Is this an Act of Terrorism?

Friday, 30 October 2015

Is this an Act of Terrorism?

Posted on October 27, 2015

[Update – 10/28/15 – The original two videos were pulled from YouTube, but duplicates have been found and reposted at the bottom of the article ]

The video above, as well as the one below, are a couple I found on a pro-Israel YouTube channel, posted apparently in hopes of portraying Palestinians as monstrous, bloodthirsty terrorists. In the first video, above, we see a Palestinian youth being detained by a group of Israeli policemen. Suddenly and without warning he pulls a knife and starts stabbing the officers at random. The other police respond by drawing their weapons, and we see what appear to be at least six officers firing bullets into the youth’s body as they converge around him.

The Palestinian almost certainly would have known that if he pulled out the knife and attacked even just one of the officers there would be a spontaneous response by the others and that he would probably have zero chance of surviving. But he did it anyway. So is this an act of terrorism? Or is it a heroic act of courage in resistance to occupation?

In the next video, we see a Palestinian mother being interviewed regarding the martyrdom of her son, Muhammad Shamasne, who was killed on October 12 after stabbing an Israeli soldier on a bus. The soldier did not die of his injuries. Muhammad, however, was shot to death. In the interview the mother offers candy in celebration of her son’s martyrdom and expresses the hope that her other children will become martyrs as well. Then she pulls out a knife and brandishes it in front of the camera and says, “Watch out Israel!”

Is this a terrorist we are looking at in this video? Is it a woman deranged

over the death of her son? The mother’s performance before the camera has been picked up and covered in articles in the mainstream media as well as the Jewish press (see here, here, and here), and the writers seem to take the view that she’s either a lunatic or a terrorist or both. But I doubt any of them have ever lived under Israeli occupation or have an inkling of how their views might be reshaped were they suddenly thrust into an environment of apartheid in which they would have no protection from violent, racist settlers and in which they could be shot or indefinitely detained on the slightest of pretexts. I don’t think pulling out a knife in an interview with a journalist is an admirable or praiseworthy act, but all of us, humans and animals alike, can and do exhibit bizarre behavior when pushed to a point of desperation. And I would dare say that living under a brutal occupation with no end in sight might push one to such a point fairly quickly.

The plain, unadulterated fact is that Israel stole most of the land of Palestine in 1948, and then, starting in 1967, it began an occupation of the West Bank as well. And instead of ending that occupation, it has entrenched and expanded it–until today there are roughly a half a million Israeli Jews living in settlements illegally constructed on land that was supposed to have been given to the Palestinians for a state. And on top of that we now have people pointing fingers, issuing self-righteous exclamations, and posting videos on YouTube because a woman pulls out a knife in an interview.

Another plain, unadulterated fact is that hatred and racism permeate Israeli society, extending all the way up to the highest levels of government. And along with this comes a thirst for blood and vengeance, similar to what we see from the god of the Old Testament. An Israeli Knesset member, Yinon Magal, recently stated in an interview he thinks that as many as “100,000 Arabs” could die in the next war with the Palestinians. In last summer’s war in Gaza, 20,000 Palestinians were killed. Magal apparently fantasizes about multiplying that number by five now.

“If we are not strong, and if we do not make clear to them that they will pay a price for their violence, there will be a lot of blood here,” Magal said. “I think crazy stuff will happen here if this violence continues…”

Asked by the interviewer whether it might not be better to take a softer approach so as to try and calm down the situation, Magal gave the following reply:

“Achieving calm is not a value. Victory is a value. We need to say the truth, we need to say what we really think, we need to say what the situation really is. People say, ‘We have no war with the Palestinian nation; we have a war with the terror organizations.’ What is this nonsense? When they murder two parents next to their children, and in all of the [Arab] villages, people hand out candies, what is that? What does it mean? Do we want to turn a blind eye to that?”

The views held by average Israelis are likely even more radical–by far–than what Magal expresses in the interview. You can go here to read a story about Dania Arsheid, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed execution-style by Israeli forces as she tried to pass through a checkpoint on Sunday.

Arsheid reportedly raised her hands in the air.

“I don’t have a knife,” she is described by a witness as saying–before being shot eight to ten times.

If you follow the link above you will see a video taken after she was shot. The video shows her lying in her own blood as Israeli police stand around, making no effort to provide medial assistance to her. According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, the officers even prevented medics from reaching her.

Another account of her shooting is here:

Dania was still wearing her school-uniform and school-bag, coming from school in the afternoon. Just twenty minutes before the incident, at a checkpoint leading to the Ibrahimi mosque, a female soldier was heard on the army-radio by passers-by announcing that she wanted “to kill a Palestinian person that day’.

Dania passed through the checkpoint leading from the Palestinian market to the Ibrahimi mosque, and a few meters further to the next checkpoint. She passed through the metal detector and gave her bag to the soldiers at the checkpoint. An eyewitness explains: “I saw with my own eyes, there was no knife – nothing.”

According to eye-witnesses, soldiers then shot at her feet – at which point she immediately stepped back and raised her hands. That is when soldiers started shot her, according to witnesses, seven to eight times. While she lay on the ground bleeding from her neck, no first aid was given, not even the Israeli ambulance that arrived after about twenty minutes gave any medical help. A Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance was denied entry to the scene and ordered by soldiers to leave.

Israeli Police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld is reported to have described Dania as a “female Arab terrorist” and asserted that police “neutralized her” after she had attempted to stab one of them with a knife.

This past summer, when Palestinians held a rally to express support for a Palestinian hunger striker, a group of Israelis converged upon them shouting obscenities and, at one point, even rejoiced over the deaths of Gaza children.

Last week, an Israeli writer published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitledConfessions of an Israeli Traitor, in which he expressed the view that the Jewish state is in a “downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society.”

It’s probably an accurate statement–or maybe even an understatement.

And then just today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau delivered an address to the Knesset in which he stated that “at this time we need to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future.” So in other words, there will be no Palestinian state if Netanyahu and those who share his views (and that is the overwhelming majority of Israelis) have their way.

Interestingly, at the same meeting Netanyahu went on to offer up a comment in which, subconsciously or not, he evoked the words of Jesus.

“You think there is a magic wand here, but I disagree,” he said. “I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword–yes.”

The words are indeed taken from a comment made by Jesus, but of course Netanyahu left off the last part of the quote–about dying by the sword.

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Update: Less than 24 hours after I posted this article, both videos were pulled from the YouTube channel I mentioned. However, I have managed to find the same videos posted by other channels. How long they will remain up after I embed them, I can’t tell you. But at least as of now, 5:40 p.m. on 10-28-15, they are still there. So here they are in the order I mentioned them–i.e. first the one at the top of the post, followed by the one just below paragraph 3 and featuring the mother with the knife: