31-Dec-06: Terror Sinks Roots in Even the Best of Neighbourhoods

Five months ago, in an article called "BBC Exposes Hamas' UK Terror Financiers", we wrote about a BBC Panorama expose of Interpal. That's a British charity certified by the US authorities as a terrorist front organization but happily in business in the UK all these years, riding above the storm. The BBC calls Panorama its most important documentary programme.

We pointed our readers to a transcript of the Panorama programme here, and to a streaming video edition of the entire one-hour film.

Today, the BBC reports that

...the Charity Commission has launched a formal investigation into the London-based Palestinian charity Interpal. The commission says there are "concerns about the potential for indirect and inappropriate links" between Interpal "and organisations or individuals who appear to support the militant or terrorist activities of Hamas".

This about-face comes after years of the British authorities refuting claims from Israeli and American sources about those "inappropriate links", while downplaying strong documentary evidence that Interpal plays a central role in the global jihadist enterprise. An earlier Charities Commission investigation stubbornly provided Interpal with a clean bill of health.

That investigation, it now turns out, was "not in depth." Who'd ever have thought it?

But to their credit, the Panorama team kept plugging away, undaunted by the status and prestige of Interpal as one of Europe's largest Moslem charities, according to Wikipedia. If you catch the show, you'll be left in little doubt about what Interpal really stands for. As today's BBC item says:

The programme showed how Interpal's Managing Trustee Dr Essam Yusuf doubled as the key trustee for a coalition of Islamic charities chaired by Dr Yusuf Qaradawi, who has championed suicide bombings in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

We've not the only ones to have a hard time understanding the British authorities and their hands-off attitude to the purveyors of terror. Their capital city has turned into Londonistan right under their prim and proper noses.

In the interests of full disclosure, our interest in this story is personal. On 9th August 2001, Hamas murdered our fifteen year-old daughter with the financial backing of overt and hidden supporters in Europe and throughout the Arab world.

29-Dec-06: Seven Arab Terror Attacks So Far Today

Don't look for this story in the New York Times, BBC World, the Guardian or AFP. Because it's not there. Check now - you'll see from Google News that almost all the reporting that's been published is Israeli.

Palestinian Arabs have fired seven more Qassam rockets into Israel so far today (Friday) and it's still only mid-afternoon. We can tell you what happened with six of the seven. One landed in the Sha'ar Hanegev area; two landed in the Eshkol area; one near the Karni Crossing (a goods crossing for trucks moving between Israel and Gaza); in the strip between Kibbutz Nahal Oz and Kibbutz Alumim; and one on Zikim beach (it's freezing cold, so presumably very few people there).

Nearly seventy - that's 70 - rockets have been fired so far by Pal-Arab thugs operating in Gaza since the "ceasefire" declared on 27th November 2006.

(The comprehensive BBC Israelis-and_Palestinians web-page is almost entirely devoid of mentions of Qassams or Israeli victims. The sole reference to what's being done to Sderot is from June.)

Thankfully the casualties and damage were relatively light this time. But there have been deaths. And families unlucky enough to be making their homes in undisputed, uncontested, unoccupied, 100%-lawful Israeli towns within firing range of the Gazans are in constant, very real danger, their lives terrorised and bordering on the unbearable.

On a far more positive note, we're very glad to report that there has been a significant improvement in the condition of 14-year old Adir Basad who was injured by a Qassam rocket in Sderot on Tuesday. He recovered consciousness in Barzilai Hospital yesterday, breathing independently after being taken off the respirator on Thursday morning. One report says he managed to speak a little with his family.

Discerning consumers of news products will be asking themselves why the constant barrage of rockets is almost entirely unmentioned in news reports; why the so-called "ceasefire", now in its second bogus month, continues to be reported as if it were holding; why the absence of even a semblance of counter-terrorist activity by the terrorist regime in Gaza is undisclosed. The disgraceful, deliberate, politically-motivated silence of the major media channels in the face of this ongoing war is a story that has to be told.

Just don't hold your breath waiting for Reuters, AP and the other majors to do it.

27-Dec-06: So This is What's Meant by Ceasefire

It's hard not become affected by cynicism when you live in this neighbourhood.

We're now into the second month of a "ceasefire" between Israel and the Palestinian Arab leadership. A ceasefire designed to bring an end to Israeli defence actions inside the Gaza Strip on one hand, and to stop the murderous firing of explosive rockets into Israeli cities, towns, settlements, farms, homes and people.

So how effective has it been? Very effective... if you're a Gazan. Israeli military actions inside the Gaza Strip have come to a complete stop, as Israel agreed.

But if you're an Israeli, especially one who lives near Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, the picture could not be more different. Eight Qassam rockets were fired into Israel yesterday (Tuesday). That's the largest one-day total since the ceasefire was declared. Sixty rocket attacks so far since the "ceasefire" started. 60.

And at 9 o'clock last night, two Sderot boys, both 14, were injured when a Pal-Arab rocket crashed into the street where they were walking. This morning's reports say Adir Basad is in surgery and in critical condition. And Matan Cohen is in moderate to serious condition having lost one foot and in danger of losing his leg. Matan's home had been hit in a previous Pal-Arab terror attack.

For the record, reports about the two boys and their injuries are almost completely absent from the news coverage coming from this extremely over-covered part of the world. If you do a Google News search now (click here), you'll see that, by and large, the only news reports about Israeli children being injured by Palestinian Arab terrorists and in danger of dying are Israeli sources. The rare foreign reports use such laconic language as "Two Israelis were wounded..."

