18-Aug-17: Spain reels under multiple - evidently connected - jihadi assaults

Barcelona yesterday

It's been a terribly dramatic day and night in Spain. Three separate terror attacks in the Catalan region now appear to be tied to each other and to Islamist terror groups. In the words of Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, “jihadi terrorism” is what's behind the assaults, the maimings and the murders.

Here's an overview based on a range of mainstream media sources. First Barcelona:

• A van was deliberately driven into pedestrians on one of the city's most popular boulevards, Las Ramblas, killing 13 people on Thursday afternoon. 
• ISIS claimed "credit". Its Aamaq news agency said (according to Irish Times): “The perpetrators of the Barcelona attack are soldiers of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to calls for targeting coalition states” - evidently referring to the US-led coalition against ISIS.
• The BBC for reasons none of us ought to respect calls ISIS "the so-called Islamic State". (If that's the game, should we believe that the United Kingdom is actually united? Isn't that unity also so-called? Let's ask the Scots.)
• "It was clearly a terror attack, intended to kill as many people as possible," Josep Lluis Trapero, senior police official, said. [Telegraph UK]
• Times of Israel says a manhunt is underway for the driver.
• The attack vehicle is a rented white Fiat van. One version [Telegraph UK] says the driver rammed it into pedestrians outside a kosher restaurant shortly after 5pm. He then "veered onto the promenade and barreled down the busy walkway for 500 metres, swerving back and forth and mowing down pedestrians. Victims were left sprawled in the street, spattered with blood or writhing in pain from broken limbs. Others fled in panic through Las Ramblas, screaming or carrying young children in their arms."
• The death toll includes one Belgian and three Germans. Among the 100 injured, 15 are in serious condition. The injured include four Australians and according to Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop: “We are concerned for one Australian who remains unaccounted for. SKY News says that Australian is a seven year-old boy. Another of the Australian injured is in serious condition. In addition there are three Dutch, 26 French (of whom 11 are said by the French government to be in serious condition), three Greeks, one Chinese among those hhurt. Others are from Venezuela, Ireland, Peru and Algeria.
• Times of Israel reports that the area under attack "went into lockdown. Swarms of officers brandishing hand guns and automatic weapons launched a manhunt in the downtown district, ordering stores and cafes and public transport to shut down. Several hours later authorities reported two arrests, one a Spanish national from Melilla, a Spanish-run Mediterranean seafront enclave in North Africa, and the other a Moroccan. They declined to identify them."
• According to Spanish public broadcaster RTVE, one of the detained is named as Driss Oukabir, said to be a French citizen of Moroccan origin. But there are also reports a man of that name went to police in Ripoll to report that his identity documents had been stolen. One version being reported is that Driss Oukabir claimed his brother might have stolen them.
• Reuters says the Spanish royal household said on Twitter: “They are murderers, nothing more than criminals who are not going to terrorise us. All of Spain is Barcelona.” A person could wish that the sentiment of the Spanish royals would occasionally be extended to apply to the murderous, hateful attacks we here in Israel endure on an almost daily basis.

Next, Cambrils:

• Another vehicle-ramming attack last night (Thursday) in the seaside resort town of Cambrils, about 100 kilometers from Barcelona is being linked to the Barcelona attack.
• A police officer and five civilians are injured; two are in serious condition. The injuries all appear to be caused by the deliberate ramming.
• Times of Israel quotes the Cataln region’s Interior Minister Joaquin Forn saying this morning (Friday) that the Cambrils attack “follows the same trail. There is a connection.” He has not yet explained the connection and confirmed the driver in the Barcelona attack remains at large.
• The same source told Catalunya Radio this morning (Friday) that a third person has been arrested in connection with the Barcelona attack. He was taken into custody in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll.
• Five men carrying bomb belts and acting as human bombs - evidently inside the ramming vehicle - were shot and killed by police who then detonated their explosives in a controlled blast. Media reports however use a different way of describing their intentions. CNBC for instance writes that they "were wearing suicide belts". Telegraph UK says "five terrorists wearing suicide vests launched the second ramming attack in the country in a matter of hours." CNN says "police killed five men wearing fake suicide belts".

Permit us to interject something (not for the first time) about suicide and human bombs:

If the attackers in Cambrils were going to commit suicide, why in a public place? Could it be that suicide was not actually their goal? Were they in reality contemplating well-thought-out murder? Were they in fact murder-minded terrorists? If so, why confuse and mislead by implying (through the term suicide-belt or suicide bombers) that they were intent on committing suicide? They made themselves into human bombs and that is what we owe to ourselves and victims past and future to call them and those like them. We explain the thinking here: "30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs".

And it now appears a Wednesday night gas explosion in the town of Alcanar, 160 kilometers south-west of Barcelona along the Mediterranean coast is part of the same battle:

• "At least one person died and another six were injured in the explosion at around 11.15pm Wednesday night in the village of Alcanar Platja in southern Catalonia. Firefighters discovered about 20 gas cylinders while examining the scene of the blast... According to reports in the Spanish media, authorities were working under the assumption that a butane gas leak caused the blast. The deceased is believed to have been of Moroccan origin." [RT]
• Then came a second blast. From Mirror UK: "The first blast occurred at around 11.15pm on Wednesday night in a housing estate called Montecarlo de Alcanar Platja, in Alcanar, in the province of Tarragona, south of Barcelona.... the house was completely destroyed... Police said it was possible a second person was dead among the ruins of the house. They added that they suspect the house was being used to build an explosive device... 
• A second explosion injured nine more people, including six police officers and two firefighters. 
• The second explosion happened as the emergency services sifted through the rubble of the house... 
Neighbours had said that two north African brothers had been renting the house."

In reactions to the blood-letting and terrorism, the World Council of Churches shamelessly tweeted "Terrible attacks in Barcelona. Must be condemned by all. Prayers for the victims and their families. #PrayforBarcelona". We hope our readers will help circulate a response we published seven months ago: "08-Jan-17: Where the World Council of Churches stands as Israelis are rammed to death".

The head of the Palestinian Authority did what he does best - make up a respectable-sounding but totally insincere and counter-factual condemnation while hoping no one relevant notices the hypocrisy of his being the inciter-in-chief of almost identical attacks directed against Israelis [see "18-Aug-17: On vehicle rammings, Mahmoud Abbas, moderate advocate for terror, is open-minded, sees both sides"]

18-Aug-17: On vehicle rammings, Mahmoud Abbas, moderate advocate for terror, is open-minded, sees both sides

Innocent targets fleeing the murderers in Barcelona yesterday [Image Source]

President-for-life of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas - now serving the twelfth year of his four-year term of office - has just gone public with a condemnation of yesterday's appalling jihadist massacre of pedestrians in a tourist precinct of Barcelona.

Abbas condemns Barcelona attack | PA chairman sends condolences to Barcelona victims, says he condemns all forms of terror | August 18, 2017 | Israel National News | Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday condemned the terrorist attack in Barcelona, in which 13 people were murdered and 100 injured. In a message to the King of Spain Felipe VI and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Abbas sent his condolences to the victims of the attack. According to the official PA news agency Wafa, Abbas condemned the attack and stressed his rejection of all forms of terrorism as well as the need to confront all terrorist organizations around the world.

Source

Meanwhile a public figure with the exact same name and similar-looking features has been delivering the exact opposite message to Palestinian Arabs:

Abbas: Palestinian violence is “justified popular uprising” | Mohammed Daraghmeh | Associated Press | December 14, 2015
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas referred to the last three months of violence Monday as a “justified popular uprising”. Abbas’s comments came as a new poll shows widespread Palestinian support for ongoing attacks on Israelis. Later Monday, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, wounding nine before bystanders shot him dead.
Israeli leaders have accused Abbas and other Palestinian leaders of inciting the violence with incendiary rhetoric. Abbas has previously refrained from either endorsing or condemning the attacks, often referring to the wave of violence as understandable but not in the best interests of the Palestinian people.
“We cannot ask the youth why they are going out (to revolt),” Abbas said in Ramallah. “They just despaired of the two-state solution.”
A poll released Monday found that two-thirds of Palestinians support the current wave of stabbings. Most Palestinians believe if the current individual attacks develop into an armed intifada, the violence might serve Palestinian national interests more than negotiations would.

We are about to contact the BBC and several of the major global news packaging/syndicators to ask when their updated, detailed take-down of the lethal hypocrisy on show in Abbas' outrageous double-talk will appear.

We're also hoping to hear from friends in Spain that the government there plans to throw Abbas' "condemnation" right back at both of his two faces.

Meanwhile in a similar vein: "23-May-17: Condemning terror is so easy to do, even Jordan can do it - and no news reports will criticize them"

07-Mar-16: In the UK, the jihadist threat now has Scotland Yard's full attention

Ms Dare's older son, aged 4 [Image Source]

The child in the image on the right is four years old. Speaking with a British accent and dressed in military fatigues, he is the central figure in a ten-minute-long ISIS propaganda video that got considerable media coverage in January 2016.

Without exaggerating, it's a hideous production. The little boy points off in the distance and says, “We will kill kuffar [infidels] over there.” Before it's over, the clip shows five shackled men dressed in orange boilersuits who are said to have “confessed” to spying for the UK. They are then killed.

The boy is the son of a notorious Islamist zealot, Khadijah (nee Grace) Dare, the daughter of a Christian family from Nigeria who raised her in Lewisham, UK. Despite her good Catholic school education, she transplanted herself to the killing-fields of Syria in 2012 in order to marry a Swede with the adopted nom-de-guerre Abu Bakr and who is now thought to be dead. Mrs Dare-Bakr "used social media to gloat about the beheading of the American journalist James Foley and said she wanted to be the first British woman to kill" a hostage, evidently by removing his head. A serious-minded person, she "missed junk food and Chinese takeaways, but said she would never return home" [Telegraph UK, January 4, 2016].

As well as the little boy in the photo above, she has a second son who is younger still. It's not clear when he will be pressed into serving the Islamist cause, but the path ahead of him seems to be clear.

How serious is the existential threat posed by the unchecked spread of ideological terrorism? We think the answer is "very" and have been saying so for 14 years. The masthead of this blog includes some language intended to express that deep concern.

Not everyone agrees with us. 

Madrid, March 11, 2004 [Image Source]

In the next few days. Spain will mark the anniversary of 11-M, the name they give to the March 11, 2004 jihadist massacre at Madrid's Atocha central train station [see our blog post "8-May-14: Madrid moments"]. 

In the dozen years since it happened, the atrocity has been the subject of a kind of partisan tug-of-war over how it ought to be understood. 

Compare, for instance, an article in The Guardian ["The worst Islamist attack in European history", October 31, 2007], with Wikipedia's survey of the Spanish voices - notably including El Mundo and La Razon newspapers - that claim it was not the Islamists at all but a consortium of other malevolents, among them the police and the Basque separatists of ETA.

For some people, warnings about how badly the battle against the terrorists is going are treated as noise and dismissed as causing more confusion than clarification. Some others pay lip-service (this includes public figures from among the many we have personally encountered) but their actions show they are not convinced and don't regard the dangers as serious or the warnings actionable.

Today, the "UK's national head of counter- terrorism" gave a media briefing from which we have extracted some bullet pointed quotes below. His views are being translated into action, and though we are not close enough to the UK to appreciate how seriously this is being taken by the wider public, his views seem to be mainstream.

Mark Rowley has been the Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations in the Metropolitan Police Service for the past four and a half years. That's the body that, with its tens of thousands of employed officers, police staff, Community Support Officers and volunteer police, provides greater London with policing services. When people speak of Scotland Yard, they mean the MPS. The Guardian calls Rowley the policeman who "leads on counter-terrorism for Scotland Yard".

