18-Jan-20: Red lines, defilement and more Arab-on-Israeli knifings

The Kiryat Arab victim in today's Israel National News report

If you rely on news reports alone, the ebb and flow of Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks can seem to happen without any obvious pattern or underlying motivation.

But sometimes, you wait a little and you learn that there are forces at work that wanted these to happen.

We're mostly in the dark about what's driving events here in the Jerusalem area today. But as always, there are clues. And yes, a Palestinian Arab child is involved. Again.

From Times of Israel, we know a man of 22 suffered moderate injuries this afternoon (Saturday - Shabbat) when he was stabbed in the shoulder by "a Palestinian youth" (a term that can have multiple meanings) in Kiryat Arba. The knifer was arrested while trying to escape the scene of the attack according to the IDF is in their hands for questioning. Haaretz says the stabber is an as-yet-unnamed seventeen year old. Keep that in mind the next time you see, and you surely will see, hostile news coverage complaining of how Israel takes so many children into custody.

The knifing victim is in Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center where they say he is in stable condition. Israel National News this evening says the Israeli is Moshe Greenblatt, who says from his hospital bed that "Thank G-d, I feel good... The knife broke and he didn't manage to stab any of the people around me."

Earlier today (Saturday - the Jewish Sabbath), a Palestinian Arab female said to be "in her fifties" was taken into custody by Border Police officers after threatening them with a knife at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City. The Times of Israel report says she was subdued by officers and a civilian who happened to be at the scene and is also undergoing questioning.

Friday morning, right after the completion of their morning prayer service which were attended by an estimated 8,000 people, hundreds of Muslim Arab worshipers chanted about killing Jews outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. Police dispersed the crowd. Times of Israel says no one was injured in the clashes with police.

TV footage from the march shows members of the unruly crowd shouting in Arabic “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning.”

Video clip from 124news.tv

It's a recurring theme - the chant recalls how in the seventh century Muslims massacred and expelled Jews from the town of Khaybar, located in today's Saudi Arabia. Their chants also included “With spirit and blood, we will salvage Al-Aqsa” and “Jews, the army of Al-Aqsa is returning.”

Hamas, on Friday, declared itself happy with the unrest. Times of Israel quotes one of its spokespeople saying the morning prayers “support our people in their campaign against the Zionist occupation and thwart its racist plans.”

This past Wednesday, Hamas publicly called for Palestinian Arabs to “mobilize” during Friday’s prayers against the “defilement” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs by “the Zionist occupation.” The terrorists sought to persuade Israeli authorities that “our sanctities are a red line that cannot be tolerated.”

07-Oct-19: How hard is it to produce 12 year old knife-attackers?

We don''t claim to be 100% sure but a social media post [here]

suggests this is the stabber described in our post.

The world-class treatment he's getting is courtesy of

Shaarei Zedek Medical Center and the government of Israel

With a current news item in mind, here's some insight into how the Palestinian Authority's policy of child weaponization works.

We wrote here a week and a half ago ["27-Sep-19: Weaponized Palestinian Arab children and more Arab-on-Israel stabbings"] about an on-duty female member of the Israel Police being injured in the course of a frenzied stabbing attack launched by a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen. We were wrong: he was twelve. And it's evident he didn't intend to inflict mild trauma. He was very likely intent on killing.

The boy apppeared in court yesterday.

12-year-old indicted for Jerusalem attack in which officer was lightly injured | Boy charged with terror offenses for attempting to stab police officers in Old City last month; female officer was lightly hurt when barrier fell on her hand during scuffle | Times of Israel | 6 October 2019 | The Jerusalem district attorney on Sunday indicted a 12-year-old boy under terror laws for the attempted stabbing of a policewoman in Jerusalem’s Old City last month.
According to the indictment, on September 26, the day of the attack, the minor attended prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. At the conclusion of prayers, he allegedly walked up to a group of female officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate, above the Western Wall area, pulled out a knife and attempted to stab the officers. During the ensuing scuffle, a female officer, age 34, was lightly injured when a security barrier fell on her hand. According to the indictment, a staff member of the Waqf, the Muslim trust that oversees the site, tried to catch the boy and keep the police from him.
The boy was overpowered at the scene and arrested.
The boy is accused of committing an act of terror in which he unlawfully attempted to injure a person with a knife for religious and national motive. Prosecutors asked that the boy remain detained until the end of legal proceedings.

There's no indication whether the Waqf worker who tried to prevent the police from taking the stabber into custody will face criminal or terror charges. If he's not, that's disturbing.

Here's some of the background that put the boy in the photo above into, first, an Israeli hospital bed and then Israel's juvenile criminal justice system where he's now fated to spend some of what should have been his best years.

First, let's understand the meaning of Waqf, an Arabic term defined [Wikipedia] as "confinement and prohibition" or causing a thing to stop or stand still. In the legal sense, it is said to mean the detention of a specific thing for purposes of "charity of poors [sic] or other good objects".

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan imposed a waqf on Jerusalem after the invasion by its British-led army, and the subsequent two-decade long massively-destructive conquest and occupation, of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

After East Jerusalem was liberated in the course of the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel - for pragmatic reasons related to its desire for neighborly relations and respect for Muslim sensibilities - allowed the waqf to re-assert its authority over the Temple Mount, which happens to be Judaism's holiest site.

Jordan's King Abdullah II "currently supplies all of the funding needed to operate the waqf." But as a recent analysis of changes in its structure shows, ["New Waqf Council Managing the Temple Mount", JCPA - Nadav Shragai, Lenny Ben-David | February 28, 2019], the Waqf is poised to do more harm:

The main, most dramatic change in the composition of the Waqf... was the joining of Sheikh Akram Sabri, currently chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council and former Mufti of Jerusalem. Sabri is now identified with the Muslim Brotherhood’s “the northern faction of the Islamic Movement” in Israel, and he follows the orders of Turkey and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some also believe that he is close to Hamas. At the beginning of the second intifada, Sabri identified with suicide bombings, and he is known for his extreme pronouncements against Israel... Other new members of the Jordanian Waqf, who Jordan agreed to allow into the new council after it was expanded from 11 members to 18 are mainly affiliated with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority... Until the establishment of the new Waqf, most of its members were pro-Jordanian. Its new composition expresses a united front [among] the Palestinian Authority, Fatah, and people like Sheikh Akram Sabri – and anyone who fears for Jordan’s future status on the Temple Mount. It is a joint coalition against the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

The weaponization of Palestinian Arab children by the kleptocratic/geriatric Mahmoud Abbas regime that rules them is the result of several concurrent strategies that have been implemented for years by now:

• Large long-term monthly payments to prisoners and the families of dead terrorists by the Palestinian Authority, funded from a deficit budget that is replenished via foreign aid grants to the PA. These Pay-to-Slay payments as they are comminly termed grow with the seriousness of the terror offense. 
• Overt, explicit incitement to more acts of terror by the Palestinian Authority and by terror groups
• The recruiting and training of children to engage in conflict: Special mention to the United Nations UNRWA people responsible these past seven decades for nurturing, preserving, perpetuating and legitimizing the violent discontent of Palestinian Arab schookl children.
• The systematic glorification of Arab-on-Israeli violence throughout Palestinian Arab society
• The deliberate, ideology-driven abandonment of weaponized Palestinian Arab children by the numerous child-protection agencies that raise billions each year on the profoundly dishonest premise that, like DCI Palestine, they are "committed to securing a just and viable future for Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory".

With all these in place, getting to the results they want are not that challenging.

Israel attracts serious criticism for its treatment of child offenders. In large measure, this is dishonest, politically-spun and based on poorly understood data. For instance, as a respected human rights organization based in Israel reported in February 2018 [NGO Monitor] in an essay that contradicts some of what "everyone knows" about Israel's "failures":

• Some 90,000 children aged between 10 and 17 were arrested in England and Wales between April 2015 and March 2016, an average of about 7,500 per month. Adjust these numbers for population and you can make this highly relevant comparison - that minors are arrested in England and Wales (where armed conflict is not currently a major feature of life) 5.5 times more often than Palestinian Arab minors living in the so-called West Bank are.
• In data covering the years since since 2013 (a period of considerable Arab-on-Israeli violence and the massive Arab promotion of terror), the number of Palestinian Arab minors arrested annually in areas under Israeli control was between 800 and 1,000. 
• Of these arrested, how many were subjected to prosecution? About 450-505. Thus on average, in a population of roughly a million minors (quoting Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics data), fewer than 85 such minors are arrested each month and fewer than half of those are prosecuted.
• And this: International law and Article 66 of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandates that Israel must establish military courts as part of its obligation to “take all the measures in [its] power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.” Moreover, Israel's law and enforcement practices meet all the requirements of “due process,” the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 68 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The rules of evidence applied by the Military Courts are the same as the rules of evidence applied in the Israeli domestic criminal justice system.

These are not points that the chorus of child-weaponizers and their foreign-government-funders, backers and advocates want us to know.

Nor do they advertise the single most important take-away we can think of: that, given Pal Arab society's massive ongoing investment, it is dead easy to weaponize pre-teen Palestinian Arab boys and girls and turn them into killers.

27-Sep-19: Weaponized Palestinian Arab children and more Arab-on-Israel stabbings

Image Source

From Israel National News, an on-duty Israel Police officer was stabbed in Jerusalem's Old City Thursday afternoon.

The attack on the woman is being treated as a terror attack. Her injuries were relatively mild (for a stabbing); she was brought to Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment.

The knifer was apprehended after being wrestled to the ground (not shot, not beaten to a pulp) and taken into custody by other officers at the scene. Israel's Channel 13 News shows a video clip [here] and says the attacker is a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen.

Thirteen. Yet another weaponized child. A life incomprehensibly cheapened, and in danger of being wasted before it gets underway.

Referring to this child assailant, Times of Israel says he approached a cluster of officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate (in Hebrew: Sha'ar Hashalshelet), above the Western Wall area, around 4:00 pm. He pulled out a knife and in the customary way attempted to stab anyone he could, indiscriminately. Any Jew would do.

We expect he will now become another poster child for the irresponsible human rights industry's pleas for Israel to stop arresting children. Listening, Amnesty?

A day earlier, Wednesday, an Israeli woman of about twenty was stabbed in another act of Arab-on-Israel terrorism near the busy Maccabim/Shilat Junction on Route 443. That's the major highway that runs between Jerusalem and the airport.

The website of i24News reports that the woman was standing at a bus stop which is adjacent to the main entrance to the city of Modi’in. For what it's worth, the bus stop is inside the Green Line which is frequently - and totally misleadingly - called the 1967 border. (It's simply the 1949 armistice line, nothing more.) The Arabb news reports we have seen tell their readers that this was an attack on settlers in some occupied place. It's a powerful form of incitement, too good to skip by troubling themselves with checking the actual facts.

The Israeli victim received emergency medical treatment at the scene and was brought to Tel Hashomer Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Her condition was described as light to moderate in a Magen David Adom bulletin.

We found this security camera footage on an Arab news site (the contents almost certainly originated with an Israeli source):



A 14-year-old Palestinian Arab male was taken into custody at the scene. Yes, 14. Yet another weaponized child. Who says the Palestinian Arab education system produces nothing notable?

Child weaponization by the Palestinian Arab despots of their people's children is a subject that enrages us. That's one reason why we address it so frequently. Click here for some our prior posts on this deplorable and ongoing phenomenon.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Zamienione w broń palestyńskie dzieci") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

UPDATE Thursday October 10, 2019: The stabber in the video above, the attack near Modi'in, turns out to be all of fifteen. Times of Israel reports today

15-year-old Palestinian indicted for stabbing Israeli woman near Modiin
Teen charged with terror offenses for attack at Maccabim Junction on Route 443 last month
October 10, 2019 at 2:18 pm | Prosecutors on Thursday indicted a 15-year-old on terror charges for stabbing an Israeli woman near the central city of Modiin last month. According to the indictment, the teenage boy is accused of carrying out a terror attack, illegal possession of a knife and entering Israel illegally. The prosecution has requested that the suspect be detained until the end of legal proceedings. The 22-year-old woman was stabbed on September 25 at the Maccabim Junction along Route 443. She was treated in a hospital for a stab wound to her upper body. Police said a Border Police officer was also lightly hurt while restraining the suspect. According to police, Border Police officers driving on Route 443 spotted the suspect trying to flee and chased after him on foot. The officers fired a number of bullets in the air, and collared the suspect a few hundred meters from the scene of the stabbing.

16-Aug-19: Children with knives and another Arab-on-Israeli stabbing frenzy

Photo montage from an online source [here] shows the stabbers

as depicted today in the social media and via security cam footage

In the latest such attack, two Palestinian Arab children armed with knives ["Cop injured in Jerusalem stabbing attack; 2 assailants shot", Times of Israel, August 15, 2019] were stopped from killing their Israeli targets on Thursday.

Both are minors. At least one is 14 years old. Some reports, but not all, say the other is too.

Two teenage assailants stabbed a police officer, moderately injuring him, in an apparent terror attack in Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday, officials said. The assailants were shot by security forces at the scene. One of them was pronounced dead at the scene, the second was critically wounded and taken to the hospital, a police spokesperson said.
Graphic video footage from the scene showed the two teenagers walk up from behind a group of police officers stationed in the Old City. As they approached, they suddenly pulled out knives and began repeatedly stabbing one of the cops. Other officers at the scene opened fire at the pair as they were stabbing the victim.
The injured police officer was approximately 40 years old. He sustained multiple stab wounds to the upper body, medics said.
“We gave him medical care, including stopping the bleeding and bandaging him, and we took him to the hospital,” one of the medics on the scene said. The officer was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Via social media [click to view], there's high quality graphic security cam video of the actual attack and of the quick and focused response by the Israeli security personnel.

The location is said to be the Old City's Chain Gate. It's one of the dozen open gates (though sometimes closed) that lead to the Temple Mount and is limited, in accordance with current Israeli security measures, to Muslim worshipers and visitors only. In Arabic, they call it Kubat A Silsila.

Shortly after the attack [Image Source]

Haaretz names the 14 year old knifer as Hamuda Khader a-Sheikh who is being treated for his wounds, and a 17 year old (in their version) they name as Nassim Abu Rumi who is said to have died at the scene. (In its report, Ynet says the dead attacker was also fourteen.)

Both evidently, though not confirmed, are from Al-Azaria, a village on the slopes of Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. It's better known to some as the Biblical town of Bethany, the home of Lazarus (hence its Arabic name).

Arab reports include wide-ranging claims that deny and distort:

• Eyewitnesses refuted the IDF's allegations and confirmed that there was no stabbing. They explained that a settler tried to storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and when the guards tried to stop him, he opened fire on the guard's foot... [Sabaharabi, Egypt]
• The police opened fire on two citizens at the Gate of Chains [in the Old City] from the outside, then announced the martyrdom of one of them. The injury of the other is described as medium. An Al Aqsa guard was shot in the foot. [Arabic edition of Ma'an News, Bethlehem]
• The Zionist media reported that a cop was injured by two Palestinian stabbers who attacked him in occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem). The Israeli occupation troops shot directly at the two youths, injuring both of them, and closes the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque, according to Palestinian sources. [Al-Manar, Lebanon]
• Video shows the pair approaching a group of Border Police officers and then lunging at them. The officers immediately open fire on the boys, and do not appear to attempt to subdue them with nonlethal means [from the especially loathsome propaganda mill of Electronic Intifada].
• From a Gaza-based Arab reporter: "2 palestinian kids got murdered by israeli occupation fire in occupied Jerusalem after allegedly stabbing operation #BDS" [Twitter account with more than 6,000 followers]

Source

How Palestinian Arab society weaponizes its children and encourages stabbing attacks in particular has troubled us for years. 

