24-Mar-16: In the UK, a near hit

The convicted would-be shooters
[Image Source]

No one needs to be told how much media attention, and follow-on political attention, was generated in the past 36 hours because of the terrorist assaults on Brussels.

Given the focus of this blog, we pay more attention than most people to the many instances of terrorism that get stopped in time because something fortuitous intervened. Many discussions we have about how serious the threat posed to ordinary lives and large societies by terrorists - and jihadists in particular - is seem to go right over the heads of those with whom we are having a dialogue. People just don't know.

Here's an example from today that, unless you are in the UK, you probably won't be hearing.

A couple of university students were convicted of plotting to carry out a series of drive-by shootings in London, targeting police and soldiers. Here's how The Guardian sums up the case:

Two university students have been convicted of wanting to kill on London’s streets in the name of Islamic State in what counter-terrorism officials believe was the most significant jihadi plot targeting Britain in a decade.

We posted about them when we first heard of the charges ["12-Oct-14: In London, they are monitoring thousands of suspected terrorists" and "18-Oct-14: If UK travel is in your plans... Part 1". Now we know more about their involvement with jihad and how close they came carrying out its aim. In the words of the head of the Crown Prosecution Service's counter-terrorism division, Sue Hemming:

These are dangerous men with strong beliefs. Had their plot not been exposed when it was, I am in little doubt that they would have gone on to murder.

The now-convicted jihad-minded terrorists are Tarik Hassane, 22, and Suhaib Majeed, 21. They knew each other from primary school. Hardly no-hopers, Hassane was born in London to a Moroccan mother and a father who was a Saudi diplomat. Unable to get into Kings College London because his marks were not good enough, he headed to Khartoun, Sudan where he was accepted into the faculty of medicine. That's where, in the summer of 2014, he took a pledge of allegiance to the Islamists of ISIS. Majeed, studying for a bachelor's degree in physics, was chairman of the Islamic Society at prestigious King’s College London.

Majeed, born in Iraq but holding a British passport since 2002, acquired a handgun, ammunition and a silencer on Hassane's orders but was arrested in September 2014 before managing to carry out the plan. Hassane, aware of the arrest, came back to London to execute a shooting attack but he too was arrested. Police had been monitoring his movements.

Both plotters bought weapons from a pair of British Muslim converts who, once arrested, pleaded guilty to supplying them. They were cleared of knowing about the jihadist attack plot. It might have been interesting to know what brought the jury to that view.

The Independent UK's report of Hassane's and Majeed's conviction, published a few hours ago. notes that the jury were not told that Hassane had links to a notorious mosque in west London which Mohammed Emwazi, the now-deceased ISIS murderer/executioner better known as Jihadi John also attended. Majeed had a video of one of Emwazi’s "execution" murders on his tablet. Hassane is thought to have gone to Syria during his Sudan sojourn, and to have visited Emwazi there.

Thanks to a joint operation by Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command and Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence services (according to The Guardian), their plans were thwarted. Instead of becoming martyrs in the eyes of the communities that nurtured them, they are likely to spend decades in British prisons. The rest of us should be thinking of how close they came to carrying out their plans, and how many others are in line behind them or inspired by their story to do it better.

12-Nov-14: A decade after Arafat, more Palestinian Arab rhetoric, hatred and terror

1974 Arafat at the UN in his freedom-fighter period.
That's a pistol famously poking out from
under his jacket [Image Source]

[Our thanks once again to Malgorzata Koraszewska for having translated this article into Polish. It now appears in that language on the Listy z naszego sadu site.]

Ten years ago this week, an American television journalist offered up a solemn tribute to the death that day of the kleptocratic mass-murderer Yasser Arafat:

"There may not be any other man in history who better embodies the saying that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter... For most Israelis, many Jews, he was a bloody terrorist and nothing more. Yet elsewhere in the world, even among Arabs who questioned his leadership, he was treated as a hero, freedom fighter, revolutionary. A diminutive man who became a larger than life symbol of the Palestinian dream..." Diane Sawyer reporting Arafat's death on Good Morning America, November 11, 2004 [Source]

We wish Ms Sawyer understood - and hope the past decade has shown - that one does not have to be Israeli to see this as one of the most galling aphorisms of our time.

