22-Jun-18: Jordan's king heading back to Washington. Is extradition on the agenda?

White House - April 5, 2017 [Image Source: Video]

From AFP last night

AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s King Abdullah II set off for the United States on Thursday for talks with US President Donald Trump on Middle East issues including the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the palace said. Accompanied by his wife Rania, the monarch is also scheduled to meet with senior officials from the Trump administration and members of Congress, the palace said in a statement. His meeting with Trump is expected to take place at the White House on Monday. The White House said in a statement that they would “discuss issues of mutual concern, including terrorism, the threat from Iran and the crisis in Syria, and working towards a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” ["Jordan king heads to US to discuss peace plan with Trump", June 21, 2018]

Reuters says President Donald Trump "will welcome King Abdullah of Jordan to the White House on June 25", quoting the White House announcement.

Trump has hosted Abdullah at least three previous times since becoming president:

• On February 2, 2017 in Washington DC on the sidelines of the National Prayer Breakfast ["Jordan's King Abdullah to be first Arab world leader to visit Donald Trump", The Independent UK] During the same visit, Abdullah met with Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis and senior members of Congress.
• April 5, 2017 at the White House, including a full formal press joint conference [YouTube]
• September 20, 2017 at a New York City hotel [White House press release]

They seem to have developed some chemistry. Perhaps, if one or the other is listening, even a common language. 

Was the subject of the fugitive Jordan-resident terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, whom Jordan is obliged under its 1995 Extradition Treaty to send to the Washington DC, publicly mentioned at any of their previous get-togethers. As far as we know, no. (See "09-Feb-18: Acting slowly in Jordan and the United States?")

Is this deeply disturbing in terms of the determination of the US to defeat violent extremism - the State Department's preferred term for terrorism? Certainly. (See "18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms").

Since Tamimi, who boasts of killing Israeli children of whom one is our daughter Malki, is an unrepentant Hamas agent who hosted a terrorism-inciting television program in Amman for a worldwide Arabic-speaking audience for five years, and benefits from extraordinary protection from King Abdullah, it's strange to us to note that "issues of mutual concern, including terrorism" are on the agenda.

So can we assume Tamimi's extradition is going to be discussed?

30-May-18: In Belgium, another murderous "lone-wolf" attack by a criminal already on the police watch list

Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucille Garcia, right,
the two police officers murdered in the attack [Image Source]

In Belgium, a pointless act of terror inspired by one man's religious fervor resulted in the deaths on Tuesday of several innocents and some questions that don't seem likely to be properly answered quickly.

The basic facts as gleaned from Irish Times and Standard UK:

• Benjamin Herman, a Belgian man of 36 described in reports as a petty criminal and drug dealer who was serving time in prison, was let out Monday on what some reports have called a day-release for "family leave". (Reuters calls it a two-day pass.) One source says he "was due to travel back to his home town of Rochfort, just 40 miles from Liege". But didn't.
• Instead he attacked two police officers, women of 45 and 53, from behind about at about 10.30am on a lovely late spring morning on a pleasant boulevard in the centre of Liege, Belgium’s third city. Those two victims are Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and Lucille Garcia, 45. Their work involved checking parking meters. Soraya Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters who earlier lost their father, also a police officer, and are now tragically orphaned of both parents.
• First slashing their throats from behind, he then stabbed them both and succeeded in seizing their handguns. (Evidently parking meter officers carry guns in Belgium.)
• A young man sitting in a car nearby was his next victim: he shot him dead too. He is Cyril Vangriecken, 22.
• The armed attacker then rushed into a high school building about 100 meters away and took two female employees hostage; one of them was a cleaner. He used her as a human shield in the subsequent confrontation with armed authorities. (He also, it is reported, "spared the life of the high school janitor he took hostage because she is Muslim, according to the woman, who was hailed Wednesday for her courage as she faced off with the madman.")
• Police were called. The school's children were evacuated as a gun battle erupted in which the prisoner managed to wound four of the police officers before they shot him dead.
• La Libre Belgique newspaper quoting police source says the Moslem attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” – “God is greatest” in Arabic. Irish Times says Beaupère declined to comment when asked about that.
• According to De Standaard, a Flemish-language newspaper in Belgium, police suspect he also carried out the murder a day earlier of "a criminal associate whose body was found south of Liege".
• So is he a terrorist? The authorities are being cagey. "Prime Minister Charles Michel says Herman was indirectly mentioned in state security reports on radicalization, but did not have his name on a list maintained by an anti-terror assessment group" according to USNews.

Cyril Vangriecken, 22, shot dead while sitting in a parked car
[Image Source]

Some questions that come to mind:

• According to state broadcaster RTBF Herman, who was born in 1982, had a criminal record that included a number of convictions for theft, assault and drugs offences.
• A Belgian politician, Georges Dallemagne, quoted by Irish Times, said Herman was already on a police watch-list arising from his radicalization in jail and his conversion there to Islam. So why was he freed unsupervised? How realistic was it that he would peacefully come back to his prison cell?
• There's more disturbing background according to one newspaper source. He "had been jailed numerous times"; he "appeared in national security documents"; he was "extremely violent" according to prison officers. Does this amount to a profile? Does it trigger any defensive measures on behalf of society?
• Liege police chief Christian Beaupère told a news conference “The goal of the assassin was to target the police”. Is this based on something they knew ahead of time? Were precautions taken? Did the two murdered officers know he was nearby? And is that a full and complete statement of the motivation for this cowardly, worthless explosion of lethal violence?
• The police chief was asked to confirm that the killer shouted “Allahu Akbar” in the course of his moments in the sun. M. Beaupère declined to comment on the question.
• These are not the first murders of innocents carried out by petty criminals inspired to Islamist violence while incarcerated. 
• Reuters: "The national crisis centre, on high alert since attacks by Islamic State in Paris and Brussels in recent years, said it had not raised its alert level – an indication the man was acting alone and follow-up attacks were not expected." So does Belgium have a strategy for dealing with lone-wolf attacks? They're not entirely mysterious, after all - they have some glaring factors in common. Do the authorities know this? No one ought to subscribe to the view that all members of any specific faith community are plotting to murder people, but are there any patterns worth taking into account when safe-guarding cities and populations?
• The politician Georges Dallemagne, who evidently [Irish Times] sits on several Belgian parliamentary security committees, tweeted: “The supervision of radicalised prisoners remains tragically flawed.” How concerned are Belgians to change that dangerous state of affairs?

After the murders [Image Source]

The phenomenon of the lone wolf is not a new one [click for past "Lone Wolf" posts of ours] and no more mysterious than any other aspect of criminology. Too often, public officials seem to use the term after criminal attacks have thrust them into the news by implying that if it's a "lone wolf" attack, what do you want from us? And if radicalization - to use the polite and somewhat vague term that most of the news industry does - is a factor, why aren't there more indications in the media of what's being done to identify individuals who have undergone it? 

Which is more problematic: avoiding any public discussion of it? Or burying its victims and comforting their families?

And let's agree that Belgium, with its vast problems involving terror and lone wolves acting individually as well as in large, well-organized packs, is only slightly different from most of Europe. And not only Europe.

UPDATE Wednesday May 30, 2018 at 11:00 pm: According to this report, ISIS, the Islamic State terror group today claimed one of its “soldiers” carried out the murder of the two policewomen and a student in Liege, quoting the jihadists' Amaq propaganda agency. “The author of the attack on the city of Liege in Belgium is a soldier of the Islamic State,” IS said in a statement published on Amaq’s Telegram account a day after the attack. It said “he led the attack in response to calls to target the countries of the US-led international coalition” which is fighting the jihadist group mainly in Syria.

26-Sep-17: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?

[Image Source: PCR]

It's been about nine months since we last addressed the core question of what Palestinian Arab opinion polls tell us about their hopes, fears, ambitions and values. That last review is here: "15-Dec-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?"

As it happens, this morning has gotten off to a really rotten start with another Arab-on-Israeli terror attack at the entrance to the bucolic northern Jerusalem suburb of Har Adar. As we write this, reports say three Israelis were shot to death and a fourth is fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital. The gunman is dead. We will report on what we know about this later.

With the fresh extreme violence in mind, what do the data tell us? What do Palestinian Arab polls of Palestinian Arab opinion, reveal about support for murder of this kind and about the other issues that are on the minds of the people who play such an influential/complicated role on the lives lived by us Israelis?

As we have said here before, what the Palestinian Arabs think is something we're very interested in knowing. Relying on newspapers or electronic media coverage of their views, a person is likely to get someone's wishful projections or politically-skewed understandings rather than data-based analysis. The difference between the two is vast and unbridgeable.

There are some serious polling organizations that are themselves Palestinian Arab. We tend to focus on the findings of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research or PSR [website] headed by the respected Prof. Khalil Shikaki. We're doing that again now.

In PSR's Poll Number 65 (there have been three on which we did not manage to report since our last related post), which was published on September 19, 2017, we think these are the key findings (italicized texts are taken verbatim from the source)

A syndicated AFP photo shows the supporters of Fatah and of Abbas in the
Gaza Strip last week. There may be more out of camera range. [Image Source]

• Violence: 35% of those polled "think that the most effective means of creating a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel is armed action". Negotiation gets 33% and "popular non-violent resistance" 26%. In the December  2016 poll, armed action got slightly more: 37%. A year ago, it got 34%. Those slight rises and falls are less significant than the reality that a third of the Arabs living closest to us see the best solution to the differences between as being achieved by murder and terror. A third. But it gets worse...
• Non-violence? Now bear in mind that "popular non-violent resistance" is an expression that means something quite different for the Palestinian Arabs and their advocates - including their president - than for most other people. Abbas and people around him use it to refer to lethal measures like hurling rocks at Israelis and their vehicles: non-violent resistance in  their lexicon includes rock hurling, knifings and vehicle-rammings. That's plainly terrorist violence, whatever advocates for the Palestinian Arabs claim, and it means that nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian Arabs are for it. 
• An "overwhelming majority" are "worried about the future of liberties in Palestine". Contributing factors, over and above the decades of heavy-handed, thuggish rule by a self-preserving clique of aging Abbas/Arafat regime kleptocrats (our observation, not PSR's) include a marked rise in PA arrests of reporters and "activists"; a new presidential decree enacting an oppressive piece of regulation that they call a "cybercrime law"; and upcoming changes to the PA's Law of the Judiciary. 
• Related to the first point: A large majority of Palestinian Arabs (85% of West Bank Arabs) now say they are afraid to criticize their PA masters. Fully half of them believe Abbas' PA has become "a burden on the Palestinian people". 
• This is evidently affecting their political outlooks. If presidential elections were held today, the Hamas candidate "Haniyeh would win against Abbas. Findings also indicate a decline in support for Fatah, particularly in the Gaza Strip where Hamas is more popular. In the West Bank however, Fatah remains more popular than Hamas." Just 3 months ago, PSR found that each candidate had the same level of support if this were a two-horse race. No longer. 
• But even before they get to elections, there's no doubting the appetite for immediate political change: "67% of the public want president Abbas to resign... Three months ago, 62% said [this]... Demand for Abbas’ resignation stands at 60% in the West Bank and 80% in the Gaza Strip."
• Gaza is one big set of problems for Fatah and its leader: "It is certain that [Mahmoud Abbas, president-for-life of the PA] would lose any presidential elections in the Gaza Strip to Hamas’ Ismael Haniyeh". 
• Worth recalling that the last time Palestinian Arabs were given the chance to vote for a president was in January 2005 when Abbas won; he has held tenaciously on to power ever since. The only previous presidential election, dominated by Yasser Arafat, was in 1996.
• For the rather touchy Abbas and his hangers-on, there's more bad news and it involves Abbas' fiercest rival: "Fatah is fast losing its popularity in the Gaza Strip, standing at 28% today compared to 40% only nine months ago. Those who still support Fatah in the Gaza Strip are shifting loyalty to Mohammad Dahlan whose popularity among Gazans has more than doubled during the past nine months, from 9% to 23% today, while his popularity among West Bankers did not change, remaining hardly at 1%."
• In a three-way race, the convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti who lives in an Israeli prison cell, would easily beat both Abbas and Haniyah.
• Support for violence against Israelis has risen over the previous poll, "despite the fact that a majority remains opposed to it", partly because of "the lack of trust in diplomacy. Findings show that about three quarters believe that the Trump Administration is not serious about Palestinian-Israeli peace making and an even higher percentage believes that the Administration is not an honest broker and that it is biased in favor of Israel".
• When they watch television, here's where they tune in: Al Jazeera (Qatar-owned, Qatar-based) 20%; Ma'an TV 14%; Hamas' Al Aqsa TV 13%; Palestine TV (controlled by the PA) 12%; Filasteen al Youm/Palestine Today 11%; Al Arabiya (Saudi-owned, Dubai-based) 6; Hamas' Al Quds TV 4%; al Mayadeen (satellite-news station based in Beirut) 3%.
• The popular perception of corruption in the PA and its institutions is now at 77%. This is actually something of an improvement; in a 2014 PCR poll, it stood at 81%.
• On the list of "Most vital Palestinian goals and problems", the top item with 40% support is the need "to end Israeli occupation". A mere 12% think the "first and most vital goal should be to establish a democratic political system that respects freedoms and rights". The most serious problem confronting their society today is poverty and unemployment (26%) with "the spread of corruption in public institutions" second at 25%.
• The violent confrontations that took place on Jerusalem's Temple Mount in July 2017 in the wake of the brazen and cold-blooded killing of two Israeli Druze security men [see our post] occupied much of the thinking of the Palestinian Arab public. In PSR's words and despite those other concerns we just listed, the "the installment of metal detectors at the entrance to al Haram al Sharif gates were the most important event during the period in question". 
• As for Israel's decision to quickly remove them, a minuscule 7% of Palestinian Arabs attribute this to King Abdullah II of Jordan despite Jordan's not-so-subtle PR efforts to grab the limelight, as in this Arab media quote: “Without the Hashemite custodi­anship and the steadfastness of the Jerusalemites, the holy sites would have been lost many years ago.” (Those of us old enough to remember life in Jerusalem pre-1967 recall how the Old City of Jerusalem was under illegal Jordanian military occupation from 1949 until freed in the Six Day War.)

There's not much here to feel good about. As their own societies - both Fatah and Hamas - explore new kinds of tyranny, between one-third and two-thirds of them hold tight to a vision of more violence as a solution to their problems. The future of their children, meanwhile, along with their health, their schools, their environment and their economy remain mired in self-inflicted gloom, failure and inertia.

PSR 65 was based on a sample size of 1,270 adults interviewed face-to-face (not by phone) in 127 locations selected randomly. The statistical margin of error is 3%. 

22-Jul-16: Who says the BBC never calls terror terror?

Currently appearing on the BBC website (if it has changed by the time
you click, here's the archived version)

Regular readers of this blog, and of the much-more focused and excellent BBC Watch, will be aware of the infuriating and ultimately dangerous practice at the BBC to (a) Never use the word terror outside of quotation marks and (b) To use it when it suits the editors.

Then there's another option: (c) To change their minds once or twice on a single day depending on... well, in truth, we don't know on what such editorial swings depend.

But they certainly happen. We watched it and then described it in "22-Mar-16: At the BBC, they're challenged by terror in quite revealing ways" when the BBC decision-makers couldn't quite determine whether their news consumers could be entrusted with knowing that terror played a role in the Brussels Airport terror massacre.

(In the end, they decided that it did not, then that it did, and eventually, later the same day, that it did not. We documented the silliness here.)

Rule of thumb: it almost never suits the editors and has not suited them for years, to use the word terror when describing any act of savagery, no matter how transparently jihadist in nature, when such acts are directed at Israelis. Check it out.

Knowing this, and understanding how much double-talk and hypocrisy lie behind it, take a look at this morning's BBC report from Brazil and the events we ourselves mentioned yesterday ["21-Jul-16: As the Olympics approach, Brazilian jihad comes into focus"]. The screen shot above show how that BBC item is currently headlined.

Click to see how very seriously the BBC
takes its own editorial guidelines - on paper

What's obviously going on is that, while BBC editorial guidelines are one thing, the decisions taken by the editors at the BBC on a given day are frequently another. 

We tried to lay out our view of those double-standards (we're being polite) in this post: "06-Jan-16: Perceptions and realities at the BBC". It includes a revealing (though discouraging) list of our earlier comments on this important issue, all of them addressing the BBC and its terror strategy from a critical perspective.

There's also the disturbing way the BBC pays what we consider to be self-evidently inadequate attention to the frequency and nature of terror attacks (whatever the BBC chooses to call them) against Israelis compared with its comprehensive and often up-close coverage of Israeli actions against the Arab side after those terror attacks happen, 

Over at BBC Watch, they address this very matter on a monthly basis via a statistical review, and in March 2016 provided this summary chart ["Reviewing the BBC News website’s coverage of terror in Israel"]:

From BBC Watch

As you mull over BBC's editorial practices, think of its standing as a publicly-funded (to the tune of an unparalleled billions of dollars each year), globe-straddling radio/TV/web/print colossus with a mission

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

Yep: Accurate and impartial, and it's clear that many people buy that. '

But closer inspection, and some informed knowledge of what goes on in Israel, and a person realizes this is how ideology-driven journalism works. All those well-rounded vowels, the pompous self-justifications and the serious-sounding guidelines don't change that. 

We can take comfort from the fact that today's BBC headline doesn't read "Violent extremism arrests in Brazil".

15-Apr-16: Stand by for a united Islamic assault on terror... and possibly some other things as well

Erdogan addresses Muslim kings and prime ministers yesterday in Istanbul [Image Source]

Almost entirely unreported at this early stage, might it be that the Islamic world has decided, finally, to do something serious to curb terrorism? Perhaps, but in the circumstances (which we're about to describe) it would be wise to suspend judgment for a while. That's because it's not that clear what sort of steps they are planning to take. Or against whom exactly. Or frankly for what purpose.

It stems from a major announcement by Turkey's most powerful politician.

Today, Friday, is the second day of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 13th Islamic Summit Conference. Held once every three years, the event is hosted this time by Turkey in Istanbul with the attendance of "prime ministers and presidents from over 30 countries".

The OIC, about which we have posted several times in the past [click], was formed in 1969 and is made up of 57 member states. It calls itself "the collective voice of the Muslim world" working to "safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony".

Peace and harmony, let's concede, are in notably short supply these days, and strikingly so in a significant number of the Muslim countries and even at the summit itself (see "OIC conference begins with Iran-Saudi spat"). Indeed Turkey's foreign minister, quoted today by Aljazeera ["Islamic world leaders seek to bridge differences"], reveals that

"the Islamic world is experiencing many disputes within itself. Fratricidal conflict causes great pain. Sectarianism divides the ummah," he told OIC foreign ministers on Tuesday, using the Arabic world for the Muslim community. "Hopefully, this summit will pave the way for healing some wounds." [Aljazeera, April 14, 2016]

Healing wounds? The Russian RT news outlet helps us understand how they are going about that. It reports this morning that terrorism (and not violent extremism, please note) has emerged as a core feature of this OIC summit:

Turkey is trying to unite the Islamic world and lead it in the fight against terror with a new Istanbul-based police force tasked with tackling extremism in the region... Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has accepted his proposal to create a multinational police center based in Istanbul to battle international terrorism. The new structure is to be called the OIC Center for Police Cooperation and Coordination... “It would be helpful to establish a structure among member states that will strengthen and institutionalize cooperation against terror and other crimes,” he said, during a speech... The aim, according to Erdogan, is to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Iraq, Syria and Libya and Boko Haram and Al Shabaab in Africa, as “all these terror organizations oppress and harm all Muslims."

Turkey's Davutoglu and PA's Abbas yesterday at OIC summit.
Probably preparing their attack on terrorists [Image Source]

However, and it's a rather big but, that's not all they want to fight. RT explains that

While the details of the new Islamic anti-terror police force yet to be made public, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is already calling to “liberate all Islamic lands under occupation.”

The Turkish daily Hurriyet expands: 

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has put forth a call to “liberate all Islamic lands under occupation,” while also asking for a common and broader view of Muslims in order to discuss the problems of the Muslim world with maturity. “We need a common stance for the liberation of all the Islamic lands that are under occupation, especially Palestine,” said Davutoğlu April 14, while delivering an opening speech... “The most important indicator which would show the effectiveness of the OIC is protecting Muslim minorities and liberating occupied lands such as Palestine, Karabakh and Crimea,” Davutoğlu said... [explaining that in these places] the Islamic identity is under threat of being demolished... “Despite differences of opinion, we need to maximize political relations and improve bilateral contacts in maturity so we can discuss all problems in the Muslim world,” he said. ["Turkish PM calls for broader view of Muslims", Hurriyet, April 15, 2016]

(In passing, we will mention that the editorial offices of Hurriyet, whose line is considered liberal and secular, were sacked by pro-Erdogan mobs screaming Islamist slogans several times in the past year. Still, they managed to escape the fate of their larger competitor Zaman, Turkey's biggest-circulating newspaper; it was shut down by court order last month and placed under state control. BBC says "no reason was given by the court for the decision", and quotes Davutoglu as cryptically explaining the takeover was "legal, not political".)

We have found relatively few mentions in online news channels today of the two-pronged strategy announced by the Turks. This report ["Muslim countries have agreed to work together to fight terrorism: Turkey President Erdogan"] for instance, from a respected Mumbai-based news service seems to have been written by someone who was out of the room when Palestine came up. The same with yesterday morning's Reuters despatch ["Muslim nations agree to work closely to fight terrorism: Turkey's Erdogan"] The Gulf News editors saw fit [here] to report how Erdogan "noted that the majority of the victims of terrorism are Muslims and called it a “source of shame” that most of those who risk their lives at sea to reach Europe are Muslims." But didn't mention the Palestine angle either.

Perhaps we'll be seeing some more-comprehensive news reporting later today. But it seems an odd dropping of the ball.

Being opposed to terror is one of those abstractions that tend to have more to do with prevailing cultural values than with the plain meaning of the words. Sometimes, too, the results of attitude polls into such matters as how people feel about terror and human bomb attacks just don't make sense without drilling down into how they understand some of the basic words.

To illustrate, this might be a good time to review how "terror" seems to mean radically different things at different times and in different contexts. For instance, "03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?" And for a specifically-Turkish context, "6-Jun-10: It's not that complicated: Is IHH a humanitarian group or a terrorist group?"

Finally a reminder of how the juxtaposition of the words victim, terror and Israel tends to make some people loses their moral compass completely: "03-Mar-16: When the UN responds to terrorism, which victims does it entirely ignore?"

01-Jun-15: What's in a name?

Source

A friend pointed us to a slightly surprising, but smart-sounding, op ed that appeared in a major Arab news publication yesterday. He emailed it to us with the subject line "Arab journalist asks why we can't call terrorism terrorism". Great question.

It's an article by Faisal J. Abbas, the editor-in-chief of Al Arabiya English, and

a renowned blogger and an award-winning journalist... [who] blogs for The Huffington Post since 2008, and is a recipient of many media awards and a member of the British Society of Authors, National Union of Journalists, the John Adams Society as well as an associate member of the Cambridge Union Society

Call us impressed. He starts this way:

The two recent attacks on mosques in eastern Saudi Arabia can’t be labeled as anything but evil acts of terrorism. Now, such a classification seems obvious to most of us, as there isn’t a term that is more expressive to describe these ideologically-driven, murderous attacks on a group of innocent people who were simply practicing their basic right of observing Friday prayers. However, having just attended brain-storming sessions at the regional World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in the Dead Sea, I fear there might be some confusion as to what is defined as terrorism and what isn’t.

We agree. It's concerns like those that get us to blog here every day. We outlined our concerns ["18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms" and "27-Feb-15: CVE revisited"] some months back.

We felt, though, that his seriousness warranted some prior validating. We get exposed to too many voices from the Arab world complaining that too often terrorism is not being called what it really is. But then too often it turns out they actually mean something very different from what we do when they say "terror".

Jordan's parliament is a good instance. It approved an amendment to the Kingdom's anti-terror legislation in December 2013 to exclude what it termed "resistance actions" against one specific party - Israel - from the jurisdiction of its State Security Court and from its law against terror. As the Jordan Times put it. the legislators "agreed that any actions against Israel cannot be "terrorism" at all" by definition.

So we browsed over to the home page of his Saudi Arabia-based Al Arabiya English website,

In the search bar at the top of the page, we entered the name of the woman who engineered the terrorist massacre in which our fifteen year-old daughter Malki was murdered. If anyone's a terrorist, that person is. It's a matter of public record that she confessed to all the terrorism charges at her trial, and has spoken on YouTube and many other public places dozens of times, explaining that the killings she engineered were done in the name of Hamas for ideological reasons. Not only that but she says proudly, smiling as she does so, that she went looking for religious Jewish children that day, and that she has never had any regrets.

A terrorist? Believe it.

Entering her name in the search bar got us four hits. (You can check by clicking here.) We visited each link and counted up the total number of times the string "terror" appeared in the article. Here are the results.

• Israel publishes names of Palestinian prisoners to be released in Shalit deal | October 16, 2011 | 1 hit
• Palestinian female prisoners resist deportation to Gaza | October 18, 2011 | 0 hits
• Palestinian Prisoners Arrive in Turkey and Syria | October 19, 2011 | 0 hits
• Palestinians released in Shalit prisoner swap face challenges | June 13, 2012 | 0 hits

The one time 'terror' does appear in the four articles is when an Israeli terror-victim organization opposed to the Shalit deal is quoted and named. The Shalit deal is the act of extortion in which 1,027 killers and other terrorists, our daughter's murderer among them, walked free.

So now we turn to Faisal J. Abbas, editor-in-chief, and ask: Is this because

murderous attacks on a group of innocent people who were simply practicing their basic right of observing Friday prayers [Mr Abbas' words]

are terror? 

But murderous attacks on a group of innocent people, most of them children simply practicing their basic right of buying lunch in a pizzeria, are not terror?

