16-May-07: Report Card

Here's what the Hamas government of the Palestinian Arabs did today.

• They continued fighting their fratricidal civil war against the gunmen of Fatah while agreeing to the sixth ceasefire in the past three days. It began at 8 o'clock this evening and ended a few seconds later.
• Hamas "liberation" forces continued their rocket barrage against Israel's western Negev. Some 30 Qassam rockets have been fired into Israel so far today.
• Some of those Qassams were deliberately fired into Sderot, the Israeli town unlucky enough to be within firing distance of Hamas emplacements. A 60-year-old Israeli woman was severely injured in her home which took a direct hit.
• Their Qassams led to four other Israelis being treated for shock.
• One Qassam struck a cluster of Israeli homes in Sderot, causing damage to several buildings. This is the complex where the Yaakobov family lives. Yaakov Yaakobov was killed by a Qassam rocket in November 2006.
• A Hamas Qassam rocket struck Sderot this evening and knocked out power throughout the town.
• Another Qassam rocket struck a home next door to the home of Israel's minister of defence who lives in Sderot. There was property damage but thankfully no injuries. A nearby basketball court was destroyed.
• Note that Hamas openly claimed credit today for the Qassam rocket attacks. It announced that they will continue to be fired into Israel. An Israeli report confirms what we wrote this morning, quoting Palestinian sources who say "Hamas is trying to provoke a fight with Israel in the hopes that an Israeli military response would calm the Fatah-Hamas fighting by uniting the two against a common enemy". So what else is new?
• But at the same time, Hamas issued an official statement blaming the entire mess on (as if you didn't know) on Israel, as well as the international community and the Arab states.
• Hamas also expressed severe contrition today for the unmitigated disaster it has bought upon the heads of its society, its children, its economy and its culture. Not.
• Oh, and to round off a week of genuine achievements, yesterday Hamas gunmen launched a heroic attack against a Jeep-ful of their enemies. Except that it was not their enemies but in fact their own gunmen (this we are not making up), five of whom went straight to their seventy-two virgins.

In Gaza today, there are no supplies of blood; people are being arrested or shot for the way they look (says The Times of London in an article entitled "I heard the screams of women and children"); business is at a standstill while freshly smuggled Arab weapons are fired at Arab targets; children, women and geriatrics (including incredibly naive "human shields") are being wounded and killed in the cross-fire between the selfless heroes of Fatah and their Hamas counterparts.

Carnage. Anarchy. Unlimited bloodshed. Dead women and children everywhere. The Times puts it graphically and clearly: "The random use of weapons and explosives is out of control... the elite, the politicians, sit with the Egyptian mediators at night and then come out with statements about a truce, and in the morning we see the opposite has occurred. These people are not controlling anything."

Meanwhile the Pal-Arabs find enough energy left over, as they have for several generations, to keep pouring their barrages of death into Israeli towns and homes. Not disputed territory, not military camps, not industrial complexes.

In other words, business as usual. This ongoing war.

16-May-07: Barrages

Another day of muddled mainstream reporting that obscures more than it explains.

The BBC leads its Middle East coverage today with a somewhat laconic report that "Sporadic gunfire has continued in the Gaza Strip, despite a third ceasefire". In its customary tit-for-tat, "cycle of violence" manner, the BBC report mentions in passing that "14 people were killed" among the Palestinian Arabs, while "Four Israelis were injured, one seriously, by a rocket fired into the town of Sderot, near the Gaza Strip."

What in fact is going on in Gaza is an internal war among Arabs. 14 killed yesterday, dozens injured, by Arab gunmen of all political stripes. About 150 dead in the past few months in Gaza alone.

And in the traditional way of the Arab world, rather than deal with the fractiousness and self-inflicted dysfunctionality of their society, they turn to Israel. Let the dreaded Zionist enemy fulfill its historic scapegoat role - to unite the gunmen, the victims, the politicians and the religious rabble-rousers against a hated common enemy.

That's why Arab terrorists fired 21 Qassams into Israel yesterday; go here to read the details and don't waste time at the BBC since they chronically and deliberately fail to report the scope of Arab attacks on Israeli civilian life. Yesterday was no exception.

The terror attacks are motivated by hatred and the need to create a diversion from the catastrophic chaos that Pal-Arab leadership has perpetrated and perpetuated in the lives of their people.

What is happening in southern Israel is horrifying: far from the cameras and notepads of the reporting classes, one of yesterday's rockets made a direct hit on a home, injuring a mother and her son, age 4. More than twenty other Israelis in Sderot - a peaceful civilian town unfortunately located close to Palestinian Arab hell - were hospitalized yesterday for injuries and shock.

Reporting from this country, the BBC and so many other agenda-driven news sources manage to chronically and systematically ignore the evidence in front of their eyes. They persist in telling an ill-informed global audience that Palestinian terror is about liberation, self-determination, resistance, nation-building and other such self-serving nonsense.

Not today though. Today, the BBC slips into the unaccustomed role of telling it like it is - revealing what people who live in the neighbourhood have known for generations. Quote: "The BBC's Aleem Maqbool, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, says whatever the militants started fighting for, the killings are now in the name of revenge."

Good call, Maqbool. Do you perhaps see a pattern here?

13-May-07: On unspeakable depravity and those who defend it

This woman, a mother of little children and the daughter of a wealthy
family, turned herself into a human bomb in January 2004, soon
after this photo was snapped. She has become a Palestinian Arab poster-girl
for their monstrous notion of motherhood [Image Source]

Unlike most people, we have every reason to think hard about what it takes to turn a person into a human bomb.

The murder of our daughter at the hands of barbarian thugs, religious fanatics and foaming-at-the-mouth racist extremists is the hardest thing we have ever had to face in life. Whatever we thought we knew about human society, about people who espouse religious values different from ours, about the racism and xenophobic hatred that infects the societies bordering our country in all directions - all went a little way towards explaining the impossible-to-explain.

But at the end, we are left with more questions than answers.

The little that we do understand about the ability of Hamas to persuade young Palestinian Arabs to die violently stems from the knowledge we have gotten about how Hamas and other dark forces in the Arab world educate their children. Education is at the black heart of this 'achievement'. No society in the history of mankind has done more to create a culture of self-destruction. Self-destruction... in the interests of destroying the lives of those they hate.

You can see -- if you are interested in seeing -- endless expressions of a poisonous racism, of religious intolerance and of mindless hatred in all aspects of the Palestinian Arab media and education system. It goes hand-in-hand with the broad-scale brainwashing of children, the creation of a death-worship cult, and child abuse on a scale that we in the more cultured parts of the world simply cannot grasp.

All of this would be tragic enough on its own. But what continues to appall us is the way this poisoning of an entire society's young minds is ignored and swept under the carpet. Or subtly supported and understood and quietly half-justified in Europe and elsewhere.

This is on our minds because events this week make clear that the whole appalling story of Palestinian Arab manipulation of their children is getting worse, much worse.

We wrote last week about the Mickey Mouse-lookalike who promotes Islamic domination to children on a Hamas-operated television station. For a short while afterwards, there were reports that some Hamas regime official or another had gone public with a statement that this sickening piece of government-sponsored madness was being pulled. Turns out the death-cult apparatchik spoke prematurely because it's going strong as of today. In fact, there's no sign that the pedophiles and child-slaughterers of Hamas have any intention of bringing it to an end. Why should they? It's achieving exactly what they want.

For the rest of us, it remains to wonder how Pal-Arabs and their apologists sleep at night.

What do they say to themselves as they watch the four-year-old daughter of now-deceased bomber-murderer-terrorist Reem Riyashi singing to her dead mother and vowing to follow in her footsteps? The latest Palestinian Media Watch bulletin records how that particular video clip ends with the little girl picking up sticks of explosives from her mother's drawer.

What happens after that is left to the viewers' imaginations.

(It's helpful to know that Reem Riyashi killed four Israelis and wounded seven at the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel in 2004. She gained the sympathy of the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint by telling them that she had a metal plate in her leg that would trigger the metal detector. After she was taken to a room to be searched privately, she detonated the bomb hidden under her clothes.)

This sickening message is pumped out by official Pal-Arab television seven days a week.

There are always going to be people who are utterly confused about the two sides of this divide - the one that separates barbarism from civilization. The media are filled with them. The hate mail we get at this blog is evidence of plenty more befuddlement and moral myopia. But none of this changes the basic, inescapable reality that you are either for encouraging children to go out and commit murder or against it. And if you don't get that one right, you have a lot of explaining to do to yourself, your own children and to history.

6-May-07: It's raining death... again

Yesterday (Saturday), one of the Hamas "government's" most prominent and consistently credible agents, politbureau chief Khaled Mashaal, declared to the utter astonishment of no one that the Hamas Palestinian Arab government intends to continue to bombard Israeli towns, houses and schools at every opportunity.

Demonstrating that when they threaten death the practitioners of terror absolutely mean it, Hamas operatives today (Sunday) fired five barrages of Qassam rockets into any Israeli residential areas that they can reach. A man standing near a gas station was severely injured, suffering shrapnel wounds all over his body; he's in hospital being treated for injuries. And the day's not over yet.

Yesterday, the day we honor as the Sabbath, they fired five more. An Israeli home took a direct hit.

What's particularly interesting about Mashaal vowing that the Palestinian Arab rocket fire will not stop is that Associated Press and other news sources continue, even today, to refer to a Palestinian Arab "cease fire". 

For them, we'll repeat what the politbureau thug said in Damascus 24 hours ago:

"I officially declare Hamas's rejection of this document or any American, European, Israeli or even Arab project that diminishes the Palestinian cause like this... The Zionist and American schemes to trigger Palestinian civil war will fail. Those who are bidding on an internal Palestinian explosion are living in an illusion. The only explosion will be in the face of the Zionists."

Unfortunately for Israelis living on undisputed Israeli land in proximity to the cesspools of the emerging Pal-Arab polity in Gaza, whenever the fratricidal Fatah -v- Hamas blood-letting reaches fever pitch, as it is this week, the rockets start to fly into the cottages, shops, factories and schools on our side of the border. (The ever-reliable Khaled Abu Toameh offers his against-the-stream analysis today under the headline "Boycott fueled Fatah-Hamas tensions".)  

Fratricide, of course, being s-o-o-o boring, it's unreasonable to expect the mainstream media to report on this. Much more interesting to hammer away at the reports of unprovoked Israeli aggression. A pity because there are some really interesting things being done by Hamas lately.

For instance, Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook in PMW reported today that a squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse look-alike named Farfur is the star of a weekly children’s program called Tomorrow’s Pioneers on official Hamas TV. Farfur and his co-host, a young girl named Saraa’, teach children about such things as the importance of the daily prayers and drinking milk, while taking every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the US and support of "resistance" – the Palestinian euphemism for terror. Children must pray in the mosque five times a day until there is “world leadership under Islamic leadership.” Soft-spoken Saraa’ explains that the nucleus of this world Islamic leadership will be from “all of Palestine,” i.e., including Israel. Farfur refers to Israel as “the oppressive invading Zionist occupation,” which the children must "resist."

Though (or because) it's targeted at a very young audience, Saraa’ announces that after death, the children will have to answer to Allah for what they did or did not do for the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and for Palestinian prisoners.

Amazing how many Europeans believe this is the way to build a democratic, peace-oriented future for the children of this region.

Feh!

23-Apr-07: A Remembrance Day to forget

Today - 23rd April - Israel marks Yom Hazikaron. This is the day of the year designated for remembering the dead of our wars of defence against those who want to see our borders and our children removed from the map. It's also (since 1980) the day we officially stop and remember the civilian victims of terror in our land. At 11 this morning, the entire country will come to a stop for two minutes of silence (see picture). The op-ed article below, originally published by FrontPageMag, is written by Frimet Roth, one of the two editors of this blog. Publications and blogs who choose to reproduce it are encouraged to please reprint in full the contents of the paragraph at the very bottom.

A Remembrance Day to Forget
By FRIMET ROTH

Does Israel have a nuclear reactor? Most of us can only guess at the answer. But there is no ambiguity about another potent reactor, Israel's Prime Minister. Ehud Olmert has honed "reacting" into a fine art to the exclusion of almost every other leadership strategy.

His handling of the Gilad Shalit case has made this painfully obvious. As far as anyone can tell, Olmert's efforts to get Shalit freed have been focused solely on the idea of a mass prisoner release. The public has grown accustomed to this routine: the Palestinians submit a list of prisoners whose release they demand; Israel peruses it and then duly responds. With each rejection, with each protestation by Olmert that he will never release murderers, it's plain that his inevitable cave-in has drawn nearer.

Is there no other way? Why haven't key Palestinian players been abducted for use as bargaining chips? Why haven't collective penalties, like disconnecting water or electricity, been meted out to Palestinian civilians. If they felt the repercussions of Shalit's abduction, they would take to the streets to demonstrate against their own leaders. We've seen them do this forcefully when the subject was unpaid public service salaries.

Israelis have come to accept as dogma that a mass release of Palestinian prisoners is the only way to bring Shalit home. And Olmert, nursing political injuries and maintaining a low profile, has carefully avoided any pro-active steps that might correct that misconception.

This year many bereaved families like mine will miss out on the customary collective hug and comforting words of past Remembrance Days. Instead we will be grappling with news of the impending release of our children's murderers: fresh salt on a chronic wound.

What this dreaded move tells me is that, in the eyes of some Israelis, my daughter's murderer is less evil than other murderers; that they don't deem him as worthy of lifetime incarceration as other mass murderers. The columnist Dan Shavit writing in YNet says it explicitly in a piece entitled "Return Shalit at any Price". A terrorist with blood on his hands, he writes, is different from your garden variety killer. He is a "pawn… bargaining chip… political merchandise", not merely a "regular criminal offender".

Abdullah Barghouti was convicted of murdering 65 innocent Israelis in addition to my daughter. I find it very difficult to comprehend why he should walk free because he also happens to be a card-carrying member of Hamas.

Other lame arguments for releasing convicted mass murderers have been making the rounds of opinion columns. One is that this is not the first mass prisoner release to be agreed by Israel so why the big deal? The obvious answer is that previous mistakes, deadly miscalculations, need to be avoided rather than repeated.

