RUTHFULLY YOURS

A news photograph from Hazem Bader, who chronicles newsworthy doings in Israel for Agence France Presse, inspired a good deal of guilty giggles on Tuesday: A Palestinian thug mishandled his Molotov cocktail and managed to set fire to his T-shirt and then to his keffiyeh, which had his compatriots scrambling to put out the flames dancing on his head. That was not the sort of halo that the holy warrior had in mind at all — martyrdom, yes, inshallah, but not right now. Like all decent people of good will, my first reaction was: Serves you right, ass. And then a smidgen of guilt: If you’ve ever seen a human being burned, you don’t wish it on anybody. Not even these Jew-hating jihadi bums.

I myself have been closer than you’d generally like to be to that sort of fire on a few occasions: the automobile accidents and house fires that are part of the daily newspaper fare; the fiery climax of the Branch Davidian siege at Waco; a terrorist bombing of a train near New Delhi. Burning, it seems, is a very bad way to go.

But, as everybody from the Joker to Heraclitus to Father Gerard Manley Hopkins has observed: Everything burns.

I cannot help but seeing in the image of that hapless would-be Palestinian murderer a metaphor for the entirety of the Palestinian experience, and for the broader jihadist worldview.

Israel is on the brink of a third intifada. In the last several days, Palestinians have shot, stabbed, and rammed Israeli civilians to death, prompting fears that suicide bombings are next. But even without explosives, the attacks have been gruesome enough. In the the last 24 hours, two terrorists boarded a bus, locked the doors, and started shooting and stabbing passengers until one terrorist was shot to death and the other wounded. That same day, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, emerged from his vehicle “swinging an axe,” and killed a rabbi before he was stopped. In two other incidents, Palestinians seriously wounded Israelis in stabbing attacks.

What’s prompting the violence? The typical, tired media explanation for Palestinian attacks is “frustration with the lack of progress towards peace” (as if “peace” were ever the terrorists’ goal). But this time the consensus is that the immediate reason for violence is Palestinian rage over rumored policy changes at Jerusalem’s most holy sites. The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit explains:

The stated cause of the recent surge in attacks is Palestinians’ belief that the Israeli government is trying to change the status quo at the holy compound in Jerusalem, a place revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. According to security arrangements dating back to 1967, the site, while open to Jewish visitors at specific times, is sealed off to non-Muslim prayer.

HOORAY FOR JON BON JOVI….RSK
Ra’anana, Israel — “We don’t run. / I’m standing my ground. / We don’t run, / And we don’t back down. / There’s fire in the sky, / There’s thunder on the mountains. / Bless each tear and this dirt I was born in. / We don’t run. / We don’t run.”

Jon Bon Jovi sang these words ten days ago to a raucous crowd of 50,000 Israelis during his first-ever performance in the Jewish state. “This should be the fight song for all you Tel Aviv-ers,” Bon Jovi told us that night, as my wife, my son, and tens of thousands of our closest friends wildly applauded.

Little did the rocker know how apt his words would prove to be. Minutes before his performance, two Israelis were stabbed to death in Jerusalem’s Old City by a Palestinian attacker, in part of what has become a surge in terror attacks against Israeli civilians.

Already this month, the Jewish state has absorbed dozens of murderous assaults with guns, bombs, fists, screwdrivers, cars, axes, vegetable peelers, and, most commonly, knives. Most of the attacks have been carried out in broad daylight in public places for maximum effect.

The terrorism hit very close to home for my family Tuesday morning with two separate attacks in our town north of Tel Aviv, just blocks from our kids’ school.

Again total cover up in the Muslim invasion of Europe. In this report, a doctor describes the stabbing of an attending physician at one of the hospitals overrun with Muslim migrants — there are no arrests and no media coverage, of course. But there’s more — what he describes is gruesome.

Czech doctor describes conditions in German hospital — watch the whole thing:

Here is an excerpt from a work in progress:

There will be no way of stemming the flow of refugees, no effective defense against jihad conquest without a re-evaluation of the “Israel-Palestine” conflict. It is not the cause of instability in the Middle East; it is the core, the base, the launch pad for an assault on Western values. No degree of magnitude and horror of Daesh atrocities has yet untangled the twisted media narrative. Faced this fall with a flareup of murderous violence against Jewish Israeli civilians—again—media junkies indulge in the usual cheap tricks, reversing chronology to switch cause with effect and turn the hate-filled murderer into a Palestinian victim “shot dead by the police.” Day in day out they spin the same tired tales to shore up their tumbling certitudes. “It’s all because of the colonization.”