Palestinian infant burned to death in West Bank, IDF blames 'Jewish terror'

[Didymus 34,380]

No, I'm asking about burning of this baby and his family.... How are the perpetrators described? Is there any mention of terrorism in headlines? 

Oh, sorry :air:

Not yet Not the biggest news agencies anyway what's up with that omg.

[lego 44,165]

Oh, sorry :air:

Not yet Not the biggest news agencies anyway what's up with that omg.

oh wow... 

[Melech 9,900]

No, I'm asking about burning of this baby and his family.... How are the perpetrators described? Is there any mention of terrorism in headlines? 

I'm asking about Belgium media, since you mentioned it.

In German media it's described as a terrorist act! 

[lego 44,165]

Palestine to lodge ICC complaint over baby's death

 

 

[lego 44,165]

"Two bloody attacks in 24 hours have laid bare a culture of impunity – and deep internal divisions

 

The condemnations are striking but still they ring hollow. Binyamin Netanyahu denounced the arson attack by Jewish settlers on the West Bank home of the Dawabsha family, in which Ali Saad, a baby just 18 months old, was burned to death, as an “act of terrorism in every respect”. Netanyahu was joined by Naftali Bennett, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, which is close to being the political wing of the settlers’ movement. Bennett described the murder as a “horrendous act of terror”. The defence minister, the army, they all condemned this heinous crime.

 

Which is welcome, of course. It’s good that there were no ifs or buts, no attempts to excuse the inexcusable. But still it rings hollow.

 

The words sound empty partly because, while this act is extreme in its cruelty, it is not a freak event. Talk to the Israeli human right groups that monitor their country’s 48-year occupation of the West Bank and they are clear that the masked men who broke into the Dawabsha family home in the early hours and set it alight committed a crime exceptional only in its consequences. “Violence by settlers against Palestinians is part of the daily routine of the occupation,” Hagai El-Ad, director of the B’tselem organisation, told me.

 

Indeed, El-Ad says this attack was the eighth time since 2012 that settlers have torched inhabited buildings. There have been dozens of assaults on property, too: mosques, agricultural land, businesses. “In most of these cases, they didn’t find the perpetrators, despite having the best intelligence agencies on the planet.” He is referring to the culture of impunity that has always protected the settlers.

 

That charge can be directed at past Israeli governments of the centre-left as well as the hawkish right: while the latter actively sponsored the settlement that followed the 1967 war, the former indulged it. But the right’s guilt runs deeper, which is why its tearful words of regret now sound so false.

 

Take Bennett. Put aside his repeated insistence that there will never be a Palestinian state, thereby crushing the dreams of an independent life for all those living under Israeli rule. Focus only on his conduct this week. Today’s murderous arson attack is assumed to be an act of revenge for the court-ordered dismantling on Wednesday of two buildings in the West Bank settlement of Bet El. The buildings were unfinished and empty. Israel’s supreme court ruled them illegal and ordered the army to demolish them. The settlers raged at the decision, demonstrating violently against the soldiers and police who were there to enforce it. And guess who stood on a roof at Bet El, egging the protesters on, stirring them to ever greater heights of fury? Why, it was Naftali Bennett.

 

Israeli hawks pump ever more air into the ultra-nationalist balloon – only to feign shock when it explodes

Netanyahu himself is not much better. You don’t have to recall his own disavowal of Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution on the eve of March’s election, or his racist warning that Arab citizens of Israel were heading to the polls “in droves”. 

 

Look only at his actions in recent days. Stung by the protests at Bet El, he announced construction of another 300 units in Bet El and 504 in East Jerusalem. In other words, he did not punish the settlers for their lawless behaviour: he rewarded it.

 

There is a pattern here. The hawks of the Israeli right pump ever more air into the ultra-nationalist balloon – only to feign shock when it explodes. A small, but telling example: yesterday an ultra-orthodox Jewish fanatic went on the rampage at the Jerusalem Pride march, stabbing wildly at anyone his knife could reach. He injured six, one critically. Among those who condemned his actions was Jewish Home Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich. Yet Smotrich calls himself a “proud homophobe”: in 2006 he helped organise “the beast parade” which saw demonstrators mock Pride by walking through Jerusalem with donkeys and goats, as if to equate homos-xuality with bestiality.

 

The prime example of turning on the tap – only to be appalled by the flood – is Netanyahu himself. Twenty years ago he stirred up crowds livid at then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s apparent concessions to the Palestinians. They waved placards depicting Rabin as a Palestinian terrorist, even as an SS officer – but Netanyahu said nothing. They carried a mocked-up coffin of Rabin and still Netanyahu said nothing. But when a far rightist assassinated Rabin, Netanyahu was of course among the first to be shocked, shocked, by such wickedness.

