07-Dec-17: Gazan rockets fired at southern Israel this evening may have crashed into Gaza

The whipping up of furies among Palestinian Arabs and those who stand with them continues apace in the wake of the decision by the White House to finally take formal notice of Jerusalem being the capital city of Israel these past seventy years.

It's still early evening and the reports are somewhat contradictory. Israel National News says this about the rocket attack that happened around 6:15 this evening (Thursday):

Two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip landed in Israel Thursday evening. Warning sirens [Tzeva Adom] were sounded in the Shaar Hanegev and Hof Ashkelon (Ashkelon Coast) regional councils in the western Negev Thursday evening. Shortly after the sirens were sounded, an IDF spokesperson reported that two rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel. Both of the rockets landed in open spaces. There are have been no reports of injuries or of damage. The rocket fire comes after the Hamas terror organization which rules the Gaza Strip warned that the “gates of hell” would be opened in the region following President Trump’s announcement Wednesday that the US recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

But other sources, including the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and this Australian source quoting the IDF say the two rockets fell short - meaning they crashed ob the Gaza side of the border. This happens frequently and the injuries to Gazan Arabs along with the property damage are often hushed up. We will adjust this report once we know for sure.

Reuters says of Gaza that

dozens of protesters gathered near the border fence with Israel and threw rocks at soldiers on the other side. Seven protesters were wounded by live fire, one was in a critical condition, the [Hamas-controlled] health ministry said... Member of armed groups including from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, appeared at a news conference in Gaza, their faces hidden by masks and called for a resumption of armed resistance in the West Bank.

Xinhua, reporting from Gaza, said around 7:15 pm that not two but six Gazan rockets were fired at Israel in the previous hour. It also focused on the public statements of the Islamists:

The Islamic Hamas movement called on Thursday for a Palestinian "popular uprising" against U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital... "Tomorrow [Friday] will be a day of public anger and the launching of an uprising under the name of Intifada of Jerusalem Freedom," said Hamas Chief Ismail Haniyeh during a public speech. He reaffirmed that Friday would be "the beginning of a new movement" to fight Israel's plan of occupation of West Bank and Jerusalem. "Trump will regret this decision," said Haniyeh... Describing Trump's recognition as "a turning point in the history of the Palestinian cause," the Hamas leader stressed that Jerusalem "has always been the source of victory, the beginning of revolutions and the starting point of uprisings."

Most people with whom we talk here think we're likely to experience less calm in the hours and days ahead.

UPDATE Saturday night, December 9, 2017: Times of Israel reported late last night (Friday) that "the Tawhid al-Jihad group claimed responsibility for the attack on social media. The small, radical group is affiliated with al-Qaeda." The Wikipedia entry for the the group claiming to have fired the rockets says

Jahafil Al-Tawhid Wal-Jihad fi Filastin (Arabic: جحافل التوحيد والجهاد في فلسطين‎, "The Armies of Monotheism and Jihad in Palestine") is a Sunni Islamist Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula, and is the branch of al-Qaeda in Gaza. The establishment of the group was publicly announced on 6 November 2008, with communiqués vowing loyalty to al-Qaeda, after having "received the messages of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri." Various forms of the "Tawhid al-Jihad" label have appeared in relation to developments in the Gaza Strip. The size of the group is not publicly known.

A group of the same name claimed to be behind the kidnapping and murder in 2011 of Vittorio Arrigoni, a high-profile foe of Israel described in various sources as a pacifist supporter of the Palestinian cause, a member of the Palestinian-aligned International Solidarity Movement, and a blogger reporting from the Gaza Strip. He had been living there after sailing in on one of the flotillas to Gaza in 2008. The terrorist regime of Hamas blamed his murder on Israel, unsurprisingly. Some time later, it became evident that this same offshoot of Al Qaeda - or a group using the same name - were actually responsible. We wrote about the tragic affair in three past posts: "14-Apr-11: Gazan jihadists grab Italian journalist, threaten to murder him in name of glorious revolution"; "15-Apr-11: For the record, Hamas is blaming Israel for the murder of the Italian hostage" and "20-Feb-13: Following up a 2011 Gaza murder".

19-Mar-15: In Tunisia, terrorists target tourists... again

Evacuating victims of Wednesday's terrorist attack in Tunisia
[Image Source]

A murderous attack by terrorists in broad daylight yesterday (Wednesday) left at least 19 people killed on the streets of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.

"They just started opening fire on the tourists as they were getting out of the buses ... I couldn't see anything except blood and the dead," the driver of a tourist coach told journalists... [Reuters, March 18, 2015]

The victims were assaulted outside the National Bardo Museum, located inside the "heavily-guarded" parliament compound. Other than two of the attackers, the dead (the numbers seem uncertain even now) are reported to be made up of 5 Japanese, 4 Italians (among hundreds from an Italian cruise ship, the Costa Fascinosa, touring the western Mediterranean), 2 Colombians, 2 Brits, 2 French, 2 Tunisians - one a civilian, one a police officer - and individuals from South Africa, Poland (perhaps 2), Australia (he may also be one of the two Colombian victims) and Spain. Dozens more were left injured, and some people are still regarded as "missing", including 14 (more or less) from the cruise ship.

The president of Tunisia says his country will now fight terrorism "without mercy", according to the BBC. Interesting to see how the BBC's notorious guidelines make it impossible for them to call yesterday's cold-blooded murders "terrorism", though their reports do freely quote other people - such as Tunisia's political leaders and security officials - using the "T" word.

Tunisia is "the Arab world’s most successful democracy" [NYTimes] having "recently completed its first free presidential elections and a peaceful rotation of political power". It's also "one of the biggest sources of foreign fighters joining the Islamic State" [NYTimes].

The new Tunisian prime minister, Habib Essid, who took office last month ["Tunisia's secular-Islamist coalition takes office", Al Ahram], said "two or three accomplices might still be at large", and urged "national unity", calling the massacre “the first operation of its kind ever to occur in Tunisia”. 

The synagogue in Djerba where a previous human bomb attack
targeted civilians, including tourists visiting Tunisia [Image Source]

The first? That's true only if we ignore (and ignore is exactly what most parts of the news media are doing) the April 11, 2002 Djerba synagogue bombing in which terrorists operating on behalf of Al Qaeda deployed a human bomb and a truck full of explosives to attack people, most of them tourists, visiting a historically-significant (and exceptionally beautiful) Tunisian synagogue. The death toll was heavy: 14 German tourists, 3 Tunisians, 2 French. 

Terrorism rarely needs a trigger. But there is speculation [here, for instance] that Wednesday's massacre is 

linked to the death of Ahmed al-Rouissi, Tunisia’s most-wanted terrorist, who had become a senior leader in Isil’s Libya group. Accused by the Tunisian government for a string of terrorist attacks in his home country, he was killed last weekend in a clash with Libyan militiamen.

And

Al Rouissi was one of the most wanted men in Tunisia, where he was considered the mastermind of a string of attacks carried out by the Ansar Al Shariah movement... Al Rouissi fled to Libya where he began fighting under the banner of the Daesh [ISIS] group, which already controls about a third of Syria and Iraq. Tunisia’s Interior Ministry has not confirmed Al Rouissi’s death, though the local Press has been filled with reports on the incident. [Khaleej Times, March 16, 2015]

BBC Watch has done a good job [for instance here] of tracking the history of anti-Jewish violence in Tunisia and the deaf ear and blind eye provided by the BBC.

What will be? For the optimists, there is the fact that, in the past few hours, the international community has sprung into decisive action. The U.N. Security Council last night "condemned the Bardo museum attack saying that no terrorist action can reverse the path of Tunisia toward democracy..." [Associated Press] and offering condolences to the victims. According to Xinhua (which calls the killers "terrorists" in quotation marks lest we suspect the Chinese news-agency of taking sides on such contentious matters) the UNSC "underlined the need to bring perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of these reprehensible acts of terrorism to justice." 

