Friday, March 25, 2016

25-Mar-16: In Jerusalem, another 15 year old, another knife

French Hill: the commercial center at the top, the university and the hospital
behind the point from where the photo was taken [Image Source]
Yet another stabbing attack, yet again in Jerusalem, yet again a fifteen year old attacker, yet again she's a girl.

At the end of the lethal assault, she's alive though likely to be facing a changed life in the immediate future.

This Friday afternoon, Friday and Purim in Jerusalem (though nowhere else in the world), a unit of Border Police (Mishmar Hagviul) officers standing next to a gas station in the French Hill neighborhood which abuts both the Hebrew University's Mt Scopus campus and the Isawiya neighborhood, watched as an Arab girl approached them.

At some point, she pulled out a knife and began to slash at whoever she could strike. The Border Guard personnel overpowered her without shots being fired, and she is now arrested and being questioned. Times of Israel states rather laconically: "There were no injuries during the incident." That, it's fair to surmise, was not the Arab girl's intent. Alive and undamaged, she is luckier than she probably realizes.

A report in the Arabic-language service of the Ma'an News Agency correctly identifies her a child, though it leaves readers in doubt as to whether she actually did anything or was simply framed by the cruel Israelis. Questions worth asking, it unfortunately fails to ask. Which school had she been attending? Are the members of her family politically aligned? Is she friends or relatives with any of the other Arab children who have launched stabbing attacks on Israelis in recent months? It will be interesting to see if anyone asks them in future news reports. Those are core pieces of missing information that, if they were disclosed, would help reveal the scale of the ongoing weaponization of Palestinian Arab children in which the "moderate" PA is engaged.

That French Hill gas station was ransacked and almost destroyed by rioting Arabs in 2014 [link]. The neighbourhood itself has a history of inter-community tensions though it is somewhat mixed with a growing number of Arabs having bought apartments in the mostly Jewish section.

This, according to parts of the anti-Israel propaganda industry, never happens, but in reality of course it does.

French Hill with its busy shopping center and numerous restaurants is a short walk away from the Mt Scopus campus of Hadassah Medical Center, and of the Hebrew University as well as close to Jerusalem's Light Rail which provides a rapid transit solution into the center of Israel's capital for the thousands of Arabs living in the city's northern Arab-majority suburbs.

No comments: