Posted: Sun 22. Apr 2012 1:07 am Post subject: Denne pågående krigen
Denne pågående krigen
"Mange mennesker mangler grunnleggende forståelse av hendelser i vår del av verden fordi media ofte rapporterer unøyaktig om dem", skriver grunnleggeren av denne bloggen. "Datteren vår Malki, som ble myrdet 15 år gammel i en restaurant massakre i Jerusalem, ble et offer for jihadistisk hat og barbarisme. For at jihadisme og terrorisme skal kunne ta slutt i Israel, New York, Madrid, London eller et hvilket somhelst annet sted, er det først og fremst nødvendig at folk forstår skalaen dette hender i."
The alertness of Mishmar Hagvul (translation: Border Guard) service personnel manning one of those despised security checkpoints averted more harm to Israeli civilians today. A pair of Palestinian Arab youths, seventeen years old, arrived at Tapu'ach Junction, just south of Nablus/Sh'chem this afternoon (Saturday) by taxi. It's an important regional cross-roads, with many public buses stopping there round the clock. Sgt Ihab Khatib, a Druze serving in the IDF, was stabbed to death there by terrorists two years ago.
Their nervous behaviour aroused suspicion, according to Ynet's report. The Border Guards and police stationed at the crossing called on them to stop and undergo a search. The suspects attempted to run from the scene. After a chase and a struggle, they were apprehended but not before dropping a pistol and a knife. They were bodily searched and were found to be carrying five pipe bombs as well as munitions. They are being interrogated this evening. Their bombs were safely disposed of by IDF sappers from the bomb squad. One of the young servicemen is quoted saying: "When it was all over and we realized what they had in their bags, I thought about the fact that we helped save people's lives. It's a great sense of satisfaction."
We have noted numerous times in the past the plain dishonesty that seems to characterize much of the criticism of Israel's security checkpoints strategy. Some examples from many:
Though we have written it here in the past, it bears repeating: Israel's still-incomplete security barrier and its multiple checkpoints constitute one of this country's most effective counter-terrorism measures. The numbers put this beyond doubt. We live here and for us, it matters.
De som har gjort det til sin hjertesak å kreve at kontrollpostene rives ned, er hjerteråe! Det må være Israel alene som vet når dette er forsvarlig og våger å ta sjansen. Det er israelske barn som bærer prisen! _________________ Mvh Kinga
Last edited by Kinga on Sun 22. Apr 2012 2:27 am; edited 1 time in total
We've written numerous times here about events that happen at the military checkpoints through which Palestinian Arabs are obliged to pass and be checked.
The Hawara crossing, rarely mentioned in the foreign news but the scene of frequent trouble, offers an insight into this ongoing war and the many ways it is not understood by people who ought to know better.
This morning, alert Israeli service personnel at Hawara, located in the Shomron (Samaria) district near Shechem (Nablus) sensed that a man with a bag was worthy of closer checking. Turns out he was carrying two explosive pipe bombs. They detained him and called in a sapper who removed the weapons and destroyed them in a controlled detonation.
Two weeks ago, at the same place, a young Palestinian Arab man was stopped and arrested after pulling out a 10-centimeter (4-inch) knife and attempting to stab one of the Israeli personnel manning the station. YNet reports that "the soldier cocked his weapon, and the terrorist let go of the knife". A pity the report did not state the obvious which is never - somehow - obvious: the armed Israeli military personnel could have easily ended the would-be murderer's life. They had the arms, the military and moral justification and the opportunity. But that's not the nature of the transactions at the crossings. The Palestinian Arabs keep passing through on their journey to Paradise; the young Israeli service people are under strict orders to stand stoically and seek to disarm and stop them.
Two days before that, a Palestinian Arab woman poured acid on a young Israeli soldier stationed at the same checkpoint. He may lose the eyesight in one of his eyes.
The same woman had hurled an acidic substance on a soldier at the checkpoint two weeks earlier than that, managing to injure three Palestinian Arabs along the way according to AFP.
Time to state the obvious, though experience suggests it's rarely obvious to most people: the aim of the Palestinian Arabs mentioned here is not to achieve some strategic goal; not to capture some crossing; not even - based on years of data - to cause harm to the soldiers they regard as an occupation force, and whom we regard as the main reason why more Israelis have not been killed or maimed.
The aim of the stabber, the pipe-bomber, the acid thrower is to bring terrorism into Israeli society. If they can reach women, children, civilians, buses, hospitals, schools, restaurants - then they have won. Those are their goals. That is their morality and their value system.
The picture above shows a 14 year-old, somewhat learning-disabled Palestinian Arab boy called Hussam Muhammad Bilal Abdu. Four years ago, on 24th March 2004, the socially-awkward child was made to place an 8 kilogram explosive belt on his body under his coat and to carry it through Hawara and onward into those parts of Israel where large numbers of Jewish women and children can be found. He was in a literal sense turned into a walking bomb, like so many who have been stopped since then by Israeli forces.
The great gift made to this child by the Palestinian Arab education system was, by his own admission, to impregnate his mind with a vision of sex with heavenly virgins. That, and a daily regimen of Fatah-inspired hate training, was what it took to turn a child into a bomb. (Fatah is headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Fatah claimed responsibility for the Hussam Abdu outrage, and freely acknowledged equipping him and sending him.)
After years of construction and much political controversy, the security barrier that has brought such criticism onto Israel has still not been completed. There remain vast swathes of the country where terrorists can cross over unimpeded. And yet day after day, the security personnel manning the checkpoints find and stop terrorists. And day after day, clueless observers, many of them paid reporters for important media outlets, criticize and condemn Israel for the presence of these measures that have saved so many lives in the past eight years.
Not all of them are quite as witless or agenda-driven as the appalling Robert Fisk, author of a classic of the genre. Published in the Independent (UK) in April 2001, his noxious polemic entitled "How pointless checkpoints humiliate the lions of Palestine, sending them on the road to vengeance" appeared less than four months before our daughter and 14 other innocents were murdered by a man who carried a bomb through an Israeli checkpoint and was not stopped.
Fisk rhetorically asks of the Israelis "So why did they stop me? For "security" reasons? Or because their checkpoints are not about security at all, but about humiliation?" The man with the pipe bomb and the woman with the acid can probably help him and his colleagues figure it out.
Three weeks ago and on numerous occasions before that, we wrote in this blog about terrorists being intercepted at the Hawara crossing by Israeli service personnel, and thus prevented from carrying out yet another in the tragic stream of stabbings, shootings and bombings directed by Palestinian Arab terror operatives against civilian Israelis and Israeli civil society.
Today, there's another.
A Palestinian Arab youth was stopped at Hawara today after a pipe bomb was found on his body. He had arrived at the security crossing from the direction of Nablus. A bag on his back aroused suspicion, and a search revealed the pipe bomb.
YNet reports that "During the search a number of Palestinians at the checkpoint advanced towards the soldiers, and warning shots were fired into the air as a response. The checkpoint was closed following the incident."
(And just for the record, the most-recent reported intercept of a terrorist at Hawara before this one was as far back as... this past Wednesday, when a 17-year old Palestinian Arab was arrested at the same place. This one had a Molotov cocktail, a pipe bomb and other explosives concealed under his clothing.)
Criticism of such passive security measures taken by Israel as the security barrier and the numerous security checkpoints that require traveling Palestinian Arabs to stop, identify themselves and, occasionally, to be searched, is a constant in this ongoing war.
So is the inability or unwillingness of those who report on events in this part of the world to report on the almost daily intercepts by Israeli security of active terror agents en route to an appointment with their seventy-two virgins.
The murder two days ago of an eighty-six year-old Israeli pedestrian in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Gilo would have been prevented if the terrorist who stabbed him had been caught en route. He was not stopped, and so an innocent life - one among thousands - was brutally ended.
Critics of Israeli policy frequently refer to the anger engendered by Israeli security checkpoints. "A daily exercise in humiliation", an article published in Canada's Globe & Mail a year ago, is one of many instances.
HAWARA CHECKPOINT, WEST BANK — Under the supervision of an Israeli soldier clutching an M-16 assault rifle, Qassem Saleh begins his daily disrobing. First, he lifts his bright orange shirt so the soldier can see there's no bomb strapped to his torso. Then, after passing through a metal floor-to-ceiling turnstile, he undoes his belt and hands it over for examination to a second soldier, along with his wallet, mobile phone and cigarettes. The second soldier peruses his documents and asks his reason for travel. The answer is a simple one: Mr. Saleh goes through all this, not to board a plane or visit a prison, but so that he can go home to his family after a day's studies at An-Najah University in Nablus. It's a process Israel says is necessary for security, but one that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians consider their daily humiliation. "If a person was carrying anything [illegal] do you think he'd pass through here?" the 23-year-old media student said as he walked through a crowd of taxi drivers shouting offers of rides to the cities of Ramallah and Hebron to the south. "They just do this to humiliate us, to annoy us into leaving this country."
