Muslims Have Been Targeting And Murdering Jewish Children For Decades

Update, 4/6/11: Muslims just targeted Jewish children AGAIN by attacking an Israeli school bus.  Muslims target and murder Jewish children.  It is simply a fact.

There are many who want to separate the “radical jihadist” Muslims from ordinary Muslims and say, “The problem is ‘them,’ not us.  Real Muslims aren’t doing any of this.”

I submit categorically that unless and until Muslims recognize that it very much is Muslims who are responsible for nearly all the terrorism in the world, and that Muslims therefore bear the responsibility of standing up and repudiating terrorism morally, theologically, culturally, politically and militarily, it will continue to be a fact that Mulisms are responsible for terrorism.  And furthermore, Islam is a religion of terrorism.

When Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait, there shouldn’t have been a single American or Western soldier in the Middle East, because the ISLAMIC WORLD should have stomped him.  When the 9/11 attack occurred, there shouldn’t have been any Americans in Afghanistan; because the ISLAMIC WORLD has the responsibility to deal with Muslims who commit terrorism.  Unless, of course, Islam is itself a religion of terrorism, in which case the Islamic world should have acted precisely as it did – which was 1) do virtually nothing to help deal with terrorism; and 2) actively oppose our efforts to deal with it.

We’re not just talking about Islam being a religion of terrorism, however.  It is actually far, far worse than that.  History blatantly reveals that Islam is the religion of targeting and murdering innocent children:

Three Year Old Stabbed in the Heart, Baby’s Throat Slashed
by IsraelNN Staff

The initial findings of the investigation into the terrorist massacre in the Israeli town of Itamar in Samaria Friday night show that the Fatah ‘Freedom Fighters’ stabbed the Fogel family’s sleeping three year old in the heart and slashed the throat of his three-month-old sister.

Click here for photos on the murder victims (Warning: Extremely Graphic)

The IDF and police forces are conducting widespread searches in the vicinity of the community since the barbaric terrorist murder of five members of the Fogel family in their home on Friday night.

It is not yet clear how many terrorists took part in the massacre. About 20 Arabs have been arrested up to now.

One area in which the IDF is concentrating its investigations is whether there were any intelligence warnings of terrorist plans before the attack that might have alerted residents.

The community of Itamar has had no terrorist attacks since 2002, when an advanced protection and security system called the Special Security Area was installed. The electronic system, which includes varied methods of observation and a wired fence, is kept in repair by the regional authority rather than the IDF.

In addition to an electronic fence surrounding the community, there is an inner, coiled wire fence. The community is allotted six non-army security personnel from a recognized security firm who are on patrol all the time. All signals go automatically to a central operations room in the town staffed by two of these guards, and in addition there is a company of soldiers on the adjoining hill.

The IDF investigation of the attack has discovered that at 20:59,  terrorists entered the community. They jumped over the fence and an alert sounded. The guard on duty went to the spot from which the warning was heard, but saw no evidence of infiltration and therefore, made the erroneous decision that an animal had activated the electronic fence’s warning signal. There are many false alarms of that nature in the winter, but cameras would have shown the terrorists. However, the IDF did not agree to fund a  request to keep cameras working on the fence.

A security person who was in the vicinity said that since the fence was not cut, the guard thought there was no infiltration and did not inform the IDF unit that was less than a kilometer away.

The terrorists first entered one home, which was empty. They found a weapon there, which they do not seem to have used. A group of youngsters was having a Sabbath evening party at the Fogel house nearby, and at 22:20 they left, along with the Fogel’s 12-year-old daughter, for an activity at the local Bnei Akiva youth group.

Between 22:20 and 22:30 the terrorists entered the house through the living room picture window, did not notice the 6-year-old boy sleeping on the couch and continued on to the bedroom where they slashed the throats of the father and newborn baby who were sleeping there. The mother came out of the bathroom and was stabbed on its threshold. The evidence shows that she tried to fight the terrorists.

They then slashed the throat of the 11-year old-son who was reading in bed. They did not notice the 2-year old asleep in his bed, but murdered the 3-year old with two stabs to his heart. After that, they locked the door, exited through the window and escaped.

Exactly two hours after the infiltration, there was another warning signal from the same spot on the fence, as the terrorists left the way they had come.  Once again, the patrol did not identify the source of the signal as infiltration.

The 12-year-old daughter returned home at 00:30 and found the door locked. She asked a neighbor, Rabbi Yaakov Cohen, of the Itamar Yeshiva, to help her. He brought a weapon with him once he noticed tracks and mud near the house. The two woke up the 6-year old sleeping in the living room by calling through the window and when he opened the door, the Rabbi returned to his home.

When she entered the bedrooms, the young daughter saw the horrific bloodsoaked scene and ran out of the house screaming. The neighbor ran back and fired several shots in the air to alert security personnel.  Within a short time, large police and IDF forces arrived and began intensive searches to see if the terrorists were still in the community. At 03:30 a.m., military trackers discovered footprints leading to the Arab village of Avrata.

“Sky Riders” Israeli UAV’s (unmanned aerial vehicles),  continued the search Saturday morning.

The IDF Chief of Staff, General Benny Gantz, arrived at the family’s home during the morning hours and said: “We will not rest until the murderers are in our hands. This is a bestial act perpetrated by barbarians. It is impossible to grasp the horrendous scene before us. We are working non-stop on the intelligence and operational fronts.”

Defense Minister Ehud Barak held a situation meeting in IDF Tel Aviv headquarters. Attending were the Chief of Staff, ISA head Yuval Diskin and other high ranking IDF intelligence and security personnel. Barak instructed those present to use every means at their disposal to find the murderers as quickly as possible. He called on the leaders of the Palestinian Authority to condemn the murders and on the Judea and Samaria Regional Authority Heads to exercise restraint.

As truly depraved as this act of religious devotion truly is, it is – despicably – nothing unusual for Muslim terrorists:

The Arab-Islamic “Palestinian” tactic of targeting Israeli children, right from the start.
Glorification and celebration at their mainstream: – by officials / leadership, masses.
Posted on Sunday, March 13, 2011 6:01:37 PM by PRePublic

[PPT] israeli-children.pps – Israel-wat
Some children were even murdered in. their beds, while they were asleep. In Memory of the 125 Israeli Kids. Murdered by Palestinian Terrorists [2002-2005]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7109702/Israeli-Children
http://www.israel-wat.com/pps/israeli-children.pps 


Note:
The following cited massacres are by by no means a ‘list’ of the huge history of crimes against humanity where Arab-Muslims have been targeting the unarmed innocent Israelis. These are only a few publicized sad samples where children were specifically targeted.TARGET: ISRAELI CHILDREN

The stories of the young victims of terrorist attacks

http://www.education.gov.il/children/children.htmThe Israeli-Palestinian conflict – War crimes. The Islamists are quite open about targeting women and children in their homes, …
http://markhumphrys.com/israel.conflict.crimes.htmlAiming at children – From the start___Massacre at Avivim, May 1970Israel versus Jibril: the thirty-year war against a master terrorist Samuel M. Katz – (Paragon House) 1993 – 285 pages – Page 30
As the sun appeared and the darkened fields and hills were suddenly illuminated, the terrorists clutched their weapons and produced high-powered field glasses. Their target would be nearing soon. The objective that sunny May morning was not an IDF patrol but rather a school bus filled with children from Moshav Avivim going to their school in Kibbutz Bar- Am, a few kilometers down the road.
http://books.google.com/books?id=56dtAAAAMAAJ&dq=nearingAvivim School Bus Massacre – sfgate Topics
Avivim School Bus Massacre Topic on sfgate.com – News and archives about Avivim … 1970 in which 12 Israeli civilians were killed, nine of them children, …
http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Avivim_school_bus_massacreOn May 22, 1970, members of The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) led by Ahmed Jebril, ambushed an Israeli school bus that was driving along the road between Avivim to Dovev in Israel. Twelve civlians were killed, among them eight children.
http://www.ict.org.il/Articles/tabid/66/Articlsid/291/currentpage/5/Default.aspxAvivim School Bus Massacre Multimedia Information
Page updated on Jun 9, 2010
Early in the morning, the bus departed from Avivim heading with its passengers to two local schools. This route had been scouted by the militants, believed to have infiltrated from Lebanon, and an ambush was set up. As the bus passed by, ten minutes after leaving Avivim, it was attacked by heavy gunfire from both sides of the road. The driver was amongst those hit in the initial barrage, as were the two other adults on board. The three were killed as the bus crashed into an embankment as the attackers continued firing into the vehicle.The children, who were in first to third grade, were buried in a special plot in Safed. A monument commemorating the victims of the attack stands in the middle of the moshav.
http://www.sandiegoaccountantsguide.com/library/Avivim-school-bus-massacre.phpBus: Webster’s Quotations, Facts and Phrases – Page 336
Icon Group International, Inc. – 2008 – 575 pages
Avivim school bus massacre. An ambush attack known as the Avivim school bus massacre took place on May.. 1970 near Avivim, an agricultural community in Israel founded in 1963 by Moroccan immigrants.
http://books.google.com/books?id=HG2NVsFbQZ0C&pg=PA336Not shooting and not crying: psychological inquiry into moral …
Ruth Linn – 1989 – 162 pages [Page 14]
On May.., 1970, nine pupils and three teachers from a village in the Galilee (Avivim) were killed and nineteen other children wounded, when their bus was attacked by bazookas from an ambush.
http://books.google.com/books?&id=Tb7eAAAAMAAJ&dq=AvivimKiryat Shmone massacre – April 1974, The ‘Maalot’ Schoolchlildren massacre – May 1974 

Betrayed: The Conspiracy to Divide Jerusalem Mike Evans – 2008 – 329 pages – (Page 87)
Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists, Benjamin Netanyahu defines it this way: “Terrorism is the deliberate and systematic assault on civilians to inspire fear for political ends.” PLO terrorists sought to victimize children as one of their most devastating weapons of fear against Israel. Perhaps these two examples will indicate how these people operate. In April 1974 three terrorists entered a school in Kiryat Shmonah, a town in northern Israel. Unknown to the terrorists, the schoolchildren were away on a trip. So the terrorists used the weapons intended for the massacre of the schoolchildren on nearby residents, killing eight adults and eight children in an apartment building close to the school. Israeli soldiers trapped the terrorists inside the building, but the Palestinians were killed when their own explosives were detonated.
In May of that year, Palestinian terrorists struck another northern town, Ma’ alot. During the early morning hours the terrorists fired on motorists, killing an Arab woman; then they murdered an entire family asleep in their home.
http://books.google.com/books?&id=1974
http://books.google.com/books?&id=ma%27alotThe War on Terror
April 11 – Kiryat Shmona Massacre at an apartment building killing 18 people, 9 were children.
http://strategypage.com/the_war_on_terror/tactics/2004102822.aspArab “Palestinian” sniper shoots, murders 10 month old baby Shalhevet Pass, while in her father’s arms. Hebron, Israel. March 2001 

israelinsider: security: Sniper Kills Jewish Baby in Hebron Mar 27, 2001 … Palestinian sniper fire killed ten-month-old Shalhevet Pass yesterday evening in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood of Hebron. The gunfire also wounded her father Yitzhak, 24, as they stood in the entrance of the neighborhood.Shalhevet was killed instantly by a bullet wound to her head, fired by a sniper positioned on a rooftop in the Abu Sneneh neighborhood which overlooks the Avraham Avinu area, and which is under Palestinian control. Oriyah Pass, Shalhevet’s mother, who was with the family at the time, was unharmed. Shalhevet Pass is considered the youngest victim of the Intifada on either side of the conflict so far.
http://www.israelinsider.com/channels/security/articles/sec_0019.htmIsraeli spies fight Jewish terror gang – Times Online timesonline.co.uk
Aug 31, 2003 … ג€œThey’re evil people,ג€ Pass, a child like and forlorn 24-year-old, … 2001 her daughter, Shalhevet, was shot dead in her father’s arms. …
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1153949.eceThe Agony of the Promised Land – Page 165
 Joshua Levy – 2004 – 232 pages – Preview
The Hamas terrorist, Nasser Jarrar, who had earlier lost both legs and one arm while preparing a bomb to be used against Israeli … a Palestinian sniper deliberately shot dead in cold blood the 10 months old baby girl, Shalhevet Pass .
http://books.google.com/books?id=PQ5THa5gWPIC&pg=PA165Boycotting Israel?
May 3, 2005 … A ten-month-old Jewish baby, Shalhevet Pass, was shot in her father’s arms by an Arab sniper in 2001. The following year, a five-year-old …
http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48914817.htmlA family argeted at their home in Itamar, surviving child hid under the bed while parents are slaughtered – June 2002Avia Shabo Remembers the Mother and 3 Brothers She Lost – One Family Fund
Shortly after 9pm on June 20, 2002 a terrorist burst into the Shabo family’s home in Itamar and went on a killing spree. The terrorist first shot the mother Rachel in the back, then killed 5-year-old Avishai, 12-year-old Tzvika, and 16-year-old Niria. Avia, who was 13 at the time, was injured in the attack. She told rescue workers that she’d heard her mother cry out in pain, from her hiding place under the bed, and then all was quiet.
http://www.onefamilyfund.org/article.asp?ID=2237The Shabo Family(IsraelNN.com) 06:09 Jun-21-02, 11 Tammuz 57625 Murdered in Itamar MassacreThe Shabo Family… – Rachel [killed], Avishai [killed], Boaz, Meir, Yariv
Avia [wounded], Tzvika [killed], Asael [wounded], Neria [killed], Atara  Rachel Shabo and three of her children were murdered by terrorists who infiltrated into the Shomron community of Itamar on Thursday night. Also murdered were three of her boys, Nerya, 15, Tzvika, 12, and Avishai, 5, as well as a neighbor Yossi Twyto, who responded to assist in saving the family.
Among the wounded is another child of the family, a 10-year-old boy in serious condition and his sister, 13, with moderate-to-serious chest wounds… Avia, was hiding under her parents’ bed hearing her family getting killed…
http://www.shechem.org/itamar/eshabo.htmlTerrorism, 2002-2004: a chronology: Volume 1
 Edward F. Mickolus, Susan L. Simmons – Praeger Security International, 2006 – 834 pages – Page 72
June 20, 2002. Israel. At 9:00 pm, at least two Palestinian gunmen snuck into Itamar, an Israeli settlement, during the night and fired automatic weapons in a street. They then ran into a nearby settler family’s house, taking hostages. One of the gunmen died in a clash with civilian settlement guards and Israeli border police who surrounded the house. Another five people, including Boaz Shabo’s wife Rachel and their three sons ( Neria, 15, Zvi, 12, and Avishai, 5), and a civilian security guard, were killed and another four, including two border policemen, a woman, and a boy…
http://books.google.com/books?id=LMYZAQAAIAAJ&q=itamar
http://books.google.com/books?id=LMYZAQAAIAAJ&q=weaponsArabs stone two Israeli teenagers to death. The terroists write with the blood on the wall… May 2001BBC News | MIDDLE EAST | Israeli teenagers ‘stoned to death’ bbc.co.uk
May 9, 2001 … The bodies of two |sraeli teens found dead are recovered from a dry river bed … The two youths, both aged 14, had been reported missing on Tuesday … outside the Tekoa Jewish settlement near Bethlehem where they lived. … Police suspect the boys were stoned to death by Palestinian militants, …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1320589.stmTwo Israeli teenagers stoned to death
By Matthew Kalman, USA TODAY TEKOA, … of two teenage boys, one an American, in a cave near a West Bank settlement …
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/mideast/2001-05-09-slainteens.htmNewsweek: Volume 137, Issues 19-26
 Jean Strouse – (Newsweek, Inc.,) 2001 – Snippet view (Page 40)
They had been stoned and beaten so badly that a dentist had to be called in to identify them. http://books.google.com/books?id=MikYAQAAIAAJ&q=tekoa
 
Text – Home ֲ« Ohr Somayach
Arabs butcher two boys hiking in a cave near Tekoa and smear their blood on the wall. (One, Kobi, was the son of a colleague and friend here at Yeshivat Ohr …
http://ohr.edu/tw/5761/bamidbar/shlach.twPalestinian War Crimes
Especially shocking were the ax-murder of a student (1975) and the brutal murder of Leon Klinghoffer, … Yossi Ish-Ran, 14, and Kobi Mandell, 14, both of Tekoa, were found … [Palestinian courage: stoning teenage boys to death!] …. .
http://www.omdurman.org/warcrime.htmlThe massacre at the ‘Sbarro’ pizzeria in Jerusalem. A pizzeria packed with children – target by Arab “Palestinian” [disguised as a “Western tourist”]. The “proud” Arabs celebrate the massacre by desplaying a replica of the restaurant. Convicted Arab aide to the bomber smiled at the verdict as she heard how many children died…  

Suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem – 9-Aug- 2001 “I deplore and strongly condemn the terrorist bombing in downtown Jerusalem today…
http://www.israel- mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2000/10/Suicide% 20bombing%20at%20the%20Sbarro%20pizzeria%20in% 20Jerusale‘The street was covered with blood and bodies: the dead and the …Describing the carnage following a suicide bombing in a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, which Hamas claimed….
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,5347 48,00.html

The Events of 9th August: The Press Ministry of Foreign Affairs Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem (Includes names and photographs of all …
http://www.kerenmalki.org/Press/Press_Listing.htm

YouTube – Sbarro Pizzeria Bombing
http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=qJrWtVYofA4

Worst terrorist attacks in Israel, 9 Aug 2001, 15 killed (including 7 children, 1 American, and 1 Brazilian), 130 injured in suicide bombing at Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem …
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/terrisrael worst.htmlNine years after the Sbarro massacre – Jerusalem Post
 
By FRIMET ROTH 
08/09/2010 11:34We, the bereaved families who feel the pain of terror every day must remind Israelis what ‘releasing prisoners’ for Gilad Schalit entails.
 
It’s been nine years since my daughter Malki was murdered in the suicide bombing of Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant and terrorism denial is still rampant.[…] This campaign could not have galvanized so many – some estimate 200,000 joined its eleven-day march to Jerusalem last month – without the groundwork laid by terrorism denial. Were the faces of the 1,000 innocent Israelis murdered during the second intifada still fresh in Israelis’ minds, warnings about the dangers of a mass prisoner release would not be dismissed as casually and as persistently as they are being now.The statistics are chilling. According to government numbers, some 45 percent of released terrorists return to terrorism, while the rate of recidivism among Hamas members is 63%. And yet these numbers impact fewer and fewer Israelis.[…] Ahlam Tamimi is one prisoner that Hamas wants freed. As a woman, she garners much sympathy for their cause. The mere mention of “woman” and “prison” in one sentence is a surefire tearjerker.But here are the facts. Tamimi is a mega-terrorist. She is responsible for the deaths of fifteen men, women and children, all of them civilians. She transported 10 kg of explosives hidden in a guitar case into west Jerusalem, handed them to her accomplice and escorted him through the city center disguised as a Western tourist. She led him to the target she herself had selected, an eatery filled with families eating lunch. She then warned her “weapon” to wait fifteen minutes before he detonated the bomb – allowing her enough time to escape unharmed.After her conviction, Tamimi smiled with pleasure upon learning from an interviewer how many children she murdered. She told Ynet: “I am not sorry for what I did. I will get out of prison and I refuse to recognize Israel’s existence… Discussions will only take place after Israel recognizes that this is Islamic land.” She has served only six years out of sixteen consecutive life terms.[…] Here is “the face of a beautiful Israeli” I would like this country to see today. It’s the face of a fifteen-year-old girl who cared passionately about disabled children and volunteered with them in myriad settings. Who loved and nurtured her own profoundly disabled sister unconditionally. Who studied the flute for years and played classical music on it that brought tears to my eyes. Who kept a diary throughout the last year of her life in which she detailed her activities in school and in her youth movement. Who recorded alongside those anecdotes the names of the victims of every terror attack perpetrated that year. Whose wish for the coming new year, which she did not live to see, was that her family remain close and supportive of one another. It is the face of my daughter, Malki, z”l.
 
On August 9th for the last eight years, I have urged others to remember the Sbarro bombing and its fifteen victims. One of them was Malki. Five others were the members of one family, a mother, father and three of their eight children. Another victim was an only child who was pregnant with what would have been her parents’ first grandchild. One of the “injured,” not even counted among the fifteen dead, is a young mother who has remained in a deep coma since that day.This year, I beg you not only to remember them but to also to remind another person, someone who may have fallen prey to terrorism denial.The author is a freelance writer in Jerusalem. She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation (www.kerenmalki.org) in memory of their daughter Malki who was murdered in the Sbarro restaurant massacre in 2001.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=184157The Malki Foundation | The Sbarro Jerusalem Massacre The unguarded Sbarro restaurant was filled with patrons, most of them children and young mothers – precisely the preferred target of the barbarians of Hamas …
http://www.kerenmalki.org/Press/Press_Listing.htmAn Exhibit On Campus Celebrates Grisly Deed – NYTimes.com Sep 26, 2001 … One student, Mohamed Mahamud, 23, said he wondered too if now was the moment for celebrating what happened in the Sbarro. …
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E0DE133AF935A1575AC0A9679C8B63A female jihadi bomber, wearing a hidden suicide belt, enters a restaurant in Haifa frequent with Arabs and Jews. Eats her meal quietly in calm. Pays the bill. Comes back, approaches the table where a Jewish family enjoys lunch and detonates herself on the children. October 2003BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel suicide attack kills 20 bbc.co.uk
Oct 4, 2003 … A woman suicide bomber has killed herself and at least 19 other people at a restaurant in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa. …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3164096.stm(From… Yediot Ahronot)
“Israeli security authorities and police investigators at first refused to believe that the female suicide bomber, Hanadi Jaradat, who murdered 21 people at Maxim restaurant in Haifa on Oct. 4, sat wearing an explosive belt while she ate lunch, looked at those serving her and those seated around her, and decided to murder them in cold blood.  A cash register receipt proves that she got up, paid the bill, then went back inside and exploded.”
http://www.bjf.org/update_archive/2003_10_01_archive.aspOran Almog Celebrates His Bar Mitzvah with Friends and OneFamily …… The Almog family, Oran’s family, went out to eat lunch at that restaurant that Saturday. The terrorist, seeing such a big and happy family, moved close to their table and detonated her bomb. Oran’s grandparents, Zevik and Ruti, his father, Mushik, older brother Tomer and cousin Assaf Shtier were killed on the spot. Oran, his mother Orly, his little sister Adi, and his aunt were seriously injured…
http://www.onefamilyfund.org/article.asp?ID=2826Countering Terrorism: Biological Agents, Transportation Networks …
OCR for page 195
…Maxim Restaurant, Haifa, January 4, 2004: The female bomber did not raise suspicion during her entire presence at the restaurant. She concealed an explosive-laden vest made from white cloth under her clothes. The opening was at the back. The vest had eight pockets arranged around the waist area that held the explosives. The bomber sat as one of the diners, ate her meal, then rose from the table and activated the vest. ISRAEL’S DEFENSE: LESSONS LEARNED Israel’s vast experience in dealing with terrorism has led the country to a proactive position in developing systems to combat the terror. Their proven methods are both physical and psychological, and they involve the general public as well as trained security professionals. Israel has enacted security laws and built fences…
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12490&page=189Qassam missiles – targeting kindergartens 

Kindergarten children targeted by Kassam
Dec 27, 2005 … … Palestinian Authority-controlled Gaza Strip regularly target Israeli schools and other public …
http://www.jnewswire.com/article/801Rocket lands near Sderot kindergarten; none hurtAug 6, 2007 … A Kassam rocket fired from the northern Gaza Strip landed in the yard of a Sderot kindergarten on Monday afternoon. …
http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=71086Near East report: Volume 51 – 2007 – (Page 63)
Earlier this month, a Qassam barely missed a Sderot kindergarten on the second day of school. Twelve children were treated for shock at the hospital. Had the rocket landed just a few meters away, the results could have been devastating. 
http://books.google.com/books?&id=X8MMAQAAMAAJ&dq=sderot+kindergartenIsrael At ‘War to the Bitter End,’ Strikes Key Hamas Sites …Dec 29, 2008 … Hamas missiles hit near Ashdod on Sunday,… ” Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told reporters Monday, while “Hamas is looking for children to kill.””Hamas is targeting deliberately kindergartens and schools and citizens and civilians because this is according to their values. Our values are completely different. We are trying to target Hamas, which hides among civilians,” Livni said.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,473448,00.htmlUnder Fire in Sderot – New York Times
Mar 22, 2008 … More than 7000 Qassam rockets have landed in Sderot since 2001. … of a kindergarten, a week after a rocket landed in her schoolyard. …
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/opinion/lweb22israel.htmlQassam explodes near kindergarten – Israel News, Ynetnews
Dec 21, 2010 … Miracle south of Ashkelon: A Qassam rocket exploded near a … Some of the children were already in the kindergarten when the rocket…
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4002195,00.htmlIsraeli teen hurt as Qassam strikes meters from Ashkelon Dec 21, 2010
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israeli-teen-hurt-as-qassam-strikes-meters-from-ashkelon-kindergarten-1.331779The Itamar massacre, Arab-Muslim “Palestinians” infiltrate the Itamar town in Israel, butcher the Fogel family while asleep, the baby’s throat was slashed. In the aftermath, the Arab Muslim city of Gaza celeberates the crime. March 2011 

Horror in Samaria: Terrorist murders family of 5 / Yair Altman
Terrorist stabs five family members to death in settlement of Itamar early Saturday; three children, including baby girl, among victims. Paramedic describes horrific sight, toys next to pools of blood 
Full story
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4040974,00.htmlThree Year Old Stabbed in the Heart, Baby’s Throat Slashed …Mar 12, 2011 … Report: Initial Probe of Friday night massacre in Itamar shows terrorists stabbed 3-year old in the heart and slashed 3-month old baby’s …
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142843Itamar massacre: Fogel family butchered while sleeping – Israel …Mar 13, 2011 … Names of Itamar attack victims cleared for publication Saturday evening: Udi Fogel, 36, Ruth Fogel, 35, and their children Yoav, 11, Elad,…
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4041237,00.htmlFamily Slaughtered By Palestinians‎ – Fox News (blog)
http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/03/12/family-slaughtered-by-palestinians/US condemns killing of five Israelis in Itamar attack

By REUTERS
03/12/2011 18:55

White House calls on PA “to unequivocally condemn this terrorist attack and for the perpetrators of this heinous crime to be held accountable.”

WASHINGTON – The United States on Saturday called the stabbing deaths of five Israelis in the West Bank settlement of Itamar a terrorist attack and urged the Palestinian Authority to “unequivocally” condemn the killings.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the murder of five Israelis in a terrorist attack in the northern West Bank, and we offer our condolences to their loved ones and to the Israeli people,” the White House said in a statement.

A Jewish couple and three of their children were stabbed to death in Itamar on Saturday in what Israeli officials said was an attack by a Palestinian who broke into their home in the early hours.

“There is no possible justification for the killing of parents and children in their home,” The White House said.
“We call on the Palestinian Authority to unequivocally condemn this terrorist attack and for the perpetrators of this heinous crime to be held accountable.”
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=211843International community condemns murder of Israeli family of 5 – WireUpdate
[March 13, 2011]
By BNO News JERUSALEM (BNO NEWS) — The international community has strongly condemned an attack in the West Bank on early Saturday morning that left five.
http://wireupdate.com/wires/15815/international-community-condemns-murder-of-israeli-family-of-5/AUN Chief condemns murder of West Bank Israeli family | VANCOUVERITE
Mar 13, 2011 … UN Chief condemns murder of West Bank Israeli family … late Friday night’s shocking murder of an Israeli family of five, … Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the international community as well as …
http://www.vancouverite.com/2011/03/13/un-chief-condemns-murder-of-west-bank-israeli-family/Quartets Condemns Itamar Attack – News Briefs – Israel National News
Quartets Condemns Itamar Attack. Reported: 07:48 AM – Mar/13/11 … the European Union, the Russian Federation and United States, said “attacks on any …
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/206003Report: Itamar massacre was first attack in Iran-funded strategy to ignite Third Intifada …Mar 12, 2011 …
http://israelinsider.net/xn/detail/2018399:BlogPost:66246?xg_source=activityFive Israelis murdered by Palestinians at Itamar were Gaza evacuees
DEBKAfile Special Report March 12, 2011, 9:53 AM (GMT+02:00)

The five members of the Israeli family murdered at Itamar on the West Bank, Friday night, March 11, have been identified as Udi Vogel, 38, the father; his wife Ruth Vogel, 35, their sons Yoav, 11 and Elad, 3 and their four-month old daughter Hadas. The three children who survived are Roi, 8, Yishai, 2 and their sister Tamar, aged 12, who found the victims when she arrived home later that night.
The family moved to Itamar after Jewish communities were forcibly evicted from the Gaza Strip in 2007 as part of the Sharon government’s disengagement plan.
The terrorists had broken through the fence guarding the sleeping settlement and entered the Vogel home through an open window without raising an alarm.
Military and police units fanned out to hunt the perpetrators and set up checkpoints. Hamas websites hailed the murder as a “heroic operation,” without taking responsibility.
This attack is the first of its kind in years. Hamas Websites hailed the murder as “heroic,” without taking responsibility.
http://www.debka.com/article/20754/Massacre of Jewish Babies, Children in Israel Lacks Condemnation As Netanyahu Demands UN ActionBy Joel Leyden
Israel News AgencyJerusalem, Israel
March 12, 2011 ….. Part of the following was communicated by the Israel Government Press Office to the Israel News Agency.As many in Israel shed a tear, they shake their heads and question: “how can an animal stab a 4-month-old baby to death”?Most of the world’s nations remain quiet, few condemnations have come forth as Islamic Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah have poured out onto the streets to celebrate the terror attack in West Bank town of Itamar, in which five family members were murdered in their sleep. These “democratic” and “peace loving” nations are quick to grab headlines in criticizing the natural growth of cities and towns in the West Bank – Judea and Samaria – but when it comes to the innocent blood of Jewish children, they are nowhere to be seen.Arab oil over democracy and basic human rights?Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated this evening: “I would like to express my deep outrage, outrage which is certainly felt by every Israeli over the murder of a young family – father, mother, eleven-year-old boy, four-year-old-boy and four-month-old girl.””Three orphaned children have been left in this family. One of the girls saw her parents and siblings stabbed to death. The family was brutally murdered in their sleep on the Sabbath. We embrace and support the orphans and the other members of the family. We embrace and support our brothers who reside in Judea and Samaria. Do not be disheartened. I know that this is a difficult time for us, but the entire nation is with you. Since the disaster, this awful murder, became known I have held discussions with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Israel Defense Forces Chief-of-Staff, Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz, ISA Director Yuval Diskin and other senior security officials. I instructed them to make every effort to find the murderers and not to rest until they have been found and brought to justice.”Netanyahu added: “I expect the international community to sharply and unequivocally condemn this murder, the murder of children. I have noticed that several countries that always hasten to the UN Security Council in order to condemn Israel, the state of the Jews, for planning a house in some locality, or for laying some tiles somewhere have been dilatory in sharply condemning the murder of Jewish infants. I expect them to issue such condemnations immediately, without balances, without understandings, without justifications. There is no justification and there can be neither excuse nor forgiveness for the murder of children. I expect a similar condemnation, and I demand a similar condemnation, from the Palestinian Authority. I am disappointed by the weak and mumbled statements. This is not how one condemns terrorism. This is not how one fights terrorism. See how Israeli prime ministers, myself among them, have reacted in similar situations, but there has never been anything like this, in which terrorists entered a home and cut children’s throats.””This requires sharp and unequivocal condemnation. This requires something else. This requires a halt to the incitement. I demand that the Palestinian Authority stop the incitement that is conducted on a daily basis in their schools, mosques and the media under their control. The time has come to stop this double-talk in which the Palestinian Authority outwardly talks peace, and allows – and sometimes leads – incitement at home. The time has come to stop the incitement and begin educating their people for peace.”Israel’s Prime Minister concluded: “Despite all the awful pain, I call upon all Israelis to act responsibly, with restraint, and not to take the law into their own hands. When one takes the law into his own hands, there is no law. The IDF and the security forces will carry out their responsibilities; only they. We will not allow terrorism to determine the settlement map. The settlement map will be determined by Government policy, which is in accordance with our national interests, with security first and foremost. Terrorism will not determine the settlement map. We will determine it.”Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, and their children Yoav, 11, Elad, 4 and Hadas, 3 months were all stabbed to death.The funeral for the five members of the Fogel family, murdered in a terror attack in the West Bank town of Itamar on Friday night is scheduled to take place in Jerusalem on Sunday.
http://www.israelnewsagency.com/itamarisraelwestbankterrorismmassacremurderpalestinianidfhamasgazairanislamicjihadjewishbabieschildrennetanyahufogelfamily48031211.htmlGaza celebrates; Fayyad condemns terror attackRafah residents hand out candy following murder of parents, three children in West Bank settlement of Itamar. Palestinian PM denounces act, says “we categorically oppose violence and terror, regardless of victims’, perpetrators’ identity”Elior Levy Published:  03.12.11, 14:36 / Israel News Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy “is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4041106,00.htmlItamar massacre: Fogel family butchrered while sleeping
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-570901?ref=feeds%2FlatestIMRA – Saturday, March 12, 2011 Itamar terrorism: photos of …imra.org.il
Mar 12, 2011 … murdering children and babies in their sleep, simply because they are. Jewish. https://picasaweb.google.com/picsyesha/Itamar
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=51363 

This vile madness is not being done in the name of any other religion or any other God or gods than Islam and Allah.

If Muslims want to claim that this has nothing to do with them, then they need to stand up and not merely condemn this ugly and despicable side to their religion, but they need to actively stand against it and fight it.

And yet in spite of all of this the mainstream liberal media continue to side with those who murder children and against those whose children are murdered.

.

12 Responses to “Muslims Have Been Targeting And Murdering Jewish Children For Decades”

  1. HL Says:

    Thank you Michael for telling the truth. My heart has been stunned since seeing the pics of the heinous murder of the family of five at Atlas Shrugs Blog this past weekend. That anyone could do this is beyond me.

    If the Muslims of this world and nation want us to believe differently than what the facts keep telling us, they had better stand up, speak out and condemn these murderous acts done in the name of their god.

    I refuse to submit to the PC muzzle the MSM and those who deny reality keep trying to intimidate us with.

    This is a level of evil that is staggering, outrageous and must be condemned.

  2. masidayu@jkr.gov.my Says:

    Yeah….and i got a compilation of stories that are totally the opposite. I think this is just normal and I don’t hate you.

    I, myself always a true believer of Allah, Quran and Muhammad as the last prophet of humankind. I just wanna be good. To learn very hard to understand Quran and be a good Muslim and a good servant of Allah. My jihad right now is to avoid anything that can lead me to a greater sin. It’s okay if you hate my religion. You hate it because you don’t know. My prayer to all my family, friends and all the Muslim people, May Allah bless us always. Amin….

  3. Michael Eden Says:

    masidayu,

    Your “rebuttal” reminds me of something someone told me during an argument once.

    I was wiping the floor with the guy. And then he said, “I read someone who has an argument that refutes you.”

    And as far as he was concerned, he’d just won. He didn’t actually have the argument. He simply asserted that somewhere out there in the ether there was this argument out there that could refute me.

    The problem with Islam is that the Quran, the Haddith and the actual historical life of Muhammad support the terrorists in their understanding of Islam.

    Like it or hate it, masidayu, Muhammad was a man of constant violence and genocide. He had been in something like 30 military campaigns of religious conquest at the time of his death. And he about that same number planned had he lived – including the conquest of the Christian Byzantine Empire (whose attack by Muslims triggered the Crusades) and the conquest of Christian Europe which took place 100 years after his death.

    I challenge you or anyone else to read the book The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion and offer a refutation of it from any sort of literal reading of the Quran or the Haddith.

    By the way, Muhammad was a man of violence. If you want peace, you will never find it from him, but only from Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.

  4. Michael Eden Says:

    Here’s another story about Muslims targeting children, for what it’s worth.

    If you go to the actual link it is better formatted, but here is just another example in which Muslims are literally using children to attack other children.

    I don’t mind you being a Muslim, masidayu, but I demand that you take some personal responsibility for the incredibly wicked things that are going on all over the place in your religion.

    “Birds of Paradise” – Al Qaeda´s Child-Bombers in WikiLeaks Iraq Logs
    Posted on 2010/10/24
    by ojihad| Leave a comment
    by Florian Flade

    When we seek martyrdom, we go to heaven.

    No, don’t say we’re young. This life has made us old.

    Without Palestine, what are our lives worth? Even if they give us the whole world, we will never forget her (Palestine)? –

    ______________________

    These are the lyrics of a kid´s song, produced by a Bahrain-based TV channel and meant to recruit children to the cause of fighting for the liberation of Palestine by sacrificing themselves. The production record is called “Tiyur al-Jannah” – Birds of Paradise.

    The term “Birds of Paradise” refers to the Islamic belief, that a child that dies prior to reaching the age of puberty (becoming an adult member of society), will enter paradise as a martyr straight away and turn into a bird of heaven singing for the adult martyrs.

    In Iraq, the terror group al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, used “Birds of Paradise” (sometimes described as “Youth of Heaven” or “Paradise Boys”) as a name for a special unit of suicide bombers age 10 to 16. The newly released nearly 400,000 WikiLeaks Iraq-War documents show, U.S. forces were concerned about the increase in the use of children as potential terrorists.

    By late 2008, early 2009, Iraqi and American forces had discovered several safe houses used by al-Qaeda to train and harbour young teenage boys, training them on weapons, explosives and brainwashing them.
    The children are sent out by their al-Qaeda commanders to attack coalition forces with hand grenades, RPGs or suicide vests, sometimes telling them to deliver a bag to a group of soldiers and then remotely detonating the device, while it is still in the child´s hand.

    In Kirkuk, Iraqi forces detained four children in April 2009, suspected of being part of a “Birds of Paradise” cell. “Special forces units have arrested an organisation of children consisting of four individuals under the age of 14 who call themselves the ‘Birds of Paradise’,” said General Abdelamir al-Zaidi, the commander of the Iraqi army division in Kirkuk. “The group relies on children and is connected to al-Qaeda. It works to recruit children and young people to carry out suicide attacks and to aid the terrorist groups in detonating roadside bombs.”

    Five propaganda videos produced by al-Qaeda in Iraq, were discovered by U.S. forces during a raid in Diyala Province in December 2007, showing young boys, some about 11 years old and younger, wearing masks and holding guns. The child-militants are seen conducting searches and kidnappings as part of their training.

    The newly released secret Iraq War documents, covering events from 2004-2009, indicate incidents involving al-Qaeda child-terrorists happened throughout 2008 and 2009, hinting to an increasing use of underage Iraqis in attacks on coalition and Iraqi security forces.

    One U.S. Military Log created October 04th 2008 describes a raid near Samarra, where two individuals suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda´s “Birds of Paradise”, where arrested.

    The two individuals detained have been reported as members of an organization known as Birds of Paradise. This group recruits youth between the ages of -___ in the city to conduct SAF, Grenade, and IED attacks on CF in ___. Reporting states ___ is the leader of this cell and ___ is believed to be a driver and liaison between other AQI/ISI cells

    A few days later, Iraqi forces recovered a weapons cache south of Samarra and found RPG launchers, anti-tank mines, rockets, mortars, artillery rounds, explosives and batteries. The U.S. military´s assessment was:

    The SoI members that recovered this cache claimed it belonged to members of the Birds of Paradise. This is unlikely, as the majority of reporting indicates Birds of Paradise recruits young members for the purpose of suicide attacks. It is likely that the SoI affiliated this group with the cache because of the intense interest CF has exhibited regarding the Birds of Paradise. The recovered items indicate the primary uses for this cache would likely have been IED-related.

    On the same day, U.S. forces were attacked by a boy, throwing a hand grenade at them in the same area south of Samarra. Again, “Birds of Paradise” were believed to be involved:

    At 141630OCT08, A/___ BSB, while conducting a combat patrol in support of Operation Mammoth IV, in ___, in ___ Ad Din province, in the vicinity of ___, was attacked with a grenade.

    ___. The grenade was thrown from the west. A/___ BSB was not able to positively identify the ___ and did not return fire. A/___ BSB continued mission with no injuries or damage to equipment.

    S2 ASSESSMENT: This is the second grenade attack this month on CF. It is also likely that the UE was a child from the Birds of Paradise cell. IIR ___ claims these children are being trained to conduct grenade attacks against CF.

    In November 2008, U.S. forces detained two suspected insurgents West of Ar-Rutba, near Jordan Junction. They were suspected of being part of a cell that carried out a suicide bombing against coalition forces with a young man wearing an explosive vest:

    Both suspects were detained for suspected involvement in an SVEST attack in ___ (reference: Sig Event 150430C SEP ___) and possible affiliation with the BIRDS OF PARADISE insurgent group.

    Update # -___-The two individuals detained are suspected ___ insurgents associated with the group Youth of Paradise and believed to be involved with a ___ Sep SVEST detonation in ___. The initial detention date and time is unknown; once their affiliation was discovered, coordination was made with ___ by / ___ to transfer custody to CF.

    The suspected leader of al-Qaeda child-unit, Bassim Abu Khalil al-Mujahid, was arrested in the Balad district, north of Baghdad, in April 2009. Lt.Col. Abdullah Ali, police chief in Salah ad-Din Province said: “The Birds of Paradise group was directly responsible for recruiting children under 15, brainwashing them, and convincing them to carry out suicide operations — or even deceiving them by placing explosives around their bodies, sending them to markets, and then blowing them up using a remote control.”

    But even with its leader in custody, the “Birds of Paradise” were still active, as the WikiLeaks documents show.

    On May 12th 2009, Iraqi security forces came under attack by a teenage suicide bomber near Kirkuk, resulting in five Iraqi policemen being killed, five policemen and 11 civilians wounded. In the WikiLeaks document, U.S. military assesses the suicide attacker was probably part of the al-Qaeda child-unit:

    UPDATE : /-___ reports that the VBIED was command detonated. The driver was a young teenage boy approximately ___ years of age. The driver swerved and slammed in to ___ element while they were conducting shift change over.

    However, it is assessed that this attack ___ be ___ and AQI/ISI working to discredit IPs and their ability to maintain security within Kirkuk City. While ___ is not known for conducting VBIED attacks they have been known to facilitate VBIED attacks through various other ___ groups allowing them plausible ___. In recent weeks, there has also been increase reporting of an AQI sub-group which called themselves the Bird of Paradise. The most recent report stated that on or about 02MAY09, ___ SVEST bombers ranging from ___ to ___ years old were transported from Baghdad to Kirkuk to increase ___ and ___ Tensions .

    A young boy brought an mortar round to a U.S. military unit south-west of Baqubah on May 13th 2009. Eventhough the device did not explode, the assessment of the U.S. forces was clearly an alert for increase in the activities of al-Qaeda´s child soldiers:

    RECENT REPORTS SUGGEST A RESURGENCE IN THE PARADISE BOYS, AN AQI SUBSIDIARY GEARED AT RECRUITING CHILDREN AND USING THEM IN ATTACKS, WITHIN THE ___ OE. IN MOST INSTANCES THE CHILDREN ARE UNAWARE THAT THEY ARE THE COURIERS OF EXPLOSIVE DEVICES, AND PARADISE BOYS‘ LEADERSHIP EITHER INSTRUCT THE CHILDREN TO ___ A SEEMINGLY INSIGNIFICANT ITEM NEAR A SPECIFIC SITE, OR THEY REMOTE DETONATE THE DEVICE WHILE IT IS STILL IN THE CHILD’___ POSSESSION. CHILDREN ARE COERCED INTO THE ORGANIZATION BY THE LURE OF MONEY OR PRESENTS AND A SENSE OF BELONGING. -___ INF HUMINT COLLECTORS HAVE RECEIVED MULTIPLE REPORTS THAT PARADISE BOYS ELEMENTS ARE MEETING REGULARLY AT A MOSQUE IN FIFTY ___, AND THIS, COUPLED WITH THE FACT THAT IT WAS A CHILD WHO DELIVERED THE ROUND TO IPS MAY INDICATE THAT THE ORGANIZATION IS IN THE EARLY STAGES OF PLANNING FOR AN OPERATIONAL PHASE WITHIN ___ WEEKS.

    Iraqi security forces found a weapons cache Northwest of Baghdad on May 29th 2009, containing among arms and grenades also a suicide vest and explosives – again the al-Qaeda children unit was suspected:

    S2 ASSESSMENT: THIS WEAPONS CACHE WAS INTENDED TO DISRUPT IA PATROLS AND TO SCARE THE LOCALS INTO LOSING ___ IA. THIS WEAPONS CACHE IS ASSESSED TO BELONGING TO THE PARADISE BOYS GROUP, WHO IS TRAINING THE CHILDREN TO CONDUCT THE SUICIDE ATTACKS.

    When a U.S. military convoy was attacked with an RPG-round North of Baghdad on August 3th 2009, the soldiers involved started a hunt for two teenage boys who had fled the scene of the attack:

    ___ MP’___ REPORTED TO -___ TOC THAT THERE CONVOY WAS HIT WITH AN ___. THE ROUND DID NOT EXPLODE. ___ MP’___ REPORTED NO CASUALTIES OR VEHICLE DAMAGE. THE PATROL WAS JOINT AND ___ MP’___ AND THE FP’___ CORDONED OFF THE AREA. NO FURTHER CF ASSETS ARE BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME.

    S2 ASSESSMENT: THIS IS THE FIRST -___ ATTACK IN ___ OE IN OVER ___ YEAR. ___ MP COMPANY REPORTED SEEING 2X MALES, APPROXIMATELY ___ YEARS OLD, CONDUCT THE ATTACK ON THEIR PATROL. REPORT DIIR—–___ DATED ___ IDENTIFIES A GROUP CALLED BIRDS OF PARADISE OPERATING IN THE ___ AREA AND CONSISTING OF TEENAGE MALES BETWEEN ___ AND ___ YEARS OLD. IT IS ASSESSED THAT THIS GROUP IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ATTACK.

  5. mingarinny@sbcglobal.net Says:

    That children’s song is sick. I believe Iran did the same thing in the early 80’s when they were trying to convince teenage boys that the “plastic gold key” they were being given were the “keys to paradise”, IF THEY WERE LUCKY ENOUGH TO DIE A MARTYR through the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq. Just sick.

  6. Michael Eden Says:

    Islamo-fascist jihadist, American liberal-fascists like Obama. All their kind indoctrinate their children through disgusting songs.

  7. Wiilliam Smart Says:

    Little known fact, discovered from the discussion pages behind articles in Wikipedia – after killing Mohammed al-Durrah, Israel killed a further 83 Palestinian children before a single Israeli child died. Then they spent (and are still spending) $millions to try and prove they didn’t kill the one child and it was an antisemitic slur to portray the incident as had been done!

    You can see more details in “Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories” By Peter Phillips of “Project Censored”, p.291 http://books.google.com/books?id=-og-GZfAuWcC&pg=PA291&lpg=PA291&dq=%22months+of+the+current+Palestinian+uprising+against%22&source=bl&ots=wMF5ujW765&sig=Aa7704gqU4HVd7QxSF9JCzIwjY0&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result

    Project Censored say “In the first three-and-a-half months … Israeli forces killed 84 Palestinian children. The largest single cause of their deaths was gunfire to the head. During this period, not one Israeli child was killed. Not one suicide bombing against Israelis occurred.” The actual numbers of children killed are at “Remember the Children” at http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/remember2000.html presumably worked out from http://www.btselem.org/english/statistics/Casualties_Data.asp?Category=6&region=ISRAEL&sD=29&sM=09&sY=2000&eD=26&eM=12&eY=2008&filterby=event&oferet_stat=before – and the first deaths of Israeli children were on 28th March 2002 (I make that 4 months later, never mind)

  8. Michael Eden Says:

    I don’t know all the things you allege, William. I certainly do not trust the sources you provide. Hitler wrote a lot of things in his book; does that mean they were true? I’d say not.

    That said, I looked up a couple of keywords and see an awful lot of disparity even in the details you provide. For example, I googled the Wikipedia article re: Muhammad al-Durrah incident and found this:

    An investigation in October 2000 concluded the IDF probably did not shoot the al-Durrahs[4] but shortly after the investigation has been called dubious[5] and sidelined by Israeli General S. Mofaz who declared it was a personal investigation and not an official one.[5] Three senior French journalists who saw the raw footage in 2004 said it was not clear from the footage alone that the boy had died, and that France 2 cut a final few seconds in which he appeared to lift his hand from his face. France 2’s news editor said in 2005 that no one could say for sure who fired the shots, but other commentators, including the director of the Israeli government press office, went further, saying the scene had been staged by Palestinian protesters. Philippe Karsenty, a French media commentator, was sued for libel by France 2 for suggesting this; a ruling against him was overturned by the Paris Court of Appeal in May 2008, a decision France 2 has appealed.[6]

    Yes, I blocked only those points that undermine your account. But as anyone can see, it’s not like you are stating the unvarnished truth in your claim.

    I googled the phrase (not using quotes) ” after Mohammed al-Durrah 83 Palestenian children killed” and found nothing. I also used the number “84” and the ONLY link I found was one related to the very author you yourself cite.

    In that article, I was able to check footnotes. And they are rather pathetic. For example, he mentions reading accounts of atrocities by Israeli soldiers in which – among other things – it is alleged that the author had read about accounts of Israeli soldiers allegedly admitting using sticks to crush the skulls of Palestinian children. I clicked on the link; and there is an allusion to “testimony of an Israeli soldier.” This soldier is not named or identified in any way.

    Do you know how utterly trivial such an allegation becomes? Watch me make up something very similiar out of thin air: Testimony of a Palesitinian fighter: “They killed 20 Israelis, women and children. Killing the children gave them the most pleasure. They raped all the women and massacred everyone.”

    Your book isn’t filled with “facts.” It is filled with unsourced, unsubstantiated and unidentified assertions.

    I don’t doubt that Israeli soldiers have participated in what would rightly be called “war crimes.” I say that because the USA – a moral country that is less likely to have its troops committing war crimes than probably any other – have had a VERY FEW soldiers convicted of such crimes. And I hasten to add, it’s hard to get away with that crap because unless a soldier does something heinous in isolation, he is likely to be seen and identified by a fellow soldier who has a conscience BECAUSE HE IS A CIVILIZED HUMAN BEING FROM A CIVILIZED COUNTRY WITH A CIVILIZED MILITARY. Just like Israel, btw.

    Let me give you an American example: take John Kerry (please!). This is a man who claimed that he had personally witnessed war crimes being committed during his incredibly short stay in Vietnam. He actually gave that testimonty before Congress. Kerry as a 29-year old attention seeker testified in 1971 telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had personally heard stories from American troops about how they had cut off heads and ears, razed villages “in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan” and commited “crimes . . . on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” But then it was later pointed out that he had not himself reported any of these “incidents” at the time, making HIM guilty of participating in war crimes, HE PROCCEEDED TO PROGRESSIVELY DENY HIS OWN DOCUMENTED QUOTES ON THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD:

    MATTERA: Do you think this crop of anti-war activists, do you there’ll be any frauds like Al Hubbard?

    KERRY: I have no idea. I hope not.

    MATTERA: Do you think that they will make slanderous accusations–accusing the troops of raping women, pillaging villaging, just like you did to the Fulbright committee?

    KERRY: Uh, I didn’t make those.

    MATTERA: You didn’t?

    Audio clip, John Kerry, 4/22/71: [They told the stories at times] they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

    Kerry claims Winter Soldier Investigations were substantiated by further investigation.

    MATTERA: Did you ever verify those?

    KERRY (crosstalk): I’ve been misquoted about that hundreds of times.

    MATTERA: So you never substantiated those charges before you–

    KERRY: I proposed–I gave them to the committee because I felt that they ought to be investigated and that’s exactly what I said. These are the–many of those charges, incidentally, were subsequently verified by different entities.

    Slate: No criminal charges were filed as a result of any of the [Army’s Criminal Investigative Division] investigations into Winter Soldier.

    Which goes to point out the fact that, in the case of John Kerry, even when we had a specific identified source, it was a DISCREDITED SOURCE and the testimony was BASED ENTIRELY ON HERESAY.

    So you’ll have to pardon me for taking your claims with a very tiny grain of salt.

    Let me further state that it IS factually confirmed that United Nations troops ARE guilty of war crimes:

    UN troops accused of ‘systematic’ rape in Sierra Leone
    By Tim Butcher, Africa Correspondent
    (Filed: 17/01/2003)

    Rebels, government troops and United Nations peacekeepers were all guilty of raping women on a systematic scale throughout Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, a leading international human rights group reported yesterday.

    10 Muslim UN Peacekeepers rape 13-Year-Old Girl

    BLOG: End impunity for U.N. Peacekeepers Who Rape and Abuse (Online Dialogues & Blogs)

    [2007] UN staff accused of raping children in Sudan Members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Sudan are facing allegations of raping and abusing children as young as 12…..more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex. It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

    [2003] UN troops accused of ‘systematic’ rape in Sierra Leone Rebels, government troops and United Nations peacekeepers were all guilty of raping women on a systematic scale throughout Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, a leading international human rights group reported yesterday.

    That’s just a fraction of the links found here.

    Will you please agree with me that the United Nations is a criminal organization that ought to be torn down and destroyed?

    There is no moral equivalence. The Arabs, the Palestinians in particular, and terrorists in the name of Islam have on thousands of documented occassions targeted and murdered Israeli civilians, including women and children. The war is one that the ARABS/Persians have continually waged against Israel, not the other way around.

    That is the fact.

  9. Wiilliam Smart Says:

    Nothing of what you’ve posted disputes the fact that 84 Palestinian children are known to have died (even according to Israeli sources) before a single Israeli child died 4 months later.

    Making it bizarre to pick on this one partially “illustrated” case and insist that someone else must have killed Mohammed al-Durrah. No Palestinian is ever known to have shot Palestinian kids, while Israeli soldiers boast of doing it.

    Nothing else you’ve said makes sense either, especially not an attack on the natives as being the terrorists. The immigrant Zionists arrived in Palestine as an immensely effective killing machine. Zionists killed over 200 Jews in Haifa in 1940 with a bomb attack, an act 5 times more deadly than anything ever carried out by Palestinians. The immigrants probably slaughtered 100,000 Palestinians in the Nakba, only killing foreign observers and blocking UN staff has prevented a lot more of their crimes being exposed. None of it was in self-defense, all of it was naked aggression against people in homes that really did belong to them, to which they’re entitled to return.

  10. Michael Eden Says:

    William,

    What I DID do was document the fact that there was no reason to accept your claims or your numbers for them. You proceed to demand that I “prove” a negative.

    Nothing of what you’ve posted disputes the “fact” that if George Bush hadn’t been president, for instance, that evil space aliens would have wiped out the human race, either.

    You prove that evil space aliens wouldn’t have invaded had Bush not been president, and I’ll prove that Israelis didn’t kill 84 children. You prove my negative, and I’ll prove yours.

    Geez, I get some asinine comments.

    Show me public school textbooks for children like THIS coming from Israel:

    Despite Saudi Arabia’s promises to clean up textbooks in the kingdom, recent editions continue to raise alarms in the West over jihadist language.

    The recent editions were obtained by the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, D.C., and the translations were first provided to Fox News.

    “This is where terrorism starts, in the education system.” Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, told Fox News. Al-Ahmed, a Saudi national, said the textbooks, made and paid for by the Saudi government, were smuggled out of the kingdom through confidential sources.

    In a textbook for 10th-graders printed for the 2010-2011 academic year, al-Ahmed said teenagers are taught barbaric practices. “They show students how to cut (the) hand and the feet of a thief,” he said. In another textbook, for ninth-graders, the students are taught the annihilation of the Jewish people is imperative. One text reads in part: “The hour (of judgment) will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. … There is a Jew behind me come and kill him.”
    According to the textbook translations provided to Fox News, women are described as weak and irresponsible. And al-Ahmed said the textbooks call for homosexuals to be put to death “because they pose a danger at society, as the Saudi school books teaches.”

    Al-Ahmed say the textbooks are both a Saudi and an American problem. “If you teach 6 million children in these important years of their lives, if you install that in their brain, no wonder we have so many Saudi suicide bombers.”

    After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there was an intense focus on Saudi Arabia and its educational teachings because almost all of the attackers were from the kingdom. In 2006, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Turki al-Faisal told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relationships that the Saudi king was determined to eradicate this ideology of hate.

    “In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah recognizes that above all else education is the key, and he has put forth a program of reforms in this area,” al-Faisal said. “In recent years, the kingdom has reviewed all of its education practices and materials and has removed any element that is inconsistent with the needs of a modern education. Not only have we eliminated what is objectionable from old textbooks that were in our system, we have also implemented a comprehensive internal revision and modernization plan. “

    But the new textbooks, most from the 2010-2011 academic year, show the hateful speech remains.

    In Atlanta earlier this month, the Saudi minister responsible for the textbooks talked about the importance of education for woman. Asked by Fox News about the textbooks, Prince Faisal Bin Abdullah Al-Saud said, “I always say to people, please come. Come, try to see us. But come without a preconceived idea. … Especially when you want to raise the future, no one is going to introduce violence. Violence is absolutely against – I think this is, I don’t know who put in those ideas.”

    When Fox News offered to show the quotes to the minister, he said, “there are many quotes” and walked away.

    Fox News also asked the Saudi Embassy in Washington D.C., for comment on the textbooks and the translations, but there was no immediate response.

    Palestinian schools are even more toxic than Saudi Arabian ones.

    We’ve seen thousands and thousands of documented terrorist attacks by Muslims all over the world. And you want to blame the Jews for it.

    But you’re not done. You want to go back in time and demonize the Jews.

    When Jews – I know you use the word “Zionists” as an attack – arrived in the homeland they had been driven out of 2,000 years before, THERE WAS NOBODY THERE. They bought the land they settled on from the legal owners – the Ottoman Empire – and then they began to hire Arab workers to help them restore a land that was either deserted desert or deserted swamp. And as word got out that work was available, more Arabs came. WHICH IS TO SAY THERE WAS NOBODY FOR THE “ZIONISTS” TO KILL WHEN THEY ARRIVED.

    If you have a particle of moral intelligence – present company aside – you will see that for every Muslim Israelis have killed, Arabs and Muslims have killed at least TEN THOUSAND Muslims. You look at the Iraq-Iran War, you look at the hell African Muslims created in Africa, you look at the killings by Arab terrorists of Iraqis after we took down Saddam, you look at what just happened in Libya, you look at what is going on before our very eyes in Syria, and you will understand just how truly depraved these claims blaming the Jews are.

    Now get off my blog, you racist, Jew-hating son of hell.

  11. William Smart Says:

    You can check the figures yourself from this Israeli source: http://www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/before-cast-lead/by-date-of-event/wb-gaza/palestinian-minors-killed-by-israeli-security-forces

    Muhammed al-Durra was supposedly the first Palestinian minor killed in the 2nd intifada (though in fact, he was one of 4 that first day, 30th Sept 2000).

    The next day, 6 Palestinian kids were shot dead (5 shot in the head, 1 chest). That first month at least 30 Palestinan minors were killed, still no Israeli minors.

    At least a further 40 dead Palestinian minors in November and 12 in December 2000. Not a single Israeli child killed.

    So, in a “2nd Intifada” supposedly started by Arafat, not a single Israeli minor died (and very few adults) in the whole of the first three months.

    Now then, if Israel deliberately murders this number of Palestinians children then what sort of disgusting accusation is it to claim that Palestinians sacrificed him?

    I’ll tell you what it is, its a blood-libel. Disgusting, false, and used as an excuse to kill 100s of the persecuted faith-group.

    In fact, of course, its much worse than that because although the Israeli group B’tselem does the best it can, it undercounts by a huge amount, even if it waits until after the Israeli bullets stop flying. At the Jenin massacre it can only count 9 bodies and name 7 of the 52 people that Israel admits to having killed. Perhaps 1% of the real number of dead – which Israel never allowed anyone to check. Israeli forces even shot dead Iain Hook from Lowestoft as he was struggling to re-house the huge numbers of freshly de-homed refugees.

    Share our values, do you?

  12. Michael Eden Says:

    William Smart,

    The problem is that your leftist fascist sources are completely WRONG.

    Your very first example is proof: read this from the reliably liberal “Atlantic” (i.e., not “Fox News”) to see your own star case of Israeli atrocity refuted.

    In point of fact, ALL THE EVIDENCE leads one to the conclusion that the Israelis did NOT shoot Mohammed al-Dura:

    Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?
    The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father’s arms during an Israeli confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. Now a number of Israeli researchers are presenting persuasive evidence that the fatal shots could not have come from the Israeli soldiers known to have been involved in the confrontation. The evidence will not change Arab minds—but the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon
    James FallowsJun 1 2003, 12:00 PM ET

    The name Mohammed al-Dura is barely known in the United States. Yet to a billion people in the Muslim world it is an infamous symbol of grievance against Israel and—because of this country’s support for Israel —against the United States as well.

    The name Mohammed al-Dura is barely known in the United States. Yet to a billion people in the Muslim world it is an infamous symbol of grievance against Israel and—because of this country’s support for Israel —against the United States as well.

    Al-Dura was the twelve-year-old Palestinian boy shot and killed during an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators on September 30, 2000. The final few seconds of his life, when he crouched in terror behind his father, Jamal, and then slumped to the ground after bullets ripped through his torso, were captured by a television camera and broadcast around the world. Through repetition they have become as familiar and significant to Arab and Islamic viewers as photographs of bombed-out Hiroshima are to the people of Japan—or as footage of the crumbling World Trade Center is to Americans. Several Arab countries have issued postage stamps carrying a picture of the terrified boy. One of Baghdad’s main streets was renamed The Martyr Mohammed Aldura Street. Morocco has an al-Dura Park. In one of the messages Osama bin Laden released after the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he began a list of indictments against “American arrogance and Israeli violence” by saying, “In the epitome of his arrogance and the peak of his media campaign in which he boasts of ‘enduring freedom,’ Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing.”

    But almost since the day of the episode evidence has been emerging in Israel, under controversial and intriguing circumstances, to indicate that the official version of the Mohammed al-Dura story is not true. It now appears that the boy cannot have died in the way reported by most of the world’s media and fervently believed throughout the Islamic world. Whatever happened to him, he was not shot by the Israeli soldiers who were known to be involved in the day’s fighting—or so I am convinced, after spending a week in Israel talking with those examining the case. The exculpatory evidence comes not from government or military officials in Israel, who have an obvious interest in claiming that their soldiers weren’t responsible, but from other sources. In fact, the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, seem to prefer to soft-pedal the findings rather than bring any more attention to this gruesome episode. The research has been done by a variety of academics, ex-soldiers, and Web-loggers who have become obsessed with the case, and the evidence can be cross-checked.

    No “proof” that originates in Israel is likely to change minds in the Arab world. The longtime Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi dismissed one early Israeli report on the topic as a “falsified version of reality [that] blames the victims.” Late this spring Said Hamad, a spokesman at the PLO office in Washington, told me of the new Israeli studies, “It does not surprise me that these reports would come out from the same people who shot Mohammed al-Dura. He was shot of course by the Israeli army, and not by anybody else.” Even if evidence that could revise the understanding of this particular death were widely accepted (so far it has been embraced by a few Jewish groups in Europe and North America), it would probably have no effect on the underlying hatred and ongoing violence in the region. Nor would evidence that clears Israeli soldiers necessarily support the overarching Likud policy of sending soldiers to occupy territories and protect settlements. The Israelis still looking into the al-Dura case do not all endorse Likud occupation policies. In fact, some strongly oppose them.

    The truth about Mohammed al-Dura is important in its own right, because this episode is so raw and vivid in the Arab world and so hazy, if not invisible, in the West. Whatever the course of the occupation of Iraq, the United States has guaranteed an ample future supply of images of Arab suffering. The two explosions in Baghdad markets in the first weeks of the war, killing scores of civilians, offered an initial taste. Even as U.S. officials cautioned that it would take more time and study to determine whether U.S. or Iraqi ordnance had caused the blasts, the Arab media denounced the brutality that created these new martyrs. More of this lies ahead. The saga of Mohammed al-Dura illustrates the way the battles of wartime imagery may play themselves out.

    The harshest version of the al-Dura case from the Arab side is that it proves the ancient “blood libel”—Jews want to kill gentile children—and shows that Americans count Arab life so cheap that they will let the Israelis keep on killing. The harshest version from the Israeli side is that the case proves the Palestinians’ willingness to deliberately sacrifice even their own children in the name of the war against Zionism. In Tel Aviv I looked through hour after hour of videotape in an attempt to understand what can be known about what happened, and what it means.

    The Day

    The death of Mohammed al-Dura took place on the second day of what is now known as the second intifada, a wave of violent protests throughout the West Bank and Gaza. In the summer of 2000 Middle East peace negotiations had reached another impasse. On September 28 of that year, a Thursday, Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s Likud Party but not yet Prime Minister, made a visit to the highly contested religious site in Jerusalem that Jews know as the Temple Mount and Muslims know as Haram al-Sharif, with its two mosques. For Palestinians this was the trigger—or, in the view of many Israelis, the pretext—for the expanded protests that began the next day.

    On September 30 the protest sites included a crossroads in the occupied Gaza territory near the village of Netzarim, where sixty families of Israeli settlers live. The crossroads is a simple right-angle intersection of two roads in a lightly developed area. Three days earlier a roadside bomb had mortally wounded an IDF soldier there. At one corner of the intersection were an abandoned warehouse, two six-story office buildings known as the “twin towers,” and a two-story building. (These structures and others surrounding the crossroads have since been torn down.) A group of IDF soldiers had made the two-story building their outpost, to guard the road leading to the Israeli settlement.

    Diagonally across the intersection was a small, ramshackle building and a sidewalk bordered by a concrete wall. It was along this wall that Mohammed al-Dura and his father crouched before they were shot. (The father was injured but survived.) The other two corners of the crossroads were vacant land. One of them contained a circular dirt berm, known as the Pita because it was shaped like a pita loaf. A group of uniformed Palestinian policemen, armed with automatic rifles, were on the Pita for much of the day.

    Early in the morning of Saturday, September 30, a crowd of Palestinians gathered at the Netzarim crossroads. TV crews, photographers, and reporters from many news agencies, including Reuters, AP, and the French television network France 2, were also at the ready. Because so many cameras were running for so many hours, there is abundant documentary evidence of most of the day’s events—with a few strange and crucial exceptions, most of them concerning Mohammed al-Dura.

    “Rushes” (raw footage) of the day’s filming collected from these and other news organizations around the world tell a detailed yet confusing story. The tapes overlap in some areas but leave mysterious gaps in others. No one camera, of course, followed the day’s events from beginning to end; and with so many people engaged in a variety of activities simultaneously, no one account could capture everything. Gabriel Weimann, the chairman of the communications department at the University of Haifa, whose book Communicating Unreality concerns the media’s distorting effects, explained to me on my visit that the footage in its entirety has a “Rashomon effect.” Many separate small dramas seem to be under way. Some of the shots show groups of young men walking around, joking, sitting and smoking and appearing to enjoy themselves. Others show isolated moments of intense action, as protesters yell and throw rocks, and shots ring out from various directions. Only when these vignettes are packaged together as a conventional TV news report do they seem to have a narrative coherence.

    Off and on throughout the morning some of the several hundred Palestinian civilians at the crossroads mounted assaults on the IDF outpost. They threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. They ran around waving the Palestinian flag and trying to pull down an Israeli flag near the outpost. A few of the civilians had pistols or rifles, which they occasionally fired; the second intifada quickly escalated from throwing rocks to using other weapons. The Palestinian policemen, mainly in the Pita area, also fired at times. The IDF soldiers, according to Israeli spokesmen, were under orders not to fire in response to rocks or other thrown objects. They were to fire only if fired upon. Scenes filmed throughout the day show smoke puffing from the muzzles of M-16s pointed through the slits of the IDF outpost.

    To watch the raw footage is to wonder, repeatedly, What is going on here? In some scenes groups of Palestinians duck for cover from gunfire while others nonchalantly talk or smoke just five feet away. At one dramatic moment a Palestinian man dives forward clutching his leg, as if shot in the thigh. An ambulance somehow arrives to collect him exactly two seconds later, before he has stopped rolling from the momentum of his fall. Another man is loaded into an ambulance—and, in footage from a different TV camera, appears to jump out of it again some minutes later.

    At around 3:00 P.M. Mohammed al-Dura and his father make their first appearance on film. The time can be judged by later comments from the father and some journalists on the scene, and by the length of shadows in the footage. Despite the number of cameras that were running that day, Mohammed and Jamal al-Dura appear in the footage of only one cameraman—Talal Abu-Rahma, a Palestinian working for France 2.

    Jamal al-Dura later said that he had taken his son to a used-car market and was on the way back when he passed through the crossroads and into the crossfire. When first seen on tape, father and son are both crouched on the sidewalk behind a large concrete cylinder, their backs against the wall. The cylinder, about three feet high, is referred to as “the barrel” in most discussions of the case, although it appears to be a section from a culvert or a sewer system. On top of the cylinder is a big paving stone, which adds another eight inches or so of protection. The al-Duras were on the corner diagonally opposite the Israeli outpost. By hiding behind the barrel they were doing exactly what they should have done to protect themselves from Israeli fire.

    Many news accounts later claimed that the two were under fire for forty-five minutes, but the action captured on camera lasts a very brief time. Jamal looks around desperately. Mohammed slides down behind him, as if to make his body disappear behind his father’s. Jamal clutches a pack of cigarettes in his left hand, while he alternately waves and cradles his son with his right. The sound of gunfire is heard, and four bullet holes appear in the wall just to the left of the pair. The father starts yelling. There is another burst. Mohammed goes limp and falls forward across his father’s lap, his shirt stained with blood. Jamal, too, is hit, and his head starts bobbling. The camera cuts away. Although France 2 or its cameraman may have footage that it or he has chosen not to release, no other visual record of the shooting or its immediate aftermath is known to exist. Other Palestinian casualties of the day are shown being evacuated, but there is no known on-tape evidence of the boy’s being picked up, tended to, loaded into an ambulance, or handled in any other way after he was shot.

    The footage of the shooting is unforgettable, and it illustrates the way in which television transforms reality. I have seen it replayed at least a hundred times now, and on each repetition I can’t help hoping that this time the boy will get himself down low enough, this time the shots will miss. Through the compression involved in editing the footage for a news report, the scene acquired a clear story line by the time European, American, and Middle Eastern audiences saw it on television: Palestinians throw rocks. Israeli soldiers, from the slits in their outpost, shoot back. A little boy is murdered.

    What is known about the rest of the day is fragmentary and additionally confusing. A report from a nearby hospital says that a dead boy was admitted on September 30, with two gun wounds to the left side of his torso. But according to the photocopy I saw, the report also says that the boy was admitted at 1:00 P.M.; the tape shows that Mohammed was shot later in the afternoon. The doctor’s report also notes, without further explanation, that the dead boy had a cut down his belly about eight inches long. A boy’s body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag but with his face exposed, was later carried through the streets to a burial site (the exact timing is in dispute). The face looks very much like Mohammed’s in the video footage. Thousands of mourners lined the route. A BBC TV report on the funeral began, “A Palestinian boy has been martyred.” Many of the major U.S. news organizations reported that the funeral was held on the evening of September 30, a few hours after the shooting. Oddly, on film the procession appears to take place in full sunlight, with shadows indicative of midday.

    The Aftermath

    Almost immediately news media around the world began reporting the tragedy. Print outlets were generally careful to say that Mohammed al-Dura was killed in “the crossfire” or “an exchange of fire” between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. The New York Times, for instance, reported that he was “shot in the stomach as he crouched behind his father on the sidelines of an intensifying battle between Israeli and Palestinian security forces.” But the same account included Jamal al-Dura’s comment that the fatal volley had come from Israeli soldiers. Jacki Lyden said on NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered that the boy had been “caught in crossfire.” She then interviewed the France 2 cameraman, Talal Abu-Rahma, who said that he thought the Israelis had done the shooting.

    ABU-RAHMA: I was very sad. I was crying. And I was remembering my children. I was afraid to lose my life. And I was sitting on my knees and hiding my head, carrying my camera, and I was afraid from the Israeli to see this camera, maybe they will think this is a weapon, you know, or I am trying to shoot on them. But I was in the most difficult situation in my life. A boy, I cannot save his life, and I want to protect myself.

    LYDEN: Was there any attempt by the troops who were firing to cease fire to listen to what the father had to say? Could they even see what they were shooting at?

    ABU-RAHMA: Okay. It’s clear it was a father, it’s clear it was a boy over there for ever who [presumably meaning “whoever”] was shooting on them from across the street, you know, in front of them. I’m sure from that area, I’m expert in that area, I’ve been in that area many times. I know every [unintelligible] in that area. Whoever was shooting, he got to see them, because that base is not far away from the boy and the father. It’s about a hundred and fifty meters [about 500 feet].

    On that night’s broadcast of ABC World News Tonight, the correspondent Gillian Findlay said unambiguously that the boy had died “under Israeli fire.” Although both NBC and CBS used the term “crossfire” in their reports, videos of Israeli troops firing and then the boy dying left little doubt about the causal relationship. Jamal al-Dura never wavered in his view that the Israelis had killed his son. “Are you sure they were Israeli bullets?” Diane Sawyer, of ABC News, asked him in an interview later that year. “I’m a hundred percent sure,” he replied, through his translator. “They were Israelis.” In another interview he told the Associated Press, “The bullets of the Zionists are the bullets that killed my son.”

    By Tuesday, October 3, all doubt seemed to have been removed. After a hurried internal investigation the IDF concluded that its troops were probably to blame. General Yom-Tov Samia, then the head of the IDF’s Southern Command, which operated in Gaza, said, “It could very much be—this is an estimation—that a soldier in our position, who has a very narrow field of vision, saw somebody hiding behind a cement block in the direction from which he was being fired at, and he shot in that direction.” General Giora Eiland, then the head of IDF operations, said on an Israeli radio broadcast that the boy was apparently killed by “Israeli army fire at the Palestinians who were attacking them violently with a great many petrol bombs, rocks, and very massive fire.”

    The further attempt to actually justify killing the boy was, in terms of public opinion, yet more damning for the IDF. Eiland said, “It is known that [Mohammed al-Dura] participated in stone throwing in the past.” Samia asked what a twelve-year-old was doing in such a dangerous place to begin with. Ariel Sharon, who admitted that the footage of the shooting was “very hard to see,” and that the death was “a real tragedy,” also said, “The one that should be blamed is only the one … that really instigated all those activities, and that is Yasir Arafat.”

    Palestinians, and the Arab-Islamic world in general, predictably did not agree. Sweatshirts, posters, and wall murals were created showing the face of Mohammed al-Dura just before he died. “His face, stenciled three feet high, is a common sight on the walls of Gaza,” Matthew McAllester, of Newsday, wrote last year. “His name is known to every Arab, his death cited as the ultimate example of Israeli military brutality.” In modern warfare, Bob Simon said on CBS’s 60 Minutes, “one picture can be worth a thousand weapons,” and the picture of the doomed boy amounted to “one of the most disastrous setbacks Israel has suffered in decades.” Gabriel Weimann, of Haifa University, said that when he first heard of the case, “it made me sick to think this was done in my name.” Amnon Lord, an Israeli columnist who has investigated the event, told me in an e-mail message that it was important “on the mythological level,” because it was “a framework story, a paradigmatic event,” illustrating Israeli brutality. Dan Schueftan, an Israeli strategist and military thinker, told me that the case was uniquely damaging. He said, “[It was] the ultimate symbol of what the Arabs want to think: the father is trying to protect his son, and the satanic Jews—there is no other word for it—are trying to kill him. These Jews are people who will come to kill our children, because they are not human.”

    Two years after Mohammed al-Dura’s death his stepmother, Amal, became pregnant with another child, the family’s eighth. The parents named him Mohammed. Amal was quoted late in her pregnancy as saying, “It will send a message to Israel: ‘Yes, you’ve killed one, but God has compensated for him. You can’t kill us all.'”

    Second Thoughts

    In the fall of last year Gabriel Weimann mentioned the Mohammed al-Dura case in a special course that he teaches at the Israeli Military Academy, National Security and Mass Media. Like most adults in Israel, Weimann, a tall, athletic-looking man in his early fifties, still performs up to thirty days of military-reserve duty a year. His reserve rank is sergeant, whereas the students in his class are lieutenant colonels and above.

    To underscore the importance of the media in international politics, Weimann shows some of his students a montage of famous images from past wars: for World War II the flag raising at Iwo Jima; for Vietnam the South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head and the little girl running naked down a path with napalm on her back. For the current intifada, Weimann told his students, the lasting iconic image would be the frightened face of Mohammed al-Dura.

    One day last fall, after he discussed the images, a student spoke up. “I was there,” he said. “We didn’t do it.”

    “Prove it,” Weimann said. He assigned part of the class, as its major research project, a reconsideration of the evidence in the case. A surprisingly large amount was available. The students began by revisiting an investigation undertaken by the Israeli military soon after the event.

    Shortly after the shooting General Samia was contacted by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist and engineer who had worked closely with the IDF on the design of pilotless drone aircraft. While watching the original news broadcasts of the shooting Shahaf had been alarmed, like most viewers inside and outside Israel. But he had also noticed an apparent anomaly. The father seemed to be concerned mainly about a threat originating on the far side of the barrel behind which he had taken shelter. Yet when he and his son were shot, the barrel itself seemed to be intact. What, exactly, did this mean?

    Samia commissioned Shahaf and an engineer, Yosef Duriel, to work on a second IDF investigation of the case. “The reason from my side is to check and clean up our values,” Samia later told Bob Simon, of CBS. He said he wanted “to see that we are still acting as the IDF.” Shahaf stressed to Samia that the IDF should do whatever it could to preserve all physical evidence. But because so much intifada activity continued in the Netzarim area, the IDF demolished the wall and all related structures. Shahaf took one trip to examine the crossroads, clad in body armor and escorted by Israeli soldiers. Then, at a location near Beersheba, Shahaf, Duriel, and others set up models of the barrel, the wall, and the IDF shooting position, in order to re-enact the crucial events.

    Bullets had not been recovered from the boy’s body at the hospital, and the family was hardly willing to agree to an exhumation to re-examine the wounds. Thus the most important piece of physical evidence was the concrete barrel. In the TV footage it clearly bears a mark from the Israeli Bureau of Standards, which enabled investigators to determine its exact dimensions and composition. When they placed the equivalent in front of a concrete wall and put mannequins representing father and son behind it, a conclusion emerged: soldiers in the Israeli outpost could not have fired the shots whose impact was shown on TV. The evidence was cumulative and reinforcing. It involved the angle, the barrel, the indentations, and the dust.

    Mohammed al-Dura and his father looked as if they were sheltering themselves against fire from the IDF outpost. In this they were successful. The films show that the barrel was between them and the Israeli guns. The line of sight from the IDF position to the pair was blocked by concrete. Conceivably, some other Israeli soldier was present and fired from some other angle, although there is no evidence of this and no one has ever raised it as a possibility; and there were Palestinians in all the other places, who would presumably have noticed the presence of additional IDF troops. From the one location where Israeli soldiers are known to have been, the only way to hit the boy would have been to shoot through the concrete barrel.

    This brings us to the nature of the barrel. Its walls were just under two inches thick. On the test range investigators fired M-16 bullets at a similar barrel. Each bullet made an indentation only two fifths to four fifths of an inch deep. Penetrating the barrel would have required multiple hits on both sides of the barrel’s wall. The videos of the shooting show fewer than ten indentations on the side of the barrel facing the IDF, indicating that at some point in the day’s exchanges of fire the Israelis did shoot at the barrel. But photographs taken after the shooting show no damage of any kind on the side of the barrel facing the al-Duras—that is, no bullets went through.

    Further evidence involves the indentations in the concrete wall. The bullet marks that appear so ominously in the wall seconds before the fatal volley are round. Their shape is significant because of what it indicates about the angle of the gunfire. The investigators fired volleys into a concrete wall from a variety of angles. They found that in order to produce a round puncture mark, they had to fire more or less straight on. The more oblique the angle, the more elongated and skidlike the hole became.

    The dust resulting from a bullet’s impact followed similar rules. A head-on shot produced the smallest, roundest cloud of dust. The more oblique the angle, the larger and longer the cloud of dust. In the video of the shooting the clouds of dust near the al-Duras’ heads are small and round. Shots from the IDF outpost would necessarily have been oblique.

    In short, the physical evidence of the shooting was in all ways inconsistent with shots coming from the IDF outpost—and in all ways consistent with shots coming from someplace behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location of the Pita. Making a positive case for who might have shot the boy was not the business of the investigators hired by the IDF. They simply wanted to determine whether the soldiers in the outpost were responsible. Because the investigation was overseen by the IDF and run wholly by Israelis, it stood no chance of being taken seriously in the Arab world. But its fundamental point—that the concrete barrel lay between the outpost and the boy, and no bullets had gone through the barrel—could be confirmed independently from news footage.

    It was at this point that the speculation about Mohammed al-Dura’s death left the realm of geometry and ballistics and entered the world of politics, paranoia, fantasy, and hatred. Almost as soon as the second IDF investigation was under way, Israeli commentators started questioning its legitimacy and Israeli government officials distanced themselves from its findings. “It is hard to describe in mild terms the stupidity of this bizarre investigation,” the liberal newspaper Ha’aretz said in an editorial six weeks after the shooting. The newspaper claimed that Shahaf and Duriel were motivated not by a need for dispassionate inquiry but by the belief that Palestinians had staged the whole shooting. (Shahaf told me that he began his investigation out of curiosity but during the course of it became convinced that the multiple anomalies indicated a staged event.) “The fact that an organized body like the IDF, with its vast resources, undertook such an amateurish investigation—almost a pirate endeavor—on such a sensitive issue, is shocking and worrying,” Ha’aretz said.

    As the controversy grew, Samia abbreviated the investigation and subsequently avoided discussing the case. Most government officials, I was told by many sources, regard drawing any further attention to Mohammed al-Dura as self-defeating. No new “proof” would erase images of the boy’s death, and resurrecting the discussion would only ensure that the horrible footage was aired yet again. IDF press officials did not return any of my calls, including those requesting to interview soldiers who were at the outpost.

    So by the time Gabriel Weimann’s students at the Israeli Military Academy, including the one who had been on the scene, began looking into the evidence last fall, most Israelis had tried to put the case behind them. Those against the Likud policy of encouraging settlements in occupied territory think of the shooting as one more illustration of the policy’s cost. Those who support the policy view Mohammed al-Dura’s death as an unfortunate instance of “collateral damage,” to be weighed against damage done to Israelis by Palestinian terrorists. Active interest in the case was confined mainly to a number of Israelis and European Jews who believe the event was manipulated to blacken Israel’s image. Nahum Shahaf has become the leading figure in this group.

    Shahaf is a type familiar to reporters: the person who has given himself entirely to a cause or a mystery and can talk about its ramifications as long as anyone will listen. He is a strongly built man of medium height, with graying hair combed back from his forehead. In photos he always appears stern, almost glowering, whereas in the time I spent with him he seemed to be constantly smiling, joking, having fun. Shahaf is in his middle fifties, but like many other scientists and engineers, he has the quality of seeming not quite grown up. He used to live in California, where, among other pursuits, he worked as a hang-gliding instructor. He moves and gesticulates with a teenager’s lack of self-consciousness about his bearing. I liked him.

    Before getting involved in the al-Dura case, Shahaf was known mainly as an inventor. He was only the tenth person to receive a medal from the Israeli Ministry of Science, for his work on computerized means of compressing digital video transmission. “But for two and a half years I am spending time only on the al-Dura case,” he told me. “I left everything for it, because I believe that this is most important.” When I arrived at his apartment, outside Tel Aviv, to meet him one morning, I heard a repeated sound from one room that I assumed was from a teenager’s playing a violent video game. An hour later, when we walked into that room—which has been converted into a video-research laboratory, with multiple monitors, replay devices, and computers—I saw that it was one mob scene from September 30, being played on a continuous loop.

    Shahaf’s investigation for the IDF showed that the Israeli soldiers at the outpost did not shoot the boy. But he now believes that everything that happened at Netzarim on September 30 was a ruse. The boy on the film may or may not have been the son of the man who held him. The boy and the man may or may not actually have been shot. If shot, the boy may or may not actually have died. If he died, his killer may or may not have been a member of the Palestinian force, shooting at him directly. The entire goal of the exercise, Shahaf says, was to manufacture a child martyr, in correct anticipation of the damage this would do to Israel in the eyes of the world—especially the Islamic world. “I believe that one day there will be good things in common between us and the Palestinians,” he told me. “But the case of Mohammed al-Dura brings the big flames between Israel and the Palestinians and Arabs. It brings a big wall of hate. They can say this is the proof, the ultimate proof, that Israeli soldiers are boy-murderers. And that hatred breaks any chance of having something good in the future.”

    The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf’s evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father’s lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead? Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if “directing” a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear—based on the length of shadows—to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father’s shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, “The boy is dead” before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?

    A handful of Israeli and foreign commentators have taken up Shahaf’s cause. A Web site called masada2000.org says of the IDF’s initial apology, “They acknowledged guilt, for never in their collective minds would any one of them have imagined a scenario whereby Mohammed al-Dura might have been murdered by his own people … a cruel plot staged and executed by Palestinian sharp-shooters and a television cameraman!” Amnon Lord, writing for the magazine Makor Rishon, referred to a German documentary directed by Esther Schapira that was “based on Shahaf’s own decisive conclusion” and that determined “that Muhammad Al-Dura was not killed by IDF gunfire at Netzarim junction.” “Rather,” Lord continued, “the Palestinians, in cooperation with foreign journalists and the UN, arranged a well-staged production of his death.” In March of this year a French writer, Gérard Huber, published a book called Contre expertise d’une mise en scène (roughly, Re-evaluation of a Re-enactment). It, too, argues that the entire event was staged. In an e-mail message to me Huber said that before knowing of Shahaf’s studies he had been aware that “the images of little Mohammed were part of the large war of images between Palestinians and Israelis.” But until meeting Shahaf, he said, “I had not imagined that it involved a fiction”—a view he now shares. “The question of ‘Who killed little Mohammed?'” he said, “has become a screen to disguise the real question, which is: ‘Was little Mohammed actually killed?'”

    The truth about this case will probably never be determined. Or, to put it more precisely, no version of truth that is considered believable by all sides will ever emerge. For most of the Arab world, the rights and wrongs of the case are beyond dispute: an innocent boy was murdered, and his blood is on Israel’s hands. Mention of contrary evidence or hypotheses only confirms the bottomless dishonesty of the guilty parties—much as Holocaust-denial theories do in the Western world. For the handful of people collecting evidence of a staged event, the truth is also clear, even if the proof is not in hand. I saw Nahum Shahaf lose his good humor only when I asked him what he thought explained the odd timing of the boy’s funeral, or the contradictions in eyewitness reports, or the other loose ends in the case. “I don’t ‘think,’ I know!” he said several times. “I am a physicist. I work from the evidence.” Schapira had collaborated with him for the German documentary and then produced a film advancing the “minimum” version of his case, showing that the shots did not, could not have, come from the IDF outpost. She disappointed him by not embracing the maximum version—the all-encompassing hoax—and counseled him not to talk about a staged event unless he could produce a living boy or a cooperative eyewitness. Shahaf said that he still thought well of her, and that he was not discouraged. “I am only two and a half years into this work,” he told me. “It took twelve years for the truth of the Dreyfus case to come out.”

    For anyone else who knows about Mohammed al-Dura but is not in either of the decided camps—the Arabs who are sure they know what happened, the revisionists who are equally sure—the case will remain in the uncomfortable realm of events that cannot be fully explained or understood. “Maybe it was an accidental shooting,” Gabriel Weimann told me, after reading his students’ report, which, like the German documentary, supported the “minimum” conclusion—the Israeli soldiers at the outpost could not have killed the boy. (He could not show the report to me, he said, on grounds of academic confidentiality.) “Maybe even it was staged—although I don’t think my worst enemy is so inhuman as to shoot a boy for the sake of publicity. Beyond that, I do not know.” Weimann’s recent work involves the way that television distorts reality in attempting to reconstruct it, by putting together loosely related or even random events in what the viewer imagines is a coherent narrative flow. The contrast between the confusing, contradictory hours of raw footage from the Netzarim crossroads and the clear, gripping narrative of the evening news reports assembled from that footage is a perfect example, he says.

    The significance of this case from the American perspective involves the increasingly chaotic ecology of truth around the world. In Arab and Islamic societies the widespread belief that Israeli soldiers shot this boy has political consequences. So does the belief among some Israelis and Zionists in Israel and abroad that Palestinians will go to any lengths to smear them. Obviously, these beliefs do not create the basic tensions in the Middle East. The Israeli policy of promoting settlements in occupied territory, and the Palestinian policy of terror, are deeper obstacles. There would never have been a showdown at the Netzarim crossroads, or any images of Mohammed al-Dura’s shooting to be parsed in different ways, if there were no settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect. Gabriel Weimann is to the left of Dan Schueftan on Israel’s political spectrum, but both believe that Israel should end its occupation. I would guess that Nahum Shahaf thinks the same thing, even though he told me that to preserve his “independence” as a researcher, he wanted to “isolate myself from any kind of political question.”

    The images intensify the self-righteous determination of each side. If anything, modern technology has aggravated the problem of mutually exclusive realities. With the Internet and TV, each culture now has a more elaborate apparatus for “proving,” dramatizing, and disseminating its particular truth.

    In its engagement with the Arab world the United States has assumed that what it believes are noble motives will be perceived as such around the world. We mean the best for the people under our control; stability, democracy, prosperity, are our goals; why else would we have risked so much to help an oppressed people achieve them? The case of Mohammed al-Dura suggests the need for much more modest assumptions about the way other cultures—in particular today’s embattled Islam—will perceive our truths.

    James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of Looking at the Sun (1994), Breaking the News (1996), and Free Flight (2001). His article about the postwar future of Iraq, “The Fifty-first State?” appeared in the November 2002 Atlantic.

    So who shot the kid? The evidence:

    One of them contained a circular dirt berm, known as the Pita because it was shaped like a pita loaf. A group of uniformed Palestinian policemen, armed with automatic rifles, were on the Pita for much of the day…

    The Palestinian policemen, mainly in the Pita area, also fired at times…

    By hiding behind the barrel they were doing exactly what they should have done to protect themselves from Israeli fire….

    In short, the physical evidence of the shooting was in all ways inconsistent with shots coming from the IDF outpost—and in all ways consistent with shots coming from someplace behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location of the Pita

    It was PALESTINIANS who killed that kid, you liar. And since you indict the Jews as monsters because they killed that kid, in actual FACT you indict the Palestinians. THEY are the monsters, according to your own demagoguery.

    You use the term “blood libel.”

    Interestingly, the article (again, in a liberal magazine) says this:

    The harshest version of the al-Dura case from the Arab side is that it proves the ancient “blood libel”

    In other words, you present the VERY HARSHEST MUSLIM VERSION of reality. You literally are one of the terrorists, thank you.

    The term “blood libel” that you use is a term used by the very worst Jew haters, a term that implies that the whole Jewish race is guilty of some crime and that it is therefore right to hunt them down and kill them wherever they may be found (like your terrorist Muslim pals and your Nazi friends believe).

    But the article also manages to not only debunk one “child murder” that you cite, but most likely THREE:

    What is known about the rest of the day is fragmentary and additionally confusing. A report from a nearby hospital says that a dead boy was admitted on September 30, with two gun wounds to the left side of his torso. But according to the photocopy I saw, the report also says that the boy was admitted at 1:00 P.M.; the tape shows that Mohammed was shot later in the afternoon

    It’s time for you to go. I don’t deal well with anti-Semitic bigot haters.

    Go sell your lies somewhere else.

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