21-Dec-18: After the terror attacks, the focus moves on as the quiet struggle of the victims continues

Shira and Amichai Ish-Ran speak to reporters from hospital
five days ago [Image Source]. Their baby did not survive the cowardly attack.

Based on reports in the past few hours from several news sources, including Times of Israel and Jerusalem Post, here are some updates on the Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks of the past ten days.

Amichai Ish-Ran, who took three bullets in the leg as a civilian victim - alongside his wife - of a  drive-by shooter at a bus stop near the entrance to the Israeli community of Ofra ["09-Dec-18: A shooter in a passing vehicle seriously injures several Israelis tonight near Ofra, north of Jerusalem"] is thankfully doing well enough that he was released from Shaarei Zedek Medical Center yesterday (Thursday).

His wife Shira, who suffered critical injuries in the attack, is said to be "steadily recovering". She had further surgery on Wednesday and this is reported by the hospital to have been successful. The baby boy she was carrying in her womb when they were shot died four days after the attack after being born under emergency conditions by Caesarian section.

An IDF soldier, 21-year-old Naveh Rotem, who was critically injured this past Friday when stabbed and head-bashed with a rock by a Palestinian Arab at a military post outside the Israeli community of Beit El is thankfully doing much better. The attacker who fled the scene, prompting a manhunt, later turned himself in.

The soldier, had been taken to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in life-threatening condition, unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator. The hospital said in a statement that Rotem had been treated by multiple medical experts over the past week, and quoted neurosurgeon Dr. Iddo Paldor as saying he was returning home “in good condition, strong and smiling.” Rotem will undergo followup treatment. His parents said in a statement that they were “happy to thank all the hospital staff,” saying they had “felt we were in good hands..." [Times of Israel]

Shira Sabag, a civilian seriously injured in last week’s Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack ["13-Dec-18: Another lethal Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack Thursday"] at a bus stop near the small Israeli community of Givat Assaf, is said to be improving though still hospitalized at Shaare Zedek.

An IDF soldier, Netanel Felber, whose family made aliyah to Israel from the US a decade ago, is still reported to be critically injured and fighting for his life and suffering gunshot wounds to his head in the attack, He has undergone multiple surgeries at Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital. Two of his army colleagues, Yovel Mor-Yosef and Yosef Cohen, were killed in the attack.

It was reported yesterday (Thursday) that the main perpetrators of both the Ofra and Givat Assaf attacks are brothers, As'am Barghouti, 32, and Saleh Omar Barghouti, 29, clansmen and residents of the same village (up until he was incarcerated) of prominent Palestinian Arab convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti. (There's some background here: "18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?") Salih Barghouti was shot last Wednesday in a village near Ramallah as he resisted apprehension by Israeli security forces. The attack allegedly carried out by As'am Barghouti happened the following day. There is an ongoing manhunt for him.

It was also reported yesterday for the first time that this As'am Barghouti was released from an Israeli prison in April 2018 after serving an 11-year sentence.

We personally sat through the 2003/4 terrorism trial of Marwan Barghouti in Tel Aviv (he was convicted and has been in prison since then). Beyond the homicides for which he was convicted, we learned that Barghouti personally laid out $500 [source] for the making of the explosive-filled guitar case that was brought to, and exploded inside, Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria destroying it on August 9, 2001 and killing fifteen innocent people including our daughter Malki. 

The Sbarro bombmaker, the inventor of that grotesque explosive-and-nails-filled guitar case, was another Barghouti clansman, Kuwait-born Abdullah Barghouti. About him, we have written numerous times. Here's one piece: "20-Jun-13: Abdullah Barghouti, terrorist, bomb-maker, killer of 66 innocents, has some demands".

When churchman Desmond Tutu, himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner,
nominated convicted murderer and terrorist Marwan Barghouti for the same
award, he tweeted the news with this photo of himself with Mrs Marwan
Barghouti [Twitter Source]

And yet one more clansman, Bilal Yaqub Barghouti, a senior Hamas operative, was personally sheltered by Marwan Barghouti in his home when Bill Barghouti was on the run from the Israeli security forces because of his involvement in the massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria (he was later convicted for his part). Bilal Barghouti said for the record that, during his stay there, "he saw a number of weapons, and when he left the house Barghouti armed him with a gun for his use."

Unlike most of the Sbarro Massacre plotters, Bilal Barghouti still resides in an Israeli prison cell. On being sentenced in 2003, he said: "Thank god. I regret that I did not kill even more people than I did kill". (More background here: "24-Aug-18: What aid funds handed to the Abbas regime ($1 million and growing) have done for savages who kill Jews".)

And this: Marwan Barghouti, whom the Nobel Prize-winning social activist church-man Desmond Tutu odiously nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2017, is arguably an unindicted accessory-after-the-fact to the Sbarro murders. (It would be nice if someone were to forward this post to Archbishop Tutu in South Africa.)

May all the victims needing a full and rapid recovery get it.

27-Jul-18: A murderous Thursday night knifing attack in suburban Jerusalem; the killer, again, is a child

Image Source: CUFI

The Israeli community of Adam (also known as Geva Binyamin, recalling the name of the site on which it stands which is mentioned in the biblical Book of Joshua), located just a few minutes drive north of Jerusalem and 45 minutes by frequent Egged bus ride from the capital's Central Bus Station, is in stunned shock this morning.

As Times of Israel reports:

The Israeli man stabbed to death in a terror attack in a West Bank settlement on Thursday night was named Friday morning as 31-year-old Yotam Ovadia. His funeral will take place at 1 p.m. on Friday at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem. According to Israeli authorities, suspect Mohammad Tareq Yousef climbed over the security fence of the West Bank settlement of Adam sometime before 9 p.m. Thursday. He walked deeper into the settlement, crossing a playground area, where he encountered [31-year-old Yotam] Ovadia, and stabbed him repeatedly in the upper torso...  father to a 2-year-old child and a 7-month-old baby. The Brinks security company announced on their Facebook page that he worked for them as a technician...
A second resident, 58, was also stabbed after arriving on the scene. He was rushed to a hospital in serious condition but it was upgraded to moderate after doctors managed to stabilize him.
A third resident, Assaf Raviv, 41, went outside to investigate the disturbance and, realizing that an attack was occurring, shot the Palestinian terrorist three times, killing him. He was stabbed and lightly injured during the incident, and on Friday morning it was announced he had been released from hospital. The settlement committee on Friday released a statement praising Raviv’s bravery... 

Haaretz captures some of the Arab world's blood-lusting reaction:

In response, the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza said it welcomes the attack, describing it as "the appropriate response to the crimes of the occupation." [PRC is aligned with Hezbollah and with the government of Iran.]

And

Hamas said in an official statement: "This is an act of heroism and a message to all the heads of the occupation that attempts to uproot the spirit of resistance from the heart of the Palestinian people have failed and today's heroic action proves the unity of the Palestinian people and its common destiny. Yesterday three fighters were killed in Gaza and today the response has come from the West Bank."

And from a different Hamas source quoted on a Jordanian news site, a supercilious, general-purpose, one-size-fits-all self-justification for the barbarism:

"The operation today is a natural response to the crimes of the occupation against our people, and an extension of the ongoing uprising of our people," said Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanoua

The terrorism-friendly editors of the Bethlehem-based Ma'an News Agency have not yet managed to report any of this in their English-language edition but it's already headline news in their Arabic version (they understand their market's needs). Via machine-translation, we see they name the killer as Ahmed Tarek Dar Yusuf Abu Ayouch, 17, and frame the news as "the death of a boy". Other reports say he was younger than that. We won't post his photo on our site, but it's over here.

Unsurprisingly Israel-hating social media posts (like this one and this) refer to the cold-blooded knifer as "martyr".

Times of Israel notes that he comes from

Khobar, a West Bank town near Ramallah. The village is the same village the killer of the Salomon family came from, exactly a year ago.

They are referring to the savagery we reported a little over a year ago in "22-Jul-17: Friday night carnage in Neve Tzuf". (Do the British citizens of the English Midlands town of Walsall understand what they got into when they entered a twinning relationship with Khobar?)

What they ought to have mentioned as well, but didn't, is that Khobar (or Kobar or Kaubar or Cobar), a dusty village of about 4,000 people located about 10 km north of the PA administrative capital Ramallah, happens also to be the pre-imprisonment home-town of another notorious murderer, Marwan Barghouti, convicted on terrorism charges and involvement in five counts of murder in a criminal trial which we attended ["21-Mar-14: Allegedly objective journalism"]. It prides itself on having 25 of its residents in Israeli prisons.

Unlike the #WeaponizedChild teen who was lethally stopped last night trying to murder Jews, the older villager ["Who is Marwan Barghouti?"] gets his op eds published in the New York Times where they disingenuously call him "a Palestinian leader and parliamentarian".

There's much more in our post "18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?", almost all of it ugly in the most serious of ways. Admirers of a certain loathsome South African churchman ["Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominates Marwan Barghouti for Nobel Peace Prize"] may be interested in the supporting role he plays.

As often happens in the wake of lethal terror attacks inside Israeli communities, it's likely the IDF will enlarge (for a time) its visible presence in the communities and on the roads of Judea and Samaria and carry out very active investigations in places like Khobar.

This morning's reports suggest the possibility that the terror in Adam involved an accomplice and that a "suspicious vehicle" was seen leaving the community shortly after the killing. Ma'an reports (again - only in Arabic for now) that three villagers have already been taken into Israeli custody this morning in Khobar and names them as Nasrallah Yousef Mishal, 17, his brother Mohammed Mishal, 21 and a 42-year-old Barghouti male named Khaldoun.

A Friday morning Arabic news report says the knifer's home is being prepared for demolition by the IDF. On that issue, bear in mind that the perpetually-insolvent Palestinian Authority's Rewards for Terror scheme will be providing lifetime incentive payments to the family of the dead killer.

UPDATE 3:00 pm Friday July 27, 2018: If you're familiar with the nauseating, agenda-driven editorial skills of the Ma'an people, you won't be surprised with how they approach the terrorist attack in their slow-to-arrive English-language report on last night's unspeakable savagery in Adam:

"Israeli settler shoots, kills Palestinian teen after stabbing attack" is the nauseating headline they came up with. In the body of the report, they quote Arab sources who say the boy came with an axe and that was what he used to attack his victims, and to carry out the murder of Yotam Ovadia.

And with Arab culture being flexible in the way names change form according to circumstances, they now call the killer Muhammad Tareq Youssef Abu Ayyush. Being cautious in their customary way, Ma'an's editors don't call the high-school-age killer a "martyr", at least not in this shabby Western-funded outfit's English-language version. But for the less delicate consumers of Ma'an's Arabic version, martyr is of course what they call him. Ma'an's editors know their readership and its predilections.

UPDATE August 28, 2018: Haaretz reports today ["Israeli Military Demolishes West Bank Home of Terrorist Who Stabbed Settler"] that, last night (Monday), the Israeli military demolished the home of the stabber who killed Yotam Ovadia:

The Israel Defense Forces went into the village of Kubar in the West Bank and tore down the house of Muhammed Tarek Ibrahim Dar Youssef. During the demolition violent protests took place and dozens of Palestinians threw rocks and firebombs and set tires on fire, according to the military. The military responded with riot dispersal means, the IDF said. No injuries were reported. Israeli law allows the military to demolish the homes of terrorists who have killed Israelis. The policy has been a matter of some controversy, but is carried out on the argument that it serves as a deterrent against future terrorist attacks as it affects other family members living in the household...

The terrorism-friendly Palestinian Arab news outlet Ma'an covers the demolition extensively with photographs and video, editorializing that house demolitions "against Palestinians and not against Israelis, who have committed attacks or hate crimes against Palestinians, has only fueled more anger against the decades-long Israeli occupation. Israel has come under harsh condemnation over the past several years for its response to attacks committed by Palestinians on Israelis, which rights groups have said amounted to "collective punishment" on family members and entire communities in a clear violation of international law." Ma'an needless to say makes no mention of the lifetime stipends to which the parents of the stabber have recently become entitled under the PA's grotesque policy of incentive payments for the perpetrators of terrorism and their heirs.

18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?

Barghouti, convicted on multiple counts of murder by shooting,

is a candidate for the next Nobel Peace Prize [Image Source: Arab media]

There are serious efforts underway this week to re-engineer the public image of the convicted Palestinian Arab felon, Marwan Barghouti.

Based on disinformation, partial information and lots of spin, they are directed at concealing the facts of his crimes and imprisonment and putting some wind into the sails of this ambitious man's on/off political career.

Outrageously, the key thing to know about Barghouti, according to one of the world's most influential newspapers which yesterday provided him yesterday with an invaluable op ed platform ["Why We Are on Hunger Strike in Israel’s Prisons", New York Times, April 17, 2017] to megaphone his extreme views, is that

Source: New York Times

In the following 24 hours, the Times found itself in the midst of a storm of protest. We have little sympathy for how the NYT's public editor summed things up today.

A side issue: Barghouti's English is poor. Yet "his" op ed, datelined Hadarim Prison, is a slickly-written piece of eloquent self-promotion. We think there's a teensie-tiny possibility it was written by professional pubic relations people in his name. But then who pays attention to such trivia when the cause is just so compelling?

Barghouti has an interesting group of admirers who help his self-promotion process move forward. Here are just a few.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, the South African church leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, regularly sings Barghouti's praises. On one view, this is exceedingly odd, given how the Nobel committee specifically noted Tutu's own "nonviolent path to liberation" in its citation. So then is Tutu unware of Barghouti's lethal criminality, as widely outlined in the media for anyone who cares to look (for instance Dr Emmanuel Navon's cogently argued "Desmond Tutu is Wrong about Marwan Barghouti")? No, it does not seem that he is unaware. Instead, like many at that extreme end of the political spectrum, he seems to feel criminality of Barghouti's kind just doesn't count. And to show he means it, he has lately been touting the deeply offensive notion that Barghouti ought to get the same rich prize that Tutu himself did ["Bishop Tutu Nominates Jailed Palestinian Leader Barghouti for Nobel Peace Prize", Michael Friedson, June 8, 2016].

Al Jazeera, referring to the noble hero of the South African struggle to defeat apartheaid, calls Barghouti "the Palestinian Mandela". So do the Ma'an News Agency and a commentator at The Guardian. On the other hand, Le Monde, in the course of an interview with Barghouti, calls the comparison "debatable".

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, an Argentine human rights activist who received the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize and is a leader of the non-violent Latin American Christian group Servicio Paz y Justicia, is another supporter of a Barghouti Nobel [May 2016 source]. So is the parliament of Tunisia [source]. And so are sixteen mayors of towns in France [source] including Valenton and Bergerac (unfortunately we don't know the names of the other metropolises).

A cluster of Belgians, all of them involved in their country's national politics, followed suit and wrote to the Nobel committee in May 2016, improbably calling Barghouti "a peace activist":

“Peace requires the freedom of Marwan Barghouti and of the political prisoners, and more generally the freedom of the Palestinian people living for decades under occupation.”

Thinking logically, we might have surmised that the Belgians meant to exclude homicidal thugs from the list of those to be freed because what possible basis can there be to label such felons "political prisoners"? But then they do seem serious about wanting Barghouti to go to Oslo. So evidently they - like Tutu - don't see a conflict between being (a) a convicted murderer and (b) a peace activist. Sort of like being both a cheese-burger addict and an activist for veganism.

But for those to whom facts and realities still mean something, here's a brief excursion through the contemporary reports that accompanied his journey into the Israeli penal system. To emphasize the point, we refer to news reports carried by Haaretz which is much closer to Tutu's views than to ours.

The capture:

Wiretapping revealed that Barghouti was hiding in a safe house. The commander of the army’s Ramallah Brigade... told Haaretz: “When the intelligence arrived that he was in a building in the heart of a Ramallah neighborhood... an armored brigade surrounded the site and the baton was passed to me. The Duvdevan unit was under my command. We understood that he was in the building. One of the soldiers saw him through the window, taking cover close to what looked to us, at least, like an old woman who was lying on a bed. We removed everyone from the building... ["Will Marwan Barghouti be the Palestinian Nelson Mandela?", Haaretz, July 5, 2016]

The conviction

The Tel Aviv District Court convicted former West Bank Tanzim commander Marwan Barghouti in the deaths of five people on Thursday. Barghouti was convicted of three terror attacks in which the five were murdered, as well as in another charge of attempted murder, membership in a terror organization and conspiring to commit a crime. However, the court acquitted him of 33 other murders with which he was charged, noting that there was no evidence that he was a full partner to those incidents...  The court ruled that Barghouti was directly responsible for a January 2002 terror attack on a gas station in Givat Zeev in which Israeli Yoela Chen was murdered. The attack, the judges said, was carried out at his direct order in revenge for the assassination of Raed Carmi. Barghouti had admitted his responsibility for this attack. The attack in which a Greek monk was murdered in Ma'aleh Adumim on June of 2001 was also carried out at the instruction of Barghouti, the judges said. The former Tanzim leader, the court ruled, also approved the March 2002 attack at Tel Aviv's Seafood Market restaurant in which three people were murdered, as well as a car bomb attack in Jerusalem... [He] was charged with leading dozens of terror operations against Israeli targets since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, including suicide and shooting attacks that led to the death and injury of hundreds of Israeli citizens and Israel Defense Force soldiers. According to the charge sheet, Barghouti headed the Fatah, Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade terror groups in the West Bank and was subordinate to Arafat... The state prosecutor said Barghouti funded and planned terror attacks and is not the political activist he claimed to be... Barghouti's supporters in the European parliament were expected to show up for the ruling... ["Barghouti Convicted in Deaths of Five People", Haaretz, May 20, 2004]

Barghouti was sentenced by judges Sarah Sirota, Amiram Benyamini and Avraham Tal to five consecutive life terms plus an additional 40 years. The judges observed that

Barghouti used to receive reports of the attacks carried out by his associates only after they were completed. This was an effort to preserve his image as a political leader not involved in armed attacks against Israelis... [Haaretz, June 6, 2004] 

And some occasionally overlooked points, via JTA:

When Israeli authorities chose to put Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti on trial in a criminal court rather than a military court, prosecutors may have set the stage for an even bigger prize: Yasser Arafat. That possibility was given a boost last week with Barghouti’s conviction on five counts of murder, for Israelis killed in three separate shooting ambushes... The judges said Barghouti could be convicted only in cases where it was proven that he had prior knowledge of imminent terrorist attacks and that he approved the attacks... [He] was acquitted on 21 other counts of murder for lack of evidence. Both outcomes bolstered the argument for putting Palestinian terrorists on trial in regular Israeli courts rather than in military courts, where the standards of evidence are not as strict. Barghouti’s conviction shows that there is sufficient evidence to put terrorists behind bars using standard criminal procedures, and his acquittal on the other counts lends legitimacy to the argument that even Palestinian terrorists will get fair trials in Israel... ["Barghouti conviction could foretell Arafat trial", JTA, May 24, 2004]

Some additional overlooked dimensions:

• Marwan Barghouti publicly boasted of his role in igniting what many call the Second Intifada in 2000. We published his direct quotes (translated to English at the archived Wayback Machine]. This may come as a surprise to those who think of Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount in September 2000 as being the real story. 
• He personally laid out $500 [source: the archived Wayback Machine quoting a November 30, 2004 Margot Dudkevitch report in the Jerusalem Post] for the making of the explosive-filled guitar case that was brought to, and exploded inside, Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria destroying it on August 9, 2001 and killing fifteen innocent people including our daughter Malki. The bombmaker was Abdullah Barghouti, Marwan's clansman.
• We sat through Marwan Barghouti's trial in a Tel Aviv court.
• When another clansman Bilal Barghouti, a senior Hamas operative, was on the run from the Israeli security forces because of his involvement in the massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria (he was later convicted for his part), Marwan Barghouti sheltered him for a time in his home. Bilal Barghouti said for the record that, during his stay there, "he saw a number of weapons, and when he left the house Barghouti armed him with a gun for his use." [Source: CAMERA] Marwan Barghouti is an unindicted accessory after the fact to the Sbarro murders.
• And since we're mentioning the Barghouti clan, let the record show that Ahlam Tamimi, the Jordanian Hamas agent who boasts of taking the central role in the 2001 Sbarro massacre and who faces terrorism charges in Washington that were made public on March 14, 2017, is the daughter of a woman named Hasna al-Barghouti [Arabic source]

Leader and parliamentarian, battler for non-violence and peace, candidate for the world's most important reward for bringing peace to the world. And also a cold-blooded thug closely directing other thugs. A man happy to appear in public gripping a sub-machine gun as he claims credit for the blood-drenched Intifadeh years from 2000 onwards.

We don't think it's all that difficult to distinguish between Barghouti the plastic-coated fantasy and invention of parts of the media, and Barghouti the loathsome killer of innocents. 

In the end, it seems to come down - tragically - to whom and what you want to believe.

04-Apr-17: Something you rarely read about Marwan Barghouti the killer

Marwan Barghouti, the reality: on trial in an open court, convicted
and sentenced to life Image Source: Getty

Times of Israel has a report today ["Jailed Fatah terrorist organizing hunger strikes, protests"] by Avi Issacharoff, its high-profile Middle East analyst, that focuses on the latest manouveurings by Marwan Barghouti to stay in the public spotlight.

We added this to the comments section at the foot of the article:

News sites ought to be very careful about how they describe convicted felons who have a political role to play. How they're labeled in the news has a strong impact on how they're viewed. Almost no one goes back and does their own research. They rely on the "experts". 

Marwan Barghouti and his Fatah handlers must be pleased by the headline of this story. They are probably also happy for him to be described as "jailed for life by Israel for orchestrating a string of murders during the Second Intifada..." as he is in this report. 

But a more accurate way - the right way - to say why Barghouti is spending the rest of his life behind bars is this from BBC: "But it was his arrest by Israel in 2002 and conviction on five counts of murder two years later that turned his into a household name." [BBC News] 

Barghouti, the terrorist thug, is not an orchestrator. He's not (just) a jailed terrorist. He's a convicted murderer.  

From experience, it's exceedingly rare for him to be called that in news reports.

Marwan Barghouti, the icon: A concoction of "resistance"
fantasy and an army of waiting supporters

For a range of reasons, there has been a series of efforts to paint Marwan Barghouti as an apostle of non-violence, as an emerging alternative to the thuggish Palestinian Arab political class. The reality is he is as demonstrably thuggish as the worst of them, and efforts to present him differently are cheap spin.

Here's a good illustration from, of all sources, Haaretz, which happens to be the preferred forum for much of the propaganda seeking to give birth to a new, kinder, gentler, bogus Barghouti:

In the early days of the second intifada, Barghouti led mass demonstrations. When the confrontations escalated, he declared, “The time when only we sacrifice victims is past. We must take revenge. We must kill Israelis. Yes. We have bullets. We have rifles, and they will be aimed at the occupation.” ["Will Marwan Barghouti be the Palestinian Nelson Mandela?", Haaretz, July 5, 2016]

For personal reasons, we (Frimet and Arnold Roth) have strongly negative personal feelings about Barghouti. We sat through his 2003-4 trial in a Tel Aviv court-room.

• Marwan Barghouti personally paid for the design and the making (by Abdullah Barghouti, a clansman of his) of the explosives-and-nails-filled guitar case that destroyed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001 and along with it the lives of our daughter Malki and many other innocents. Marwan Barghouti paid Abdallah Barghouti US$500 for his work. That sum came on top of the $117,000 he received for his product engineering work from Hamas, according to evidence [Jerusalem Post - Archive, November 30, 2004] given to the court in Abdullah Barghouti's multi-murder trial.
• Quote: The senior Hamas activist behind the Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem, Bilal Barghouti, told interrogators that Marwan [Barghouti] hid him for a few days while Israel was hunting for him and gave him a weapon when he left. ["Barghouti's Top Aide Incriminated Him in Tanzim Terror Strikes", Haaretz, April 26, 2002] 

An elderly South African social activist ["Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominates imprisoned Palestinian for Nobel Peace Prize"] often expresses [here for instance] how he thinks the world  [Twitter link] of Barghouti. We're fairly certain he knows most of the things we have just mentioned, along with the fact that one of the victims of Barghouti's murders was a Greek Orthodox priest whose beard gave him a vaguely Jewish appearance.

But we're confident that, like many people of similar outlook, the South African doesn't give a damn. We offer some little-publicized background here ["09-Jun-16: The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize"]. 

Click here for additional past Barghouti posts of ours.

25-Jul-16: More on Tutu, Barghouti, terror, peace and prizes

Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
Bishop Desmond Tutu [Image Source]

A Pakistani website today published an op ed lauding Marwan Barghouti, providing us (we're guessing this was not their intention) with an opportunity to share our feelings concerning the man and those who seek to aggrandize him.

The article is entitled simply "Marwan Barghouti". We had not heard of the author before; his name is Abbas Hasan and his self-description is sparse: "an engineer and a cricket fan who works in the Middle East".

Here's our comment.

It's helpful to see acolytes of Barghouti highlighting, as this piece does, the emphatically *anti-peace* stance of the convicted and imprisoned murderer. Our attention was drawn to this article because of our tracking the efforts of Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate himself, in shilling for Barghouti to get the same prize. In his public statements, Mr Tutu repeatedly speaks of Barghouti as an agent for peace. But as this fine article makes clear, Barghouti totally rejects peace in the Arab vs Israel wars as this quote makes clear:-
“The role and mission of the Palestinian authority should be reassessed so that its main mission must be in supporting and assisting a comprehensive resistance, which necessitates the immediate termination of security coordination and cooperation with Israel as this only reinforces occupation and is a tremendous detriment to the Palestinian people. We must stop betting on the illusion of peace negotiations”.
It's a valuable service to the cause of peace (in which most Israelis, us among them, believe passionately) that Abbas Hasan has done. Sincere thanks to him.

In case you missed our recent commentary on the odious and fundamentally dishonest efforts by Bishop Desmond Tutu to have the murderer Barghouti awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it's posted at "09-Jun-16: The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize". We hope you will click and read it.

We have felt the need to speak out against Mr. Tutu several times in the past, the first time some nine years ago [link]. At that time, the learned churchman said he was "in despair" over the savagery being visited on one another in Gaza by the forces of Fatah and Hamas - actually a blood-soaked struggle for control of the Gaza Strip that was resoundingly won by the side (i.e. Hamas) that managed to be more effective at hacking, shooting and beating to death and hurling from high building more of its brethren than the other (i.e. Fatah).

But not totally in despair at the Arab-on-Arab carnage for, as Tutu noted, 

"When you are oppressed, it is so very easy to turn on yourselves..." [June 2007 Source]

Forgive us, Bishop, but we find that view racist, irrational and frankly nauseating. As we wrote all those years back:

And so easy, too, to blow up innocent women, children, men, schools, hospitals, restaurants. So easy. And to have church leaders slobber their sympathy all over your poor oppressed heads. The only thing more appalling about what the Palestinian Arabs have done to themselves is the unforgivable forgiveness, the incomprehensible understanding emanating from such ill-informed, theologically-addled, hand-wringing, high-profile individuals as the pious church-man quoted above. Without him and the many others like him, the devastation and misery of the Pal-Arabs could have ended decades ago.

It hasn't ended, as we all know. And as Tutu's campaigning for a prize to be given to Barghouti demonstrates, his ill-informed hand-wringing and irrational urge to forgive remains unaffected by any knowledge he might have acquired - but clearly has not - in the intervening years. 

09-Jun-16: The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize

Convicted murderer Barghouti: Man of peace? [Image Source]

Twelve years ago, the career of an ambitious Palestinian Arab gang leader, a member of Arafat's inner circle, ended when he was convicted in Tel Aviv District Court in relation to the deaths of five innocent people.

There were other charges as well: attempted murder, membership of a terror organization and conspiracy to commit a crime; he was convicted of those as well. He was acquitted on technical grounds in relation to 33 additional counts of murder. 

Our impression (we were personally present in the court room for part of the trial) was that the prosecution could have pressed those extra charges. Evidently a decision was taken that the accused would be imprisoned for a long-enough term if convicted on those charges where technical factors did not play a role. 

And indeed, that's what happened.

At the conclusion of Marwan Barghouti's trial in May 2004, the prosecution sought a sentence of one life term for each murdered victim and he was sentenced to - and is currently serving - five life terms behind bars:

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's 

orders in 2001: Father George Tsibouktsakis

The court said in its verdict that "the defendant most of the time did not have direct contact with the field operatives who carried out the attacks. That connection was maintained through associates close to the defendant. Barghouti was responsible for providing the field units with money and arms via these associates..." The judges said Barghouti's orders for terror attacks were sometimes "based on instructions" from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. "Arafat would never give explicit instructions for attacks but he let it be known when the timing was right," the judges said. "He made sure his subordinates understood very well when he was interested in a cease-fire and when he was interested in terror attacks against Israel," the verdict said.
["Barghouti Convicted in Deaths of Five People", Haaretz, May 20, 2004] 

Barghouti was one of those Arafat subordinates. And when we wrote above that his career ended, we were engaging in what seems more and more to be wishful thinking. We'll get to that in a moment.

A few brief words about his victims, none of whom has been honored with even a tiny fraction of the often-fawning media coverage of their convicted killer:

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's orders 

in 2002: Yoela Chen, mother of 2, 

shot dead at a gas station on her way
to a Jerusalem family celebration

• The court ruled that Barghouti was directly responsible for a January 2002 terror attack on a gas station in Givat Zeev in which an Israeli woman, Yoela Chen, 45 and a mother of two, was murdered. The attack, the judges said, was carried out at his direct order in revenge for the assassination of another Palestinian Arab terrorist called Carmi who had been responsible for a long list of murderous attacks on Israeli civilians. Barghouti admitted his responsibility for Yoela Cohen's killing.
• The killing of a Jewish-looking, traditionally bearded man, driving his car in the early summer of 2001 along one of Judea's intercity desert roads was carried out on Barghouti's orders, the judges said. That man was in reality not Jewish. Shot dead from a distance by Barghouti's sharp-shooters and a volley of 13 bullets, he was in fact a young, bearded Greek Orthodox monk, George Tsibouktsakis, also known as Father Herman, a religious devotee, one of two monks who lived in, and maintained, the ancient St. George Monastery perched on the edge of Wadi Kelt. Tragically, shot dead while looking Jewish.
• The court found that Barghouti explicitly approved the murderous March 2002 shooting and hand-grenade terror attack at Tel Aviv's Seafood Market restaurant where three people were murdered in a frenzied assault just after 2 in the morning. The victims were Police Sergeant-Major Salim Barakat, 33, from the Israeli-Druze community of Yarka - killed by one of the attackers who fled the restaurant; and Yosef Haybi, 52, of Herzliya and Eliyahu Dahan, 53, of Lod - both of them killed inside the restaurant.
• He was convicted as well for masterminding a car bomb attack in Jerusalem.

