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.”

29-Aug-18: Hamas and its women take center-stage again in Hevron

Image Source

The uncovering of a significant Hamas terror cell based in the Hevron area, and the central role in it taken by females, was cleared for publication in a Shin Bet announcement yesterday (Tuesday). Ynet says initial indictments have been filed in the Judea Military Court.

Some of the key disclosures:

• A special focus on women - dozens of them from the Hevron area are reported to have been recruited into Hamas via this initiative.
• Cell leaders received "money, messages, and instructions" from Hamas terror leaders based outside Israel - including (according to Haaretz) Haroun Nasser Adin, another of several Shalit Deal beneficiaries now operating from Turkey. (See "29-Jan-18: Freeing unrepentant terrorists and the horrors it has brought" for some commentary on the scale of the ongoing Shalit Deal catastrophe.)
• The cell, made up of dozens of Palestinian Arabs, "promoted" Hamas activity in the area including recruiting new members for its work; coordinating via mosques; gathering intelligence; engaging in incitement via sermons and the social media; giving support to prisoners' families; transferring messages and instructions; moving funds around to finance terror.
• An attempt, in the words of an Israel National News report, "to take control of the Hevron municipality and various charities in the city".
• The establishment of a local committee to be the Hevron operational arm of Hamas' headquarters. 

That committee is said to be headed by a woman named Dina al-Karmi. Who is she?

Ynet gives her name as Dina al-Said. An Arab source calls her Donya Sa'id and fleshes out the description in this nauseatingly disingenuous way: "the wife a Palestinian man who was killed by the army several years ago". An unfortunate accident?

In fact, her late and not-lamented husband Nashat al-Karmi was a terrorist who (in the rather laconic words of last night's Jerusalem Post report - which to be fair may merely be echoing what the Shin Bet said) "carried out an attack in 2010 in which four Israeli civilians were killed". 

Carried out an attack? As it happens, we wrote at the time about that specific savagery:

Reuters reports today that the Hamas terrorist organization has claimed full reponsibility for yesterday's ambush and execution of four Israeli civilians. It quotes a Hamas statement saying it "announces its full responsibility for the heroic operation in Hebron". This, in Hamas terms, was indeed a heroic operation, a classic of its kind. It was directed at a carload of two men, two women. No Israeli soldiers in the vicinity. No strategic goal other than terrorism for its own sake. The shooters, dressed in civilian clothing, fled into the night. Heroism, pure and simple. Heroism of the kind  that the world has come to know and expect from exponents of Islamicism in its various jihadist flavours. A little reported aspect of the Hamas heroism: one of the rescue service volunteers who arrived on the scene (according to the Jerusalem Post) broke down in tears on viewing the bodies. His colleagues were surprised - this is not a new experience in their line of work. Then they heard him crying out: "That's my wife!' That's my wife!' and indeed his wife is one of the four victims. Their names again (because these are human beings): Yitzhak and Tali Ames (who leave six orphans), Cochava Even Haim, and Avishai Schindler... ["1-Sep-10: Real people, real terror"]

Nashat al-Karmi's career in barbarism came to an abrupt end a couple of weeks after the murders he committed eight years ago. Here's one account of the circumstances:

Israeli forces in the West Bank have shot dead two Hamas militants they say were responsible for the killings of four Israelis last month, according to a senior Palestinian security official... Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said in a statement that the operation was "a quick response to the murder of the four Israelis"... The senior Palestinian security official said Nashat al-Karmi and Mamoun al-Natshi were killed in an early morning raid and had been identified by family members. Hamas media later confirmed the killings. The official said the two belonged to Islamist Hamas and were behind the killing of four Israelis on the eve of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that began last month. Hamas, which controls the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, opposes the talks. ["Two shot dead in Hebron", The Irish Times, October 8, 2010]

Image Source

So is this clear? Four innocent Israelis were murdered on an Israeli highway because Hamas opposes peace talks that were getting underway the following day.

