One of the gunmen in Sunday night's terror attack ["
15-Feb-16: Capping a long day of extreme violence, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack in Jerusalem"] may have been an officer in the Palestinian Authority police. Unless you get your news from a handful of Israeli and Palestinian Arab sources, you would never know. And there's a reason for that.
Israel National News gives the name of one of the Sunday night shooters as
Omar Mohammed Omar. It says he is from Hebron, and the third Palestinian Arab policeman involved in a violent terrorist attack on Israelis since the beginning of what the report calls "
the current escalated wave of terrorism". They mean the period since the start of October 2015. (No one is ready to give it a name at this stage.)
The Palestinian Arab newsagency
Ma'an tells it differently. Like the Israeli report, they say one of the attackers was indeed a Palestinian Authority "
security officer". But they identify him as
Mansour Yasser Abdul-Aziz Shawamrah, aged 20. They then give a name for the second of the shooters that sounds similar but not the same as the Israeli article:
Omar Ahmad Omar, also 20. Ma'an says the two of them come from the same town - al-Qubeiba - and they are both now dead.
Whatever the right names and identities, what's clear is that the mainstream news reporting companies see no compelling reason to report the fact that freelance gunmen who open fire on Israelis late at night with high-powered weapons are salaried members of the Abbas regime's security apparatus. The shooters may even (though we don't know this) have gotten weapons training from US experts, as so many of their colleagues have over the years since the Arafat regime was established [for background: "
United States security assistance to the Palestinian National Authority", via Wikipedia]. But that goes unreported too.
We have checked with Google and, while we can't be certain yet, it seems to us that no other news service - other than in Israel and parts of the Palestinian Arab media - seems to have picked up on the question of whose fingers were on the triggers of the automatic guns that fired at Israelis on Sunday. And on the connection between those fingers and the salaried men of the PA armed forces.
Why's that? Perhaps because publishing evidence of the black-and-white involvement of PA personnel and resources in clear acts of terrorism does not fit so well with the customary mainstream media narrative of Palestinians being ready for statehood and Nobel Prizes.
That and the fact that the Abbas regime,
totally dependent on outside funding from providers of foreign aid, is already twitchy enough - along with the Europeans and Americans who hand those millions over - about the criticism they get for being the enablers of the PA's appalling "
cash for terror" rewards scheme.
It's a vastly under-reported issue that we (via
Arnold Roth's testimony before a US Congress oversight committee two weeks ago) hope is going to become more widely known and its implications better understood. The fact that this has not yet happened is not because the facts are hard to find. They are a matter of open record. But they are consciously ignored by those who ought to be focusing on them. They have been for years.
Just to give one stark, but little-known, illustration:
When the [so-called Second] Intifada broke out, it turned out that 70% of the martyrs, and of the people who carried out attacks against the occupation, were members of the Palestinian security forces.
That's a verbatim sound-bite from a television interview that we references in a blog post three years ago: "
21-Oct-13: An insider's insight into who carried out most of those Palestinian Arab terror attacks over the past decade". The man being quoted was the Palestinian Authority's ambassador to post-Qadaffi Libya - in other words, a regime inner-circle insider. The interview was carried on an Al-Jazeera television talk program on September 27, 2013. But you would be hard-pressed to find any brand-name Western journalists or their editors ready to say it in their media. Many of them certainly know it. They just don't want you to know.
Finally, for readers wanting to drill down, a short selection of relevant articles from among those we have written on this painful and very dangerous matter:
