Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16) told left-wing Israeli media Haaretz that he will be boycotting Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to a joint session of Congress next week. He offered “I’ve been very outspoken regarding the treatment of Palestinians. The United States is important in ensuring accountability and uplifting the human rights of Palestinians.”
It is a remarkable statement in light of Palestinian polls showing the prevailing attitude pushing for violence rather than peace.
In June 2023, Palestinians said the two most positive Palestinian events since the “Nakba,” the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 were the creation of the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the first and second Intifadas. A majority support another intifada and 57% support or strongly support killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel.
Not only is Bowman ignoring Palestinian thirst for Jewish blood, he is choosing to boycott a left-wing leader Israeli leader, who speaks to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas frequently. Such action sets back the cause of peace and empowers the Islamic Republic of Iran.
ACTION ITEM
EMAIL REP. BOWMAN “Israeli President Isaac Herzog is in favor of peace and dialogue with Palestinians. A decision to boycott him is not just an insult to the Jewish State and to a future of peace with Palestinians but is a vote to empower the dangerous genocidal regime in Iran.”
There has been an uptick in the number of homicides happening in Israel recently, and it deserves a detailed review which the mainstream media is too lazy to examine and too biased to report clearly.
In 2021, the last year for which homicide information is available by the World Bank, Israel’s homicide rate was 1.94 per 100,000, which increased from 1.42 in 2020, a 36% jump. The 1.42 in 2020 figure placed it amongst its neighbors’ average of 1.39 in Turkey, Lebanon, Cyprus and Jordan (no data was available for Lebanon in 2021).
Israel’s jump in 2021 to 1.94 homicides per 100,000 was similar to the murder rate in Montenegro (2.39), Albania (2.31), Armenia (2.18), Canada (2.06), Estonia (1.96), Morocco (1.93), Azerbaijan (1.91), Ghana (1.83) and Algeria (1.57). The United States homicide rate in 2021 was 6.80 per 100,000, or 3.5 times as much as Israel.
The rise in the murder rate shows particular trends.
Breakdown By Sex
The murder rate of males jumped to 3.3 per 100,000 in 2021 from 2.3 the prior year, while the murder rate for women jumped to 0.6 from 0.5 per 100,000, according to the World Bank.
The Israel Observatory on Femicide noted the erratic nature of the data: 21 women murdered in 2020, 16 in 2021 and then 24 in 2022, a 50% jump. The average age of the female victim jumped to 45.6 years old in 2021 due to a spike in matricide cases, where people killed their mothers.
Breakdown By Ethnicity
For 2021, the murdered women were 44% Jewish, 31% Israeli Arab and 19% Druze. In almost every case, the murderer had the same ethnic background as the victim. As in 2021, half of the women murdered in 2022 were Arab and killed by Arabs, mostly family members or former partners.
Overall, there were 126 Arabs murdered in 2021 (110 males and 16 females), almost all killed by fellow Arabs. While various organizations track violence in the Israeli Arab sector Abraham Initiatives, the data isn’t as available for Israeli Jews. Using the 1.94 homicides per 100,000 in an Israeli population of 9.364 million in 2021 would imply a total homicide figure of 182, of which 56 were Jewish. This assumes that the 17 Israelis killed by Arab terrorism in 2021 are not included in the homicide statistics.
While data from different sources are somewhat inconsistent, there is a sharp pattern.
The difference in the rate of murderers between Jews and Arabs is astounding if one considers that Jews make up 76% of the population and Arabs account for 21%. It means that an average Israeli Arab is 8.1x more likely to commit a murder than an Israeli Jew.
The 0.79 homicides per 100,000 amongst Israeli Jews is similar to the homicide rate in Greece (0.85), Germany (0.83), Croatia (0.81), Denmark (0.80), Portugal (0.80), Hungary (0.77), Australia (0.74) and Austria (0.73).
The homicide rate in Israel has taken a worrying trend upwards since 2021, now approaching the rate of Turkey when it used to be closer to Cyprus in 2015. The jump has principally come from Israeli Arabs killing other Arabs in gang violence amongst male victims, and “honor killings” and matricide among female victims. At the same time, the homicide rate of Israeli Jews remains much closer to those in Western Europe.
On July 2, 2023, the Israeli government approved the establishment of a new town in northern Israel. Located near the Sea of Galilee and Mount Arbel, the town is to be called “Ramat Arbel”, designed to house roughly 500 families.
