18-Aug-18: Friday afternoon Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack is thwarted by police - who are accused by attacker's family

Screen-cap from the security video

Security camera video has emerged of a stabbing attack on Israeli police keeping order in Jerusalem's Old City on Friday afternoon.

The would-be knifer, identified subsequently as Ahmed Muhammad Mahameed, 30, an Arab resident of the Israeli city of Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel, is seen walking briskly from the direction of the Temple Mount, turning sharply in the direction of a small group of on-duty police, then quickly pulling a knife out and attempting to stab someone. There follows a scuffle which is shown only briefly and then - according to a Times of Israel report - the assailant is shot by one of the police who came under lethal attack and he is killed.

The report goes on to focus on the complaints of the dead attacker's family. They say he was mentally ill and had twice tried to take his own life. They deny that he carried out the attack for nationalistic reasons but fail to offer an explanation - beyond mental illness - for what happened. They also deny that the response of the police was reasonable and say the officer who fired at him was “light with his finger on the trigger.”

“They didn’t have to kill him,” said the assailant’s father, pointing to other instances where police managed to neutralize attackers by shooting at their legs instead of their upper bodies. Mustafa Abu Megged, a friend of Mahameed’s, called his family a “normative” one that would never endorse such conduct. “They could have neutralized him in another way. When it comes to Arabs, they [the police] are easy to pull the trigger,” Megged charged. In addition, the Umm al-Fahm Municipality released a statement Saturday condemning police for what it called the “cold-blooded murder” of its resident.

Members of the family are quoted as well in a Ynet report:

"He suffers from a mental illness and he tried several times to commit suicide. We did not know he was in the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday, he never usually goes there,” said Ahmad’s brother Naseem, in an interview with Ynet... "My brother is a mentally ill person who never thought of harming people... We thought at first that he was misidentified. My brother is not a terrorist. Everyone needs to understand his mental state and not jump to conclusion that are so far from the truth," Naseem vented... ["Family of stabbing attack suspect: He has mental illness", Ynet, August 17, 2018]

There's a video embedded in the Times of Israel report that concludes with an officer reassuring the uniformed men on duty that they acted correctly in defending themselves and that doing so was in accordance with police values. It's hard to disagree with him.

Umm al-Fahm is home to more than 50,000 Arabs, overwhelmingly Muslim and almost all of them Israeli citizens.

For the past two decades, its public life has been increasingly viewed as directed by the outlawed (since 2015) Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement whose leading figure, former mayor of the city (between 1989 and 2001) Sheikh Raed Salah, is identified with Hamas. Salah is notorious for inciting under the slogan "Al-Aqsa is in danger":

In 1996, as events surrounding the authorization of a northern exit to the Western Wall tunnels were unfolding (and which led to violent riots), Salah became aware of how to capitalize politically on matters regarding the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
He started to hold an annual rally titled “Al Aqsa [Mosque] is in danger” in the northern city of Umm al-Fahm. Thousands usually attended. [Avi Issacharoff, "The Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch — long a thorn in Israel’s side", Times of Israel, November 17, 2015]

We may be about to see the flames of that particular kind of incitement being fanned again.

UPDATE August 21, 2018:

The stabber's funeral in Umm Al-Fahm drew hundreds of participants, turning it into yet another sickening mass rally in support of #PalArab terror. The family had committed to the police to limit its scale and may now have to forfeit the bond they posted: https://t.co/PvkHiME34n pic.twitter.com/O7mBY009Yk

— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) August 21, 2018

14-Jul-17: In the Jerusalem Old City shadow of one of their more sacred sites, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack

Image Source: Al Jazeera

There has been an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack this morning - the Moslem Sabbath - at a location adjacent to the sacred Temple Mount (in Hebrew: Har Habayit) plaza in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Two Israeli victims are reported to be seriously injured with gunshot wounds and were rushed to Hadassah Medical Center's Mount Scopus hospital for emergency treatment.

A third is injured more lightly as a result of being hit by shrapnel and sustaining wounds to the neck, arms and hands. He is being treated at Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center.

The three are described in a Times of Israel report as men in their 30s. (Past experience says the initial guesses are often wrong.)

Police opened fire on the Arab attackers and they are all now dead.

Police believe the armed gang approached the Temple Mount plaza shortly after 7:00 am today when the Temple Mount area is generally starting to be thronged by participants in the Friday prayers. They ran [as this graphic brief video shows] toward Lions' Gate - Sha'ar Ha'arayot in Hebrew - where they opened fire on the Israelis.

They then fled towards the Temple Mount complex with Israeli police in pursuit.

Video posted in the past hour shows one of the shooters lying on the ground with Israeli police, guns drawn and surrounding him. He suddenly jumps up, takes a flying leap with a knife drawn clearly trying to wound one of the police officers. He is shot before he can complete the stabbing.

The shooters were armed with two Carlo-style (from Carl Gustav) sub-machine guns and a pistol. A knife was also found at the scene. Photos are circulating on the Hebrew-language social media [link] this morning showing three Israeli photo-identification cards, said to prove that the Arab shooters were all the holders of Israeli citizenship or Israeli residential status.

As scenes of attempted carnage go, the Temple Mount is an especially historical and sacred one. (being frank about this, it's hard to ignore how often murderous attacks of a certain kind happen in synagogues, churches, mosques, sacred places and sacred times. Is there a pattern here?)

Lion's Gate is thought to have that name according to one theory because of the image of leopards - mistaken for lions - two on the left and two on the right - embedded in the wall beside the gate itself. (Another version says they are indeed lions.) It marks the start of the 600 meter long Via Dolorosa along which Jesus walked, according to tradition, on the way to his crucifixion. Fifty years ago, it was the entry point through which Israeli paratroops passed during the 1967 Six-Day War and famously unfurled an Israeli flag above the Temple Mount.

Despite its holy and historical nature, Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks do happen in the vicinity and with growing regularity. We have posted on attacks at or very close to Lions' Gate several times in the past 15 months:

• 03-May-16: On a quiet lane in Jerusalem's Old City, a Monday night terror-by-knifing attack
• 14-Dec-16: In Jerusalem's Old City this afternoon, an Arab-on-Israeli stabbing
• 13-Mar-17: Jerusalem and the (alleged) knife-men
• 13-May-17: In Jerusalem's Old City, a Jordanian stabs an Israeli and the Jordanians are outraged (so are we, for different reasons)

Times of Israel says that in the wake of this morning's terrorist attack, Jerusalem Police chief Yoram Halevi canceled prayers for the day on the Temple Mount for the first time in decades, ordering the complex cleared and the entrances to the holy site closed. Police have also placed security checkpoints at the entrances to the Old City.

Aftermath on the Temple Mount this morning [Image Source]

How did the terrorists manage to bring weapons into the holy site? Normal procedure - perhaps to the surprise of people less familiar with how real life is lived here - is that Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount are subjected to less rigorous security checking than non-Muslim visitors, all of whom are obliged by the Israeli authorities to enter via the Mughrabi foot-bridge.

There's bound to be a high-level investigation since the implications of what happened there today are serious and broad.

Don't expect the Palestinian Arab media to be asking the serious questions. They're still totally stuck in their victim-centric reporting-narrative style - the sort of reporting (referring to the Fatah-controlled and scandalous Ma'an News Agency) that produces this opening line today:

Three Palestinians and two Israeli police officers were killed during an armed confrontation in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem early on Friday morning... ["3 Palestinian citizens of Israel, 2 police officers killed in Jerusalem shooting", Ma'an, today]

Armed confrontation?!

Al Jazeerah's man on the spot offers this insightful gem:

"It is reportedly the first time in years that the compound would be closed for prayers on Friday. Of course this has the potential to increase tensions among the about 10,000 Palestinians who normally pray here on Fridays," Fawcett said. ["Jerusalem: Palestinians killed after 'shooting attack'",  Al Jazeera, today]

Tensions?! The sub-machine guns and the knife don't raise the tensions. The critically injured Israelis don't raise the tensions. The cynical abuse of a site they declare to be holy doesn't raise the tensions. The utter silence of the Muslim religious leadership and their systematic, ongoing failure to condemn Arab-on-Israeli terrorist attacks don't raise the tensions.

But decisions by responsible law-and-order authorities, conditioned by long experience to know the nature of the Palestinian Arab mobs and the harm that generally follows (mainly in their own settlements and to their own children) their irresponsible violence - they raise the tensions.

Lethal journalism is what it's called.

UPDATE 12:30 pm Friday July 14, 2017:
Tragically, the two seriously injured Israelis shot by a gang of armed Arab attackers this morning have died of their wounds [Israel National News]. Times of Israel identifies them as two police officers, both from Israel's Druze community: Haiel Sitawe, 30, from Maghar, a mostly Druze and Arab city in northern Israel, who signed up with the Border Guard as part of his mandatory national service in 2012 and served in the unit responsible for securing the Temple Mount ever since; and Kamil Shnaan, 22, from Hurfeish, an almost entirely-Druze village also in Israel's north. Sitawe is survived by a wife, Irin, and a three-week-old son, as well as parents and three brothers. Shnaan was to celebrate his engagement party to his girlfriend in a week. He leaves behind parents, a brother and three sisters. His father, Shachiv Shnaan, served for a time as Knesset member representing, first the Labor party, and later Ehud Barak's short-lived Independence party.

The three dead attackers are all from the Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, with a population of more than 50,000 Israel's third-largest Arab community and a center of power for Israel's Islamic Movement whose notorious so-called Northern Branch headed by Raed Sallah was outlawed by Israel in 2016 because of its ties to Hamas and the Moslem Brotherhood. The dead gunman are all called Muhammad Jabarin and all are plainly from the same clan: Muhammad Ahmed Muhammad Jabarin, 29; Muhammad Hamad Abdel Latif Jabarin, 19; and Muhammad Ahmed Mafdal Jabarin, 19. The Jabarin clan's home base is Musherifa, a village in the vicinity of Um-al-Fahm.

UPDATE 3:00 pm Friday July 14, 2017
An updated version of the Ma'an news report on the terror attack calls the two proudly-patriotic Israeli Druze police officers who were the victims of the shooting attack this morning "Palestinian citizens of Israel" whose lives ended "during an armed confrontation":

Source

We fear the intention of the Ma'an editorial spinmeisters was not to bring comfort to the families of the fallen Druze police men.

In similar black-is-white fashion, the savages of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have fulsomely praised today's shooting attack with their own public statements. Hamas called the brazen bloodshed at a sacred site "heroic" and a ''natural consequence of a series of crimes''. Not to be outdone in the chase for outlandish similes, Islamic Jihad said the shootings were ''demonstrations of courage by our people against occupying forces that must now beware to cross a red line''.

Whether or not the Israeli side is going to be more cautious about crossing an imaginary Islamist line in the coming days, what's sadly clear (again) is that on a day in which five lives, all of them Arab, were lost in pointless Jerusalem violence, the fat-cats in Gaza are congratulating themselves as they pump the heads of their society's children with self-destructive notions of honor, courage and dying while killing the "occupiers" in the occupiers's own capital city.

05-Apr-16: 96 years of Arab-on-Jew terror and lessons still not learned

Hebron 1929: A Jewish survivor of the Arab massacre
mourns. Even today, voices seek to deny the terror
and absurdly connect it to 'occupation' [Wikipedia]

Much of the hostile commentary ripping into Israel in its conflict with the Arabs comes from people with an exceedingly thin grasp of history.