Fierce determination of this sort (excuse our cynicism) ignores the way the UN has for years struggled with defining terrorism. Because of "a lack of consensus on the definition of this phenomenon", it has consistently failed and

"a UN Ad Hoc Committee to Eliminate Terrorism, created by the General Assembly back in December 1996, has remained deadlocked as it tries to reach agreement on a comprehensive draft convention to eliminate terrorism" [Aljazeera]

We don't know any informed sources who believe the UN is ever going to get past that problem. The consequences of its condemnation and call to action in the wake of yesterday's terrorism are unfortunately predictable.

01-Mar-15: Facts, dam facts, and non-factual inventions aimed at the gullible

Friday's revised AFP report on that Gaza flooding
[Screen capture from this source]

A number of news channels reported this past Monday ["23-Feb-15: Dam!"] about a malicious Israeli "attack dam" strategy. With Hamas regime spokespeople in Gaza as their sole source, they dutifully parroted serious charges about Israel deliberately opening the gates of dams in southern Israel so that floodwaters would pour into the teeming communities of the wretched Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. 

Not a single reporter saw anything to confirm the claims. The dams were never named or located or photographed. 

None of this, however, prevented some of the most respected names in journalism from reporting that Israel's actions were malicious and calculated to increase Gazan suffering.

We followed up a day later ["24-Feb-15: The mess that the receding flood waters reveal"] with some observations about how some of the silly media people were dealing with having been conned: 

• Ma'an, the self-styled "independent" Palestinian Arab news source that had run the story (here) as its main lead during last Sunday's evening hours, left it online, unchanged (you can see that it's still unchanged today). Headlined "Hundreds of Palestinians flee as Israel opens dams into Gaza Valley", the piece reports as fact that "Israeli authorities opened a number of dams near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley in the wake of a recent severe winter storm."
• The influential Chinese newsagency, Xinhua, reported it too, and made no change once the facts got clearer. It too has left the story as it was, unmoved by the actual facts even today.
• Egypt's Al Akhbar reported it on the first day ("Israel's Open Dams Flood Gaza, Hundreds Evacuated"), and it too found no need to update it, to modify the charges, or to investigate the facts as received from the Hamas-controlled ministry that announced them. The same is true as of today: Sunday's bogus Al Akhbar story still stands.
• Aljazeera's version changed its version of the story, to their credit, quoting Israeli sources and presenting a more balanced version while repeating the made-up Hamas claims.
• The Russian RT news agency editors also ran with the Hamas claims, but a day later tried to clean their act up by modifying the original headline and some of the contents too, to project a "he said/she said" narrative. As we noted, RT's editors didn't claim to conduct any actual investigation into the facts. Getting it from Hamas was evidently sufficient validation for them.

There are others as well. But the most interesting of the list is Agence France-Presse ("...the oldest news agency in the world and one of the largest", according to its Wikipedia entry). They published and syndicated the Hamas whopper on Day One to their huge subscriber base. But by the following day the story had already been removed. Clicking on the story's original link [http://news.yahoo.com/video/gaza-village-floods-israel-opens-163038474.html] produced an AFP error message. 

On Friday, the French agency issued a completely-changed version of its tune.

"For the residents [of Gaza], there was no doubt: Israel was responsible after deliberately opening "a dam" to flood the enclave. But an examination of the facts on the Israeli side tells another story, shattering a long-held Palestinian myth... [AFP]

(There's a video version of AFP's February 27, 2015 shattering-the-myth report here.)

Here's what AFP's new take on the attack-dams story does not do:

• Does not make any mention of its disgraceful original report
• Does not acknowledge that its gullible reporters and editors accepted at face value a string of Hamas claims about Israeli malfeasance, and did so without making the smallest effort at checking the facts until it ran into a torrent of criticism from readers and media watchdogs
• Does not apologize for its role in creating the Hamas myth and then spreading it as "news" throughout its subscriber base
• Does not name and shame the Hamas individuals who fed it the original story
• Does not name and shame the AFP stringers, AFP reporters, AFP news editors, AFP fact-checkers and AFP syndication editors who had only one job to do (report and disseminate the facts on an objective and verifiable basis) and failed miserably.

Affairs like the attack-dam myth get propagated widely because, for the professionals of the news reporting industry, their anti-Israel character is enough to overcome the absence of a factual basis and the nonsense logic underpinning them. For those of us who depend on them (to whatever extent) for information and ideas, we have much to fear from today's industrialized mainstream news channels.

24-Feb-15: The mess that the receding flood waters reveal

The Anadolu (Turkish news agency) caption reads:
"Hundreds of Palestinians were evacuated from
their homes Sunday morning after Israeli
authorities opened a number of dams
near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley
in the wake of a recent severe winter storm.
Anadolu/Ashraf Amra"

Here's some follow-up to a post ["23-Feb-15: Dam!"] we published yesterday about the uncritical, lazy and irresponsible way some news agencies carry stories, often originating from notoriously partisan sources, that pin damaging allegations against Israel without bothering themselves to check whether they're true or made-up.

First, a clear and unambiguous assertion: yesterday's widely published news reports about Israel opening up dams in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip are in the made-up category.

The story, based on allegations that no reporter claims to have investigated or to have proven, exists in order to validate perpetual claims from the Palestinian Arab power structure - in this case, from Hamas - of Palestinian Arab victimhood and Israeli malevolence.

Once invented and handed to gullible reporters and editors, stories like the one about Israel's "attack dams" go public and become part of the news cycle. Their anti-Israel character, it seems, is enough to overcome the absence of a factual basis and the nonsense logic underpinning them.

The most direct version of the libelous story can be found in Ma'an, the self-styled "independent" Palestinian Arab news source about which we posted critical comments on Sunday. It ran this story as its main lead during Sunday's evening hours; the article remains online and unchanged as of today:

Hundreds of Palestinians flee as Israel opens dams into Gaza Valley | Hundreds of Palestinians were evacuated from their homes Sunday morning after Israeli authorities opened a number of dams near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley in the wake of a recent severe winter storm.

The Chinese newsagency, Xinhua, reported it too, and has made no change since then:

Israel opens dams, floods Gaza | Mufid al-Hasaynah, minister of Housing and Public Works in the Palestinian unity government, told Xinhua that Israel deliberately increases the suffering of the Gazans.

Egypt's Al Akhbar reported it yesterday ("Israel's Open Dams Flood Gaza, Hundreds Evacuated"), and has found no need to update it or modify the charges. Or to investigate the facts as received from the Hamas-controlled ministry that announced them.

The major French news agency Agence France-Presse ("...the oldest news agency in the world and one of the largest", according to its Wikipedia entry) published it too. But click on its link now [here] and you get an error message:

The nonsense article has been removed by the AFP editors, leaving behind this text: "Hmmm... the page you're looking for isn't here. Try searching above". Perhaps it should read:

"Hmmm, you discovered we trusted Hamas with predictable consequences. In future, try searching at a more reliable source".

In any event, no apology from AFP and no explanation for the article or its removal.

Aljazeera's version of the bogus story has been changed, and now carries this doctored headline: "Israel denies causing Gaza floods by opening dams". We should have archived the original version but did not. However the URL gives a clear indication of the headline it used to have:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/02/gazans-flee-floods-caused-israel-dams-opening-150222115950849.html

To their credit, Aljazeera's editors now open their account with what they ought to have reported a day earlier:

Israel has rejected allegations by government officials in the Gaza strip that authorities were responsible for released storm waters flooding parts of the besieged area.
"The claim is entirely false, and southern Israel does not have any dams," said a statement from the Coordinator of Government Activites in the Territorities (COGAT).
"Due to the recent rain, streams were flooded throughout the region with no connection to actions taken by the State of Israel."

Over at the Russian RT news agency, the editors have tried to clean their act up by modifying the original headline and some of the contents too. Yesterday their story was entitled "Israel opens dams forcing hundreds of Gazans out of flooded houses", and asserted as fact that "In the wake of a recent severe winter storm in the region, Israeli authorities opened the floodgates to discharge the accumulated water." Today at the same URL it's called "Palestine accuses Israel of opening dams, flooding Gaza, forcing evacuations". Not much better, but in the face of the criticism directed at their editorial foolishness, it's a concession. And in the body of the piece, they now add:

In a letter to RT regarding the issue, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) maintained that “the claim is entirely false."

As for RT actual investigation into the facts, their editors evidently don't feel the need. Getting it from Hamas is apparently sufficient validation for them.

No one was killed. But the affair gives a useful - if depressing - insight into how packaged news on the Arab/Israel conflict (and many other matters) gets its character and makes its way into our living rooms and heads. There is much to fear from today's industrialized mainstream news channels.

23-Feb-15: Dam!

Flooding in a Gazan urban street: Not this week, and not because of any
Israeli dams (there are none in the area) but because of heavy rain in November 2014
and chronic Hamas municipal malfeasance [Image Source]

The "independent" Palestinian Arab news agency Ma'an (about whom we had some comments just a few hours ago) ran this story as its main lead during the evening hours yesterday (Sunday):

Hundreds of Palestinians were evacuated from their homes Sunday morning after Israeli authorities opened a number of dams near the border, flooding the Gaza Valley in the wake of a recent severe winter storm.

Aljazeera ran with a similar report, as did Agence France-Presse, the Chinese Xinhua news agency, Russia's RT and Egypt's al-Akhbar. All quoted Gaza ministries as their source. None of them named or located the dams. Not one of them said a reporter of theirs saw anything to confirm the central claim. But all were able to report that this was malicious and intended to increase Gazan suffering.

It's not the first year we are hearing of un-named Zionist dams that are opened at precisely the same time as torrential rains wash through Gaza's under-invested, sewer-deficient communities bringing havoc in their wake. See "How Hamas used the weather to defame Israel" from last winter, as an instance.

There were also torrential rains in the area at the start of the winter, just a few weeks ago. The reliably hostile UNRWA published reports [here] about the damage at that time, along with appeals for more help, without once mentioning an Israeli hand in the disaster. That's because there was none. Of course, it might have been helpful if they had said what they know about Hamas' chronic and deliberate failure to improve infrastructure, facilities and life for the unfortunate Gazan population living under their rule. But that kind of thing is not in UNRWA's charter.

As for the notorious "Gaza Valley", does anyone out there know where in the narrow coastal plain it's located? And if we can ask that question, why can't the lazy editors at those news outlets? They are at least as culpable as the thugs inside Hamas are.

For the record, Honest Reporting sought and got a relevant quote this morning from a respectable Israeli source, the Spokesperson’s Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT):

The claim is entirely false, and southern Israel does not have any dams. Due to the recent rain, streams were flooded throughout the region with no connection to actions taken by the State of Israel. Prior to the storm, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories allowed the transfer of four water pumps belonging to the Palestinian Water Authority from Israel into Gaza to supplement the 13 pumps already in the Gaza Strip in dealing with any potential flooding throughout the area.

Stand by to see those newsagencies listed above promptly issue a prominent correction, and express thanks to COGAT for relieving widespread regional concerns about malicious Zionist use of attack-dams.

Kidding aside, shouldn't they?

04-Oct-14: Hamas announces "a new victory"; once again, it's about terrorists being freed from Israeli prisons

Scene from August 2013 release of convicted Palestinian Arab murderers
from their Israeli prison cells under the influence of a failed
US State Dept-engineered transaction [Image Source]

Here's a syndicated report from the Chinese news agency Xinhua that was published Friday. At the moment, we don't see any other sources for the story, but we have just begun to look. We will comment separately but at this point here's the dry report:

New prisoners' swap deal with Israel will be soon: Hamas 

GAZA, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) -- Islamic Hamas movement on Friday promised the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that a new prisoners' swap deal with Israel is expected to see the light soon. Large banners were stuck early on Friday morning at crossroads in the coastal enclave. The banners signed by al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas armed wing and wrote "Palestinian Prisoners to be released soon." 

The banners included a picture of the Israeli soldier Shaul Oran, who was captures after 12 days of the large-scale Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip, which lasted for 50 days and ended in Aug 26. The group's banners didn't say clearly if the soldier is dead or alive, but said a new prisoners' swap deal is expected to see the light soon. The banner included several question marks, in reference to the fact that there is another soldier. 