More than that: convincing other people that "One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" is an essential part of ensuring moral confusion will reign. A thoughtful friend of ours puts it this way: it makes people stupid.

The United Nations which does not have, perhaps never will have, an agreed definition of terrorism, is the world's most important shrine to the consequences of not grappling effectively with terrorism and terrorists. In 1999, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1269 (full-text version here). It's not a long document - the entire text could fit on a single sheet. Broadly what it does is:

• Condemns all acts of terror around the world, calling them criminal and unjustifiable regardless of the circumstances (important words)
• Asks all countries to adopt anti-terrorist conventions and co-operate with each another in their enforcement as well as share information
• Stop the financing of terrorist acts via "all possible legal means" and decline to give refugee asylum to terrorists.

What it lacks is one important thing: a statement of what terrorism is - a definition. 

Two years later, the world experienced 9/11 and the seismic shocks that followed. Again, the Security Council, adopting Resolution 1373 on September 28, 2001 (full text here) and girding its collective loins, leapt into action, this time establishing the Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) which was intended to be the pointy end of the UN attack on terror.

Sadly - perhaps inevitably, given what the UN is and how it works -

the CTC has never named a single terrorist, terrorist organization or state sponsor of terrorism... The four state sponsors of terrorism Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria have written reports to the CTC about their compliance with Security Council Resolution 1373. In the absence of any UN definition of terrorism, all of these states have readily proclaimed that they are engaged in a vigorous campaign to combat terrorism... The CTC has been empowered to conduct country visits -- with the consent of the state concerned. The countries selected for a visit have to first be approved by the CTC (Security Council). The Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) has conducted some 70 country visits since 2005 – and claims to transparency notwithstanding – has never made the reports of those visits public either... It is also known that the CTC has visited another 13 countries. The identity of the other 13 states visited is not publicly available. No reports on any visits have been made available to the public. And the central state sponsors of terrorism are not known to have been visited... [From the website of Human Rights Voices, an NGO dedicated to exposing "the UN's record on its fundamental promise -- to identify, condemn, and protect against human rights violations and confront and respond to threats to international peace and security"]

Arafat (meaning, of course, his speechwriters) provided some insight into how this works and why the UN is not likely to ever really challenge terrorism:

"The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the colonialists cannot possibly be called terrorist, otherwise the American people in their struggle for liberation from the British colonialists would have been terrorists; the European resistance against the Nazis would be terrorism, the struggle of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples would also be terrorism, and many of you who are in this Assembly hall were considered terrorists... As to those who fight against the just causes, those who wage war to occupy, colonize and oppress other people, those are the terrorists. Those are the people whose actions should be condemned, who should be called war criminals: for the justice of the cause determines the right to struggle." From Arafat's speech to the UN General Assembly, November 13, 1974 (full text here)

2002: Arafat's cultivation
of a culture of hatred and terror meant that
his followers were - and are - more
boxed in than he

Looking back, we can discern that those lofty Arafatian phrases so dazzled his audience and many who came after them that they simply could not consider the other interpretation: that the Palestinian Arab with a gun stuck into his pants, and those who did his satanic bidding in the years that followed, were engaged in hatred-driven acts of thuggery and a vile bloodlust bearing no resemblance at all to those noble struggles against tyranny referenced in his UN speech.   

The columnist Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe exactly ten years ago, captured that notion well:

It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it. Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children. Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims? Let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command. ["Arafat the monster", November 11, 2004]

Not long after Arafat's death, we had a quiet meeting here in Jerusalem with a pleasant and lawyerly UN official from Finland. He was here on one of those fact-finding trips that inevitably seem to skip the facts. What sticks in our memory years later is not the discussion we had but the business card he handed us. It described him (word for word) as: 

Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism

That's a job title to get a person thinking. (It featured in a speech Arnold Roth delivered in Paris in September 2007.)

What contortions must the members of the UN's CTC have devoted to coming up with a name like that? Certainly it mentions terrorism; the rising global evil that lacks an agreed definition at the UN. But only after cramming in those weasel words that sound like Arafat's speechwriters at work again.