It's a chronic form of incitement that starts at the highest levels of the Palestinian Arab power structure: click for indexed articles.

Three years ago we wrote about how there is no way of avoiding the reality of large swathes of Palestinian Arab society being in the obvious thrall of a passionate embrace of vicious bigotry, murderous savagery and explicit incitement of their own children and grandchildren to murder and to be killed.

Two outside actors deserve a special mention in this grotesquerie:

• The central role of UNRWA, ostensibly an agency that exists to ameliorate the suffering of Arab refugees (Palestinian Arab refugees to be more precise) but in reality a cornerstone of the seven-decades-long Arab strategy to keep the Palestinian Arabs displaced, as miserable as possible and in the news - ought to be acknowledged at this point. By their own reckoning, they play a huge role in the education of Palestinian Arab children. They are certainly part of the problem and not of the solution.
• Amnesty International'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. As we have noted several times [most recently here: "20-Sep-16: Another Pal Arab boy with a knife died today - exactly as the PA intended him to"], there's no longer anything to expect from them.

More than 80 of our blog posts have the tag "Weaponizing Children". This would be an excellent time to re-acquaint ourselves with the betrayal of, and the outrages perpetrated on, the children of Palestinian Arab society by those responsible for their well-being.

It's a reality that's difficult to deny or ignore though plenty of reporters and their editors nonetheless do just that.

11-Apr-19: Two more thwarted terror attacks at heavily-traveled security checkpoint outside Jerusalem

Image Source: Video of the young female attacker
recorded from inside the Arab bus [Source]

Too many observers of what goes on here in Israel talk about terrorism being behind us, finished, defeated. 

It's certainly not so.

A Palestinian woman tried to stab security forces while they were checking a bus passing through the A'Zaim checkpoint next to Jerusalem on Wednesday. Police fired into the air and police detectives who happened to be in the area were able to incapacitate the woman and take away the knife. No injuries were reported. The woman is being interrogated.
On Tuesday, at the same checkpoint, multiple guns and magazines and hundreds of bullets were found in the car of a Palestinian family. The driver's wife, young daughter and days-old son were in the car when it was stopped. [Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2019]

The "Palestinian woman" in yesterday's mid-afternoon attack looks to us more like a girl than an adult woman. Israel National News says she was a resident of Tulkarm.

The video captured from inside the Arab bus out of which she emerged during what we think was a routine security check leaves no doubt that she was armed with and was brandishing a knife. In the specific circumstances, it's clear she was more interested in offense than defence.

A-Zaim (sometimes written Az-Za'ayyem and Al-Zaim; א-זעיים in Hebrew; الزعيم in Arabic) is a busy security checkpoint on one of the roads connecting Maale Adumim with Israel's capital.

A 16 year-old Arab female was intercepted just three months ago ["30-Jan-19: Pal Arab would-be stabber, a 16 year old girl, is stopped before executing an attack near Jerusalem"] at the very same location on Jerusalem's eastern edge. The outcome was far more serious then:

A Palestinian teenage girl was shot dead as she tried to stab an Israeli security officer at a checkpoint outside Jerusalem on Wednesday, police said. According to police, the assailant attacked one of the guards at the A’Zaim crossing east of the capital, in the central West Bank. The Palestinian girl was identified as Samah Mubarak, 16, from the nearby village of al-Ram, the Palestinian Authority’s official Wafa news agency reported... Israeli security officials have said that many attacks by Palestinians, especially women, are driven by personal and domestic issues, more than by ideological considerations. In some cases, Israeli officials have said Palestinians appeared to have carried out attacks or attempted to do so in order to be shot dead by Israeli security forces, as a form of “suicide by cop.” [Times of Israel, January XX, 2019]

Again at A-Zaim, two days ago:

...multiple guns and magazines and hundreds of bullets were found in the car of a Palestinian family. The driver's wife, young daughter and days-old son were in the car when it was stopped. [Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2019]

No one seems to be noting in the news reports (there are very few of them) how appalling it is that a man smuggling a serious weapons cache would use his family, including a new-born infant, as human shields.

30-Jan-19: Pal Arab would-be stabber, a 16 year old girl, is stopped before executing an attack near Jerusalem

From the police security cam video

In yet another instance of a thwarted attack by a weaponized child, a teenage Palestinian Arab girl launched a stabbing attack on an Israeli officer at the A-Za'im security checkpoint east of the capital between Ma'ale Adumim and Jerusalem today (Wednesday) at about 10:15 am.

An Israel Police statement, quoted by Times of Israel, said

"A rapid response by additional security forces brought about her neutralization with no injuries to the security personnel... Police are investigating where the female suspect came from, and heightened security is continuing in the area."

The same media source speculates that this may be yet another instance of 

attacks by Palestinians, especially women, [that] are driven by personal and domestic issues, more than by ideological considerations. In some cases, Israeli officials have said Palestinians appeared to have carried out attacks or attempted to do so in order to be shot dead by Israeli security forces, as a form of "suicide by cop".