This is a problem for those of us open to dialogue because an incredible proportion of the haters of Israel are often as dumb as a boot about how we got to where we are today.

Moshe Arens, a veteran of Israel's political scene now in his nineties who was raised in the United States, has an essay in yesterday's Haaretz under the title "The Changing Face of Palestinian Terror". Reflecting on his decades of exceptionally-well-informed, insider experience (minister of defence in three governments, a term as foreign minister, a professor of aeronautics, and Israel's ambassador to Washington in the eighties), he refers back to how things were in the very early days:

From the attack by Arab mobs wielding hatchets and knives on the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem in 1920 to recent attempts by Arab youngsters to knife individual Jews, we have witnessed 96 years of terror acts waged by Palestinian Arabs against the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.
The riots of 1920 were followed a year later by attacks on Jews in Jaffa, and culminated in the attacks by Arab mobs on Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed in 1929. The reaction by British police forces was inadequate, and the Jewish community was as yet not organized to deal with these outbursts of violence. They caused considerable loss of life, but did not succeed in halting the Zionist enterprise.
The major Arab effort to reverse the course of events in the Land of Israel was the Arab revolt of 1936-39, in which gangs of armed Arabs attacked Jewish and British targets. It was suppressed by the use of drastic measures taken by the British forces. Thousands of Arabs were killed, and over 100 were hanged.
The Jewish community was consumed by a debate on how to respond to this wave of violence. The official line taken by the Jewish Agency and its military wing, the Haganah, was to practice restraint and not retaliate in kind, despite the loss of life.
The contrary line was taken by the Revisionist Movement’s armed wing, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (led by David Raziel), which believed that Arab terror against Jews should be answered by terror attacks against Arabs. Actually, members of the Haganah participated in the Special Night Squads led by Orde Wingate, which practiced collective punishment against Arab villages. The Arab Revolt was suppressed but, nevertheless, succeeded in bringing about a change in British policy in Palestine. This resulted in the White Paper of May 1939, limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine and preventing the escape of many Jews from Europe to Palestine.

It's worth observing that all the Arab-on-Jew terror he mentions up to this point happened when the sum total of "illegal", "occupied" "settlements" was precisely zero. That specious rationalization for Jihad - which is certainly what the Arab viciousness was about - came much later,

Prof. Arens continues:

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, we have seen “spectacular” acts of Palestinian terror, like the hijacking of commercial aircraft and the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Measures taken by the Israeli security services have been effective in preventing additional acts. The first intifada lasted for over three years. A large number of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip participated in demonstrations, strikes and rock-throwing at passing vehicles. It was a situation I inherited when I took over the Defense Ministry from Yitzhak Rabin in 1990. A concentrated effort by the Israel Defense Forces and the security services, targeting those throwing rocks at cars, brought the intifada to an end within a year. During the second intifada, which spanned the years 2000-2005, suicide bombers were the terrorists’ weapon of choice. Over 1,000 Israelis lost their lives, leading to the entry of IDF troops into West Bank cities during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002... ["The Changing Face of Palestinian Terror", Haaretz, Moshe Arens, April 4, 2016]

The 1929 Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron, a community whose Jewish population had been living there for centuries, is mostly forgotten and often ignored. Sixty-nine Jews including 46 yeshiva students and teachers were murdered in a single day of Arab rioting and savagery, August 24, 1929 right under the noses of the British mandate police. Dozens more were seriously injured and maimed; Jewish homes were pillaged; numerous synagogues were ransacked and destroyed.

The rioters and murderers were incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. (Sound familiar?) That was more than eighty years ago but progress on the Arab side is demonstrably slow in coming. Old patterns of malevolence and racist hatred are not easily shifted.