And if they are terror (and we of course all know perfectly well they are) even though those innocent victims are Jewish, Israeli and/or Zionist, why does Al Arabiya English call the murderer a prisoner, a Jordanian, in fact almost anything but a terrorist? 

Why are the crimes of terrorism to which she proudly confessed never mentioned? But irrelevant and euphemistic descriptors are?

Is this, too, because of confusion, Mr Abbas? If so, we might be able to help. After all, you yourself put it so well:

Now, more than ever, is the time to act and rid the world of terrorism and the poisonous, deadly doctrines tearing the region apart. [Al Arabiya, yesterday]

Please be in touch [email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com] and let's start a dialogue.

18-Feb-15: Countering Vacuous Euphemisms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18-Sep-14: Is it activism when they say they need to behead you?

Once, in a more innocent era, beheading was
dismissed as just a word. Placard-carrying
youth at a Sydney Moslem protest, 2012
[Image Source]

It's right and appropriate that Australia's ABC use the word terror in connection with today's reporting of the country's largest counter-terror activity in history. But for how long?

When Islamist sociopaths in the Sydney 'burbs threaten to murder and/or behead Australians, that's terror, and the people doing it are terrorists. But when they or their cousins in their Middle East villages threaten the very same to Israelis or to Arabs who pray in a different direction or whose view of their shared religion is different in some big or small way, why are they then called militants or activists?

The head of Reuters in the days right after 9/11 said the reason is "that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" [Sydney Morning Herald, 2004]. But we, and that includes the media, have to get this right. There is a way to know terror, to define terror, to classify certain actions and people as terrorist. Getting this wrong has huge life-and-death consequences. The senior people at the BBC don't agree, and say instead that using the word "terrorist" "can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding":

...we don't change the word "terrorist" when quoting other people, but we try to avoid the word ourselves; not because we are morally neutral towards terrorism, nor because we have any sympathy for the perpetrators of the inhuman atrocities which all too often we have to report, but because terrorism is a difficult and emotive subject with significant political overtones. [BBC: Language when Reporting Terrorism]

That's one of the reasons people who think the way we do have for years tried to publicly shame the BBC's policy guidelines [full text online here] on how and when to use "terror".

If Australian news reports this evening referred to the people who threaten to behead other Australians by calling them militants or activists, most members of their Australian audience would be outraged.

But as Israelis, we have gotten used to the reality of reporters and their editors engaging in walking-on-eggshells terminological acrobatics in order to disgracefully avoid using the one accurate descriptor: terrorist.  

Same protest, same Sydney public park, even
younger supporter of beheading for the sake
of Islam [Image Source]

A seminal article by Daniel Pipes in the New York Sun ten years ago surveyed the state of the euphemisms-for-terrorism art. His listing included activists (Pakistan Times).assailants (National Public Radio), attackers (Economist), bombers (The Guardian), commandos (Agence France-Presse which also called them "membres du commando"), criminals (Times of London), extremists (United Press International), fighters (Washington Post), group (The Australian), guerrillas (New York Post in an editorial), gunmen (Reuters), hostage-takers (Los Angeles Times), insurgents (a New York Times headline), kidnappers (The Observer), militants (Chicago Tribune), perpetrators (New York Times), radicals (BBC), rebels (Sydney Morning Herald), separatists (Christian Science Monitor), 

(A good thing suicide bomber is not on his list: if we had our way, no one would ever use that term. Those people are human bombs.)

A year ago, we wrote here about how

George Carlin, the great and late, joked that people once used to get old and die but not any more. Nowadays they become pre-elderly; then turn into senior citizens; then pass away in a terminal episode or following a negative patient care outcome or in response to a therapeutic misadventure. The world is poorer with him gone. But with the greatest of respect (non-euphemistically, that would be: recognizing the utter foolishness of what people routinely do), it's not at all humorous when the authorities hijack our language in order to advance policies which, if they had to explain them, would be offensive, repugnant and unacceptable.

The terrorists are a serious threat to just about everyone, and it's ludicrous to think "we" have "them" on the run. The terrorists can do immense harm, turn people's lives upside down, inflict huge pain and destruction. But unless we let them, they cannot change the shape of society. Those euphemisms and the fuzzy, agenda-driven thinking behind them, however, can do immense harm to the ability of civilized countries to keep their people and their achievements safe. What we do with words really does make a difference.

6-Jun-10: It's not that complicated: Is IHH a humanitarian group or a terrorist group?

The thug-enhanced flotilla that sought to break through the Israeli embargo on the port of Gaza was backed by a Turkish organization called IHH (Islan Haklary Ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi in Turkish). Are they pure as the driven snow? Or is this an organization compromised by deep connection to terrorism?

It's worrying and infuriating to see how this straightforward matter is being manipulated so that the credibility of the answer depends on how much you hate Israel.

First, the relatively uncontroversial aspects... IHH was founded in 1992. The CIA began tracking them in 1996 because of a perception of radical Islamist leanings. As one study has observed: "Like many other Islamist charities, the IHH has a record of providing relief to areas where disaster has struck in the Muslim world. However, the organization is not a force for good."

That study explains:

"That's because the Turkish nonprofit belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella organization known to finance terrorism called the Union of Good (Ittilaf al-Kheir in Arabic). Notably, the Union is chaired by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is known best for his religious ruling that encourages suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.  According to one report, Qardawi personally transferred millions of dollars to the Union in an effort to provide financial support to Hamas"

Their activities caught the attention of Evan Kohlmann, an investigator of terrorist groups. He published a little-noticed essay titled "Shooting the Messenger: A Look at the Facts on the Turkish Aid Group IHH" a few days ago. It's worth a few moments' reading.

When I first published a research paper four years ago with the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) on the Turkish Muslim charitable group Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), I didn't imagine it would get much of a response outside the academic conference in which it was presented in Copenhagen. However, as a result of this weekend's tragic Israeli raid on an IHH-sponsored flotilla of vessels attempting to break the ongoing blockade on Gaza, the group has suddenly jumped into the headlines, and has become a focus of intense debate over the intentions of the flotilla organizers and the controversial killing of at least 9 would-be participants by Israeli commandos.
...I'm rather mystified why the flotilla killings--whether right or wrong--would have any bearing on the factual question of whether the IHH has engaged in illicit financing and episodic support to extremist groups. The evidence in this regard is fairly weighty, and much of it comes directly from the Turkish government -- not the United States, nor the Israelis.

He describes how Turkish police raided IHH headquarters in Istanbul at the end of 1997 and had its leaders arrested. Five months later, they faced formal legal charges connected with explosives, bomb making and jihad. Evidence was presented from a French source that IHH's true goals were

"overthrowing democratic, secular, and constitutional order present in Turkey and replacing it with an Islamic state founded on the Shariah."

A second line of connection to jihad: IHH was connected to the attempt by a a jihadist, Ahmed Ressam, the so-called Millenium bomber. Ressam was convicted of attempting to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on New Year's Eve 1999. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison, but in February 2010 an appellate court held the sentence to be too lenient, and ordered that it be extended. In that prosecution, the noted French counter-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere took the stand and testified that IHH had played what he called "an important role" in the LAX plot:

"The IHH is an NGO (a non-governmental organization) but it was kind of a type of cover-up… in order to obtain forged documents and also to obtain different forms of infiltration for Mujahideen in combat. And also to go and gather[recruit] these Mujahideens. And finally, one of the last responsibilities that they had was also to be implicated or involved in weapons trafficking."

As Evan Kohlmann writes, none of this information is sensitive or secret.

"Nor is it particularly difficult to come by. Turkish government officials have openly acknowledged as much in major Western media outlets."

The French judge was interviewed in the last few days by Associated Press.

The Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, had "clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad," former investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

This information is freely available on the web. You don't need to be a terrorism specialist to see and be troubled by it. So why are otherwise credible sources raising snakey questions that undermine the allegations against IHH as if they were part of an Israeli conspiracy? For instance:

• "The IHH has been accused by Israel of funneling support to militant organizations across the Muslim world, a charge the group denies."[Christian Science Monitor]
•  "'Terror' smear against IHH springs from a familiar source" [Mondoweiss - and no prizes for figuring out where that familiar source resides]
• "Israel starts smear campaign in EU against Turkish charity" [World Bulletin]
• "The Islamic charity which largely funded the aid flotilla... Its inspiration is unapologetically religious but the IHH insists its mission is purely humanitarian, despite Israeli claims that it supports the armed activities of Hamas. It is certainly rich. ...It bought a 15-year-old ferry, the Mavi Marmara, for more than $1m (£686,000). It also has some powerful backers in the governing party, the AKP." [BBC]

You don't need to buy Israel's case to see that, being generous, IHH has a murky past and a highly compromised standpoint when it comes to jihad and acts of terror.