Later in the day, the assailant was identified in Arab media as Samah Mubarak, aged 16, from the nearby village of a-Ram. A different Israeli news source says she was

Samah Zuhair Mubarak, an 11th grade student from Ramallah, whose family was originally from Gaza... [source]

She died of her wounds according to Palestinian Authority health ministry officials.

Video footage released by the police show a female, draped from head to toe in black and wearing black gloves, approaching the security personnel at the crossing. Police also circulated a photo of the knife in her possession - while throughout the Arab media reports we have scanned, it's claimed she was unarmed and executed in cold blood. 

None of the many thwarted Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks of the past three years (at least) has ever credibly been shown to meet that description. And A-Za'im has seen numerous Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks - vehicle-rammings, stabbings and bombings. 

The claim this time is embellished by the assertion, pulled out of thin air as far as we can tell, that the girl was shot after refusing to undress and remove her black robes. This line of explanation plays tragically well in Palestinian Arab circles.

30-Jul-18: Neither Ahed's gaze nor her ideas are the problem – it’s what others do with them

Monday's media focus on Ahed Tamimi was wide, attentive - and
spectacularly shallow [Image Source]

A version of the opinion piece below by Arnold Roth was published today [online here] by the Jerusalem Post. 

It was solicited, we think, to be one of the alternative voices in the context of the wide and largely depressing current news reporting around the release from prison of Ahed Tamimi on July 29, 2018.

More horror than heroism
Arnold Roth

My sweet-natured daughter Malki, brimming with empathy and generosity toward others, always with a smile on her face, was 15 when she was murdered in the Sbarro pizzeria massacre seventeen years ago this week.

The experience of losing her, of trying to rebalance my life and my family’s and of trying to make sense of the reactions of other people has shaped much of what I believe about terrorism.

We know who plotted the Sbarro barbarism. It was not Ahed Tamimi. But when her clan, the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh, get together to celebrate it as we know they do, she is an enthusiastic participant.

In a village where almost everyone is related by blood and (yes, and) marriage, Ahed is a cousin of Ahlam Tamimi in multiple ways. Ahlam now lives free in Jordan. She boasts that she chose the site for the explosion, seeking to kill as many Jewish children as possible, and planted the human bomb. Via social media, public speeches and (for 5 years) her own TV program, she urges others to follow her lead.

When Ahlam married Nizar Tamimi ["22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"], also a murderer from the village, a few months after both walked free in the Shalit Deal, Ahed was there to dance and gaze adoringly at the bride.

But neither her gaze nor her ideas are the problem. It’s what others do with them.

Ahed’s parents make a living from propagandizing against Israel. They fashioned and groomed Ahed ["24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey"], leveraging her blondeness, pushing her into staged conflicts with Israeli soldiers from when she was 10, deliberately putting her at real risk on a weekly basis for years, long before she had the ability to discern what was being done to her.

Though all they had to go by was mostly-staged images of her thrusting fists at Israeli soldiers, too many reporters and editors responded (and still do) with absurd comparisons to Joan of Arc and Malala.

On the day of the slapping/kicking incident that led to her facing Israeli charges, Ahed’s mother pointed one of her cameras at the girl. She told her to speak to the world. And she did. The girl’s message was angry, urging anti-Israel violence and more conflict.

Though published and promoted by advocates of the Israeli cause, what Ahed said in that clip was largely ignored. As if she had said nothing. Its harsh reality was and still is denied.

The weaponization of Palestinian Arab children by their own society, even by their own families, is so incomprehensible to outsiders that it seems many deny its reality for that reason alone.

They deny what Ahed symbolizes too: identification with the vicious murderers in her own clan, with explosive rage, with a horrifying zealotry that brings people to push their society’s innocent children into the front lines. The Palestinian Arabs have many needs but what this girl stands for – more anger, more bitterness, more failure – delivers nothing of value to them.

They don’t hear this from the news industry - the reporters and editors who have built a podium for Ahed Tamimi and her enablers.

They don’t hear it either from their own utterly failed leadership who exploit Ahed Tamimi as another cheap diversion from the disasters they have brought on their people.

[Arnold Roth brought his family to Jerusalem from Australia 30 years ago. A lawyer and manager in Israel’s emerging technology industries, he now devotes his time to advocacy for special needs children and with his wife Frimet established the Malki Foundation in their murdered daughter’s memory.]

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

Image Source: CUFI

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

As Times of Israel reports:

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

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

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

And

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

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

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

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

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

Times of Israel notes that he comes from

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29-Mar-18: Taylor Force Becomes Law

Abbas getting hot under the collar in Ramallah, January 2018 [Image Source]

There's a spectrum of views on how well the new US law, just enacted, is going to serve the purpose for which it was drafted. Here's one, reprinted in full, that raises some points we think need emphasizing.

Taylor Force Becomes Law 

Editorial of The New York Sun | March 23, 2018

The passage into law today of the Taylor Force Act represents a particle of bipartisan good news amid an omnibus spending bill that is, as President Trump marked today, riddled with pork. It represents a first step toward calling the Palestinian authorities to account for paying their people to kill Jews — and others — and using American money to do so.

Sad to say, though, the memory of the magnificent American for whom this law is named deserves better than what the Congress gave him today. Taylor Force was a West Point graduate who became an officer of field artillery (its motto is “First to Fire”). Out of the Army, he was a graduate student when, at 29, he was stabbed to death by an Arab terrorist in Israel.

Early versions of the Taylor Force Act would have brought to a halt nearly all American funding of the Palestinian Arabs if the Palestinian authority continued to underwrite terrorist families. Cutting off American funds, which are fungible, could have dealt a body blow to a Palestinian Arab regime that for years has been playing a cynical and lucrative double game.

And for a lot of money. Our government alone has been paying the Palestinian Arabs on the order of $400 million a year. The Jewish News Syndicate cites a report that the outlays for 2017 would come in at $363 million. JNS quotes Prime Minister Netanyahu as reckoning that the Palestinian Authority parlays something like $353 million a year to terrorists and their families.

By the time the Senate got done with the Taylor Force Act, though, the potential penalties for the Palestinians could cost them as little as a third of the U.S. funds. The penalty is bupkis. Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America tells us he is shocked by the final measure, even though it is getting praise from many other sources.
We share his reaction. What happened to the Taylor Force Act as it went through Congress reminds us of what happened to the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which was gutted in the Senate. That deed was done at the last minute by Dianne Feinstein, through a waiver that allowed the President to hold off on moving the embassy for national security exigencies.

So Mrs. Feinstein — with the connivance of Charles Schumer — was able to delay the move of the American embassy for a generation. Is it going to take that long before the Palestinian Arab leadership feels the full force of the Taylor Force Act? It will be an early test of President Trump and his new leadership at the State Department and National Security Council.

We have written often about the Palestinian Authority's Rewards for Terror scheme (known also as Pay-to-Slay), and will be doing so again in the coming days now that the newly announced PA budget drops the camouflage and admits what it has concealed for years. Whenever Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks happen, it's important to recall that  the perpetrators become entitled to substantial payments from the PA. As we noted at the time, the relatives of the Palestinian Arab stabber who killed an American visitor to Tel Aviv, Taylor Force, in 2016 now receive monthly payments equal to several times the average Palestinian wage.

11-Mar-18: Why do so many thwarted Arab-on-Israeli terrorists survive?

The IDF Samaria Military Court compound [Image Source]

If you're a regular visitor to this blog, you won't need reminding that when it comes to the deaths of Palestinian Arabs in circumstances that involve the Israeli military, there's rarely just a single agreed version of the facts. Our question in this post is: why are such deaths so rare?

Bear with us.

The Palestinian Arab side are currently - as they have periodically for years - urging news readers to accept that an innocent fisherman ["High Court delays release of Gaza fisherman’s body", Times of Israel, March 8, 2018] was killed in cold blood by Israeli naval forces. That he's dead is sadly beyond dispute, but the circumstances are not:

“We are sure that the wounded are fishermen who went out to sea to make a living – and nothing else,” the head of the union told Haaretz daily... Incidents involving IDF using excessive or deadly force against the Palestinians have been on the rise since US President Donald Trump announced his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the US embassy there." [RT, February 25, 2018]

Another Gazan fisherman was shot dead by Egyptian forces [Al Araby, January 13, 2018] a few weeks earlier. But for reasons that most readers can intuit, considerably less media attention has been paid to that.

Which brings us to events that unfolded in Israel's Gaza-envelope communities this morning:

Gaza resident arrested after crossing into Israel with grenade, knife | Times of Israel | March 11, 2018, 10:04 am | The IDF arrested two Palestinians early Sunday after they separately crossed the border fence from the Gaza Strip into Israel, one of them carrying weapons. The military said in a statement that troops apprehended the two Gazans shortly after they had crossed the fence. One was found carrying a grenade and a knife. The army said he is suspected of planning to carry out a terror attack in Israel. One of the suspects is from the north of the Strip while the other was from the south. The army said the two incidents appeared unrelated due to the different locations. The two were transferred to security forces for interrogation, likely by the Shin Bet security service. Gazans are apprehended crossing into Israel fairly regularly, many of them apparently seeking to escape an increasingly difficult humanitarian situation in the Strip. Suspects are believed to sometimes carry weapons in the hopes of being sent to Israeli prison rather than back to the Palestinian enclave.

It's too soon to categorize today's two Gazan Arab arrivals. Are they terrorists? Social climbers? Economic refugees?

But it's not too soon to absorb the fact that both are alive. And that at least one of them came equipped with weapons. And that Gazans entering Israel always arrive without badges stuck to their foreheads announcing that they are on jihadist missions and looking to create mayhem. That assessment has to be made in the heat of the pursuit by IDF service personnel.

Given the blood-curdling ideology which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other like-minded terror organizations successfully pump into the heads of their followers and subjects, it's usually strategically wise to assume the most malevolent interpretation.

The intercepted pipe-bomb from the February 13, 2018 attack. The metal
ball bearings are there to rip apart the flesh of the victims [Image Source]

Just to reinforce that point, all of these incidents of terror-centered Arab-on-Israeli violence were recorded in the past 14 hours - and all were almost certainly intended to produce deaths:

• Three Palestinian Arabs armed with Molotov cocktails were apprehended by IDF forces near Route 90, one of Israel's most strategic arteries, running from the northern border all the way to Eilat in the south. It's Israel's longest road. Israel National News says: "The possibility that they are members of a terror cell that threw Molotov cocktails along central roads over the past month is being investigated."
• Around 10:55 pm last night, an IDF post located just outside Psagot, an Israeli community of about 2,000 residents, came under shooting attack.
• Then near midnight, shots were fired at soldiers manning the busy Beitunia Crossing, a short distance north of Jerusalem and close to Givat Ze'ev (no injuries, no serious damage). A manhunt is underway in both cases. The distance between the sites of the two shootings is only about 30 km.
• Police, quoted by Times of Israel, say two Palestinian Arab children, both of them 16 years old and living in Jenin, were stopped this morning by Border Police guards at the security checkpoint next to the entrance to the Samaria Military Court. It's in northern Israel in the village of Salem and close to Megiddo (called Armageddon in the Bible). They were found to be carrying pipe bombs - one per boy - concealed on their bodies. Each one also had a lighter "with which officers suspect they intended to ignite the bombs. The entrance to the court was temporarily blocked while a sapper inspected the devices, which contained explosives, and neutralized them." The background is extraordinary: though it may come as a surprise to even dedicated followers of news from our area, this morning's weaponized children were carrying out the seventh thwarted attempt at pipe-bombing that same court complex in the past four months. Previous intercepts happened on February 14, 2018 (three Palestinian Arabs arrested); February 13, 2018 (single attacker, his pipe bomb packed with metal shards); February 7, 2018 (single Palestinian Arab male attacker);  December 28, 2017 - again, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy with a pipe bomb); December 17, 2017 (a Palestinian Arab with two pipe bombs - one attached to his body under his clothing, and a second one in his coat pocket); October 15, 2017 (single attacker, one pipe bomb). Again - all aiming at the same target.

Motives don't get enough attention in this part of the world. Perhaps that's because the urgency of the task at hand and the potential price of the security people failing to act quickly enough. The result is  that there's always a premium on decisiveness and on certain prevention.

Fortunately for those Gazan infiltrators who come across the border for the personal benefits of the experience, and for the pipe-bombers turning up like lemmings at the doors of the Samaria Military Court compound, the IDF usually doesn't shoot first and ask questions later, at least when circumstances permit. If they acted differently, the number of dead thwarted terror-attackers would be substantially greater.

Let us know if you ever see a mainstream news article that reaches the same conclusion.

10-Feb-18: Two more Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attacks thwarted; both perpetrators are just 15

Totally unrelated to today's report, this product of the UN-operated
UNRWA school system has learned valuable skills involving household
tools which many of his age-mates have applied - under the influence
of inspiration from multiple levels of their society - to their daily lives 

Just yesterday, we posted ["09-Feb-18: At the Tomb of Patriarchs, yet another thwarted Arab-on-Israeli stabbing attack"] about what we called the sixth thwarted attack in and around the ancient and sacred Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron during the past two months.

Today there's yet another. Times of Israel reported around 4:00 pm this afternoon:

For the second day in a row, Border Police arrested a Palestinian suspect in the West Bank city of Hebron on Saturday, after finding a knife hidden under his clothes at the entrance to the Tomb of the Patriarchs holy site. After the 15-year-old boy set off the metal detector at a checkpoint outside the holy site, officers cocked their weapons at him and asked him to slowly raise his shirt. Upon recognizing the knife underneath, security forces detained the teen and took him in for additional questioning... ["Palestinian stopped outside Hebron holy site with knife", Jacob Magid in Times of Israel, February 10, 2018]

Times of Israel reports that in a separate thwarted attack yesterday (Friday), Israeli security forces arrested another armed Palestinian teenager at the entrance to the West Bank community of Hashmona'im, located just off Route 443 and a short stroll away from the city of Modi'in.

The 15 year-old from Bil'in had this knife on his body when arrested
at the entrance to Hashmona'im on Friday

Service personnel from the Border Guard (Mishmar Hagvul) police were alerted and ordered the suspect to stop. He ignored their command and was soon overpowered, arrested, searched and taken into custody. The would-be attacker, a resident of nearby Bil'in, was found to be armed with a knife. No one was injured though it's apparent to any intelligent observer that this, like today's attack, could easily have ended very differently.

With its easy access - located near major highways and half-way between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Bi'in is host to an ongoing media-focused cottage industry of holding weekly "protests" to which members of the reporting industry have made their way on Friiday's throughout the past thirteen years [see Al Jazeera for background]

The underlying story, which is egregiously ignored by the mainstream media, is the way fifteen year-old Palestinian Arab children are front-line troops on behalf of the Palestinian Arab cause, having undergone a relentless and ongoing process of weaponization in their schools, social media and mosques.

04-Feb-18: The embarrassing violence of Ahed Tamimi and its fig-leafers

Nariman, Bassem and Ahed Tamimi of Nabi Saleh

[Image Source]

We have more than the regular amount of interest in the in-your-face bigotry and incitement-to-extreme-violence of the loathsome Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh. We have explained why over and again in past posts.

