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Heaven On Earth
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Derfner’s Enderlinian Logic Questioned: Fallows on the staging hypothesis
In one of my lengthy responses to Derfner’s rattled cage I discussed his strange argumentation for dismissing the “staged” hypothesis. He invoked a list of “respectable, impartial” journalists — Fallows, Schapira, Weimann, Leconte, Jeambar — and, after accepting their conclusion that the Israelis did not kill Muhammad al Durah, then proceeds to the following logical syllogism.
Furthermore, that each of these investigators also dismissed the possibility that the shooting was “staged” – I think that alone is reason enough to brush aside the idea that Abu Rahme, the al-Duras and a cast of helpers pulled off a colossal hoax to blacken Israel’s name by faking the death of a 12-year-old boy.
This is classic Enderlinian logic: If the Israelis don’t object loudly to what I’ve done, then it must be true. We historians call this an argument ex silentio — from silence and consider it a fallacy. The problem is that there are more reasons for silence than the one the argumenter wants his audience to assume.
In Derfner’s case, there are two problems with this formulation. First, even if these journalists had dismissed the possibility of “staging,” both Derfner and the public need to look at the evidence themselves. But second — and here we come to the more disturbing element of Derfner’s method of argumentation — it systematically misinforms the reading public to tell them that “these investigators also dismissed the possibility that the shooting was staged.”
Irshad Manji Explains Honor Killings on Fox News
Irshad Manji, Canadian feminist, author, and critic of fundamentalist Islam, appeared on Fox News this week to discuss the trial of Chaudry Rashad, the Pakistani man from Georgia who killed his 25 year-old daughter for her desire to end an arranged marriage. This was, simply, and honor killing.
Manji described in very clear terms the logic behind honor killing in some societies, especially in the Middle East.
Manji explained that in Middle Eastern tribal traditions, women are the carriers of culture. Therefore, their lives and bodies do not belong to them, but to their family, tribe, or nation. If she acts in such a way that brings disrepute or dishonor upon herself, she is actually defaming her nation. As such, her punishment must be serious enough for the crime of dishonoring the nation.
Interestingly, Manji notes that honor killing is not necessarily related to religion, rather to specific cultures. With that said, these killings are often done with the name of “Allah dripping from their lips”. In the last century, honor killings were carried out by Catholics in Italy.
This is important cultural insight from Manji, and it is just as important that Western democracies stand strong in the application of their laws that consider such heinous actions murder.
Palestinians Blame Arabs Leaders for Refugee Problem-Palestinian Media Watch
A central demand of the Palestinian movement is the right of return, predicated on the notion that Israel intentionally and forcibly removed Palestinians from their homes in 1948. They place the reponsibility for the continued plight of Palestinian refugees and their descendants on Israel. Arab states use this accusation as an excuse for denying privileges and citizenship for the Palestinians within their borders.
As usual, the reality is quite different than the Palestinian narrative. While there were cases of Israeli forces removing Arabs for strategic purposes, many Arabs left their homes expecting a quick Arab victory and subsequent return. Arab leaders even encouraged these Arabs to temporarily evacuate their homes.
Palestinian Media Watch has been accumulating instances of admission by Palestinians and other Arabs that the Arab leaders called for the evacuation of the homes. This is particularly significant given the scarcity of introspective self-criticism in Arab society. Perhaps PMW glosses over the instances of forced evacuation, but they are correct in that the Arab leadership bears responsibility for the refugee problem- not only for urging the villagers to flee, but also for invading Israel and initiating the hostilities in 1948 and in 1967 that led to the current refugee situation.
The Arabs who became refugees in 1948 were not expelled by Israel but left on their own to facilitate the destruction of Israel, according to a senior Palestinian journalist writing in a Palestinian daily. This plan to leave Israel was initiated by the Arab states fighting Israel, who promised the people they would be able to return to their homes in a few days once Israel was defeated. The article in Al-Ayyam concludes that these Arab states are responsible for the Arab refugee problem.
A backbone of Palestinian English-language propaganda is the myth that Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Israel and created Arab refugees. But in recent years, PMW has documented an increasing willingness among Palestinians to openly blame the Arab states and not Israel.