 

It’s true too that each “price tag” attack like yesterday’s – designed to show that even the slightest brake on the settlement venture will come at a price – helps entrench the position that territorial compromise is impossible, that the evacuation of settlements will trigger civil war. That is a conclusion that can only boost support for the Bibi-Bennett hostility to a two-state accord with the Palestinians. And yet, for all that, it would be wrong to see the Israeli right as a monolith – and even more wrong to see Israel itself that way. There are distinctions and they matter. This week’s men of violence illustrate them.

 

The graffiti left by the murderers of baby Ali Saad offered a clue. “Long live the messiah,” said one. I’ve seen slogans like that before, in the radical settler enclave of Hebron: they point to a strand of settler extremism that denounces the actual state of Israel, and especially its army, as godless institutions of secular democracy, demanding in their place the creation of a “Judean kingdom”. To them, Netanyahu is a traitor and apostate.

 

Similarly, the would-be assassin of the Pride rally, Yishai Schlissel, told the Jerusalem court where he appeared today that he did not recognise its authority because it “does not follow the rules of the holy Torah” (as if he does). That suggests he belongs to the strand of anti-Zionist ultra-orthodoxy that regards the modern, secular state of Israel as a blasphemous pre-empting of the divine plan for the Jews.

 

It can be baffling, but such are the deep divisions within Israeli society, often missed by those looking on from afar. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin – who, though a hawk on territorial issues, has emerged as the country’s most urgent voice against bigotry and intolerance – spoke in June of Israel’s four tribes: the strictly orthodox, the secular, the national-religious and the Arab minority.

 

Back when we used to speak of the “Middle East peace process” there was an assumption, contained in that very phrase, that if only Palestinians and Israelis could reach an accord, peace would come to the entire region. Now we surely know that even if there were such a pact, it would not end the killing in Yemen, the slaughter in Syria or the carnage in Iraq. Even if Palestinians and Israelis embraced, Isis would keep on beheading those it deems the wrong kind of Muslim.

 

But something else is true too. If the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were solved tomorrow, there are no guarantees it would bring tranquillity to Israel or indeed to the divided Palestinians. It might simply unleash the internal conflicts that the external clash has bottled up and contained for so long.

 

As the Dawabsha family mourns, and as Israelis and Palestinians hold their breath, trembling at the prospect of yet another dread cycle of retaliation and escalation, it is worth remembering that this conflict involves enmity piled upon enmity, hatred upon hatred, within and without – making it harder to solve with each passing day."

 

                                          Jonathan Freedland

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/31/israel-hawks-dodge-blame-two-bloody-attacks-impunity-internal-divisions

[lego 44,165]

 

Jewish Israeli teens lean right, many support ‘price tag’

Only 9% of adolescents consider themselves left-wing; 45% say they wouldn’t study in a class with Arabs

 

Jewish Israeli teens are becoming increasingly polarized in their political beliefs, with more than half identifying as politically right-wing and less than 30 percent willing to condemn attacks against Arabs, according to a poll published Tuesday.

 

Four hundred teens between the ages of 12 and 18 were canvassed for the survey across a spectrum of religious, national and political backgrounds, including Jews and Arabs, NRG reported.

 

According to the poll, 52% of Israeli adolescents define themselves as right-wing, 30% see themselves as centrist, and only 9% consider themselves left-wing.

 

When asked about Israel’s Jewish and democratic character, 41% of Jewish students responded that the state’s Jewish character is more important than its democratic one, while 25% answered the opposite.

 

Among Arab students, 96% responded they believe Israel should be democratic first and Jewish second.

 

Divisions between Jews and Arabs were evident throughout the survey. Forty-five percent of Jewish teens said they were not prepared to sit in the same classroom with Arab classmates, while 39% of Arab students said the same of their Jewish peers.

 

Thirty-five percent of Jewish students and 27% of Arabs also said they have never interacted with peers from the other group, while 20% of traditional and secular Jewish-Israeli teens have never held a conversation with an ultra-Orthodox peer.

 

While 76% of secular Israelis were willing to live in the same apartment building as Arabs, only 37% of religious Jews and 11% of ultra-Orthodox teens said the same. Sixty-eight percent of Arab adolescents said they were willing to have Jewish neighbors.

 

Many Arab and Haredi respondents reflected their anxieties about their place in society, with 40% of Arab teens saying they were concerned about their sector’s place in Israeli society, while about a third of Haredi teens responded the same.

 

In an alarming trend, only 28% of Jewish respondents said they condemned so-called price tag attacks associated with religious, far-right Jewish groups, with students from a traditional home surprisingly more likely to decry those attacks than their secular peers.

 

Such incidents of violence or vandalism target Palestinians or Israeli security forces and are asserted to be payback for actions against the settlement enterprise.

 

Of the students who identified as right-wing, 48% condoned or said they understood the rationale behind such attacks.

 

The support for price tag attacks seem to run contrary to the widespread condemnation for the activity that has been voiced by senior Israeli officials from across the political spectrum.

 

The survey also examined teens’ willingness to express their political opinions, with an overwhelming 84% noting they avoid airing their views online. Among those who did express themselves, a third reported being harassed for their beliefs on the net.

 

The results were presented at a confab (Hebrew) on the state of education in Israel on Tuesday, featuring President Reuven Rivlin among other speakers. Co-sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute and the Open University, the conference examined public education trends and changing demographics in the Jewish state.

 

The poll was conducted by the Rafi Smith Institute. A margin of error was not provided.

 

“At a time when we are witnessing increased instances of intolerance, racism, discrimination and violence, education must play a key role in shaping Israeli society as democratic, open and enlightened,” said Professor Kobi Metzer, the president of the Open University.

 

“[It’s an equality] that should be conferred upon members of various groups regardless of their label or status,” Metzer said.

 

http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-israeli-teens-lean-right-many-support-price-tag/

 

 

 

Herzog: Time for Israel to treat Jewish terrorists like their Islamist brothers

In Facebook post, opposition leader calls to outlaw Israeli extremists, demolish their homes and put them in administrative detention

 

Without mentioning the firebomb attack on a Palestinian home on Friday that left 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha dead and his family fighting for their lives, Herzog wrote in an impassioned post on Facebook that, “After we have condemned and condemned again, we cannot — again – return to daily events as though nothing happened.”

 

It is time for action, he wrote, “That meets the threat to Israel’s security posed by Jewish terrorists, who endanger us exactly like their brothers – Islamist terrorists.”

 

Herzog took aim at the political and security echelons, which he accused of ineffectual measures and of turning a blind eye to Jewish extremists. “If I were prime minister, I would instruct the Shin Bet [domestic security service] to deal with Jewish terrorism like Islamist terrorism,” he wrote. “With determination and not with a wink.”

 

He urged the defense establishment to utilize “all the tools at our disposal in the battle against Islamist terrorism,” calling for the use of administrative detentions and the outlaw of certain organizations.

 

 

Citing radical right-wing group Lehava, as well as “the Marzels” — a reference to far-right extremist and failed Knesset candidate Baruch Marzel, and “La Familia” — Beitar Jerusalem’s cabal of racist fans, Herzog said he “would class them as terrorist organizations. And even consider demolishing the homes of these terrorists and their families. Everything that is used to strike against Islamist terrorism should be used here too.”

 

The opposition leader also demanded that the media stop whitewashing such attacks and call “this by its true name. It is not a revenge attack, nor is it a price tag. It is terrorism. Period. And they are terrorists. Period. Jews and Islamists who endanger the security of Israel.”

 

http://www.timesofisrael.com/herzog-time-to-treat-jewish-terrorists-like-their-islamist-brothers/

 

[lego 44,165]

Kahane's grandson arrested in crackdown on ultranationalists after deadly arson attack

"arson attack" ?

 

 

Most wanted Jewish terror suspect arrested by Shin Bet

Meir Ettinger, a grandson of Meir Kahane, denies existence of a Jewish terror underground, but calls for fighting the 'idol worship' of the existence of mosques and churches in Israel.

 

The Shin Bet arrested on Monday right-wing activist Meir Ettinger, who tops the Shin Bet security service’s list of most-wanted Jewish terror suspects.

 

According to intelligence, the 24 year old grandson the late right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane escalated his activity in 2014 and started planning a series of attacks against Palestinians. These were meant to stir up unrest among the Palestinians and thus bring about the overthrow of the Israeli government.

 

According to the Shin Bet, Ettinger was arrested with the aid of the special police force in the Judea and Samaria District and has been taken for interrogation for his suspected role in an extremist Jewish group.

 

Last year the Shin Bet sought to place Ettinger under administrative detention, but State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan denied the request. Instead, a restraining order was issued that prohibited him from being in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and he moved to Safed.

 

Following the deadly arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma, which killed an infant and wounded three of his family members, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon asked the Shin Bet to place several right-wing activists under administrative detention, including Ettinger.

 

Though Ettinger is currently under arrest, should he refuse to cooperate with his interrogators he could face administrative detention, pending the approval of a district court judge.

 

Last week, the Shin Bet claimed that Ettinger heads an underground group that in June torched the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. Ettinger denied the accusation, saying in a post from Sunday on his regular blog on the Hebrew-language Kol Yehudi news website, that there is no Jewish terror underground.

 

However, he did assert that there are “lots and lots of Jews, many more than one might think, whose value system is very different than that of the High Court of Justice or the Shin Bet, and the laws that bind them are not the laws of the state ... but rather laws that are much more eternal.”

