30-Nov-20: A long-obstructed step towards justice: Norway is extraditing a Jordanian fugitive to Paris

Undated photo of the Goldenberg restaurant in Paris' Marais Quarter

This is about a murderous attack nearly four decades ago on people seated in a Parisian restaurant. Why are we writing about it now?

The answer comes in a report that Norway's government said Friday it is going to extradite to France a man suspected of taking part in the carnage. 

For people like us who are fighting to see the confessed bomber of a pizzeria filled with children - who happily boasts that this was her personal doing - and who has astoundingly lived the life of a princess in total freedom for the past nine years, this is an important development. 

It's also inspirational. And it ought to be a big deal for everyone concerned with justice.  

First the background: Around noon on August 9, 1982, a gang of Islamist terrorists threw a grenade into the dining room of Chez Jo Goldenberg, a Paris restaurant packed with about fifty lunch-hour patrons. They then directed their machine gun fire point blank at the innocent patrons guilty of being seated at the tables of an eatery known for its Jewish cuisine. They murdered six people - four French nationals and two American tourists - and injured 22 others. 

The atrocity was completed in some three minutes. At the time, it was called "the heaviest toll suffered by Jews in France since World War II". The killers were not found, according to the police. In fact years went by before there was a break in the case.

Because there are both parallels to and lessons for our efforts to see Jordan arrest and extradite our child's killer - the unspeakable Sbarro Massacre Monster, it's a case in which we are vitally interested We have written about the hunt for the perpetrators before. See

• 20-Jun-14: Does Europe face the most serious terror threat ever? At CNN, they say yes and explain (poorly) why
• 13-Feb-16: Three decades after a terror attack on a Paris restaurant, some things remain just as they were
• 30-May-19: Paris, Amman, Washington: Extradition and what it can reveal about governments and terror

Here's what Reuters reported on Friday ["Norway to extradite suspect in 1982 attack on Paris Jewish restaurant"] in a news story datelined Oslo:

Norway will extradite a man to France who is suspected of taking part in an attack that killed six people in a Jewish restaurant in Paris 38 years ago, the government said on Friday. At least 20 others were wounded in the bombing and shooting assault on the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in the Marais quarter in August 1982. In 2015, arrest warrants were issued against three former members of the Abu Nidal Organization, a splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a source told Reuters at the time. The suspects were identified long after the attacks because of statements from other former members of the Abu Nidal group under a French judicial process that maintained their anonymity, the source said. One of the men, named as Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, lives in Norway, where he moved in the 1990s. Norwegian authorities rejected an original 2015 extradition request for him on grounds that, in most cases, it would not extradite its own citizens. Norway recently adopted new pan-European regulations on arrests, leading French prosecutors to seek extradition of the suspect for a second time, and he was arrested in September. The Ministry of Justice cleared Abu Zayed for extradition to France on Nov. 12 but the decision was later appealed to the full Norwegian cabinet. “The appeal was unsuccessful and today the decision was final,” a spokeswoman for the justice ministry said in an email to Reuters. Now in his early 60s, Abu Zayed has denied any involvement in the case. In 2015, he told the Norwegian daily VG he had never been to Paris. The Jo Goldenberg bloodshed, at the time, marked the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in France since World War Two and came amid a wave of violence involving Palestinian militants.

So with this development, people now know this Abu Zayed has lived a quiet and comfortable post-massacre life in Scandinavia for two decades. But what became of the other terrorists? 

We know what's happened to at least one of them. He's sheltered by a friendly Arab government that brazenly refuses to hand him over and, of course, has zero interest in bringing him to any kind of local justice in its own courts. Given our focus here on how our child's murderer has lived a charmed life for the past nine years, this sounds like Jordan, right? 

Right.

Goldenberg's right after the 1982 atrocity

In 2015, a year after those anonymous Abu Nidal terror group informants tipped off the police in France (and we're guessing that one or more of them were members of the same gang), Marc Trévidic, an examining magistrate at the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris, specializing in fighting terrorism. issued arrest warrants for several suspects. 

One was Nizar Tawfiq Mussa Hamada, a Jordanian. 

The other, reputedly the mastermind behind the attack and also a Jordanian, was Souhair Mouhamed Hassan Khalid al-Abassi, known in crime circles as Amjad Atta.

Ben Cohen writing for Algemeiner last year ["Jordanian Refusal to Extradite Paris Kosher Restaurant Killer to France Renews Concern Over Amman’s Terrorism Policy"] takes up the narrative, explaining that France turned to the Jordanian authorities asking for them to honor the France/Jordan extradition treaty that, by no coincidence, had been signed in the middle of 2015. 

The Jordanians rebuffed them. Ben goes on to refer to how 

France is not the only country to have been turned down by Jordan after submitting an extradition request in connection with terrorism. In March 2017, the US Department of Justice issued a criminal complaint against Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, who ferried a Palestinian suicide bomber to the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem on August 9, 2001, in her car. In the subsequent bombing attack, 15 people lost their lives, including two US nationals. US Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary B. McCord described al-Tamimi as “an unrepentant terrorist who admitted to her role in a deadly terrorist bombing that injured and killed numerous innocent victims.” A $5 million reward has been offered by the Justice Department for information leading to the arrest of Al-Tamimi, whose name can also be found on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. So far, however, Jordan has refused to extradite al-Tamimi, who has lived openly in Amman since she was released in a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas on October 28, 2011, to the US.

Jordanian Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed at his court hearing in Oslo 

[Image Source]

The article goes on to quote some comments that put Jordan's shameful evasions into context:

“The thwarted Jo Goldenberg extradition shows that you can either have healthy bilateral relations based on justice, openness, and honesty,  or you can pander to the pro-terror forces inside Jordan,” [Arnold] Roth said in an email. “You cannot hope to have both.”

Roth, who has been advocating with his wife Frimet for al-Tamimi’s extradition to the US, said that the Jordanians were being given a pass by Western allies eager not to jolt the kingdom’s political stability.

“There seems to be a sense that Jordan’s dear friends in the West need to cut the country some slack, not press too hard and do what needs to be done, so that its widely admired anti-terrorist monarch, King Abdullah II, can get on with the job of building a stable, prosperous Western-facing state,” Roth remarked.

At the same time, Roth said, al-Tamimi had been turned “into a pan-Arab hero from her safe perch in Amman, Jordan’s capital.”

Through her TV and internet appearances, Roth said, al-Tamimi had “become an inspiration to the powerful and very large forces inside the kingdom (and far beyond it) who want more bloodshed and conflict, more killing of Israelis and Jews.”

We stand firmly by what we said. If anything, what we have learned in the past year reinforces our views even more strongly.

Jordan continues to be given an absurdly generous pass by its Western allies. This is self-defeating and encourages the very strong forces at work in the kingdom that want more bloodshed, more conflict, more killing of Israelis and Jews. The groundswell of support for Ahlam Tamimi ("Ahlam we hear your voice") since October 1, 2020 when her husband was expelled by Jordan's authorities ["04-Oct-20: The Sbarro bomber's husband has been forced to leave Jordan: A snapshot of developments"] is one clear and public expression of how that works.

As for the fugitive mastermind, al-Abassi/Amjad Atta, an Agence France Pess report some years ago said an Interpol Red Notice had been issued against him directed at Jordan's police. Said to be 62 years old at the time and an "elderly man who works as a construction worker", he was born in Zarqa, a Jordanian city located 30 km east of Amman and home to "one of the largest camps for Palestinian refugees in Jordan". AFP notes it's also "known to be the hometown of Jordanian Abu Musab Al-Zarqaoui, the late leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq".

They fail to mention that Zarqa is also where Ahlam Tamimi, the Sbarro bombing monster who murdered a larger number of innocent Jews than Amjad Atta did, was born in 1980. 

A year after his arrest, according to an AFP report at the time, Jordan's judicial system ruled that Amjad Atta could not be handed over to the French for trial because 

"at the time of his arrest an extradition deal between Jordan and France had not entered into force, the source says. The deal was signed in 2011 but became effective only in July last year, after Abassi, also known as Amjad Atta, was released on bail. Jordan has also refused to hand over a second suspect, Nizar Tawfiq Hamada, 54, because the statute of limitations concerning the criminal allegations against him expired, the source says."

Jordan's contemptuous disdain for the war against terror and terrorists, for its relations with allies and for the law of extradition all get far too little international attention. People ought to know.

27-Nov-20: Are Australian news reports whitewashing who the Iranian prisoners freed by Thailand really are?

Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert in an Iranian news clip [Image Source]

There's been a major development in a long-running battle to save an innocent female hostage from the malevolent rulers of Iran. 

This is from Australia's national broadcaster:

British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert is now departing Iran after spending more than 800 days in prison. Two videos released by Iranian state television showed the Melbourne University Middle East specialist in transit, with the latest video showing her boarding what appears to be an Australian Government-chartered jet. Dr Moore-Gilbert was sent to Tehran's Evin Prison in September 2018 and sentenced to 10 years on espionage charges — which she has always denied. International pressure on Iran to secure Dr Moore-Gilbert's release escalated in recent months, following reports that her health was deteriorating during long stretches of solitary confinement and that she had been transferred to the notorious Qarchak Prison, east of Tehran... "Kylie Moore-Gilbert has been released in exchange for three Iranian men — who are they?"