Salah explaining the role of vomit, Jews and filth to Islamist worshipers,
March 25, 2016 [Source]

Illustrating how this works, one of the current crop of Israel-based Arab leaders, Raed Salah, speaking ten days ago from an Islamist pulpit in Jatt, a town in northern Israel with an Arab majority and zero Jews, promised his congregation

that “the Israeli occupation” will vanish just like the Roman and Persian empires and British and French colonialism... [T]he land will “vomit” the Israeli occupation “just like the sea vomits its filth.” [Video and transcript]

We could easily fill this blog with ongoing ugliness of that sort from Islamist preachers and their secular counterparts. But what would that achieve?

Absorbing the experiences collected by Israel's Jews for 96 years so far, Prof. Arens observes that there are significant differences between the terror attacks we are seeing today against the Jewish presence in Israel and those that went before:

The present wave of Palestinian terror differs from all the others. Terror acts are being committed by individuals or pairs, using knives, guns or ramming pedestrians in the street. It makes for one-on-one encounters where the victim, civilian or soldier – if he is alert and, better yet, armed – can frequently stop the threat. Seemingly on the wane at the moment, the terror wave has only harmed the Palestinian cause – as was the case with both intifadas... [Arens]

He goes on to address some of the ethical issues that arise when terror is brought into the car parks and supermarkets of a busy, thriving society. These are of course not simple - at least not for our side. For the side with the knives and the axes and the weaponized children, they could hardly be simpler. Driven by a spectrum of passions, respect for ethical principles is certainly not one of them.

Notice, if you visit the Haaretz page, that several of the comments, presumably from some of those dumb-as-a-boot "activists" we mentioned above, dismiss Arens' observations on the usual nonsense argument that

Your history of the area from the 1920s to the present day and not one mention of the occupation. - Liz

Sadly, that's an actual quote. The idea of Jewish "occupation" of Arab holdings is what holds it all together for them, giving their lethal bigotry a useful fig-leaf.

Here's what we say: that no fig-leaf, not even one as widely-spouted as "never forget the occupation", can adequately conceal the moral nakedness of critics for whom the thought of a national dimension to Jewish peoplehood is literally unbearable.

Or the vile, racist bigotry of religious leaders like Salah for whom the Jewish neighbours around them are "filth" that needs to be "vomited".

---
[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("96 lat terroru arabskiego wobec Żydów") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children

Haredi Jew climbing stairs from Jerusalem's Damascus Gate towards the
Nevi'im neighbourhood [Image Source: File photo]

The boy in the images below is the stabber who was shot to death on Saturday morning in Jerusalem soon after plunging his knife into the upper bodies of a pair of Israeli worshipers, both in their sixties, both heading home after Sabbath morning prayers in a synagogue near where they live - which happens to be close to Jerusalem's Old City. We described the circumstances earlier [10-Oct-15: Bloody Saturday and Hamas says "we intend to join in"].

Here's how AFP summarized it:

On Saturday, morning a Palestinian teenager stabbed and wounded two ultra-Orthodox Jews, aged 62 and 65, just outside the Old City's Damascus Gate in east Jerusalem, police and medics said. Police said they shot and killed the 16-year-old assailant, identified as Ishak Badran of Kafr Aqeb in east Jerusalem.

In customary fashion, the Arabic-language media, many parts of which published the images below, praise him and what he did:  

• He was a "teen martyr" ["Zionist Police Kill Palestinian Teen in Jerusalem after Alleged Stabbing", Al Manar, Lebanon]. 
• His father, speaking to a video camera from the family's mourning tent this afternoon [via YouTube here] blames the knife-wielding son's death on - who else? - the Israelis: "...His son was the victim of the criminal Netanyahu government which stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque policy and engaged in killing in cold blood".
• On PLS48, a Palestinian Arab site, where his name is given as Ishak Qasim al-Maqdisi Badran, they quote the father saying the boy "was killed brutally and deliberately, pointing out that the occupation forces left him bleeding for more than two hours without allowing medical teams rescued him or save the rest of his life." (All the signs are that he in fact died immediately after being shot.)
• Another Palestinian Arab site, Al Haya, says the boy died Saturday "after being hit by four bullets in front of a falafel shop by Almasserarh near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem under the pretext that he stabbed one of the settlers in the face and the other in the shoulder... The martyr remained lying on the ground three and half hours". The boy was "peaceful", possessed of "high moral character", "prayed regularly and was hard-working at school".
• Silwanic, another Palestinian Arab website, says "The body of the martyr Badran remained on the ground for two hours. The occupation forces hurled stun grenades towards the citizens to keep them away from the scene."

Someone with a camera understood what was about to happen

Approaching target (person with camera does nothing to prevent what comes next)

Assailant lunges at one of his Jewish victims 

Israeli security people bring the murderous attack to a permanent close

The sixteen year-old Badran is never going to be able to tell us what had to happen in order for him to take a knife and plunge it into the chests and backs of a couple of Jews in their sixties.

Perhaps, but we have no way to know, he was given instructions by one or another of the ultra-violent death cult groups - Fatah, Hamas, PIJ, Sheikh Raed Salah's Islamic Movement in Israel - that dominate Palestinian Arab political life. Or did a senior figure in his own community, perhaps in the place where he prays or possibly at the local barber shop, whisper something meaningful into his ear? Did he tune in as Mahmoud Abbas warned the United Nations ten days ago [full text here] that the PA regime "cannot continue to be bound by these (Oslo Accords) agreements and that Israel must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power, because the status quo cannot continue" [CNN, September 30, 2015]? Clarifying Abbas' intent, Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestine Liberation Organization explains (in that same CNN article) that the Palestinian Arabs, presumably including their teenagers, "will begin using nonviolent resistance". What does that mean?

In the mind of one especially voluble member of the infamous Tamimi clan ["02-Oct-15: Truth, honesty, love, murder... and useful idiots"], it means everything from pebble-flicking to acts of mass-murder by bombing. Perhaps others think like her. Who knows? Amnesty International calls the Tamimis non-violent human rights activists. It waxes eloquent about their bucolic rural community - the one about which we wrote here: "11-Sep-15: How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really?", and which is located just a few miles from where the dead Badran boy lived.

Same youth

It's hard not to think about the influences that played with the knife-youth's mind. We wonder especially about the extent to which Badran was impacted by the incitement to terror of a different member of that same Tamimi clan, the convicted, unrepentant murderer of children, Ahlam Tamimi. She killed our daughter by placing a bomb (a human bomb) at a busy site in the center of Jerusalem. She was, in fact, the mastermind of that 2001 Sbarro pizzeria attack, and the murderer of the 15 victims who died there that day.

But her impact extends much further than that. Via a weekly TV program and the social media, hers has become a uniquely popular and influential voice for evil in the world of the Palestinian Arabs and their backers.

In Facebook and Twitter postings, both widely re-posted and pushed around the social networks, she offered this enticement (translated here from the Arabic original) in the past week:

“A point of light: Each stage has its special form of resistance and the signs of this stage have clearly appeared in the method of the individual operations. They are planned by individuals, financed by individuals, prepared by individuals, and carried out by individuals. The result is the 100% success of the mission. Do not wait for an organization to organize you, set the time for you, give you orders, politicize you. Put your life on the line and go ahead, Allah will be with you.”

It's a potent message. And especially so at a time when the storm-winds of extreme violence are raging in the Arab world. Given who she is, her history, her prominence, her role within Hamas, her exalted status in the pantheon of murderers of innocent Jews, the capacity of Ahlam Tamimi's malevolent messages of just-do-it ought to be taken very seriously.

The sixteen year old boy is dead. Whatever potential it had for constructive achievements, his future no longer exists.

In its place, a society in the grip of lethal depravity calls him hero and martyr and continues weaponizing other young men and women to follow him to oblivion. It's an appalling process of grooming and exploitation with many facilitators, contributors and (especially) enablers, certain of whom call themselves human rights organizations.