Mount Arbel overlooking the top of the Sea of Galilee
The popular political-terrorist group Hamas was apoplectic.
Its spokesperson said that Israel’s plan to “establish a colonial Jewish settlement in occupied Galilee represented a serious escalation in the occupation’s policy of Judaization and colonial settlement.” It added that Israel “is waging an open war against the Palestinian existence” and seeks to “advance the agenda of complete displacement, on which Zionism was founded.”
The root cause of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is Arab refusal to accept Jews living ANYWHERE between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River
The terrorist group Hamas is very popular among Palestinian Arabs, and has 58% of the seats in the current Palestinian parliament. According to a June 2023 poll, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would win the presidency with 56% of the vote, trouncing the current President Mahmoud Abbas, who would net only 33% of the vote.
Palestinians are not upset about Jews living east of the 1949 Armistice lines (E49/ “West Bank”), they are livid that Jews live anywhere in Israel.
That is the plain truth and root cause of the conflict.
ACTION ITEMS
CONTACT Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) “The root cause of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is Arab refusal to accept Jews living ANYWHERE between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The US must therefore remain steadfast in: supporting Israel; ensuring that UNRWA textbooks include the long history and sanctity of the land for Jews, while teaching coexistence; denying the Palestinian Authority any funding while it continues its “martyr payments” and incitement to violence; and backing Israel’s and Egypt’s ongoing blockade of Gaza until Hamas formally accepts Israel’s existence.”
Other member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
The New York Times wrote an article about deaths by drowning on July 8, 2023. It made sure to follow its particular progressive editorial bent while quoting statistics from the Center for Disease Control.
The Times wrote that CDC research “shows that Black children between ages 5 and 9 are 2.6 times more likely to drown in swimming pools than white children, and those between ages 10 and 14 are 3.6 times more likely to drown. Disparities are also present in most age groups for Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Native American and Alaska Native children.” Those CDC facts fit well within the Times orientation of a racially discriminatory society that hurts minorities.
Yet the Times failed to quote another statistics from the CDC that “Nearly 80% of people who die from drowning are male,” meaning males are four times more likely to drown than females.
Picture from CDC website about drownings
We should all want to prevent everyone from drowning. That the NY Times should pen an article to exclude the disproportionate number of male drownings highlights a deeply ingrained and noxious bias that has taken over the paper.
Boat packed with as many as 750 fleeing migrants capsizes off Greece in June 2023
Since 2014, the United Nations International Organization of Migrants estimates that 56,912 migrants and refugees are dead or missing. This year is set to be perhaps the deadliest on record, as thousands of people flee their homes due to war or poverty.
The United Nations and media spend a scant moment mourning these poor souls. Men, women and children who reluctantly ran to far-away lands in pursuit of peace were quickly forgotten. No actions are taken to prevent the frequent tragedies.
The United Nations has other priorities:
For synthetic “refugees” over real refugees; and
For people who seek to murder over defenseless souls
The UN has dressed up Palestinian Arabs who have been living in the same land for generations, as a special class of “UNRWA Refugees”. It pardons their jihadi violence against Israeli Jews as a matter of routine and concocted resolutions.
The media closes its eyes and minds to the facts that Palestinian Arabs are not refugees who do not deserve a special UN agency accompanied by a promise of invading a UN member state. Politicians suspend belief that they favor a two state solution while simultaneously advocating that the Jewish State shouldn’t be Jewish and forced to take in millions of Arabs from a few miles away.
The UN held a week-long conference on counterterrorism in June, and subsequently informed Israel that only the rest of the world can combat the global scourge. Israel must accept jihadi violence as penance for its existence.
The UN Security Council is now scheduled to meet to invert reality in discussing Israel’s successful raid to eliminate terrorists in Jenin but will not convene to dismantle UNRWA camps in Gaza and the West Bank which serve as the incubators for Muslim extremists.
It is terribly sad that politicians, the United Nations and media do not attend to peaceful people in actual dire need. It is a horrific state of reality, that the world supports jihadi extremists living next to Israel in their quest to kill Jews and the only Jewish State.
Once again Israel is being forced to combat terrorists who have committed and plan to commit murderous attacks on civilians. Once more, the locus for the attacks is coming from United Nations’ “refugee” camps. Once again, the majority of the terrorists are Arabs whom the UN has told have rights to move into grandparents’ homes in Israel.
UNRWA Wards By The Numbers
For the year ending December 2021, according to UNRWA, there were 6,539,844 Palestinian wards who accept services from the agency, of which 5,807,653 (89%) were “refugees” and another 732,191 (11%) were other people whom the UN thought deserved particular support. Of the 6.5m, 863,708 (13.2%) are above age 60, suggesting perhaps only 2.6% of the total, or 175,000 are actual refugees from 1948 who lost homes a few miles away in Israel, after they launched a war to destroy the Jewish state.
The total number of UNRWA Refugees jumped by about 2.5% by year end 2022 to 6.7 million, while the number of actual refugees continues to decline. The total for West Bank wards was around 1.12 million (16.7%) and in Gaza it was 1.76 million (26.3%), which means that around 43% of all UNRWA wards already live in the area of 1948 Palestine, just a few miles from where ancestors had lived.
The majority of UNRWA wards live in Jordan, about 2.55 million (38% of the total wards), and have Jordanian citizenship. Jordan had been part of the original Palestine Mandate in 1922, and then attacked Israel in 1948 and illegally annexed the eastern portion of Israel which became known as the “West Bank” in 1950. After expelling all Jews from the region, Jordan granted all non-Jews in the area citizenship in 1954. Jordan abandoned its claim on the “West Bank” in 1988, and began pulling its citizenship from Arabs in the region.
The balance of UNRWA wards live in Lebanon (557,300) and Syria (674,500).
UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
UNRWA Camps in the West Bank
Roughly 25% of UNRWA’s West Bank wards live in official UNRWA “camps”. There are 19 camps currently including:
The Jenin Camp was established in 1953 and houses about 23,000 people at the western end of Jenin in the northern West Bank. It encompasses about 0.42 km which yields a population density of roughly 33,333 per sq km. For comparison, Manhattan’s population density is about 28,000 per sq km.
UNRWA’s Jenin Terrorists
UNRWA’s camp in Jenin has long served as the launching point for terrorists as well as a safe haven for murderers.
2002 Massacre
On March 27, 2002, roughly 250 people sat down for a festive holiday seder meal for Passover in the Park Hotel in Netanya along the Mediterranean Sea. A 25-year old member of Hamas from the nearby West Bank city of Tulkarm walked into the hotel and blew himself up, killing 30 and injuring 140. Hamas praised the attack and said Israelis “have to expect those attacks from everywhere, from every Palestinian group.” The Palestinian Authority named a soccer tournament after the terrorist the next year.
In response to the attack, part of a wave of Palestinian terrorism that killed 135 Israeli civilians in that month, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield a few days later. From April 1-11, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered the Jenin Camp which was home base of many of the killers. Rather than bomb the area from the air which might have resulted in the injury of Arab civilians, the IDF deployed infantry into the narrow streets. Palestinian militants set boobytraps which killed and maimed over a dozens soldiers, so the IDF brought in armored bulldozers to clear them out. The militants surrendered on April 11 and the IDF cleared out of the area the following week, but not before losing 23 soldiers.
Center of Jenin Camp in April 2002, cleared of wanted militants, land mines and boobytraps
June and July, 2023 IDF Incursions for Jenin Camp Terrorists
The Jenin Camp has long been a stronghold of the political-terrorist group Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In September 2021, a new group called the Jenin Brigades was formed, soon accompanied by the Lion’s Den. The terrorists groups committed in excess of 50 attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, many attacks staged under the umbrella of UNRWA.
On June 19, the IDF came to arrest two UNRWA ward terrorists. As the Jenin Brigades open fire on the IDF, the Israelis responded with live fire. Eight Palestinian gunmen were killed, most of them confirmed terrorists. UNRWA confirmed that the majority were wards under its care.
As the IDF left the camp, the terrorists detonated a roadside bomb under an Israeli armored vehicle, wounding eight soldiers. Israel deployed a gunship helicopter to help rescue the soldiers from the hornet’s nest.
After yet additional terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, Israel launched another incursion into the camp on July 3rd. The 48 hour operation once again focused on a small section of the UNRWA camp, where the IDF removed Palestinian terrorists, weapons and weapon-making factories.
UNRWA Ward Terrorists
The high percentage of UNRWA wards who are terrorists goes to the heart of the conflict: it is not about “occupation” or lack of sovereignty, as these people are in Palestine and under Palestinian rule. These terrorists have been told by the United Nations that they are entitled to move into homes where grandparents used to live inside of Israel. They are frustrated by the failure to get their “right of return” which the global body has promised.
Entrance to UNRWA refugee camp as a keyhole with a key on top, demonstrating that the pathway to homes inside Israel is via UNRWA.
The United Nations has incubated a destructive cult mentality which is leading to terrorism and death. It is well past time to shut UNRWA, and the first camps to be shuttered are those under Palestinian rule, the launching pads in Gaza and the West Bank.
The brewing anger of Israeli Jews living east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49 / “West Bank”) started in May of 2021 principally from two events: a Palestinian-American terrorist shooting three people and killing one, and the Israeli government failing to enforce its own laws.
Palestinian-American Muntasir Shalabi, age 44, did a drive buy shooting in E49 and killed a teenager and injured two other 19-year old boys on May 2, 2021. He was sheltered by Palestinians for a few days but was ultimately captured and sentenced to life in prison. His home, in the wealthy West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, was demolished in June despite American protests.
The fact that a well-off American citizen would commit such an outrageous act of terrorism in shooting three unarmed young men standing on a road, undermined any narrative that terrorism is a matter of poverty and opportunity as opposed to an evil ideology. Israelis also saw that the new American Biden administration was going to be much more supportive of Palestinians than the Trump administration had been over the prior four years.
Just a week after the terrorist attack, the Israeli government decided to not enforce its own laws and allowed Palestinian Arab squatters to remain in homes in Sheikh Jarrah and continue to not pay their Jewish landlords any rent. The political-terrorist group Hamas launched missiles from Gaza over the threat of the squatters’ evictions, and West Bank Arab support for killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel immediately began to climb.
The message that violence trumps Israeli laws was internalized by both Palestinians and Israelis.
While Gazans always favor killing Israeli Jews, West Bank Arab support started to climb in May 2021 and escalated much further in the fall of 2022.
While West Bank Arabs had always committed terrorist attacks, the Israeli Jews in the area did little in terms of revenge.
Consider the heinous Arab murders of the Fogel family in 2011, in which the parents and three children were stabbed to death – including an infant. The Jewish residents mourned the event but did not commit revenge attacks.
That slowly started to change with young Jews living in hilltop settlements committing “price tag” attacks in which small groups would attack Palestinian Arabs in proportion to those whom Arabs had previously attacked. The extremists would sometimes also attack Israeli soldiers for failing to protect the Jewish communities in E49.
The uptick in vigilante attacks started in 2021 and 2022, as new Palestinian terrorist groups emerged in E49. In September 2021, the Jenin Brigades was formed, the Nablus Brigades in May 2022, and the Lions’ Den in August 2022. These West Bank terrorist groups led a series of mass casualty attacks between March 22 and May 5, 2022 which spread from major Israeli cities of Be’er Sheva, Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv to a smaller border town of Elad and the E49 city of Ariel. Jews on both sides of the 1949 Armistice Line did not feel safe, which helped bring down Naftali Bennett’s short stint as prime minister in June.
Things would get worse between August and October, as the Lions’ Den became a force of terror, and Israeli forces went on the offensive to mitigate the mayhem. E49 Jews stepped up their activity, taking matters in their own hands as well.
The Lions’ Den became very popular in the West Bank and polls showed that Palestinians did not want the Palestinian Authority to rein in the group. In his September 2022 address to the United Nations, PA President Mahmoud Abbas essentially said that the Oslo Accords were dead (21:30) and was abandoning security coordination with Israel. At the end of his talk (45:00), Abbas discussed the “hero martyr Nasser Abu Hamid,” heaping praise on the terrorist convicted of killing seven people, who was the founder of the West Bank terrorist group Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
These events helped usher Benjamin Netanyahu back to being Prime Minister with a more right-wing coalition in December. Yet despite the new right-wing government, Arab violence against Jews continued to increase and become more lethal, even as the United Nations looked away and vilified “Settler violence.”
Palestinian terrorist attacks were increasingly fatal in 2023.
The Israeli Jews living in E49 have become exasperated and are starting to engage in massive revenge attacks.
In February 2023, after Palestinian Arabs shot and killed two Jewish men who were driving in their car, hundreds of settlers burned dozens of cars and homes in Nablus. Netanyahu urged them to calm down, that “when blood is boiling and the spirit is hot, don’t take the law into your hands.”
In June 2023, the dynamic repeated after Palestinian terrorists killed four Jews in a restaurant and gas station. Hundreds of settlers went to Turmus Ayya – the hometown of the May 2021 terrorist – and burned dozens of cars and homes.
