27-Mar-08: Palestinian infanticide

The article below by one of this blog's authors appears on FrontPage Magazine's web site today.

Palestinian Infanticide

Frimet Roth

The welfare of Palestinian children has always stood at the center of the Middle East conflict. Whether in debates, in photographs or in casualty figures they are the substance of the local news.

In the early days of the Second Intifada, Israeli Brigadier General Benjamin Gantz (now Israel's military attache in the US) appeared on the popular American television program, Sixty Minutes, hosted by Bob Simon, in a segment entitled "To Be Continued..."

Predictably, the discussion turned to Palestinian children. With candor and prescience rarely encountered nowadays, Gantz tackled the issue head on. He asserted that Palestinians often deliberately place their children at the front lines of the clashes where they are killed, adding: "When they are sending their kids forward and they are firing at us and then the kids are in the killing zone so unfortunately, really unfortunately, those things happen."

Simon seemed aghast and asked: "Do you really think that the Palestinians are actually pushing their kids to the front line?"

Gantz affirmed this.

Simon, incredulous, pressed on: "With the objective of creating casualties?"

Gantz did not budge: "That's right, sir. I'm sure that they are trying to get the world to see that Israel is a terrible, cruel people and cruel army and that's really what they want to do."

By now, Simon seemed apoplectic: "Is this something that you can really imagine? That there are people who would do that, who would get their, their kids killed or wounded to make good television?"

When Gantz said yes, Simon concluded: "In other words, the Palestinians are really different from Israelis in that respect?"

Gantz: "Unfortunately."

For those mired in this awful ongoing war, his words could not ring truer.

To us, it is obvious that people who not only allow their children to chill out beside missile launchers, but who actually send them to die fighting, are not loving. In fact they do not fit any definition of "parent" that we can find.

People in the West may find this difficult to digest. Such conduct is considered child abuse in their societies. It is aberrant, criminal and punishable.

Moreover, they hear the incessant harangue of Palestinian spokesmen insisting they love and protect their children just the way Western parents do theirs. No Israeli army officer, not even Gantz, is going to convince them otherwise.

But perhaps Hamas MP, Fathi Hammad, could do the job. A speech he gave on February 29, 2008 and broadcast on the Al Aqsa television channel, is currently circulating on the Internet with English subtitles (see "We Used Women and Children as Human Shields"). It is compelling footage.

"For the Palestinian people", Hammad boasts in Arabic, "death has become an industry at which women excel and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this and so do the mujahideen and the children."

Hammad then confirms everything that Bob Simon found inconceivable:

"This is why they [the Palestinian people] have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine."

The Palestinians are careful to only utter these truths in Arabic and amongst themselves. Such revelations are never intended for wider consumption. Non-Muslims are only exposed to hand-picked, English speaking, articulate representatives, such as Dr. Hanan Ashrawi.

She was entrusted with the rebuttal of Gantz' allegations that day on Sixty Minutes, and did so with aplomb.

"To me this is the essence, the epitome, of racism", she railed indignantly. "They're telling us we are – we have no feelings for our children? We're not parents? We're not mothers or fathers? This is just incredible."

Indeed it is. But we in the Middle East learned long ago that reality can be incredible. The staging of 12 year old Mohammed Al-Durah's shooting in October, 2000, which at first seemed ridiculously far-fetched has been almost definitively proven true.

That segment of 60 Minutes was entitled "To Be Continued..." because that was the caption on posters distributed across the Arab world depicting the final moments in the life of the allegedly slain 12-year old Al-Durah.

Hammad's speech demonstrates that Al-Durah was but one of many children sacrificed on the alter of the Second and extant Intifada by their own people.

It is high time that the West accepts that its attitudes toward parenting are not universal. Child sacrifices are still exalted in certain cultures today just as they were in ancient times.

Haddad summed it up thus: "It's as if [we] were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death like you desire life."

I wonder how Dr. Ashrawi would respond to her comrade Haddad. After all, on 60 Minutes, she balked at being forced to "sink to the level of ...proving I'm human." and noted that "Even animals have feelings for their children."

Both she and Haddad were spot on. We Israelis do desire life, but more than anything, we desire our children's lives. We live for our children and we grieve interminably when they are murdered. And, yes, Dr. Ashrawi, animals do have more feelings for their children than the people who use their children as weapons do.

...

Frimet Roth, a freelance writer, lives in Jerusalem. She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation in their daughter's memory. Malki Roth was murdered at the age of fifteen in the Sbarro Jerusalem restaurant massacre in 2001. The foundation in her name provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.

27-Mar-08: Guns, rockets and memory

Twenty additional rocket attacks into southern Israel on Wednesday from the terrorists in Palestinian-Arab Gaza maintained their ongoing war of terror. Two people suffered injuries and nine others needed to be treated for shock after last night's volleys into the Sderot area, according to JPost. Another rocket crashed into the backyard of a kibbutz residence in the western Negev area causing damage to buildings. YNet says Islamic Jihad, the al-Quds Brigades and the Salah a-Din Brigades all claimed credit for the attacks. Separately, Gazan gunmen fired on Israeli farmers near Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, causing injuries. Ignored by most media channels and most opinion-makers and opinion-holders in most places, these cold-blooded attacks on Israel and on Israelis are not so quickly forgotten by those who experience them personally. Thus, the thug who organized 2002's tragic attack on a Passover night celebration in 2002 that caused the deaths of 30 Israelis, many of them in their seventies and eighties, was captured by Israeli forces yesterday in the Tulkarm area. His deeds are unlikely to be forgotten as he is processed by Israel's justice system.

21-Apr-08: Yet another day's work

Most people tend to assume that, when this government or another is being discussed, the things they do are more or less rational, more or less compliant with international norms and standards.

This, of course, has no relevance at all when we're speaking of the world's jihadist regimes, a growing cluster of national governments fully engaged in hate-driven murder on a daily basis. Like the democratically-elected government of the Palestinian Arabs, for instance.

A Hamas militant on Friday [i.e. today] was killed and two others were wounded in an explosion apparently caused by a "work accident" at a training camp run by the militant group in Gaza. On Thursday, a similar incident occurred when two members of Hamas' armed wing died and another was wounded in a blast at a training base in the central Gaza Strip, after the men had been handling explosives. The militant group, which controls Gaza, had initially claimed that the militants were killed in an Israel Air Force strike. Hamas later said there had been no attack. More...

A Chicago pastor, recently famous for ministering to one of the Democratic Party's leading contenders for president of the United States, evidently thinks Hamas is decent enough, religious enough, acceptable enough to get pride of place in his church's newsletter.

The July 2007 pastoral newsletter of Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s Trinity United Church of Christ has its entire "Pastor's Page" devoted to the words of the unspeakable Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, laconically identified in the newsletter as a "deputy of the political bureau of Hamas". (The Marzook article ran originally in the Los Angeles Times. The text is here.) Marzook is, in fact, a notorious terrorist ringleader, the founder of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a US-based organization whose assets were seized in 2001, three months after our daughter's murder at the hands of Hamas, by the United States government because they were funneling money to terrorists. The U.S. deported Marzook to Jordan in 1997.

The Hamas manifesto published in the Chicago church's letter (extract pictured above right) defends terrorism as legitimate resistance, refuses to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compares the terror group's official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America's Declaration of Independence.

Melanie Phillips asks (yesterday in the pages of The Spectator) what seem to us to be some pertinent questions: Did Barack Obama, as a worshipper at the Trinity church, receive this bulletin through his letter-box? Did he read this article? Did he agree with it? How can he so brazenly continue to affirm his commitment to such a pastor and such a church?

As we've learned to our sorrow, you'd be surprised how many people think the same way the reverend Mr Wright does.


Mr Obama and the Reverend Mr Wright

21-Mar-08: Fifteen - a message for Purim

It's Purim today. This short essay was first published three years ago:

Age Fifteen
Arnold Roth

Fifteen is the number that conceals God's name, and is the mysterious turning point for three generations of one family.

Most Jewish teenagers growing up in Australia during the 1960s were, like me, children of concentration camp survivors. Our parents were involved in owning small businesses or were employed. There was hardly a professional among them. At birth, we lacked even a single grandparent in most cases, and almost all of us were named after family members who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

It was clear that we were "everything" to our parents, and no one needed to tell us why. Top of their priorities list was ensuring that we gained the best possible education. Little wonder that several of the largest and most successful Jewish schools in the world were started in Melbourne in the years right after World War II. And the community's interest in things Israeli was unlimited -- the occasional Israeli film and Israeli visitor to Australia's distant shores were memorable events.

The Six Day War happened when I was 15. The weeks of rising tension leading up to it left an indelible mark on me: the grainy television images of Egyptian and Syrian troops on the march; Nasser's strident speeches and unilateral blockade of the sea lanes to Eilat; the massing of Egyptian forces on Israel's Sinai border and of the Syrians on the Golan frontier; U Thant's disgraceful capitulation in removing UN peace-keeping forces from Sinai precisely when they were most needed. And the blood-curdling threats of one after another of the Arab dictators and monarchs: "The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified... This is our opportunity to erase the ignominy which has been with us since 1948... Our goal is clear -- to wipe Israel off the map."

Fifteen marked a turning point in my life. A few months after Israel's stunning defeat of the forces bent (once again) on the liquidation of the Jews, I enrolled for the first time in a Jewish day-school. My ideas about being a Jew in the world, about history and how it affects our lives, about the Holocaust and the chain of Jewish life, began taking grown-up shape.

My mother grew up near Lodz in a town located close enough to the Polish/German frontier to have been overrun by Nazi forces on the first day of the war. Among the men rounded up by the invaders on that September day was her father, the grandfather whose name I was given. As a father myself, I have to breathe deeply in calling to mind the image of my mother throwing herself at the feet of a German soldier, begging, screaming for her father's life to be spared.

On the day the Nazis marched into Poland and began the process of destroying a world, trampling a unique culture into the mud, murdering Jews by the millions, my mother had just turned 15.

My awareness of my parents' lives begins, in a certain sense, with the end of the war: their four or five years as displaced persons in post-war Germany, their long journey to Australia as a young couple with no English, no marketable skills and no roots beyond their few personal ties and their very Jewish sense of community.

An unexpected photograph changed this for me a few years ago.

I have a cousin, a kibbutznik, the daughter of my father's oldest brother. She was brought to Tel Aviv in the 1930s as a baby by her parents who fled pre-war Galicia, and has lived her life in Israel. Returning as a tourist to her roots, she traveled to Krakow in 2000, and via a chain of circumstances ended up in possession of four photocopied pages which she shared with me. These were Nazi documents -- census forms which the Germans required the Jews in the Krakow ghetto to complete prior to dispatching them to the death camps.

The first page had been completed in the distinctive handwriting of my father, of blessed memory. A small snapshot attached to the form showed him as I had never seen before: virile, handsome, young. Two other pages were the census forms of two of my father's sisters. Their names were known to me from a family tree I had put together years earlier with my father's help, but until that moment they were nothing more than names. Now I gazed at the portraits of two vibrant young women.

My oldest daughter, Malki, had just completed a family-roots project at school and I knew she would be interested. A glance at the pages and she said exactly what I had been thinking: Malki bore a striking resemblance to my father's beautiful sister Feige (see pictures below).

Unlike my parents, Feige did not survive the Nazi murder machine. Whatever promise her life contained, whatever talents she was developing, whatever gifts she was planning to give the world -- all these were overturned by a massive act of violent, barbaric hatred.

Some months after we gazed on those extraordinary pictures for the first time, Malki sat down and quietly (without telling us) composed the words and music of an infectiously upbeat song: "You live, breathe and move - that's a great start!... You'd better start dancing now!"

Living in the land promised to the Jewish people was a source of deep contentment to this granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. The discovery of Feige's picture enabled Malki, I think, to gain a strengthened sense of her personal role as a link in an ancient chain.

Arafat's intifada war against Israel's civilian population broke out around the time we received those precious pages. From the diary she kept, it's evident that the near-daily toll of injuries and deaths weighed heavily on Malki's mind. She writes of having to leave her classroom to weep in privacy upon learning of another terror attack... and another and another. We, her parents and siblings, were unaware of the depth of her empathy for the victims of the war raging in her precious land. The turmoil and pain, to Malki, were deeply personal. Though born in Australia, she had lived in Jerusalem since age two. She felt deeply connected to Jewish history.

In August 2001, my daughter and her friend Michal interrupted the activities of a busy summer vacation day to grab lunch in a crowded Jerusalem restaurant, Sbarro.

If she had noticed the man with a guitar case on his back striding through the unguarded door and positioning himself next to the counter where she was engrossed in tapping out a text message on her cell phone, would Malki have recognized the hatred, the barbaric ecstasy, on his face before he exploded?

Malki and Michal were buried the next day. The closest of friends since early childhood, they lie side by side, forever, on a hill near the entrance to Jerusalem.

Malki was 15.

Her diary is full of questions: How can such terrible things happen to our people? Why is our love for the Land of Israel not better understood by outsiders? What kind of Divine plan calls for teenagers to be injured and killed by people for whom we hold no hatred at all? How can such intense hatred even exist?

The unbearable question marks left behind by my daughter scream at me every day.

Jewish life, viewed from a distance, is an astonishing saga of tragedy, achievement, grandeur, destruction and greatness, played out over millennia. There is a risk we lose this perspective when we are the individuals living it.

At Purim, we feast, we drink, we ceremoniously deliver gifts, we celebrate with those we love and like. But the narrative at the heart of this festival is of a close brush with tragedy: the Jewish victory over a genocidal conspiracy by murderous Jew-haters.

Here in Jerusalem, a day later than almost everywhere else in the world, Purim is marked on the 15th day of Adar. Jewish calendar dates are written using a simple alphanumeric code: alef is one, bet is two and so on. But longstanding tradition is to avoid the straightforward way of writing the number 15. You would expect it to be yud-heh (lit: ten-five); however these two letters happen to form the first half of God's name and are accorded special treatment and respect.

Accordingly, 15 is written as tet-vav: nine-six. God's Name, as it were, is hidden within the number 15.

Purim is odd in another way: the name of God is completely absent from Megillat Esther. Does this mean the victory of the Jews over their oppressor happened without His involvement? Jewish tradition answers with a firm 'no'. God's role was crucial, but our ability to make sense of how and why He acts is limited, inadequate.

Those of us raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and who have experienced the tragedy of a child's death by hatred, struggle to understand the nature of the Divine role in our lives as individuals and as a people. There are times, according to Jewish wisdom, when you need to know that God's hand is at work even when the evidence is difficult to see, even when there are more questions than answers.

Malki Roth's memory is honored by the Malki Foundation that supports families wanting to provide their severely disabled child with quality home care. More information at www.kerenmalki.org


Malki (of blessed memory) and her Polish-born Australian grandmother (may she be well and live in good health)


Feige z"l (at left) and Malki

21-Mar-08: All in another day's work

An explosion for which Hamas blamed Israel (and the mainstream media obediently followed suit) is now revealed to be another "holy mission" gone awry (thanks to JihadWatch for pointing this out.) See "Hamas: Blast that killed 2 was accident," by Ibrahim Barzak for the Associated Press:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Palestinian militants accidentally set off a large blast at a Hamas training base in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing two members of the violent Islamic group and wounding another, a Palestinian medical official said.

Hamas initially blamed Israel for the blast, but later acknowledged that it was caused by a mishandling of explosives, saying its men died while performing a "holy mission." The Israeli military denied involvement.

Hamas security men kept photographers and TV cameramen away from the scene. Dr. Moaiya Hassanain, a Palestinian Health Ministry official, confirmed the deaths.

The only thing relatively rare in this report is that the deaths of still more Palestinian Arab Gazans are put in a context that exposes the proclivity of the jihadists, including and especially their chosen leadership, to bring death and destruction to their own.

A pity the mainstream media don't pay more attention to the steady flow of anti-Israel fabrications - and we use the word advisedly - emanating from Pal-Arab sources. See "14-Jun-06: What happened on the beach?" for one example among depressingly many.

20-Mar-08: All in a day's work

A Palestinian-Arab rocket fired from Gaza struck a western Negev kibbutz today. No injuries were reported, but the rocket damaged a building.

YNet quotes the kibbutz's security officer: "The rocket landed very close to one of the houses. There was a loud explosion and several houses' windows were shattered by the blast. Unfortunately, the kibbutz homes are not fortified, a process we are hoping to accelerate."

Two rockets were fired into the same general area yesterday (Wednesday). One of them, according to YNet, fell short and crashed into something or other in the Gaza Strip... but no one's reporting on damage. Palestinian-Arab on Palestinian-Arab damages or injuries don't reach the reportable threshhold in the mainstream media; gotta have the Israelis in there somewhere.

Four mortar shells were fired at the area on Wednesday as well, landing near the security fence and causing no damage.

A smuggling tunnel under the Egypt-Gaza border collapsed today, says Haaretz, killing one man, doctors said. Another is said to be buried under the rubble. Palestinian smugglers have for years used tunnels to bring weapons and a range of contraband into Gaza from Egypt. The illustration above (from this fine source) shows how. Somehow when the media report revert to their humanitarian-tragedy mode of telling the Gaza story, they neglect to mention how the place is bristling with smuggled weapons and militias out to outdo one another. But from Israel, those aspects of the Gazan reality are hard to forget.

UPDATE: Friday 6:30am - A roadside bomb, relatively unusual in the Palestinian-Arab war of terror against Israelis, was detonated around 11pm last night (Thursday) in the south Hebron hills, injuring a 13-year-old boy who was a passenger in a vehicle. He's now in Hadassah Ein Karem medical centre in Jerusalem being treated.

18-Mar-08: The more Jewish the better in the haters' eyes

The Palestinian-Arab terrorists have long understood the emotive power of attacking visibly Jewish Jews. The more Jewish-looking, the more Jewish the nature of the target, the stronger the statement the haters are able to make. There are strong parallels to this in our parents' and grandparents' generation as the pictures on the right and below remind us, and as the history of Arab complicity in the Nazi holocaust of the Jews demonstrates.

This morning, two weeks after a massacre of unarmed schoolchildren in a Jewish religious seminary in Jerusalem, a rabbi who teaches at one of the numerous yeshivot in the holy city of Jerusalem (why are Iranian and Iraqi cities routinely called holy in the mainstream media, but Jerusalem - holy to three religions - never?) was stabbed in broad daylight by a Palestinian-Arab terrorist who thrust a knife into his neck. The rabbi was rushed to Hadassah's Ein Kerem medical center where he is getting emergency treatment at this moment.

It's worth mentioning that in this practical, no-nonsense country, the practical, no-nonsense police are on heightened alert throughout Israel ahead of the festival Purim which starts at the end of this week. The thinking here - based on years of bitter experience with a callous and hate-driven enemy - is that the Palestinian-Arab dark forces are planning a terror attack to coincide with the holiday. Very much their style to focus on Jewish holidays, Jewish institutions and Jewish symbolism as targets for their barbarism.

16-Mar-08: The unindicted co-conspirators

The frustration and sadness most Israelis feel in the face of acts of cold-blooded murder like the massacre of schoolboys (see "Terrorism. Their world. Our world.") at a religious seminary in Jerusalem is great.

Seeing how certain other people react makes those feelings even deeper.

Here's a striking example. The editor of an influential British Arab newspaper said yesterday that the celebrations in Gaza that followed the Merkaz Harav murders symbolized the "courage of the Palestinian nation." He is Abd al-Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi (pictured at right). If, like us, you frequently tune in to BBC World or CNN or SKY News, you'll likely recognize him; he frequently appears on all of them as a "moderate" analyst on news emanating from the Arab world and the Israel/Arab conflict.

Far from being a moderate or objective observer, this highly prejudiced individual has a long track record of partisan and deeply offensive statements directed against Israelis. The winner of Honest Reporting's 2007 Annual Award for Worst Pundit, he attracted attention in April 2007 for saying: "If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight."

What does yesterday's Bari Atwan statement say about his own people? If it's true that the courage of the Palestinians is best symbolized by an armed man, carrying an Israeli identification and with an Israeli pay-check in his pocket, walking into a school library and aiming his sophisticated and powerful weapons deliberately and coldly at children, then that "courage" is not courage at all but mere religiously-inspired hatred and zealotry.

How much "courage", in the conventional sense of the word, did it take? He's hardly the first person to commit an act of suicide - this takes no courage. And he is not the first to couple his courage with his hatred. History is filled with examples of the power of hatred. It is not a function of courage but the opposite. Whatever it was that enabled the murderer to carry out the massacre of unarmed children, courage is the last word you ought to be reaching for. In a civilized world, the brutal shooting of unarmed children in a school library ought to be the last quality a nationalist like Atwan would want to attach to his people. But we've learned that civilized categories of behaviour and of politics don't always apply when people like Atwan take the stage.

When you call this hatred courage, you are inspiring others to do the same thing. And precisely this kind of moral confusion is what stands at the heart of the world's struggle against terror. For while some parts of our civilized societies call for action against the terrorists wherever they are, other parts of our civilized societies are encouraging it and making it a "safe" and understandable choice.

This editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi says he will not condemn the Jerusalem murders. In fact he's quite frank about the fact that he's OK with the killings (see "Mercaz Harav attack was justified"). That's his choice; it's hardly controversial. He joins the United Nations Security Council which could have come out with a firm denunciation of the massacre last week, but somehow did not (see "Libya blocks condemnation of Jerusalem attack").

Condemnation by itself achieves nothing. It has to be accompanied by action. But a deliberate failure to condemn inhuman actions like the massacre of the students in the Merkaz Harav library is a powerful and meaningful statement. It encourages, justifies and legitimizes the action and ensures there will be more in the future.

This is more than a moral failure. It is a criminal act of incitement for which our civilized societies apply legal sanctions.

Unfortunately the moral confusion which accompanies terrorism today will ensure that this British Arab journalist and many others like him will not only not be subject to sanctions but will continue doing damage as invited, objective "moderates", politely given airtime by uncritical, unquestioning program presenters.

For this, it is not possible to forgive the operators of BBC, Sky, CNN, Australia's ABC and other major media channels. Without them, Atwan would be just another in a depressingly long line of spewing partisans on one side of a very bad-tempered argument. But by giving this spokesperson for terror with a global platform and equipping him with the credentials of moderation, they are complicit in an appalling process. It's a process that threatens not only the lives of Israelis and our neighbours but also people in other places which are targeted by the global jihadists.

In other words, everyone.

13-Mar-08: Raining even more rockets

It's now 10:30pm here in Jerusalem. Haaretz reports: "Gaza militant groups said late Thursday that they had fired 64 rockets and mortar shells at Israel during the course of the day Thursday." The photo on thr right was snapped in Sderot today and shows a sadly familiar scene of city residents huddling under a concrete shelter, seeking protection from yet another in the endless stream of weapons seeking a Jewish target.

64 rockets and mortar shells in a day.

Notice that there's been an absence of countering Israeli action against the rocket-men of Gaza today, apart from the knock-out of a fully loaded rocket platform; we mentioned that earlier today and NYT has a brief report on it here. Perhaps this passivity stems from the global chorus of condemnation against Israel in the past 48 hours - a condemnation so naked in its political bias that it would be funny if it weren't so serious and disturbing. If that's right, it's a very disturbing state of events.

The world's largest Muslim body, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest bloc inside the United Nations, is having its international conference today, and is calling for Israelis to be tried by an international war crimes court for "heinous" attacks against Palestinians.

We're wondering what plan the OIC has for stopping the rockets from falling on our homes. They don't have one, you say? Then why does anyone pay them any attention at all?

13-Mar-08: Raining rockets

Some twenty-five rockets have been fired into Israel today, all of them originating in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Two of the 25 crashed into residential areas; the rest landed in open spaces, but every one of them - even those that injured no one and damaged no property - was a terrifying intrusion into the lives of innocent Israelis in the area under attack, southern Israel.

13-Mar-08: Return to reality

Rockets are flying into Israel again today from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Thirteen of them around midnight last night, and at least two more this morning (Thursday). They landed in industrial areas, uninhabited open spaces and residential neighbourhoods and - as usual - at least one rocket landed inside the Gaza Strip itself with no reporting about the damage done by a rocket landing inside an area the Palestinian Arabs and some of the media like to call the most densely populated place on earth. Despite the property damage in the targeted Israeli cities, no physical human injuries are reported, though several residents of Sderot have had to hospitalized to be treated for shock.

Credit for the attacks has already been claimed by Islamic Jihad. The media are reporting their statement that the barrage is an "initial response" to the killing of four Islamic Jihad terrorists in an IDF action in Bethlehem yesterday (Wednesday). To place that in context, a Jerusalem Post article this morning says the now-dead terrorists included Mahmoud Shehada, 45, the commander of Islamic Jihad in Bethlehem and the person who planted a car bomb in November 2000 in one of the lanes running next to the Machane Yehuda market in central Jerusalem. Ayelet Hashacher Levy, the daughter of Rabbi Yitzhak Levy, the head of the National Religious Party at the time, was one of the innocent victims killed in that explosion.

PA President and lifelong Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Abbas reacted to the deaths of the four IJ terrorists too. Through his spokesperson, he called the four men "martyrs" and "heroes" today. Their deaths, resulting from an attempted arrest by IDF forces that turned into a two-way gunfight, constituted what he termed a "brutal crime against our fighters and people." Note that Shehadeh's body (according to AP) was wrapped in a Hezbollah flag signifying the ever-growing role of the Iranians in the Palestinian-Arab terror war against Israel.

Abbas is frequently called "moderate" by journalists and analysts who ought to know better or, alternatively, ought to be more open about their motives.

• As for example this morning's despatch from Ibrahim Barzak on the AP wire: "The US fears continued fighting will torpedo peace talks between Israel and moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas..."
  
• And this from AFP: "The Islamist movement has ruled Gaza since June when it ousted the rival forces of moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose authority is now limited to the occupied West Bank".
  
• This one from the American ABC News: "New arrangements would allow forces loyal to moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to re-enter Gaza..."
  
• And this from the International Herald Tribune about "...the moderate president, Mahmoud Abbas, who governs from the West Bank".
  
• From a Scottish daily: "Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian president, condemned the massacre..."
  
• And this from Ireland: "...moderate Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas condemned the shooting."
  
• This from Voice of America about "Condoleezza Rice [holding] talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday, trying to get the moderate Palestinian leader to return to peace talks".
  

Those quotes are all from the past few days. Google displays thousands of them.

The shameful and transparent painting of a bogus "moderate" aura for Abbas has been a work-in-progress for years. For those of us personally caught up in that war, the labels and the semantic nonsense are a side-show. The man's actions are what counts, and what the man does is terrorism.

Leaving aside the spin and the fantasy, and returning to hard realities, it's reported that the IDF last night scored a direct hit on a fully-loaded Qassam rocket launch pad in northern Gaza just as a cluster of Palestinian Arab terrorists were preparing to fire rockets into Israel.

12-Mar-08: Making children, saving children - stories you don't see

The item below appears in this week's edition of Spiegel, the German news magazine. It's translated to English, and shows familiar events in a rarely-seen light. Don't pass this along to those who believe there's a Zionist plot to perform genocide on the Palestinian Arabs. Poor dears, they won't have a clue how to deal with this reality.

BORN IN ISRAEL: Palestinian Twins Under Rocket Fire from Gaza
Christoph Schult in Ashkelon

When a Palestinian woman gave birth to twins in an Israeli hospital she experienced what it is like to be the target of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

The humming noise in the sky over Beit Lahia grows slowly louder. It sounds as if the buzzing of a hornet were being amplified by loud speakers in a football stadium. Residents of the Gaza Strip call them "Sannana," or the humming ones, the small unmanned drones that the Israelis use to scan the border region for rocket commandos -- and then to liquidate them with precisely targeted missiles.

Ashraf Shafii has climbed onto the roof his house and is looking across strawberry fields toward the border wall. The smoke-belching towers of the power plant in the Israeli city of Ashkelon jut into the sky along the horizon. His wife is over there in Ashkelon today.

Shafii, a 34-year-old lab technician at the Islamic University of Gaza, glances at his six-year-old daughter. "We were so desperate to have more children," he says. For years, he waited in vain for his wife to bear a son. When she turned 30, the couple decided to get fertility treatment.
Iman Shafii finally became pregnant. During an ultrasound examination, doctors discovered four small embryos. The first died in the fifth month of pregnancy and the second died a few weeks later. Shafii was admitted to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, but the condition of the two remaining embryos became increasingly fragile. "You have to go to Israel," the doctor told her.

Because Israel refuses to engage in any contact with the authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza, patients turn to private brokers who submit their entry applications to the Palestinian Authority of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. But it can be a lengthy process.

The Shafiis were lucky. Iman was permitted to enter Israel after only 24 hours. She took a taxi to a spot near the Erez border crossing, and then she was pushed in a wheelchair across the last 500 meters of bumpy ground. She reached the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon just in time. She gave birth on Feb. 25, by Caesarean section, to a girl, Bayan, and to the couple's long-awaited son, Faisal.

Iman Shafii, 32, wearing a headscarf and oval glasses, and speaking in a soft voice, sits on a chair between two incubators. Today is the first day she is permitted to hold her babies in her arms. A nurse brings out the boy first, then the girl. As the tears well up in her eyes, Shafii kisses her children on their foreheads. "If the children had stayed in Gaza, they would not have survived," she says.

Her only impression of Israel has been the one she gets on Palestinian television, which usually shows tanks and soldiers, and celebrates attacks, like the recent shooting inside a Talmud school in Jerusalem, as acts of heroism. But now a doctor wearing a yarmulke walks into the room, says "Shalom" and asks her in English how she is feeling.

Dr. Shmuel Zangen, the director of the hospital's neonatal unit, doesn't care who he treats. "As a doctor, I enjoy the privilege of not having to think about it," he says. "It certainly is odd that we take care of Palestinian children while they shoot at us. It's the sort of thing that only happens in the Middle East."

'Not a Just War'
In the past, Shafii saw the Israelis exclusively as perpetrators, but in Ashkelon she is encountering, for the first time, victims of the acts of terror committed by her own people. One of them is nine-year-old Yossi, who is sitting in a wheelchair. A steel frame holds his left shoulder together. It was fractured by shrapnel from a rocket that landed in the city of Sderot. "The people in Sderot are suffering just as we are in Gaza," she says.

There was a sharp increase in the Palestinian rocket attacks after Israel cleared the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip in September 2005. The Israeli military counted 2,305 hits last year, and there have already been 1,146 in the first two months of this year. Until now, almost all of the missiles have been Qassam rockets, which are made in the Gaza Strip and have a range of about 12 kilometers (seven miles).

But the breaching of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Egypt by Hamas in January made it possible to bring in Russian and Iranian rockets with longer ranges. This means that cities considered safe in the past are now threatened. One of them is Ashkelon. On the second day after the birth of Bayan and Faisal, a Soviet-made "Grad" rocket landed on the hospital grounds. "I heard it hit, 200 meters away from me," says Shafii. The neonatal unit was moved to a bunker the next day. "The groups that are firing the rockets are not fighting a just war," says the Palestinian mother, adding that they are not abiding by what the Prophet Muhammad said: that wars may only be waged between soldiers, but not against civilians.

The buzzing drone in the sky over Beit Lahia has flown away to the south. The sound of an Israeli missile striking its target can be heard a short time later. Within a few minutes, there are reports that a member of the group Islamic Jihad was killed.

Ashraf Shafii describes how young, masked men repeatedly set up their rocket launchers under the cover of houses in Beit Lahia. "They shoot at Israeli civilians, which is completely unacceptable," says Shafii. "And they put us Palestinian civilians in grave danger, because the Israelis shoot back."

Why doesn't he object? "They are armed," says Shafii, "and they shoot at anyone who gets in their way."

The father is holding the first photos of his newborn twins in his hands. He is worried about the rockets being fired at Ashkelon. He says that he would never have believed it possible that he could be indebted to the Israelis for anything. "What a confusing situation," he says.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

12-Mar-08: A tribute to and from Australia

We made our aliyah (going "up" to settle in the historical homeland of our people, Israel) from Australia in 1988. Malki, our only daughter at the time and the youngest of the four children born to us up until that time, was two when we arrived here and made our new home in Jerusalem.

Malki never again left this land and is buried in Jerusalem. Her life, and our hopes, came to an end in a massacre carried out by Hamas who now rule Gaza, and celebrated - literally celebrated - by the neighbours who covet our land, our lives and our achievements.

Australia was a special place to live, and is a wonderful place to be from.

For all the kindnesses with which our children's grandparents were blessed when they arrived in Melbourne in 1950 as refugees from the displaced person's camps in Germany and from the Nazi concentration camps and labour camps before that, we will owe an eternal debt of gratitude.

This is why, with special pleasure, we are reproducing here a speech made today by the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, in the Australian parliament in Canberra.

House of Representatives - 12 March, 2008
60th ANNIVERSARY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

Mr RUDD (Griffith—Prime Minister) (11.58 am)—by leave—I move:
That the House:
(1) celebrate and commend the achievements of the State of Israel in the 60 years since its inception; (2) remember with pride and honour the important role which Australia played in the establishment of the State of Israel as both a member state of the United Nations and as an influential voice in the introduction of Resolution 181 which facilitated Israel’s statehood, and as the country which proudly became the first to cast a vote in support of Israel’s creation; (3) acknowledge the unique relationship which exists between Australia and Israel; a bond highlighted by our commitment to the rights and liberty of our citizens and encouragement of cultural diversity; (4) commend the State of Israel’s commitment to democracy, the Rule of Law and pluralism; (5) reiterate Australia’s commitment to Israel’s right to exist and our ongoing support to the peaceful establishment of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue; (6) reiterate Australia’s commitment to the pursuit of peace and stability throughout the Middle East; (7) on this, the 60th Anniversary of Independence of the State of Israel, pledge our friendship, commitment and enduring support to the people of Israel as we celebrate this important occasion together.

Today the parliament of Australia notes the occasion of this year, being the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel. The story of the establishment of the state of Israel begins with the unimaginable tragedy of the Holocaust. At the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem the words of the Australian delegate to the 1938 Evian Conference are recorded. He said that Australia could not encourage refugee immigration because, ‘as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one’.

Thankfully, later in 1938 the Australian government took the decision to admit 15,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. But by the time the war began only 6,500 had reached Australia.

By war’s end, six million Jews had been murdered. By war’s end, the international community finally began to look again in earnest at the question of a homeland for the Jewish people. Australia is proud to have played a significant part in the international process that led to the foundation of the state of Israel. Australia’s then Minister for External Affairs, Dr Evatt, was part of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which recommended in August 1947 the termination of the Mandate for Palestine. And he was chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee meeting on the Palestinian Question that proposed the partition of Palestine. He strongly believed that the fundamental right of self-determination for the Jewish people and for Palestinians could only be achieved by each having their own state.

The resolution that the United Nations adopted in November 1947 reflected that. It proposed the establishment of two independent states—one Arab and one Jewish. And Australia was the first state in the historic vote of the international community on that resolution to cast its vote in support of the modern state of Israel. On 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion declared the foundation of the modern state of Israel.
Prime Minister Ben Chifley, too, was closely involved in Australia’s policy towards Israel. In June 1948 he reinforced Evatt’s strong support for a two-state solution when he cabled British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and urged early recognition of Israel, saying that:

Such [a] declaration would properly indicate willingness to agree in principle to the recognition of the Provisional Government of Israel, and at the same time willingness to recognise de facto the Arab authorities in actual control of Arab Sections of Palestine.

On 29 January 1949 he announced that Australia would become one of the first countries to recognise the new state of Israel, describing it as ‘a force of special value in the world community’. As President of the General Assembly ‘Doc’ Evatt then presided over the historic May 1949 vote admitting Israel as the 59th member of the United Nations. On 11 May 1949 the Chifley Labor government opened an embassy in Tel Aviv. Evatt later said that, when working on the question of Israel, he wanted to ensure that the ‘new State of Israel, whose people had in the past done so much for humanity, would be welcomed, not merely formally but with good heart and good conscience’ into the international community.

The 60 years since the establishment of Israel have been full of challenges and full of trials. Similarly, the process for the emergence of a Palestinian state has come along a torturous path. There has been too much bloodshed. But over those 60 years there has also been cause for hope.

We think today of Prime Minister Menachem Begin standing with President Jimmy Carter and Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, at the White House on March 26 1979 at the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty that followed from the Camp David Accords. Prime Minister Begin used both the Hebrew and Arabic words for peace when he urged: ‘No more war, no more bloodshed, no more bereavement. Peace unto you. Shalom, salaam, forever.’ We can think, too, of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, shaking hands with his lifelong enemy Yasser Arafat on the lawns of the White House on September 13 1993, saying:

We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood; we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes; we who have attended their funerals and cannot look in the eyes of their parents; we who have come from a land where parents bury their children; we who have fought against you, the Palestinians—we say to you, in a loud and clear voice, enough of blood and tears. Enough!

All peoples of goodwill yearn for that vision to be realised. It has not been realised yet. To borrow again from former Yitzhak Rabin, a man who tragically paid the ultimate price while pursuing peace: ‘The risks of peace are preferable by far to the grim certainties of war’.

We firmly believe the establishment of an independent and economically viable Palestinian state must remain a key objective in the Middle East peace process. This is important for the future. It was important in the vision of 1947. It remains the vision today, just as our objective must be for Israel to exist within secure and internationally recognised boundaries.

Today, we in Australia support the ongoing negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority towards a final status agreement by the end of 2008, as launched at the Annapolis Conference in November last year. To support the establishment of a viable and sustainable Palestinian state Australia pledged a $45 million assistance package at the donors conference for the Palestinian territories in Paris on 18 December. Australia remains, as we have in the past, committed to an effective two-state solution.

Over the past 60 years Israel has preserved its robust parliamentary democracy and has built a vibrant society and economy. If anyone wants a dictionary definition of the term ‘robust’ they should spend an afternoon in the Israeli Knesset. That is where you see the definition of ‘robust’ at work. By contrast we are a pack of pussycats in here! Over the past 60 years governments from both sides of politics in Australia have supported our strong relationship with Israel. That relationship is strong and it is deep—and it will remain so.

Because we are both democracies, as democracies sometimes we will agree and sometimes we will disagree. That is in the nature of strong relationships. But the underlying friendship between us does not alter.

Australia offers our congratulations to the government and people of Israel on this the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the modern Israeli state. We acknowledge our special history and relationship and we look forward to its continued strength and development into the future. I commend this motion to the House.

More power to him, to his parliament and to the great nation of Australia.

11-Mar-08: One tiny pinpoint of light in the smothering darkness

The barbaric murders (see "Carnage in the library") of Jewish students in Jerusalem's Merkaz Harav Yeshiva this past Thursday night, and the grief it produced in all parts of our society here, have been weighing heavily on us.

The loss of promising and innocent young lives is awful. There are no words.

But there are words - and we need to find them - to condemn the stunning silence of the vast ranks of Israel's perpetual critics in the UK, Europe and North America. In particular the silence of the academic and media elites of those places in the face of a brazen act of mass murder in the name of jihadism. That screaming silence is an indictment of their hypocrisy and animus.

Now from an unexpected quarter comes the kind of straight-talking self-criticism that is so notable by its absence in the Arab and Islamic world. A welcome development even if it's mainly notable for being so rare.

We're referring to an op-ed under the title "Hamas terrorism and (Hezbollah!)" in Kuwait’s Al-Watan newspaper today. So far, it's been mentioned in very few media reports; we heard it described on Israel radio's midday news today and went searching for it on the web. Google's machine-translation gave us an approximate sense of the writer's intent, subject to the usual confusion that comes with all machine translations. Arabic readers can find the full original text here.

Until MEMRI comes out with its customary first-rate professional translation, we'll borrow the summary that one Middle Eastern English-language site offered:

An “unprecedentedly harsh” opinion piece (Arabic) appears in Kuwait’s Al-Watan newspaper today, condemning the recent massacre at Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem, and calling the attackers “terrorist” and the products of an “evil alliance”. Abdallah Al-Hadlaq calls the attack a “barbaric murder” and writes in his article that one can not negotiate “with terrorism that indiscriminately aims itself at students, women and babies without any consideration for the means and the targets." When 15-year-old students are gunned down while holding their holy books, when blood has to be mopped up off the floors of religious institutions, when eight families have to be told that their children’s schools have “floors covered in blood-soaked holy books” — the attackers are not heroes, and their attack should certainly never be praised as a “heroic operation”.

