15-May-17: If Jordan's stand on terror is "clear to everyone", can they answer these two questions?

Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri
and Saeb Erekat, PLO’s executive committee’s secretary and chief
Palestinian negotiator, during a press conference in Amman on Sunday
[Image Source]

Over at Ynet, there's a report ["Responding to Netanyahu, Jordan says stance against terrorism 'clear to everyone'", Roi Kais, May 14, 2017] from last night that's hard for us to ignore.

It quotes the foreign minister of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan attempting to explain, in the wake of bitter criticism from Israel a day earlier, that when it comes to defeating the terrorists, Jordan is on the right side:

After Israel and Jordan trade accusations and condemnations over Saturday's stabbing attack which resulted in the killing of a Jordanian citizen, Jordan announces, 'Our positions against violence and terrorism are clear to everyone,' adding that they are invested in 'establishing security, peace and freedom for the Palestinians... Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi made his response at a press conference in Amman with his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shukri and Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee... “Jordan is and was a voice of reason and peace... " Safadi said, adding that King Abdullah II is “invested in establishing security, peace and freedom for the Palestinians.”

Jordan came in from criticism from many quarters, including via a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in the wake of the events we described on Saturday ["13-May-17: In Jerusalem's Old City, a Jordanian stabs an Israeli and the Jordanians are outraged (so are we, for different reasons)"] Essentially, the Jordanians reacted to the killing of a Jordanian attacker who was stopped while in the act of an unprovoked stabbing attack on an Israeli Druze police officer by condemning Israel.

We are going to try to get a message to Mr Safadi of Jordan tonight. In it, we plan to ask him these two questions:

1. When he refers to the Kingdom of Jordan holding "positions against violence and terrorism", does he see this as being consistent with harboring a self-confessed Jordanian mass-murderer who is on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list and, in effect, telling the American Justice Department to go take a hike? 
2. Does Jordan being "a voice of reason and peace" fit with Jordan's repudiation - on transparent and specious grounds - of the Extradition Treaty it signed in 1995 with the United States and which the United States (as sources in the US government have given us to understand) regards as fully effective and valid?

We absolutely share the Jordan foreign minister's view that Jordan's "positions" ought to be "clear to everyone".

As clear as they can possibly be.

The background is here.

03-Nov-16: Saeb Erekat's heroes

Erekat [Image Source: AFP]

He appears to crave publicity. And he gets plenty of it in parts of the mainstream news-reporting industry where his self-flattering claims to being a peace-maker are taken seriously.

He also gets his op eds published in the likes of the New York Times, The Guardian and the Washington Post; is a featured interview subject on the BBC, Aljazeera, PBS and NPR; and manages to insert himself into what he calls "the forces of moderation in this region".

Some serious talent there.

But for our part, we have long felt that Saeb Erekat (and his under-appreciated ability to issue and then serially retract dramatic resignations over several decades) gets less attention than his self-promoting showboating, stunning flexibility in invoking history and outlandish disrespect for truthfulness would justify.

Here's a good recent starting point. It's a report from a few days ago in which he makes plain to Arabic speakers (again: to Arabic speakers only) the kind of "peace" he has in mind as he goes about making it:

Erekat calls Palestinian prisoners — many held for terrorism — ‘heroes’ | Top Palestinian negotiator says men and women in Israeli jails are worthy of ‘admiration and honor’ | October 28, 2016, 7:28
The Palestinians’ top negotiator with Israel, PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat, has praised prisoners held in Israeli jails — many of them for terrorist acts — as heroes deserving of “admiration and honor.”
Erekat was quoted by official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida as saying: “Our brave prisoners, who gave and sacrificed their freedom for Palestine and its freedom, are worthy of aid, support and constant activity by us in order to release them and put an end to their suffering.”
According to the quote, translated by Palestinian Media Watch on Friday, Erekat added that the Palestinian people “bow our heads in admiration and honor of the prisoners’ sacrifices, for their acts of heroism, and for their ongoing battle with the occupation.” [Times of Israel, October 28, 2016]

Did we make clear that this is the kind of thing Erekat, a skilled veteran player of the media, prefers to say in the Arabic language. Why would that be?