The names of the leaders of this newly-uncovered 2018 Hevron cell - the one where the loathsome al-Karmi's widow is a dominant figure - are given as Nizar Shehadeh and Faras Abu Sharh.

It's troubling, and frankly hard to understand, why almost no background details about the two men are given in any of the published reports.

The Shin Bet report rather laconically calls them "senior and well-known Hamas terrorists who had served prison terms several times in the past for their terrorist activity."

We went looking for background. We found that someone with Shehadeh's name was a figure in this 2004 BBC report:

"Israeli radio said troops in Hebron killed two men in a gun battle which broke out after they surrounded a militant hideout and dynamited it... Correspondents identified the two dead in Hebron as members of the Hamas militant organisation. Witnesses said one of them was a local Hamas chief called Murad Qawasmeh. The two-storey house they were hiding in belonged to Nizar Shehadeh, witnesses said, who was jailed by Israel six months ago for having links to a local charity that supported Hamas." ["Israelis kill three Palestinians", BBC News, November 25, 2004]

From the Sheikh Firas Abu Sharkh sermon video [here]

As for Faras Abu Sharh, that name didn't produce much so we cast our net a little wider than that specific Shin Bet spelling. (English isn't their first language.)

A "Firas Abu Sharkh", described as director of the Hebron municipality's library at the time, is named in a Hamas website report from February 2008, more than a decade ago. Turns out he had been taken into custody by the Israeli military - for no reason at all, naturally.

Then he was back as the director of the Hevron municipal library when this (Arabic) March 2017 report appeared.

He turns up in a new Palestinow report (in English) from August 6, 2018 where he is the only one of 14 Palestinian Arabs arrestees to be labeled "former political prisoner" and said to be from Hevron. We think he's the ring-leader mentioned by the Shin Bet.

A Google search of the Arabic version of his name leads to many hits including this Arabic news report from February 2009 where he's said to be a Hevron-area preacher known to many as Abu Wael and who "has been in the cells of the gangs of the security services for six months" - again, for no reason at all.

There's also a YouTube clip of Sheikh Abu Sharkh delivering a sermon in a Hevron mosque on June 13, 2014. [We have asked an Arabic-speaking friend to say what this angry-sounding man is addressing. Stand by.]

Hevron is nominally under the control of the Palestinian Authority which is essentially at war with Hamas. Tayseer Abu Sneineh, a convicted murderer and a member of Fatah (the largest faction in the PA) became mayor of Hebron in the elections of May 2017 ["Palestinian terrorist in killing of 6 Jews elected Hebron mayor | Tayseer Abu Shneineh to head biggest West Bank city", Times of Israel, May 14, 2017]. Fatah took 7 of the city's 15 seats but that was enough. 

Despite this, as the New York Times already pointed out in 2009 ["In Fatah-Governed West Bank, Solidarity With Hamas"], a complicated internal struggle goes on there:

Fatah leaders are growing deeply worried over popular reaction and support for its rival, Hamas, to the point of crushing recent demonstrations...  In a series of interviews, people here said they were enraged by the photographs and television images of the Palestinian dead in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which they consider part of themselves. They said that support for Hamas would grow as this conflict went on, and that they were intimidated by the Palestinian security forces of Mr. Abbas..."

In a formal statement, the Shin Bet said yesterday: 

"The exposure of the infrastructure proves once again that the Hamas headquarters in the Gaza Strip and abroad are directing Hamas activities in Judea and Samaria, through any means at their disposal, including through the use of women..."

The first woman terrorist in the service of Hamas was Ahlam Tamimi who murdered our daughter Malki and many other innocents in the bombing attack on the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in 2001. The mutual embrace - females and Islamist savagery - has grown broader and tighter since then:

Women make good terrorists. They offer a strategic advantage in conducting terrorist attacks; as women do not conform to traditional security profiles, they typically arouse less suspicion, and their actions often garner more international media attention... [W]omen have traditionally been seen as the victims of violence, whether domestic or political. However, the historical record makes it clear that women have not just been the passive victims of terrorism, but also have played an active role. In Muslim history, although women took part in battles at the time of the Prophet Mohammed, their participation was gradually restricted, as women's roles became consigned to the private sphere... This wave of violence has not only seen women as active participants, but as proactive participants in terrorism. As the terrorist attacks continue, women will continue to play an active role in carrying out attacks, as well as mobilizing public support for further violence. ["Women’s Liberation: Violence and Palestinian Women in the Third Intifada", Haaretz, October 27, 2015]

Those calls (here for instance, and here and here and here and all over the social media) from widely-varied Arab sources, and not only Arab, for Israel to free the females being held in its prisons for terror offences come from a deep and cynical appreciation of the strategic value of women's roles in jihad. It's a fatal mistake for us to fall victim to their blandishments.

As for the gang, we think there are some more disclosures not yet made.

24-Jun-16: Vehicle ramming attack in Kiryat Arba: the assailant, a young woman again, is dead

The attack vehicle shortly after it and the young
driver were stopped in a hail of IDF bullets

A security camera video, posted in the past hour on YouTube, shows what the IDF is calling an apparent terror attack on an Israeli vehicle and the people inside, next to the hitch-hiking post at the entrance to the Israeli community of Kiryat Arba. The attack happened around 2:00 pm today.

Times of Israel reports that a Palestinian Arab woman

crashed her car into an Israeli vehicle in a likely car-ramming attack... A soldier who was nearby shot the driver, killing her, the military said, describing the incident as an “apparent” terror attack. An Israeli couple was hurt in the incident... The two Israelis, who are in their 50s, were lightly injured, according to the Magen David Adom emergency service. They were taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center where they will stay through the weekend for observation, the hospital said.

Here's what security camera located at the traffic circle captured:

The Bethlehem-based Ma'an News Agency says 

The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed her death, identifying her as Majd al-Khadour. Israeli sources said she was 18 years old... Some Palestinian social media outlets reported that eyewitnesses told them the incident appeared to be car accident, not a premeditated attack.

Fatah incitement: ""Run over, friend, run over
the foreign settler!" [Image Source: PMW]

As the video above indicates, the camera is also an eye-witness.

A campaign promoting vehicle rammings by Palestinian Arabs has been a feature of the Arab social media during the past 18 months. 

A Palestinian Media Watch article, "Abbas' Fatah encourages terror attacks by car" [PMW, November 6, 2014] includes some of the Twitter images and posters that deliver the message of redemption via vehicle ramming directly into the heads of young, impressionable Palestinian Arabs, presumably like this afternoon's young driver who is never going to reach her 19th birthday.

14-May-15: Dozens more Hamas victims of unstoppable Hamas blood-lust

First victims arrive at a Gaza hospital tonight [AFP Photo]

AFP released this breaking news in the past hour:

50 wounded in blast at Gaza training camp | May. 14, 2015 | 10:53 PM | Agence France Presse | Gaza City, Palestinian Territories: At least 50 Palestinians were wounded in a blast that occurred Thursday inside a militant training camp in Gaza, Hamas officials, medics and witnesses said. "An explosion happened inside a post of the resistance in Beit Lahya," said interior ministry spokesman Iyad al-Bozum, in reference to the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The health ministry spokesman in Gaza, Ashraf al-Qudra, said the blast wounded 50 people, five of them in a serious condition, and including children. Witnesses said the blast took place inside a training camp of the Ezzezdine al-Qassam Brigades in the northern Gaza Strip, where Hamas is the de facto power. A doctor in the Israeli-blockaded coastal enclave, Baker Abu Safia of Al-Awda Hospital, said 30 wounded people were brought to his establishment, most of them women and children. He said the hospital "declared a state of emergency" after the explosion took place.

