Israel's Channel 10 News report on the celebrations that took place in Gaza when news came of the murder of Israeli Yeshiva students.
Article from YnetNews
Student killers praised
Andrew Bolt
What a barbaric culture:
A PALESTINIAN gunman opened fire inside a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem today, killing eight people, as violence in the region continues to escalate.
Eight students at the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in predominantly Jewish west Jerusalem were killed and another nine wounded when a Palestinian from east Jerusalem entered the building and started shooting, police said…
The Palestinian Hamas movement hailed the attack as “heroic’’ as hundreds of people poured out in the streets of Gaza to celebrate the shootings.
UPDATE
“We bless the (Jerusalem) operation. It will not be the last,’’ Hamas said in a text message sent to reporters.
Hamas, of course, runs Gaza and won the last elections there. If you gave that lot a nuclear weapon, think they’d hestitate to use it?
UPDATE 2
A reader in comments below notes that the usual depressing others have trouble condemning this school massacre:
The UN Security Council failed to reach an agreement overnight Thursday on issuing an official condemnation over the deadly shooting attack in Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav Yeshiva because of Libyan opposition. “Most members (of the council) wanted to condemn (the attack) but Libya blocked it,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, told reporters.
Another glorious chapter in the history of the UN.
UPDATE 3
Students slaughtered; Gaza parties:
Scenes from a mad house.
5 comments:
Gaza: Thousands celebrate Jerusalem attack
Palestinians distribute sweets in celebration of Jerusalem terror attack as Hamas promises 'this is only the beginning'
Ali Waked
Published: 03.06.08, 22:31 / Israel News
Gaza's streets filled with joyous crowds of thousands on Thursday evening following the terror attack at a Jerusalem rabbinical seminary in which eight people were killed.
In mosques in Gaza City and northern Gaza, many residents went to perform the prayers of thanksgiving.
Armed men fired in the air in celebration and others passed out sweets to passersby.
Hamas stopped just short of claiming responsibility but issued a statement saying the group "blesses the (Jerusalem) operation. It will not be the last,'' Hamas said in a statement.
An Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Ahmed told Ynet the blame for the attack lay with Israel for its operations in Gaza. "The responsibility lies with those who killed 130 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them children," he said. "We welcome this heroic act and strengthen the hands of those who carried it out. This is only the first of many responses the Palestinian people are planning."
The spokesman, a member of the organization's military wing -- the al-Quds Brigades -- said Israel is "reaping what it has sown in the Strip. Those who carried out the attack have brought great pride and raised the heads of the Palestinians."
Palestinian gunmen kill eight at Jewish school
From Alastair Macdonald
A PALESTINIAN gunman has opened fire in a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem, killing at least eight people and wounding about 10 in the most lethal attack in Israel in two years.
"It was a slaughterhouse," said Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, head of the Zaka emergency service after surveying the scene at the Merkaz Harav seminary, one of the most prominent Jewish educational centres in the holy city.
Jerusalem police chief Aharon Franco said a lone gunman carried out the attack and was killed by an off-duty Israeli army officer who lives nearby and ran to the school after hearing gunfire. Police had said earlier there were two gunmen.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but it was greeted with celebrations in the Gaza Strip, where a recent Israeli offensive killed more than 120 Palestinians, about half of whom were identified as civilians.
The United Nations, Washington, France and Germany condemned the attack in the strongest terms, and diplomats said the UN Security Council would discuss the attack at an extraordinary session.
Israeli media reports said the gunman was a resident of Arab East Jerusalem. The school is in the Jewish western part of the city.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said "terrorists are trying to destroy the chances of peace but we will certainly continue peace talks" with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
The Palestinian leader condemned the Jerusalem attack.
Witnesses said the gunman entered the crowded seminary and fired an automatic weapon at students in its library. Police chief Franco said the attacker killed eight people.
Police said it appeared most of the dead were in their 20's.
"He hid the weapon in a cardboard box," Mr Franco said.
Emergency worker Yerach Tucker said bloodied students ran out of the seminary. "I went into the library and there were youngsters lying there, dead with bibles - with holy books in their hands."
It was the most lethal attack in Jerusalem since 2004 and caused the highest Israeli death toll since April 17, 2006, when 11 people were killed in a suicide bombing during the Passover holiday in Tel Aviv.