The Palestinian Arab man's question is not to be taken rhetorically. Anyone with experience of daily life here knows the answer is: Yes, terrorists bring their instruments of death right up to the doors of Israeli security on a daily basis.
Knowing this changes the whole analysis.
Our personal experience with reporters covering the complex events that characterize the Middle East conflict and the ongoing war of the Arabs against Israel is that, for the most part, they are easy prey for the baseless assertions and simple distortions of their interview subjects.
A report released last week by the International Committee for the Red Cross singled out the checkpoints and the isolation of Nablus as key parts of a system that denies Palestinians "normal and dignified lives."
Being wrong - as so many of those reporting and pontificating on these events are - on the moral, legal and strategic argument for security against terrorists is a very expensive mistake measured in human lives and grief. People, like us, who know the price from personal experience have an obligation to speak out on this. That's one of the reasons we write this blog.
Security checkpoints and barriers are unlikely to bring peace. But they go a considerable way towards protecting an innocent civilian population from religiously-inspired terrorist thugs with access to virtually unlimited stocks of weaponry. In this light, and until a better approach is devised, they are the most rational decision a society can take.
In a Haaretz report tonight, Hamas, the outlawed terror organization, says the murder of an 86 year-old Jewish man in a Jerusalem suburb on Thursday afternoon, was a "natural response to Israel's continued aggression".
På bildet i linken er den nå myrdede Avraham Ozeri 86 år, sammen med sitt barnebarn. _________________ Mvh Kinga
There's a report this afternoon (Monday) from the Hawara security checkpoint near Nablus. IDF forces arrested a Palestinian Arab carrying a 10 centimeter long knife and an improvised gun. He is now being questioned by security officials over the possibility (as Ynet puts it) that he was intending to carry out a terror attack.
Notwithstanding the constant criticism from anti-Israel sources, Israel's part-constructed security barrier and its multiple checkpoints constitute one of this country's most effective counter-terrorism measures. The numbers put this beyond doubt. That critics can - and obsessively do - call it an "Apartheid Wall" reveals something about the shortage of intellectual honesty in such attacks. The fact that the barrier and the checkpoints have had a clearly positive effect on terror statistics, greatly reducing deaths and injury on both sides, ought to be central to any discussion about them, but is not. There's useful background on the issues in a monograph written by Prof. Gerald Steinberg called "The UN, the ICJ and the Separation Barrier: War by Other Means" [online here].
A Palestinian Arab female arrived at the Bitunya security checkpoint south of Ramallah, near the edge of the city of Jerusalem, this morning. This Hebrew report says she came armed with a 30 cm knife that she pulled out of its concealed location and, blade unsheathed, threw herself at one of the Border Police.
One of the alert service personnel at the checkpoint then fired a warning shot into the air. Another leapt onto her, got her under his control and took her away for interrogation. No one was seriously injured, and the woman - evidently with murder on her mind - will be able to try this again in the future should the passion so move her. A Palestinian Arab news agency reports it briefly ("Israeli forces detain woman at Ramallah crossing") but it would be a mistake to think this is heading for the mainstream news because no one was killed.
The security checkpoint at Bitunya is routinely reported on by the silly ideological extremists of Machsom Watch, a naive and troublesome collective whose members believe something is wrong with Israel protecting its population from similar Palestinian Arabs with murder on their minds.
The IDF's Twitter report on today's near tragedy expresses the danger this way: "#Israel Boarder Police uncovered 30cm knife on #Palestinian #woman, capable of impaling a human body #terror". There's room to criticize the Twittering soldier's spelling skills, but what do you say to people who believe the decent, fair-minded thing to do with Palestinian Arab women and their 30cm knives is to stand back and let them come through?
Answer: it depends who you are. The EU [source] provided Machsom Watch with a €77,632 grant for 2010-11. Additional funding in the same period came from Diakonia (Sweden) and Norway and the UK including a £30,000 British grant for a project called “No Legal Frontiers”. In the interests of sanity, the Netherlands did not renew funding after 2009. The heavily ideological New Israel Fund provided $204,698 of grants to Machsom Watch between 2006 and 2009.
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