Guide to abused language:

• "inside a militant training camp in Gaza" refers to a terrorist facility, one of the many funded by foreign aid to Hamas, designed to produce with roughly equal passion dead Israelis and dead Arabs. Both serve the designs of the Hamas regime.
• "a post of the resistance" obscures the reactionary Islamist lust for murder in the name of their understanding of a major religion
• "military wing of Hamas" falsely conveys the sense that there a non-military wing of the terrorist organization exists. Its charter is a public document. Though written in Arabic which many do not speak or read, English-language translations are widely available. Here's one. When it says "It is a brigade that must be reinforced by brigades upon brigades from this vast Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah's victory is revealed", those words do not define its so-called military wing, but define the essence of Hamas.
• "the blast wounded 50 people... including children" in a terrorist training camp. Children - alive and dead - are absolutely central to the Hamas concept of a fighting force. 
• "30 wounded people were brought to [hospital], most of them women and children" is the most important sentence in the report. An explosion at a terrorist training facility and the victims brought to hospital are mainly women and children. Can this have happened in any military training facility in any other part of the world? If not, does this say something about the ethics and motivating drive that propels the terrorists of Hamas? In defending against them, should an army (Israel's for instance) regard them as a military force like any other? Or does it represent a remarkable, utterly different form of organized savagery, with all that that entails in terms of defensive military doctrine?

14-Apr-15: Women and what the Palestinian Authority sees them as good for

Um Nasser (also Um Nasr, Um Sharif, Um Muhammad), designated
by the PA as embodying its transcendent values [Image Source]

From the official organ of the Mahmoud Abbas-dominated Palestinian Authority, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (edition of March 11, 2015) as translated by the diligent people of Palestinian Media Watch without whom the PA's propaganda in all its hideosity would go largely unappreciated.

It's an article evidently timed to appear during International Women's Day festivities:

The Commission of Prisoners' Affairs honored its female employees and several released female prisoners, March 10, 2015. Director of Prisoners' Affairs Commission [and PA Parliament Member] Issa Karake and Chairman of the Prisoners' Club Qadura Fares honored the female employees of the authority and the club and a number of released female prisoners on the occasion of the International Women's day, today [March 10, 2015] at the headquarters of the El-Bireh Women's Arab Union Society. The event was attended by Rashida Mughrabi [that would be the sister of notorious woman terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, one of the PLO terrorists who carried out the hijacking of an Israeli bus and the murder of 37 Israelis, all civilians, 12 of them children, in 1978. Disgracefully, PA schools, summer camps, and sports tournaments are named after her]; Chairwoman of the Women's [Arab] Union Muntaha Jarrar; Um Nasser Abu Hmeid, mother of four prisoners sentenced to life in the occupation's prisons; the released girl Malak Al-Khatib and a number of [other] released female prisoners...

Um Nasser et al, being honoured again [Image Source]

Here, courtesy of PMW, is what the heroic Mrs Abu Hmeid (pictured above - actual given name: Latifa) has achieved in her life.

Of her seven sons, one is deceased (Abd Al-Mun’im Muhammad Yusuf Naji Abu Hmeid, previously of Hamas), three others are in prison for various terrorists actions, while four more are too but they are all in for acts of homicide:

• Her son Nasser took part in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Fatah's so-called military wing - as if the rest of Fatah is nt heart-and-soul engaged in terrorism. He is currently serving 7 life sentences plus 50 years in an Israeli prison for killing 7 Israeli civilians and for 12 additional attempted murders. 
• Her son Nasr (who says Palestinian Arabs have no sense of humor?) belonged to the Tanzim (another Fatah terror faction, this one headed by the imprisoned "peace activist" Marwan Barghouti). Like his brother Nasser, Nasr is serving 5 life sentences in an Israeli prison for his involvement in two terror attacks and for arms dealing.
• Their brother Sharif carried out terror attacks against Israeli civilians as well as soldiers and is behind Israeli bars serving 4 life sentences for accompanying a human bomb to an attack in March 2002.
• And her son Muhammad is serving 2 life sentences plus 30 years for involvement in terror attacks directed at Israelis.