But for anyone fresh to this blog or to us - the parents of Malki Roth - or to the news industry's sickening and highly-selective fixation with the media-centric doings of the Tamimis, we suggest to start here:

• 24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey
• 19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets
• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists
• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

With the background in mind, think now about the stream of news articles during the past six weeks that have delivered up softball versions of Tamimi analysis, driven by yet another in a long series of reports of what are in reality self-engineered "clashes" with the IDF. 

The central player is, invariably and as always, Ahed Tamimi.

Today she's a young woman of seventeen (born January 31, 2001) who, as we sit here writing these lines, is being held behind bars in an Israeli prison while a phalanx of publicists, reporters, TV presenters and politically-active non-governmental organizations calls with rising urgency for her unconditional release. 

We leave to readers to figure out for themselves why she was arrested and whether and on what terms she ought to be let loose.

Our concern here is to cover matters that one high-profile news article after another in the past month and a half have simply ignored: what are her actual values? Where does she stand on the subject of real, physical Arab-on-Israeli violence of the lethal kind? (Given the obvious confusion about this in the media, the questions have surprisingly clear-cut answers.)

Our comments are prompted by an egregious case, the latest in a depressing series, of superficial and therefore second-rate reporting, this time from a serious source: "Meet 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, the new face of Palestinian resistance" [Derek Stoffel, Middle East Correspondent for CBC, the Canadian national broadcaster, February 4, 2018]. 

It's simply too painful to quote from. The link is there for anyone patient enough to read the same re-hash of Tamimi PR hand-outs.

It's not the poor reporting per se that is so enraging but the absence of two key elements that if the reporters had disclosed them would have put a fully-justified violent frame around (gritting our teeth) the charming portrait of a blonde girl with curls:

• The connection between Ahed Tamimi and her idol, Ahlam Tamimi with whom she is related closely and in multiple ways and at whose 2012 wedding (to Ahed's cousin) little Ahed danced and gazed worshipfully at the bride for the cameras.
• The terrorism-rich personal credo that the adorable Ahed recently recorded for her mother's video camera and which no reporter should ever dare to ignore in telling news-consumers the things worth knowing about this not-exactly-new "new face of Palestinian resistance".

Ahed Tamimi captured by her mother's video camera, responding to her

mother's request to share "a message to the world", December 15, 2017

[Source: YouTube]

The historian and analyst Petra Marquardt-Bigman has followed the violent Tamimi clan for some years and does an unparalleled job of providing a context to the often-context-free promoting that passes for journalism in much of the news industry.

Here's a small and highly relevant part of what she knows but CBC's man does not:

As reported by media around the world, Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager, has been charged by Israeli authorities with assault, after she was filmed by her family kicking, punching and slapping Israeli soldiers in mid-December.
Nariman Tamimi, Ahed’s mother, live-streamed the incident and its aftermath on her Facebook page. About seven minutes into the video, when the soldiers Ahed had attacked – supported by her mother and a cousin – had left, Ahed was asked by her mother to send a “message to the world.” As you can see in this subtitled clip, Ahed seemed embarrassed for a moment, but then she responded by dutifully repeating the slogans she had grown up with.
“I wish that everybody would participate in demonstrations because that is the only way for us to get results; because our strength is in our stones; and I wish that everybody all over the world would unite so we can liberate Palestine, because Trump must bear responsibility for the decision he took for any Palestinian reaction – be it stabbings, martyrdom-seeking operations [i.e. suicide bombings], throwing stones – everyone must do something. So we can unite this way, so we can get our message across in the required way and get this result, that is the liberation of Palestine, Allah willing.”
As shocking as it is to hear a girl who is just approaching her 17th birthday (on January 31) to casually list “stabbings” and “martyrdom-seeking operations” among the actions she wants others to take in support of her cause, there is no doubt that Ahed’s mother was pleased to hear her daughter express exactly the views she had been taught throughout her childhood. [From "Advocates for Terror: Why Ahed Tamimi and Her Family are No Heroes", Petra Marquardt-Bigman for The Tower, January 5, 2018] 

The entire video "message" in Arabic with English subtitles is here on YouTube.

June 16, 2012: Ahed Tamimi on stage in Amman, Jordan, gazes longingly at

her role-model cousin and Nabi Saleh's pride and joy, the boastful and

confessed murderer-who-got-away-with-it Ahlam Tamimi. The occasion

is the wedding of the Tamimi woman with another Nabi Saleh

murderer (who is also the bride's cousin as well as little Ahed's cousin),

Nizar Tamimi, the male in the photo. Everyone in the

picture is a blood-relative of everyone else. [Image Source]

There's another aspect to the journalistic wrong done by the Canadian: the absence of background. How did we get here? What caused this innocent child to develop her ideas, her attitudes, her fists?

The reality is that Ahed Tamimi has been groomed, trained, weaponized, hardened and massively exposed for years - and by the same manipulative pair of people the whole way: Mummy and Daddy. This is all a matter of the public record that remains just as public when reporters who ought to know better choose to ignore the record.

So Mr Stoffel, and the CBC people who oversee your work-product, please thumb through what we published here: "24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey" And the excellent piece by Shoshana Keats Jaskoll that Forward published a month ago: "Why Is No One Talking About Ahed Tamimi’s Call For Stabbings?"

Articles like these and like the post you are browsing now are unlikely to get you to see things more clearly or very differently. But ignoring them turns your article into a shallow piece of cheap, amoral flim-flammery.