President George W. Bush condemned the attack "in the strongest possible terms" and said he had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to offer condolences.
"I told him the United States stands firmly with Israel in the face of this terrible attack," he said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "condemns in the strongest terms today's savage attack ... and the deliberate killing and injuring of civilians ..." Mr Ban's spokeswoman Michel Montas said in New York.
"(He) is deeply concerned at the potential for continued acts of violence and terrorism to undermine the political process, which he believes must be pursued to achieve a secure and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians, based on a two-state solution."
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner added their condemnation, while British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the only way to honour the memory of the dead was to promote peace.
Yitzhak Dadon, who told reporters that he shot the gunman, said the attacker, wearing torn jeans, fired at the students with an AK-47 assault rifle. Witnesses said the shooting spree went on for about five minutes.
"I saw the gunman and he fired a long burst in the air. But then he disappeared," Mr Dadon said. "I saw him again when he approached the door of the library. I shot him twice in the head. He started to sway and then someone else with a rifle fired at him, and he died."
Hamas boasts
Andrew Bolt
Murdering school students turns out to be government policy:
HAMAS Islamists today claimed responsibility for a shooting attack at a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem that killed eight people yesterday, a Hamas official said.
“The Hamas movement announces its full responsibility for the Jerusalem operation. The movement will release the details at a later stage,” the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Hamas forms the elected government of the Palestinian Authority, which relies on international aid to survive.
Killer lines
Andrew Bolt
LaTrobe University historian Patrick Wolfe reviews Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Dafur:
(Kiernan) overlooks situations that match his criteria (of genocide)… Israel could hardly exemplify Kiernan’s four criteria more squarely…
Another substantially missing question, particularly from an Australian perspective, is that of the Stolen Generations, discussion of whom is limited to an allusion in the introduction.
Wow. Merely saving children is now genocidal to Wolfe?
But actually exterminating men, women and children need not be, if the race is right:
In places, I am even moved to protest. Native Americans, for instance, are held to have committed genocide against white settlers. This even-handedness run amok.
And then this strange touch of xenophobia at the end of a review in The Age of a book which lists a variant of xenophobia as a criterion of genocide:
Melbourne University Press has done Ben Kiernan a disservice by not bothering to convert the US spelling of this book’s original Yake University Press edition. To most Australian readers, renditions such as “color” and “plow” will provide distractions uncomfortably suggestive of cultural imperialism.
Hmm. Others have shared this rather too-touchy view of “cultural imperialism”, as Dr Rachel Rinaldo has noted:
In their abhorrence of ‘cultural imperialism,’ the Khmer Rouge not only banned any foreign material items, but neutralized all people deemed externally influenced.... The Khmer Rouge’s obsessively nationalist, autarchic ideology reflected this increasingly fearful and resentful identity, and national purity was the leitmotif of the Democratic Kampuchea regime.
What a hall of mirrors is such academic theorising, where a book denouncing genocide can be accused of a tendency to genocidal thoughts by a reviewer who can be accused of having genocidal thoughts himself. No wonder in this world that saving children is held to be genocidal but murdering whole peoples is not.
(No link. And to be clear: I am not accusing Wolfe of having the heart of a genocidal killer. Clearly he does not. I’m noting only a confusion of theoretical concepts.)
UPDATE
Reader Spencer de Vere in comments below says genocide is so tricky a concept for the academic that Ben Kiernan at first couldn’t see it even being practiced in Cambodia.
Thousands Mourn Massacre at Jerusalem Seminary; Hamas Backtracks on Responsibility Claim
fox news
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Thousands gathered to mourn eight yeshiva students killed after a Palestinian gunman went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem, as Hamas backtracked on its claim of responsibility for the massacre.
Masses of mourners marched in funeral processions after a rabbi recited Hebrew psalms line by line, the crowd repeating them after him in memory of the dead. Israeli officials said the victims were between ages 15 and 19 except one, who was 26. They identified one of the slain as 16-year-old Avraham David Moses, an American citizen whose parents moved to Israel in the 1990s.
Shortly after Hamas Radio went on the air with the claim of responsibility, sources told FOX News that a few officials within the militant organization were backing away from the boast.
Ibrahim Daher, head of Hamas' al-Aqsa radio, said his station put out an earlier claim of responsibility prematurely.
Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas' military wing, confirmed the group was not taking responsibility for the attack — at least yet.
"There may be a later announcement. ... But we don't claim this honor yet," he said.
t was not immediately clear whether a militant group had orchestrated the shooting.
A Hamas radio presenter earlier had said the group's military wing had "promised a jolting response" to the Israeli offensive, and called on believers to "celebrate this victory against the brutal enemy."
Israel slapped a closure on the West Bank and beefed up security and emergency forces around Jerusalem and other areas in the wake of the shooting, the first major attack in Jerusalem in four years and the deadliest in Israel since a homicide bomber killed 11 people in Tel Aviv on April 17, 2006.
The attack came on the heels of an Israeli offensive on Gaza that Palestinian officials say killed more than 120. The campaign targeted militants who have been barraging southern Israel with rockets. Four Israelis have also been killed in fighting since last week.
Some Israeli lawmakers called on their government to break off peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' moderate, West Bank-based government, but an Israeli official said the negotiations would continue.
Israel will push ahead with talks "so as not to punish moderate Palestinians for actions by people who are not just our enemies but theirs as well," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the government had yet to make an official announcement.
Israeli police on Thursday night took three remaining brothers and their father into custody for questioning. The 25-year-old gunman, who was shot and killed during the attack, was identified as Alaa Abu Dheim of east Jerusalem; his fiance was detained by Israeli police on Friday morning.
The family of Abu Dheim said he had carried out the attack on the seminary, a prestigious center of Jewish studies identified with the leadership of the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank. They described him as intensely religious but said he was not a member of a militant group and had planned to get married in the summer.
Sources told FOX News he called his sisters on Thursday night just to see how they were doing.
Abu Dheim had been transfixed in recent days by the news of bloodshed in Gaza, said his sister, Iman Abu Dheim.
"He told me he wasn't able to sleep because of the grief," she said.
Initial reports had said Abu Dheim had been in prison, but FOX News learned this is not accurate.
Abu Dheim reportedly drove a shuttle bus for Arab students, not students from the Jewish religious school that was attacked.
His cousin, who was not identified, said there is "no one to help us but God. ... We don't know what got into his mind. He never spoke about Gaza."
Abu Dheim's family set up a mourning tent outside their home and hung green Hamas flags along with one yellow flag of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Israeli defense officials said the gunman came from Jabel Mukaber in east Jerusalem, where Palestinian residents hold ID cards giving them freedom of movement in Israel, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter told mourners that Arabs in east Jerusalem who have been involved in militant activity should be expelled to the West Bank.
Mark Regev, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, said that the shooting almost certainly had been organized in the West Bank. He would not confirm that Israel had reached a decision to continue peace talks, but did not deny the other official's statement that negotiations would go on.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the attacker walked through the Mercaz Harav yeshiva seminary's main gate and entered the library, where witnesses said some 80 students were gathered. He carried an assault rifle and pistol, and opened fire with both weapons.
Students scrambled to flee, jumping out of windows as the gunman fired. Holy books drenched in blood littered the floor. Rosenfeld said at least six empty bullet clips were found on the floor.
David Simchon, head of the seminary, said the students had been preparing a celebration for the new month of the Jewish calendar, which includes the holiday of Purim.
"We were planning to have a Purim party here tonight and instead we had a massacre," he told Channel 2 TV.
A seminary graduate who is an army officer and lives nearby rushed into the seminary with his weapon and killed the gunman, Simchon told Israel Radio.
"He saw the terrorist shooting, and with amazing resourcefulness he went into one of the rooms and managed to kill him," he said.
The seminary serves some 400 high school students and young Israeli soldiers, and many of them carry arms.
Jewish seminarians gathered outside the library and screamed for revenge, shouting, "Death to Arabs," while in Hamas-controlled Gaza thousands of Palestinians celebrated in the streets.
Abu Dheim's family set up a mourning tent outside their home and hung green Hamas flags along with one yellow flag of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Family members said several relatives had already been taken for questioning by Israeli police.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who called the attack an "act of terror and depravity," told Abbas in a phone call Friday that she would do everything in her power to restore calm as soon as possible, said Abbas aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Abbas.
Abbas, who condemned the seminary attack, suspended negotiations this week because of the spike in violence in the Gaza Strip, but later backed down under pressure from U.S. Rice, who was in the region to push the talks forward.
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