20-Dec-17: The Tomb of the Patriarchs: Another would-be stabber is intercepted in time

Image Source: Haaretz

A Palestinian Arab armed with a knife was stopped today (Wednesday afternoon) around 4:00 pm at one of the security checkpoints that surround the ancient and sacred Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. He was promptly arrested.

The would-be stabber from the Arab town of Dahariya, 23 kilometers south of Hebron, aroused the suspicions of the Border Guard officers stationed at the checkpoint. They demanded he submit to a metal detector examination. It found a metal object hidden on his body.

The suspect then mysteriously declined a request by the officers to empty his pockets after the metal detector found what it found, and preferred instead to pull out and brandish the knife. The Border Guard men brought their powers of persuasion into play and convinced the Palestinian Arab man - by means of their quickly-raised weapons and well-focused words - to surrender before he was able to stab anyone.

The men with the guns could have killed him on the spot but chose instead to take him custody. No one was injured.

Under preliminary questioning, according to Israel National News, the gentleman under arrest agreed with his interrogators that he had come with his knife to "to carry out a terrorist attack against the officers".

UNESCO decided by a vote in July that the Tomb of the Patriarchs is a "Palestinian heritage site". Haaretz reported at the time that 12 states on its World Heritage Committee voted for the resolution and three voted against. The vote also recognized the site "as being in danger, meaning that each year UNESCO's World Heritage Committee will convene to discuss" its case.

It would be nice to think the UNESCO concern stemmed from the long line of stabbers and would-be stabbers who have targeted the ancient site for their murderous purposes. But our impression is they have not the slightest interest in Palestinian Arab violence and their influence on sites of cultural significance.

13-Mar-17: Jerusalem and the (alleged) knife-men

The Old City and Lions' Gate [Image Source]

At about 4 this morning (Monday) there was a slightly elevated police presence in Israel's capital city because in Jerusalem it's the festive day of Purim. (Everywhere else in the world celebrated Purim a day earlier.)

An Arab assailant managed to squeeze into an occupied and cramped guard booth adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem's Lions' Gate, armed with a large butcher knife. He embarked on a frenzied stabbing attack, injuring the two Border Guard police inside.

"One of the officers fought his way out of the guard booth, loaded his weapon and shot the assailant, police said. The assailant was shot and critically wounded during the attack. He later died of his injuries." [Times of Israel today]

The Border Guard men are recovering at Hadassah Medical Center's Ein Kerem hospital where they were rushed for emergency treatment, arriving there in stable and fully conscious condition according to a hospital spokesperson.

The assailant has been named in the Arab media as Ibrahim Mahmoud Mattar, described by Israel Police as a 25-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s notorious Jabel Mukaber neighborhood from which a significant number of Arab-on-Israeli shooters, rammers and stabbers have emerged in the past two years (click to see some relevant earlier posts).

The attacker's knife [Image Source: Foreign Ministry]

Ma'an News Agency, whose work is in large measure paid for by the mostly unwitting and increasingly unwilling taxpayers of several European countries, adopted its customary alternative-reality approach to reporting on Palestinian Arab terror, starting with the headline of its tendentious report: "Witnesses: Israeli police 'execute' Palestinian in Jerusalem over alleged attack":

Israeli police shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian near the Lion’s Gate entrance to occupied East Jerusalem's Old City early Monday morning over an alleged stabbing attack that left two Israeli police officers lightly and moderately injured. The slain man was identified as Ibrahim Mahmoud Matar, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood Jabal al-Mukabbir, located south of the Old City. The shooting happened ahead of the al-fajr (dawn) prayers, as worshipers were headed to Al-Aqsa Mosque inside the Old City. Witnesses told Ma'an they saw a dispute inside an Israeli police post located near Lion’s Gate, between an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian "who was carrying a stick.” Israeli police then forced the young man outside of the enclosure and “executed” him at point blank range with with four bullets, leading to his immediate death, witnesses said. Referring to the dispute that lead up to the shooting, eyewitnesses told Ma’an that Israeli police were “controlling the situation” and could have easily detained Matar without using lethal force... Following the killing, Israeli forces were heavily deployed in and around Lion’s Gate and prevented many Palestinians from reaching Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray, with witnesses saying the lockdown lasted from 4:30 until 6:00 a.m. Later Monday morning, Israeli forces raided Matar’s home in Jabal al-Mukabbir and detained his brother, parents, and his uncle, according to locals and Israeli police.

A few words about the journalistic values on display here. We follow Ma'an's reporting more closely than most people. The reflexive use by its editors of the cowardly term "alleged" to describe most Arab-on-Israeli attacks is a constant. But the mostly outlandish claims of Arab so-called witnesses and their fanciful explanations for how knives and guns ended up in Arab hands are almost never termed "alleged". 

Taking Ma'an's Palestinian-Arab-centric reportage at face-value requires a prior commitment to a thoroughly partisan view of events. In war, that's not unusual or even in some ways unacceptable. What's outrageous is that none of this could be done without the massive ongoing funding its editors and managers have gotten since its inception in 2005 from Western sources. Most of that money is from governments which means from tax-payers. And while many of the government bureaucrats in Europe signing off on those cheques and foreign aid forms are ideologically comfortable with how the money they supply is spent, it's a certainty that many, probably most, of the people actually providing those funds have no such political leanings.

NGO-Monitor does first-rate, systematic work examining how government funding from the West often gets wasted and channeled into very dark places connected with the Arab/Israel conflict. You might want to know that it has a resource page [here] devoted to shining some light on the quiet funding that is Ma'an's life-blood. 

Most people don't realize, but NGO-Monitor documents this, that for years Ma'an - an outlet for news in several languages - has been the recipient of millions (dollars and Euros) in foreign aid. Initial funding came from the governments of Denmark and the Netherlands. 

Since then, the torrent has continued to arrive from (among others) the governments of Denmark, Sweden, the United States,  Switzerland, Netherlands, the European Union and the United Kingdom. Several human rights and humanitarian juggernauts, in particular Catholic Relief Services, UNESCO and most egregiously Save the Children, have found ways to justify sending some of their budget to the Bethlehem offices of the propaganda agency. Why donors accept this is a puzzle - assuming they know.

UPDATE Monday March 13, 2017 at 10:00 pm: Elder of Ziyon notices, on visiting Facebook, that

Naturally, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah is extolling him as a "martyr" and making sure that his act is viewed as a religious obligation. This is all to let the next terrorist know exactly how his acts will be honored.

Tragically, it usually plays out this way.

21-Jul-16: Palestinian Arab ass being saved, once more, by concerned Israelis

Image Source: Screen shot

Thanks to Aussie Dave over at Israellycool, we just watched a brief video clip that, on its face, is about Israeli police confiscating Palestinian Arab property. It originates with Corey Gil-Shuster, who interviews subjects for his Ask an Israeli/Ask a Palestinian video project and who came across the Hebrew-only source on an Israeli channel for animal lovers.

In dry terms, it's a clip filmed recently by someone from Israel Police that graphically shows the mistreatment of a neglected, very badly-lacerated donkey. And the frightened, angry, frustrated boy in charge of the animal. And the animal being saved from a slow and awful death through the intervention of grown-ups wearing Star of David symbols on their uniforms.

Dave quotes Corey noting the significance of what's being shown, beyond the cruelty and the animal, and touching on truths that are central to the generations-long Arab/Israel conflict. Paraphrasing Corey,

• An Arab child of 11 from the West Bank, despatched into Israel on his own to work illegally, almost certainly by his hard-scrabble family. He could have been hurt or killed. And it's certainly illegal to do this to a child of his age.
• Indications, based on what we see the child do once the police move, that he gets beaten at home and will likely be beaten some more for losing the donkey to the Zionists.
• And "this video will end up being edited to show that Israelis steal donkeys from Palestinian children".

Dave adds that "it shows the compassion of the Israeli police officers towards this illegal entrant into Israel, even though he has abused a donkey and is not cooperating with them". He's of course right. He could have also mentioned their admirable patience and forbearance.



But there's also this aspect:

Deeply cynical, and very often life-threatening, abuse of Palestinian Arab children is not only a well-documented reality. It's also one of these perplexing sides of the conflict that causes human rights bodies  - the sort we would otherwise expect to scream to the heavens in protest - to lose their voices and stare off into the distance, humming.

Palestinian Arab children, whether they are having their heads filled with life-changing hatred and often-lethal bigotry by an education system run by UNRWA, or whether being incited by their despotic president to go out into the fields and onto the streets and (literally) kill Jews and die for the "purity" of their "homeland" - in other words, when they are being weaponized - are egregiously ignored by the likes UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development and others.

The self-incriminating silence of the thriving multi-billion dollar children's rights industry on what's being done to the Palestinian Arab children by their own ruling clique is an articulate expression of their priorities and of the ideology motivating many of the prime movers of those charities and NGOs. It's a scandal that ought to get more attention than, say, a plagiarized paragraph in a politician's wife's speech. But it gets close to none.

In an age of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, they certainly can't say they don't know. They have decided to not care, not intervene and not do what their donors want them to do. Instead, they align themselves with the sadly familiar narrative that preposterously ascribes "Palestinian suffering" to "occupation" (as the British House of Lords, in a report it withdrew this week after a single day's exposure, does and did) Since it's children's lives being ruined, we're entitled to feel and express fury. It surprises us to see that so few other people get that. 

There's something about advocacy for the Palestinian Arabs that makes smart people stupid, empathetic people cruel and philanthropy-minded Westerners witless.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Palestyński osioł, palestyńskie dziecko, izraelska policja") including the video clip - all by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her once again, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

19-Jan-16: Children with knives and what they destroy

The victim's family arrive at the cemetery for Monday's funeral [Image Source: Reuters]

Anyone paying attention to the nature of the many Arab-on-Israeli attacks launched on Israel's streets and inside its shops and homes and buses these past four months (in particular) will be struck by an aspect that continues to go largely un-noted by the mainstream news reporting media: the age of the attackers. Many of them are children. (Click for some recent posts about child-executed terror attacks against Israelis.)

An individual believe by authorities to be the killer of Dafna Meir z"l was arrested overnight (early Tuesday morning), according to Times of Israel:

The suspect, said to be 15 years old, was arrested by IDF troops and agents from the Shin Bet security service in a village near Otniel, where he was hiding out, and was taken in for interrogation. He is suspected of entering Meir’s home and killing her before fleeing the scene. Three of Meir’s six children were home when she was killed, and one, 17-year-old Renanaa, gave security forces a description of the terrorist. Police officers and IDF soldiers set up roadblocks in the area surrounding the settlement as they launched a manhunt for the stabber, who was believed to have escaped to a nearby village, possibly Khirbet Karme, located just north of Otniel, on foot. According to reports Tuesday morning, he did not possess a permit allowing him to work in Otniel, despite early assessments to the contrary.

Haaretz says the finding and arrest of the boy, said to be named Marawad Badr Abdallah Ada'is, was done by soldiers in the Duvdevan unit

an elite special operations force within the Israel Defense Forces, directly subordinate to the Judea and Samaria Division. Duvdevan are particularly noted for conducting undercover operations against militants in urban areas. During these operations, Duvdevan soldiers typically wear Arab civilian clothes as a disguise... [Wikipedia]

The knife-wielding attacker who seriously wounded a pregnant Israeli woman in Tekoa yesterday is allegedly fifteen. Other recent Arab-on-Israeli knifers have been as young as 11. [See "11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children".]

The Arab home front generally provides a reliable cover for fugitive killers of Jews, hence the need for expert undercover security people to go right inside those towns and villages and extract the alleged killers and terror-minded thugs who can be expected to otherwise remain clutched close to the nurturing bosom of Palestinian Arab society. As for outrage and condemnation, there may be some Palestinian Arab voices but no one hears them and they don't get reported - assuming they exist.

The moral depravity that brings government officials and ordinary folk to stand with, instead of against, the wielders of kitchen knifes and axes is mirrored by the strategic silence of the world's well-funded children's rights industry -  UNICEF, Defence for Children International, Human Rights Watch, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development to name just a few donor-supported, PR-savvy entities who have seem to have collectively lost their voices, their senses and their moral compasses when it comes to what Palestinian Arab society is doing to their own children. And to ours. 

(We no longer mention Amnesty International in that list. Amnesty's increasingly explicit identification with the practitioners of the Palestinian Arab brand of terror makes plain their abandonment of principle and betrayal of their supporters' values. There's no longer anything to expect from them.)

The arrest, in the wake of an intense manhunt, came some hours after the funeral of his victim:

Hundreds arrived at [Jerusalem's] Givat Shaul cemetery on Monday morning to accompany Dafna Meir, who was murdered by a terrorist in her home, on her final journey. Meir, 38, is survived by her husband Natan and their six children: Renana, 17, Akiva, 15, Ahava, 10, Noa, 11, Yair, six, and Yaniv, four. The four older children are Dafna and Natan's biological children, and the two younger ones - Yaniv and Yair - are brothers that the couple adopted. At their mother's funeral, the children could not stop crying... [Ynet, January 18, 2016]

Image Source

Children with knives: it's a phenomenon worth pondering as Red Hand Day, February 12 each year, approaches. So too is the choking silence that accompanies the devastation it brings. (If you visit the Red Hand Day website, notice that it is published in four languages but Arabic is not one of them.)

Given what a heavy toll the reality of killers-who-are-children exacts from Palestinian Arab society, it's surely top of the list of matters to which the lavishly-funded editors of Ma'an News Agency will be turning their journalistic attention and moral fury today. Let's just not stop breathing while we wait.

22-Dec-15: A knife-wielding Palestinian Arab child and her two arrests

Not the girl with the two arrests. This is a video grab from a Pal Arab 
video that has recently went viral in their circles, depicting a passionate 
toddler explaining what she wishes her people would do 
to the Jews [Source: Palestinian Media Watch clip  - here]

Another little-noticed skirmish in the war of the children:

Police officers in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem Old City on Monday arrested an East Jerusalem teenage girl found in possession of a knife, on suspicion she was planning to carry out a stabbing attack. This was the second time in two weeks the 15-year-old had been detained for carrying a knife, the police said in a statement. The teenager “raised the suspicions” of police officers in the Jewish Quarter, who called for her to halt. The police initially reported that the knife had been found in the 15-year-old’s purse, but later clarified that it had, in fact, been hidden in her sleeve. As a result, they brought the teen in for questioning.
When officers checked the girl’s information, they found that she had been arrested two weeks before, under the same suspicion. The girl, who was not named, was released a few days after her first arrest, when she claimed the knife in her bag was purchased for use in her family’s home. However, police now believe that she was preparing to attack Jewish Israelis. “The way she took out the knife today — and other pieces of information that have been collected — increase the suspicion, and it appears as though the officers prevented the injury of innocent civilians today, thanks to their awareness and sensitivity to aberrations,” the Israel Police said in a statement Monday evening.

As we noted here a couple of times in the last week ["14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?" and "19-Dec-15: Saturday afternoon terror-knifings in Ra'anana"], stabbing attacks on Israelis, a feature of Arab/Jewish co-existence for more than a century, have phenomenal support among today's Palestinian Arab public. They are actively promoted and encouraged (this video for instance) via the Arabic social media, with predictable results.

See also "15-Dec-15: Hear about the stabbing in the heart of Jerusalem this afternoon?" and "26-Nov-15: Peering into the darkness, seeing pre-teen children groomed to be ready to die so they can kill" and "23-Nov-15: Central Jerusalem's shuk - two slashers attack and are stopped". 

No less significant than the stabbings themselves is the utter absence of a response to these sickening illustrations of systemic, society-wide Palestinian Arab child abuse from the well-funded global child-protection and children's rights industries. It's a failure worth pondering as the likes of UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, Save the Children and (if you happen to be a government) UNRWA, come to us with their hands open, requesting donations to allow them to keep doing what they do and fail to do.

04-Dec-15: Two more knifers are shot dead by their intended victims. One is fifteen. Does anyone care?

Hebron rock-throwing youths in November: Who's next? [Image Source]

It's a sunny, chilly Friday morning here, the shortest Friday of the year with the Sabbath starting here in Jerusalem at 3:59 in the afternoon.

Very early this morning, a little after midnight, two young Palestinian Arab men - actually one was a boy - launched a knifing attack on IDF service personnel manning the Jilber post in Hebron's historic Tel Rumeida Jewish quarter. They managed to sink their blades into a 20-year-old soldier's face, injuring him lightly according to the Ynet account.

His IDF colleagues at the post responded with shots and killing the two attackers. The soldier was rushed to Sharei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem for emergency treatment.

Ma'an, the Palestinian Arab news source we often quote because it owes its existence to European government money (thereby reflecting on the low threshold European governments apply to acceptable return-on-investment when it comes to advancing the Palestinian Arab cause), puts its customary spin on events. Its report starts with

Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian teenagers in Hebron overnight Friday... 

making clear where the emphasis needs to be: on yet another case of death-by-Israeli. It continues

after an alleged stabbing attack on an Israeli soldier, Israel's army and locals said.

That's almost certainly untrue. If Ma'an is quoting the Israeli account, then the IDF certainly did not use the word "alleged". But "alleged" is a fixture in Ma'an's reporting on the terrorism directed against Israelis. Its editors seem to be addicted to the useful term; it allows them to pay lip-service to the facts while casting doubt on how factual they are. Perfect.

It's an especially effective strategy when - as has been the case on almost every day of attacks for the past two months - the attackers are children, below voting age (imagining for a moment that voting is a regular activity in Palestinian Arab society - and it certainly is not). This morning's attackers have never voted, and now certainly never will. Dead as of this morning, they are both being elevated to the ranks of PA martyrs (the posters may already be hanging in the alleys and markets).

They are cousins, says Ma'an. quoting Palestinian Arab sources who say their identities are:

Taher Faysal Fannoun, 19, a student at Hebron University, and Faysal Abd al-Minem Fannoun, 15.

(For the record, at least one other Arab news source says the 19 year old was 17. And it gives the 15 year old's name as Mustafa Fadel Fannoun, The Iranian government mouthpiece, PressTV, identifies them as Teher Faisal Funun, 22, and Abdul-Monem Funun, 15.)

It's more than likely they belong to the same clan as Mahmoud Fannoun, described [here] as the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which operates from a stronghold in nearby D'heisheh. The PFLP claimed credit a year ago for the savage murder (again, by knives and axes) of five unsuspecting Jewish worshipers at prayer in a Har Nof, Jerusalem, synagogue. They also claimed to have carried out a shooting attack on a car-full of Israelis, injuring four, near the community of Shvut Rachel in June 2015. There's room to think they are trying to put themselves back on the bloodshed-by-terror map after being somewhat quiet for two decades.

Palestinian Arab culture, and the Mahmoud Abbas regime in particular, trumpet the involvement of children among the stabbing/shooting/ramming Pal Arab dead as a matter worthy of celebration (literally). They are what they are, no outside influence is going to bring them to recognize the horror of the systematic child abuse raging in their ranks, and their masses are totally at peace with it. It's an ongoing tragedy about which we have written several times. The fact that it keeps costing lives, almost daily at this point, should not be lulling people on the outside into accepting this horrifying reality. And the numbers are not small: one Arab source says that of the 112 Palestinian Arabs killed by Israeli fire since October 1 (understandably without explaining what those dead people were doing in their last moments of life), 26 are children. From our informal record keeping, every one of those Arab children was killed with a knife or other killing implement in his or in her hand.

But how to explain that not a single one of the many, very well-funded children's-rights industry organizations active in the Palestinian Arab territories or Jordan (where a vast number of Pal Arabs live) has ever, as far as we can tell, drawn attention to the blood lust that Pal Arab society focuses on its own children? (We're of course ignoring for the moment the barbarism they reserve for us and ours.)

To name (once again) just some of the silent co-conspirators: UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development, UNRWA,

How long before the next Palestinian Arab child is shot dead trying to murder an Israeli? 

26-Nov-15: Peering into the darkness, seeing pre-teen children groomed to be ready to die so they can kill

One of the two cousins (11, 14) being
led away after their stabbing 
attack is thwarted [Source]

As the toll of innocent Israelis who are rammed, shot or stabbed grows, so too the anger here at unwanted, often deeply offensive, advice from people sitting safe and far from the scene and the mortal danger who find it necessary to vent their spleen at the things Israeli society does to defend itself and its children. On reflection, the term "profoundly ignorant" belongs in that description too.

Take for instance, Jacob T. Burns, self-described as

"Research and Campaign Assistant at@Amnestyonline, focus on#Israel/#Palestine. Tweets own etc."

Campaign assistants, it's known, can be uniquely well-placed to formulate ethical assessments about life-and-death matters. So here's what this passionate young man wants us to know:

Are the stabbings targeting civilians reprehensible? Yes, absolutely. But it doesn't give you permission to do whatever in response

— Jacob Burns (@JacobTBurns) November 23, 2015

And this

Proportionate force may be used to stop imminent threat to life. Lethal force absolute last resort. Trying to stab shld not = death sentence

— Jacob Burns (@JacobTBurns) November 23, 2015

Some observations now from a couple of parents of a child murdered by products of the same sickening religion-driven fanaticism about which global authorities like this Amnesty fellow know so much.

Yesterday, the Israel Security Agency, better known as the Shin Bet, published the transcript of its interrogation of two Palestinian Arab boys, cousins aged 11 and 14 from East Jerusalem. They were in the news and in our blog not so long ago ["10-Nov-15: Arab teens and their knives: today's latest Jerusalem stabbing attack"] because of their central roles in a stabbing rampage. A man working as a security guard on the Jerusalem Light Rail came close to losing his life thanks to what they did. So did the boys themselves.

The younger cousin, aged 11 and in sixth grade, will not be facing any charges under Israeli law because of his tender age. The older one, 14, is likely to be charged as a juvenile with attempted murder. There are no plans to indict Mahmoud Abbas, Saeb Erekat or the PA Minister of Education at this stage.

What the two children told their interrogators [according to a report in Times of Israel, November 26, 2015] ought to get close attention but will not. It's appropriate that we pause here for a moment and once again think about the moral bankruptcy of UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development, plus of course the leader of the pack, UNRWA, along with the other players in the lavishly-well-funded child-focused NGO industry. All studiously looking the other way, all staring vacantly into the distance, all being utterly silent about the massive, institutionalized child-abuse in which every part of Palestinian Arab society is deeply engaged.

The boys intended their murderous attack "as an act of revenge". Why? Because - in the spirit of the cycle of violence that has crushed everything worthwhile in the world they occupy - a relative, Muhammad Ali, from the Shuafat neighborhood of Jerusalem, was himself shot in front of security cameras trying to murder a Border Guard officer near the Damascus Gate of the Old City early last month (and that was intended as revenge too). The title of our post about that attack and its outcome ["11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children"] expresses some of our deeply bitter feelings about a society that manufactures a lethal juveniles with homicide on their minds.

“I met my cousin at the entrance to school,” said the 11-year-old, who was not named... “The headmistress refused to let us in because our parents had not paid tuition. My cousin told me that on the way to school he wanted to carry out a stabbing attack but did not succeed because all the travelers were senior citizens,” ...The two first boarded a bus and looked for the opportune moment and target. “We travelled from Shuafat to Damascus Gate in order to stab a soldier but did not do it because the soldiers were in groups and we didn’t find one standing alone,” recalled the 11-year-old. “Then he told me ‘let’s do an attack together to revenge the death of Muhammad Ali.’ He opened his bag and showed me the knife. At Damascus Gate I bought a pair of scissors and then we boarded the light rail and looked for Jews to stab.” Two light rail security guards boarded the train, but the boys decided “not to stab them because there were two of them. Later on one of them got off and we immediately attacked the one that remained... I stabbed him in his head, my cousin stabbed him in his chest and stomach until the guard pushed me and fired three bullets in my stomach,” said the 11-year-old. The two cousins had decided they were ready to die as shahids, or martyrs, he said. The younger one said in the interrogation that none of their family members knew about their intentions. “I wanted to die as a shahid but now I understand I made a mistake and I am sorry,” he was quoted saying. At the end of his interrogation, according to the Shin Bet, he repeated: “I made a mistake. I want to be in school like any normal person. I don’t want to resist the occupation any longer.” The older cousin confessed early on in his interrogation, but said he did not mean to kill anyone... “The Israelis are occupying us and I am angry at what is happening in Gaza. I wanted to avenge the Jews who are torturing us.” Asked why they did not try to stab one of the passengers on the light rail, he said: “The Jews on the train were only old people and women, and it’s shameful to stab them.”

Jacob T. Burns of Amnesty International understands that what these boys, and a long line of boys and girls before them, did was (ahem) "reprehensible". He seems not to comprehend that this is about murder, something most sane, civilized people believe goes a way beyond the language used to describe spitting in the school corridor.

Not for the first time we see that something about the Arab conflict with Israel makes "activists" like the people from Amnesty stupid. Their silence in the face of the ongoing catastrophe we described here ["23-Nov-15: A third knife-wielding Arab boy is dead in terror attack"] speaks louder and more eloquently then their tweets do.

That leaves us (again) with the matter of how Palestinian Arab society keeps generating children who hate to the point where they stop caring - at least momentarily - about their own well-being. An entire society driven - without any audible or visible dissent - by lethal, blood-and-gore hatred, and willing to allow their own children to be buried in the name of that hatred.

Here's what we wrote some weeks ago about the attempted murder carried out by the older cousin of the two boys:

The sixteen year old boy is dead. Whatever potential it had for constructive achievements, his future no longer exists. In its place, a society in the grip of lethal depravity calls him hero and martyr and continues weaponizing other young men and women to follow him to oblivion. It's an appalling process of grooming and exploitation with many facilitators, contributors and (especially) enablers, certain of whom call themselves human rights organizations... ["11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children"]

Now that's something the Jacob T. Burnses of the world might want to tackle,

Meanwhile, we're grateful to have well-prepared, fast-acting, but also restrained, men and women on our side who shoot when our lives are endangered by the rising tide of self-destructive madness emanating from the dark side of the fence.

06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal

Arab schoolchildren: Baqa al-Gharbiyye, Israel [Image Source]

This post is about making a radical change to the education that Palestinian Arab children get in their schools. A change for the better, but then - as most people know - that's not saying much.

We have posted here about UNRWA dozens of times over the years (here's a link). Why? Because its existence is a fundamental pre-requisite for the hatred and passion for lethal violence that is cynically injected daily, year after year for almost 66 years into the blood and consciousness of generations of Palestinian Arab children.

This has been happening for nearly seventy years. As refugee support organizations, can there be one as spectacularly ineffective as UNRWA? As a terrorist training institution, can there be one as heart-breakingly effective as UNRWA?

We have recently been focusing on the money problems at the billion-dollar-annual-budget agency, and how its absolutely sickening focus on educating for terror goes unremarked, unchecked and un-stopped by all of the world's agencies for the protection of children. We're referring, in no particular order, to UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development and numerous others. Thousands of bureaucrats, hundreds of fund-raisers and no one with enough time to address the daily disaster which is Palestinian Arab education. 

Just a few recent examples of those posts of ours:

• 27-Jan-13: Hamas' new army of children: Will the UN's and foreign funders' role in this scandal be critiqued by the news-reporting media?
• 15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?
• 27-Jan-14: In Gaza, a death cult celebrates its graduating class
• 19-May-14: Will momentary focus on UNRWA throw any light on PA and Hamas abuse of their own people? 
• 10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed
• 03-Jul-15: Misery, terrorism and money-making: a cynics' guide

Arab schoolchildren, Umm Tuba, East Jerusalem [Image Source]

Now there's a new UNRWA crisis. Alright, not exactly a new crisis, but a new batch of reports and headlines referring to something chronically and terribly wrong at UNRWA - the abuse of its allegedly-humanitarian mission, the mis-allocation of its massive resources, and the setting of its hugely-politicized priorities. 

Naturally, the principal victims are the children:

UNRWA funds crisis worries Palestinian refugees | Nisreen El-Shamayleh | Aljazeera | Yesterday |  With a funding shortfall of $101m, UNRWA, the UN agency that has been looking after Palestinian refugees in the Middle East for 65 years has said it may be forced to delay the new academic year at the schools it runs in refugee camps across the region. UNRWA schools are considered one of its most successful projects. With 700 overcrowded schools in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza unable to open their doors to students, half a million Palestinian children will be deprived of their right to education. And if that's not enough, 22,000 UNRWA teachers will be out of their jobs...

And if that's not enough, there's a distinct loss of perspective here. The Palestinian Arabs are part of a larger Arab world that includes several of the world's wealthiest populations both per capita and in absolute terms. If they can't fix this, they don't want to fix it.

But this is not the time to score political points. There's a humanitarian crisis approaching, and we need to be helpful.  So let's take a broader look at this latest UNRWA crisis.

Arab teacher, unidentified pupil - the Jerusalem campus of the Hand-in-Hand
bilingual Arabic/Hebrew schools, Israel [Image Source]

We did some sums. 

The funds of which UNRWA is so desperately short amount to 0.05% (in simple words: one twentieth of one percent) of the sum reported to be being laid out by the Qataris alone for something else of a comparably urgent life-and-death nature. 

Why single out Qatar? Because of the gas-soaked family business' fraternal passion, endlessly trumpeted, to "leverage the enormous and abiding symbolism of the Palestinian cause to both enhance its own profile and credentials" [source]. 

Since Qatar's owners read the news and know about the existential dangers of which UNRWA bleats, and do nothing to help, might it be a smart move if Israel were to step up and offer to take over the education budget of the morally-and-otherwise bankrupt UNRWA? And develop a suitable educational curriculum that actually promotes peace?

What an opportunity. And cheap at the price.

So Chris Gunness, when you're ready to have a constructive discussion about healing the minds and souls of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab children (that's not meant to sound funny), please touch base [thisongoingwar@gmail.com]. 

And no, to be frank and based on past experience, we're not waiting.

By the way, in Hamas-controlled Gaza yesterday, they completed yet another highly successful values-rich "educational" program for some 25,000 school-age children. To understand why "educational" is in quotation marks, take a look at this article and this article and this article. And two previous posts of ours (among many others): "14-May-15: Dozens more Hamas victims of unstoppable Hamas blood-lust"; "18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions".

And if children's minds and welfare mean something to you, as they do to us, prepare to weep.

09-Jul-15: When incitement to murder is financed by foreign aid, where will the accounting come from?

Sitting in an Israeli court, the bomb maker who has murdered 66 people
until now says he wants to kill some more. Makes his father
so proud. [Image Source]

Our daughter Malki - graceful, pretty, smiley, a musical prodigy, a social activist on behalf of children with severe disabilities - will never reach her sixteenth birthday.

That privilege was stolen from her (and us) by a gang of Islamist men and women on August 9, 2001. A thunderous, sickening flash of explosives and thousands of flesh-ripping nails destroyed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria and with it the bodies and lives of fifteen innocents, the majority of them children. Malki (whose photo is over there on the right of this page) was one of them. Her best friend, the girl who lived next door and was standing at the counter with her, was another.

The explosive device was concealed inside a guitar case carried on the back of a man. He was a human bomb, brought to the center of our city - Israel's capital, Jerusalem - by the engineer of the massacre ["17-Nov-11: A monster walks the streets and she has many accomplices"]. He is of course dead, but the planner of the massacre is not. She hosts a TV program that is produced in Amman, Jordan, and since 2012 has gone to air on Fridays to an eager global audience of Arabic speakers.

Rejoicing in streets of Lebanon as news of the
massacre in Jerusalem is announced, August 9, 2001 [Image Source]

The man who constructed the diabolical guitar-case bomb, and several others similar to it, has haunted our thoughts through the years since we first learned of his monstrous savagery. Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti with Jordanian citizenship, sits in an Israeli prison cell today, serving 67 life terms to which he was sentenced in a 2004 trial. 

From inside, Barghouti has reminded every possible audience of the bestiality that underpins his murderous nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough, he declares - explicitly. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world, Barghouti notoriously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

The panel of judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. (The only time a death penalty has been carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman in 1962.)

What he did was horrifying. But hardly less horrifying are the reactions of wide parts of Arab society who stood solidly with the killers, rejoicing at the deaths. Major news services carried photos that day of macho men expressing their joy in Arab streets (like the one above). Children were provided with platters of candies to hand out in celebration of the massacre of Jewish youngsters. 