 

In a blog post from Friday, Ettinger wrote that he does not lead the organization that was behind the church arson, and the Shin Bet’s claim that he does reflects the intelligence agency’s own crisis.

 

“Whoever made up this lie knows better than anyone else that his remarks were lies, and the Shin Bet understands that all of the activities they are looking into aren’t stemming from some kind of ‘organization’ but rather just happening on the ground, fueled by the most simple, popular insights that motivated people to feel that they need to take action, that kind of evil spirit that emanates from the establishment,” Ettinger wrote.

 

Continuing, he wrote: “The truth must be told. There is no terror organization, but there are many, many Jews, many more than one might think, whose value systems are very different than those of the Supreme Court or the Shin Bet, and are not bound the ignorant laws of the state, but rather by laws much more eternal, from the source of the living water.”

 

In his post, Ettinger explained the rationale behind targeting Christian holy sites. He wrote about the protest against the demolition of buildings in Jewish settlements, saying it was insufficient: “The important struggle over the Land of Israel must be joined with another, real struggle against the government’s sin of allowing idol worship to happen here, particularly mosques and churches, in the Land of Israel, where the sound of church bells interferes with the sound of Torah and prayers,” wrote Ettinger, adding, “the State of Israel added insult to injury by detaining two Jews suspected of torching the church.”

 

“[The Jewish principle of] mutual responsibility obligates all to pitch in, and not to forget the suspects who are being held for all of us. We must amplify the struggle against the desecration the state allows by funding and aiding idol worship in the Holy Land,” Ettinger wrote.

 

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.669372

 

[lego 44,165]

@Luiz could you update OP and the title? 

 

Father of Palestinian baby killed in West Bank terror attack dies from wounds

 

Saad Dawabsheh sustained burns to 80 percent of his body in vicious attack by suspected Jewish extremists

Saad Dawabsheh, the father of 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh, who was burned to death in an arson attack by suspected Jewish extremists on the family's home in the West Bank village of Duma, has died from his wounds sustained in the attack, his brother told Al Jazeera Saturday morning.

 

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official in the north of the West Bank which includes the village of Duma where Dawabsheh lived with his family, said Palestinian and Israeli authorities were trying to make arrangements to transfer his body for a funeral.

A spokeswoman for Soroka hospital in Israel where Dawabsheh, who sustained burns on 80 percent of his body had been receiving treatment confirmed his death.

Dawabsheh, his wife Riham and their four-year-old son Ahmad were critically injured in the attack and his wife and son remain in critical condition at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv.

Ahmad Dawabsheh has meanwhile opened his eyes and begun to interact with his surroundings, the Israeli Israel Hayom paper reported.

 

Palestinian security officials said, four suspected Jewish settlers set fire to the family's house in Duma and scrawled graffiti on a wall before fleeing to a neighboring settlement.

The masked assailants reportedly hurled Molotov cocktails through the windows, which were left open because of the summer heat.

The attack caused was strongly condemned by most Israelis, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing to harshly deal with the perpetrators of the attack.

“I am shocked by this terrible criminal act,” he said.“This is a terror attack. Israel deals harshly with terrorism, no matter who the perpetrators are,” he said.

Netanyahu said he had instructed the security forces to use all the means at its disposal to pursue the killers and bring them to justice.

“The government is united in its opposition to terrible heinous acts, such as this one,” he said.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon also labelled the attack an "act of terrorism."

"The fire and the murder of the Palestinian toddler is an act of terrorism," Yaalon said in a statement, after the attack in the village of Doma, near Nablus.

"We will not allow terrorists to take the lives of Palestinians."

Both Netanyahu and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin visited the Israeli hospital where the family were fighting for their lives, while Israel's chief rabbi, David Lau, said "all Jews condemn this despicable murder".

But the Palestine Liberation Organization said it held his government "fully responsible".

The death of 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsheh was "a direct consequence of decades of impunity given by the Israeli government to settler terrorism", the PLO said.

Mahmud Abbas said he had ordered his foreign minister to file a complaint at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

"We want true justice, but I doubt that Israel will provide that," he said of the attack in Duma, near the northern city of Nablus.

The European Union called on Israel to show "zero tolerance" for settler violence, while Jordan, the only Arab state apart from Egypt to have signed a peace accord with Israel, strongly condemned the attack.

"This ugly crime could have been avoided if the Israeli government had not ignored the rights of the Palestinian people and turned its back on peace," government spokesman Mohammed Momani said.

And UN chief Ban Ki-moon condemned the murder while calling on both sides to "take bold steps to return to the path of peace".

 

http://www.i24news.tv/en/mobile#content/81324

 

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.668967