This is more than just appalling. It's part of a pattern which Israelis can see and almost no one else wants to. To understand what's happening in this ongoing war, you need to be an Israeli or be willing to avail yourself of Israeli news sources. Otherwise you're left wondering why Israel is constantly beating the daylights out of those poor defenceless Pal-Arabs, making their lives miserable with "unprovoked", massive military over-response. 'Activist' news sources such as the French AFP make the task of finding the truth even more challenging when they come up with classics like "The truce has generally held amid hopes that it can help restart the dormant peace process."

Whose hopes? The Pal-Arabs'? For heaven's sake, they openly claim credit for these acts of terror, including last night's. But evidently they don't issue their press releases in the French language.

The news and the way it's reported is a critical part of the advances which terrorists are making against civilized society. What are you doing about it?

26-Dec-06: Excavators for Freedom, Dig It?

An Associated Press report says the digging of tunnels used for smuggling arms into the Palestinian Authority is Gaza's "fastest growing" business. Not only that, but it's "one of the biggest obstacles to any lasting Israeli-Palestinian truce".

The number of tunnels has doubled since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip almost a year and a half ago. According to both Israeli and Palestinian sources, the weapons reaching Palestinian hands include longer-range Katyusha rockets, cordite, the explosive propellant used in anti-aircraft weapons, anti-tank missiles and "thousands of rifles and tons of explosives."

When Israel withdrew, says AP:

some 90 tunnels were operating. Now, there are at least 150, but the number is probably closer to 250, said one tunnel digger. The digger, a tunnel operator and a former operator - all insisting on anonymity because they said they fear repercussions despite relatively lax law enforcement - described the tunneling.

But to be fair, when you're as busy blowing one another's people's brains out, as Abbas of Fatah and Haniyeh of Hamas are, you can hardly be expected to trouble yourself with sideshows like tunnels. Or with stopping Qassam rockets. Four were fired into Israel this morning, bringing to thirty the number of Palestinian Arab missiles fired from Gaza into Israeli towns, cities, farms and homes in the past week of this "ceasefire".

Is anyone, but literally anyone, bothered by the bald-faced hypocrisy of the Pal-Arab terrorists and their fancy Italian suits and ties?

22-Dec-06: An End-of-Year Call to Action

For many people, we're approaching the end of the financial year. A good time to remind you of the voluntary work we (the bloggers behind this site) do and have done since September 2001.

We lost our child to an act of barbaric murder and incomprehensible hatred. Our response has been to create the Malki Foundation in our daughter's name and to raise money and distribute it very efficiently in a way that allows us to do a lot good. You can get the whole picture at the website of the Malki Foundation. But if you're click-resistant, here's the brief version.

For Israeli families (Jews, Christians, Moslems, Druze, others) who have a special-needs child like the little boy above being helped by his brother, we provide substantial subsidies to enable five kinds of therapy: physical, occupational, speech, water and horse-riding. This subsidy is given without limit, provided the child is being cared for at home and not institutionalized. The parents decide how much therapy, which therapies and which therapist. We aim to empower them, and certainly not to patronize or direct them. They get enough of that from the establishment.

We also provide long-term free loans of home-care equipment like beds, wheelchairs, walkers and standers. The goal, again, is to make home-care a real option for such families.

In a country which has some fine institutional solutions, we believe that home care is and always will be the best option for a child with serious disabilities. For those who agree (not everyone), we want to help in our murdered daughter's name. We are doing this today for many hundreds of families with a special-needs child.

We have a blind, severely-disabled eleven year old child at home (she attends a special school but sleeps at home) and came by our opinions the authentic way - by living the experience, by fighting the establishment and by learning how to work around the schlerosis in the system in order to do substantial good. And for those to whom this sort of statistic is important, nearly a third of the families we support month-in, month-out are Arab.

If you're in a position to help us by making a 2006 fiscal-year donation, we can promise it will be honestly and effectively applied. And if you're living in the United States or Israel, we can provide you with a tax-deduction for your contribution. Details here.

22-Dec-06: In Confusing Times, It Sometimes Pays to Stop, Look and Listen

There's steady bloodshed going on down south of us. The revolutionary heros of the Palestinian Arab nation-to-be are busy firing into one another, into one another's children and into Israeli homes, towns and cities that have the misfortune of a location close to the Gaza Strip.

There's been a ceasefire between Israeli forces and the Hamas/Fatah/Jihadist gangs since November... but as of yesterday more than forty Qassam rockets had been fired in the direction of Israel since it was announced, presumably to provide added emphasis to that ceasefire.

There have been numerous injuries and plenty of damage from the random firings of these 'heros', mostly among their own children, siblings and cousins. Yesterday, though several rockets crashed into the southern Israeli city of Sderot, most of the injuries were among small Arab children in Gazan Bet Hanoun where a rocket fell short. Your local media won't report it (Pal Arabs injuring other Pal Arabs? Who cares?) so click on this Israeli media link about the rockets, or this other Israeli link about forocious gun-fights and mutual kidnappings and killings (read about Pal-Arab parents placing their children into empty baths to protect them from revolutionary bullets flying in through the window) among over-supplied, over-testosteroned Pal-Arab terror gangs.

And not only in Gaza. The pictures above are from yesterday in the entirely-Pal-Arab-controlled town of Nablus. The manly heros prancing, preening and wielding their weaponry belong to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a thuggish, brutish armed gang that answers directly to the head of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. the president of the Palestinian Authority). You don't really need to know much about the attitude of Pal-Arab society to the welfare of its own children beyond what these images convey so articulately.

But if perchance you do care to hear a reasonable, rational, extraordinarily well-informed Arab voice speaking articulately and fearlessly about the moral dimensions of the endless war of terror against the Jewish communities of Israel and about the almost inconceivable harm which Palestinian Arab society has done to itself and in particular its children, this video speech would be a good place to start.