Khaled Abu Toameh: The Palestinians: Refugee Camps or Terrorist Bases?
The 450,000 Palestinians in Lebanon are still banned from several professions, especially in the fields of medicine and law. They refer to these restrictions as apartheid measures. The Lebanese apartheid measures against Palestinians are rarely mentioned in the Western media and international human rights groups. The UN does not seem overly concerned about this discrimination.A Deadly EU Blind Spot on Israel
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have become in the past few decades bases for various innumerable militias and terrorist groups.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, is formally in charge of the refugee camps in Lebanon, including those that are now providing shelter to Islamist terrorists.
The Lebanese authorities are increasingly running out of patience with the growing Islamist threat.
Following last week’s terror attack in Nice, a Belgian Jewish organization issued a highly unusual statement charging that, had European media not spent months “ignoring” Palestinian terror against Israel out of “political correctness,” the idea of a truck being used as a weapon wouldn’t have come as such a shock. But it now turns out that European officials did something much worse than merely ignoring Palestinian attacks: They issued a 39-page report, signed by almost every EU country, blaming these attacks on “the occupation” rather than the terrorists. The obvious corollary was that European countries had no reason to fear similar attacks and, therefore, they didn’t bother taking precautions that could have greatly reduced the casualties.ISIS Praises “Palestinian Tactic” of Truck Attack in Nice
The most shocking part of the Nice attack was how high those casualties were: The truck driver managed to kill 84 people before he was stopped. By comparison, as the New York Times reported on Monday, Israel has suffered at least 32 car-ramming attacks since last October, yet all these attacks combined have killed exactly two people (shootings and stabbings are much deadlier). Granted, most involved private cars, but even attacks using buses or heavy construction vehicles never approached the scale of Nice’s casualties. The deadliest ramming attack in Israel’s history, in 2001, killed eight.
Firstly, this is because Israel deploys massive security for mass gatherings like Nice’s Bastille Day celebrations, forcing Palestinian assailants to make do with less densely-populated targets, like bus stops or light rail stops, which greatly lowers the death toll. As an Israeli police spokesman told the New York Times, an Israeli event comparable to the one in Nice would entail “a 360-degree enclosure of the area, with layers of security around the perimeter,” including major roads “blocked off with rows of buses, and smaller side streets with patrol cars,” plus a massive police presence reinforced by counterterrorism units “strategically placed to provide a rapid response, if needed.”
Secondly, Israeli security personnel have no qualms about using deadly force against terrorists in mid-rampage if less lethal means would take longer to succeed because they understand that the best way to save innocent lives is to stop the attack as quickly as possible. This lesson was driven home by a 2008 attack in which a Palestinian plowed a heavy construction vehicle into a crowded Jerusalem street. A policewoman tried to stop him without killing him; she wounded him and then climbed into the cab to handcuff him. But while she was trying to cuff him, he managed to restart the vehicle and kill another person before he was shot dead.
ISIS supporters have praised the terrorist who used his truck to kill 84 people in Nice, France last week, hailing the Palestinians for developing the car ramming method.
“Killing by ramming using civilian cars and trucks is an idea born from the Maqdisi [Palestinian] mind, which has an innovative nature of thinking up jihad tactics,” one ISIS supporter commented on the social network Telegram. “Yesterday they taught us [about] the explosive vest, and many plans for street fighting, and today they taught us this tactic. May Allah bless Jerusalem and the environs of Jerusalem, and may Allah bless all of the Levant… Oh Aqsa, we are coming.”
Vehicular attacks have become a hallmark of Palestinian terrorism. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 46 car ramming attacks have been carried out by Palestinian terrorists in Israel since last September. One particularly high-profile incident in October 2015 saw a Palestinian terrorist ram his car into a group of people waiting at a bus-stop, then proceed to exit the vehicle and hack one of those wounded — Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky — to death. (The terrorist involved was later called a “martyr” by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who met with the killer’s family.)