Meanwhile, Mushir al-Masri, a senior Hamas leader in Gaza told Xinhua that his movement promised the Palestinian people that "we have an appointment with a new victory, a new prisoners' swap deal with Israel." "The Palestinian resistance (Hamas) has the right to keep the details in secret, but it promised its people of an honorable swap deal, and resistance has the ability to do so," said al-Masri, who declined to give anymore details. 

However, everything is related to finalizing the Egyptian- sponsored indirect negotiations for enforcing a permanent ceasefire agreement and end the Israeli siege that has been imposed on the Gaza Strip for eight years. 

"Talks for a prisoners' swap deal will be completely isolated from reinforcing a ceasefire and ending the siege on Gaza," said al-Masri... 

Oddly the Xinhua reporters and/or editors seem to lack the word "hostage" in their professional vocabulary. 

About Mushir al-Masri, the Hamas spokesperson: we last mentioned him here when we wrote about three Hamas politicians who were ignominiously kicked out of Bulgaria in February 2013 [see "15-Feb-13: Gnashing of teeth in Gaza as its reps are roused from bed and thrown out of Bulgaria". One of them was this al-Masri. We wrote at the time that he

is a clansman of another al-Masri who entered Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant on August 9, 2001, walked up to the counter and exploded the guitar case on his back. That bomb caused the deaths of 15 Jews, most of them children - which was the plan - and injured more than 130 others. We have written a great deal about that bombing since it cost us the life of our fifteen year-old daughter Malki. 

He happens to be an individual with a deep and personal commitment to violence and terrorism that he has no problem publicizing at any opportunity. In a 2006 backgrounder entitled "Hamas Essentials" produced by CAMERA. they quote him saying in a speech:

We have come here to say that the weapons of the resistance that you see here will remain, Allah willing, so that we can liberate Palestine - all of Palestine - from the Sea to the River, whether they like it or not. 

Quite the diplomat, with his well-matched suit and civilized-looking tie. But his public speeches exemplify unvarnished racist hatred and incitement, in the customary Islamist-style. The "distinguished politician" tends towards finger-wagging and shrieking with hate-filled passion and foaming at the mouth (please do check to see if we're over-stating this) in his public appearances. A YouTube video captures him fully engaged in putting on a show of spite, spit, blood-curdling threats and Islamist hatred at a women's rally in Gaza, March 2012. Check it out.

None of this, astonishingly, dissuaded the Swiss authorities from allowing him to come to Geneva in 2012 as the head of a Hamas "parliamentary" delegation and to be received there as an honoured guest at the University of Geneva (here's a January 2012 Swiss news report about this. with al-Masri's face as its focus). We were personally involved in creating some media awareness about this at the time (with little effect - Switzerland is a European country with all the political consequences). We blogged about this ["17-Jan-12: Switzerland again: International parliamentary group says it erred in inviting Hamas"] at the time.

We will be back later with some more comments about the claims of a prisoner release deal. Meanwhile, just for the record, a Haaretz report this past Wednesday quotes Israeli negotiators saying 

Israel is refusing to discuss the release of Hamas terrorists who were freed in the 2011 deal for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit but then rearrested after Hamas kidnapped three Israeli teens in June, a senior defense official said on Tuesday. Hamas had raised their release as one of its demands in the Egyptian-mediated talks on a long-term cease-fire in the Gaza Strip that began in Cairo last week. But the official said Israel’s position, as presented in the talks, is that it refuses even to discuss any demands relating to the West Bank, including the release of the rearrested terrorists. “We told them clearly and consistently: We’re willing to discuss Gaza,” the official said. “But nothing about the West Bank – not the [other Palestinian] prisoners and not those freed for Shalit.” [Haaretz]

Checking now.

16-Jul-08: So what's the right way to relate to a freed psychopathic thug?

What's the right way to describe the Lebanese man called Kuntar, an unrepentant convicted murderer of children, a vile terrorist serving a 542-year prison sentence, a thug who swears that as soon as he is free he will seek out his next murder victims?

That really depends on who you are.

A columnist for the Haaretz newspaper wrote this week that he is "a monster convicted of a crime so brutal that even the designation terrorist is too good for him". On an earlier occasion, the same writer said Kuntar "may never have deserved a life."

A columnist writing in The Atlantic magazine said Kuntar "is perhaps the most terrible person held in an Israeli prison, a man who crushed the skull of a Jewish child against a rock. Sometimes, these prisoner exchanges don't seem worth it."

How true that is can be seen in a Pakistani paper today that quotes someone from Hamas saying "there was no reason to soften its demands in light of the heavy price that Israel agreed to pay in its deal with the Lebanese group Hizbullah. "

The same thought had occurred to us.

Some people might be surprised to know that the "moderate" leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, odiously and publicly "extended congratulations" today to the killer’s family on his being "liberated".

Actual 'moderate' quotation: "He [Abbas] extends his congratulations to the family of Samir Kantar, the dean of Arab prisoners, and the families of the other released prisoners".

It's plain that Abbas wants people to know he's delighted that Kuntar is back on the streets.

Ismail Haniyeh, the slightly-less-moderate leader of the globally-outlawed Hamas regime in Gaza, says the child-killer is "a great hero".

Additional words are unnecessary. Kuntar delivers the goods. Period.

The killer's brother says getting him out of jail is "a historical achievement". You'd expect him to say that. But in Ramallah, heartland of Palestinian-Arab "moderation" and ground-zero for the in-pouring of massive quantities of foreign aid from Western Europe to the enlightened PA government, Mahmoud Abbas's own Fatah party organized a celebratory rally. "This is an historic victory over Israeli arrogance," says Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a top Fatah official and official advisor to the "moderate" Abbas.

Many ordinary Palestinian Arabs feel so uplifted by Kuntar's story that they are reported to be distributing candy in the streets in honour of his release from prison. This is not to be taken for granted; Palestinian towns already have too many child-killers walking their streets. But this one, perhaps because of his having bashed a four year-old Jewish child's head to pieces on rocks and killing her after first murdering her father in cold blood in front of her eyes, is special. He's a successful, authentic role model.

The government of Lebanon, a genuine member of the family of nations, a seat-holder at the UN, a sovereign state with its own flag and postage stamps and everything, officially rolled out the red carpet. Its government declared Wednesday to be an official public holiday. It's simply incredible to us that three of its most prominent politicians - Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Lebanese parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri - are going to provide an honour guard to celebrate the return of the child-murderer. Have Lebanese everywhere swallowed their moral compass? Where's their outrage? Have they no pride? Don't they care what this says about them?

As for Kuntar himself, a graduate of an Israeli university (tertiary studies are routinely made available for free to terrorists in Israeli prisons), let's give him a moment to help us understand why those who support him are so enthusiastic.

In Kuntar's own words:

"I give you my promise and oath that my only place will be in the fighting front soaked with the sweat of your giving and with the blood of the shahids (martyrs), the dearest people, and that I will continue your way until we reach a full victory."

And this:

"I return today from Palestine, but believe me, I return to Lebanon only in order to return to Palestine".

He means it and he needs to be believed. His credibility is not in question.

The Chinese newsagency Xinhua accurately terms Kuntar a "convicted Lebanese killer". Sky News refers to him correctly and properly as a "Lebanese terrorist". But cooler, more mature, heads, like those at the cooler, more mature BBC, see things differently. The BBC has long referred to Kuntar as a "Lebanese militant" who was imprisoned because of his involvement in a "deadly guerrilla raid". Agence France Press news service, constitutionally incapable of attaching "terrorist" to the terrorist's name, also calls him a militant. And Associated Press can't bring itself to call the murderer anything more pointed than "Lebanese gunman".

We'll let Smadar Haran-Kaiser's words close this entry with a cold dose of water in our faces. Mrs Haran-Kaiser was a wife and the mother of two little girls aged 4 and 2 when Kuntar thrust himself into her apartment and her life in 1979. She has lived with the deaths of all three for the past 29 years. She watched the man who erased her loved ones walk to freedom this morning.

"This man, he is more than a killer to us, he is a symbol of the viciousness, the brutality, the hatred, of this fight against us. The demands for his freedom expose the evil faces from behind the mask, and show we cannot trust these people."

So sad. So true. How can it be that so many people fail to understand this? How can the lessons of terror be so consistently ignored, forgotten, twisted and misunderstood?

And who really pays the price?