Since this came out, Dr Moore-Gilbert has thankfully arrived home safely ["Kylie Moore-Gilbert arrives in Australia after being released from Iranian prison", ABC, November 26, 2020]

 

According to a BBC news report last night:

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described her release as a miracle, saying she seemed in good spirits when he spoke to her. "The injustice of her detention and her conviction, Australia has always rejected, and I'm just so pleased that Kylie's coming home," he told local network Nine. Mr Morrison declined to comment on whether a swap had taken place, but said no-one had been released in Australia. His government has been silent on the circumstances surrounding the deal, and some observers have said it could encourage Iran, which is accused of "hostage diplomacy". According to Thai authorities, the three Iranians were not exchanged with anyone.

But there's a problem - one that has familiar echoes to it.

Mainstream Australian media reports like the one in Melbourne's The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald have answered the ABC headline's question ("Kylie Moore-Gilbert has been released in exchange for three Iranian men — who are they?"). But in doing so, they significantly mischaracterize who the three Iranians imprisoned by Thailand, and now released, actually were and are. 

The Australian dailies report that the three Iranian convicted terrorists, Masoud Sedaghatzadeh, Saeid Moradi and Mohammad Khazaei

"were all detained in Thailand on charges of having planned to bomb the capital, Bangkok, in 2012 that authorities said was intended to target Israeli diplomats... News of the exchange was first broken by Iran's Young Journalist Club, a news website affiliated to state television in Iran, which trumpeted the release of the three men who faced "baseless charges" and were "exchanged for a dual national spy named Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who worked for the Zionist regime".

Detained? Horse manure. 

Far from just being detained, those Iranians were arrested, tried, convicted on terrorism charges and imprisoned by Thailand. See Reuters, August 22, 2013. 

Prior to their convictions but after they were arrested, we wrote here nearly eight years ago about the terrorism for which they had been taken into custody: "16-Feb-12: Bangkok: So what actually happened there on Tuesday?"

"Detained" is what the Arabic-language media mischievously say about fugitive Sbarro bomber Ahlam Tamimi constantly ["16-Nov-20: Justice, the Tamimi extradition and what Jordan tells Arabic media but not the world"]. It conceals the reality that she confessed and was tried and convicted of terrorism and in due course sentenced to sixteen consecutive terms of life imprisonment. 

Their systematic concealing of incontrovertible reality lets them get away with murder.

It's now plausible, at least to us, that this week's multi-party deal is the reason why Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic who lectures in Islamic studies at University of Melbourne, was taken prisoner and held hostage by Iran in the first place. 

06-Jan-16: Perceptions and realities at the BBC

Inside the BBC newsroom in Broadcasting House, London
[Image Source: BBC]

The BBC ("the largest broadcaster in the world"; "the World's Radio Station"; home to a close-to-incredible 22,000 employees) has much for which to answer in relation to how it systematically fails to call terror "terror". 

It's a painful subject not only because of the damage the BBC's resort to aggressive euphemisms does to people's understanding of terror, but also because of the blatant hypocrisy inherent in the way it adheres to the policy sometimes and ignores it other times. To deeply concerned observers like us, it's plain that the BBC's rule book [BBC Editorial Guideline: Language when Reporting Terrorism] provides a fig-leaf for journalistic values that do no credit to BBC management.

The estimable BBC Watch today posted the kind of well-written and penetrating article that makes its work so valuable. We're referring to "More evidence of BBC News double standards on use of the word terror". There, the writers remind us of what the BBC itself and the laws under which it operates say it's supposed to do, and then expands on

the BBC's inconsistent application of those editorial guidelines and the resulting two-tier system of reporting is evidence of precisely the type of “value judgement” it supposedly seeks to avoid and indicates that the choice of language when reporting acts of terror is subject to political considerations which undermine the BBC’s claim of impartiality. If further evidence of those double standards were needed, it could be found in an article published on the BBC News website on January 3rd under the title “Israelis charged over fatal West Bankfamily arson attack”.

Those are obviously serious allegations. The chronic, systemic issues to which they relate are among the most weighty and consequential that an organization with the mission

to ensure that the BBC gives information about, and increases understanding of, the world through accurate and impartial news, other information, and analysis of current events and ideas.

ever faces.

In its reporting of arrests made this past week following the deaths of three members of a single family in a house fire in Duma, a Palestinian Arab village, the BBC's news reporters and editors used

the words “Jewish terrorists” not in quotation marks and not as quoted text. This was the BBC speaking in its own voice.

Calling the Jewish Israelis who were taken into custody over the Duma deaths “suspected terrorists” is unexceptionable. Israel's government has referred to the lethal fire at the Duma home as terror from the outset. See, as an illustration, "PM condemns ‘horrific, heinous terror attack’ on Palestinians" in Times of Israel on July 31, 2015.

BBC newsroom [Image Source: BBC]

BBC Watch reminds us that other terror attacks, some of them among the most horrifying this country has ever known, stunningly failed to reach the BBC's call-it-terror threshold:

• The almost-unimaginably horrific throat-slitting murders of five members of the Fogel family from Itamar. Three little children, the youngest only 3 months old, along with their parents, killed in their beds as they slept at home in March 2011 (BBC report);
• The murder by shooting of Na'ama and Eitam Henkin of Neria in front of their four little children (the youngest 4 months old) in October 2015 (BBC report)
• The early-morning slaughter - by men using knives, axes and meat-cleavers - in a quiet Har Nof, Jerusalem, synagogue of four worshipers and a police officer in November 2014 (BBC report)
• The shooting death of Malachi Rosenfeld in June 2015 - three other Israelis were wounded in the terrorist gunfire. That attack in fact was never reported at all by the BBC.

BBC Watch says, and we certainly agree, that in deciding not to call these acts of murder "terror", while using "terrorist" to describe the unconvicted Israeli Jews arrested in the Duma case, the BBC ought to be required to tell its funding public why. 

Its management should also be called on to justify their engaging (as we say they are) in highly-politicized decision-making whose contours are influenced more by unspoken policy considerations than by the obligations imposed on the BBC by the laws under which it operates.

Here's some further reading from past posts of ours dealing with the BBC and its terror strategy:

• 08-Aug-15: Another BBC moment
• 01-Apr-15: A question for Jeremy Bowen and his morally-challenged BBC handlers
• 20-Dec-14: BBC, unable to call him "terrorist", says French police killed an "Allahu Akbar attacker"
• 01-Sep-14: Gaza, Israel, the BBC: What children - and their parents - ought to know
• 15-Aug-13: To promote something truly hideous, can't do better than adopt the BBC's approach
• 24-Mar-13: Seed of evil: Whitewashing terror at the BBC
• 10-Jan-13: When terror is ignored by news reporting agencies, the BBC for instance, what can we learn?
• 17-Feb-12: It's final: the BBC is relieved from having to reveal the results of in-house inquiry into whether it is biased against Israel
• 16-Aug-11: When the powers at the BBC put this much effort into something, they must really care
• 15-Jun-07: Journalistic Objectivity from BBC and Other Oxymorons
• 18-Jul-06: What Is It About the BBC?
• 14-Jul-06: A word about the BBC

Finally, on a more generous note, let's a take a moment to offer congratulations to BBC management for having just won a well-deserved major award from Honest Reporting. The prize and the attainments that earned it for them are detailed here.

29-Oct-15: Pal Arab terror attackers: Martyrs not because their deaths have meaning but because it's too hard to admit they don't

Trapped in pointlessness and uncertainty: Photo 
montage images like this one, depicting young 
Palestinian Arab attackers detained and in the hands 
of Israeli security and smiling, are currently viral 
and all over the Arabic-language social media [Image Source]  

We have just read, and want to recommend, a thoughtful and constructive analysis article by Haviv Rettig-Gur ["Losing Palestine: The terrorism of the past month is not a new surge in Palestinian opposition to Israel, but a howl against the pervasive Palestinian sense that resistance has failed", Times of Israel, October 27, 2015].

We don't agree with every word (naturally). But it's a well-written, helpful and informed counterpoint to the superficial, tendentious, agenda-driven and fact-light reporting that currently provides most people with what they think they know about events on Israel's streets and buses this past month.

Some selected excerpts (the bolded emphasis is ours):

• ...[T]he Palestinian people are not lashing out at the Israelis. They are staying home. The elites, meanwhile, are paying lip service to the “martyrs” — the PA’s lip service can be rabid, to be sure, openly celebrating the stabbing of children or offering anti-Semitic blood libels in official media — but are simultaneously acting with determination on the ground to disrupt and stop the attacks against Israelis, and even, more rarely, to offer arguments against them. In this absence of the people and the elites from the fighting, in the quiet, desperate effort to end the violence alongside the public need to affirm its legitimacy, a deeper message emerges. 
• These youths — the average age of the attackers hovers at around 20 — who are killing Israelis, and often dying almost instantly in the attempt, are lauded as martyrs among Palestinians not so much because Palestinians believe their deaths have meaning, but because it is too agonizing to admit publicly that they do not... 
• These young killers are striving, in their kamikaze fervor, to rekindle the idea among Palestinians that straightforward victory remains possible, if only because the alternative – the possibility that Israel cannot be dislodged, that the nostalgic vision of an undivided, unfettered Palestine cannot be reclaimed — is simply too monstrous to accept.
• [I]t is significant that their actions are loudly celebrated and quietly regretted.
• Their self-proclaimed “Jerusalem awakening,” at once an appeal to the sanctity of Al-Aqsa and an admonition at the galling vacuum of powerlessness that Jerusalem has come to represent, is no awakening at all. In their rejection of existing Palestinian authorities, these “digital natives,” at home in the anarchic internet and partly shaped by its narcissistic tendencies, are in search of a new cultural and political wellspring of resistance that is not tainted by the failures of Fatah and Hamas...
• [T]he very thing that gives these young, decidedly modern attackers their tactical advantage ensures their strategic defeat. Israelis who ultimately brushed off the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada through the simple expedient of continuing with their daily lives will not be cowed by stabbings in the street. This simple truth is not lost on the attackers. It is one reason that they do not discuss goals or strategy in any serious way. The video games, cartoons and music videos they share are essentially devoid of a narrative. These artifacts of the present state of Palestinian “popular resistance” are mostly focused not on a discernible path to national redemption, but on the promise of personal satisfaction. The message is simple: stab the Jews, watch them scream, prove to yourself in that instant that they are mortal, vulnerable. For that brief moment – so the online campaign implicitly claims – Palestinian dignity is restored.
• Yet the real-world attacks that flow from this promise, the moments of frantic scuffling with Israelis, the quick deaths the attackers meet time and again, even when facing unarmed Israeli civilians, only bring the collapse of Palestinian solutions and self-respect – and Israeli unflappability – into sharper relief...
• [A]s Palestinian public opinion grows weary of the pointlessness of the current struggle, Palestinian politics remain trapped in the lingering uncertainty, an uncertainty that is Hamas’s lifeblood and validation: What if we are giving up too soon? What if a little more pain, a little more sacrifice, will yet redeem and restore all that has been lost? Few really believe that anymore in Palestine, but none are yet willing to seek another path.

The context is important, and these are only extracts. The writer's analysis of what we see as the latest chapter in the Palestinian Arab tragedy is certainly worth the few minutes of thought and attention that it demands.

18-Oct-15: Being aware of our neighbours' passion for terror is the first step

Knives, axes, meat-cleavers: Not a  movie scene but Palestinian Arab reality

Terrorism confounds people. 

Too often, it produces bad decision-making by political decision-makers. Sometimes it evokes visions of one-slap solutions (in Hebrew, we call this the zbeng-ve'gamarnu approach) when in reality the hatred and violence stem from passions that have huge sticking power. And far too frequently it brings out silliness, superficiality and befuddlement on the part of reporters and their editors. And we're not speaking of terror in Israel specifically; in great measure, it's a universal phenomenon.

The op-ed below appeared four days ago in Times of Israel. It speaks of terror from the perspective of those to whom it's being done. That's a vantage point with which we are too familiar. David Horovitz, who founded Times of Israel, expresses his message with his customary eloquence. We don't agree with every word, but sincerely hope readers readers will share it widely. (The accompanying pictures were selected by us, not Times of Israel.)

What do you do when the people trying to kill you live around the block? | Ultimately, the only way to thwart people bent on murder, with their minds poisoned by racism and religious extremism, is to curb the flow of toxicity

David Horovitz | Times of Israel | October 14, 2015

What do you do when the people who are trying to kill you live in the neighborhood down the street?

Or when they live in the same village as that lovely man your son’s been working with?

Or when they work for the phone company?

When they try to kill anybody - uniformed soldiers and police, ultra-Orthodox Jews, all the passengers - on a city bus?

When they target men and women and children.

When they are men and women and children?

When their leaders - politicians, spiritual leaders, teachers - lie to them about us, lie about our history, lie about our ambitions?

When some of their leaders tell them they will go to paradise if they die in the act of killing us?

Palestinian Arab religious leader, October 2015 [Image Source]

When they (sometimes) lie to themselves about the killings they carry out - claiming that it is we who are rising up to kill them, that their bombers and stabbers are being attacked in cold blood by us - and thereby widen the circle of embittered potential killers?

When they (sometimes) lie to themselves about who it is they are killing, falsely claiming in widely circulated social media exchanges, for instance, that Na’ama Henkin, gunned down with her husband in the West Bank two weeks ago, was deliberately targeted because it was she who had insulted the prophet, calling Muhammad a pig, on a visit to the Temple Mount this summer?

When all they need in order to kill is a knife or a screwdriver and a mind that’s been filled with poison?