[Image Source]

Some of what he said today:

• The nature of the threat from ISIS is changing. "Going from [a] narrow focus on police and military as symbols of the state to something much broader. And you see a terrorist group which has big ambitions for enormous and spectacular attacks, not just the types that we've seen foiled to date..." [Telegraph UK, today]
• Where, in the recent past, ISIS was thought to be trying to incite small-scale attacks by individuals, using knives or vehicles, their goals seem much broader now, In the wake of the Friday 13th massacre in Paris during November, Rowley and other counter-terrorism chiefs believe ISIS has "the capability and intent to stage a mass-casualty attack in the west".
• Rowley said ISIS "is trying to get supporters who have received military training in Syria into northern Europe to stage attacks". What sort of alarm bells ought this insight to be ringing in those European countries currently swamped with waves - hundreds of thousands - of newly-arrived and still-arriving "refugees" said to be fleeing the blood-letting in Syria?
• Abdelhamid Abaaoud, regarded as the ringleader of the Paris terrorism attacks [we have some interesting things to say about him here], is now known to have visited Birmingham and London during 2015. "Found on his phone were pictures taken during his visit to fellow jihadis. Rowley declined to comment on this." [The Guardian, today]
• ISIS recruiters are increasingly targeting (a) people with mental illnesses (b) women and (c) teenagers, and they are successfully drawing them in. In terms of 2015 arrests under counter-terrorism laws in the UK, 77% were British nationals, 14% were female and 13% were 20 or younger. The Guardian quotes him saying "Over half of those arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences ended up being charged with a terrorism offence."
• Dozens of children were “safeguarded” (a police expression) during 2015. These interventions arose because their parents tried to take them to Syria or Iraq, or because of suspicions that they were being radicalised.
• The overall view taken by the authorities is that the terrorists still want to kill soldiers or the police but are increasingly focused on "attacking western lifestyle targets".
• About those re-education and community-based efforts to intercept would-be jihadists before they get completely weaponized, this sobering comment from The Guardian: "Privately, counter-terrorism officials see no sign of ISIS’s internet propaganda campaign being thwarted by community and government efforts and believe the group still has the same ability to attract devotees."

If the police analysis is even half right, there's good reason for the UK's citizens to be seriously agitated.

24-Aug-15: Honor, shame, technology, crime and how they brought down a good, hard-working boy

A French investigator in protective gear gathers evidence on-board the Thalys intercity train on Friday
[Image Source] The role of officials before and during the attack is considerably less clear
or media-covered

This past Friday evening, as we described here ["22-Aug-15: Carnage on a high-speed European train and the quick-thinking that prevented it"], a massacre on board a busy train traveling between two European capitals was narrowly averted, though the gunman managed to get off several shots. Fast-thinking, selfless action on the part of some of the intended victims made all the difference.

This was not a victory for the governments, the authorities or the people responsible for ensuring public security. Quite the opposite - it was a reminder of what happens when security systems fail. And the huge influence of luck and circumstance.

In the past few days, a little more has become known about the attacker. He started out as a question mark, described in vague terms. Now through media enquiries, we know a little more. Some of it is useful. All of it is helpful to understanding how and why terrorism keeps happening, and will keep on doing so.

