

 * * *

Ahlam Tamimi’s post-massacre trajectory has been like something out of Hollywood - or perhaps the New York Times Magazine. 

On being convicted by an Israeli court in October 2003, she was sentenced to 16 consecutive life terms in prison. The presiding judge speaking for his colleagues on the bench and having heard her proudly claim credit for the killings and maimings, added for the record their view that Tamimi should “not be eligible for pardon by the military commander, nor to early parole by any other means”. 

He and his fellow judges and my wife and I as well were coldly and very deliberately ignored when eight years later, almost to the day, she walked free as one of the 1,027 murderers and assorted other terrorists unjustly freed – not pardoned - as part of Israel’s agreement to the extortionate terms of the Gilad Shalit transaction. 

Tamimi who had been bussed to Cairo with many other delirious convicted terrorists flew to Jordan the same day. That's where she was married in an event carried live on mainstream Jordanian television channels to another freed and unpardoned murderer. He is her cousin, a Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, convicted of the cold-blooded murder we mentioned above when we mentioned Bassem Tamimi who was his mother's brother. 

Ahlam Tamimi's handlers soon sent her off to address rallies in various Middle East capitals outside Jordan. She evolved into a media hero as the presenter of a weekly Hamas satellite television program, devoted to the interests of imprisoned Palestinian Arab terrorists, and broadcast from Amman to all corners of the Arabic-speaking world.  

How the twists and turns of this life have impacted on her victims has never, as far as we know, been explored by any branch of the media, presumably for reasons of lack of interest. But within the Arab world, she is a celebrity.

Bassem Tamimi receives a salary from the foreign-aid-funded Palestinian Authority. But, like many thousands of other Palestinian Arabs on the massively-bloated PA payroll, he admits to the NYT Magazine that he almost never has to report to his office or do any work - while blaming this on the Israelis, naturally. 

The article might have pointed out, but did not, that massive servings of no-strings-attached funds paid by European governments to the terrorism-friendly PA are the reason men like Bassem Tamimi have the time and energy it takes to become a star of the New York Times and a source of videos, interviews and opinions.

His own photogenic daughter Ahed Tamimi has achieved fame and influence and even been awarded a prize by one of the Middle East’s more Israel-phobic political figures for playing her part. Photos of her sticking a fist in the face of IDF servicemen in Nabi Saleh, the personification of an innocent sort of juvenile courage, are everywhere. (The NYT article mentions that she has been dubbed "Shirley Temper" in some quarters; you can see why in this video clip.) 

In reality, those images of defiance were captured by a horde of press agency photographers arranged by her parents. They followed the girl around as she walked up to one Israeli officer after another, hoping to provoke a camera-worthy (meaning violent) response. It never came, though not for lack of effort by the Tamimis. 

Ahed Tamimi has been used and abused in this way again and again by her parents and community; there is no shortage of collaborators among the paparazzi. Any connection between this contrived set-piece and reality is entirely accidental.

* * *

Two years ago, in the New York Review of Books, a writer launched into his experience of the same hilltop town (spelled differently, but the same place) with these words:

The first thing I saw in al-Nabi Salih was a huge sign in Arabic and English: “We Believe in Non-Violence. Do You?” It was World Peace Day, and speaker after speaker reaffirmed a commitment to peace and to nonviolent resistance to the occupation.

What kind of non-violence do these people actually espouse?

We wonder how often public opinion about the complex lives and unwanted war in which we and our neighbours live is formed by people who don't speak the local languages, and don't know much of its history or geography. Lacking the ability and sometimes the will to actually delve, they are left to read romanticized narratives, signs painted onto walls, political analysis crafted by full-time practitioners of public relations, staged photographs and other tendentious imagery.

The result is a kind of entrancement: messy, nasty complexity reduced down to simple pill form. Swallow this, and join us.

This process, of the kind that an astute observer has called auto-stupefaction, has an antidote: reality. We wish there were enough courageous and ethical journalists to deliver what has not yet been done: a blunt look directly into the face and deeds of Ahlam Tamimi and those who share her views, who admire her demonic actions. 

That the New York Times Magazine focused on Nabi Saleh while barely mentioning the convicted child killer celebrated by the residents of the town as an honored daughter (for confirmation, see Arabic Wikipedia) indicates how manipulated its readers are. Also: how far we are from beginning to blunt the ongoing threat of the terrorists.

UPDATE March 23, 2013: This post has gotten what for us is a very large number of views, and was republished on several other sites including Algemeiner, FrontPageMag, The Jewish Press, and the Check the Pulse and Love of the Land blogs. Thanks for helping us get it out. Frimet submitted a letter to the editors at the New York Times Magazine some days ago, and we are still hoping to see them decide to publish it, but no indication so far. [It's here.]

UPDATE September 2, 2015: The post above is by far the most widely-read item we have ever published in this blog. There's evidently something about the extraordinary Tamimi clan and their extraordinary ugliness, brazen weaponization of their children and striking success at winning allies like Amnesty International that seems to capture people's attention. Also their passion for killing.

To read other posts of ours that are indexed with the search term "Nabi Saleh" (there are already several dozen in our blog), click here. We want to recommend these two posts in particular:

• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters
• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists

UPDATE December 28, 2017: The arrest last week of Ahed Tamimi, known widely (as mentioned above) by the not-exactly-complimentary name of Shirley Temper has provoked a storm of media attention. Here are three pieces we have put out in the past few days:

• 28-Dec-17: So how old is the Tamimi girl?
• 24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey
• 19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets