18-Jan-16: Multiple Arab-on-Israeli attacks and a Jewish mother is murdered at her front door

Kiryat Moshe's Harav Reines Street in Jerusalem [Google Maps]

Sunday was a hard day here, and made harder still by the way life-and-death events affecting Israelis are being routinely swept under the carpet or simply ignored by the vast swathes of the global news-reporting industry.

The day's first notable violence came early Sunday morning here in Jerusalem. What could easily have become a repeat of a terrible tragedy that struck this city 14 months ago ["19-Nov-14: In the wake of Tuesday's murderous attack on Jewish worshipers in Jerusalem"] was averted. The line between what might have been and what was, and the impact on many lives, is terrifyingly thin.

Three Palestinian Arab men were stopped and arrested outside the Heichal Yaakov synagogue on Harav Reines Street in the capital's Kiryat Moshe quarter soon after dawn - peak hour in many synagogues - after arousing suspicions among people who watch for precisely such threats. The three turned out to be armed with crude but lethal knives and according to an Israel National News report

are believed to have planned to carry out an attack on the synagogue as it was packed with worshipers attending morning prayers.

After interrogating them, the police say they are open to a far milder interpretation: that the weapons were for car-theft purposes, but that the investigation remains ongoing [Times of Israel, January 17, 2016].

The would-be knife-attacker: Unharmed though
her lethal intentions were thwarted,
perhaps postponed

A stabbing attack was thwarted at the western entrance to Kiryat Arba, near Hebron a little later in the day. A Palestinian Arab woman - named in Arab media as Nivin Muhsin al-Jaabari, and said to be 18,.was intercepted with a knife secreted in her handbag. Forced at gunpoint to crouch on the road and remove her coat, her concealed weapon was revealed, and she was arrested; no one was hurt.

Another attempted stabbing attack took place during Sunday afternoon at the Samaria Regional Brigade Junction, better known here as Bahad 3. Wikipedia explains that Bahad [in Hebrew: בה"ד‎] stands for Basis Hadrakha meaning training base. There are several Bahads around the country; Bahad 3 is a school for infantry.

Alert soldiers opened fire before he could harm any of his intended victims. The attacker is now dead. An Associated Press bulletin names him as Wissam Qasrawi, 21, from a village called Mesilyeh near Jenin.

By far the most serious of today's Arab-on-Israeli violence is the murder of an Israeli woman, the mother of six children, in a horrific stabbing attack at the door of her home in Otniel, a town in southern Har Hevron.

The victim of today's murder in Otniel, and her husband

We now know the murdered woman is Dafna Meir, 39 (though it's striking that her name is absent from many of the non-Israeli news reports - like that of AP - that mentioned the killing). She was a hospital nurse who, with her husband, adopted two children to add to the four to whom she gave birth.

Her killer is on the loose, and a major manhunt is now underway. Says the BBC, without ever resorting the use of the word "terror":

Security forces are hunting for the attacker using helicopters and military vehicles.
Roadblocks have been set up, residents were told to lock themselves inside their homes and flares lit the night sky as the manhunt went on.

Witnesses to the attack, quoted by Israel National News, say the killer worked in the town "and used his familiarity with the community to carry out the attack." From other sources, we understand he worked in construction. His victim will be remembered as a woman of principles and constructive activism - as well as fierce and heroic determination:

Initial investigations indicated that Meir wrestled with the attacker in an effort to protect the three of her children who were in the home during the attack. The stabber fled the scene without continuing the attack and before he could reach the children. Media reports said her teenage daughter witnessed the attack and described the terrorist to authorities... [Times of Israel, January 17, 2016]

Mrs Meir, of blessed memory, will be laid to rest later today (Monday) in Jerusalem's Har Hamenuchot cemetery, just a short walk from Kiryat Moshe where Sunday's violence began.

19-Nov-15: In Europe, they're closing synagogues

The Malmo synagogue in Sweden was "rocked by an explosion"
in the summer of 2010

For anyone with a Jewish sense of history (such a sensibility exists), Europe keeps producing a stream of events and insights that shake a person to the core. Like this report from the World Jewish Congress today:

Swedish synagogues shut down as terror alert is raised | Thu, 19 Nov 2015
Sweden's Jewish community shut down synagogues across the country as a precautionary measure against possible attacks by terrorist groups. The chairwoman of the Official Council of Jewish Communities in Sweden, Lena Posner-Körösi, said the security situation would be re-assessed on a daily basis.
On Wednesday, Swedish police said they were hunting for a man wanted for "planning a terrorist act". An arrest warrant had been issued for the suspect, the head of domestic intelligence and counter-terrorism, Anders Thornberg, told a press conference in Stockholm.

Sweden's National Center for Terrorist Threat Assessment yesterday raised its national terror threat status to "high", the second-highest level on a five-point scale. Denmark raised its threat status yesterday too but the WJC report says the Danish community has no current plans to close its synagogues.

How surprising is all this? Not so very.

• 20-Jun-14: Does Europe face the most serious terror threat ever?
• 12-Jun-13: As Islamist numbers grow, Europe's future is unlikely to ever again be what it was
• 13-Dec-12: Europe's ongoing moral collapse: the next chapter

19-Mar-15: In Tunisia, terrorists target tourists... again

Evacuating victims of Wednesday's terrorist attack in Tunisia
[Image Source]

A murderous attack by terrorists in broad daylight yesterday (Wednesday) left at least 19 people killed on the streets of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.

"They just started opening fire on the tourists as they were getting out of the buses ... I couldn't see anything except blood and the dead," the driver of a tourist coach told journalists... [Reuters, March 18, 2015]

The victims were assaulted outside the National Bardo Museum, located inside the "heavily-guarded" parliament compound. Other than two of the attackers, the dead (the numbers seem uncertain even now) are reported to be made up of 5 Japanese, 4 Italians (among hundreds from an Italian cruise ship, the Costa Fascinosa, touring the western Mediterranean), 2 Colombians, 2 Brits, 2 French, 2 Tunisians - one a civilian, one a police officer - and individuals from South Africa, Poland (perhaps 2), Australia (he may also be one of the two Colombian victims) and Spain. Dozens more were left injured, and some people are still regarded as "missing", including 14 (more or less) from the cruise ship.

The president of Tunisia says his country will now fight terrorism "without mercy", according to the BBC. Interesting to see how the BBC's notorious guidelines make it impossible for them to call yesterday's cold-blooded murders "terrorism", though their reports do freely quote other people - such as Tunisia's political leaders and security officials - using the "T" word.

Tunisia is "the Arab world’s most successful democracy" [NYTimes] having "recently completed its first free presidential elections and a peaceful rotation of political power". It's also "one of the biggest sources of foreign fighters joining the Islamic State" [NYTimes].

The new Tunisian prime minister, Habib Essid, who took office last month ["Tunisia's secular-Islamist coalition takes office", Al Ahram], said "two or three accomplices might still be at large", and urged "national unity", calling the massacre “the first operation of its kind ever to occur in Tunisia”. 

The synagogue in Djerba where a previous human bomb attack
targeted civilians, including tourists visiting Tunisia [Image Source]

The first? That's true only if we ignore (and ignore is exactly what most parts of the news media are doing) the April 11, 2002 Djerba synagogue bombing in which terrorists operating on behalf of Al Qaeda deployed a human bomb and a truck full of explosives to attack people, most of them tourists, visiting a historically-significant (and exceptionally beautiful) Tunisian synagogue. The death toll was heavy: 14 German tourists, 3 Tunisians, 2 French. 

Terrorism rarely needs a trigger. But there is speculation [here, for instance] that Wednesday's massacre is 

linked to the death of Ahmed al-Rouissi, Tunisia’s most-wanted terrorist, who had become a senior leader in Isil’s Libya group. Accused by the Tunisian government for a string of terrorist attacks in his home country, he was killed last weekend in a clash with Libyan militiamen.

And

Al Rouissi was one of the most wanted men in Tunisia, where he was considered the mastermind of a string of attacks carried out by the Ansar Al Shariah movement... Al Rouissi fled to Libya where he began fighting under the banner of the Daesh [ISIS] group, which already controls about a third of Syria and Iraq. Tunisia’s Interior Ministry has not confirmed Al Rouissi’s death, though the local Press has been filled with reports on the incident. [Khaleej Times, March 16, 2015]

BBC Watch has done a good job [for instance here] of tracking the history of anti-Jewish violence in Tunisia and the deaf ear and blind eye provided by the BBC.

What will be? For the optimists, there is the fact that, in the past few hours, the international community has sprung into decisive action. The U.N. Security Council last night "condemned the Bardo museum attack saying that no terrorist action can reverse the path of Tunisia toward democracy..." [Associated Press] and offering condolences to the victims. According to Xinhua (which calls the killers "terrorists" in quotation marks lest we suspect the Chinese news-agency of taking sides on such contentious matters) the UNSC "underlined the need to bring perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of these reprehensible acts of terrorism to justice." 

Fierce determination of this sort (excuse our cynicism) ignores the way the UN has for years struggled with defining terrorism. Because of "a lack of consensus on the definition of this phenomenon", it has consistently failed and

"a UN Ad Hoc Committee to Eliminate Terrorism, created by the General Assembly back in December 1996, has remained deadlocked as it tries to reach agreement on a comprehensive draft convention to eliminate terrorism" [Aljazeera]

We don't know any informed sources who believe the UN is ever going to get past that problem. The consequences of its condemnation and call to action in the wake of yesterday's terrorism are unfortunately predictable.

22-Sep-06: This is what people who are "desperate" do In Norway

Oslo's synagogue

Apologists for terror in general, and for the Palestinian Arab brand of savagery in particular, like to express their pseudo-criticism in terms like "Well, these people are desperate" and "What else would you do when faced with imperialism / colonialism / occupation?"

For those of us in touch with the facts, and with sufficient intelligence to separate self-serving ignorance from self-serving arrogance, this is rubbish.

Case in point: the report below of Islamists caught preparing to explode a Scandinavian synagogue, and kill innocent people. This has nothing to do with desperation, occupation or politics. It's hatred. That's always at the root of terrorism. Those who understand this are in a state of growing horror at the ostrich-like know-nothingness of those who don't.

Norway taped plot to blow up US, Israel embassies 22 Sep 2006 12:48:47 GMT | Reuters | Camilla BergsliOSLO, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Norwegian prosecutors unveiled on Friday evidence against four men detained on suspicion of plotting to blow up the U.S. and Israeli embassies and of participating in a shooting at the Oslo synagogue [we've added an old photo above] last weekend.
Prosecutor Unni Fries told a court the Norwegian secret services had bugged the car of the main suspect and recorded conversations between the men planning the attacks.
"They spoke in detail about how to attack the synagogue and the U.S. and Israeli embassies," Fries said, asking the court to detain all four suspects for four weeks without visitors or other contact with the outside world.
Early on Sunday morning at least 10 shots fired from an automatic weapon hit Oslo's only synagogue. No one was hurt in the shooting, the most serious in a string of attacks in recent months on the Nordic country's small Jewish community.
Police have identified the detainees only as men between the ages of 20 and 30. Defence lawyers, who said their clients were innocent, said one suspect was of Turkish origin, two had Pakistani backgrounds and one was a native Norwegian.
Fries said the main suspect had "expressed extreme Islamist views" and was briefly detained during this summer's World Cup by German police, who found drawings of rockets in his car.
During a trip to Britain in June he was reported to have told his girlfriend over the telephone that he "felt that he had to act", Fries said. She did not say whether prosecutors were linking the suspects with any extremist organisation.
The U.S. embassy said in a statement that it was watching developments closely and would cooperate fully with Norwegian authorities.
"We are deeply concerned about the emerging information on these planned terrorist attacks," ambassador Ben Whitney said. "This situation reflects the importance of having the necessary legal tools to prevent terrorism."
The four men could face jail terms of up to 12 years if convicted of conspiring to carry out acts of terror.

12 years!!?