This radiant mother, the embodiment of human kindness and the endless search for peaceful relations with people who hold to different religions and different outlooks on life, is a regular fixture at PA ceremonies (here for instance from 2011), evidently because of the transcendent peace-and-future-centric values her life reflects in the eyes of Palestinian Arab society.

14-Apr-15: Women and what the Islamists see them as good for

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The United States is about to see a woman with a serious chance of succeeding embark on the political process of trying to get elected president. Women in the world of the terrorists play a role of a different sort.

A profile article about Gaza on the Foreign Policy website today offers an oddly-disconnected look at how women are used by the Islamist terror groups:

Throughout Gaza, armed groups have stepped up their recruitment. Now, each one — including Hamas’s Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — has a female contingent. No one knows exactly how many female fighters there are in Gaza, but the Nasser Salahuddin Brigade boasts 80 female combatants working in 25-women units. Each unit has female commanding officers, who answer to a male superior... "We fit the training around our domestic chores," said Hadifa, 26, her face obscured by a niqab, while cuddling an assault rifle during a midnight meeting at her Gaza City home. She said the women are trained to use sniper rifles, AKs, RPGs, M16s, and also how to drive cars through war zones, how to fight with a knife, and most recently how to capture an Israeli soldier in battle... It is not hard to see why they would be a military asset: Women have an easier time moving around war zones, due to the presumption that they are civilians. As a result, they can deliver weapons and food to fighters on the front lines with less risk than their male counterparts.

There's not one mention of the word "terror" in its various permutations in this article, though it's all about Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The jihadists are repeatedly called "combatants", "fighters", "military asset",  in an article replete with references to their participation in "armed resistance". In this sense, it illustrates again how a deeply cynical strategy like that of Hamas, keeping its subjects in conditions of maximum misery. depriving them of the benefits of the foreign aid inflows that make Palestinian Arabs the most-heavily-funded target group in history, pays significant dividends, particularly when there are sympathetic or dumb-as-a-boot reporters in the vicinity. This piece quotes a nameless Gazan woman, a mother, saying that:

Gaza residents see armed resistance as one of the only ways to take control of their lives. "Gaza is a tomb; we are dead anyway," she said, helping her injured son out of his wheelchair. "Either you die pointlessly and slowly, or quickly with purpose."

That sounds like it could have been lifted from an Islamist kill-the-unbelievers sermon.

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It's been a year (exactly - April 14, 2014) since hundreds of girls were seized in the name of a Nigerian Islamist terror group and have not been seen since. There will be walks in their honour and other commemorative "ceremonies" (the word used by the BBC) this week in London, Washington and other places. But it's clear the one walk that would make a real difference - one in which the girls emerge and are free of their Islamist kidnappers - is unlikely to take place, either today or anytime soon.

Another prominent female political figure, holding up a sadly pointless placard for the cameras, with a handwritten appeal to "#BringBackOurGirls", famously framed their plight in terms that seemed to many (us included) to have missed the real point completely. The tragedy of the Nigerian girls, in Michelle Obama's words, was an "unconscionable" effort by

"a terrorist group determined to keep these girls from getting an education – grown men attempting to snuff out the aspirations of young girls... In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes, their dreams..."

but not a single mention of the words Boko Haram, for the terrorists who openly took credit, or Islam or Islamist, in whose name they acted (see the official text of her speech). 

Could be its a matter of semantics, and that Mrs Obama really sees the Nigerian atrocities as being about missed educational opportunities. It could also be that being unwilling or unable to face up to the ideological platform on which men who seize girls act ensures such hideous things will keep happening.