To be a Jew in the West Bank is to be a target, of both Arab violence and UN condemnation for simply living. The poisonous legacy of the Arab intifadas has infected the mindset of settlers, as they see an Israeli government unable to stop the murders of innocent Jews driving in cars, eating in restaurants, standing on a road or sleeping in their beds. As the provocations become incessant, the attacks of E49 Jews may naturally morph from retaliatory in nature to constant.
Israel reacted to the First Palestinian Intifada of 1987 by helping create Palestinian political institutions as part of the Oslo Accords. It reacted to the poorly named “Second Intifada” / Palestinian Pogroms of 2000-2004 which were directed by Palestinian leadership, by erecting a security barrier near the 1949 Armistice Line with Transjordan.
This uprising is being launched by nearly half a million Jews living in E49/West Bank. It remains to be seen if their actions will remain restricted to reactive attacks, and what actions the Israeli government and PA will be.
One of the sessions at the United Nations Conference on Counter-Terrorism in June 2023 was called “Building Effective and Resilient Member States’ Institutions in the Evolving Global Terrorism Landscape.” One of the speakers, Colin Smith from the United Kingdom, spoke (44:35) of the changing landscape of terrorism over the past twenty years and covered:
a focus on al Qaeda 20 years ago versus local terrorist groups today
a secretive counter-terrorism community vs. an open forum where countries share information and resources
immature counter-terrorism agencies vs. more sophisticated organizations
centers of terrorism vs. geographically diffuse operations now
Smith said “Since 2018, there’ve been nine successful terrorist attacks in the UK and one failed attack but none of them were directed from overseas. They were all self-initiated terrorists. So an individual or perhaps a small group getting together being radicalized by what they saw online or what they heard and turning to a terrorist attack in perhaps a very short of time, perhaps radicalizing in weeks, and not in months or years; perhaps days or weeks. Very low sophistication attacks using knives and cars. So since 2018, there have nine such attacks killing six people and injuring 23 in the UK but we’ve had no externally-directed attacks. In fact, the last time there was an externally successful attack in the UK was back in 2005.”
It begs the question as to the nature of home-grown terrorism in the UK since 2005.
Colin Smith of the United Kingdom talking at the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in June 2023
A quick review of some of the attacks:
On May 22, 2013, two Muslim men killed and hacked to death a British soldier stating that they did so “because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers. And this British soldier is one…. By Allah, we swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.“
Quite a heavy toll between 2005 and 2018, and certainly more violent than only “using knives and cars.”
Smith’s UN comments were seemingly dismissive of the news when he said that the attackers were “radicalized by what they saw online or what they heard,” making it sound like the attackers were being fed disinformation and preyed upon. However, it was a well known and reported fact that the United Kingdom participated in fighting Al Qaeda and ISIL. The British Muslims who committed the terrorist attacks simply showed a greater love for co-religionists than for their fellow citizens whom they saw as co-conspirators killing Muslims.
Smith highlighted that the UK published a counter-terrorism document called CONTEST in 2018. Importantly for the UN conference, he spoke of the broad coordination happening amongst different agencies and the public sector to combat terrorism holistically, as called for in the report.
Yet he avoided discussing that between 2013 and the 2018 counterterrorism report, British police “foiled 25 Islamist plots since June 2013, and four extreme right wing terror plots in the past year alone…. The war in Syria, which was in its infancy when the last Strategy was published, has created both a haven and a training ground for British and foreign terrorists. UK citizens have been targeted in attacks overseas, for example in Sousse in 2015,” when 30 British tourists were killed in Tunisia.
The CONTEST publication was explicit about the serious threats facing the UK: “Daesh’s ability to direct, enable and inspire attacks still represents the most significant global terrorist threat, including to the UK and our people and interests overseas. Daesh’s methods are already being copied by new and established terror groups. Using pernicious, divisive messaging and amplifying perceived grievances, Daesh and Al Qa’ida exploit the internet to promote warped alternative narratives, urging extremists within our own communities to subvert our way of life through simple, brutal violence.”
In the setting of the United Nations panel, Smith avoided mentioning Islamic extremism, despite being the root cause of the British developing its comprehensive counterterrorism strategy. He alluded to disinformation, rather than point out that terrorists had grievances about actual facts. He did not discuss the end of British troops fighting in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan (or at least the media covering such events) as cause for the pause in jihadists killing British citizens in recent years.