And when that poison pours into them from most every media channel they consume, and from the horrendous Facebook postings of their peers and their role models?

What do you do?

First, acknowledge the scale of the problem.

After decades relentlessly demonizing and delegitimizing the revived Jewish state, the Palestinian leadership has produced a generation many of whom are so filled with hatred, and so convinced of the imperative to kill, that no other consideration - including the likelihood that they will die in the act - prevents them from seeking to murder Jews.

The false claim pumped by Hamas, and the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and Fatah, and many more besides, that the Jews intend to pray on the Temple Mount - a place of unique sanctity for Jews, but one whose Jewish connection has been erased from the Palestinian narrative - has all too evidently pushed a new wave of young Palestinians, urged to “protect al-Aqsa,” into murderous action against any and all Jewish targets, using any and all weapons.

Instructional poster designed by Waleed Zohid [more of his blood-lusting
graphic work here]. The self-delusion in such incitement is that it urges
the killing of soldiers and police, but Israeli civilians know better

The suicide bombings of the Second Intifada were carried out by West Bank Palestinians; the onslaught was drastically reduced when Israel built the security barrier. Today’s terrorism is largely being carried out by Palestinian Arabs from East Jerusalem, some of whom have blue Israeli identity cards. The relative neglect of East Jerusalem since 1967, by an Israel that expanded the city’s municipal boundaries but signally failed to ensure anything remotely close to equality between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, only made the lies and the incitement spread more easily. In an Israel where Jews and Arabs live utterly intertwined lives, this new level of potential danger in every seemingly banal encounter is rendering daily life nightmarish.

Second, tackle the problem in all the spheres where it is exacerbated.

In the short term: Arrest the preachers who spout hatred. Ask Facebook to close down the pages that disseminate it, and find the people behind those pages. Monitor hateful sentiment on social media more effectively; several of this month’s terrorists made no secret of their murderous intentions.

Make plain, via every mainstream and social media avenue, in Arabic, that Israel has no plans to change the status quo at the Temple Mount. Involve King Abdullah of Jordan. Involve anybody else who can credibly address that incendiary lie about Al-Aqsa.

Boost security, of course, as Israel is doing, but know that there can be no hermetic prevention of these kinds of attacks.

Efforts at more strategic change, inevitably, run into the 48-year dilemma of what Israel wants and needs to do about East Jerusalem in particular, and the Palestinians in general. It is unforgivable that Arab neighborhoods of the city lie decades behind the Jewish neighborhoods in everything from city services to education to job opportunity. But in some neighborhoods, addressing such inequalities is impossible. Physically impossible. As in, Jewish city officials would be taking their lives into their hands to set foot in Shuafat refugee camp.

"Moderate" PA president, Abbas: His overt support for terrorism and concrete
encouragement of its practitioners is a matter of record [Image Source]

By contrast, handing control of such areas to the PA, whose leader Mahmoud Abbas insists that all Jerusalem territory captured by Israel in 1967 be part of a Palestinian state, becomes ever less palatable and viable, as he becomes ever more extreme in his pronouncements and as the Palestinian-Arab population becomes ever more of a threat.

Only “resistance” will liberate Palestine, Hamas has always argued. In fact, it is “resistance” that keeps the Palestinians from statehood

Ultimately, the only way to thwart people bent on murder, with their minds poisoned by racism and religious extremism, is to curb the flow of toxicity. Different lessons at school; different priorities and values from spiritual leaders; different messages from political leaders; different approaches on mainstream and social media.

But all that, of course, is far easier said than done. A different tone, a different approach, from the Israeli government, might have helped until recently. Then again, we’ve tried different tones and different approaches. As former prime minister Ehud Barak once said, it’s doubtful, when the Jews in their exile through the millennia prayed for a return to Jerusalem, that they were thinking of Shuafat refugee camp. But Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s peace terms in 2000, and opted instead to foment the Second Intifada. And Mahmoud Abbas, eight years later, failed to seize Ehud Olmert’s offer to withdraw from the entire West Bank (with one-for-one land swaps), divide Jerusalem, and relinquish sovereignty in the Old City.

And so we still run the lives of millions of Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of whom are on the “safe” side of the barrier we built to protect ourselves from what has now evidently morphed into yet another phase of vicious, futile bloodshed.