The Palestinian Media Watch report [here] on which the Times of Israel article is based quotes some examples of "heroes deserving of admiration and honor" like those (or perhaps precisely those) covered by those recent utterances of Ereket:

• Abdallah Barghouti, whose guitar-case bomb destroyed the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in 2001, and our daughter Malki's life with it. Barghouti, PMW reminds us, is "serving 67 life sentences for preparing explosives for terror attacks in which 67 people were murdered". 
• Abbas Al-Sayid who planned two human-bomb massacres on innocent Israeli civilians in the coastal city of Netanya, one at a Passover dinner at the Park Hotel (30 people murdered) on March 27, 2002 and one at a shopping Mall (5 people murdered) on May 18, 2001.
• Ibrahim Hamed, the planner of several of the most blood-drenched massacres of Israelis and visitors, including human-bomb attacks at the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Jerusalem's Hebrew University (9 people murdered), Jerusalem's Cafe Moment (12 people murdered), Jerusalem's Cafe Hillel (7 people murdered), and in central Jerusalem's open-air Zion Square (11 people murdered). He is currently serving a sentence of 54 life terms. His monthly 

And in case it's not entirely clear to readers how influential Erekat is within his own Arabic-speaking milieu, keep in mind his current public roles include being Secretary-General of the PLO Executive Committee and a Central Committee member in the dominant Fatah faction. That's before we pay attention to how much the world's most important media platforms burnish this man's standing, providing him with a world-class megaphone for views that it's generous to called bigoted and loathsome.

The young Palestinian Arab imprisoned just yesterday is very likely another Erekat hero:

An IDF court on Wednesday sentenced 16-year-old Palestinian Morad Bader Abdullah Adais to life imprisonment and an NIS 1.75 million (about $458,500) fine for the January slaying of Israeli mother of six, Dafna Meir, in her West Bank home. Meir was murdered by Adais as she painted the outside of her home in the Hebron-area settlement of Otniel on January 17. Three of her children were home at the time. A statement from the IDF said the court found that Adais should never be set free, calling it the appropriate punishment for carrying out such a murder “with abnormal cruelty and in cold blood.” The court recommended that any panel which considers the case in the future not grant him early parole. Adais was arrested in the West Bank village of Beit Amra on January 19, two days after he killed Meir in the nearby Jewish settlement of Otniel and fled the scene. He confessed to the killing. He was indicted in February on charges of murdering the 38-year-old mother of four and foster mother of two in the entryway to her home, located just south of Hebron. He was convicted in May for murder and illegal possession of a knife. Prior to carrying out the deadly attack, Adais watched “Palestinian television broadcasts which portrayed Israel as ‘killing young Palestinians,’” a statement from the Shin Bet security agency said after he was captured. “On the day of the murder, while under the influence of the programs he had been exposed to on Palestinian television, the minor decided to commit a stabbing attack with the goal of murdering a Jew,” the statement read.
During his interrogation, Adais described fighting with Meir as her children looked on in horror. “She started screaming, the children saw me and also started screaming, then I stabbed her in her upper body another three or four times. She tried to fight me and tried to take the knife from me. The two children who were there were still screaming, but she continued to resist, so I pushed her, and overpowered her,” he said, according to a partial transcript of his interrogation released by the Shin Bet. When asked by the investigator what he would do if allowed to go free, Adais said: “I would go Al-Aqsa mosque, even if I was killed, and on the way I would kill as many Zionist Jews as I could.” ["Teen given life in prison for ‘cold-blooded murder’ of Dafna Meir", Times of Israel, today] 

Astoundingly Erekat, who means makes clear that he barbarians like these when he praises "heroes", keeps getting invited to appear on global TV programs and keeps being taken seriously. We're baffled and depressed by this phenomenon. We wonder how the editors who do it manage to sleep.

And it's not just words.

When the leaders of the Palestinian Authority want to show their appreciation for acts that advance their cause, they give money - vast amounts of it. They don't actually possess much, as they obsessively remind whoever is listening, but wealthy friends in other countries give as needed. Those wealthy friends include the governments of the UK and Germany, both of whom have finally, at least for the moment, discontinued the funding of what we call the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme. France and Norway, among others, continue to be active funders.

PMW's April 2016 report "The PA’s billion dollar fraud | The PA’s claim that it no longer pays salaries to terrorist prisoners is false" is an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to get past the dopey and misleading news articles that have played a key role in allowing this open scandal to continue for so many years.

Under the PA's policies, as top-level senior terrorists, Al-Sayid and Barghouti currently get paid at least NIS 6,000 per month, substantially more than most Palestinian Arab senior civil servants. (The size of the scheme's monthly payments rises with the number of years a convicted terrorist serves in an Israeli prison.) Hamed joined them in that bracket a couple of months ago when he entered the eleventh year of his sentence.

Dafna Meir's killer, Adais, assuming he is not freed before he rises to their level of seniority, is likely to get the same. Saeb Erekat will appreciate that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14-Aug-13: Making 'peace' by celebrating the murders of children and of Holocaust survivors

Murderers triumphant [Image Source]

Eli Lake, writing for the Daily Beast today, interviews Arnold Roth in the course of a close and critical look at last night's opening of the peace process season: round one of the mass release of convicted Palestinian Arab murderers and terrorists. All of them, no surprise, received a triumphant welcome on returning to the bosom of the two Palestinian Arab statelets, embraced by their political leaders and by jouous, vengeance driven rank-and-file. 

And if you're holding your breath to hear Arabic-language words of caution and condemnation decrying the festivities, the disgraceful way in which cowardly knife-men and thuggish shooters of elderly Jews have been put on pedestals, look elsewhere. But remind yourself, as the Secretary of State of the US has been doing: this is how peace is made. Believe him, and ignore your lying eyes.

Palestinian Prisoners Released on the Eve of Peace Talks

Eli Lake | Daily Beast | Aug 14, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Plotting suicide bombings, throwing grenades, killing a Holocaust survivor—these were among the crimes of the 26 prisoners Israel released Tuesday to bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Eli Lake reports.

Call it the dark side of the peace process. Just hours before the start of new negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians on Wednesday, Israel released 26 prisoners its courts had convicted of murder or accessory to murder.

The prisoners were freed as an inducement for the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to participate in the peace talks. Since 2009, Abbas has said he would participate in negotiations only if Israel stopped settlement activity after President Obama imposed the condition on Israel in the first year of his first term. But Abbas has moderated his position at the behest of Secretary of State John Kerry, who has made restarting the peace process a high priority. The moderation of Abbas was tested this week after Israel announced new housing construction in some West Bank settlements.

Palestinian negotiators have said they expect Israel to release 104 prisoners. Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator, told Israeli Arabic-language radio on Tuesday, “We hope to put into effect what we’ve agreed on...we hope for the release of 104 prisoners. Each will return to his house. This is what we’ve agreed on.” He added, “There is a clear understanding between us and the Americans and Israelis. Any change [in that] will mean the agreement is off the table.”

While Israel holds thousands of Palestinians in prison, some for small offenses such as throwing rocks, the prisoners released Tuesday evening were convicted of more serious crimes. Among the released are Palestinians who have plotted suicide bombing attacks, thrown grenades at checkpoints, and committed murder, according to documents published by the Jerusalem Post. One of them, 40-year-old Atiyeh Salem Abu Musa, was jailed in 1994 for hacking a Holocaust survivor to death with an ax.

Some families of victims of prisoners who have been released in the past are now seeking a meeting with Kerry to explain to him what they see as the dangers of pressuring Israel to release to release Palestinians from prison.

“We don’t see this as a step towards peace,” Arnold Roth, one of the Israelis who helped organize a letter to the secretary of state, told The Daily Beast. “The objection is to the madness of positing the peace process on the prior release of murderers. We support a peace process.”

Roth has some experience with the pain of seeing the killer of a loved one go free. His daughter, Malki, was killed in Aug. 9, 2001, in the bombing of a Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem. One of the planners of that attack, Ahlam Tamimi, who also broadcast the bombing for Palestinian television from Ramallah, walked free from multiple life sentences in 2011. Tamimi was one of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners freed in exchange for Gilad Shalit, the Israel Defense Forces corporal who was abducted in 2006 by Hamas in a cross-border raid. Roth, who is still mourning the death of his 15-year-old daughter, said Tamimi has since married and is now pregnant with a child of her own.

Roth signed a letter sent Tuesday to Kerry asking him for a meeting. “Meet with us,” wrote Roth and 16 other family members of victims. “Let us explain why being complicit in turning the killers of our children into heroes and ‘freedom fighters’ must not be part of any policy befitting a great nation and moral exemplar like the United States.”

Kerry and other State Department officials have kept largely quiet on the behind-the-scenes dealmaking needed to bring the Palestinian Authority to the negotiating table. A State Department spokeswoman on Tuesday declined to call the prisoners scheduled for release “terrorists” when asked.

Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, told The Daily Beast, “We’ve received the letter today, and we’re reviewing it.” She also said Kerry “respects the exclusive right of the Israeli government to make these decisions.” But Harf stressed that Israel alone made the decision to release the prisoners.

“The decision to release these prisoners was taken by Israel only after the most serious review, at the highest levels of the Israeli government,” she said. “Prime Minister Netanyahu made a tough decision that he determined was in the best interests of the Israeli people.”

Said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine: “Some of the people who have been released clearly did some bloody deeds. Some of the people who are being released are now old, some are affiliated with organizations that are not functional.”

Erekat told reporters on Tuesday that he was disappointed the Israeli side had not allowed his side to have input in choosing the prisoners scheduled for release.