• First and most important, the intending murderer was "a good boy". His father, Mohamed El Khazzani who lives in Algeciras, Spain and who admits to not having had contact with him "for over a year", says so in a Telegraph UK interview.
• And not only a good boy but a "very hardworking" person who "never talked politics; just football and fishing". In the mosque which his family does not attend, the president of the South Algeciras Muslim community who presides over it knows him. And surprise, surprise, it turns out "He was an ordinary young man, he played football, went fishing, he worked to make a living" [Alarabiya, August 23, 2015].
• But he's evidently also a "good boy" with a serious grievance. Echoing the days of European slave-trading and its horrors, the son "had been brought to France" (father's words, speaking of an able-bodied son in his early twenties) by "a French telecommunications company... to work on a six-month contract that was terminated early." Imagine. The father of this murder-minded gunman knows a felonious scenario when he sees one: "They're criminals in that company, using people like that... After one month they were just kicked out. So now he's in France, not Spain. What is he meant to do? What is he supposed to eat?" Right. The path from that outrage to dead and bleeding bodies on an inter-city train carriage floor is evident to any thinking person possessed of an honour/shame frame of mind.
• Then there's the small matter of the fish-loving lad's actual criminal record. Father says his hardworking good boy was arrested twice in Madrid in 2009 on charges of selling hashish though "he was only carrying a little bit". A British report [Mirror UK, August 22, 2015] quoting the Spanish paper El Pais says that in fact he was arrested for "drugs trafficking, in May and December 2009, and a third time in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta on a warrant issued by a court in Madrid for a drugs offence." It adds that he is subject today to an arrest warrant issued by a different Madrid court, again for a drugs-related offence.
• He gave up smoking hashish when he moved back to his parents' home in 2012, and after that "seemed very calm". [Telegraph UK]
• The father "recycles materials for a living" (meaning he's a scrap dealer, we assume) in Algeciras. He moved there after earlier bringing his family from Morocco to Spain in 2007 and living for a short time in Madrid. Algeciras is a southern port city in Spain with a population of about 120,000. Some 10,000 of them, or about 9%, are Muslims, according to one report [Mirror UK].
• As for the charges of terrorism-inspired attempted murder, the father says the "hardworking" "good boy" was merely "trying to rob passengers". The young lad "is said to be "dumbfounded" by accusations he was planning a terror attack" [AFP]. Because, we're thinking, that would be so wrong.
• As for us, we're dumbfounded too. The son, Ayoub El Khazzani, now 25, was not "only carrying a little bit" on Friday when he boarded the train. He was actually packing (and struggled hard to use) a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a Luger automatic pistol, plenty of ammunition and a box-cutter with which he came close to slicing off the fingers of one of the men who stopped him.
• Prior to Friday's murderous attack (or unfortunate attempted robbery, if we engage in fantasies) he had already been tagged "as an Islamic extremist by intelligence services in Belgium, France, German and Spain" [AFP] 
• The Mirror report says the French authorities had already decided in March 2014 that his "relationship with radical Islam" justified keeping him under watch. Since he was on a train hurtling towards the French capital when he cocked his high-powered gun and prepared to fire at fellow train travelers, one would be excused for wondering what kind of watch he ought to have gotten. And also whether there might one or two other ladies or gentlemen traveling Europe's roads and tracks at this moment, and who are believed to have a "relationship with radical Islam" that warrants them being watched.
• Those authorities had had some opportunities to check him out since, as BBC reports, he visited Spain, Andorra, Belgium, Austria, Germany and France in the past 6 months alone, There is some evidence he also went to Turkey and Syria, but his lawyer says that part is untrue. Naturally we're wondering why that's important to either side.
• Spanish anti-terrorist services are reported [Mirror UK].to have entered Ayoub El Khazzani's data into "the Schengen-area police database" because of a perception that the young man had ties to "religious extremism". Whoever takes care of checking passengers who board international trains in Europe might eventually be asked how the data and the millions of Euros of technology completely failed to trigger any security measures when he board at Brussels South station. 
• And that's before anyone starts asking about the Kalashnikov assault rifle and the other implements of death and destruction that he brought on-board with him.
• In that last point, we think the Mirror report means to refer to the "Schengen Information System" or SIS. Let's take a moment on thaty. SIS is a European inter-government database keeping and accessing information on people "of interest" in matters of national security, border control and law enforcement. It's a phenomenally important tool. 27 countries officially use the SIS data: France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Greece, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia.
• But if, as reported, Friday's would-be massacre-man was listed there, and still got on-board the train with enough fire power to carry out a world-class act of carnage, something might be a teeny tiny bit wrong with this picture. Was SIS down that day? Is using it optional for security officials? Do any security officials work at Belgium's inter-city train stations watching for suspects or trouble? And who watches the watchers?
• The gunman's lawyer is named as Sophie David by Alarabiya which quotes her saying the client looks ill and malnourished: "[V]ery sick, somebody very weakened physically, as if he suffered from malnutrition, very, very thin and very haggard" but also a person of enormous good fortune who "found the Kalashnikov he had taken onto the train in a park near the Gare du Midi rail station in Brussels where he was in the habit of sleeping..." and, as anyone would, then "decided to get on a train that some other homeless people told him would be full of wealthy people travelling from Amsterdam to Paris and he hoped to feed himself by armed robbery".

This is all probably going to get much clearer soon, especially the part about why it took three quick-witted, selfless and tough travelers to save a carriage full of train passengers while some of the world's most sophisticated anti-terrorism measures - along with the people who operate them and the policies according to which they work - totally and utterly failed. 

Until it does, we're left to muse about the risks we ordinary people take as we walk into stores, board planes and trains, and generally act as if we live in safe and free societies.

30-Jun-15: Towards a clearer understanding of how and where they hate us in Europe

Many of the Jews we know feel there is much about which to worry when it comes to the general state of people's attitudes to the Jews among whom they live and, to an astonishing degree, the Jews whom they don't know at all.

The Anti-Defamation League, whose largest-ever study of anti-Semitic attitudes (more than 53,000 people in 102 countries) we covered here ["13-May-14: Understanding who hates us"] has today announced a follow-up. In summarizing the results today [press release here], the ADL's statement sets the stage by referring to current events:

In the aftermath of the shocking violence against Jews in Western Europe the past year, the level of anti-Semitic attitudes among the general population in France showed a dramatic decline, while Germany and Belgium registered significant reductions...

Then in exquisitely careful language it moves on to add a new quantitative layer to the existing analysis, touching on an issue that gets discussed a great deal but almost always on the basis of anecdotal evidence only: attitudes to Jews among Europe's Moslems:

For the first time, the ADL poll measured Muslim attitudes toward Jews in six countries in Western Europe finding that acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes by Muslims in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K was substantially higher than among the national population in each country.

This is a report that is likely to trigger widespread discussions for some time to come. The key findings (in our words):

• The propensity towards racist hatred of Jews among Europe's Moslems is much higher, multiples higher, than among non-Moslem Europeans. There is no room for doubt about the width of the gap, and no reason to look at sampling errors. It's a yawning chasm.
• Western Europeans who "harbor antisemitic attitudes" compared with Moslems in the same country who "harbor antisemitic attitudes" follow a depressingly clear trajectory: 21% of all Belgians versus 68% of Belgian Moslems; 16% of all Germans versus 56% of German Moslems; Italy 29% versus 56%; France 17% versus 49%; Spain 29% versus 62%; United Kingdom 12% versus 54%.
• Overall, the numbers average out (our rough calculation) at 20% across all 6 countries for their populations taken as a whole, versus 58%, or about three times as hateful, when you consider their Moslem residents as a distinct and separate demographic.

It's going to be interesting to see the sense that people make of these insights.

The numbers emanating from Greece (where what remains of an ancient and historic Jewish community is a tiny remnant - about 5,000 in the entire country) are noteworthy, given the extreme, self-inflicted instability that has set in there:

Greece continues to show extremely high levels of anti-Semitism, scoring significantly higher than any other European country. In Greece, 67 percent of the population was found to harbor anti-Semitic attitudes (essentially unchanged from 69 percent in 2014).

20-Jun-14: Does Europe face the most serious terror threat ever? At CNN, they say yes and explain (poorly) why

Moslem protestors outside the Danish Embassy in London,
February 3, 2006 [Image Source: Getty Images]

A lengthy article on the CNN website yesterday looks CNN-style at the threats posed to European countries by returning jihadists who have cut their terror teeth in the carnage of Syria and Iraq. [See "Europe faces 'greatest terror threat ever' from jihadists in Iraq and Syria" | CNN | June 19, 2014]

It starts out focusing on a recent police raid in Cannes on the French Riviera. Their target was the apartment of Ibrahim B., a man of 23, who had returned to France from 18 months of fighting in Syria on behalf of Jabhat al Nusra, an Al Qaeda offshoot, prohibited as a terrorist organization by the United Nations,, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Turkey. He had been spotted sending online messages that called for "punishing France" which evidently triggered some concern. The police raid on his home turned up a stash of soda cans converted to bombs containing nearly a kilogram of TATP. That's a high-explosive substance used to make detonators in multiple post-9/11 Al Qaeda bomb plots.

The case of Ibrahim B is one of dozens in recent months involving European jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq... gaining combat experience, training and an extremist mindset... A European counter-terrorism official told CNN up to 300 veterans of the Syrian Jihad have already come back to Europe. "The threat of attacks has never been greater -- not at the time of 9/11, not after the war in Iraq -- never," the European counter-terrorism official told CNN. He envisaged a flood of small-scale but effective and chilling attacks.

Being CNN, the article is long on superficial, short on substance. It races through some quasi-research data, without any indication of where it comes from or how accurate it is. For instance:

• About 2,000 citizens of EU states have traveled to Arab states to join the jihad. 
• "France, Germany and the UK account for the largest numbers, all with hundreds of citizens fighting in Syria. But in per capita terms more have travelled from Belgium... (which) has sizeable North African and Turkish Muslim populations and active radical groups)... than any other EU country." 
• An anonymous source says there are 150 Belgian fighters in Syria. "Up to 15 more" go each month.
• "About 35 are thought to have been killed..." and "60-70 had returned home". 

So much for the data candy. (Some of the numbers seem similar to an earlier article dealing with essentially the same theme, published in the Wall Street Journal on June 2.) Then a faltering attempt at trying to sound more weighty and serious:

• Quoting an anonymous European official connected to counter-terrorism, the way intelligence-sharing is done in Europe is "woefully inadequate". A central database to serve all of Europe is needed to track the "extremists" (i.e. the jihadists and Islamists) who fly out of Europe take part in the carnage directed at fellow Moslems and Arabs.
• But some good news: "European governments were beginning to understand the need for better collaboration" - no source for that fatuous line.
• Much of what is known about eager jihadists comes from looking at Facebook, Twitter and darker corners of the social media. "But scouring social media and jihadist forums is labor-intensive and demands language skills. And the most dangerous militants won't be so transparent about their intentions." That's important to know, right?
• And then a key observation: "There's huge excitement on online jihadist forums," said the official. "It's a further catalyst for radicalization and could lead to a surge in travel flows."
• And as for what this might mean in life-and-death terms, "An early indicator of the potential threat came last month when a gunman opened fire at a Jewish museum in the Belgian capital, Brussels, killing four people." Those murders happened in May.

The problem is that, sensationalism aside, there is indeed a great deal about which to be concerned in Europe. 

But focusing on the relative handful of committed European Islamists who actually take up arms (principally, let it be noted, against other Moslems) is to miss a much larger and more meaningful point. And for journalists to portray the callous murders carried out in the Belgian Jewish museum as "an early indicator" of the Islamism-in-Europe problem is absurd. 

• Could the cold-blooded murders in March 2012 of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France by French-born Islamist Mohamed Merah have been an indicator of the problem?
• Perhaps the 2007 "Sauerland-Gruppe" bomb plot  in which three men (two of them German converts from Christianity to Islam) were arrested on September 4, 2007 while leaving a rented cottage in Medebach, Germany where they were building car bombs using 700 kg of a hydrogen peroxide-based mixture?
• Is it warning of things to come when Islamists plan in 2006 to kidnap and kill Jews in Prague, hold them captive in a synagogue, make demands which cannot be met and then blow up the building, killing everybody inside?
• Would not the 7/7 massacres (52 killed, hundreds injured) carried out by British-born Moslems in London in 2005 qualify as a sign? 
• How about the Islamist 11-M bombing of the trains in Madrid (death toll: 191, with some 1,800 injured) in March 2004?
• Or the machine-gun and grenade attack that killed two people and wounded thirty attending a Bar mitzvah service at the Stadttemple in Vienna on August 29, 1981? Was that a warning sign?
• The August 9, 1982 Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant attack in Paris: Islamist terrorists threw a grenade into the dining room and fired machine guns on a Jewish restaurant in Paris's Marais district, on 9 August 1982. They killed six people, including two American tourists, and injured 22 others - "the heaviest toll suffered by Jews in France since World War II".

These instances are literally selected at random. The list of Islamism-driven attacks and attempted attacks of a terrorist nature on European targets is lengthy. It's not possible that the people at CNN are seriously suggesting this is a new process with its origins in the last eight weeks.

We think a big part of Europe's problem - apart from a serious case of historical amnesia - is a self-imposed stupidity on this subject. You can see how it works by examining the practices of the BBC, where the very use of the word "terrorism" is made impossible as a result of political-correctness gone mad. [See "16-Aug-11: When the powers at the BBC put this much effort into something, they must really care"; and "10-Jan-13: When terror is ignored by news reporting agencies, the BBC for instance, what can we learn?"]

Will Europe recover in time to address the very real existential challenges it faces? Stay tuned.

8-May-14: Madrid moments

Two bereaved fathers with more
in common than the differing backgrounds might have
suggested: Michael Gallagher and Arnold Roth
at the Madrid photo exhibition

I visited Madrid for the first time (writes Arnold Roth) ten years ago. I was invited to go there as one of a small delegation of Israelis participating in a conference of terror victims, the first international gathering of its kind. In many ways, it was an extraordinary experience, mostly positive.

Three weeks later, on March 11, 2004 and after I was back home, Spain was shocked to discover that its terrorism problem involved more than just a decades-long conflict with its Basques, and that the curse of jihadism and of Islamist terror had other countries on its agenda beyond the US and Israel.

I have been invited back there several times since as an invited speaker addressing issues of terrorism. It's not surprising to me that Spanish audiences have real interest in the subject. But the political antipathy of large parts of Spanish society to Israel - among the worst in Europe - has remained a puzzle to me. Israel and Spain first established diplomatic ties in 1986. That's when Spain finally recognized an independent state of Israel (independent in fact since 1948).

Relations since then have been proper but (as far as I can tell) not especially warm. Israelis have noted how, in Pew Research Center’s 2008 Global Attitudes Project, an astounding 46% of Spaniards were found to hold an unfavorable view of Jews. (In 2005, it had been 21%.) Spain's Jewish community numbers about 12,000 making it roughly 0.03% of the Spanish total. Notwithstanding the microscopic presence, it's said to be the European nation with the poorest view of Jews.

Memorial mass: view of the cathedral entrance from the far side of the street

Two months ago, Spain observed the tenth anniversary of the Madrid train bombings. The European Union sponsored a project in which a dozen or so terror victims from Spain and beyond came to Madrid for the commemoration and to speak to the cameras about how they have dealt with life in the wake of their personal encounters with terror. I was invited to be one of the interviewees, and I traveled back to Madrid.

For me, Madrid is the most spectacularly beautiful city in Europe. My encounters with Spaniards, with some small exceptions (political figures, mostly), have been warm and rewarding.

But this time there were some mildly discordant notes too. A very moving photographic exhibition - to the opening of which our group was invited - sympathetically depicted victims of terror from many parts of the world - with one obvious exception which readers of this post will need no help in identifying. And at the Atocha railway station where a striking memorial to the 191 people killed, and the 1,800 injured in the terrorist bombing, incorporates hundreds of messages of support, solidarity and condolence in a large number of languages including Arabic, one particular language is not in evidence. No prizes for guessing which.

On the morning of March 11, the date Spaniards now call 11M, the anniversary of the train massacre was marked with a Mass in the Almudena cathedral next to the royal palace. I chose to remain outside on the street and watched as a small handful of protesters, placards at the ready, gathered on the boulevard under the watchful gaze of the police, while a stream of VIPs including the royal family arrived and eventually left the magnificent church.

Onlookers and protesters outside the 11M memorial
religious service

I overheard one of the protesters, standing right in front of me, being asked by an English-speaking tourist to explain what brought them there.

Two things, it turns out. One, they were offended by the fact that Spain's official religious commemoration of the jihadist attack had an entirely Catholic character, when it ought to have been more respectful of certain other religions.

And two: the evidence is that it was not the Islamists, as the government claims, but NATO that was the true culprit. He launched into a multi-point rationalization with some of the usual depressingly-familiar components of 21st century conspiracy theories.

At about that moment, a passing Spaniard gave me a close look and stopped right next to me. Here's trouble, I thought to myself. He spoke: Shalom, he said. Then said it again: Shalom. Instinctively, I responded in Hebrew but quickly saw that "shalom" was the only Hebrew he knew. He had evidently noticed the kippa on my head  as he walked by and wanted to share with me the one aspect of Jewish culture that he could summon up on a moment's notice. We ended up smiling pleasantly and a little stupidly at each other and then he went on his way.

The following evening, a Spanish friend who is a prominent lawyer in Madrid invited me out for drinks just before I had to leave to catch a midnight flight back to Tel Aviv. He chose a stunningly elegant venue for our conversation, the Villa Magna Hotel, across the street from the far more modest (but very adequate) hotel where we terror victims were accommodated.

Ricardo and I were deep in conversation in the gorgeous cocktail lounge when I became slowly aware of something that seemed somehow out of place. It took me some moments to figure out what. The piano in the background - the pianist was playing... Hatikva. I didn't recognize it immediately because he was interpreting it in dramatic fashion.

But that's what it was, and I asked my friend to pause while we both paid closer attention to the delightful music. Then the pianist, seated some way off at his grand piano, gave a small smile of acknowledgment and switched gear - playing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. There was no sign among the business people in the vast lounge that anyone else was aware of the significance of either piece of music.

When it became possible to do so, I got up and walked over to the piano and thanked the young pianist. We exchanged business cards. His opening words in our brief conversation were "I love Israel" followed by a few seconds of explaining that after centuries of turbulent history many Spaniards have Jewish blood running through their veins and they know it. Then he moved on to his next piece and I returned to my host.

Members of the terror victims group in the Atocha
train station experience the "cylinder of light"
memorial to the victims of the March 11, 2004 Islamist atrocity

This week on Israel's Independence Day I received an email from the Spanish pianist, David Marín Ariza.

I have to say I am so sorry about that terror atact. I feel so closed to Israel in its fight against terror. My father is Guardia Civil (police man) in Spain, and we were always object of terrorists, we had just luck. I was as well born in 1985, and I am a musician, like Malki. I feld so sad while I was reading her story. I think there will be never enough tribute to victims of terror, they and their families are the most important value in open and free sociaties, they are, as well with our police and army, our heroes. It is what I think, and the reason because I tried always to go to demostrations of terror victims in Madrid, against negotiation with terrorist. I am no great pianist, but if you need some day one, for beneficial concert or whatever here in Spain, let me know. Here [click] is a version fo mine of Hatikvah, in a concert wich I played in Madrid one month ago. (The quality of the video is not very good)... Excuse my English, please... I am actually musicologist but I have worked as pianist at Villa Magna since I finished my studies. I would like to work actually as composer for video, films, etc, and music manager. But there are not many possibilities right now in Spain. So I want to go to the Unated [presumably means the United States] to practish English, look for a job and perhaps study music (film, management...) Do you live in Israel? I was there once, and loved it. I want to visit it again. I wished could soon.