Following are five such statements of blame, starting with this most recent article and including testimony from refugees themselves and corroboration by Palestinian leaders. Clearly, there is a growing Palestinian willingness to blame the Arab leaders, which corroborates Israel’s historical record.
Desperate Zimbabwean Mother Dupes The New York Times
The New York Times’ June 26 edition featured a large photograph above the fold that caused readers to pause- it depicted an 11-month old with two broken legs, ostensibly by Mugabe’s thugs. The caption read:
Suffering Great and Small
An 11-month-old boy with broken legs found shelter in a church in Harare, Zimbabwe. His mother said youths with the governing party shattered his legs while trying to make her disclose the whereabouts of her husband, an opposition supporter.
Powerful. Dramatic. A lasting symbol of the brutality that Mugabe and his cohorts are willing to use in order to intimidate opposition and secure victory in the elections.
Unfortunately, the media, and as a result, the public, are victims of a dupe perpetrated by a mother understandably concerned with the welfare of her young child. The New York Times published this correction:
A front-page picture caption on June 26 describing an 11-month-old boy whose legs were in casts stated that his legs were broken and that his mother said the injuries were caused by an episode of state-sponsored violence in Zimbabwe. After the picture and an accompanying article that also described the injuries were published, The New York Times took the boy to a medical clinic in Harare for help. When the casts were removed, medical workers there discovered the boy had club feet. Doctors said on Monday that X-rays of the baby’s legs showed no evidence of bone fractures.
The mother subsequently admitted that she had exaggerated injuries she said had been sustained by the boy during an attack by governing party militia. In multiple interviews, she said that youths backing President Robert Mugabe had thrown her son to the concrete floor – and she still says that event did occur.
The owner of the house where she and the baby were staying confirmed that marauding youths from the governing party had attacked the house. He said he believed the baby had been thrown to the floor during the attack, but the owner was in a different room and did not witness it firsthand. The landlord, other lodgers, neighbors and opposition supporters also confirmed that the mother had been singled out because her husband was an opposition member.
The mother, however, later told The Times that the boy had been wearing casts even at the time of the attack, as part of a treatment he had received for his club feet at a different medical facility. She said she misrepresented the boy’s injuries to generate help because she could not afford corrective surgery for the boy.
It is likely that the attack indeed occured as the woman and her neighbors describe it. She is clearly a victim, and in her tragic situation, she quite honorably did everything in her power to attain medical treatment for her child.
While our hearts break for her plight and that of her countrymen, and though we recognize Mugabe as a brutal dictator whose death or exile is a necessary step for a return to Zimbabwe’s former prosperity, we Western readers must demand that our media maintain the strictest accuracy in their dispatches. Though Mugabe is a brutal dictator, and other innocents have been assaulted in the very manner that the caption describes, we cannot countenace our media publishing images that are themselves untrue, but reflect a larger truth. That is the flawed logic behind Enderlin’s defense of his Al-Durah reporting, as well as Gideon Levy’s and Arad Nir’s assertions that it does not matter if the IDF actually shot Al-Durah, since they have undoubtedly killed many Palestinian children.
The New York Times is to be commended for the correction, although they have been duped recently by the Iranians, along with the rest of the major media organizations. But the fact that a concerned mother can so easily put one by their fact-checkers should be cause for alarm. No surprise that Palestinians and Iranian see fooling major Western media outlets as no great feat.
Poynter Online covered the story, including an interview with Meaghan Looram, picture editor of The New York Times.
Domestic Fauxtography Driven by Greed: The AP Retracts Tornado Images
In an example of domestic doctored footage being fed to the media likely for monetary gain, Fox News reports that the AP, CBS, and NBC pulled purported footage of a tornado touching down last weekend in Valentine, Neb., after
a person who asked that his name not be used contacted the AP and said the supposed Nebraska footage was really video he had taken four years ago. The image was “flipped” to make it seem the tornado was pointed in another direction, and the action sped up. The Nebraska images add power lines and subtracts trees that were in the Kansas pictures.