Only “resistance” will liberate Palestine, Hamas has always argued, proudly citing the prisoner releases it extorted when kidnapping Gilad Shalit, and the control of Gaza it achieved when expediting Israel’s withdrawal via terror attacks and rocket fire. But in fact, it is “resistance” that keeps the Palestinians from statehood. Most Israelis want to separate from the Palestinians — want to stop running their lives, want to keep a Jewish-democratic Israel. “Resistance” in each new iteration tells Israelis that they dare not do so. Had Gaza been calm and unthreatening after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal, the late Ariel Sharon would likely have withdrawn unilaterally from most of the West Bank. The Hamas takeover in Gaza, the incessant rocket fire and the frequent rounds of conflict told Israel that it could not risk another such withdrawal — that it could not risk another Hamas takeover in the West Bank.

Education, Palestinian Arab style [Source: MEMRI]
“I will shoot the Jews!” the little child says. “All of them?” the host asks.
“Yes,” the girl says. “Good,” the host answers.

The international community peers shortsightedly at a strong Israel - very strong indeed compared to the Palestinians - and concludes that the onus is upon us to take the calculated risk and grant them full independence. But step back a little - to a perspective that includes Hamas, the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, the threat posed directly by an emboldened Iran and via its terrorist proxies, the anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel rampant across this region - and it should be obvious that a miscalculation by “strong” Israel would quickly render it untenably weak and vulnerable. We might get better international media coverage, but we also might face destruction; Israelis aren’t about to vote for that.

There are two peoples with claims to this bloodied land. Neither is going anywhere. Only conciliation, however reluctantly achieved, is going to enable either and both of these two peoples to live normal lives. And that’s what anybody truly interested in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be working for.

What do you do when some of your neighbors are trying to kill you? Protect yourself. Stop them. Do what you sensibly can to help create a different, better climate - to moderate your enemies. 

Meanwhile, hang tough. Refuse to be terrorized. Get on with living. That, not killing, is what people were born to do.

04-Aug-15: Back to prison

Shalit Deal prisoners depart for freedom, October 2011 [Image Source]

When the government of Israel submitted to the extortion of the Hamas terrorist regime, and agreed in October 2011 to release a group of convicted terrorists in order to secure the freedom of a young hostage, Gilad Shalit, a considerable part of what was done received little and often no media coverage. And some of what was said in the media and by political figures was (in our view, and based on looking at things closely) outright wrong. We have a half-written analysis of this that we plan to publish some time soon.

But for now, here's an important news item from today:

A committee charged with reviewing the terms of release for the Palestinian terrorists freed in the 2011 Gilad Schalit prisoner swap deal has decided that 39 of the prisoners released committed additional crimes that warrant their return to jail to complete their sentences. The committee has been examining the cases of prisoners released in the deal since last summer's Operation Brother's Keeper, when some 50 such prisoners were rearrested in the efforts to locate the perpetrators of the June 12 triple kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens in Judea. The defense establishment filed 48 cases with the committee following the arrests. One of the remaining two prisoners was released and the other was sentenced to return to jail by a military court in Lod. In six of the cases reviewed, released prisoners were not found to have committed an additional crime, but were ordered to return to jail to serve part of their remaining sentences. Appeals have been filed for some of the decisions.
["39 Palestinians released in Schalit exchange to be re-jailed", Israel Hayom, August 4, 2015]

We wish we knew what guidelines were given to this committee. But we don't. We don't know yet which terrorists are going to be serving the balance of their terms or what those prison terms are.

So far, there has been very little media analysis of this. The immediate problem with that is that the Palestinian Arab prisoner propaganda machine is likely to keep doing what it has done for years - entirely distort the facts to create sympathy for some of the most sociopathic individuals imaginable.

18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms

It's troubling to see the gyrations being performed by the US government as it convenes a serious-sounding gathering of policy makers and others on a subject for which they have chosen a strikingly context-free title.

White House Prepares for Summit on Countering Violent Extremism | Maya Rhodan | Time Magazine | February 16, 2015 | The White House will host a long-awaited summit on countering the behavior that leads marginalized groups and individuals to join terrorist groups starting Tuesday... The White House was careful to not single out any particular group as the main culprit of extremism at home and abroad, but Muslim leaders have already expressed concern that the event will lead more Americans to express fear and hatred toward the community...

President Obama has an editorial in connection with this CVE ("Counter Violent Extremism") in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times ["Our fight against violent extremism"] in which it's hard not to notice that the word Islam appears just three times - and each time in a way that conveys a distinctly defensive connotation: (1) "peaceful nature of Islam", (2) "how terrorists betray Islam". and (3) "the lie that the United States is at war with Islam". (Naturally those are all direct quotes.)

If you're anxious to find a robust engagement with the realities of Islamist terror, then the bad news you are going to need to look for it elsewhere,

But don't bother searching on the State Department website's announcement of the same event:

On Thursday, February 19, 2015, the Department of State will host Ministers and foreign leaders, senior officials from the UN and regional organizations, and private and civil society representatives to discuss a broad range of challenges facing nations working to prevent and counter violent extremism. 

