Today's stabber was pursued and caught in a
Ra'anana backyard [Video image grab]
In these stressful times, the departure of the Sabbath - at sundown on Saturday evenings - is more and more accompanied by a degree of trepidation for those of us who disconnect ourselves from news sources during the 25 hours of holy withdrawal. Tonight unfortunately the news is disturbing.
Police in Ra'anana, a Tel Aviv suburb, pursued and arrested a Palestinian Arab late this afternoon after he attacked several Israelis, inflicting serious knife injuries. The city is no stranger to such malevolence, having been the scene of two other Arab-on-Israeli stabbings in a single day on October 13, 2015 (see our post).
Today's terrorist is a 20-year-old male from a village near Jenin, illegally in Israel according to the IDF (quoted by Times of Israel). He was evidently delivered into Ra’anana by an accomplice with a car; he or she fled the scene and is the subject of a manhunt at this hour.
There are three Israeli victims: a seriously injured 40-year-old man and a lightly injured woman both stabbed on Ra'anana's Anielewicz Street. Another woman was injured about a block away on Ramchal Street. Witnesses, quoted by Ynet, say the knife-man attempted to get inside a synagogue, presumably in search of additional victims, some 300 meters from where he was apprehended. The Ynet report identifies him as Mahmoud Faisal Basharat, from a village called Tamun. The English-language edition of the Ma'an News Agency report on the attack says he is from Tammum. We suspect both have it wrong and that his home town is Al-Yamun.
No one has the right to be surprised by today's attempted murders. We noted in a post this past week ["14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"] that stabbing attacks on Israelis, a feature of Arab/Jewish co-existence for more than a century, have phenomenal supportamong today's Palestinian Arab public:
There's no room for doubt that terrorism has the Palestinian Arabs firmly in its grip. The numbers show clear, unambiguous and widespread support for a violent, armed intifada against the Israelis: 60% support it today, up from 57% in the PSR September 2015 poll. The cohort most opposed to a two-state solution and most supportive of "an armed intifada and stabbings" is the one aged between 18 and 22. Two-thirds of Palestinian Arabs say they are in favour of stabbing attacks on Israelis. There's no number published for how many of them support those other violent means (shootings, vehicle-rammings, nuclear bombs, poisoning the wells.)
There is close-to-zero likelihood that the Palestinian Arab political leadership or any part of it will criticize, let alone condemn, today's stabbings. That's something to bear in mind the next time the appalling head of the Palestinian Authority ["Palestinian violence is justified popular uprising, says Mahmoud Abbas", December 14, 2015] is quoted in the news saying how opposed he is to acts of terror.
Also a reminder of where the prime minister of Sweden, a noted expert on events in Ra'anana and other parts of the Jewish state, stands on these matters. Here's how he was quoted by Israel National News two weeks ago:
Amid rapidly-deteriorating relations between the two countries, Sweden's prime minister has come under fire for declaring that the recent spate of stabbing attacks in Israel are not terrorist attacks. Speaking to the Swedish TT news agency, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said of the Palestinian attacks, which have claimed the lives of 22 people and left hundreds more wounded in just over two months: "No, it is not classified as [terrorism]... There is an international classification regarding what constitutes or does not constitute [terror]. As far as I know, the [stabbing attacks in Israel] are not defined as terror." Soon after, however, the Swedish PM reached out to TT and attempted to clarify what he described as a "misunderstanding" regarding his remarks, likely realizing the potential for backlash.
Not for the first time, we're obliged to point out that there is a great amount of willful silliness expressed about terror by politicians and analysts. In a literal sense, they threaten the lives and welfare of all of us.
Malchei Yisrael Street, Geula, Jerusalem - aftermath of this morning's
murderous car-ramming of people standing innocently at a bus stop
It's been an incredibly stressful day here in Jerusalem, and throughout Israel.
Strikingly, four major attacks - and they were by no means all of today's attacks - took place at almost the exact same moment this morning.