Busted: Blogs Catch Iran’s Photoshop Forgery After MSM Lets It By
Yesterday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s media operation, Sepah News, released a photograph of four missiles being fired (see b
The “Public Secret” Dossier: Revelations about the MSM from the Al Durah Affair
This constitutes a longer version of the op-ed piece at the Jerusalem Post where I exercise my “right of reply” to respond to Larry Derfner’s most recent attack on my arguments. The essay contains links (more to be added), three additional documents, and a number of paragraphs dropped from the published piece.
The Self-Destruction of the Al Durah Faithful
When I first began work on the al Durah affair, I knew I was on to a story whose unraveling would reveal a wide range of cultural dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century –
- • the dramatic dysfunctions of the Mainstream media’s news reporting,
• the resurgence of various forms of Judeophobia, from the paranoid anti-Semitism of the Muslim world to the joyous moral Schadenfreude of the European “left”,
• the mainstreaming of an active-cataclysmic apocalyptic movement in global Jihad and its weapon of choice, suicide terrorism,
• the cultural vulnerabilities of Western democracies faced with an asymmetrical war so lopsided they cannot take it seriously
• the pathologies of Leftist and Jewish self-criticism,
• the disorientation of liberals prisoner of their cognitive egocentrism, and
• the moral failure of the “progressive left.”
By any standards this offers a fairly good scope of issues to illuminate with a “thick description” of one single incident, even if it strikes many as what one French friend classed as a “human interest story” (faits divers).
Part of what attracted me to the topic was its quality of “public secret.” Everywhere I looked there were public secrets: from the obvious staging of Pallywood and the stunning complacency in private of the Western media (“oh, they do that all the time”), to uncanny refusal of otherwise rational people to reconsider despite the deeply troubling evidence. Karsenty calls it the “so what” defense: No blood… so what; no bullets… so what; 55 seconds not 27 minutes filmed of an alleged 45 minutes of non-stop Israeli firing… so what; no “death agonies” that Enderlin cut to “spare the public”… so what; no ambulance evacuation scenes… so what; the kid moves after he’s supposed to be dead… so what; Talal lies… so what; Enderlin lies…
Indeed quite early on, in addition to seeing this story as having strong parallels to the Dreyfus Affair, I began to see it as a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Here the tailors are Talal and his friends who spin their story; Enderlin is the chamberlain who comes back from examining the evidence and announces that the tale is good and true, the MSM are the courtiers to whom he gave both the evidence and the talking points for announcing the great news in order to prepare the tale’s public exposure, the media launch of the icon of hatred, the martyr Muhammad al Durah. And a string of lonely individuals, from Shahaf, to Juffa, to Huber, to Poller, to Landes, to Karsenty, tried unsuccessfully to say, hey wait a minute, this martyr’s narrative robe is woven of wholesale deception. And each of us were told, as does the father of the child in Andersen’s tale, “Hush child.” Only whereas in the original tale, the “revelation” was that those who couldn’t see the magical cloth were “fools and unworthy to rule”, in this one, those who saw a fake were “far-right-wing Zionist conspiracy freaks.”
Like many such “public secrets,” this tale does not wear well over time. (The French call them secrets de Polichinelle, secrets like pregnancy that will, eventually, out.) What I did not expect, was how often the defenders of al Durah would reveal the nature of these dysfunctions I was trying to chronicle and explain. Now Larry Derfner has added his text to the dossier of self-revelatory texts that explain so much about the al Durah affair. He has, as a result, inspired the formal launching of the Al Durah Affair’s Public Secret Dossier. So in his honor, I propose to go over some of these extraordinarily revealing texts and compare and contrast them.
1) Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000.
2) News analysis of William Orme for the New York Times, October 24, 2000
3) Response of Adam to James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly article June, 2003
4) Nouvel Obs Letter of Support to Charles Enderlin, May 27, 2008
5) Larry Derfner’s Second Column on Al Durah in Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2008
Letter of Ricardo Christiano to the Palestinian Authority, October 13, 2000
On October 12 (less than two weeks after the al Durah footage first aired and provoked rioting throughout Israel’s Arab population), two Russian-born reservists took a wrong turn and landed in Ramallah, Arafat’s “Oslo” capital. Palestinian police took them into custody, but the rumor of their presence spread rapidly. A lynch crowd soon stormed the police station, and in a frenzy, Palestinian men beat the soldiers to death with their bare hands, threw their bodies out the window, and a mob below literally tore apart their bodies, beaten to a pulp, dragging the parts through the street, shouting all the while, “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.”
