16-Apr-09: Jihadists for peace

Passover has just ended, and with it two weeks of relative quiet from our rocket-hurling, jihadist neighbours in Gaza. YNet says one of their Qassam missiles was fired in the general direction of Kibbutz Magen in the early evening hours, landing near the border fence and exploding without any serious effect.

The most recent of the thousands of rocket attacks by Gazan Palestinian terrorists occured on April 1, when they fired another three Qassam rockets into Israel. A woman and a teenage girl were injured then as they rushed to shelter after the incoming-missile siren sounded.

This past Monday, in a failed terror attack, a booby-trapped fishing boat exploded near an Israel Navy vessel off the northern Gaza Strip coast. And yesterday, Wednesday, the authorities in Egyp uncovered some 900 kilograms of TNT hidden in 18 sacks near Egypt's border with Gaza.

8-Apr-09: An especially apt time to cherish freedom

As the Jewish world makes its last-minute preparations to honour and commemorate our national festival of freedom, we received a timely personal reminder yesterday of how our own child's freedom was stolen by a terrorist group's calculated act of mass-murder.

On Tuesday, here in Jerusalem, the local Magistrates Court considered a compensation claim by the family of our teenage daughter's murderer. Fortunately we were completely unaware of it.

Izz a-Din al-Masri was a religious fanatic from a well-to-do Palestinian Arab family. A guitar case on his back filled with explosives and nails, he was brought into the center of Jerusalem by a well-organized gang arranged by the Hamas jihadists. When he went to his 72 virgins on 9th August 2001 on the premises of the Sbarro restaurant that used to be in the center of Israel's capital city, he took fifteen lives - most of them Jewish children and Jewish women, which was precisely (and remains precisely) the Hamas plan. More than 130 other innocent victims were maimed and wounded by this savage act of "freedom" and "national self-determination".

This being a free and democratic society, the family of the Hamas jihadist sued the state of Israel for damages after their house, which was used by their son to prepare for the massacre at Sbarro, was demolished by judicial order. Media reports said they claim the house was destroyed in a negligent manner.

It's reported (but not widely) that the presiding judge, Yoel Tzur, held the demolition of the al-Masri home was "an appropriate and legal response to the murderous attack. Under wartime laws, including those laws accepted by the international community, a country may demolish property in order to deter attacks... Israel's destruction of terrorists' property can be defined as a method of deterrence".

As to whether the house was destroyed in a negligent manner, the court found that the army took extra precautions and had carried out a "dry run" of the demolition ahead of the real event to ensure the process would run smoothly. The court held that the jihadist's family was given plenty of time to remove their belongings from the building, and rejected their claim for compensation.

We want to point out here that a woman called Ahlam Tamimi, who is serving multiple life-sentences for her role in the Sbarro massacre and in the killing our 15 year-old daughter Malki, is at the top of the Hamas list of "women and children" terrorists that was said to be accepted by the recently-replaced Olmert government in the context of a deal to free Gilad Shalit. There is a very real likelihood that she will soon be free. Hamas has held the young Israeli hostage for the past 1,000 days as a lever to get their jihadists out of Israeli prisons... and back into the cafes, buses and playgrounds of Israeli society where they can again advance the principles of savagery and hatred-driven murder.

Given the amount of widespread confusion and disinformation about terrorists and their agendas, this week's denial of monetary damages to the al-Masris and the continued incarceration of the mass murderer Tamimi are likely to continue to appear on Israel-bashing lists of Israeli "human rights offences".

When we sit down to the festive seder meal tonight, we will be remembering the Jewish people's long struggle for freedom, and the traditional Jewish values that underpin both that struggle and the nation-state that they eventually enabled to be re-established.

2-Apr-09: The murder of children - the positives, the negatives

More appalling acts of terror from the Palestinian Arabs in this ongoing war: two Israeli boys, one either 13 or 16 according to conflicting reports, and one 7, are attacked today by a Palestinian Arab wielding an axe and a strain of religious extremism that defies comprehension. The older of the boys is dead. The younger is in a Jerusalem hospital being treated for serious injuries.

