07-Oct-17: A quiet evening

London's museum precinct this afternoon: The driver
is pinned down by police [Image Source]

It's an ordinary Saturday night here in  Jerusalem.

Alright, not so ordinary since the whole country is in the midst of the Jewish religious festival of Sukkot which runs for a week and whose central motif is the temporary and generally-flimsy dwellings that are built by hundreds of thousands of families all over the country, and wherever in the world Jews live. It's the tail end of summer, the days are still sunny and warm and the evenings - Jerusalem's summer evenings are like this - are breezy and pleasant. A relaxing time.

All of which has gotten us thinking about the range and volume of news reports about terror in tonight's bulletins. A selection:

• Authorities in New York City revealed last night (Friday) that they have arrested three ISIS sympathizers who planned terror attacks on various New York locations including the MTA subway, music concerts and targets in the Times Square area. NBC News says the FBI arrested Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, 19, a Canadian citizen, who [source] has been in US custody since May 2016 when he was arrested in New Jersey and who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in October 2016; Talha Haroon, 19, an American citizen living in Pakistan and arrested there; and Russell Salic, 37, a Filipino who is being sent to the US for trial. It quotes Federal prosecutors saying the three men’s goal "was to kill and injure as many people as possible"  and that El Bahnasawy had already acquired bomb-making materials and secured a cabin to build them. They also planned - shades of last week's Las Vegas massacre - to shoot civilians "at specific concert venues". Reuters says "documents unsealed in federal court in Manhattan on Friday [showed] El Bahnasawy and Mr Haroon planned to carry out attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ran from early June to early July."
• In Switzerland, a man wielding two knives rushed at police and two refugees inside a refugee center in the southern Italian-speaking region of Ticino at 2:00 am, local time, today. Police fired at the attacker as a result of which he is now dead. The French news agency AFP says the assailant was a 38 year old Sri Lankan "asylum seeker". Police were called to break up a fight in Brissago, on the shores of Lake Maggiore and were in the building when the man with the knives attacked the other people. 
• French police yesterday (Friday) charged three men in Paris with launching an explosive attack on a residential building in the city's upscale 16th Arrondissment. The plot failed when the gas canisters they rigged up failed to ignite. According to Times of Israel, two of the suspects were already on a police terror-watch list. The three, identified as Amine A, his cousin Sami B, and Aymen B., are now charged with multiple crimes and in detention. Police found four gas cylinders after being called to the scene: two in the hallway attached to a mobile phone which evidently served as a detonator and two more on the sidewalk outside the building. Associated Press says the charges against the three are attempted murder linked to a terrorist enterprise, transporting explosives and participating in a terrorist association aimed at preparing attacks. All three have prior French criminal convictions; we are not yet able to learn the details.
• In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a little-reported shootout today between police and terrorists, according to an RT news story, resulted in the deaths of a "gunman and two guards... as the Saudi Arabian security forces prevented a terrorist attack near the royal Al Salam Palace... There has so far been no confirmation of the attack from Saudi authorities. The US Embassy in Saudi Arabia has issued a security warning to American citizens in Jeddah over the reported attack." This is bound to get more coverage but there's almost none tonight. 
• Another little-reported terror attack though on a much larger scale in the huge (but almost invisible to Western eyes) West African state of Niger. CNN says "three US Green Berets were killed and two others were wounded... near the Mali-Niger border when a joint US-Nigerien patrol was attacked Wednesday... Initial indications are the Green Berets were ambushed by up to 50 fighters who are thought to be affiliated with ISIS... The Green Berets were part of a team advising and assisting local forces when they were attacked." A sizable French and US military presence is seeking to stem the incursion of ISIS forces into Niger: some 800 US troops are currently based there; some are called advisers but that's likely to be mere foreign policy camouflage. CNN: "The US military has maintained a presence in the northwest African country for five years, with small groups of US Special Operations Forces advising local troops as they battle two terrorist groups, ISIS-affiliated Boko Haram and al Qaeda's North African branch, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb." 
• In Malaysia, where the authorities have been on high alert for human bombs and shooters since "Islamic State launched multiple attacks in Jakarta, the capital of neighboring Indonesia, in January 2016", Reuters says 8 people, four foreigners and four Malaysians, were taken into custody today "for suspected involvement in terrorist activities linked to Abu Sayyaf, the Islamic State and Jemaah Islamiah". Those arrested are said to include three Filipinos, one Albanian (a law lecturer at a local university) and two people convicted in 2016 of participating in terrorist activities (so people might be asking why are they free now).
• And here in Israel, the death of Reuven Shmerling, a Jewish Israeli in his 70s who lived with his family in Elkana and whose body was found on Wednesday at a location on the outskirts of Kafr Qassem, an Israeli town whose residents are overwhelmingly Arab, now appears (after the police expressed initial doubt) to have been the result of terrorism. Haaretz says "Shmerling left his home on Wednesday morning and went to a warehouse in Kafr Qasem, which belonged to his son. When his wife Hanna noticed he did not return home and is not answering his phone, his son was called to the warehouse, where he discovered his father's body. Paramedics pronounced Shmerling dead. In a statement, Shmerling's family stressed they have no doubt he was killed in a terror attack."

Two additional alarming reports turn out (so far at least) to be unrelated to terror:

• An incoming-missile alert was sounded in the Israeli communities closest to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip around the time we started writing this report. As of now (10:30 pm Saturday), the alert appears to be without basis and there were no actual rockets. This happens.
• In London, a car drove onto the sidewalk outside a popular museum at 2:20 pm London time today. According to Financial Times, this happened "at the junction of Exhibition Road and Cromwell Road, between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum — is part of a shared space experiment and the pavement is at the same level as the road." The response from security services was rapid and large: "dozens of armed officers flooded the area and a 200 metre cordon was created around the scene. Witnesses fled in panic as police told them to "keep running" and put businesses around the area in lockdown." [Telegraph UK]
  The BBC quotes the Metropolitan Police saying one person was arrested. But earlier concerns that this was a terror attack were now being set aside, and "the incident was being treated as "a road traffic collision". London Ambulance said the people it treated - including the detained man - had mostly sustained head and leg injuries. Nine were taken to hospital." Meanwhile the driver "is being held in custody at a north London police station." The British are uncommonly tense over the prospects of more terror in their lives; as BBC notes tonight: "The current terror threat in the UK is at "severe" - the second highest level - meaning an attack is highly likely."

Life is so much more relaxed when you ignore what terrorists are planning and doing. But the difficult reality is that ignoring them doesn't make them go away.

31-Mar-15: The other Iran, the one with less need of Swiss hotel rooms and press conferences

One of a collection of snapshots published in December 2014 on an
Iranian military website under the headline "We come..." depicts
uniformed Iranian soldiers touring southern Lebanon, close to the
border with Israel [Iranian source]

Israel, and especially our country's border zone, is often described as tense.

This might seem odd so long as no actual shooting or rocket firing is taking place. Some might seet it as paranoia, maybe even war-mongering.

But it's less so to Israelis. Many of us understand that the general level of a population's anxiety is a function of the extent to which real and physical threats are reported. If you don't know they are there, or choose to look in the other direction, you may feel more relaxed.

But that does not mean there are no enemies, or that they are not deployed out there.

Here's part of a chilling news report about our northern border ("Iranian troops advance towards Israeli border") from yesterday's Times of London:

Iran is close to putting its forces on Israel’s northeast border for the first time, as its allies crush rebel groups in the Golan Heights area of Syria. The prospect of Iranian troops being posted on a frontier that has been calm for decades is causing alarm in Israel, and comes as international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions near a climax.
“Iran will be so close to the Israelis that it will no longer need long-range missiles to hit them,” said Abu Ali, a fighter with Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah organisation who has served multiple combat tours in Syria...
Mortar fire and heavy machineguns are audible daily from the area as Hezbollah fights Syrian rebel forces, some of them aligned with al-Qaeda.
Israel assesses that the Syrian government army, apart from some artillery units, is largely exhausted. With its best divisions stationed around Damascus, the Assad regime is now leaving the fight in the south to Iran and its proxies. A spokesman for the Syrian rebel forces in southern Syria, Major Issam el-Rayyes, said that 80 per cent of a 5,000-strong force attacking rebels around the Golan Heights were Iranian-backed militias, including Hezbollah, but also Shia fighters from Yemen, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
The offensive into the southern region of Daraa and Quneitra, bordering the Golan Heights, began in February. It is the first time that Iranian forces have operated openly in southern Syria.

Same Iranian, same Lebanon/Israel border

“Iran is on the march, its proxies are taking territory,” an Israeli official said.
Abu Ali confirmed that Iranian troops were on the ground. “We are taking the area square by square until we reach the border with Israel.” ...From August to October last year, rebel groups gained territory along the southern half of the Golan Heights adjacent to the Israeli line, leaving only one village in the northern border area under Syrian government control.

Israel has offered medical assistance to more than a thousand wounded Syrian rebels and civilians, in a medical centre in the town of Zefat — but the Assad regime has accused Israel of going beyond humanitarian aid, and providing rebels with weapons, ammunition, communications equipment and tactical intelligence. This pragmatic decision to be a “good neighbour” to Syrian rebels — even though some elements are affiliated to al-Qaeda — appears to be aimed at countering the more pressing threat from Iran.
Abu Ali said that, over the past year, a military infrastructure of bunkers and tunnels had been constructed in parts of the Golan Heights under the Assad regime control — echoing the facilities Hezbollah built in south Lebanon before a month-long war with Israel in 2006. “We are almost ready,” he said.On January 18, Israeli drones targeted a convoy of vehicles near Quneitra, on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, killing an Iranian general and six Hezbollah fighters. The highly unusual attack was interpreted as a forceful message to Iran to stay away from the Golan Heights. It appears to have fallen on deaf ears...

Is it paranoia if they say at every opportunity they really are out to attack your home and community? And they have colossal means of doing so?

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-Jan-12: Switzerland again: International parliamentary group says it erred in inviting Hamas

Inter-Parliamentary Union Secretariat in Geneva

There's a follow-up to our report ["15-Jan-12: Hamas, intolerance and Switzerland"] that a Hamas delegation has spent the last few days in Switzerland on an official visit, and will be received at the University of Geneva tomorrow.

Anders Johnsson, the secretary-general of the Swiss-based Inter-Parliamentary Union, is quoted in the Jerusalem Post this evening telling the speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, that he plans to stand by a commitment he made to Rivlin to ban the terrorist organization:

He said he is sorry that the Palestinian delegation to the IPU took advantage of the [human rights] committee, but that the IPU itself had no contact with Hamas. In addition, Johnsson said that the committee rejected many of the Palestinians’ declarations in the meeting. The IPU secretary-general also said he would raise the issue with the Human Rights Committee’s management.

The JPost article is not the clearest of news reports, and there might still be misunderstandings here about what happened, and what's going to happen. We'll soon know.

Meanwhile the International Alliance Against Terrorism, a non-partisan group based in Paris that speaks in the name of terror victims from several countries (Algeria, Argentina, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Israel, Northern Ireland, the United States) issued a press release this evening that expresses dismay at the official Hamas visit to Switzerland. It focuses in particular on the University of Geneva's decision to allow the participation by Hamas spokesman Mushir Al Masri in a campus event due to take place tomorrow (Wednesday).

The IAAT statement says the Swiss readiness to receive Hamas

"...destroys the hope of a peaceful solution in the Middle East. We also fear it will only encourage the spreading of terrorism in a troubled world. Organizations so far fighting peacefully for their demands may well change their minds when they see that terror is rewarded and entitled to Swiss hospitality. Hoping all democratic organizations to join into this protest, we urge the Swiss Federal Government and Parliament to take into account the human rights of Hamas victims and their families who deserve justice and consideration, like all terror victims. We solemnly urge Geneva University to declare the representative of Hamas persona non grata at the meeting it is hosting."

For our part, we expressed our anger in a note to representatives of the Swiss Jewish community yesterday:

"When we permit the practitioners of terror to be received with respect as if the only differences between us are our political or religious or ideological opinions, then the terrorists have won. Terrorism - and Hamas is one of its purest practitioners - takes its exponents outside the framework of normal, civilized relations with the rest of the world. The terrorists knowingly and willfully place themselves outside. They have knowingly and willfully abandoned discussion and persuasion. Their tools are death and misery. We show respect for our democratic principles by shunning them, by totally rejecting what they wish for our societies.
I hope the authorities in your beautiful land will understand from your words how serious is the mistake they have made in allowing the official representatives of Hamas to walk on your nation's soil. The loss of innocent lives, like the life of my daughter Malki, is indeed a tragedy which deeply touched my family... In choosing to speak out against the terrorists in general, and against Hamas in particular, my wife and I made the decision that our loss must not be merely a private one but symbolic of something larger and less personal. The awful sight of men from Hamas walking freely and without interference in the center of democratic Europe, as if they were decent and civilized human beings, is a reminder that we have not yet succeeded in conveying this vitally important message."

As we have said on numerous occasions, so far the terrorists are winning.