Caroline Glick: Israel’s homegrown enemies
Wednesday, as Israel’s entire rabbinical and political leadership stood as one and condemned the wedding guests who glorified Jewish terrorists on the video, Fatah – the terrorist group and political party led by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – published a post on its Facebook page praising the terrorist murderers who the same day killed two Israelis and critically wounded a third outside the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.JPost Editorial: 100 days of terrorism
For counterterror and law enforcement bodies, fighting Jewish terrorism poses the same challenges as fighting Islamic terrorism. In both cases, the central challenge is to target and arrest terrorists and infiltrate their networks while continuing to respect the civil rights of the surrounding population.
In both cases, when investigators are contending with active terrorist networks, they are sometimes compelled to use unpleasant interrogation techniques.
As numerous courts, ministerial oversight committees and the Knesset have determined, these techniques are not torture. They are legitimate interrogation methods and they are used sparingly and only when they are required to protect the public from terrorists who target the innocent.
This brings us back to the wedding video and the difficulty we experience in accepting that Jewish terrorism exists, support for Jewish terrorism exists, and both need to be dealt with.
There can be little doubt that Jewish terrorism would be far easier to fight today if the Shin Bet and the state prosecutors had not made malicious use of agent provocateurs to demonize the national religious camp in the 1990s. So too, if IDF commanders and the civil administration were less quick to support anti-Israel European-funded NGOs against Jewish communal interests in Judea and Samaria today, community members would have less trouble believing the worst about Jewish extremists at the fringes of society. Indeed it would be far more difficult for overzealous defense attorneys to convince anyone that suspected terrorists have undergone torture.
But while the public has legitimate grounds for suspicion, it is no longer possible to dismiss the allegations of Jewish terrorism. There are members of the nationalist camp that wish to destroy Israel.
They are willing to commit terrorist attacks against Arabs as well as Jews to achieve their goals.
As a consequence, just as the vast majority of the public demands that the government take all necessary measures to destroy Palestinian terrorist groups, so the public must demand that the government destroy Jewish terrorist groups.
Just as we decry apologists for Palestinian terrorism, so we must shun apologists for Jewish terrorism.
A number of media outlets have pointed out this week that we have marked 100 days since the beginning of the present wave of terrorism – some would call it an intifada.2015: A turning point in WWIII
On Rosh Hashana Eve, Alexander Levlovich, 64, of Jerusalem was murdered. Palestinians threw rocks at his car as he was on his way home from a festive dinner. He lost control and died of his wounds.
Ever since, vehicular attacks, rock throwing, firebombings, stabbings and shootings have murdered at least 24 Israelis and wounded at least 260. And no end is in sight.
On Thursday there were several incidents: One Israeli was lightly hurt in an attempted car-ramming near Adam junction; two security guards were wounded, one seriously, in a stabbing in the Ariel industrial park; and soldiers were attacked by a Palestinian wielding a screwdriver in Hebron.
No deterrents seem to exist to stop these lone-wolf Palestinians terrorists, many of whom are very young. At the beginning of this present wave many in the security establishment hoped that potential terrorists could be deterred. The thinking was that if the young Palestinian man or woman contemplating carrying out a terrorist attack were to know that there was a nearly a 100 percent certainty that he or she would be killed either before, during or immediately after the knifing or car-ramming, he or she would refrain from carrying out the attack. Politicians, police officers and IDF officers called on Israelis with guns to carry them and to shoot to kill if they happened upon a terrorist attack. They believed this would strengthen deterrence.
Unfortunately, over the past 100-plus days it has been made abundantly clear that this thinking was hopelessly unrealistic.
Islamism tested its fire before 2001, with bombings of American and French targets in Beirut in 1983 and of the Paris metro in 1995, but those were not clearly part of a quest to seize history and subdue the world. The September 11 attacks were.
Having that day taken its attack as deep into enemy territory as it could possibly imagine – crossing the ocean and reaching for the sole superpower’s political, financial and military nerve centers – Islamism soon kindled fires around the globe: from Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Moscow (2010), to Bali (2002), Ottawa (2014) and Timbuktu (2015).
In this regard, the elapsing year’s 11 attacks in France, Denmark, Australia and the US; a 12th on a Russian civilian flight; and about a hundred others in Nigeria, the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan, don’t constitute a turning point, since they merely intensified what had been long under way. Rather, the turning point was psychological.
The year that began with the murders of journalists in their Parisian office and ended with massacres of Californian health workers and Parisian rock fans, pedestrians and café sitters has made millions this side of the war understand their role in it: they are targets.
This realization was underscored by the war’s procession from the air, where it was announced in 2001, and the land, where it subsequently spread, to the sea, where a Muslim multitude fleeing a burning Middle East now approached Christendom’s shores.
Conspiracy theories, that this migration was masterminded by Islamist strategists, are far-fetched. Moreover, the exodus is the historic fault of post-colonial Europe, which ingratiated the Arab autocrats who let their societies degenerate and their economies rot.
In 2015 the victims of this legacy came knocking on Europe’s doors only to be suspected as agents of the Islamist wrath that European passivity had helped breed.


