Significantly, Smith also did not talk about the United Kingdom’s refusal to repatriate perhaps as many as 400 British citizens back to its shores after fighting alongside terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.
CONTEST was explicit, writing “Daesh’s initial state-building narrative persuaded thousands of people, including women and families, to travel to Syria from around the world, including from Europe and North Africa. This includes around 900 people of national security concern from the UK. Of these, approximately 20% have been killed while overseas, and around 40% have returned to the UK. The majority of those who have returned did so in the earlier stages of the conflict, and were investigated on their return. Only a very small number of travellers have returned in the last two years, and most of those have been women with young children.” That leaves 40% of the 900, or about 350 Britons still abroad as of 2018.
In regards to children still overseas, as of April 2023, as many as “60 British children are believed to be detained in al-Hol and Roj, two sprawling detention camps in northeast Syria primarily holding family members of Islamic State (ISIS) suspects” according to Human Rights Watch. Those children are among 37,000 foreign nationals held in the camps who are being refused re-entry into their home countries, many of whom have been stripped of their citizenship.
The UK published its goals of reintegrating returnees from the conflict in CONTEST, noting that its Desistance and Disengagement Programme (DDP) was “to reduce the risk from terrorism through rehabilitation and reintegration… will aim to more than double its current capacity to accommodate up to 230 individuals…. Through the DDP, we provide a range of intensive tailored interventions and practical support, designed to tackle the drivers of radicalisation around universal needs for identity, self-esteem, meaning and purpose; as well as to address personal grievances that the extremist narrative has exacerbated.” It was unclear whether addressing the terrorist’s grievances meant discussing why the UK fought ISIL or changing policy and having the UK abandon the fight.
Further, if there were still as many as 60 British children held in detention camps in Syria as of April 2023, it stands to reason that the UK has left almost all of the 350 adults in the camps as well, repatriating no one.
CONTEST also spoke of the government’s intention of pursuing would-be terrorists “including covert human intelligence sources, surveillance assets and the lawful intercept of communications. In addition to these capabilities, we also use a wide range of tools to constrain the ability of terrorists to act, for example working to proscribe organisations, freeze and seize their financial assets, and break up networks and associations in prison.” Even before the effort was launched, the report noted the government had contained “approximately 700 prisoners… who have been identified as engaged in terrorism or extremism, or about whom there are extremism concerns.”
Incarcerating would-be terrorists was also excluded from the panel discussion at the United Nations.
In summary, the UN forum was devoid of mentioning Islamic extremism, keeping terrorist in prisons at home and abroad, and blamed disinformation on the Internet for spawning attacks rather than actual grievances from a warped ideology.
It also did not mention acceding to terrorists’ demands which the United Kingdom may have already done, such as abandoning the fight on Islamic terror, whether ISIL, Taliban, al Shabab and Boko Haram, and resuscitating terrorist groups like Hamas.
The United Nations panelists on counter-terrorism did not speak openly, honestly or comprehensively about various approaches countries have implemented to tackle the global scourge and opted instead to parrot politically correct non-controversial narratives. Perhaps honest dialogues exist in private but the public spectacle of the UN is a ghostly version of reality.
The United Nations met this week to discuss counter-terrorism. One of the discussions focused on a left-wing term-of-art called “masculinities” and its need to be studied and addressed in the field of terrorism. Specifically, a 90-minute discussion called “Bridging the gap: Connecting research, policy and practice on masculinities to more effectively counter terrorism and prevent and counter violent extremism” urged the UN and members states to tackle the issue of “toxic masculinity” and how it is used to draw recruits to terrorism.
At 1:18:15 of the talk, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini of the International Civil Society Action Network spoke via Zoom. She described the work she did on behalf of the UN to explore the role that “toxic masculinity” played in terrorism in ten countries. It was an interesting question to ask a women who runs a women’s peace organization, as she focused her work on “what does it mean to be a man? Whether in Liberia, Nigeria, Palestine, Jamaica, Yemen, Syria, Iraq.”
Sanam Naraghi Anderlini
Anderlini contended that four themes emerged in each country as critical elements for male self-definition and worth, the 4 “Ps”: Provide, Protect, Prestige and Procreation. She argued that men living in societies where they failed in their “manly” roles to provide for the family monetarily, to protect them, to have a position of prestige or power, or to procreate and have progeny, were easy prey for radical actors. People like radical jihadis tap into the male aggrieved status and advance the idea that their religion is greater than all others and the pathway to power and prestige is to protect their families and communities via violence.