This is Babylon points out that Al-Hadlaq calls Hamas a terrorist organization - notable in itself. He goes further, referring to the Merkaz Harav massacre as having been carried out by an “evil Alliance” of Hamas and Hezbollah. These are unusual and rarely-heard views in the Arab world.

As welcome as anti-terrorism op-eds are in the Arab world, the fact that they do appear from time to time is proof that the Arab world could, but doesn't, speak out clearly against jihadism minus the usual ifs, ands or buts. It would be nice to think this Kuwaiti column is a sign of change. But it's not likely. Still, you have to admire the writer's courage. Let's hope he doesn't end up paying an unreasonable price.

11-Mar-08: After the carnage, questions for "moderates"

In a confusing and complex world, you can learn a great deal by understanding the process of glorification of individuals in someone else's culture.

Thursday night's massacre of teenage boys in a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem is the sort of watershed event that, when you analyze the reactions it generated, helps you understand the true nature of the forces at work. We don't like the expression "root causes" because of the way it's used polemically by too many people. But if there's a root cause for terrorism, hate-based education needs to be right up there as a contender.

Media observers and some politicians have for too long presented the Abbas/Fatah/PLO part of the Palestinian-Arab world as 'moderate'. How dishonest this is can be seen from the published and highly public reaction of the official daily voice of the Abbas party.

Mahmoud Abbas heads the Palestinian Authority. The PA puts out a daily newspaper called Al Hayat Al Jadida. None of that publication's readers is today in any doubt about the official Fatah/Abbas party line regarding the Jerusalem massacre which took the lives of eight students in a library of spiritual texts.

That's because they - the readers of Al Hayat Al Jadida - read Arabic. And now thanks to the indispensable work of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Media Watch, so can we.

The headline in its front page article reads:
"Killer of eight young men is a shahid [a holy martyr]"

The holy martyr's photograph covers most of the page. We won't re-publish that sort of disgraceful propaganda here. PMW have done a service to the thinking public by reproducing the Al Hayat Al Jadida portrait of the murderer here.

In their analysis, PMW's Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook point out that

"the PA is sending its people a straightforward message of support for the terror murders and the murderer. According to the PA interpretation of Islam, there is no higher status that a human being can achieve today than that of Shahid... In response to earlier PMW reports on the widespread Palestinian honoring of terror, Congress made it illegal for the US to give money to entities that "advocate" terror... Since a society's honoring of terrorists is one of the greatest terror promotions, and as the budget for the PA newspaper comes from the PA's general budget, the incessant honoring of this and all recent terrorists by Abbas's PA as Holy Islamic Shahids should render the Palestinian Authority ineligible to receive any American money under the terms of US law."

Abbas, whose doctorate [a surprisingly little-known aspect of the man's history] was earned in a study questioning whether the Holocaust of Europe's Jews happened, is no moderate. He never was.

Calling a cold-blooded murderer of innocent Jews a hero is no isolated aberration - not isolated in history (see the pre-war nazi poster above) nor in the world of the Palestinian Authority. The opposite is true. Such incitement is a matter of routine, and is done systematically and repeatedly at the highest levels of their society. It is in fact a cornerstone of the hate-based education without which such acts of terror would not be possible.

To substantiate this, following are a small selection (from a vast library of such appalling material) of theological statements about the supreme status of martyrhood by Palestinian religious leaders on official PA (Fatah) television and radio, once again courtesy of PMW:

Sheikh Yusu Abu Sneina, Al Aqsa Mosque:
"Shahada [Islamic Martyrdom] is an honor, only those who Allah desires, attain the privilege."
-Friday Sermon, Palestinian Authority Radio, Dee. 28, 2001

Dr. Isma'il al-Raduan:
"When the Shahid meets his Maker, all his sins are forgiven from the first gush of blood, and he is exempted from the torments of the grave. He sees his place in Paradise. He is shielded from the Great Shock and marries 72 dark eyed [maidens]. He is a heavenly advocate for 70 members of his family. On his head is placed a crown of honor, one stone of which is worth more than all there is in this world."
-Friday Sermon, PATV, Aug 17, 2001, several days after the Hamas Palestinian massacre that took the life of our fifteen year old daughter Malki

Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Razak:
"The believer was created to know his Lord to fulfill Islam... to be a Shahid [Islamic Martyr] or intend to be a Shahid. If the believer does not hope for Shahada he will die as in the Jahiliya [pre-Islam]... We must yearn for Shahada and request it from Allah. If we truthfully request it from Allah, he will grant us its rewards even if we die in bed."
-PA TV Friday Sermon, March 22, 2002

Sheikh Ibrahim Mudyris:
"We are not like you, because we do not desire life. If you threaten to kill President Arafat, we will pray to Allah: 'Grant the President Shahada [Islamic Martyrdom] for you."' Yes, we do not pray - like other preachers pray - for longevity for the rulers; here in Palestine we pray: "Lord, grant the President Shahada for you."
-PA TV Friday Sermon, April 30, 2004

Sheikh Imad Hamato:
"When a man sees one of his brothers being killed for Allah, a person with no head, no legs, his body completely burned. Intestines outside, fingers are gone... The most difficult thing which we fear is what the Shahids [Islamic Martyrs] wish for most of all. They ask Allah: 'Oh God, bring us back [to earth] to be killed by the Apache, so the planes will blow us up, that our heads will be cut off...' We shouldn't forget that Allah, praise him, in blessing the blood of the Shahid, He forgives him from the first gush of blood. And he sees his place in Paradise. He is shielded from the Great Shock and marries 72 Dark-Eyed Maidens (virgins)."
-PATV religious program, Nov. 3, 2006

Now to the questions.

• Did the mainstream media in your area report on this story? Their editors know about this incitement, just as we do. What does it mean when they decline to publicize it?
• The PA newspaper that did this is funded by the PA. The PA, Mahmoud Abbas' power structure, is funded by foreign donors, chief among them the government of the United States. Should the US be reacting in a practical fashion to hate-mongering of this sort? Is a slap on the wrists the response of choice?
• A week ago, the Bush Administration asked Congress to approve an allocation of $150 million to the Palestinian Authority. Are you comfortable seeing foreign aid being passed to the people who turn barbarians into national heroes?
  
• Will the $150 million create additional such heroes? If yes, who can then be said to have funded the process?
• Does a political party that actually glorifies the perpetrator of a massacre of school-children deserve anyone's support? Are they, on any view, moderates? Google has 4,452 news articles at this moment in which the words 'Abbas' and 'moderate' appear together. Click to see for yourself.
• If the official voice of the official power power that speaks for the Palestinian Arab people declares the murderer of innocent unarmed Jewish children learning the library of a religious seminary to be a martyr and hero, can we really say that only the extremists in their society support terrorism?
• And finally where are the Arab and Moslem voices authentically condemning - not just pretend-condemning but demanding substantive actions to stop the hatred, to end the idealization and glorification of the martyrs?
  

As we've observed many times here, knowing how to tell the difference between the terrorists and their victims is somehow more difficult for many people than it ought to be. But if we get this wrong, and fail to adequately understand the size of the threat posed by the terrorists and their legions of apologists and explainers in every part of the world, and then act on that understanding, we're liable to end up paying an unbearably high price.

11-Mar-08: Their society's response to the carnage in the seminary

Scenes of utter jubilation in jihadist Gaza Thursday night when word reached them of the massacre of teenaged Jewish students in the library of a Jerusalem religious seminary.

Watching these images, hearing these sounds, makes something terribly clear: the message from Gaza speaks more eloquently than any "root causes" speech ever could. The hatred coursing through the veins of these people makes them capable of actions the rest of the world would treat as unimaginable, vile, bestial.

Only when their own society sees what it has wrought in Gaza can we expect the beginnings of the reversal of this breakneck descent into the netherworld. But the reality is that reversal is absolutely nowhere in sight.

Day after day, hatred is pumped into their children, ensuring another generation of desolation and failure, and another and another.

9-Mar-08: Terrorism. Their world. Our world.

Understanding the effects that terrorism has on society is an essential pre-requisite to deciding how to stop terrorism.

As vitally important as this is, understanding does not come easily.

Many people in almost every society on earth simply don't understand. They neither understand what it does to their own society, nor what it does to the society of the people who perpetrate the acts of terror.

Terrorism is a corrosive and deeply painful phenomenon on both sides. But this does not mean the two sides are the same or similar or even comparable.

Since their faces and ages are almost completely unpublished anywhere in the world, here below are the eight murdered victims of the well-planned, cold-blooded massacre of students in a Yeshiva library that took place on Thursday night. Still others are fighting for their lives today in Jerusalem hospitals.

















Now for a look at what goes on inside a society whose moral tone, whose educational and social values are interwined with a religious love of death and an embrace of hatred:



Palestinian-Arabs dancing in Gaza.



Palestinian-Arabs dancing in southern Lebanon



Celebrating the massacre - Jabaliya, Gaza

As parents of a child murdered in an earlier massacre of children, we're frequently advised to look to "root causes" for an explanation of how the Palestinian Arabs - uniquely in the world, uniquely in history - have created a society whose most basic values are rooted in terrorism, whose very name is a by-word for terrorism.

"Root causes", as we have noticed again and again in the rhetoric of Palestinian terror's apologists, is a synonym for occupation. The shallowness and historical wrongness of that diagnosis is clear to anyone who knows how many villages and acres were "occupied" when Arafat took the reins at the PLO in 1964. (Hint: zero.)

There's only one root cause; it's hatred. It's immensely difficult to teach understanding and tolerance. It's far easier to teach hatred, and giving it a religious underpinning makes it easier still, and more potent.

When the world, and in particular Palestinian Arab society, understands the role that their home-grown hatred has in the evolution of men, women and children ready to blow themselves up just so long as they can take the lives of their Jewish enemy, we will have taken the first and by far most important step towards changing this appalling situation and ending this ongoing war.

7-Mar-08: Carnage in the library

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Things change but really they stay just the same.

Another massacre in the heart of Jerusalem, so reminiscent of the massacre that took the life of our own precious Malki six and a half years ago.

Then too our trust and naiveté left a bustling location, full of children, totally unguarded.

Then too the leader of the PA condemned the attack out of one side of his mouth and gave terrorists the green light out of the other. Abbas is Arafat without the kefiyah and army drabs. Like his mentor he is waging a "fight" against terrorism that is nothing but window dressing. When Israel finally reacted last week to Hamas' daily attacks from Gaza, Abbas jumped up and down screaming "massacre".

Abbas' terrorists have unabashedly assured journalists that they retain their arms and have not disavowed terrorism. Time and again, terrorists that Abbas claims to capture mysteriously "escape" or are sentenced to token prison terms.

Nevertheless Prime Minister Olmert, with Condoleezza Rice almost visibly breathing down his neck, was quick to "reassure" the West that these vicious, sadistic murders will not derail the "peace" talks.

The mirage of a "moderate" Palestinian contingent ensconced in Gaza and the West Bank lives on. It is a mirage embraced not only by our American patrons but ever more widely here in Israel too. During the barrage of Qassams and Grads on Sderot and Ashkelon, Bradley Burston Polyanna-ed in his Haaretz column: "The world of jihad is fraying at many points and, in the worst symptom of any revolution, beginning to show its age."

Burston chirps about an "exhaustive" Gallup poll of the world's Muslims (actually a sample of 50,000) that "claims to represent the views of 90% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims", 93% of whom are said to be moderates who condemn the 9/11 attacks.

Even disregarding the questionable reliability of such a poll, we all know that a dangerous distinction is consistently made between terrorism against Israel - which they "understand" - and the terrorism everywhere else.

Moreover, 7% of 1.3 billion is an awful lot of radical, blood-thirsty jihadists, particularly when so many of them reside within spitting distance of your own home.

Burston concludes with these empty words: "If recent indications hold, Islamist terrorism as an ideological brushfire is dimming in its ability to galvanize and electrify."

If we needed evidence of his delusion, last night was it. The demise of Islamist terrorism is nowhere on the horizon.

The world watches us grieve and bury our dead children. But it cannot commiserate. It sees footage of the "poor" Gazans rejoicing over our murdered children, handing out candies to passers-by, but it cannot condemn. (See AP's report this morning: "Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip praised the operation in a statement, and thousands of Palestinians took to the streets of Gaza to celebrate.")

Almost every major news-network concluded its reports of the terror attack with variations on this unrelated addendum: "...An inevitable response to last week's Israeli military operation in Gaza that killed more than 100 Palestinians." Never mind that those casualties were Palestinian terrorists clutching sub-machine guns along with the neighbors they chose to endanger by fighting from within their midst.

With that one sentence the Western mainstream media have equated them with innocent Jewish school-children murdered in school, seated at their desks, clutching their books.

---

We remember the young victims of last night's murderous terror attack on the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva:
Segev Pniel Avihail, 15, of Neve Daniel
Neriah Cohen, 15, of Jerusalem
Yonatan Yitzhak Eldar, 16, of Shilo
Yonadav Haim Hirschfeld, 19, of Kohav Hashahar
Yohai Lifshitz, 18, of Jerusalem
Doron Tronoh Maharata, 26, of Ashdod
Avraham David Moses, 16, of Efrat
Ro'i Roth, 18, of Elkana

Our thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of all those caught in the line of fire of the barbarian gunman and his backers.