All have been widely reported so we will not delve into details, and the smartphone videos of Palestinian Arabs engaged in terror have been posted and seen by those who can bear to look at them.
Videos like this one (be warned - it's explicit and very clear) of Alaa Abu Jamal, an East Jerusalem Arab employed as a service technician by Bezeq, Israel's dominant telecoms company, driving a work-supplied Bezeq-logo'ed van that he crashes deliberately at murderously high speed directly into a small group of Israelis standing at a bus stop on Jerusalem's busy Malchei Yisrael Street. And then, emerging from his smashed vehicle, he slashes furiously - with a meat cleaver - at an injured Jew lying prone on the ground, killing him, before being shot by a passing armed security man. It's all on the video. One of his victims - Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky, 60 - died in the remorseless attack and was buried this afternoon. Several more are seriously injured. The principal attacker, Abu Jamal (who will doubtless be termed "lone wolf" in parts of the media who avert their gaze when non-stop PA incitement to kill is shown) is now dead.
UPDATE February 4, 2016: File this enraging comment away for when the know-nothing reporters and editors of Big Media next serve up a portion of "Abbas the moderate" counter-factual nonsense: "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday hosted the families of Palestinian terrorists involved in Jerusalem attacks, just hours after three Palestinians killed an Israeli Border Police officer and injured a second in Jerusalem. Abbas met with the families of 11 terrorists in Ramallah who carried out attacks against Israelis in the past four months and whose bodies remain in Israeli custody, Ynet reported... Also present were the relatives of Alaa Abu Jamal, also of Jebel Mukkaber, who in October careened his car into Israeli pedestrians, exited the vehicle and stabbed the victims. The families of the terrorists called upon Abbas to act to secure the release of their bodies from Israel. Abbas said that the Palestinian leadership is making great efforts to do so in order to ease the pain for the families. “Your sons are martyrs,” the Palestinian Authority president told the families. [Source: Times of Israel]
And like this one of the aftermath of an assault on the city's Egged 78 bus in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv (Governor's Mansion) neighborhood. Two victims are dead; 16 are injured, some of them very seriously. This was an attack in which the outcome could have easily been much, much worse: the goal of the two terrorists, one armed with a gun and the other with a knife, was evidently to take control of the bus by force and use it to do even more serious harm.
One terrorist is Baha Aliyan, 22, from Jabel Mukaber. The second is Bilal Ghanem, from the same neighborhood, an "activist" in the Islamist Bloc at Al-Quds University who had a record as a Hamas terrorist [source] and was released from 14 months imprisonment just a year ago [source - Arabic]. Tom Gross, the distinguished media analyst who follows the Al-Quds school closely (it has a violent and hateful history) points out in a despatch today that the university's Fatah student faction published a tribute to the dead killer in Arabic on a university-affiliated website: our translation of the Arabic
جامعة القدس تزف شهيدها الثالث احد منفذي عملية اطلاق النار اليوم في
الباص في مدينة القدس الشهيد بلال غانم ...
makes plain that (no surprise here) the students call their former colleague a martyr. Such is the deplorable value system of the better-educated of the Palestinian Arabs. (Fatah's head is the current PA president, Abu Mazen or Mahmoud Abbas.)
The two murder-minded jihadists boarded an Egged bus on Olei HaGardom Street in East Talpiot, a neighborhood also known as Armon HaNetziv. According to Ynet:
They started shooting and stabbing passengers while the bus kept moving, killing a man in his 60s and wounding 10 others. One of the wounded, a man in his 40s, was evacuated in critical condition and was declared dead at the hospital. Two others were seriously wounded - women aged around 60 and 40, who suffered stab wounds to their upper body. Two others were in moderate condition: a woman of about 60 years old with gunshot wounds to her upper body and a man in his 30s. Three were lightly wounded, and two were suffering from shock.