Most Israeli school-children are on vacation now in the days before the festival of Passover which begins next week.

The BBC quotes Israeli sources saying that the responsible parties are "the military wing of Islamic Jihad" and an entity they call "Imad Mughniyeh Group" (an invented title to anyone paying attention to these things). The jihadists had no special difficulty getting access to the Jewish children since, despite a history of previous jihadist murders in the vicinity, theirs is a community which chooses to have no protective fence around its perimeter. The optimism of that ongoing open-door policy is hard for us to understand.

The moral horror of an axe-bearing man with murder and mayhem on his mind is a clear and unambiguous thing for most of us... but not necessarily when you are a media reporter and it's Jewish children who are damaged, and Palestinian Arabs who are the killers.

Consider.

A Palestinian media source applies the customary code language in reporting that "one settler was killed and another injured when a Palestinian man attacked Israeli settlers". To know that the victims were children, you would have needed to check elsewhere.

A Reuters report, differing from the BBC, acribes the act to "Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement". Unable to report on an act of terror on its own savage terms, Reuters connects the murder/maiming to "crimes of occupation".

AFP, true to its snarling, Israel-bashing form, says - with not an ounce of substantiation - that "Bat Ayin is one of the most radical settlements in the occupied West Bank. Most of its 1000-odd residents are hardline settlers who prevent Palestinians from even entering the settlement boundaries". This is what the readers of news channels sourcing AFP's syndicated reports evidently need to hear when a Jewish 13 year old is chopped to death and a Jewish seven year old is slashed and bashed.

A Tim Butcher story in The Telegraph (UK) calls this an "incident" that "appears to fit a long-running series of attacks involving Israelis, who in breach of international law established settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and Arabs, demanding their land back". The particular international law that renders the community a "breach of international law" is not specified by the editors of The Telegraph. The complexities and details of Israeli national rights in their historic homeland long ago ceased to be a matter worth examining when it comes to common editiorial practice. It's perhaps worth pointing out what The Telegraph's fact-checkers don't; Bat Ayin where the boys were attacked today is part of a region called Gush Etzion. This was indeed occupied territory, but not the way Israel's enemies mean it. The occupation started in 1948 when Jordanian forces stormed in immediately after Israel declared its independence, and presided over a massacre of the Jewish farmers who worked the previously-barren land. The occupation ended in 1967 when Israeli forces recaptured it from the Jordanians, who subsequently relinquished any claims to the area in 1988. The Gush Etzion land including Bat Ayin was legally, lawfully and with no controversy purchased by Shmuel Yosef Holtzman in 1930, as Soccer Dad takes the trouble to point out today.

It's difficult not to be bitter about how today's act of child-murder, and the many, many that have come before it arouse such confused, confusing and morally-ambivalent reactions. So long as journalists, analysts and politicians find it so difficult to unambiguously damn the perpetrators of such savagery, terrorism will go on and on.

In this regard, note please the total silence from responsible Arab leaders when it comes to condemning acts of murder directed at children in this ongoing war. And if we're factually wrong about this, please let us know. As parents of a child murdered by jihadists, and as witnesses to the double-speak that emerged in its wake, we have a vested interest in speaking out about this catastrophic reality and trying to sensitize people to what it means not only to us but to them, their societies and their lives.

9:30pm UPDATE: When you're completely immersed, as the members of the Hamas regime are, in acts of savagery that define your very essence, then murder is just another of many actions that you embrace for their expedience. Thus, tonight, a spokes-thug for the Gazan government justified the unthinkable with these comments captured by the Jerusalem Post: the axe-murder "was simply a natural response to the Israeli "occupation"... committed in the framework of the resistance". It "is a reaction to the continuing occupation and the continued building of settlements... It is our right to defend ourselves and to act in every way and with every means at our disposal in order to defend ourselves." The words quoted are those of Hamas goon Ayman Taha. But his "we have no choice" values, attitudes, justifications can heard coming from the mouths and word processors of a depressingly long list of people who ought to know much better.