The 2004 Barghouti trial in Tel Aviv District Court was public,

transparent, and definitive: the accused was convicted on multiple

charges of murder and sentenced to five terms of life

imprisonment [Image Source]

None of these convictions in a non-military court and in front of an overflowing and often unruly crowd of witnesses, many of them Arabs, and overseas observers who flew in especially for the trial, prevented tendentious media coverage before, during and after Barghouti's conviction. Much of it is just as tendentious today.

Of all the many distortions, inaccuracies and open lies connected with that coverage, none is as galling as the way this vicious, violent man is routinely - and dishonestly - called a "political prisoner", and sometimes a "detainee". He has never been either. 

As a matter of objective reality, he ought to be called convicted murderer. And taking into account his undisputed role as head of the Tanzim shooting-and-bombing division of Fatah, he fully qualifies to be termed a terrorist.

Associated Press, as we wrote in an earlier blog post ["21-Mar-14: Allegedly objective journalism"] produced one of these distorted, politically-spun articles two years ago. That AP piece, entitled "Jailed militant key to Mideast talk" (March 19, 2014), sought to depict Marwan Barghouti as a Mandela-like man of peace who, if only he were sprung from jail, would take his natural place in the pantheon of Palestinian Arab statespersons and blaze a path to whatever peaceful destination they believe the Palestinian Arabs are heading. (UKMediawatch documented similar news-media efforts in an excellent analysis in 2013.) 

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Yosef Haybi

Here's some of what we wrote two years ago:

We personally sat through the [2004] murder trial of Marwan Barghouti... The hearing was in Tel Aviv, in the Magistrates Court complex that rarely gets the kind of lavish media attention in evidence that week. Aljazeera's TV crew were there along with reporters from all over. A motley assemblage of lawyers from Israel, the PA and overseas were too, intent on defending the 'great' man from the lowly offenses of which he was charged. Some of the most entertaining moments on the trial's first day involved one of those would-be advocates, an unusually boorish individual intent on making a splash, being physically picked up by the security people and thrown out the door of the court room and onto the floor of the adjacent lobby. (You dream of moments like that.) 

Two main factors (among many) persuaded us to be there. One: Marwan Barghouti had personally given post-massacre shelter and money to members of the Hamas gang that planned and carried out the bombing of the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in which our teenage daughter was murdered three years earlier. He was, in legal terms, an accessory after the fact to the terrorism...  

For us as recently bereaved Israelis, grieving for the lost life of a fifteen year-old daughter with such goodness and potential, it was almost unbearably painful to observe the lengths to which Israel's organs of justice bent over backwards to give this prominent member of the loathsome Palestinian political 'elite', a first-degree Arafat inner-circle insider, the fairest and most transparent of trials.  

One of lawyers in the defense counsel team was the self-parodying (and subsequently disgraced) Shamai Leibowitz, grandson of one of modern Israel's great religious philosophers. Leibowitz proposed to the court, with chutzpah that brought some of us to point of choking with rage, that the cold-blooded Barghouti with those deeply blood-drenched hands ought to be viewed as a warrior in the service of freedom, challenging the Pharaohs of his time. The court ought to think of him as being like Moses, Israel's great Law Giver. There were less bizarre moments too. 

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Police Sgt Major Salim

Barakat, 33, an Israeli Druze, father of a

3 year old daughter

It appears we are now facing a fresh round of bizarre Barghouti moments, the theological equivalent of fashioning a silk purse out of a female pig's aural orifice. 

As reported by a church news site a few hours ago [Episcopal Digital Network] 

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has endorsed the nomination of Palestinian political prisoner, Marwan Barghouthi, for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the nomination letter sent by the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, he said, “I decided to support this campaign alongside seven other Nobel Peace Prize laureates as a reflection of our belief that freedom was the only path to peace… I hope the Nobel Committee will take a bold decision bringing us closer to the day this holy land, charged with unique symbolic value, can stop being a living testimony of injustice and impunity, occupation and apartheid, and can finally be a beacon of freedom, hope and peace.”

Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, is, to put it mildly, not one of our favourite church-people - or people of any kind - on the basis of his years of explicit support for Palestinian Arab terror and for Barghouti. He has been a member of the modestly-named International High Level Committee of the Campaign for the Freedom of Marwan Barghouti and all Palestinian Prisoners, launched in October 2013.

Nine years ago we noted [here] what he said when Gaza erupted in an Arab-on-Arab bloodbath with Hamas and Fatah battling it out for winner-takes-all control of the rich-in-absolutely-nothing enclave: Tutu, watching the thuggery and the slaughter from a safe distance, said he was "in despair over these events", though he claimed to understand why the rival factions were at each other's throats:

"When you are oppressed, it is so very easy to turn on yourselves," he said.

Murdered on Marwan Barghouti's

orders in March 2002: Eli Dahan, 53

And so easy, we reminded ourselves at the time, to blow up innocent women, children, men, schools, hospitals, restaurants. 

So easy. And to have church leaders slobber their sympathy all over your poor oppressed heads.

The only thing more appalling about what the Palestinian Arabs have done to themselves is the unforgivable forgiveness, the incomprehensible understanding emanating from such ill-informed, theologically-addled, hand-wringing, high-profile individuals as the pious church-man quoted above. Without him and the many others like him, the devastation and misery of the Pal-Arabs could have ended decades ago. [Our June 2007 blog post]

Painful as this is, Barghouti and his terrorist handlers must be quietly confident the crimes of the bigoted, violent Fatah apparatchik will recede into the past as a groundswell of support builds for the frankly absurd notion that he is a peacemaker - perhaps the peacemaker - who can bring the Palestinian Arabs into a meaningful dialogue with the despised Israelis. 

The moral gymnastics involved in seeing things in that upside-down, black-is-white fashion are reality in this part of the world, and explain why we find it necessary to spend so much time reminding audiences of the catastrophic Shalit Deal and the ongoing suffering it has delivered.

The idea that Barghouti is now a serious contender for the same award that the Nobel Committee gave to Tutu - and with Tutu's enthusiastic endorsement - is an indictment of Tutu's twisted values and the values of the ideologues promoting this ugly initiative.

13-Oct-15: Thoughts about rocks through the windshield

File photo

Robert Fisk, a writer for The Independent UK, was driving his car in a remote part of Pakistan in December 2001 when something mechanical happened and he had to stop. While pushing the broken down vehicle off the road, he became aware that

a group of 40 to 50 people gathered. "At first they were reasonably friendly but then a little kid threw a stone at me. More stones followed and then I find myself being punched and beaten in the face... ["UK journalist beaten by Afghan mob", BBC, December 9, 2001]

He wrote that he thought he heard the mob shouting the word "kaffir", an Islamic/Arabic word meaning infidel, a non-adherent to the beliefs of their religious values. Much later, he recorded his feelings about what was happening in a confessional that is a classic of its kind:

They started by shaking hands. We said "Salaam aleikum" – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn't see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were [them], I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find. ["My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war", Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK)]

In a merciless critique ["The pathology of Robert Fisk"] at the time, the British/American writer and conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan tore Fisk's mea culpa to shreds, calling it

a classic piece of leftist pathology. You have to read it to believe it. Even when people are trying to murder Fisk, he adamantly refuses to see them as morally culpable or even responsible. I’ve heard of self-hatred but this is ridiculous... What it means is that someone – anyone – is either innocent or guilty purely by racial or cultural association. An average Westerner is to be taken as an emblem of an entire culture and treated as such. Any random Westerner will do. Individual notions of responsibility or morality are banished, as one group is labeled blameless and another irredeemably malign. There’s a word for this: it’s racism. And like many other members of the far left, Fisk is himself a proud racist, someone who believes that the color of a person’s skin condemns him automatically and justifies violence against him... [Andrew Sullivan, December 9, 2001]

Sullivan's take-down of the Independent's war correspondent gave rise to the emergence of the now-widely used and useful term "to Fisk". That's defined by The Guardian to mean the practice of

"savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet ["Archbishop on end of a good Fisking", The Guardian, June 19, 2005] 

All of that is offered as intro to a small, barely-noticed piece of news reported late last night in Times of Israel over the anonymous byline TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF. At this point, as far as we can tell, it is published nowhere else:

UN official hurt in stoning: ‘Allah will forgive them’
Mounir Kleibo, who heads the UN bureau of the International Labor Organization in the Palestinian Territories, sustained serious injuries to his jaw after coming under attack by Palestinian rock throwers in East Jerusalem on Friday.
The UN coordinator for development and humanitarian activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, Robert Piper, condemned the attack “on a clearly marked United Nations (UN) vehicle traveling on Route 50 in East Jerusalem, which seriously injured a senior UN official..." Piper’s statement did not identify Kleibo either by name or position. A report in the Hebrew-language NRG website noted that Kleibo’s Facebook profile was overtly pro-Palestinian, despite his being a UN official. Kleibo’s cover picture shows the dome of the al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and his profile picture is the word “Shuhada” (“Martyrdom”) on a black background. In one of his posts, Kleibo wrote, “We mourn not only our shahids but also ourselves, our eyes, our hearts, our consciousness and our humanity.” After the attack - in an update apparently posted from his hospital bed at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood - Kleibo said that both he and his wife, Tamara, were fine, and then added, “May Allah forgive those who throw the rocks at night”... [Times of Israel, October 12, 2015]

Kleibo's Facebook page

There's some sympathetic background about Kleibo here ("Mounir, you see, has a passion for Palestine and carries an ambitious vision").. His Twitter account appears not to be active (and probably hijacked as well to judge from what's posted there).

We're not psychologists, but it would make our hearts sing to see a professional in the field explain to the rest of us what it takes to bring a successful professional to the state of mind that produces a Fisk-full of self-demeaning and eventually dangerous nonsense.

In the end, if murderous hatred is dumbed down by smart, relatively powerful people into forgivable and perhaps understandable temper tantrums, then what becomes of ordinary notions of right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, and the well-being of our families and our children and our societies? At what point can it be said that a person's moral compass has ceased to function? Or his common sense?

As for the notion of forgiveness as a response to terror, that's something on which we have spoken publicly several times in the past, generally in response to journalists quoting statements made on that theme (statements we reject completely) by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. We will try to pull together a blog post about them in the wake of this Kleibo affair. Sullivan's caustic observation in that 2001 piece gets close to it:

You know the expression: you wouldn’t understand a culture if it actually hit you in the head? [Some people] won’t recognize reality, or abandon their racism, or moderate their spectacular condescension to the inhabitants of the developing world – even when reality, literally, crushingly, punches them in the face.  [Sullivan, December 9, 2001]

If anyone knows anyone in the human resources department at the United Nations or the ILO, this might be a good time to reach out and express some sympathy.

Or fury.

25-Nov-14: How different from the Nigerian Islamists are the Pal Arab terrorists?

Two girls did, in fact, come back today - with bombs

inside their clothes. The others are still where they were

[Image Source]

The largest city in the Nigerian state of Borno, is Maiduguri, with a population of about 1.2 million, most of them Muslim.

In 2006, at the height of the drama over a newspaper in far-off Denmark publishing cartoon images of the central figure in Islam, riots broke out, fifteen people were killed there and twelve Christian houses of worship were destroyed. And then things got devastatingly worse.

Nigeria's highest profile terrorist organization, Boko Haram, visited phenomenal violence on the area in July 2009, leaving 700 people dead in its wake. They have continued to carry out mind-numbingly bloody attacks right up to this month. Despite this, according to its Wikipedia entry, Maiduguri is popularly known as the City of Peace. But possibly not after today.

This morning, two female human bombs walked into Maiduguri's crowded main market a little after 11 o'clock. One exploded, and it appears three women were killed. Then when (as Nigeria's most influential newspaper puts it)

unsuspecting sympathisers gathered to watch the scene, the second girl who was also heavily wired with explosives screamed and then the device hidden under her garment blew up killing about 30 persons.... The Civilian-JTF chieftain explained that "from what one of the survivors told me while being helped to get to the hospital, the bombers were two girls dressed in full hijab..." [Leadership, Nigeria, today]

(UPDATE: Another Nigerian source says the death toll has risen to 45 and that the second human bomb was male; the explosion ensures it will be hard to tell from visual inspection.)

Boko Haram is said to mean "Western education is forbidden" in the Hausa language, according to the BBC, and it is

waging an insurgency in Nigeria. It was based in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, after its formation in 2002, but it has since been driven out of the city by the military and vigilante groups. It now controls a large number of towns and villages in Borno, amid fears that it is preparing to launch an assault to capture Maiduguri. [BBC, today]

From the time it was formed, it claimed to be "opposing Western education". But an education campaign like this is unique in historical terms. Today, the Boko Haram people are open about seeking to create an Islamic state by military means; education has evidently slipped down their list of goals. And military in their case means kidnapping hundreds of school-girls in April 2014 (and still holding most of them despite Mrs Obama's Instagram campaign), and by mutilating shoppers and traders in open-air market places; a July 2014 truck bomb in the same city killed at least 56 people.

In the wake of previous Boko Haram massacres, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the describes itself as "the largest bloc of Islamic states with 57 members and the only official voice of the Muslim world", condemned the group's "barbaric acts of violence in the strongest terms" on the basis of their

having nothing to do with Islam and against its basic tenets. The OIC continues to issue statements condemning every heinous killing and destruction of property committed by this group and urging the authorities to intensify their efforts to end these acts of terrorism and violence and bring the perpetrators to justice while offering its solidarity and assistance. [Alarabiya, July 2014]

Click here to see dozens more examples

But how different are Boko Haram from the other Islamist barbarians Hamas and Hezbollah, or from so-called secular Arab terrorists groups like Fatah and PFLP that are the "freedom fighting" darlings of the OIC? 

And do their values and their actions really have nothing to do with Islam?

• Boko Haram send female human bombs to cause devastating explosions. And what was the Palestinian Arab woman Wafa Idris? 
• Boko Haram send immature boys ("A gunman who looked like a 12-year old boy") to do their terrorist bidding. Husam Abdo, a 'mentally challenged' 14 year old Palestinian Arab boy was sent by his Fatah handlers to a certain death, with 8 kilo of explosives strapped to his torso, convinced that this was his best chance of having sex with 72 virgins. This is no figure of speech, but to be taken literally; see this BBC report and this CBS News report, "Bomb Boy's Family Mad At Militants".
• Boko Haram send little girls to be human bombs (see "10-Yr-Old Girl Strapped To Explosive Belt"). On the Palestinian Arab side, aged either 16 or 18 at the time, a female human bomb called Ayat Al-Akhras, recruited by the Fatah/Tanzim organization that was headed by Marwan Barghouti at the time walked into a Jerusalem supermarket and exploded, there with the expected lethal results. Incidentally one of the most prominent 'activists' in the current "Free Marwan Barghouti" campaign is a high profile South African religious figure, Desmond Tutu. 
• Add to this that Palestinian Authority TV routinely screens children's programs in which teenagers and pre-teens, like the little girl in the screenshot above right, probably 10 or 11 years old, sing of their desire to die as martyrs for the Palestinian Arab cause. Dozens of additional instances appear on this Palestinian Media Watch page and throughout the web.
• The mass murderers of Boko Haram don't regard themselves as having "nothing to do with Islam". Their leader, Abubakar Shekau , said just three months ago [BBC, August 25, 2014] that his forces have "set up an Islamic state in the towns and villages it has seized in north-eastern Nigeria." He makes it clear that his men, women and children are saving the world for Islam.

Flag of Boko Haram which, as the

Organization of Islamic

Cooperation says, has nothing

to do with Islam [Image Source]

We feel the embarrassment of the writer from the Organization of Islamic Co-operation ["Denying Boko Haram its assumed Islamic identity", July 15, 2014] . Who wants to be classified as being "like" the blood-lusting savages of Boko Haram, most of whose victims are said to be Muslims? But then how different is that from the blood-lusting ISIS killers of (mainly) Muslims in Iraq and Syria?

The Pew Research people said in July ["Concerns about Islamic Extremism on the Rise in Middle East"] that

publics hold very negative opinions of well-known extremist groups, such as al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah. In Nigeria, the vast majority of respondents, both Muslims and Christians alike, have an unfavorable view of Boko Haram, the terrorist group that recently kidnapped hundreds of girls in the restive north of the country. And a majority of Pakistanis have an unfavorable view of the Taliban... as well-publicized bouts of violence, from civil war to suicide bombings, plague the Middle East, Africa and South Asia... [Pew Research]

But if people's lives depended on what public opinion feels about terrorists, then public opinion pollsters like Pew would be running states. As we know, they don't. In reality, acts of terror consistently get huge support from certain specific demographics, Pew's research notwithstanding. And major international roof-bodies - like OIC which speaks for 56 nations [listed here] making it the largest international grouping of countries after the UN - line right up behind the terror organizations that do them,

And leaving aside what "publics" think, can we look at how the OIC - the "only official voice of the Muslim world" - looks at Hamas and the other jihad organizations? How, for instance, does it feel about Hamas training Palestinian Arab children to want to die as young martyrs? What does it consider to be the very worst kind of terrorism? As it happens, this we can answer:

At the 34th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM), an OIC section, in May 2007, the foreign ministers termed Islamophobia the worst form of terrorism... [source]

On April 3, 2002, a few months after the Hamas-engineered massacre that took the life of our daughter Malki, the OIC adopted and published a cornerstone policy document entitled "The Kuala Lumpur Declaration on International Terrorism" [full text here]. Some of its highlights:

• "We reject any attempt to link terrorism to the struggle of the Palestinian people in the exercise of their inalienable right to establish their independent state with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital... We reject any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism which constitutes an impediment to the global struggle against terrorism..." A clearer vote of confidence in Hezbollah, Hamas and Fatah would be hard to find.
• And it articulated this clear warning: "We reject any unilateral action taken against any Islamic country under the pretext of combating international terrorism, as this will undermine global cooperation against terrorism".
• It established a thirteen member ministerial-level OIC Committee on International Terrorism. If that committee has done anything, or even put out a press release since 2002, we can;t find any sign on-line. Seems to be nothing more than a fig leaf.

Faced with acts of beastial savagery like the axe/hatchet/butcher knife attack on Jews at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue, the otherwise voluble OIC - which expresses views on a wide range of issues all the time - is silent. Its search engine [here] seems to let a person search on any word and see what the OIC stand is. But if you enter "Jerusalem"... well, try it and see what happens.