It's clearly more than just semantics. The lack of an agreed legal definition of terrorism has always had serious practical and operational consequences:

Without answering the question of “what is terrorism,” no responsibility can be imposed on countries supporting terrorism, nor can steps be taken to combat terrorist organizations and their allies... Although many countries have signed bilateral and multilateral agreements concerning a variety of crimes, extradition for political offenses [just one example among many - TOW] is often explicitly excluded, and the background of terrorism is always political. This loophole allows many countries to shirk their obligation to extradite individuals wanted for terrorist activities. [Dr Boaz Ganor, ICT]

Ten years after Arafat died, the resort to terror of those running the two Palestinian Arab regimes is unmistakable. So too is the vicious schism:

President Mahmud Abbas, Arafat's successor and the head of Fatah, accused the Islamist movement whose stronghold is in Gaza of trying "to destroy" efforts to broker national unity. Hamas hit back, accusing Abbas of uttering "lies, insults and disinformation"... In the West Bank city of Ramallah, a band paid musical tributes as thousands waved the yellow flag of Fatah at the Muqataa presidential compound where Arafat was buried after dying, aged 75, at a hospital near Paris on November 11, 2004... But in Gaza City, Arafat's portrait was nowhere to be seen and the stage where the tribute was to have taken place bore the marks of an explosion last Friday. [AFP, yesterday]

Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis,
one of the innocents murdered
in 2001 by gunmen led by the
"political prisoner" Barghouti

Arafat's message of hate and violence is echoed in a manifesto issued this week by the supporters of Marwan Barghouti. He is a murderer, convicted on May 20, 2004 in Tel Aviv District Court on multiple charges relating to the killing of five people, none of them soldiers or security officials. (The charges are detailed here,) We sat through part of the trial because the man played a role in the murder of our daughter, paying $500 to another Barghouti who built the explosives-filled guitar case that destroyed the Sbarro pizza shop in August 2001. Barghouti was sentenced on June 6, 2004 to five consecutive life terms plus 40 years [source].

It's worth focusing for a moment on one of his victims, a non-Jew whose beard (we think) - plus the yellow license plate on his vehicle - may have been a factor in the lethal fire directed at him as he drove near the Israeli desert community of Maale Adumim.

His name is Georgios Tsibouktzakis. He was a Greek Orthodox monk, living and working in St. George's Monastery in Wadi Kelt near Jericho, and was 34 when Barghouti's henchmen shot him dead. Born near Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, a majority of whose residents were Jews - almost all of whom were murdered by the occupying Nazi Germans in 1943 and 1944 - he was sent to Jerusalem by Patriarch Deodoros I in 1990 for religious training. He became a monk in 1993 and was appointed to the priesthood by the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem in 2000.

Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis was well known to residents of the district and to veteran hikers. The Ma'ale Adumim police told yesterday of how the monk used his jeep last year to help retrieve the body of a tourist killed after falling into the wadi. He also helped the police when two Israeli youths were killed in the wadi three years ago by Palestinians. People who knew Tsibouktzakis said that he was a lover of peace and always glad to help others. He was buried at St. George's Monastery. [From the website of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs]

Garbage, graffiti, aimless Palestinian Arab youths:
Free Barghouti For the Peace [Image Source] 

These aspects of Barghouti's criminality appear not to have influenced prominent figures who called, and still call, the murderer "a political prisoner". Bishop Desmond Tutu is one of them.

"I am proud to associate myself with the global campaign for the freedom of Marwan Barghouti and other Palestinian political prisoners... When we call for Marwan Barghouti’s freedom, we are calling for the freedom of all political prisoners and resolution of all injustice in Palestine and Israel. I would particularly like to welcome Mrs Fadwa Barghouti’s presence in the campaign. It reminds us of the brave role Winnie Mandela played in keeping the memory of Mr Mandela and the struggle alive... We are all sisters and brothers in God’s family. All of us: Black, white, pink, green, gay, straight, Jew, Muslim, American, Palestinian, Israeli... Our humanity, our well-being, our security, our prosperity, our love is bound up with yours." [From the Kairos Southern Africa website, October 2013]

How very proud Mr Tutu must be to hear Barghouti's most recent call, this week from his cell, for love, prosperity and security. MEMRI's Arabic-to-English translation of the original, published in yesterday's edition of the Al-Quds newspaper, gives a taste:

These days we are marking the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of the founding commander, the great national leader, the late president and the wonder of the contemporary Palestinian revolution, the shahid [martyr] Yasser Arafat... Adherence to the legacy of Yasser Arafat and the principles for which he died as a martyr, as did thousands of others, will be obtained by continuing the national reconciliation process on the basis of correct principles, [and] by completing the national unity, supporting the national accord government and adhering to the option of comprehensive resistance and of the gun, just as Yasser Arafat, Abu Jihad, Ahmad Yassin, [Fathi] Shqaqi, Abu Mustafa Al-Karmi, and Al-Ja'bari were martyred with [a gun] in their hands. [Marwan Barghouti, Al-Quds, November 11, 2014, via MEMRI]

Arafat, Barghouti and more resorting to violence
in the guise of freedom

Despite the clear call for violence and the man's history of directing fire at ordinary civilians, Barghouti is still bracketed with Mandela in some parts of the news media. The Guardian, for instance, had no embarrassment in writing in March 2014 that "he always opposed actions targeting Israeli civilians". He has support, sad to say, among a certain kind of Israeli as well. On the other hand, a man who knew Mandela well in South Africa says

Mandela’s and Barghouti’s approaches were worlds apart. The two main bombings that hurt whites in South Africa were blips while property was the main target, he said, adding that a deep “personal morality” guided Mandela. “Whites didn’t have to worry about suicide bombings and drive-by shootings...” [Forward, "Is Imprisoned Fatah Leader Marwan Barghouti the Mandela of the Palestinians?", December 12, 2013]

While some Israelis want him out of jail, other Israelis, because they knew him, are repulsed by his views:

Military figures who encountered him in the course of their duty often say that his record speaks for itself. “He is not a person of peace and is not a person of compromise,” said Jonathan D. Halevi, a retired lieutenant colonel who had dealings with Barghouti in the 1990s when serving in the military body that governs the West Bank. Halevi, today a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “cannot find anything that supports the assumption that he may be ready for any concession.”  [Forward]

Understanding terrorists, who they are, what they mean, how to defeat them, is hardly an exercise in mere semantics or philosophy. In the truest sense, the lives of innocent people depend on getting this right. And to a great extent this means weaning political figures and institutions off their dangerous susceptibility to the dishonest rhetoric of terrorism dressed up in the language of resistance, freedom, liberation and human rights.

Even without a universal definition of terrorism, it's something everyone needs to recognize when they see it.

22-Sep-12: Here's what the Israeli soldiers were doing when they came under terrorist attack Friday

[Image Source] 

On Friday afternoon, we reported ["21-Sep-12: Major mid-day attack on Israel from Sinai thwarted today, but no one thinks the problems are going away"] on an attack by heavily armed terrorist gunmen on Israel's Egyptian border.

Three terrorists, at least one of them wearing an explosive belt, were killed in the ensuing firefight and deaths and injuries on a much larger scale were averted. Unfortunately, a young IDF artillery corps soldier, 20-year-old Private Netanel Yahalomi from the Nof Ayalon community, serving the military portion of his Hesder service, was killed. (His rank was raised to corporal, posthumously.) Two terrorists escaped and it's reported that the Egyptians are searching for them.

Netanel Yahalomi z"l with mother
in a family picture

The terror attack began as the IDF soldiers were giving water to dehydrated Sudanese refugees at a border fence construction. The IDF Spokesperson's Office said the terrorists were dressed in civilian clothing, and used the Sudanese - who were making the dangerous crossing from Sinai into Israel - as human shields to mount their attack.

The background, as the New York Times reported two weeks ago, is that Israel has been forced to deal with a massive influx of sub-Saharan Africans, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan - more than 60,000 of them in the past two years. While Israel believes some are genuine refugees from war-torn countries, most are economic migrants seeking work and ready to make the perilous crossing of countries - notably Egypt - where the military shoot to kill (many have been killed trying to reach the Promised Land). Israel provides temporary protection for all who arrive from Sudan and Eritrea.

Times of Israel quotes a member of Egypt’s Supreme Military Council saying the attack on the Israelis was carried out by members of the terror group Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdes that is affiliated with Al-Qaeda.