Every last member of that gang of jihadists became a celebrity in the societies in which they live. And the Mahmoud Abbas-controlled Palestinian Authority ("chronically short of funds... perpetually requesting handouts") has been paying the bomb-maker, along with all the others in the gang, a rich salary since at least April 2011 ["20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?"]

Having researched this, we know of not a single article in the Arab language published anywhere in the world that condemns the perpetrators and their act, or bemoans their corrosive impact on Arab and Moslem societies. If anyone among our readers can point us to even a single instance (an offer we have made numerous times already), we would showcase it here and let people know. 

CBS promo for the still-online 60 Minutes platform it gave
our child's killer in 2006. The voice, the pain, the anger of victims 
like us interests them much less [Image Source]

We pointed out eight years ago ["10-Apr-07: Regarding Abdullah Barghouti"] that he pleaded guilty to all charges at his trial on 66 counts of terror-inspired murder. He told the court he "did this to kill as many Israelis as possible".

Reporter Bob Simon fronted a segment called Terror Behind Bars on the CBS "60 Minutes" television program in 2006 which did much to elevate Barghouti to celebrity-dom outside the Arab world (he was already a global Arab hero).

"I get my best piece, the guitar. I have it, I like it, I respect it... I open it, make a bomb inside it, close it, send it with the guy. And he make the bomb. And it's done." [Abdullah Barghouti boasting on CBS News' 60 Minutes program, April 2006]

We wrote an open letter at the time to his TV network, CBS, in New York (published here) expressing our deep pain and fierce anger in calm and fairly reasonable terms. CBS ignored us.

There is no room for doubt about this: the massacre at Sbarro, along with the untold number of similar acts of murderous barbarism carried out against Israelis and Jews in the past decade and a half in the name of Palestinian Arab 'resistance' have had the widest support right across the Arab world. We offered some evidence here, referring to Barghouti: "1-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?"

We learned of another public display of this today.

The self-styled 'independent' Palestinian Arab news network Ma'an broadcast a television program in June focused on Barghouti. Ma'an TV broadcasts its content live via the web [here] and by satellite throughout the Arabic-speaking world. The tone of this particular Ma'an show is plain from the text, rendered into English by Palestinian Media Watch.

PMW's report begins with this brief introduction:

The independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an, on the TV program In a Prisoner’s Home, interviewed the father of the terrorist in his home. Both the TV host and the father referred to the killer of 67 as a “hero.” Barghouti’s father added he was “proud” of his son, who he sees as a “noble fighter” who acted “generously” for “Palestine.” He encouraged “every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem”:

The convicted, confessed, proud, hungry murderer has a father
with a message [Image Source: Video clip via PMW]

The original Arabic of the interview, as rendered by PMW's translators into English:

• Independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an’s TV host: “We are now in the home of the heroic prisoner Abdallah Barghouti, in the month of the blessed Ramadan.”
• Father of bomb maker Abdallah Barghouti: “Abdallah Barghouti, I am proud of him, because everyone knows of Abdallah Barghouti and what he generously did for Palestine. I am proud of him and I say: Praise Allah who gave me this hero, noble fighter for Palestine and its cause. I say: Praise Allah, Lord of the Universes, Abdallah fought for Palestine and left his family, his father and mother, and left behind three children, two girls and a boy, and sacrificed everything for the Palestinian cause. I ask every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem.”

We feel no need to say anything to the father or to the host. They are what they are. The message they intend to convey via the interview is about as clear as messages get: Barghouti the son murdered dozens of Jews, and Barghouti the father says it's something noble to do the same, again, now. 

Barghouti: Serving 67 life terms in an Israeli
prison. His advocates call him a 'detainee' and want him
freed. The 66 murders? No big deal.

Incitement to murder, and glorification of the killer, rarely come much clearer than this.

Now we have some questions for those who fund Ma'an, an organization entirely dependent on its foreign supporters. They include (according to NGO-Monitor and to the Ma'an website):

• The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
• European Commission Technical Assistance Office (ECTAO) 
• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
• The Danish Representative Office to the Palestinian Authority (PA) 
• The Netherlands Representative Office to the PA

None of these bodies ever spends private money. In every case, it comes from taxpayers - by far the easiest form of money for ideologically-motivated people to spend (as we have observed here over and again). Our questions:

• Do Danish, Dutch and other European tax-payers know that civil servants funded by them are passing along serious money, millions of Euros and of dollars, also funded by them, to encourage murder? For turning a confessed killer of 67 innocent people into a figure to emulate?
• Does this shock them? 
• Do those civil servants and public officials have anything they would like us - the parents of a victim of the beastial killer at the heart of the interview above - to know about their complicity in Ma'an's incitement to ongoing and new acts of murder? 
• Do they need to know our email address? Here it is. We're waiting.