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Terrorism Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 01, 2015 9 Comments
Sometimes the most interesting and moving stories are the ones I stumble upon. Like the Bus No. 37 bombing memorial in Haifa, Israel, that I wrote up last May. A similar thing happened to me last Friday, when I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I wanted to see the Park Slope Co-op, the scene of a well-known unsuccessful anti-Israel boycott attempt a few years ago. (The efforts continue.) Next to the Co-Op, is a memorial to NY Fire Department Squad 1 members who died in the 9/11 attack. FDNY Squad 1 Station and Food Coop I knew that hundreds of firemen died that day, but I didn't know about Squad 1, a Special Operations Unit that responds to emergencies throughout NYC.  According to its Facebook page:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 01, 2015 21 Comments
Unfortunately, Palestinian propaganda promises those "martyred" while killing or attempting to kill Jews an after-life of glory and paradise. This, of course, perpetuates the conflict and death on all sides. In a twist on that theme, two Palestinians shot and killed while carrying out knifing attacks were posthumously married at a funeral of one of them in Hebron. The video was posted on Facebook by the Palestinian Information Center which also tweeted the link. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=912887278747348 The Times of Israel provides more details:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 26, 2015 25 Comments
Among the wave of attacks on Jews in Israel was the attack on Bus No. 185:
Shortly after 8 p.m. on October 12, 22-year-old Muhammad Shamasne boarded bus No. 185 near the entrance to Jerusalem and stabbed a 19-year-old Israel Defense Forces soldier and unsuccessfully tried to grab his gun. Shamasne was shot and killed by police while passengers were attempting to subdue him.
You may remember that attack because we featured one of the heroes. Yair Ben-Shabat, an Israeli Seniors martial arts expert, helped subdue one of the attackers … with his nunchucks.

Posted by New Neo on October 19, 2015 14 Comments
What are the roots of the stabbing intifada? Jeffrey Goldberg takes a long time to say it, but he gets some of it said. It's not a "cycle of violence" where both sides are similar. One side is lying and inciting its people to violence, and this has been going on at least since the 1920s in very similar fashion. The current dispute concerns the history of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, and access to those sites. The NY Post says it more succinctly, and adds a few more things, such as the latest incident of what one might call the Muhammed al Durah phenomenon, complete with the cooperation of our State Department:
...Wednesday...Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech that Israeli security forces “executed” an innocent 13-year-old boy, Ahmad Mansara, “in cold blood.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 15, 2015 12 Comments
Incitement on social media is fueling the current epidemic of knifings, firebombings and stonings against Israeli Jews. That incitement comes from the highest levels of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, as well as people on social media. The incitement involves not only fabricated claims of Israeli intentions as to the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa Mosque, but also false claims which portray Palestinian attackers as random innocent victims of Israeli aggression. The cumulative effect is to so inflame young Palestinians, including children, that they attack Jews for being Jews. Now a famous Palestinian activist has joined in. Bassem Tamimi is the internationally-famous Palestinian activist from the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh who is best known for the viral videos and photos he creates by sending children, including his own, to confront Israeli soldiers.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 14, 2015 24 Comments
This week the Department of Justice created a new position aimed at coordinating investigations into the growth and threat of domestic terrorism. Current Assistant Attorney General John Carlin announced the move today during a speech focusing on the DOJ's efforts to combat extremism at home. From today's remarks at the George Washington University - Southern Poverty Law Center event [emphasis mine]:
At NSD [National Security Division], in order to ensure that we are gaining the benefits of the information and input from those eyes on the ground from around the country, and in recognition of a growing number of potential domestic terrorism matters around the United Sates, we have created a new position to assist with our important work in combatting domestic terrorism. Just this week, we appointed a new Domestic Terrorism Counsel to serve as our main point of contact for U.S. Attorneys working on domestic terrorism matters. The new DT Counsel will not only help ensure that DT cases are properly coordinated, but will also play a key role in our headquarters-level efforts to identify trends to help shape our strategy, and to analyze legal gaps or enhancements required to ensure we can combat these threats. The new counsel will also play an important role with the DTEC by providing its members with insights from cases and trends from around the country.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 13, 2015 24 Comments
Tuesday was another bloody day of Palestinian knifings, shootings, car rammings, and rock throwing. Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal summed up the current knifings in Israel quite well, Palestine: The Psychotic Stage:
Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.
But its psychotic for a reason -- generations of lies about Jews fed to Palestinians in schools, media, social media and mosques. Yaacov Lozowick, Israel's State Archivist, explains at this personal website, This is what long-term education to hatred will do :
Palestinian society sends itself into spasms of bloody and murderous irrationality from time to time; at the moment the present case doesn't seem the worst of them. Yet what's striking about this time is the age of the culprits. If in the second Intifada there were hundreds of suicide muderers and would-be-murderers, most of them were young adults, and they mostly had some sort of organization behind them. Someone had to give them an explosive belt and drive them to their target inside Israel. This time many of the attackers are teenagers, some even young teenagers; and since they're using kitchen knives, all they need is access to their mothers' kitchens.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 12, 2015 12 Comments
The bloodshed continues in Israel today, with additional stabbings by Palestinians, including by a 13-year old of an Israeli teenager in Jerusalem. This is a very personal bloodletting inspired by incitement at home and abroad, and it even is tearing at the fabric of Israeli Arab society. The Muslim mayor of Nazareth lambasted Arab Knesset (parliament) members for inciting riots and ruining chances of peaceful coexistence. But the story to emerge today will be how a terrorist stabbed a soldier and tried to steal his weapon. The terrorist was stopped by Yair Ben-Shabat, an Israeli Seniors martial arts expert ... with his nunchucks. https://twitter.com/Roi_Yanovsky/status/653647617654661121

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 12, 2015 2 Comments
According to a Rasmussen poll released Monday morning, more voters than ever believe terrorists have an advantage over the United States and her allies. who is winning the war on terror rasmussen Conducted from October 4-5, the poll surveyed 1,000 likely voters, asking two questions: 1) Who is winning the War on Terrorism—the United States and its allies or the terrorists? 2) Is the United States too involved in the Middle East, not involved enough, or is the involvement about right?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 11, 2015 11 Comments
We have dealt many times with the issue of promoting children to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers. It was one of the reasons there was such an uproar when Bassem Tamimi appeared before third graders in Ithaca, NY, and advocated the children become "freedom fighters for Palestine." It's also one of the dramatic aspects of the current violence -- whether called an "Intifada" or not. Young children and teens are pushed to the front or take it on themselves to attack. Like the 16 year old who stabbed two elderly Jews in Jerusalem and went after police before he was shot dead: https://twitter.com/IdoDaniel/status/652775896143806464 Then I saw this tweet.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 09, 2015 11 Comments
A few days ago we wondered whether the rise of Palestinian knife and rock attacks was the start of a Third Intifada. Despite cheerleading from Western anti-Israel activists hoping for more violence, and incitement by Palestinian politicians and religious leaders (like the Gaza preacher in the Featured Image), it's not clear whether this is something that will last. The Second Intifada lasted years and in its early stages -- before Israel built the security barrier and launched Operation Defensive Shield -- killed 452 Israelis in 2002 alone, plus hundreds more before it was quashed. But the scale of attacks is not letting up. ] Many of the attacks are by women, like this one in Afula who stabbed a security guard at the bus station and was shot in the lower body to disable her: Israeli undercover police have started infiltrating crowds of rock throwers. This image (video here) shows the moment the undercover police draw their weapons:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 08, 2015 11 Comments
It's far from clear that there is a "Third Intifada" in Israel. But there are multiple attacks daily by Palestinians, usually involving rock throwing and knives. It's a very personal type of attack fueled by incitement in Palestinian and some western social media over the Temple Mount / Al Aqsa Mosque. Many of the rock attacks on the roads are attempted lynchings, hoping to stop the vehicle in order to kill the driver, such as this incident:
Lev Ohayon was on her way to work in Jerusalem from her home in Tekoa, when she was ambushed by a group of rock-wielding Palestinians, who shattered her car’s windows. One of them began to beat her, while trying to pull her out of the vehicle.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 07, 2015 2 Comments
Today, the House Homeland Security Committee released a "Terror Threat Snapchat" detailing the growing threat of Islamic terrorism against targets both in the United States and abroad. So far this year, officials have identified 61 total ISIS attack plots against western targets. This represents a 2x increase in attack plots since 2014. 17 of those plots focused on the United States, and authorities have arrested 55 people this year in ISIS-specific attack cases alone. “Islamist extremist groups are consolidating their control over crucial terrain and seizing the initiative to expand their global footprint," said committee Chairman Michael McCaul in a statement accompanying the report. "Destabilizing aggressors, from the Putin regime in Russia to the world’s leading state sponsor of terror in Iran, are filling the void of American withdrawal to disastrous effect. This global surge in radicalism and instability has directly contributed to the elevated threat level here at home. We need decisive American leadership that starts with shoring up our defenses and advancing a credible strategy to stop the threats at the source.” Key takeaways (as per the Committee's report) include:

Posted by Doron Goldberg on October 03, 2015 6 Comments
Dear Roger Waters, Often in the past you have written detailed letters to colleagues in the music business, encouraging them not to perform in Israel because it supposedly is an apartheid state. Having read your latest letter to Bon Jovi, I won’t waste my time drawing the differences with Apartheid South Africa and the moral stand that so many artists took then, and the immoral stand some artists are taking now in the face of decades of Israeli attempts to protect themselves. I know you cannot be convinced. http://www.salon.com/2015/10/02/roger_waters_to_jon_bon_jovi_you_stand_shoulder_to_shoulder_with_the_settler_who_burned_the_baby/ Attempts to protect again and again against the Arab violence while successfully maintaining the only democracy in the Middle east. A democracy which ensures freedom of speech, women rights, gay friendly society, and minorities equality - an island of sanity in an ocean of madness, violence and hate for all of these things. So the die is cast, you are determined to proceed with your attempts to isolate Israel by blaming artists for any and every act of violence. You are making your stand, so with whom do you stand shoulder to shoulder?

Posted by Miriam Elman on September 27, 2015 38 Comments
This Thursday Israel’s 10-member security cabinet unanimously voted to approve a series of tougher measures against Palestinian rock and firebomb throwers. The new measures are being adopted following a heated debate this past week over what the government and police can and can’t legally do (shoot them with live fire? lock them in jail for longer periods? penalize the parents?) to crack down on Palestinian youth who hurl stone and petrol bombs onto highways and city streets with increasing impunity. There are no easy answers here, or simple solutions. According to experts familiar with these cases, rock-throwing is mostly being perpetrated by unorganized and leaderless young men, making it hard for Israel’s security and intelligence forces to prevent impending attacks. These angry Palestinian kids probably aren’t usually receiving direct orders to terrorize Jews. But they’re acting within an ideological environment that encourages and condones these attacks. In addition to incitement by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, Israeli Arab leaders incite violence by spreading falsehoods about the Al Aqsa Mosque:

Posted by Mike LaChance on September 25, 2015 5 Comments
Islamists in Bangladesh have published a hit list of bloggers and writers which includes people in Europe and America. The image above is of people in Bangladesh protesting the murder of a blogger earlier this year. Jethro Mullen of CNN reports:
Extremists in Bangladesh publish global hit list of bloggers and writers Islamic extremists in Bangladesh appear to be taking their war on secular writers and bloggers beyond the South Asian country's borders. A hit list purporting to be from the militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team has been sent out threatening people in Europe and North America. "Let Bangladesh revoke the citizenship of these enemies of Islam," a statement accompanying the list says. "If not, we will hunt them down in whatever part of God's world we find them and kill them right there." The list contains nine people in the United Kingdom, eight in Germany, two in the United States, one in Canada and one in Sweden. CNN isn't reporting any of the names on the list.

Posted by Miriam Elman on September 13, 2015 6 Comments
Yesterday we posted on Israel’s decision to outlaw as “unlawful organizations” two Islamic Movement-funded groups which for years have been harassing and intimidating non-Muslim visitors to Jerusalem’s revered Temple Mount, Israel Finally Outlaws “Temple Mount Screamers”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpNROFwrzAI As we noted, while the new policy comes as a welcome move for many devout Jews and Christians, merely banning some abusive hecklers from the sacred site does nothing to change the more pernicious problem: the flagrant disregard for religious pluralism and tolerance exhibited in the rhetoric and policies of the site’s Muslim authorities. Our post went live on Saturday evening (EST). Since it wasn’t yet being reported in the MSM, we were unaware that at that very moment Israel’s police and security forces were executing an operation in east Jerusalem in an attempt to avert a planned attack on Jewish worshippers ahead of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year, which begins tonight). According to media reports released this morning (EST) and throughout the day, Israel’s security forces were searching for explosive devices that were believed to be hidden in east Jerusalem on Saturday night.

Posted by New Neo on September 11, 2015 5 Comments
On 9/11's 10th anniversary I wrote a post that contained this observation:
For those of us who were grownups when 9/11 happened, it’s also been transmuted—not to something that was always there, but to something that’s been incorporated into our view of the world. We’ve all done that differently. But for us, the shock and surprise and horror reoccurs (to a somewhat diminished extent, of course; there’s no shock like the first shock) whenever we see the footage, or when we think—really really think, without the protective shield of familiarity—of what actually happened on that day.
I believe that, in the four years that have passed since I wrote those words, 9/11 has been transmuted into something that was always there, something that no longer surprises. And although I haven't watched any footage today of the attack, I think there is less shock and no surprise. The reason for that is that a great deal has happened since I wrote those words four years ago. Since then, although we had responded in Afghanistan to 9/11 and then to Saddam Hussein's defiance of nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq, the Obama administration has purposely wiped out those gains, particularly in Iraq. When I wrote that 10-year anniversary piece in September of 2011, the US was poised on the brink of Obama's complete withdrawal from Iraq, which he was determined to accomplish against the opinion and advice of every military adviser. In the four years since that withdrawal, ISIS has risen up in the vacuum that was left, and it has wreaked horrors on civilian populations, barbarities that are of enormous scale and magnitude even compared to 9/11 and which have reverberated around the world with images of sadistic violence. Does anyone doubt for a single moment that the killers would wreak a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand 9/11s on us if they could?
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