It is also argued that many of these prisoners conduct terrorist activities from prison in any case, so why bother to incarcerate them. The fact is that under our absurdly lenient prison policies, prisoners do enjoy outrageous perks. Celebrity murderer Marwan Barghouti, for instance, has conducted innumerable political meetings behind prison walls including a 30-minute phone call with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas from the prison warden's private office that attracted media attention. But the logical response to this is to right the wrong, not to exacerbate it.

No-one seriously disputes today that a substantial percentage of Palestinians release in previous deals - perhaps as many as 40 percent - have continued their terror activities. Proponents of the proposed release try to emphasize that not all do. Zvi Bar'el laconically writes in Haaretz: "Some of them returned to hostile activity and some did not." (Leaving us to wonder whether "hostile activity" is a euphemism for murder.)

Does Bar'el say this in order to reassure anyone? Has he forgotten that the Park Hotel and Cafe Hillel terror attacks were planned and executed by released security prisoners who had never even been convicted of murder? Those outrages took 27 innocent Israeli lives.

What can we expect then from someone like Barghoutti with 65 victims to his name already? A man who has proven that his passion is murder must never be set free.

There are those who opine that many of Israel's prisoners are involved in terrorism only peripherally and that the definition of "terrorist" has been stretched unreasonably to include them. Dan Shavit makes this preposterous comment about Israel's traditional attitude towards prisoners with 'blood on their hands': "[It] is an elusive definition that can be interpreted in flexible ways and is mostly "literary" rather than "legal".

To Shavit, I would say: The makers of the bombs that murder our children, in my case Abdullah Barghouti, are not "literary" killers. They are the primary culprits.

The reality is that Izzadin Al-Masri and Ahlam Tamimi - who jointly executed the Sbarro bloodbath in which my daughter died - would have vented their hatred of Jews even without Barghouti's input. But they would have carried a knife or a gun, instead of a guitar case packed with ten kilograms of explosives and with nails, nuts and bolts for heightened lethality. Barghouti alone turned their attack into a massacre.

I can never forgive the Prime Minister of the state I embraced nineteen years ago for rewarding my child's murderer with freedom. But I wonder why the rest of my people are willing to forgive him. He is demolishing Israel's justice system. He is erasing court decisions that were based on careful thought and deliberation and replacing them with his whim. Can we survive, in the words of our sages, in a society of "leit din v'leit dayan"-"no laws and no judges"?

A convicted murderer is a convicted murderer regardless of the political context. But especially, in our current precarious reality, surrounded by avowed enemies who regularly reiterate their bloody intentions, releasing convicted murderers is nothing short of insanity.

***

Frimet Roth is a freelance writer based in Jerusalem who frequently contributes articles dealing with terrorism and with issues connected with special-needs children. She and her husband founded and run (as unpaid volunteers) the Malki Foundation (www.kerenmalki.org) in memory of their fifteen year-old daughter who was murdered at the age of 15 in a terror attack on a Jerusalem restaurant in 2001. The foundation provides concrete support for Israeli families of all religions who care at home for a special-needs child.

21-Apr-07: Tomorrow is Israel's Memorial Day. Guess what the Palestinians are doing?

From Haaretz: 

No fewer than three Palestinian militant groups - Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - claimed responsibility for a Qassam rocket attack today on houses in the Israeli town of Sderot. In a joint statement, they said the attack was to avenge the deaths of three "militants" killed earlier Saturday in the West Bank.

The terrorists fired three Qassams into southern Israel tonight (Saturday evening). One rocket landed right next to a Sderot residence destroying a wall and wounding two people. Two additional rockets landed in open areas near the town. Four people were treated for shock.

An Israel Air Force aircraft immediately fired a missile at a car in the northern Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian man and wounding a second occupant. An IDF spokesperson said tonight that the dead man, a 37-year-old Gaza resident, was one of the members of the terror gang that mounted the attack on the Sderot houses. "We condemn this," said Saeb Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. "This undermines our efforts to bring about a cessation of hostilities. As such, I believe this is very, very bad."

Erekat was, of course, talking about Israel's success in quickly and effectively striking the vehicle of the terrorists who executed the rocket attack. He did not even pretend to condemn, criticize or otherwise speak against the firing of rockets into Israeli town.

As for what he calls his "efforts to bring about a cessation of hostilities", no journalist - as far as we can tell - broke out in hysterical laughter. 

A pity.

14-Apr-07: Objective British Reporting and Other Oxymorons

Experience over the past five-and-a-half years since our daughter's murder has taught us some lessons about the professional competence of journalists.

We have been involved in perhaps 250 or 300 interviews and reports - we don't keep track of the exact number but it's in that vicinity. We've written here and on the Malki Foundation website about the inaccuracy, irresponsibility, incompetence and sheer idiocy of a certain proportion of the reporters and journalists we have met. Not all, and not even most. But enough to make it clear to us that the credit most people tend to give to the media (that they report objectively and fairly) is often wrong, and that's a serious problem for all of us.

For anyone still caught up in the illusion that the news media are interested in presenting an impartial and accurate version of the facts, there's no better antidote than what Britain's reporting community has just done.

Friday, 13 April 2007 | The National Union of Journalists has voted to boycott all Israeli goods for “aggression” in Palestinian territories. After almost an hour of debate at today’s Annual Delegate’s Meeting in Birmingham, the conference voted 66 to 54 in favour of the ban [and] to “condemn the savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza” over the last few years. Paragraph four read: “That [this] ADM calls for a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions and the TUC to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government.”

There's nothing wrong with individuals forming views which are extreme or idiotic. That's a privilege every one of us has in free and open societies. Nor is there anything especially bad, in our view, with journalists taking a political stand. If the rest of us can do it, why not reporters and photographers?

What bothers us very much, however, is the inane and entirely self-serving stance taken by editors and ombudspersons in the news media, and most of all in the British news media, that they adhere strictly to professional standards and that to impugn their objectivity and fairness - as so many friends of Israel have found it necessary to do in recent years - is to reveal a certain unacceptable bias and subjectivity. The very first item in the NUJ's so-called Code of Ethics is

1. A journalist has a duty to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards.

Well, friends, the charade is over. Unless and until repudiated by its members, the decision of the representative organization of the reporting profession in the UK stands as an indictment of every last one of them.

It's also fair warning that, at least in relation to matters concerning Israel, we are dealing with people with partisan, prejudicial viewpoints that make their reporting and their photography, their headlines and their choice of interview subjects as biased and as agenda-driven as those of that other master practitioner of the agenda-driven journalistic craft, Joseph Goebbels.

Harold Evans, the distinguished British journalist (sorry if this, too, sounds oxymoronic but it's an appropriate way to describe Evans) said this in 2004 in an address to the Foreign Press Association in London:

"Fifty-three journalists died last year... Most of them were murdered for trying to tell the truth about the world. Truth seems to me to be more and more a casualty of a partisan press… The men and women who lost their lives gave them for the highest aspirations of journalism. Every time a fellow journalist distorts the facts, every time a journalist intrudes on private grief, every time a journalist torments the facts to fit a preordained thesis, he betrays those who died and shames the profession."

Britain's journalists have some serious and immediate soul-searching to do. And no, we're not holding our breaths.

10-Apr-07: Regarding Abdullah Barghouti

Abdullah Barghouti doesn't hide his regret that till now he has

managed to murder "only 66". Efforts now underway 

may get him the chance to improve on that result.

Haaretz is reporting today that a list of 45 prisoners in Israeli jails has been given to the Israeli government by Hamas. Haaretz says these are "part of the deal to free captured Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit."

One of the names on the list is Abdullah Barghouti, described as "a senior leader in Hamas' military wing". It's a name that is known to the authors of this blog.

Barghouti built the bomb that ended the life of our daughter, Malki. A Kuwaiti who settled in the West Bank village of Burqa in 1999, he has been frequently described in the media - and from his own mouth - as one of the brains behind the Sbarro restaurant massacre on 9th August 2001.

Arrested and put on trial in Israel, Barghouti pleaded guilty and told the court he "did this to kill as many Israelis as possible". He was rewarded in December 2004 with a sentence of 67 life-terms in an Israeli prison (report). In a later interview, he said: "I do not accept responsibility for their deaths. I feel pain, of course. They are little children. But the government of Israel is solely responsible."

Below is an open letter we wrote a year ago about Abdullah Barghouti. It was originally published on the website we created in our daughter's memory. We wrote it as an open letter in response to the screening of a Bob Simon segment called Terror Behind Bars on the CBS "60 Minutes" television program. That segment focuses on three Palestinian mass murderers - Barghouti and two others.

An Open Letter from Frimet and Arnold Roth 21st April 2006

This coming weekend, the high-profile television program "60 Minutes" is going to give public exposure to a convicted murderer and terrorist called Barghouti. Speaking from an Israeli prison, the interview will show him taking credit for a massacre at a restaurant in the center of Jerusalem in August 2001 and another at the Hebrew University's cafeteria a year later. In front of a huge audience throughout North America, he will say of the number of people killed in the attacks he masterminded: "I feel bad because the number is only 66."

Our daughter Malki, fifteen years old, was one of Barghouti's 66.

We, together with our neighbors living here in Jerusalem and throughout Israel, belong to the much larger number of living people about whom Barghouti feels so bad.

We have nothing to say to Barghouti, and he has nothing to say that deserves to be heard. His opinions are worthless to us and to anyone with a sense of morality. His life is a disgrace to the society which nurtured him.

But while we have no interest in him, we are very interested in the leadership of the society which has turned Barghouti into a hero - in their opinions and even more in their actions.

The political leadership of the Palestinians was decided by a process that seemed democratic when their elections took place two months ago. Whether or not a democracy can truly function when gangs of heavily armed Arab thugs rule the streets of their towns and villages is a fair question. But the legitimacy of the Palestinian government is not for us Israelis to determine. The Palestinians and most of the media called it a democratic process, and no one seriously suggests today that the Hamas leadership lacks political legitimacy. Their stated viewpoints therefore have to be heard and analyzed.

For those like us with a special sensitivity to terror, the Palestinian leadership today is the world's outstanding embodiment of unadulterated terrorism: a government which actively supports terror, promotes terror, honors terror and justifies terror. We hear them speak, and we hear the voice of terror. The current minister of the interior in the Hamas government says he will not arrest those who carry out terror attacks against us. His actions make clear that he should be believed.

As ugly and repugnant as the words of Barghouti will likely be to the viewers of "60 Minutes", we urge them and CBS not to focus on the man. He is irrelevant, except that he creates a context. Barghouti's evil deeds are the concrete expression of the desires of a government which wants to be accepted as an equal by the community of nations. The anger and revulsion which his interview creates should be redirected at them - at the terrorists in business suits who plot and scheme every day to increase Barghouti's 66 to the largest number they can think of.

It's hard for us to imagine the government of Israel giving serious consideration to handing Barghouti his freedom and a license to go out and kill more innocents. It's not at all hard for us to imagine politicians and media analysts calling on Israel to do just that.

7-Apr-07: Useless Rockets and Even More Useless Journalism

Though it's the Passover festival here, or more likely because of it, there has been more of the usual murderous attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Israeli towns.

The news reportage is about the same as usual too. Meaning confusion between cause and effect, and deliberate - or incompetent - obfuscation about the underlying reality. Bottom line: unless you're really determined to understand what's happening here, you'll fall victim to a dishonest narrative that is constantly spun by far-off news editors, local Arab 'fixers' who accompany reporters in the field, and agenda-driven reporters and photographers.

To illustrate: Reuters is reporting today that the Israelis are up to their usual kill-innocent-women-and-children "games":

"On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz authorised the army to carry out limited operations just inside Gaza against militants, despite a ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and the Palestinians in November. Some militant groups have carried on firing rockets into Israel from Gaza despite the truce, and Peretz said the Jewish state would "not allow the continued strengthening and arming" of militants in the coastal strip."

"Despite a ceasefire agreement" indeed. The ceasefire agreement they mention went into effect in November 2006. Since then, about 200 Qassam rockets have been fired into Israel, or about one a day.

A rocket a day, ladies and gentlemen, the last one having been fired into Israel last Tuesday. Thank goodness, minimal damage to life and property were caused because the Israeli side is taking steps to protect the towns and people who have the misfortune of being within striking distance of the Gaza areas controlled by the PA.

The head of the Palestinian regime, Mahmoud Abbas, is also quoted today making some statements about those Pal-Arab Qassams. If you're expecting a condemnation of Qassam firings as a cold-blooded act of hatred, terror and war, then you're obviously new to the news media.

Reuters version:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on members of his presidential guard and national security forces to step up efforts to prevent the rocket fire so "that our people can lead a safe life".

The Yediot Aharonot version (not quoted anywhere else in the world today as far as we can tell):

At a graduation ceremony for his presidential guard, Abbas was quoted by the official WAFA news agency as saying it was necessary that "all parties work with maximum effort, especially the presidential guard and national security forces, to spread security and safety in the homeland, end security anarchy and stop useless rockets.

Why is it that the brand-name newsagencies throw out such absurdities as the suggestion that Israeli actions are coming in the face of "a ceasefire agreement" without mentioning the rocket-per-day reality that has been an integral part of that "ceasefire"?

Why are Abbas's words this morning about "useless rockets" (the only justification stated for stopping them) not reported anywhere other than by Israeli sources. Why are there are no references to the Israeli children killed by those "useless rockets"?

And why is it that blogs like this one, and some parts of the Israeli news media, are the only sources anywhere for people who want to get the other side of this story?

Try searching online now for non-Israeli reports of Qassams falling onto Israeli towns in the last week. Then ask yourself what this conspiracy of silence is really telling us.

30-Mar-07: International human rights, wrongs and inanities

UN Watch is a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Geneva that monitors the dismal performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own charter. Established in 1993, UN Watch participates as an accredited NGO with special consultative status in several of the UN's forums.

"UN Watch is keenly aware (says its website) that member states often ask the UN to fulfill mandates and tasks that are neither feasible nor within the means provided... UN Watch notes that the disproportionate attention and unfair treatment applied by the UN toward Israel over the years offers an object lesson (though not the only one) in how due process, equal treatment, and other fundamental principles of the UN Charter are often ignored or selectively upheld."

UN Watch has just released a compelling piece of video. In the inimitable words of LGF, it exemplifies 

"the kinds of disgusting, evil speeches that are NOT banned by the UN Human Rights Council — including support for the execution of homosexuals, support for terrorist groups, Holocaust denial, and the inevitable demonization of Israel (to a frightening degree)."

Personally meeting with one of the key people in the UN Commission on Human Rights and spending an hour in one-on-one discussion with him was a depressing and educational experience, so we were somewhat forewarned. You might prefer to withhold the popcorn when watching this video. It's nauseating - but very informative. And the sanctimonious words of outrage of UN Human Rights council president Luis Alfonso De Alba are a real hoot.

11-Mar-07: Love Letters from Syria

As if there were a shortage of things to worry about, with Iran openly boasting of a soon-to-be-manifest nuclear capability and Hizbollah prancing about with enormous stocks of live weaponry and crowing about its self-proclaimed victory in this past summer's war on our northern border, the Syrian regime is grabbing some limelight.

It's hard to know how much of the following French press report is real or accurate. (For instance they have the name of Israel's head of military intelligence wrong.) But if some smoke means a chance of some fire, then all this smoke from Damascus is deeply troubling.

Syria deploys thousands of rockets on Israel border: sources
Ron Bousso Fri Mar 9, 4:50 AM ET
JERUSALEM (AFP) -
Syria has positioned on its border with Israel thousands of medium and long-range rockets capable of striking major towns across northern Israel, military and government sources told AFP. This deployment, coupled with other recent reports of Syrian troop mobilisation, is seen in Israel as an indication that Damascus may be preparing for future "low intensity warfare," they said...

The Syrian army accelerated its deployment of medium and long-range rockets in the wake of the Lebanon war, during which the Hezbollah militia fired moe than 4,000 rockets against northern Israel.

"We have noticed that in recent months Syria has deployed hundreds, possibly thousands, of medium and long-range rockets along the border (with Israel)," one military source said. "Many of the rockets are hidden in underground chambers and in camouflaged silos, which make them very difficult to locate," the source said. Three of the sources were from the military and two from the government, and they all spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity. They said Syria has built a system of fortified underground tunnels along its border with Israel.

Most of the rockets deployed are 220 millimetre, with a range of 70 kilometres (43 miles), and 302 millimetre rockets capable of striking targets at a distance of more than 100 kilometres (56 miles). The latter would be well within range of the main population centres in northern Israel such as Tiberias and Kiryat Shmona. These long-range rockets could also reach Israel's third largest city of Haifa and its industrial zone, which is home to several essential industries, including oil refineries and a deep-water port. It is also believed that Syria has deployed several FROG rocket launchers, with a a 550-kilogram (1,200-pound) warhead and 70-kilometre range, in areas between the border and the capital Damascus, 40 kilometres (25 miles) away.

According to the sources, such a massive deployment of well entrenched rockets poses "a real strategic threat" to Israel.

While Syria concentrates most of its long-range surface-to-surface missile arsenal in the north of the country, its decision to deploy rockets so close to the border may indicate that Syria is mulling an attack on Israel, experts say. "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad realised after the Lebanon war that Israel was not as strong as it seems and that it could be threatened by simple means rather than an advanced army," the director of the Begin-Saadat Centre for Strategic Studies, Ephraim Inbar, told AFP. Inbar, as well as the military sources, believe that "Assad could be preparing for low intensity war, a type of war of attrition with Israel, where Syria fires several rockets against Israel without provoking full-fledged war."

...Israel's military intelligence chief, Major General Amod Yadlin, told the government's annual intelligence assessment that while Syria was beefing up its military, war between the two neighbouring countries was unlikely in 2007. "Syria is continuing its military build-up and preparing for war," he told the cabinet. "The chances of a full-scale war initiated by Syria are low, but the chances of Syria reacting militarily against Israeli military moves are high."

Government sources told AFP that Syria was close to concluding a deal with Russia to procure thousands of advanced anti-tank missiles, of the sort Hezbollah used with great success against Israeli armour last year.

Tensions between Israel and Syria have peaked in recent months, with Israel rejecting peace overtures from Damascus and both sides toughening rhetoric. Damascus has repeatedly demanded the return of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed in 1981. It is now home to more than 15,000 settlers. Peace talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 2000.

The drivel about peace overtures from Syria being rejected by Israel doesn't mean the whole report is a nonsense (though much of AFP's reportage from this part of the world is badly distorted by its agenda-driven nature). News reports emanating from the Syrian government-controlled media constantly beat the Golan drum. For instance, a breathless report earlier this week announced that "the first conference of engineering education officials in the Arab world Tuesday called for implementing UN resolutions regarding the end of Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan..." Imagine, the engineering education industry, no less, demands that Syrian tanks and gun emplacements be restored to their rightful places perched above Tiberias, Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu and all the other Israeli towns and farms at which they took pot-shots for the nineteen years up to 1967 - with nary a murmer of complaint from anyone other than Israel.

26-Feb-07: The Real Threat to Islam

Yehuda Litani, a journalist for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper and a noted film-maker, published this first-person insight into what motivates the leadership of Jerusalem's Islamic religious establishment, the Waqf.

Litani writes:

In the years 1992-3 the late King Hussein of Jordan financed the renovations of the golden dome, which was carried out by a construction company from Northern Ireland. On a visit to the site during those renovations I discovered a story that wasn’t known until then, regarding the Jewish-Ottoman-Palestinian connection to the mosques on Temple Mount.

The Dome of the Rock was surrounded with scaffolding, and before ascending one of them a friend of mine drew my attention to an iron panel that lay on the floor and was inscribed in French. The foreman of the Irish construction company said the panel had been found between the two halves of the crescents at on top of the mosque, and was temporarily dismantled so that the dome could be coated in gold.

The words in French revealed that the Mosque had been renovated in 1899 during Turkish rule, and that the works had been assisted by the Jewish community in Jerusalem led by a public figure called Avraham (Albert) Entebbe, who among his numerous other activities was also the principal of the city's "Kol Israel Haverim" school.

Entebbe, who was the undersigned on the French inscription, was known for his courageous ties with the heads of the Ottoman rule, and the inscription noted that for the purpose of renovating the mosques on the Temple Mount five acclaimed Jewish artists had been invited to Jerusalem. The Jewish stone carvers, wood carvers and iron mongers from various cities in the Mediterranean basin, shared their skills with their Muslim brothers during months of work.

The inscription also noted that all the students at Entebbe's school were given a three-month leave in order to assist their Muslim brothers in the renovations works on Temple Mount. In the last lines of the inscription, Entebbe described the ideal cooperation and understanding that prevailed between Jews and Muslims in the Holy City, which reached its zenith when the Jews undertook renovations of the Temple Mount mosques in 1899.

I told the Irish foreman about my discovery, and asked him to look after the iron panel so that I could take a photograph of it. The foreman apparently told Waqf representatives about the panel, and when we came back to the site the next day the panel was no longer there. The foreman said the Waqf had taken it away. When I asked one of them a few days later where the iron panel was, he said that he didn’t know what I was talking about.

The iron panel, which told the story of the wonderful cooperation between the Jews and Muslims under Turkish rule, disappeared. There is no chance of it reappearing in the future, because it doesn't serve the Waqf's current interests. Yet at a time of harsh words and hatred it's rather nice to reminisce on days gone by.

Appalling. And the sort of analysis we will never see in the brand-name media, but that, if we did, would help our friends and neighbours make better sense of what goes on in this part of the world.

25-Feb-07: Why Don't They Tell Us About Thwarted Palestinian Murder Attacks?

The depressingly familiar media distortions and agenda-driven reporting of events in our neighborhood continue to keep us furious.

Most people we spoke with during the last few days (not only here in Jerusalem but also in Paris where we had to be for some work-related meetings this week) seem to have no idea Palestinian Arab terror continues to be a central feature of Israeli lives.

TV and newspaper reports we saw in Europe and here in Israel are largely focused on Abbas smilingly wanly at the cameras while Hamas steamrollers ahead unhindered with its Iranian/Syrian-sponsored offensive, and on the US secretary of state receiving the usual kindergarten lesson from the Pal-Arab ruling junta on how and why things never get better in this part of the world.

For those who get their information from the brand-name news sources, here's some information you probably didn't see or hear. It's about the massive terror attack of last week in Tel-Aviv. The one that, thanks to active counter-measures and divine intervention, never happened.

Four days ago, on February 20th 2007, a Palestinian Arab man exited the village of Jalboun, near Jenin in the northern Samaria district, and headed off in the direction of the Tel-Aviv area. The police say he had a backpack containing a large quantity of instruments of death, mainly explosives. As far as they can tell, his plan was to go to a central bus station - one of the many in the Tel-Aviv area - or a shopping mall - ditto - and meet his 72 virgins by means of a massive act of murder and self-mutilation.

In other words, precisely the sort of action that the current political leadership of the Pal-Arabs praises constantly.

It seems he got as far as Rishon Letzion, one of Tel-Aviv's southern suburbs by the early afternoon. Something then happened, possibly a technical fault. As a result, he threw his bombs into a public garbage dumpster and headed off to an apartment in Bat Yam, another suburb of Tel-Aviv, where he was evidently assured of some shelter and protection. No details of who or why or where have been released at this stage. He was arrested there - again the details are not a matter of public knowledge at this stage.

The police took him back to Rishon Letzion and he showed them where the bomb or bombs had been thrown away. There's no suggestion that this story is fabricated. The man, it's fair to assume, was proud of what he set out to do. His organization publicly confirmed to the media that he was trying to carry out a massacre.

After his apprehension, Israeli security forces, presumably acting on information provided by the arrested terrorist, immediately mounted an action focused on the Jenin "refugee" camp. This happened the day after the arrest - on February 21st. There they intercepted Muhammad Ibrahim Qassem Ubeid. he's known as Abu Jahim in the pro-murder publicity announcements that Pal-Arab society has grown so proficient at propagating. Ubeid was riding around in his car at the time, equipped with an M-16 rifle. The IDF says in its official report that explosive devices were found in his car. Ubeid was one of the most wanted Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in the area. He is the person who dispatched Jalboun, the failed bomber. He was responsible for recruiting other murderer/bombers and for manufacturing explosive devices. He will no longer engage in acts of barbarism or terror because, in the course of the security forces' activities this week, his life ended.

In case you have forgotten just how soaked with innocent blood these people are, here's a brief reminder of the role played by Palestinian Islamic Jihad:

• Headquartered in Damascus and sponsored and supported by Iran and Syria, PIJ is designated as a terror organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Australia and Israel.
• PIJ has been responsible for more murder/bombing attacks in Israel than any other terror group. In the past year, it executed two massacres in Tel Aviv including one on 27th April 2006 at a felafel stand near the Old Tel-Aviv Bus Station. Two attacks that left 9 people dead and 110 injured.
• Its most recent 'achievement' is the Eilat bakery murder we described three weeks ago. That multi-murder was done in collaboration with agents of Fatah, the mainstream Pal-Arab terror organization that owes its loyalty to Abbas. (Currently the president of the Pal-Arab Authority, Abbas is absurdly called 'moderate' by many of the reporters active in the field.)
• Dozens more PIJ attempted massacres have been thwarted by Israeli police, army and other security services and by solid, unpublicized undercover work in the past year.

Dozens. Remember reading about that in your newspaper?

4-Feb-07: Here's what we're up against... every day

Another (yet another) small, almost invisible, news story from among this evening's media reports. To be kept in mind for the next time they tell you Israel's security problems are all a matter of propaganda and some sort of national phobia. 

Living in the cross-hairs of the terrorists here in Jerusalem and reading other peoples' frequently superficial and ill-informed analysis from far-off, the thing you need to keep reminding yourself is that even paranoids have enemies. And we're not especially paranoid.

Security forces nab two terror cells operating in Jerusalem
Last update - 16:56 04/02/2007 | By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz Correspondent

The Shin Bet security service and the police last week arrested members of two Palestinian terror cells operating in Jerusalem, a gag order lifted Sunday revealed. 

The cells, one linked to the Islamic Hamas militant group and the other to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, both originated from the Al-Ayada refugee camp in the West Bank.

Security forces arrested some 20 suspected members of the cells, which allegedly carried out a number of attacks including opening fire and hurling explosives at Israeli military and civilian cars near Rachel's Tomb, in the Jerusalem envelope and the Tunnel Road.

During questioning of the alleged members, security services learned that the cells produced dozens of pipe bombs, based on information gathered from the Internet. The members of the Hamas cell were recruited by a 40-year-old clergyman from a Bethlehem mosque. In the past, members were paid NIS 50 head for preparing explosives or executing an attack. The members of the cell also helped transport equipment, arms, and money. 

During a search of the suspects' houses, security forces found materials for creating explosives, Israel Defense Forces uniforms, rifles and an ax.

3-Feb-07: Time For New Leaders

[The opinion piece below by Frimet Roth appears today in the online edition of the Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot]

Time for new leaders
Failed leadership at fault for needless deaths in Lebanon, on our streets
Frimet Roth
Published: 02.02.07, 22:46

This week's Eilat terror attack was a harsh reminder of the urgent need for the Winograd Committee conclusions. A people under constant threat of attack must know that its leaders are consumed with concern for them. A nation in an ongoing state of war must be reassured that its decision-makers are never distracted from the top priority: Protecting us from our enemies.

The Winograd Committee is no mere formality. Its anticipated grim findings will impact us all. But nobody will feel the brunt more than the parents of soldiers killed in the Second Lebanon War. It is painful enough to endure the loss of a child at the hands of an enemy. But to live with the knowledge that their deaths could have been prevented by our leaders is unbearable. Far too many bereaved parents in this country carry that burden. Their conviction that many casualties were entirely avoidable will apparently soon be confirmed.

But the culprits - poor judgment, irresponsibility, indifference - did not make their debut this past August. Sadly, they have been claiming lives for several years now. Many of the more than 1,000 Israelis killed by the Palestinians in the current Intifada were victims of the very same leadership defects.

So much of what our army now knows about fighting terrorists was learned on the bodies of hundreds of precious children including my daughter, Malki. Had the tactics of our police and army been as professional and determined during the first three years of the Intifada as they are now, innumerable deaths could have been avoided.

