Ma'an's attempt to pretend Fogels were not killed by Arabs

Ma'an has an Arabic-only article that tries to draw an equivalence between the murder of the Fogels and a brutal  October 2009 attack in Rishon LeZion where six members of the Oshrenko family were stabbed to death, including a 3-year old and a three-month old baby. The implication is that Israelis have a knee-jerk reaction to automatically blame Palestinian Arabs for all murders, even though that one was found to have been allegedly done by Israelis (the trial for the accused murderers has not yet taken place.)

However, the Oshrenko case proves the opposite.

At no time was that massacre ever assumed to be terrorism. From the beginning, police knew that the Oshrenkos owned a restaurant and had business dealings that could have, and evidently did, lead them to the murderers. 

The Rishon LeZion murders prove that Israelis are not blinded by bias when confronted with evil. And any implication that the Fogels, part of a small, tight-knit religious community, were killed by members of that same community - on a Friday night, no less - is simply the worst example of deflecting the blame for the crime to the victims.

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After I wrote this, Ma'an "reported"

Israeli forces on Monday afternoon rounded up all Thai workers employed in the Itamar settlement, site of the murder of five members of the Fogel family, and held them for questioning, informed sources told Ma'an.

Though Palestinians have been forbidden from working in the settlements of the northern West Bank, foreign workers, mostly from Thailand and the Philippines, have been contracted for labor in the area.

Sources close to some of the Thai laborers said that all of the workers had been gathered and taken for questioning in relation to the stabbing deaths of a settler family on Friday night.

So I held off on posting this until I could get confirmation or denial of this story.

And while I cannot give full attribution, security forces in Israel have informed me that the Ma'an story is, and I am unofficially quoting here, "total bullshit." No Thai workers have been arrested in connection with the Itamar murders.

Classic misdirection, times two, courtesy of Ma'an.