In regards to Palestinian Arabs, the fourth “p”, to “provide”, is addressed by the Palestinian Authority’s “martyr payments” in their infamous pay-to-slay program.
It’s a peculiar lens to examine the Palestinian Arab-Israeli Conflict, as not being about two people fighting a century-old civil war over a small stretch of land, but of emasculated Arabs being played by their leaders.
And by others.
Anderlini added that “the Islamists, the jihadi movements, that are around didn’t appear out of nowhere. They’ve been funded since the 1990s by UN member states like Saudi Arabia or Wahabi movements that come out of our member states…. These boys and these young men aren’t born violent. They are being exploited by and for powerful elites.”
If a key feature of Jihadi terrorism is emasculated Muslims being preyed upon by powerful leaders, then cutting off the funding and providing young Muslim men with better role models is seemingly a key pathway to stopping the systemic violence.
ACTION ITEM
EMAIL THE WHITE HOUSE “It is time to cut off funding to countries that fund violent extremism such as the Palestinian Authority, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. The Middle East is in terrible need of better role models to promote peace and coexistence.”
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
There have been constants as well as changes in the century-long assaults by Palestinian Arabs against Jews in the holy land, yet the number of terrorist attacks goes up and down. It begs the question as to the reasons.
Latest Wave 2021 To Present
After years of relative calm between 2016 and 2020, Arab terrorism slaughtering Jews began to rise in 2021 and has not slowed down. The number of murdered Jews is on pace to surpass the number of murdered in the Gaza War of 2014.
There are a few reasons for the higher total: more multi-person deaths and a greater number of deaths by guns.
The years 2016 and 2017 saw two and four multi-person fatality incidents from terrorism, respectively. The totals then dropped for several years, with a single multiple person killing in 2018, when a Palestinian terrorist ran over two soldiers with a car. In 2019 and 2020 there weren’t any multi-person deaths. In 2021 there were two, each from rocket attacks from Gaza. That changed dramatically in 2022 when there seven, with five in the first half of 2023.
As the chart above shows, Palestinians have used guns, knives and cars for many years, while rockets and bombs have been used more recently in multi-victim attacks. Many more Arabs own guns than historically, both in Israel and in the West Bank. It has led to a huge spike in Arab-Arab violence in Israel, as well as capabilities for Palestinian Arabs to kill many people. Hundreds of guns were smuggled into the region by a Jordanian diplomat.
While guns contributed to the higher death toll, it doesn’t address the motivation behind Palestinians committing more attacks.
Palestinian Sentiments
Palestinians have polled themselves every quarter since 2000. Many sentiments have remained constant about Jews and Palestinian leadership, especially for Gazans. However, the attitudes of West Bank Palestinians have changed since 2020.
Poll findings saw two significant shifts of West Bank Palestinian Arabs’ attitudes in the June 2021 poll and the polls of December 2022 and March 2023; break-out changes which did not appear during the relatively quiet prior years.
While the majority of Palestinian have consistently wanted PA President Mahmoud Abbas to resign, the June 2021 poll showed a 10% jump of those in favor. It coincided with a ten percentage jump in West Bank Arabs who believe that the Palestinian Authority has become a burden on Palestinians.
In December 2022 the number of West Bank Arabs who said they feel safe dropped below 50% for the first time. In the March 2023 poll, the West Bankers who felt that the PA was a burden jumped another 10%, as did the number of people saying they wanted to dissolve the PA, reaching 49% for the first time.
These inflection points are also seen regarding West Bank Arabs’ attitudes about Israel.
From the March 2021 poll to the June 2021 poll, West Bank Palestinians desire to murder Israeli civilians inside of Israel jumped from 18% to 33%, while those favoring another multi-year pogrom called an “intifada” jumped from 29% to 51%. Those attitudes held constant or slightly declined until jumping again in December 2022 and March 2023. In March 2023, 57% of West Bank Arabs said they were in favor of terrorism inside of Israel and 51% support a new intifada.
A similar shift in attitude happened regarding West Bank Arabs support of a two-state solution, with those opposed jumping to 61% in June 2021 from 51% three months earlier. In March 2023, those opposed to two-states crossed 70% for the first time.
Palestinians in the West Bank have moved away from supporting the Palestinian Authority and a peaceful resolution to the conflict to seeking a war with Israel, with inflection points happening in May 2021 and the fall of 2022.
The Rapture of Violent Jihad, May 2021
The various charts show how Palestinians used few rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza during the “lull” between 2016 and 2020. It is not as though they didn’t have much to complain about under the pro-Israel policies of U.S. President Donald Trump. Those initiatives included:
First sitting US president to visit Jerusalem’s Western Wall (5/17)
Recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (12/17)
Signed Taylor Force Law banning funds to Palestinians if paid for terror (3/18)
Moved US embassy to Jerusalem (5/18)
Pulled US out of United Nations’ Human Rights Council due to obsession with Israel (6/18)
Pushed for major reforms at UNRWA (8/18)
Recognized Israeli sovereignty on Golan Heights (3/19)
Launched Israel-Palestinian Peace Initiatives (6/19 and 1/20)
Rejected notion that Israelis living in “West Bank” did so illegally (11/19)
Backed Israel in face of International Criminal Court allegations (6/20)
Despite all of the pro-Israel efforts, terrorist attacks against Israel were at all-time lows.
The world changed in several ways in early 2021. Joe Biden became president of the United States in January and in early May, after another round of elections in Israel, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid announced that they would form a coalition government to oust the long-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While the news that Netanyahu was on his way out was breaking on May 9th, Arabs were rioting between May 6 and 10 about the pending eviction of long-term Arab squatters living in apartments in the Sheikh Jarrah section of Jerusalem who had refused to pay rent to the Jewish owners. Between May 10 and 25, riots spread into mixed communities in Israel and in the West Bank. Over that same time, Hamas rained rockets upon Israel.
The June 2021 PCPSR poll captured the change in mood on the Arab street well: “a semi-consensus that Hamas has won the May 2021 confrontation with Israel triggers a paradigm shift in public attitudes against the PA and its leadership and in favor of Hamas and armed struggle;… and the majority says Hamas, not Fatah under Abbas, deserve to represent and lead the Palestinian people.”
But Hamas did not follow-through to the liking of West Bank Arabs. While the political-terrorist group used language of incitement daily, it refrained from continuing to attack Israel. Even in May 2023, while Israel took out leaders and militants of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas remained on the sidelines.
New popular terrorist groups emerged to fill the thirst for violent jihad.
In September 2021, the Jenin Brigades was formed, the Nablus Brigades in May 2022, and then the Lions’ Den in August 2022. These West Bank terrorist groups led the spike in attacks against Jews in 2022 and 2023.
The December 2022 PCPSR poll captured the tide of events in the fall of 2022 which further increased West Bank Arabs’ quest to murder Israeli Jews: “The World Cup in Qatar helps to restore Palestinian public trust in the Arab World after years of disappointment; and in light of the escalating armed clashes in the West Bank and the near formation of a right wing and extreme government in Israel, the Palestinian public becomes more hardline while indicating a greater confidence in the efficacy of armed struggle.” The same poll showed almost every Palestinian thought that the PA had no right to interfere or arrest any member of the new terrorist groups.
Even as Hamas, Fatah and twelve other parties met in Algeria in October 2022 to reconcile and hold elections within the year, the Palestinian street chose to shun politics in favor of war. As one Palestinian said “This dialogue [Algerian Accords] will be recorded in the files within the long list of dialogues that the Palestinians have engaged in to achieve reconciliation, and it will not have any impact on the ground, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.”
Palestinians witnessed how violence stopped the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and believe that terrorism will yield greater rewards than negotiations. The right-wing Israeli government that formed in the wake of those attitudes is intent on proving them wrong.
Yet, despite readily available information, the press publishes its typical inanity about the conflict.
After two Palestinian terrorist slaughtered Jews at a restaurant and gas station in June 2023, The New York Times offered that “The vanishing likelihood of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the entrenchment of Israel’s control and a weakening of the mainstream Palestinian leadership have all contributed to a rise in Palestinian militancy.” That NYT opinion-stated-as-fact is complete stupidity. If those things were true, there would have been more acts of terrorism during the Trump years, not the fewest on record.
Palestinians know that they will not be able to achieve their goal of a Jew-free region without a global jihad, as the Jewish state will not negotiate away its existence. Palestinian terrorism spikes when local Arabs believe that the world supports its “armed struggle” and Israel backs down to its demands.
That’s the plain truth as shown by statistics and the sentiments aired in Palestinian polls. And Palestinians are backing these new leaders, nascent terrorist groups armed with thousands of guns committed to the violent jihad.
First One Through 