Winograd could signal dawn of new era

Critiquing our army's and our government's conduct of the war in Lebanon is a breath of fresh air for this country. But it is long overdue. Not one leader's head rolled during the years after Arafat launched an Intifada war on Israel in September, 2000. Nobody resigned while terrorists infiltrated our borders several times a week and Israeli blood flowed in our cafes, our pizzerias and on our buses. The tactical failures were glaring then too but who was scrutinizing them? The mounting casualty list was written off as the cruel fate of having blood-thirsty neighbors.

The Winograd conclusions could signal the dawn of a new and better era, provided all the responsible parties follow in Halutz's footsteps. If he remains but a lone scapegoat, the status quo will endure. We, the everymen, will remain stuck with a deplorable reality. More of us will lose loved ones, will cry to the media – and will find we have addressed deaf ears.

It's what I've been doing for five and a half years.

On the morning of the ninth of august, 2001, our army, our government and Jerusalem's police force were all warned of the presence of a Palestinian terrorist strolling the streets of the city center. Their reaction was to conceal the information. No civilians, other than hospital personnel, were alerted to the threat.

Several days later, MK Meir Sheetrit shamelessly informed the public that the cabinet had tried to enlist, of all people, Yasser Arafat's assistance in tracking down the terrorists. There is no reason to expect our leaders to be geniuses. But can we afford for them to be that daft?

My daughter's murderer walked the streets of Jerusalem with a load of deadly explosives hidden in a guitar case slung over his shoulder. Alongside him was an accomplice – a young Palestinian woman, pretty and trendily dressed so she would blend in with the Israelis and tourists around them. The couple probably passed several unsuspecting police officers during their stroll from east Jerusalem to their target on corner of Jaffa Road and King George Street, the Sbarro restaurant.

Miki Levy, at the time head of the police force in Jerusalem, had decided to send his men onto the city's streets to find someone masquerading as, well, a terrorist. But the terrorists failed to co-operate, and the police action failed horrifically.

Days of innocence over

Several months later, when on two separate occasions similar alerts were uncovered, a drastically different approach was taken. The two city centers affected were entirely evacuated until the suspects were apprehended several hours later. No lives were lost.

Furthermore, security alerts have come to be treated as declassified information – the sort of news that is now considered worthy of being shared with us, members of the public. Too late for me, Israelis now get to know when we are gravely threatened. We - and not our leaders - get to decide when to put our lives on hold.

Other errors of judgment resulted in avoidable losses. Soldiers were often sent into risky house-to-house combat with Palestinians in order to minimize civilian enemy deaths.

The days of our innocence are over. We can no longer presume that our army, our police and our government are focused on keeping us alive. That they aren't obsessed with their stock portfolios. Or their political standing; Or their facial wrinkles.

Personally, I have never been persuaded that our lives are in competent, caring hands. For example, Olmert's unabashed involvement with his appearance has always appalled me. Last August, in the midst of war, he was seen frantically plastering several wind-blown strands of hair across his bald pate whenever he was out surveying the front-lines of battle.

Then two weeks ago, with political and security crises erupting all around him, Olmert chose to have cosmetic surgery to lift his droopy eyelids. How many hours did he spend examining his face in a mirror before deciding to go under the knife; hours that ought to have been devoted to the demanding job we elected him to do? Is it any wonder he is, as he confided in us last year, "tired of fighting"?

Sometimes I wonder what was on Mr. Olmert's mind the morning of the Sbarro massacre, when as mayor of the threatened city, thousand of lives were in his hands? Which narcissistic worry absorbed him then? What is on his mind today, as we bury three more innocent victims of Palestinian terror?

We cannot see into the souls of our leaders. The snippets of behavior that we are privy to are our only barometer of their inner thoughts and values. Let's not overlook them when we next approach the ballots. Our very lives depend on it.

Frimet Roth is a freelance writer based in Jerusalem who frequently contributes articles dealing with terrorism and with special-needs children. She and her husband founded and run (as unpaid volunteers) the Malki Foundation ( www.kerenmalki.org) in their daughter's memory. The foundation provides concrete support for Israeli families of all religions who care at home for a special-needs child. She can be reached at frimet.roth@gmail.com

29-Jan-07: Bread of Affliction

A bakery in a holiday resort town in this country came under armed attack today. Three ordinary people, makers of fresh bread, were blown to pieces by a bomber. He is an Arab. He died in his own explosion.

Today's act of hate-driven terrorism happened in Eilat, the southern-most town in Israel. Eilat is filled with hotels and a fairly un-Israeli relaxed ambiance. The fact that it has not previously been hit by self-mutiliating Arab murderers may explain why security in the town has been relatively relaxed. Until now.

We know from bitter experience that until a tragedy like today's hits you personally, you tend to think that it happens only to other people.

We've also learned that those with an inclination towards pontificating and placing things in neat moral boxes tend to sink to the occasion when faced with the opportunity to express an opinion about a tragedy of this kind. Unfortunately most editors and many consumers of news seem unable to distinguish between the pontificators and those with something valuable, insightful and instructive to offer.

So let's review a few published reactions from this day's reporting, and see how much light, as opposed to cheap heat, they manage to generate.

Report: "Israeli leaders said the bombing jeopardized a two-month truce in Gaza."
We say: Really? A two-month truce? We must have come awfully close to peaceful relations with our nation-building neighbours in those two months, right? Hardly. Consider this: "In 2006, the IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) caught over 100 Palestinian terrorists who originated in the Gaza Strip and tried crossing into Israel from the Sinai Desert in Egypt. Among the terrorists were suicide bombers, weapons experts on their way to establish terror infrastructure in the West Bank and masterminds of soldier-kidnapping plots. In addition to the terrorists, security forces also succeeded in dismantling 11 terror rings that had established infrastructure which was used for infiltrations along the border. "

Report: "Prime Minister Olmert vowed to continue the "ongoing and never-ending struggle against terrorists.""We say: Really? Yediot Aharonot sees it differently.
"No obstacle along border, IDF officer says
"There is a substantial need for a physical obstacle along the border with Egypt, sources in the Israel Defense Forces said several hours after the Eilat terror attack , which claimed the lives of three people. A senior IDF officer said Monday evening that building such an obstacle, such as a fence along the Israel-Egypt border, was necessary in order to meet the challenges posed by terror organizations in the area. "What worries me is that what happened today will only tempt other terror groups to continue their attempts to carry out attack in the same pattern," the officer said. "We must remember that what happened today was not a record incident and that graver incident could take place. There is no physical, artificial or mental obstacle along the border," he added."

Report: Our defense minister, Amir Peretz, convening an emergency meeting of top security officials said: "This is a grave incident, it's an escalation and we shall treat it as such."
We say: Yes, it's grave. Every time the forces of terror manage to break through the defences which civilized societies put up against the barbarians, it's grave. But it's not an escalation of any sort. It's precisely the same old same old -- Arab terror is a constant -- that leaves us so exasperated by the empty words and incoherent actions of the political figures who bring so much noise and so little wisdom to public life here and in most other places.

Report: "A spokesman for Hamas, the radical Islamic group that controls the Palestinian parliament and Cabinet, praised the bombing as a "natural response"."
We say: Praising terror is what separates barbarian society from civilized society. So then why do the hate-filled statements of the barbarians receive so much air time? They're not only a threat to our society here in Israel. They're a threat to all societies.

Report: "Palestinian terror organizations Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, an arm of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization, and Islamic Jihad have claimed joint responsibility for the attack. "
We say: A Jerusalem Post analysis puts this in perspective: "It also does not make much of a difference which terror group was behind the attack. Nowadays, most of the groups - Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Tanzim, Al Aksa Brigades, PFLP - work together with one supplying the bomb, the other the bomber, and a third the infiltration route. The attack is also a way of trying to divert the attention from the Palestinian internal factional fighting and unite the groups to fight against their common enemy Israel instead of against one another."

Report: "A senior aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack. "We reject these acts and we do not believe that they are in the interest of the Palestinian cause and that they blacken the image of the Palestinian people," Yasser Abed Rabbo told AFP news agency. "
We say: It isn't really a condemnation when you say something shouldn't have been done because it spoils your image. Can you imagine the impact of a Palestinian Arab leader getting up and saying "We have to stop these acts of murder and hatred because they're sending our society back to the stone age and creating a moral burden for our children's children's children that no society can ever bear. We have to stop this because it's immoral and appallingly wrong."
Well, we can dream.

Report: "The last suicide attack was at a Tel Aviv restaurant, killing 10 people. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in that time, mainly in the Gaza Strip."
We say: The BBC has an interesting way of framing the story. There was a previous terror attack, they say. Then afterwards the Israelis killed hundreds of Arabs (a toll that presumably includes deaths like that of the cowardly thug who attacked the bread loaves and ovens this morning). Tit for tat. Classic BBC-talk. Cycle of violence. Want to understand why today's killings happened? asks the BBC's editor. Because hundreds of Palestinians have been killed. Except that this killing by Arabs of Jews in the Jewish homeland has been happening for more than a hundred years. Long before there were occupied territories. Long before there were any Israeli forces. Long before the BBC and the other purveyors of morally-confused news reporting began sending their ill-informed and agenda-driven reporters and photographers to this area.

25-Jan-07: An observation about religion and differences among people

As people who just want to be left in peace to raise our family, to make an honest living, to protect our health and to contribute something useful to society, we sometimes feel like an endangered species. Israel is filled with people like us, of course. But looking around at our neighbours here in the Middle East and wondering about their values, actions and aspirations can sometimes be an extremely dis-spiriting thing.

Just two examples to make a point.

First, the absolutely indispensable but relatively little-known Palestinian Arab journalist, Khaled Abu Toameh, writes in one of today's dailies about some Arab voices you almost never hear.

"The situation is very dangerous... I believe that 15 years from now there will be no Christians left in Bethlehem. Then you will need a torch to find a Christian here. This is a very sad situation."

Abu Toameh writes of how a monk was recently roughed up for trying to prevent a group of Muslim men from seizing lands owned by Christians in Beit Sahur:

Thieves have targeted the homes of many Christian families and a "land mafia" has succeeded in laying its hands on vast areas of land belonging to Christians... "President Mahmoud Abbas is taking our case very seriously," said Georgette Lama. "But until now he hasn't done anything to help us get our land back. We are very concerned because we're not the only ones suffering from this phenomenon. Most Christians are afraid to speak, but I don't care because we have nothing more to lose..."
A Christian businessman who asked not to be identified said the conditions of Christians in Bethlehem and its surroundings had deteriorated ever since the area was handed over to the PA in 1995. "Every day we hear of another Christian family that has immigrated to the US, Canada or Latin America... The Christians today make up less than 15 percent of the population. People are running away because the Palestinian government isn't doing anything to protect them and their property against Muslim thugs. "

As Jews, we have never understood how little concern there seems to be among Christians outside the region about the suffering of their Christian brothers. And if you'd like to know why this bothers us so much, click on Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society.

Meanwhile here's a second illustration of how depressing it is to see what the people in the states that border on ours do and think.

This one is a Moslem viewpoint. Published a few weeks ago by a freelance writer from Islamabad, Pakistan, it expresses opinions that are rarely heard anywhere, and probably least of all in Islamic society. The voice belongs to Farrukh Saleem, a man brave enough - or maybe crazy enough - to publish his email address.

Saleem says the League of Arab States has 22 members. 7 of them are monarchies and 6 are classed by the UN Commission on Human Rights as "authoritarian" and among the "world's most repressive regimes" (Libya, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria and Somalia).

Against this promising background, our Pakistani observer shares with us these insights:

• Of the 330 million Moslems living in Arab countries, fewer than half a million live in a democracy. That's 0.15 per cent of all the Moslem Arabs in the world.
• You need to travel no more than 250 miles from the Arab League's headquarters in Cairo to encounter the sole parliamentary democracy in the entire Middle East. It's a place that has universal suffrage. It's a country with multi-party, multi-candidate, competitive elections. It's called Israel.
• "Israel [says Saleem] spends $110 on scientific research per year per person while the same figure for the Arab world is $2."
• Knowledge [he writes] makes Israel grow by 5.2 per cent a year. Meanwhile the average production per worker in the Arab League countries was negative throughout the 1980's and 90's according to the World Bank's Arab Development Report.
• The average per capita income in Israel is $25,000. In the oil-rich Arab League countries, it's $5,000.
• "The state of Israel [he writes] now has six universities ranked as among the best on the face of the planet. "
• He gets more specific, quoting an authoritative source on tertiary education: "The Hebrew University in Jerusalem is in the top 100. Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science are in the top 200. Bar Ilan University and Ben Gurion University are in the top 300. The Arab League does not have a single university in the top 400.
• Every second Arab women is unable to read and to write. Noting this, he quotes Imam Ali Ibn Abi Taleb: "If God were to humiliate a human being, He would deny him knowledge".
• Between 1998 and 2000, more than 15,000 Arab physicians migrated out of the Arab world. According to World Bank figures, "roughly 25 per cent of 300,000 first degree graduates from Arab universities emigrated. Roughly 23 per cent of Arab engineers, 50 per cent of Arab doctors and 15 per cent of Arab BSc holders had emigrated."
• Israel, on the other hand, has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country in the world. For every 10,000 Israelis, there are 145 engineers or scientists.
• Israel ranks among the top 7 countries worldwide for patents per capita.
• He mentions Teva Pharmaceutical Industries - whose plant we can see from our living room window here in Jerusalem - because it's the world's largest producer of antibiotics. Teva also developed Copaxone, a unique immunomodulator therapy for the treatment of multiple sclerosis, the only non-interferon agent available.
• Most members of the Arab League grant Moslem women few rights in relation to marriage, divorce, dress code, civil rights, legal status and education. Israel is entirely different - its women enjoy the broadest possible rights by any standards.
• Spain (alone) translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years.
• The world's six million Israelis buy 12 million books every year. This makes them one of the highest consumers of books in the world.
• Israel has the highest number of university degrees per capita in the world. The Arab world has the lowest.
• Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other country (109 per 10,000 Israelis). The Arab world? Next to none.

Does any of this matter? No, not if you're a Christian living in a Moslem country. Or a women, or a liberal.

But yes, it does matter to people like us. We have a lot to protect: a society that's growing, achieving, making an impact. If the Arabs in general, and the Palestinian Arabs in particular, had the same kind of stake in their own future, the chances that we might find ways to live in peace with each other would be immeasurably greater.

Even from Pakistan, it's clear how far we are from that happening.