Today's other two major attacks were both in Ra'anana, a Tel Aviv suburb that has so far largely escaped acts of Arab terror. One was a walk-up stabbing (the perpetrator traveled from East Jerusalem for his moment in the sun) at a bus stop in Ra'anana's commercial center. One of the victims is badly injured; two others with light-to-moderate injuries. The second, again in a busy part of the city, resulted in six Israelis being injured, one seriously. The attacker is alive but in a bad way.
It's got to be observed that (a) all of today's perpetrators are the holders of Israeli identity papers; and (b) many of the Palestinian Arab stabbings of the past two weeks here in Israel have been the work of murder-minded children and teenagers.
For those who see this as a statistical blip, an issue of interest only to friends of Israel, or a matter of no particular significance (many of the reporters and editors in the mainstream media, in particular), we have nothing to say.
But for reasonably intelligent observers, it's evident that a web of interlocking influencers within the PA and Hamas regime governments - their civil services (such as they are), their mosques and youth groups and schools - has been and continues to be involved in churning out battle-field-ready young people, boys and girls, their heads filled with visions of glory and a readiness - even a passion - for death.
What is the regime of Mahmoud Abbas, the highly-immoderate, allegedly "moderate" PA leader about whom we have nothing good to say, doing about it? Let's be clear: he's encouraging it, and facilitating it via overt incitement of the most barbaric kind.
The video above [translated from Arabic by Palestinian Media Watch] captures a fire-and-brimstone, rally-the-thugs speech given by the normally phlegmatic Abbas less than a month ago. It ran on official PA TV and was also posted to his personal website. It's a personal message, an official call to the masses, and it's entirely devoted to precisely the cause that is on the lips of the stabbers, the shooters, the car-rammers, the rock hurlers and the firebombers: the ancient and renewed capital of the State of Israel, Jerusalem, and the holiest site in Jewish life, the Temple Mount:
"We bless you [referring to those carrying out Ribat, the pursuit of religious conflict and/or war to protect land claimed to be Islamic), we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr (shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah. The Al-Aqsa [mosque] is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours, and they [the Israelis, the Jews] have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, September 16, 2015]
Yes: Every drop of blood.
Now if you were a callow teenage boy or girl of 13, 14, 15, and getting bombarded in the mosque and at school and on the street where you hang with your friends, always, always about Jerusalem and its sacred state - and then the president comes along and promises you paradise and a reward from Heaven, and a free pass to do whatever harm to the Jews that you can imagine, wouldn't your mother's largest kitchen knife be the very next you go looking for?
If any of Abbas adviser's are reading this, and want to deny the claim, they're invited to please send us written evidence of the PA president's calls to his people to stop their blood-lusting violence, their overt and cold-blooded weaponization of their society's children, and their hunting for defenceless, civilian Israelis at bus stops, tram stops and shopping precincts.
And for any Europeans reading this - congratulations! None of this could have happened without the tax money you pay to your governments who in turn send millions of Euros to Ramallah to enable Abbas and his henchmen to get away with murder.
A hashtag that states 'I am knife' has begun trending on Twitter as hardline users take to social media to heap praise a Palestinian man who stabbed 11 people on a bus in Tel Aviv. The messages are an attempt to reappropriate the hashtag of solidarity - #JeSuisCharlie - which swept the world in the wake of the terrorist massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices. However, the tweets - often accompanied by illustrations which depict the Palestinian flag and a bloody knife - are being posted in support of the stabber, who was shot by a prison officer after injuring 11 people in a brutal act of violence.
The hatred of Israelis, of Jews, has become such a public experience, that people on social media appropriated the recent homage to those murdered at the French satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, “#JeSuisCharlie, and created their own version: #JeSuisCouteau, which means “I Am Knife.” The people using this hashtag, frequently accompanied by grotesque cartoons of stabbed Jews or glorifying pictures of knives, are celebrating the vicious attack on Jews.
What follows are many examples of the tweets and Tumblr posts glorifying the weapon used to attack Israelis.