The word terror is not mentioned once on State's new CVE page. Nor are the words Islam, Islamist, Jihad, Arab, Moslem or Muslim,

It happens that the State Department and we have some shared history on terror and semantic distinctions. It's something we have mentioned here quite a few times (here's a summary with links). 

The short version: on August 14, 2013, we wrote (here)

A persistent reporter tackled the State Department's deputy spokesperson Marie Harf [earlier today] on whether the murderers being bused tonight into the waiting arms of the two Palestinian Arab regimes are (a) freedom fighters or (b) terrorists.

Most people will think this is pretty easy to answer. But most people are not the spokesperson for the State Department. Here's an edited extract of the bizarre exchange that ensued (source: Washington Free Beacon; it's also captured in this video clip):

Persistent reporter: Do you have any thoughts or position on whether these people who are going to be released [today] are political prisoners or are they terrorists?
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: I do not have a position on that.
Persistent reporter: Do you object to the Palestinians referring to them as political prisoners?
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: I don’t have a position on that...
Persistent reporter: ...Most of these people [in fact all of them - TOW] have been convicted of murder, of killing people. And the Israelis are very clear on the fact that they think that these people are terrorists, even though they’re releasing them. The Palestinians say that they are political prisoners and... have instructed their ambassadors, all their representatives around the world to refer to them as freedom fighters, political prisoners. And I want to know, if you don’t have a position... if there isn’t anything that you call them, do you object to the Palestinians referring to them as freedom fighters?
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: The answer is, I don’t know and I will endeavor to get an answer for you on that as well. 

As we said then and believe now, something seriously wrong is going on here. This was a paradigm, a teaching moment, even if few people watching realized it. The Obama Administration State Department's spokesperson was being asked to react to the release of Palestinian Arab terrorists, all of them convicted of murder, all of them having spent many years in prison. More specifically, she was also being asked to react to a letter sent to Secretary Kerry by a group of Israeli families whose children had been murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists and who were astounded that the United States was pressuring Israel to free the homicidal convicts, not one of whom had served out a complete sentence. 

We (the couple behind this blog) drafted and sent that letter a day earlier to the State Department on behalf of the other families.So naturally we paid close attention to what Marie Harf, speaking for John Kerry, said about it: 

Roth signed a letter sent Tuesday to Kerry asking him for a meeting. “Meet with us,” wrote Roth and 16 other family members of victims. “Let us explain why being complicit in turning the killers of our children into heroes and ‘freedom fighters’ must not be part of any policy befitting a great nation and moral exemplar like the United States...” Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, told The Daily Beast, “We’ve received the letter today, and we’re reviewing it.” [Eli Lake, writing in The Daily Beast, August 14, 2013]

They are almost certainly still "reviewing" it. We barraged them with emails and Tweets in the hours and months that followed but, against all the laws of physics, politics and simple good sense, no one from State ever did answer.

It's possible we erred in asking Ms Harf and her boss whether the US sees those convicted and still unrepentant Palestinian Arab killers of unarmed Jews as terrorists. Maybe we should have let them say violent extremists. That might have pushed the State Department people into conceding that they have no idea what those words mean.

Nor do most people, which is probably why that's how they chose to characterize this week's Washington gathering.

27-Jan-15: Blessed be the True Judge: David Landau

The late David Landau: Click here (not on the picture) to see his
interview on the ABC Lateline program, arguing robustly
why the Shalit Transaction was so seriously wrong

A former editor of Haaretz and of the Jerusalem Post, David Landau passed away today. His funeral will be tomorrow (Wednesday) here in Jerusalem. An obituary has just gone up [here] on the Haaretz site. It describes an impressive career and a life of impact.

The few conversations we had with him were short and conducted - mostly - when we were both speakers at the same conference in England a few years ago. To say that a broad swathe of his political viewpoints were unpalatable to us is understating things.

But when he spoke out on the subject of Israel doing deals with the terrorists, and in particular the Shalit Transaction which remains one of the most bitter moments in our lives, he demonstrated real courage (given what most people from the camp that he says he belonged to were saying about that tragically misconceived submission to Islamist extortion) and integrity for speaking up when he could have let the wave of overwhelming (and to us, incomprehensible) public support for it in Israel speak for itself.

He was interviewed by Ali Moore on Australia's ABC on October 18, 2011, the day that Israel released the first of two tranches of 1,027 convicted killers and assorted other terrorists. The entire interview (video above, text at this link) from the Lateline program runs 16 minutes.

The deep concerns he expressed 3+ years ago have proven to be well-founded. May the memory of David Landau be for a blessing.