Walter Russell Mead: American Zionism Represents Will of American People
There has been much debate in recent years over the roots of American support for Israel. Much of this debate has focused on the influence of American Jews and the ‘Israel Lobby’. Walt and Mearsheimer’s book, “The Israel Lobby“, charged that supporters of Israel have undue influence on American foreign policy. Implicit in their charge is the assumption that sympathy to Israel is not a widespread sentiment interwoven into American beliefs, but is rather the concern of a small minority, chiefly Jews, who manipulate the political system to promote policies that actually harm the U.S. interest abroad.
Periodically, this myth rears its ugly head when Israel is in the headlines. Politico.com ran a short piece on McCain’s ads in The Jerusalem Post (based on the Augean Stables post). The comment board, not surprisingly, featured the usual borderline anti-Semitic and blatantly anti-Semitic readers invoking Jewish and Israeli control over the elections, even calling McCain traitorous for appealing to voters who are passionate about Israel.
Walter Russell Mead, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a scathing review of Walt/Mearsheimer’s work. In the July/August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Mead traces the roots of American Zionism, and finds that it exists chiefly, in numbers and origin, in the non-Jewish American community, independently of American Jews. Mead’s article rebuts the notion that a small group of Jews drives U.S. policy in a pro-Israel direction.
(For the full article, click here.)
The Link between Terror and Humiliation: Bulldozer driver was engaged in an Honor-Killing
Elder of Zion blog has an important post on one Arab reaction to the Palestinian bulldozer attack in Jerusalem last week: Saudi newspaper fawns over bulldozer terrorist. He does not miss the opportunity to highlight the grotesque “calculations” of an honor-shame culture and its justification of terror. In doing so he raises the key issue that distinguishes an honor-shame culture and an integrity-guilt culture — not the basic human instinct to avoid shame and get honor, but the response to shame and the means to regain honor. I’ll present the original article below, with comments by both the Elder (italics) and me intertwined.
The Arab News goes even beyond calling terrorism “natural” for Arabs:
The act of a frustrated man
Abdul Aziz Al-Suwaigh | nafezah@yahoo.comIsraelis killed a Palestinian youth for driving a bulldozer onto the midst of a crowd in the heart of west Jerusalem and killing three Israelis last week. But the reaction of the Western political leaders to the action of the Palestinian worker, one of over a million and half living in humiliation of the Israeli occupation, amounted to killing him and other Palestinians a thousand times.
Yes, this brilliant writer from our “moderate” friends in Saudi Arabia considers a condemnation of the purposeful killing of Jews to be equivalent to killing a thousand innocent Palestinian Arabs. This is the sort of sick mentality that is mainstream in the Arab world.
The sarcasm aside, there a couple of key points here. The idea that condemning this murderer is the equivalent of killing him and other Palestinians a thousand times (!) suggests how far from an fair sense of reality this kind of honor-shame calculus. Mere criticism is the equivalent of murdering a thousand Palestinians. And if you are tempted to read this as “mere rhetoric,” you need to consult the kind of calculations that Osama bin Laden and other Muslim “scholars” consider justification for killing millions of American civilians.
The idea that an insult is the equivalent of murder and worthy of retaliation “in kind” is a hallmark of an honor-shame culture, one in which one is allowed, expected, even required to shed the blood of another for the sake of one’s own honor. This unhinged rhetoric lies at the core of the Arab world’s pathology.
How to spot a slanted journalist: Ed O’Loughlin takes on Al Durah Controversy
Ed O’Loughlin writes for the Sydney Morning Herald did a piece on the al Durah controversy shortly before the showing of the rushes in court in November 2007. Although it might appear to the simple reader that this is a balanced piece, it’s worth a close look to see the embedded prejudice (in the etymological sense of the term, judgment before [viewing the evidence]. Note that he has only spoken with the people who support the original story, and that he presents none of the extensive evidence that there’s something terribly wrong with the report as Enderlin first broadcast it. Also note that he considers any question about the evidence, including the question of where the bullets came from, “conspiracy theory,” even though, at the end, he allows that it may have been Palestinian bullets that hit.
Truth is sometimes caught in crossfire
“We were the target” … Jamal al-Dura.
Photo: ED O’LoughlinOctober 6, 2007
There are hopes the real story of the death of a boy in Gaza may emerge at a court case, writes Ed O’Loughlin.
Note that at no point does O’Loughlin refer to the case as the “alleged” death, even though that was the issue at contention in the court case. Has the author of the article even looked at the evidence for staging? Will he discuss “take six”? And is his “hopes [that] the real story of the death of a boy in Gaza may emerge” just hoping that the court will confirm the original story? By the end of the article, that seems a fairly likely conjecture.
The death of Mohammed al-Dura is a harrowing piece of footage: a 12-year-old Palestinian boy dying in his father’s arms as the pair seek cover from withering crossfire in Gaza.
The reader is immediately told, without any mention of “alleged,” how harrowing the footage of the death.
It is also, a senior Israeli spokesman declared this week, fake.
Danny Seaman, the director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said the television station France Two “essentially staged” the footage seven years ago this week as a “blood libel” against the Jewish state.
Seaman is the most senior government official to express a view which is increasingly popular among supporters of Israeli policy.
Immediately, the journalist labels the position a political one, rather than a response to the evidence. This is, essentially, Charles Enderlin’s position. But one might actually argue the opposite: that the insistence, despite the evidence, that the footage is real, corresponds primarily to those who favor the Palestinians.
Under this view, the killing of Mohammed al-Dura, like several other incidents which produced television images particularly unfavourable to Israel, was a smear contrived by foreign journalists against the Jewish state.
Significant misrepresentation here. No one is arguing that Enderlin was in on the staging action. No foreign journalists were involved. This was a Pallywood production with Talal as both cameraman and director. To present this as an criticism of “foreign” journalists is to replicate in a new form the error of early journalists who described the scene as “captured by a team of French journalists” when, again, it was Talal without supervision.
McCain Reaches Out to Pro-Israel Community with JPost Ads
Presumptive GOP nominee John McCain’s campaign is reaching out to the American pro-Israel community and the American community in Israel through ads on The Jerusalem Post website. The campaign has featured two advertisements that would resonate with the readers of the right-of-center The Jerusalem Post.
One advertisement features a photograph of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad facing a photograph of Barack Obama, next to the question, “Is it OK to Unconditionally Meet with Anti-American Foreign Leaders?” There are two buttons, Yes and No. The colors are ominous, black, white and brown. Regardless of which button one pushes, a page pops up reading, “Elect a Leader with Good Judgment. Sign Up Below.”
The other ad features a photograph of McCain and Joe Lieberman, over the words “Support a Leader We Can Believe In”. The colors are a patriotic red, white, and blue. This slogan is a swipe at Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”. The grammatical shortcomings of both slogans aside, McCain’s ad suggests that while Obama’s campaign asks the voter to believe in the message and words of their candidate, and not in Obama himself, McCain is the leader whose record and character are worthy of the voters’ trust. McCain as the proven, safe candidate, and Obama as the smooth-talking, risky choice.
A well-placed advertisement with an effective message by a campaign that has had far too few.
Defense of Democracy and Liberal Freedoms in New U.K. Journal
In June, a new monthly journal appeared in the U.K. Standpoint is a journal of politics and culture with a conservative, pro-American outlook. Its mission statement is quite clear on its ideological underpinning:
Standpoint’s core mission is to celebrate our civilization, its arts and its values – in particular democracy, debate and freedom of speech – at a time when they are under threat. Standpoint aims to be an antidote to the parochialism of British political magazines and to introduce British readers to brilliant writers and thinkers from across the Atlantic, across the Channel and around the world.
Orientalism vs. Honor/Shame: New Book Assails Said’s Theory
Philip Carl Salzman , anthropologist at McGill University, and member of of the Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) project of the Olin Institute, recently published a book entitled “Postcolonial Theory and the Arab Israel Conflict”, edited by Profs. Salzman and Donna Robinson Divine. The work is a collection of essays by scholars critiquing Edward Said’s attack on Western study of Arab culture- the Orientalism paradigm. The essays argue against the philisophical underpinnings of Said’s theory, as well as the practical issues in the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israel conflict and honor-shame.
Schoolboys disciplined for ‘refusing to pray to Allah’
Dhimmiwatch has posted an astonishing tale from England (hattip Solomonia). Part of what to keep in mind here as you read this article, is that no religion is more overtly hostile and disrespectful towards Britain and its cultural inheritance than Islam, from the daily aggressions to suicide terrorism.
The problmes of encroaching Islam in England are pervasive, as discussed in this piece by Damian Thompson. According to Melanie Phillips, England has been chosen as the weakest target for Islamist take-over in Europe, although the alliance with left-wing radicals may actually bump Scotland to the top of the list. Hopefully, even if they haven’t underestimated the folly of England’s leaders, they have underestimated the backbone of the English people. This can still be won without much violence. Right now, the Islamists are laughing at how easy this is.
Excellent meditation by Erin O’Connor of Critical Mass in which she compares and contrasts Alice’s cultural encounters in Wonderland with those of these unfortunate school kids.
Schoolboys disciplined for ‘refusing to pray to Allah’
By Nick Britten
Last Updated: 12:37AM BST 05/07/2008
Two schoolboys were allegedly disciplined after refusing to kneel down and “pray to Allah” during a religious education lesson.A spokesman for Cheshire County Council said ‘Educating children in the beliefs of different faiths is part of Cheshire’s diversity curriculum’
It was claimed that the boys, from a year seven class of 11 and 12-year-olds, were given detention after refusing to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.
Yesterday parents accused the school of breaching their human rights by forcing them to take part in the exercise.
One, Sharon Luinen, said: “This isn’t right, it’s taking things too far. I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn’t join in Muslim prayer.
“Making them pray to Allah, who isn’t who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that they were told they were being disrespectful.”
Another parent Karen Williams, 38, whose 12-year-old daughter is a classmate of the boys, said: “I am absolutely furious my daughter was made to take part in it and I don’t find it acceptable.
“The teacher had gone into the class and made them watch a short film and then said ‘we are now going out to pray to Allah’.
I’d be interested in a) what the movie was, and b) who made it. As one commenter at Dhimmiwatch put it, “It sure isn’t Fitna or Obsession.”
Tom Gross Finds Major Media Diminished Attack in Jerusalem
I wrote yesterday about the coverage of this week’s terrorist attack on CNN, which they described as “Construction Vehicle Kills Three” in their graphic. Tom Gross, on his Mideast Media Analysis site, has found similar coverage in his survey of European and American major media outlets, including a shockingly similar depiction in the New York TImes.
MAKING IT SOUND LIKE AN ACCIDENT, AND DELIBERATELY SO
The online report yesterday in The New York Times concerning the terror attack in Jerusalem benignly began as follows:
The New York Times
July 2, 2008
Construction Vehicle Kills 3 in Israel Attack***
Research shows that most people only read headlines, not the article, and The New York Times knows this. The headline has since been changed but was up on site for many hours.
The headline writers at the Times cannot have been in any doubt about what actually happened because Times correspondent Isabel Kershner made clear in the article that the Palestinian driver went “on a rampage in central Jerusalem Wednesday, ramming several cars and two buses before a police officer clambered onto the careening vehicle and shot him dead.” She continues “the Palestinian… may have planned to crash the construction vehicle into a crowded market nearby.”
Access Journalism in Palestinian-Controlled Territory
In a contemporary Middle East featuring an ascendant Hizbullah and Hamas-ruled Gaza, it is important to periodically remind ourselves of the atmosphere out of which the reports we read and watch originate. The regular manipulation of the media by Hamas and Hizbullah are well-documented. It is more than a tactic by organizations; it derives from a cultural vision of media in the Arab world that is fundamentally different than the Western understanding of the media’s place in safeguarding the values of that society.