Meanwhile women and terror continue to be bracketed in new and tragic ways:

• "At least 2,000 women have been abducted by Boko Haram, detained in prisons and houses and subjected to forced marriage, stonings and sexual slavery, according to a report that berates Nigeria’s “dismal” security situation. The Amnesty International report – based on more than 150 witness accounts – charges the Islamist militants with the deaths of more than 5,500 civilians and paints the most detailed picture yet of the oppression inflicted upon young women... Soon after taking control of a town, militants implemented restrictions of movement, particularly on women, the report says. Failure to attend daily prayers was punishable by public flogging." ["Boko Haram 'has abducted, raped and enslaved 2,000 women in reign of terror'", The Independent UK, today]
• "Up to 40 Australian women have taken part in terror attacks or are supporting militant groups, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has said. She said an increasing number of women were going to Syria and Iraq to join husbands fighting with Islamic State (IS) or to marry a militant... Australian officials are worried about the effect of returnees, and on those who support them, on domestic security. Ms Bishop said that women accounted for nearly one-fifth of all foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, but that it "defied logic" that women would join groups such as IS." ["Dozens of Australian women 'supporting terrorism'", BBC, February 26, 2015]
• "From Denver to Vienna, "Caliphettes" – young girls pledging their support to Isil’s so called "Caliphate" on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr – are escaping to marry Jihadis in Syria. And most recently, Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of one of the perpetrators of the recent terrorist atrocities in Paris, is the most wanted terror suspect in the world today... the spectre of radicalised Western women streaming to the battlegrounds of Syria should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Isil’s highly sophisticated, tech savvy radicalisation and recruitment machinery. They deploy peer-to-peer, in this case girl-to-girl, marketing strategies, Twitter amplification apps, iconic memes, gaming imagery and go-pro footage from the field..." ["The female face of terror", The Telegraph UK, January 28, 2015]
• "Two women and self-declared “citizens of the Islamic State” were arrested Thursday in connection to a plot to detonate homemade bombs in the United States. Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui, both of Queens, N.Y., were charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against “persons or property” in the United States..." ["2 Women Arrested in New York for ISIS-Inspired Terror Plot" [TIME Magazine, April 2, 2015]
• "Women have long been involved in terror of all stripes, from female neo-Nazis in Europe to Chechen “black widow” suicide bombers. Indeed, despite stereotypes about their domesticity and passivity... women are drawn to groups like the Islamic State by many of the same forces as men: adventure, inequality, alienation and the pull of the cause. Once there, they commit violence against other women, including as part of all-female brigades enforcing female morality codes requiring modest dress and sex segregation. They operate checkpoints and go on home raids; they are also reportedly recruiters, trainers of female suicide bombers, wives and homemakers, fund-raisers and propagandists. They also help sanitize the group’s image by posting photos of themselves drinking milkshakes on Instagram and writing chatty, lighthearted tweets... The West’s inability to appreciate the role that women play in terror should come under the highest scrutiny...  ["When Women Become Terrorists", Jayne Huckerby, NYTimes, January 21, 2015]

We said here a year ago that America's current First Lady would surely agree 

that the killing of our daughter in August 2001 at the hands of another overtly-Islamist terror group - Hamas - was unconscionable. And yes, it cheated Malki of her education. And certainly it destroyed her hopes and dreams. But it was principally about murder and especially about hatred. Did it bring anguish into our lives? Oh yes, and it's an anguish that grows as we see well-informed people who fail to comprehend the nature of attacks like the one that targeted Jewish children in a Jerusalem pizza store, and like the one that targeted Nigerian girls in their school. Excising the Islamist dimension from their understanding of what is happening dooms some of the most influential people in our societies to continue seriously misapprehending the goals of Hamas, of Boko Haram and of the rising tide of terrorism-addicted savages with Islamist passion in their hearts. Ultimately, we all pay a price for this, and it's unconscionably heavy.

Part of that price is the hypocrisy and seriously shallow thinking that tinges news reports emanating from terror-rich war zones. The problem is not so much in mis-understanding why and how women play the role they do but in comprehending how different the terrorists - female and male - are from "fighters" and "combatants". The media's confusion on this, along with the double-speak of too many politicians and other public figures, ought to be understood for what they mean strategically: an indispensable achievement for the Islamists in their march against civilized societies.