Click below for his YouTube rendition of Hatikva. It's unfortunately captured in a rather ordinary cell-phone video but it conveys a taste of the music behind it. And if readers have some constructive ideas that might help David advance in his career, please drop us a line.

The human, individual response to terrorism always seems to me to be more interesting, more nuanced, more humane and generally more constructive than government statements and political declarations. 

14-Feb-14: As its children face major new threat, Hamas leadership in Gaza gears up for another crisis

Click for the AP/NP article

In Hamas-controlled Gaza, the ever-alert commissars of the ruling jihadist organization have been forced to take bold steps to preserve the absolute corest of their core values. A widely-published Associated Press [Canada's National Post has it here] describes it this way:

Gaza’s Hamas authorities have blocked a UN refugee agency from introducing textbooks promoting human rights into local schools, saying it ignores Palestinian cultural mores and focuses too heavily on “peaceful” means of conflict resolution. Motesem al-Minawi, spokesman for the Hamas-run Education Ministry, said Thursday that the government believes the curriculum does not match the “ideology and philosophy” of the local population. He said the textbooks, used in grades 7 through 9, did not sufficiently address Palestinian suffering and did not acknowledge the right to battle Israel. “There is a tremendous focus on the peaceful resistance as the only tool to achieve freedom and independence,” he said. [Ibrahim Barzak, Associated Press, February 13, 2014 3:55 PM ET]

Al-Minawi, who fronts for the educational actions of the Islamist terrorists, clarifies the Hamas objections by pointing to the unacceptable (to them) mention in their school textbooks of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the milestone UDHR recognizes "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family." You can immediately see their problem with that. AP says Hamas views the declaration as violating Islamic law by advocating for "the right of people of different faiths to marry and the right to change one's religion".

So the UN agency, ever ready to accommodate Hamas, met with people from Al-Minawi's office and

"offered to form a joint committee to revise the book. Adnan Abu Hassna, a local UNRWA spokesman, confirmed that the curriculum had been suspended while the sides work out their differences." [AP]

Incidentally, who makes this pusillanimous mode of conduct possible? You, and the people living around you - assuming you pay taxes to the governments of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the UK, the Netherlands, the United States, the European Union, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy or Spain. It's your money that makes this kind of thing possible. Nearly everyone else can relax. Oh, and if you happen to live in an Arab country, the good news is you are completely off the hook since Arab governments have historically contributed close to nothing to the education and welfare work of UNRWA, that extremely odd special-purpose body that is supposed to benefit the Palestinian Arabs. You can see the list of payers at "20-Nov-13: It's Wednesday. Time for yet another UNRWA funding crisis". 

(As an aside, if you read our blog, we assume you're not that happy about your hard-earned income tax money being used in this hideous way. So listen up: it's happening anyway and it will keep happening. Only your political leaders and you and your neighbours can change that.)

AP's article fails, oddly, to make any mention of the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. It's highly relevant in this context. The CDHRI is 

a declaration of the member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference adopted in Cairo, Egypt, in 1990 which provides an overview on the Islamic perspective on human rights, and affirms Islamic Shari'ah as its sole source. CDHRI declares its purpose to be "general guidance for Member States [of the OIC] in the field of human rights". [Wikipedia]

Article 24 of the Cairo Declaration  says "All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia." Article 19 says "There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Sharia." This not-so-universal approach has attracted a certain degree of criticism from serious multilateral bodies, but that's not our focus here. CDHRI a major document reflecting a major political/legal push that gets major respect in major parts of the world. It's their response to the UDHR, and their idea of what has to replace it.

Its author and inspiration for the Cairo Declaration is the OIC. Now renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (in 2011), it is far from being some minor marginal body, speaking in the name of 57 member states as "the collective voice of the Muslim world". Its mission is to "safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony". The OIC has Permanent Observer Mission status at the UN and is often described as the largest international organisation outside the United Nations. Iran's representative to the UN explained his side's view of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1981, explaining that it was

a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing Islamic law.

It's not just Hamas, in other words.

Down there in darkest Gaza, Hamas is expressing in its typically ham-fisted and savagely violent - but heart-felt - way a view that has support throughout the world. Our children don't need to know about the global struggle for human rights, they are saying. Our children's cultural mores, ideology and philosophy are best respected by focusing on their victimhood and on the need for them to wage war against a hated "other", the Israelis. Pizza shops, school buses, hospitals - these and skillful practice of the tools of death are the correct and proper targets for the energies of our children.

So while we and other large part of the world's communities focus on educating our children about the need to prevent incitement to religious and race-based hatred and the other values embedded in the UDHR, proponents of the Cairo Declaration, including but by no means limited to Hamas are driving in the opposite direction.

And in Gaza they don't just say it. They clearly mean it, as frequent reports about Hamas regime programs for instilling the values of jihad in their school-age children make clear to all but the most ideologically colour-blind observers. We have offered background to this in our blog posts here - for instance "15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?" 

As with that post, we end this one with the question that everyone ought to be asking. 

The real story is not the military-style training and the pledges by children to die for the values of those hideous, terror-addicted Hamas insiders. It's this: where in Heaven's name is the outrage of the civilized world? Where are the voices of the people whose tax money pays for this? Where are the politicians who speak up for human rights at cocktail gatherings but lose their courage when human rights are actually being trampled - and by means of their funding?

And another question. Are UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development and so many other child-focused NGOs silent about the disaster in Gaza for a reason? If there is a reason, let them say it. It's inconceivable that they are unaware of the horrors perpetrated every day on innocent children by the vile "educators" of Gaza and their willing co-conspirators.

17-Aug-13: On the redness of certain kinds of Scandinavian blood

Screen shot of CNN's coverage of the Norwegian terror killing, July 22, 2011

Over the 12 years since we experienced the death by murder of our 15 year-old daughter Malka, we have tried, by writing and speaking as often as we can manage, to convey the message that her death at the hands of Hamas terrorists has implications for people living their lives far from where we are. 

We have wanted them to understand what the August 2001 massacre at the Sbarro restaurant does not stand for.

• Malki was not caught in any crossfire. She was not standing between desperate patriots and their goal of militarily defeating a hated enemy. As a schoolgirl, she was not some sort of collateral damage. In the literal sense of these words, she and the other children around her in that pizza shop that day were the killers' primary target.
• The agenda of the terrorists was not political. They are not freedom fighters. The inspiration behind the murders that day and since then is not that they lack a state. It's that we, our side, have one. 
• It was not something out of the blue. It happened in a context in which large numbers of non-uniformed people, whipped up by religious leaders and political demagogues acted (and continue to act) in the most violent and savage ways imaginable against an enemy they have demonized and accuse of every imaginable offence against them. 
• The terrorism and violence that so completely turned our lives upside down, and brought such bitterness and pain to us, is not a local phenomenon, limited say to Jerusalem, or to Israel. It's a global scourge, being done by people with global ambitions and global resources. It's a growing threat to almost everyone.

Over and again, we encounter people who hear what we say but insist the real victims of terrorism are the victims in their local community. Us Israelis? We and our children had it coming to us. The people who killed Malki and the thousand-plus Israelis killed by terrorist action since Sbarro - they're not terrorists. They're... something else. 

Some years ago, I (Arnold) was in a European capital city where I had just taken part in a conference of terror victims. For reasons I have explained elsewhere, all four of us members of the Israeli delegation were invited to share views with people from that government's foreign ministry the day after the event.

It started politely and pleasantly enough. But towards the end, the political head of the ministry told us that, for the next such gathering of terror victims, his government intended to take steps to bring a delegation of Palestinian victims of Israeli terror. In this way, he said with a degree of visible smugness, both sides of the argument would be presented, rather than just Israel's. I asked to be heard, and said I felt that if his ministry managed to bring along Palestinian Arabs who would link arms with the rest of the terror victims present, as we had all done a day earlier, and declare total rejection and opposition to terror in any form, then all of us would be the beneficiaries; Palestinian Arabs, Israelis and even the citizens of that European country.

This was not the response the politician wanted and my recollection is he grew red in the face. He retorted that we Israelis were not really suffering from terror at all but from a political situation that demanded a political solution. The real victims of terror, the innocent victims, were the people of his own country. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the perpetrators had nothing but hatred on their minds. He added that steps like Israel's building of a security barrier (he called it something else) and armed security checkpoints were making the situation in our country worse and not better. 

My response to the political gentleman was to point out that terror is no respecter of international boundaries and that the innocent of his country were neither more nor less innocent in the eyes of the terrorists than us Israelis are. This, again, was not a view he seemed to want to hear. The meeting, as I remember it, ended on a distinctly sour note.

This leads us to a sharp column written by Jonathan S. Tobin yesterday in Commentary Magazine. His article is called "Scandinavia: Jews Deserve Terror, Not Us". An extract:

In the view of many Europeans, and in particular Scandinavians, not all victims of terror are alike. If, for example, you are an innocent Norwegian child who is gunned down by a deranged right-wing fanatic, you are deserving of compassion and your killer must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. However, if you are a Jew who is gunned down or bombed by a Palestinian, you had it coming and your killer should be released and honored.That’s the only possible way to interpret the anger being expressed in the region this week in response to remarks made by Israel’s Ambassador to Sweden Isaac Buchman. The ambassador is under fire for asking listeners on Swedish Radio to think about how they would feel if Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the Utoya Island massacre, were released. Buchman complained that Israel wasn’t getting credit for it’s freeing of 26 Palestinian terrorist murderers in order to entice the Palestinian Authority back to the negotiating table. But rather than sympathize with the families of Israelis victimized by Palestinian murderers, people in Norway and Sweden are angry about any comparison between their sorrow and that of Jews killed by Arabs. Indeed, as one Swedish paper put it, the families of the Utoya incident are “seething” about the ambassador’s analogy.

Tobin believes this speaks to “some sort of consensus that Breivik’s crimes are beyond the pale while the Jews have it coming when Palestinians kill them”. 

We think he's right. And it's highly appropriate that he relates this to the events of this past week in which we have been deeply involved in protesting the release of a first roundof convicted terrorists, all of them murderers, from an Israeli prison at the behest of the United States and under pressure from the leadership of the PA. 

Concerning this, Tobin writes:

Contrary to the belief of the Utoya families, the blood of the Jews slaughtered in cold blood by the Palestinians that were acclaimed as heroes this week after their release was no less red than that of Breivik’s victims. The grief of their families was no less profound. The outrage of the people of Israel—and all decent people everywhere—about these wanton acts of murder carried out by Palestinians was no less justified. The Utoya families view Breivik’s actions as “unreal” and therefore a random act of madness that must somehow be seen as on a different moral plane from Palestinian killings of Jews. But the rationale of each of those Palestinian murderers—some of whom were personally embraced by Israel’s peace partner, Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas—was no less mad or random… By treating terror carried out by Palestinians against Jews as legitimate, Europeans are signaling not only that they approve of this cause but also that Jewish lives are less precious than their own. The families of the Utoya victims deserve our sympathy in their grief. But they, and other Europeans who are “seething” about any comparison between their children and dead Jews, have crossed the line into anti-Semitism. [Jonathan Tobin in Commentary Magazine]

Some Scandinavians will likely seeth with anger (again) at the suggestion that their views point to a belief that their blood is redder than that of others (i.e. ours and our children's). 

But until Swedes and Norwegians like those quoted in the Tobin piece get to a better understanding of how terrorism works, who does it and at whom it's directed, they are going to remain prisoners of a dangerous misconception. 

Scandinavians are, of course, not alone in this.