Please click through to see the sickening gallery of malevolence collected there. And then let's ask ourselves where the media outrage is.
Meanwhile a reminder of how none of this is mere polemics if you live in the area:
Police on Thursday arrested a Palestinian man who entered Israel illegally and attempted to stab officers dispatched to detain him. The officers apprehended the 22-year-old suspect in the central city of Ra’anana, and found a second knife on his person. No injuries were reported. [Times of Israel, this afternoon]
The foreign media will ignore this since the operating dictum for many of them is "If it bleeds, it leads" - but otherwise it's mere background noise. Or they will treat the terrorism aspect as if it were something subjective - not reality but mere claims. Like the editors at The Telegraph, UK did -
Some insight from our friend David Frankfurter in Raanana (that's a snapshot of one of its neighborhoods, at right):
Israel's security fence has dropped from the news lately. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy's recent declaration somewhat explains the loss of interest. "I have significantly evolved on the matter of the separation fence. Although the wall was a moral and ethical problem for me, when I realised terror attacks were reduced by 80 percent in the areas where the wall was erected, I understood I didn't have the right to think that way," said Douste-Blazy.
How does it work? By making it harder to cross from the Palestinian Authority areas into Israel, smuggling is reduced, with traffic channelled through monitored border crossing points.
Before the fence was erected, Israeli security managed to prevent around 30% of attempted terrorist attacks. Today, the number is closer to 95%.
A case study is young 20 year old Israeli Arab Warud Qasem. Qasem worked in our local Ra'anana supermarket as a cashier. Her cousin was an illegal Palestinian worker in Ra'anana's Spaghettim restaurant. Three months ago, she joined Fatah's Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades. [You will recall that Al-Aksa is an official organ of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, and that many of its active terrorists received salaries and benefits from internationally funded Palestinian Authority budgets.]
Qasem was able to use her citizenship and familiarity with Israel to help weapons smuggling and to pinpoint terror targets. She recruited her cousin in a plan to plant a bomb in the Spaghettim Restaurant. But asked to smuggle the 7 kilogram bomb into Israel in her car (which has Israeli license plates) she demurred because the border police were likely to catch her. The bomb was driven around the West Bank, searching for a way around the fence into Israel, when Qasem was arrested with it in her possession. She is now facing charges - our town's citizens having been saved from attack by the security fence and the ever alert Israeli security services.
Of course, the intrepid Kofi Annan has never been one to let facts, public opinion or the potential saving of the lives of innocent civilians stand in the way of demonizing Israel. In his fading days as UN Secretary General, the ever-intrepid crusader for the rights of Palestinians to murder Jews has found yet another way to divert even more UN resources to the Palestinian international propaganda campaign. He is initiating an office to collect data and testimonies on damages caused by the separation fence to Palestinians in the West Bank. This "Register of Damage" is to be set up in Vienna, and is intended to serve possible future international adjudication. The office would simply collect and register claims, without any an evaluation or assessment of the loss or damage claimed. "The office of the Register of Damage would not be a compensation commission nor a claims-resolution facility, nor would it be a judicial or quasi-judicial body," said Annan, adding that "Israel also has an obligation to compensate, in accordance with the applicable rules of international law, all natural or legal persons having suffered any form of material damage as a result of the wall's construction."
It would be naive to ask what data collection Annan is undertaking to create a "Register of Damage" caused by Palestinian terror against Israeli civilians. It would be laughable to expect the UN to prepare a mechanism for potential compensation from the international funders and institutions (including the UN) who underwrote that terror for years.
Needless to say, if the Palestinians stopped the violent and criminal attacks against Israeli civilians, there would be no data to collect. There would be no damage to record. There would be no fence. Instead, there would be a basis for the peace that every Israeli yearns for. If only Anan would use UN influence and resources to resolve the Middle East dispute, instead of perpetuating it.
I guess, if confronted, the Secretary General might just paraphrase Douste-Blazy.
... David blogs his thoughts regularly at http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/