Dan Dikers’ “The Influence of Palestinian Organizations on Foreign News Reporting“, from 2003, is a useful study that documents the understanding of the role and treatmeant of media in the Arafat days.
CNN: “Construction Vehicle Kills Three”
During their 5 o’clock newscast yesterday, CNN’s graphic regarding the Jerusalem attack read, “Deadly Rampage in Jerusalem: Construction Vehicle Kills Three”. I wonder what the bulldozer’s motive was- perhaps solidarity with the airplanes that killed those Americans on 9/11. Or the gun that murdered the students at Merkaz Harav in Jerusalem. From reading the graphic, one would assume that an accident had occured, similar to the crane collapse in New York City.
It seems that CNN is confused by the attacker, considering he currently has not been linked to any terrorist organization, and do not know how to label him. It is easier to simply use the bulldozer in the headline.
Now, they are calling the killings ”a ‘terrorist’ attack”.
Adding to their confusion, Israel is labeling him a terrorist, but admits that they do not know his motivation, nor can they link him to any terrorist group.
Pictures of the Attack
My daughter Noa Landes is here in Israel this summer working as a photography intern at the Jerusalem Post. She was immediately sent to the scene and these are some of her exclusive photos.
View from an apartment on Jaffa St down to the scene of the attack. These two cars were smashed by the bulldozer. At least one of the fatalities took place here.
This is a street level view of the two cars.
The body of one of the victims was taken to the side to be evacuated after allh the survivors were seen to by the emergency workers.
There were two buses hit by the Bulldozer. This one sustained minor damage compared to the other whick was turned on its side.
This view of Jaffa St. Goes from east to west, following the path of the attacker. in the foreground are the two cars. In the middleground and background there are the two buses that were hit as well as more cars that were damaged by the rampage as well as emergency vehicles.
Sudden Jihad Syndrome in Jerusalem?
An Arab took control of a giant bulldozer and started charging up Jaffo St. in Jerusalem crushing cars and eventually overturning a bus.
Photo by Noa Landes
At least four dead, 45 injured, some badly. Let’s see how he’s treated in the Arab and Muslim press. It’s not clear whether the driver was a known problem case from East Jerusalem, or whether he just was one of the construction workers on the scene. If the latter, this looks like a case of “Sudden Jihad Jerusalem syndrome,” if the former, a minor variant on 9-11 (use big transportation vehicle to do as much damage as possible).
There are still people (bodies?) under the tractor.
There’s footage of the attack with an man riding shotgun on the tractor. It’s a off-duty Israeli soldier who took a pistol from a policeman and shot the driver. He is a relative of the man who shot the terrorist who shot up the religious school Merkaz ha-Rav several months ago.
My first press release comes in German from Ulrich Sahm:
Ein Terroranschlag, wie es ihn in Israel noch nicht gegeben hat. Ein mutmaßlich arabischer Traktorfahrer rast mit erhobener Bulldozerschaufel durch den dichten Verkehr auf der Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, einer Hauptverkehrsader. Er wirft einen Touristenbus um und auf der Strecke bleiben mehrere zerquetschte Personenwagen, bis er schliesslich noch einen Bus umwirft. Ein bewaffneter Polizist schießt auf den Traktorfahrer. Schon verletzt setzt er seine Amokfahrt fort. Schließlich steigt ein anderer Polizist auf das Dach des Traktors und erschießt den Mann. Beim Gebäude des ehemaligen Schaarei Zedek Hospitals kommt der Buldozer zum Stehen. Mindestens dreißig Verletzte und eine unbekannte Zahl von Toten soll es gegeben haben. Zwei Tote wurden schon nach einer halben Stunde bestätigt. Unklar ist, ob vielleicht sogar zwei Traktoren an dem Anschlag beteiligt waren.
Ein politischer Kommentator vergleicht die Amokfahrt mit dem 11.9., nicht wegen der Zahl der Toten, sondern wegen der Methode, ohne echte Waffe einen Mordanschlag zu veranstalten.
Eine halbe Stunde nach der Amokfahrt erklärt die Polizei schon, dass es sich bei dem Traktorfahrer um einen Palästinenser aus Ostjerusalem handle. Er sei der Polizei „bekannt“, wegen verschiedener Straftaten.
