29-Sep-10: Goldstone, Gaza, TIME Magazine

An article by Frimet Roth, one of this blog's two authors, appears today on the Israel National News website.

Hear, See, Speak No Anti-Semitism

Karl Vick wrote a Times Magazine article on Israel that aroused pro-Zionist furor. He toured Samaria with the Yesha Council and then wrote another, more objective article. Frimet Roth is not convinced.

By Frimet Roth

Some Jews can't acknowledge anti-Semitism even when it stares them in the face. It just isn't trendy these days. So, when confronted with a tirade as vile as the recent Time magazine cover story by Karl Vick "Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace", they groped frantically for excuses.

There were those who argued that the attack was simply "the most basic, obvious truth about contemporary Israeli life" and that "there are no anti-Semitic truths" as Larry Derfner did in his Jerusalem Post column. Others resorted to absurd rationalizations such as the convoluted one Anschel Pfeffer offered in his Haaretz column. Journalists stationed here try to  "alleviate their own guilty conscience", Pfeffer maintained, for "leading an extremely comfortable life in Jewish Israel while receiving kudos from colleagues and readers for delivering what look like hard-core stories from the front lines."

But the overwhelming response to Vick's piece was outrage. Because, as is obvious to anyone without rose-colored glasses, this was not an innocent slip-up. Vick is not a drunk celebrity, like Mel Gibson, who cursed Jews while copping a D.U.I. Nor is he an ancient relic of dubious sanity, like columnist Helen Thomas, who leaked, off-the-cuff, her hidden prejudices.

Vick's anti-Semitic piece was edited, vetted and sanctioned by him along with a team of sharp editors at Time magazine. They then selected it as the cover story and assigned it a headline that was, in Vick's own words, "meant to be provocative and intrigue".  Which contradicts his subsequent claim that "he did not write the headline... and that editing made the article seem more critical than he meant it to be.

Vick made that lame excuse for his article's headline to the executive director of the Council of Judea and Samaria (Yesha Council) Naftali Bennett during a personally guided tour of the Shomron last week.  The tour introduced Vick to the head of the Yesha Council, Danny Dayan, to residents of the settlements Beruchin and Eli, to the sight of Jews and Arabs working side by side in production lines and to Bennett's contention that "it is obvious that there is enough room for all of us and for Jewish expansion."

Following the tour, an optimistic Bennett mind-read that "Vick never imagined that the Shomron is home to so many secular kippa-less Israelis"… as if that was at the root of the journalist's animosity towards Israeli Jews.  Bennett added that "[Vick] is considering a sequel."

Let's hope nobody is holding his breath waiting for a mea culpa from Vick. Since the tour, he has reported, dateline Eli, West Bank, that the "something more" that settlers love about life in Eli "threatens to derail the nascent peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority."

In that post-tour report, Despite Peace Talks Israeli Settlers Are Dug In, Vick still portrays the settlers as "religious nationalist Jews" who say the territories "were promised them in the Scriptures that double as history here. In settling here, some believe themselves to be fulfilling a condition for the emergence of the Messiah Jews still await."

He concedes that "forcing them out of their homes is not something Israelis take lightly" but emphasizes that "settlers account for a small fraction of Israel's population of 7 million."

Karl Vick's tour guides should not be disappointed. Their expectations were Polyannish.  Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace was the product of egregiously shoddy journalism with a clear agenda. Selective reporting and glaring omissions demonstrated that Vick's sentiments would not be dissipated by a tour - nor, probably, ever.

Vick's  prejudice was evident throughout that first cover article. First, it was saturated with quotes from ten interviewees, clearly members of Israel's upper-middle-class and nearly all residing in the Tel Aviv “bubble" and its environs.

Most of those hand-picked - and often repugnant - individuals unabashedly described their hedonistic, materialistic lives. They insisted that they represent  Vick's "ordinary Israeli", oblivious to their Israeli neighbors, the economically struggling working-class majority.

Tellingly, none of them mentioned the bloody violence of the last decade. It is an oft-repeated axiom that in this tiny nation everyone has either lost a loved one in a terror attack or has a friend or neighbor who has. Yet Vick studiously avoided contact with any such Israelis.

Because, in his estimation, terrorism against Israel is history.  Israelis, he wrote, are "now observing two and a half years without a single suicide bombing on their territory". And "the Gaza Strip... has been largely quiescent since the thunderous military operation...in January 2009."

Vick ignored the fact that in the last two and a half years, terrorists murdered 14 Israelis in rocket attacks, shootings, and a suicide bombing. Or that over 1,000 rockets, mortars and Grads have bombarded Israeli soil since January 2009.

Vick credited the fictitious "quiescence" to Israel's "concrete wall", omitting mention that the security barrier is actually 90% fence with its remainder an 8 meter tall concrete wall.. Moreover, he asserted that thanks to this barrier, most Israelis "can easily pass an entire lifetime without meeting one [a Palestinian]."

Vick must have enjoyed excellent health during his four months here. Because a visit to any Israeli hospital, something I have been doing frequently this year with my ill daughter, reveals that nearly 50% of the patients are Arab, 10% of them from the PA . A significant number of doctors and nurses are also Arab. Shopping malls, medical clinics and many other venues bring the two peoples together.

Elsewhere, Vick brandished the results of a March opinion poll which had only 8% of Israeli Jews citing the conflict with Palestinians as Israel's "most urgent problem. That was fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty."

Determined to prove his thesis, Vick glossed over the finding that poverty was a major Israeli concern. "Israelis feel prosperous " he asserts and Israel's quality of life is "high and getting higher". Israelis are "making money".

Vick ignored annoying contradictory statistics, such as the fact that a third of Israeli children live below the poverty line according to data published by the National Insurance Institute in 2010. Or the fact that only a minuscule minority of Israeli Jews are wealthy. There are so few rich Jews here that in 2006, Business Data Israel (BDI) reported that Israel’s 19 wealthiest families controlled an aggregate NIS 248 billion in revenue, equal to 88% of the government budget.

But the most insidious element is Vick's comparison of the Jewish mentality with others.  He believes that the wealthy, superficial, money-grubbing Israeli nation he fabricated is "a trifle weary of having to handle big elemental thoughts".  Not so the enlightened others, Vick is certain:  "Deep down (you can almost hear the outside world ask)", he wonders, "don't Israelis know that finding peace with the Palestinians is the only way to guarantee their happiness and prosperity?"

Jews need to accept Vick for what he is: a non-objective journalist who will churn out articles reflecting his bias for as long as he is stationed in Jerusalem. With his Why Israel Doesn't  Care About Peace article, he succeeded in crossing a red line in the mainstream media with  the sort of anti-Semitic rant that has until now been relegated to the media fringe. But he was only reflecting a general swing in attitude toward Israel since the Goldstone report and the Gaza flotilla.

It would be wise to acknowledge this new status quo instead of closing our eyes and ears to it,  however un-trendy that may be.

Published originally on the Israel National News website, earlier today.

28-Sep-10: A small slip (again and again) by the BBC but it has consequences

Our headline says "slip" but we don't believe that's what has happened.

Israel's self-imposed ten-month long moratorium on construction in Judea and Samaria expired on Sunday. If its purpose was to encourage the Palestinian Authority leadership to join discussions with Israel on a peace process, it was no great success. For most of those ten months, Mr Abbas the head of Fatah and of the PA flatly refused; then agreed to indirect talks where the Israelis would not be permitted to be in the same room at the same time as the Palestinian Authority delegates; and then - just a few weeks ago - consented to actual face-to-face talks which started earlier in September.

Large parts of the Israeli public never understood why we would be expected to stop constructing houses, schools and communities in towns that we regard as our home. And having nevertheless agreed to do exactly that, many of us never understood why the other side's refusal to then sit down and talk was accepted at large (by the media, by international agencies, by most countries' diplomats) with almost complete equanimity. But that's how it was.

Now the parties are talking, and every rational person hopes they will find a way to reach common ground and a basis for peace.

Which brings us to the BBC.

The unilateral construction moratorium has ended, and life goes on, as normally as it ever is here. But the BBC, arguably the most important source in the world for information about current events, has the facts quite wrong and you have to ask yourself how and why.

On yesterday's 8.30am report, BBC presenter John Humphries said:

‘At midnight last night the moratorium on Israelis building new settlements in the West Bank came to an end. It had lasted ten months.’

New settlements?

He passed the mike to Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, who surely knows, to provide background. Bowen said:

‘They began the moratorium because there had been a great deal of American pressure for them to stop building settlements anywhere, in east Jerusalem or in the West Bank.’

Stop building settlements?

On the BBC World website, accompanying text for this segment reads:

‘Israel has urged the Palestinians not to abandon peace talks despite the fact that the moratorium on new settlements in the West Bank has expired.’

Moratorium on new settlements?

That's three substantial mis-statements, and it's not a small point. The tug of war over Israeli settlements is emotive, even explosive, and misrepresentation of the facts is a large part of why this is.

The voluntary, one-sided Israeli moratorium was always on construction within existing settlements. Jeremy Bowen (at least) certainly knows this. Why then would the BBC's expert on the ground deliver such misleading and factually wrong analysis?

Bowen surely knows, as an Israeli spokesman said today, that existing communities in Judea and Samaria (settlements, if you prefer - though the word itself is inaccurate and prejudicial) have not expanded. New communities in the area have not been authorized by the government of Israel since the early 1990's. The moratorium was of construction within Israeli communities. Its end means that Israelis can go back to constructing their communities, subject to getting the needed permits, within existing communities (or settlements).

Do you see the BBC correcting itself? Neither do we.

Being accurate about the facts, and drawing a line between history and propaganda, are critical to the pursuit of peace in our troubled times. Defeating the terrorists absolutely demands that people know to distinguish between politics and polemics.

And for the record, the obsessive focus on so-called settlements is not and never was what the conflict here is about, though large swathes of the news media would mischievously try to have you believe they are at the heart of the conflict.  When Arafat and the PLO got started in 1964 with their campaign of wiping Israel and Israelis off the map, the total number of "settlements" and "occupied" "territories" was zero.

27-Sep-10: Responsibility for shooting attack claimed (no great surprises here)

While the head of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas loudly professes his commitment to the search for peace with the Israelis (in some places and at some times except when he does not), his executive branch colleagues remain loyal to tried-and-tested methods of a different sort.

Fatah's military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and the Al-Quds Squads of the Islamic Jihad later claimed joint responsibility for [last night's attack], claiming in a statement that the attack was carried out to mark the 15th anniversary of the killing of Fatah founder Fat'hi Shkaki. [Source1 and Source2] 

The cowardly armed thugs of Al-Aqsa owe their alliegance to Mahmoud Abbas. For a while, four or five years ago, he and they went through a highly publicized charade of the Brigade members purportedly undergoing disarmament. As we say in Hebrew, אין דובים ואין יער  - no forest and no bears.

As we reported last night, this was the third drive-by shooting by Palestinian Arabs of Israelis in a month. Fortunately this time the injuries of the shooting victims were moderate and no lives were lost. In fact, a blessed new life was brought into existence [see "Woman survives shooting, gives birth to healthy boy"]

26-Sep-10: Another drive-by shooting attack tonight: Israeli couple shot

In the third such point-blank drive-by shooting in a single month, a woman in the ninth month of her pregnancy was wounded tonight by gun fire around 8.30pm. She was riding in a car driven by her husband (who was also shot) and the shooters were Palestinian Arab terrorists in another car. While none of the myriad so-called factions has taken credit yet, it's bound to be only a matter of time before one or another of them does. Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza with an iron fist, claimed credit for each of the two earlier attacks on Israeli civilians in their vehicles.

The location of tonight's terror attack was Highway 60 at Omarim Junction, in the Mount Hebron area. The couple, Neta Zucker and her husband Sharon, live in the nearby community of Tene Omarim, located just north of Meitar, a Beer Sheba suburb. Ynet says Neta is now in the operating room having a Caesarian section to deliver her baby.

Numerous rock-throwing attacks on Israeli vehicles were reported today (Sunday) in the Hebron sector. There's a general sense that we're going to see more 'heroic' actions like tonight's from Palestinian Arab gunmen in the coming weeks and months.

UPDATE Monday morning: We're very happy to report that the wounded mother gave birth last night to a healthy son.

26-Sep-10: More own-goals, more reportorial apathy

We reported a few days ago on jihadist rockets that land on the homes and heads of Palestinian Arabs with close-to-zero media interest or media coverage. One happened this past Friday. Another this past Wednesday. And there have been plenty of others.

As we noted, Arab-on-Arab violence is rarely reported. In these highly distorted times, such stories lack journalistic impact. Result: it's as if they never happened.

We have two more to offer. These concern Moslem-on-Moslem violence rather than Arab-on-Arab. We leave to you to judge whether they get, or have gotten, the media coverage and awareness that they deserve.

A well-known but now retired Turkish military general, Sabri Yirmibeşoğlu, interviewed in a prominent Turkish news medium, reveals that when Turkish forces invaded Cyprus in 1974 (they have been in illegal occupation of 36% of Cyprus from then until today), they destroyed a mosque. Why? Because when you see yourself as being at war with your foe

...certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance

Laconic-enough language. But when you pay attention to the vituperation emanating from Turkish sources in the wake of the failed assault on the Israeli naval blockade of Hamastan/Gaza, you see that they assertively claim some very high ground. Likewise, tensions between the Turks and their despised Greek neighbors have long run high. When it was suggested in the past (and it was) that Turkish tactics included self-inflicted damage for the effect it might have, the official Turkish response was "nonsense". Turns out not so much.  The full interview is here.

Meanwhile a chemical bomb (see original news report) that exploded this past Tuesday in the vicinity of the Islamic Society of Portland, Maine, turns out to not be another Islamophobic hate crime. This report says the local police were contacted in the wake of the explosion by Islamic elders who informed them the culprit was... a 13 year old from the Islamic Society community.

And why would he do such a thing? Well, because - and we're quoting - he "was experimenting". What could be more normal? Experimentation is part of the American way, no? How else do we expect a kid to grow to full manhood and blow things up properly?

Two notes to keep in mind. One - a second bomb was located by police underneath a parked vehicle before it was detonated. And two - a popular eatery, the Back Bay Grill, is located a handful of meters from the site of the explosion and the second bomb and shares a car park with the Islamic center.

What could be more normal than a teenager building and laying home-manufactured explosive bombs in a public place and then setting them off? And lest we jump to the conclusion that the locals are troubled to the point of acting - well, not really. The news report says: "Police say it's unclear if charges will be filed against the teenagers." (Plural.)


Now imagine for a moment the media festivities if it turned out the Israeli army was behind the bombing of a synagogue for the effect. Or if local Jewish kids experimented with live explosives in the car park of a major capital city restaurant, right next to a Mosque.

24-Sep-10: Another own-goal

As happens frequently (even though it's almost never reported by the mainstream meda), yet another Israel-bound Qassam rocket, despatched by the jihadists of Gaza, crashed to earth on the Gazan side of the fence that keeps the Hamas terrorists away from civilization. This crash is reported by YNet to have occured around 6 this morning (Friday). We reported on a previous such mishap this past Wednesday, two days ago.

We can only wish good luck to the hapless Palestinian-Gazan-Arab subjects of the Hamas regime - their injuries and losses don't even merit a mention in the media since Arab-on-Arab damage has almost always been relegated to news-reporting oblivion.

24-Sep-10: More "youths"

Arab mob violence is hardly a new phenomenon. In this part of the world, it's rarely innocent or spontaneous, and it is frequently deadly. In that light, notice anything similar about these images? Photos play an unparalleled role in framing the way most people think about events taking place far from their own familiar surroundings. What is it about a Palestinian-Arab hurling a deadly rock at a Jewish head or home or vehicle that gets news photographers so excited?

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This last picture is from a previous Arab mob riot in Jerusalem, and captures the artificiality that frequently goes on behind the events. It's an image to bear in mind when we try to make sense of what the media reports.

23-Sep-10: Dealing with those "youths" in Jerusalem

It's Thursday night here in Jerusalem. The moon is full, the weather is delightly mild, the atmosphere is festive (we have just started celebrating the week-long Tabernacles holy days)... and there are riots and violence in the mainly-Arab neighbourhoods ten minutes drive from our Jerusalem home.

This latest chapter in the turbulent history of our country's capital city started yesterday morning before dawn. A security guard in his car, driving through Jerusalem's Silwan neighbourhood at about 4.30am, ran into what YNet calls "an improvised stone barrier". The guard's employer is quoted saying the young man tried to avoid an ambush by driving back from where he came. But he was then stopped by another barrier which included stones and large rocks.

"At this stage, dozens of Palestinians approached his car. The guard feared for his life and was afraid of being kidnapped. At first he fired in the air, and after the rioters moved towards him, he shot a single bullet and hit one of them."

The man who was shot dead, Samar Sarchan, 32, has a criminal record. A screwdriver and a knife were found on his body. The Jerusalem District Police Commander Aharon Franco said that "according to an initial investigation, the guard encountered a preplanned ambush which put his life in danger, prompting him to open fire." Predictably the public pronouncements from the Palestinian Authority are quite different. The Director of Palestinian Government Media Center says the shooting was 'a trust wrecking move' by the Israeli prime minister. Meanwhile the guard was released from custody after being questioned.

What followed was a depressingly familiar spiral of instigated Palestinian-Arab violence with "worshippers" barricading themselves inside the al-Aqsa Mosque and rioting mobs in the Temple Mount vicinity and in other parts of Jerusalem's Old City precinct. During the funeral on Wednesday, an Israeli by-stander was stabbed in the back near the Augusta Victoria Hospital. He is being treated at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital and said to be in moderate condition.

The mainstream media describe "local youngsters" "throwing stones" and burning tires. But the reality is that what these political 'activists' and 'militants' are throwing are deadly projectiles, and exploding molotov cocktails. Their targets are Jewish homes, Jewish pedestrians and bus passengers, and Jewish vehicles. The forebearance of the Israel Police forces so far is extraordinary.

No less depressing is the media coverage which has managed to convey an impression of 'clashes' between 'settlers' and 'youths'. But as so often happens here, the clash is actually a cold-blooded attack by a lynch mob, and the follow-up is police action intended to protect innocent bystanders on both sides of the Jewish/Arab divide.

Some scenes of yesterday's and today's Arab violence in the Holy City.

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22-Sep-10: Tentacles in Paris and beyond

In France, always an interesting place to observe because of the massive socio-demographic changes that have flowed from its huge intake of North African migrants, they're trying to cope with a rising tide of jihadism.

Yesterday there were reports, confirming rumours that have appeared during the past week, that their national intelligence services uncovered a week ago and thwarted a plot to have an Islamist suicide bomber - a female, as it happens, explode in a "busy part of Paris". The goal, it needs to be said, was not to take control of the Eiffel tower but simply to sow the horror and devastation that are the essential ingredients of terror.

Why are such things being done to the French? According to this report, France's burqa ban has "seriously increased" the threat of a major terrorist attack. So says the French domestic intelligence chief Bernard Squarcini. "All the red lights were flashing", he warned, over the risk that jihadists would bomb French cities. "France's role in Afghanistan, its foreign policy and the debate over the law banning the burqa have all increased the risk."

That was last week. Then yesterday, more evidence of the terror tentacles reach into France, this time for what are perceived as different reasons. France is now said to be on "red alert" for a terror attack, according to a headlined report originally carried by the Times of London.

FRANCE has been warned to prepare for imminent terrorist attack. This came as Paris sent special forces to West Africa to hunt al-Qa'ida fighters who are holding seven hostages in the wastelands of the Sahel. President Nicolas Sarkozy was returning early from a visit to the UN yesterday to take charge of what he and the terrorists call a war between France and al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb, an Algerian-led offshoot of the international jihad movement. The conflict intensified last week when gunmen, assumed to be from AQIM, snatched the seven, five of them French, from a French uranium mining colony in northern Niger where they worked... The domestic security services alerted Mr Sarkozy's government to a severe threat against the public transport system last Thursday after signs that two dormant Islamist cells in Paris had been revived to receive groups of jihadi radicals returning from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Algeria also alerted Paris to signs of preparations for a bomb attack in France. Police sources told RTL radio yesterday that a suicide attack by a woman was expected [that's the report we mentioned above], but this was not officially confirmed. Bernard Squarcini, the head of the internal intelligence service, said France faced its biggest threat since the mid-1990s when Algerian-based radicals waged a murderous bombing campaign in Paris... Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said the threat was real. "We have stepped up our vigilance," he said. More soldiers were sent to guard public places yesterday under France's permanent "Vigipirate" security operation, which is now at its second-highest state of alert. Round-the-clock guards have been assigned to Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Paris Mosque and figurehead of France's Muslim community. "We do not know when or where an attack will come, but we know that it will take place," an intelligence official said. [More]

Related or not, there's growing Gallic anxiety about the influence of aggressive Islamic activism on its streets. A video based on some grass-roots investigative journalism makes for troublesome viewing.

22-Sep-10: Doing what comes naturally

Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, paid a visit yesterday (Tuesday) to the southern Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Sderot, doing what comes naturally. Pressing the flesh, eyeballing the locals, he said what you need politicians to say when there's trouble with the neighbours: "I advise Hamas and other organizations not to test our resolve to react with fire... Our commitment is first and foremost to security... We responded to recent shooting by hitting Hamas targets, including a senior Hamas official. We will continue with this policy... Rocket fire warrants an immediate response, and this has reduced the fire. "
 
In a time-honoured custom and doing what comes naturally, the local leadership handed him a memento of the visit - a small collection of missile parts that were recovered from some of the many rockets fired in past months in their general direction. 

Some hours after the prime ministerial visit, yet another in the appallingly lengthy list of Gazan Qassam rockets (almost never reported anywhere other than in Israeli news media channels) exploded in the vicinity. Turns out this Qassam rocket, like a significant number before it, landed on the Gazan-Palestinian side of the border fence that keeps the Gazan jihadists away from civilization. No one really knows whether the own-goal caused casualties among Gaza's Palestinian Arab communities because - invariably - there are no media reporters around when its Arab-on-Arab violence. The reasons why this is so are plain, depressing and usually misunderstood. 

Terrorists, doing what comes naturally, don't give a damn whether their victims are military, civilians or their own neighbours. This is true here, there and everywhere. In this ongoing war waged by the terrorists, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. It's the bystanders, no matter who they happen to be or where, who are the target, always.

It's simply not possible to defeat the terrorists without internalizing this truth.

19-Sep-10: Cops? Terrorists? Gazans know they're all the same

The analysts at Honest Reporting make a significant observation today that goes to the heart of how terrorism is thoroughly interwoven in the day-to-day operations of the jihadist Hamas regime in Gaza.

They remind us about the wrangling over the Gaza war's casualty count, when Hamas (and a good part of the mainstream media) argued against Israel over the definition of civilians. They point out that Hamas has acknowledged that, really, there's no distinction between the Hamas regime's civilian police and the Hamas regime's "resistance" groups who attack Israelis, preferably Israeli civilians (that's what makes them terrorists).

The source is TIME Magazine which writes this:

Referring to both the uniformed police and the plainclothes Internal Security, one civilian says, "They're all Qassam." The government does little to deny it. "Many of the Qassam operate within both the Qassam brigades and the Internal Security," Interior Ministry spokesman Ehab al-Ghossain tells TIME. "In our laws, we do not prevent any resistance fighter from joining the police or a security service, provided that he is committed to the rules and regulations of the department he belongs to . . . We make sure that their activities, outside of their official jobs, remain separate."

Sounds obvious to anyone watching Gaza's descent into the black hole of history. But the disgraceful Richard Goldstone report into the war between the Hamas regime and Israel in Dec'08 and Jan'09 saw things quite differently. It examined (among other matters) the Israeli attacks on Hamas police, including an air attack on a passing-out parade of police cadets in Gaza City on 27th December 2008 in which many police were killed.

Goldstone's report

"finds that there is insufficient information to conclude that the Gaza police as a whole had been “incorporated” into the armed forces of the Gaza authorities... The policemen killed cannot be considered to have been combatants by virtue of their membership in the police... From the facts available to it, the Mission further believes that there has been a violation of the inherent right to life of those members of the police killed in the attacks of 27 December 2007 who were not members of armed groups by depriving them arbitrarily of their life in violation of article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."

From the facts available to it, is what it says. How nice it would be to imagine Goldstone owning up to the limitations of his prejudiced coterie of agenda-driven lawyers and their extrenely myopic outlook. Nice, but it's never going to happen.

Hamas are laying the groundwork for what many Gazans expect to be mandatory conscription. Thus the smokescreen that Goldstone and colleagues provided for the Hamas jihadists is bound to cause considerably more loss of life on both sides of the divide. And disclosures like the one publicized by TIME and Honest Reporting will have zero effect. Demonizing Israelis as war criminals is a far more resonant tactic in international forums than owning up to how the tentacles of terrorism that have thoroughly captured Gazan society.

15-Sep-10: Southern discomfort, again

True, there are discussions going on between top-tier political leadership on the Israeli and Palestinian Arab sides. Discussions calculated, according to their US sponsors, to lead to peace via a serious attempt to grapple, as Hilary Rodham Clinton put it this morning "with the core issues that can only be resolved through face to face negotiations". The highly problematic nature of Israel negotiating with a PA echelon that, at best, speaks for half or less of the Palestinian Arabs does not need reiterating here. Nor does a long list of other aspects of the Abbas regime's constant recourse to the ugliest forms of incitement against Israelis, incitement against Israel and incitement against the kind of mutually-painful compromises essential to any progress towards peaceful co-existence.

But there is also war - an ongoing war. a shooting war. 

Two additional rockets and two more mortar shells were fired into Israel in the early hours of this morning (Wednesday) from launch pads in Hamas-controlled, rocket-rich Gaza. The Jerusalem Post calls them further evidence of "Hamas's attempts to fulfill threats made by the group on Tuesday promising a wave of violence meant to derail Israeli-Palestinian peace talks." 

Today's mortars landed in the Eshkol region of southern Israel while one of the two Qassam rockets landed in the suburbs of Ashkelon, a coastal city in southern Israel with the misfortune of being more and more within range of the Gazan jihadists. (We still don't know where the second Qassam exploded.) Very fortunately no injuries or damage are reported. This, as we keep pointing out, was not the outcome that the terrorists wanted or intended from their attack. More than a dozen rockets have been fired into Israel so far since the Jewish New Year was celebrated this past weekend.

Yesterday (Tuesday), IDF soldiers operating near the border fence with Gaza came under anti-tank fire and responded with tank shells and light gunfire. One of the terrorists was killed; four others were wounded. A report suggests they belonged to al-Qaeda or one of its local franchisees - in any event, certified, dues-paying jihadist terrorists. In the wake of the shooting, Ahmed Jaabari, leader of Hamas’ military wing, issued what JPost's correspondent termed a rare statement threatening a wave of violence intended to derail the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks on Tuesday. That wave appears to have gathered momentum this morning, and it's fair to assume there will be more, just as there were plenty before it.

This past Sunday, three Palestinians were killed after one of them picked up an RPG found in a field near the security fence and pointed it in the direction of Israeli forces a short distance away on the Israeli side of the fence. At least two of those killed – a 91-yearold man and his grandson – were later identified by the IDF as innocent civilians who were not involved in terrorist activity.

The AP photo above was syndicated out this morning. It will be interesting to see which parts of the mainstream media give publicity to Israel allowing construction materials to enter Hamastan so that a water purefication plant can be upgraded, while missiles are falling on the homes and heads of Israelis.

UPDATE Wednesday 16:00 - Today's attacks on southern Israel - the talley of mortars is now six according to AFP, in addition to the Qassam rockets. 

12-Sep-10: Religious holyday or not, more rockets fired on Israel

With Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) and the Sabbath which followed it just behind us, we have some catching up to do for the three days of non-blogging. And as usual, we find we're reporting on attacks on Israel that go largely unreported in the conventional news media - as if such attacks are trivialities, hardly worth the editorial effort.

Wednesday, the eve of Jewish new year, the jihadists of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip lobbed a mortar shell into Israel. It landed and exploded between two adjacent kindergarten buildings on the grounds of the kibbutzim that are within firing distance of Gaza. Fortunately no injures were reported in that attack, but there was damage to one of the kindergarten structures. Ynet pointed out that kindergartens on this kibbutz are normally open and filled with toddlers on Fridays and on holiday eves. This time, thank heavens, the incoming mortar was fired about 30 minutes before the children were due to arrive.

It's somehow underappreciated that hitting a kindergarten would be a major achievement in the perverted value-system of the terrorists - a victory, a success.

On Thursday, the first day of the two-day New Year festival, two Qassam rockets were fired from by Gaza-based jihadists. Both landed in open spaces, one within the precincts of the Shaar Hanegev regional council (Israeli sources avoid identifying the site of rocket landings to avoid providing any usable feedback to the Gazan thugs and their political masters). Again, no injuries or damage were reported in either case. But this was not the intention of the terrorists.

8-Sep-10: The chasm between them and us

Wherever there are Jews, you will find them being introspective today. It's the eve of the Jewish New Year, a time for trying to understand what this year just ending has meant to us. Also what we want in the year about to start unfolding.

As bereaved parents, thoughts of what terror and its exponents do to people's lives are never far from the surface. On days like today, they are right at the top of the pile.

Our lives and those of our children - and we imagine the lives of many of our neighbours and friends too, but there we speak with far less familiarity - are permanently changed in the wake of the murder of our Malki. The extent of the impact naturally varies in both extent and nature. But it's there.

The idea that there are people who can harbor a hatred so profound that they will happily die in their own man-made explosion just so long as they know they killed some of the people they hate (us), is incomprehensible. The more you think about it, the more impossible it is to understand.

But not for everyone.

The Palestinian Authority sat down, via its highest representatives, in Washington this past week to talk peace with representatives of Israel. A little earlier (as reported in  the PA's official newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on Aug. 28, 2010 and via the invaluable Palestinian Media Watch) other representatives of the same Mahmoud Abbas PA regime bestowed a public honour on a woman called Um Youssef Hamid a resident of the Al-Amari neighbourhood of Ramalla, the seat of Abbas's PLO-dominated government.

Knowing about this honour, about Mrs Um Youssef Hamid and the values she has inculcated in her offspring and, by extension, the values that the political leadership of the Palestinians seeks to inculcate in their society, is - to say the least - illuminating. The sort of insight that might contribute hugely to one's introspection.

We don't know more about Mrs Um Youssef Hamid than what the handful of news reports - until now, all of them Israeli since this event is evidently of no interest to the wider ranks of the global media - can tell us. Here's what they tell us.

Mrs Um Youssef Hamid was honoured in a special ceremony (depicted on this Hebrew-language Israeli news site) by the Minister for Prisoners Affairs in the PA government based in Ramallah, the part of the Palestinian Arab polity not yet controlled by Hamas, and his senior officials. She was honoured because her sons were responsible for dozens (dozens!) of attacks on Israelis, the overwhelming majority of them on civilians. The sort of attacks that we call terrorist. The sort of cold-blooded and deliberate terrorist attacks that took the lives of more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, including the life of our fifteen year-old daughter Malki.

The sons of Mrs Um Youssef Hamid brought tremendous honour on her, on her family, on her people and on the Mahmoud Abbas regime. Nasser Abu-Hamid killed 7 Israelis and tried to murder 12 more. Today he is in an Israeli prison serving seven life sentences plus 50 years. The second son, Nasr Abu Hamid is serving 5 life sentences for his involvement in two terror attacks and arms dealing. Sharif Abu Hamid: 4 life sentences for involvement in several terror attacks and accompanying a jihadist bomber to a March 2002 attack. Muhammad Abu Hamid - serving 2 life sentences plus 30 years for involvement in multiple terror attacks. Rounding out the family's distinctive specialness, a fifth son - Abed Almun'am Muhamed Yousef Naji Abu-Hamid - was apprehended and terminated by Israeli forces in a firefight in 1994 after carrying out several terrorist murders.

Enough. That's them. Those are their values. What's important for our society is to know against whom we are defending ourselves, and the ideas and ideology that motivate them.

We, for our part, and our neighbours and our society are driven to do acts of a very different sort. Our Malki's death left an unfillable hole in our lives. For the past nine years, her family and friends have been engaged in creating an honour of an infinitely more constructive kind than the one we just described. It's called Keren Malki, the Malki Foundation.

As we go into Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, this evening, we ask you to spend five minutes viewing a new video produced by Keren Malki UK, the London-based group of volunteers who are helping us communicate and support Keren Malki's message of goodwill and good deeds.

Please click below to view the video, and please condider passing it along to your friends.

We don't need ministers and ceremonies to articulate the values that animate the Jewish people and that run like a golden thread through three thousand years of Jewish history. All we need to do is remember lives like that of Malki, and the good that she embodied.

Shana tova! May this new year be a year of happiness, good health, peace and accomplishment for all people of goodwill.

7-Sep-10: A rocket this morning, and a response

Another "natural response" this morning from the terrorists who control the Gaza Strip. Barely reported anywhere, they launched one of their numerous Qassam rockets early this morning into an Israeli military installation, a nearby Israeli armored vehicle, the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from the hated Israelis any reachable civilian space at all, no real matter where, just so long as it is in Israel, and preferably where Jewish civilians are asleep or working.

Today's Qassam was fired in the dark of night. There were reports shortly after 2 am of a rocket crashing into an area just outside Sderot's city limits. Fortunately no injuries or damage were reported. But as we have noted many times, this - explicitly - was not the intention of the jihadists.

The timing of today's rocket seems to be connected to the same factors that underlie last week's shooting attacks (see 1-Sep-10: Real people, real terror) on Israelis traveling the roads - namely, the need to express a violent Hamas statement to those taking part in, or watching from a distance, the Washington peace talks between delegations representing Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

As expected, the Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad sees such matters through a PLO lens. His forces have arrested hundreds of Hamas members since last week's fatal terrorist attack - a cold-blooded murder of four Israelis for which Hamas proudly and publicly claimed credit. Fayyad says that attack "was politically motivated and intended to embarrass the Palestinian Authority".

That, and not the loss of innocent lives, is why the PA acted. Nice to know.

5-Sep-10: Incoming Qassam again

Iranian Fajar-5

The Jerusalem Post reports belatedly this morning that yet another Gazan-Palestinian Qassam rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel 24 hours ago, on Saturday morning. It exploded in an undisclosed part of the Negev and thankfully there are no reported injuries or damage. This of course, as we have said here time and again, was not the intention of the jihadists who fired it; nor was it the outcome that the political echelon who gave the instruction to shoot desired.

The back story is that Hamas rockets are getting more deadly all the time. Four days ago, Ynet reported that the Hamas regime in Gaza has completed a series of experiments on its version of the Iranian Fajar rocket. The enhanced model now has a range of almost 80 kilometers (roughly 50 miles) meaning, for those who understand the extremely compact nature of central Israel, it can reach as far Kfar Saba, northeast of Tel Aviv. Thus most of Israel's population is now within range of the terrorists' weaponry. The Fajar-5 is the length of a telephone pole and carries a 90-kg payload. [Our terrorist enemy in the north, Hezbullah, call this rocket the Khaibar-1, and holds vast stocks of this civilian-oriented weapon.]

The progress made by Hamas is serious, considering that the original Hamas Qassams had a range of around 1.5 km (roughly 1 mile). The rockets are believed to have been developed by scientists working for Hamas and for research institutes located in Arab countries in the region that have been working intensively to further arm the Hamas terror regime. Ynet says Hamas will be able to begin manufacturing these rockets within the next few months.

4-Sep-10: Memo to Baroness Ashton - be careful what you wish for

The London-based newspaper Al-Hayat does a major service to anyone wanting to understand the goals of the jihadist terror organization Hamas which rules the Gaza Strip with an iron fist.

The paper quotes Hamas politbureau member and occasional spokesman Azat al-Ghashek as praising the Hamas terror attack this week in which four civilian Israelis, one of them a woman in the ninth month of pregnancy, were shot and then individually executed at close range.

"Hurting Zionist settlers is a natural thing… they now constitute an actual army, in the full sense of the word. They have more than a half a million automatic weapons, in addition to the basic protection granted them by the occupation army," the Hamas apparatchik said. The deadly attack proves the Palestinian people still desire to battle "the Zionist enemy", he is quoted saying.

Whatever the jihadists may have intended, the interview proves something quite different, and it's this. Supporting Hamas by defending its demands is to align yourself with the most vicious of Islamicist thugs. If you accept that Hamas argument that ordinary civilians are legitimate targets for ambushes by Hamas gunmen, then you are the enemy of an entire society: Israeli society.

We Israelis recognize the mortal threat that having a jihadist regime on our southern doorstep means, even if people from outside the region don't or pretend not to. Statements like today's help to clarify matters for anyone in doubt, or for those who have forgotten what Hamas stands for.

When Baroness Ashton who heads the EU's foreign ministry announced her plan to go visit the Gaza Strip as a guest of the same thuggish Hamas regime, she was quoted in July reiterating a call for a complete opening of the Gaza Strip's borders with Egypt and Israel in order to ensure what she called "the flow of people and goods in both directions. The people of Gaza should be able to lead a normal life."

Ms Ashton needs to be called to account for her politically correct but factually wrong wish. It's pollyannish to the point of imbecility (given the amount of political and strategic data to which a woman in her privileged position has access) to pretend that "the people of Gaza should be able to lead a normal life". The normal life the people of Gaza want to live, as articulated by the voices like that of Azat al-Ghashek who speak for their ruling regime, involves murder on a scale limited only by their access to weaponry and military technology.

As the intended targets of that desire to murder, we Israelis believe the non-violent steps (like a blockade and a security barrier that were put in place with the full agreement of the EU) taken by our government to frustrate the wishes of the al-Ghasheks and their useful-idiot supporters (among them the appalling British politican Galloway) are justified, logical and essential for now and until the jihadists are permanently removed.

2-Sep-10: Pal-Arab shooters once more

Hamas claimed responsibility last night for another terror attack on Israeli civilians. This one, thankfully, resulted in no deaths, but served as another reminder that for the heroic terrorist gunmen, their message is intended not so much for us Israelis as for their Palestinian Arab brethren, the real enemy. Their statement, as quoted by Ynet, said Wednesday's shooting attack on an Israeli couple from the community of Ma'ale Efraim in the Jordan Valley was "a message to those in the (Palestinian) Authority who promised the Zionists that the attack in Hebron would not recur."

The "attack in Hebron" is a reference to the execution-killing by Hamas gunmen near Kiryat Arba a day earlier.

Ynet reports:

"One of (the terrorists) stepped out of the car and opened fire at me from a meter away. I unlocked the door and pulled my wife out, and we rolled into the ditch," recounted Moshe Moreno, who was attacked by Palestinian terrorists Wednesday night near the West Bank city of Ramallah. Morano is listed in moderate condition. His wife Shira sustained light injuries in the attack... "We were followed by another vehicle for about four or five minutes. The car's headlights blinded us. I signaled the driver to stop, but he continued, so I stopped, but he passed me." According to Morano, the terrorists opened fire from inside the vehicle, and one of them approached his car while firing his automatic weapon. "At some point, I guess his weapon got stuck. That's our miracle. I have shrapnel in my leg; the whole incident lasted a minute and-a-half," he said.

It's highly likely that more attacks like these cowardly shootings by armed Hamas jihadist thugs will be scheduled to coincide with the Washington conference of Israeli and Palestinian Authority representatives this week. As the Hamas statement says, they have a message to deliver.

1-Sep-10: Real people, real terror

The four victims of yesterday's Hamas ambush and execution. May their memory serve as a blessing.

Reuters reports today that the Hamas terrorist organization has claimed full reponsibility for yesterday's ambush and execution of four Israeli civilians.

It quotes a Hamas statement saying it "announces its full responsibility for the heroic operation in Hebron".

This, in Hamas terms, was indeed a heroic operation, a classic of its kind. It was directed at a carload of two men, two women. No Israeli soldiers in the vicinity. No strategic goal other than terrorism for its own sake.  The shooters, dressed in civilian clothing, fled into the night. Heroism, pure and simple. Heroism of the kind  that the world has come to know and expect from exponents of Islamicism in its various jihadist flavours.

A little reported aspect of the Hamas heroism: one of the rescue service volunteers who arrived on the scene (according to the Jerusalem Post) broke down in tears on viewing the bodies. His colleagues were surprised - this is not a new experience in their line of work. Then they heard him crying out: "That's my wife!' That's my wife!' and indeed his wife is one of the four victims.

Their names again (because these are human beings): Yitzhak and Tali Ames (who leave six orphans), Cochava Even Haim, and Avishai Schindler.

For those of us with some grounding in reality and a sense that what happened here was a human tragedy in a tragically long line of terrorist killings, above are portraits of the men and women murdered by the jihadist Hamas activists, militants, operatives, terrorists. A scene from today's funeral is below.

 

For those of us who can still summon up a sense of outrage after so much terror, so much hatred, so much hypocrisy, there's the matter of the so-called moderate Palestinian Arabs and their response. 

In today's New York Times, the Palestinian Authority's prime minister, Salam Fayyad, expresses his condemnation of the murders. These were offenses against the noble Islamic religion. No, sorry, that's not what he said. The perpetrators betrayed the noble and moral aspirations of the Palestinian people. No, sorry, that's not what he said either. Acts of terrorism and jihadist murder like these undermine the Arab right to a two-state solution. No, sorry again, that's not what he said.

What Salam Fayyad, a man who knows his people very well, said is:  “We condemn this operation, which contradicts Palestinian interests and the efforts of the Palestinian leadership to garner international support for the national rights of our people.”  As so often in the past, the "condemnation" (which is really not condemnation but tactical criticism) is entirely focused on the effect it might have on other people's support.

Where you stand on terror, terrorism and terrorists says everything about your morality, decency and values. The Palestinian Arab position, in its moderate and other forms, is out there for all to see.