Unklar ist, ob er einer der Traktorfahrer ist, die auf der Jaffastreet beim Verlegen der Trasse für die künftige Straßenbahn beteiligt ist.
UPDATE FROM SAHM:
The bulldozer driver was a 32-year old Palestinian with two children [and no hope -- rl] who was known to the Israeli police as involved in criminal activity.
Four dead and 44 seriously injured.
UPDATE from Pierre Lurcat:
Cell phone video of the event.
Further comments:
Terror Purposely Targets Civilians – The terrorist operating the bulldozer chose his victims deliberately – even starting his attack by motioning for a woman driver to precede him, before crushing her vehicle with his shovel. He went on to run-down pedestrians, ram two buses, and crush a number of civilian cars.
Among his innocent victims is an infant, who was injured in the attack and taken to hospital. Eyewitnesses told police that the murdered mother saved her baby, by throwing the child out the car window, just before the bulldozer crushed her to death.
Hateful Extremism vs. Cooperative Pragmatism – The terrorists of the region are indoctrinated and driven by a blind hate for Israelis, Jews and all non-Moslems, denying them their most basic rights, even their right to life. The attack took place in Jerusalem, a city which serves as Israel’s capital, yet is shared by Jews and Arabs, with freedom of movement for all its residents. While the terrorist was an Arab resident of Jerusalem, so too was the driver of the first bus he attacked. This bus driver, who serves as an example of cooperation that can be achieved between Jews and Arabs, was able to swerve his bus and minimize the damage of the bulldozer’s blade.
Terrorism despite Peace Efforts – The attack today comes as Israel is actively pursuing peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas. It also comes as an Egyptian-brokered state of calm was just achieved regarding Gaza, in which Israel demonstrated its desire to exhaust all efforts to achieve a halt to terrorist rocket attacks against its citizens, without having to resort to the use of force. Israel will continue its efforts to achieve peace with its pragmatic Palestinian neighbors, despite the efforts of the extremists to torpedo the process.
How will the MSM cover this? How will diplomats respond?
Editorial by David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post (Hattip EG):
The security barrier has dramatically reduced the incidence of attacks inside Israel by West Bank Palestinians in recent years. But two months ago, in the last major terror attack in the capital, an east Jerusalem resident killed eight students in a Thursday night attack at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva. On Wednesday again, Jerusalem’s vulnerability to an attack from ‘within’ by a perpetrator with the residency rights to move freely around the city was murderously demonstrated.
Ideology over Evidence in Iran Article Reminiscent of Enderlin Petition
Post by LB, additions by RL.
On the Empire Burlesque blog, Chris Floyd wrote a post entitled “Big Dog, Little Tail- The American Elite Decides on War with Iran“. In it, Floyd (willfully?) ignores the many indications that Iran’s intentions are not pure with regard to Israel and its nuclear program. While on the one hand, he dismisses the theories about the “Jewish lobby,” he turns his wrath on the US “military-industrial elite” manipulating world opinion and the U.N. because they “want to go to war,” and never takes a serious look at the evidence that runs counter to his world-view.
This pervasive disregard for evidence that contradicts deep-rooted convictions is reminiscent of the journalists who signed the petition supporting Charles Enderlin in June, 2008.
Let’s be clear about one thing: Israel will not attack Iran without the full knowledge and approval of the United States government.
That is quite a claim. Some analysts may agree, but does Floyd have any proof to make him so sure, besides his confident assertion that “The military-industrial elite control Israel”? Israel attacked Osirak in Iraq in 1981 without American knowledge, and many experts believe that Israel will do the same in Iran if it has to. “Israel will launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on its own if the rest of the world does not take action, said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and senior adviser to three presidents, including George W. Bush.
The trigger of the “warning shot” of Israel’s long-range air-strike exercise last week was actually pulled in Washington. The Israelis will not force or deceive the U.S. government into an attack on Iran; that attack – which grows more certain by the hour – will take place because America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment and military-industrial complex (to the extent that there is any real difference between the two) want it to happen, or are willing to let it happen.