US charges 2 terrorists for 2010 murder of American tourist in Israel
Charges were filed in the United States Thursday against two Palestinian terrorists jailed in Israel for the 2010 murder of a US citizen who was visiting the Jewish state.Melanie Phillips: The West’s ideological quagmire
Ayad Fatafta and Kifah Ghanimat face federal charges for murdering Kristine Luken on December 18, 2010, in a stabbing attack in the Jerusalem Forest that also seriously wounded Kay Wilson, a British-born Israeli citizen.
The two terrorists, both residents of a village near Hebron — which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority — are currently serving prison sentences in Israel. Arrest warrants were issued against them in the US on Thursday.
In 2012, Fatafta was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 20 years, and Ghanimat was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment and a further 60 years, for the lethal stabbing attack as well as another crime.
According to the US affidavit, Fatafta and Ghanimat stabbed Luken — a 44-year-old US national — to death while she was hiking near an archaeological site on a visit to Israel. She died at the scene.
According to the US Justice Department, “the maximum penalty for a person convicted of murdering a US national outside the US is a lifetime term of incarceration or death.”
Officials like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster are from the school of pragmatic realism. This views politics through the prism of state power and underplays the titanic civilizational issues now pitted against each other.Your neighbor's house is on fire, but he hates you. Do you help? That's Israel's Syria dilemma.
Which is why such figures tend not to understand the particular threat posed by Islamic religious fanaticism. It is also why they fail to grasp that the Middle East impasse is not a dispute over land boundaries between Israelis and Palestinians but an Islamic war of extermination against the Jewish homeland.
Trump’s great strength is that he is not an ideologue. The downside, however, is that he is therefore not governed by a strong, coherent view of the world. So he tends to be blown hither and yon by those who do have a strong worldview, depending upon who impresses him at any one moment.
Reportedly he has become exasperated by the vicious turf wars within his administration. As a result, it’s being said that his strategic genius Steve Bannon, who is driven by his own perception of the West’s suicidal civilizational decline, has lost out.
Those who believe Bannon is the ideologue driving America into disaster will sigh with relief that Trump appears to be reverting to traditional type.
Those who think pragmatic realpolitik was previously leading America off the civilizational precipice will be aghast.
This presidency is a work in progress. Donald Trump is on a steep learning curve. Whether he will learn the correct lessons is something on which we must all still hold our breath.
Israel has spent most of the Syrian civil war watching from the sidelines rather than becoming mired in a sectarian conflict in which neither of the sides looked particularly appealing as an ally.
Last week’s sarin gas attack, apparently by Syrian air forces, has intensified a long running debate about whether the government should be doing more to alleviate humanitarian suffering just beyond its northern border and act militarily to weaken President Bashar Assad.
Despite a state of war that exists between the neighbors, a growing number of Israelis are calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to do more to assist Syrian civilians, arguing that Jewish history of displacement imparts a moral obligation on Israel to help wounded Syrian civilians.
At a security cabinet meeting on Sunday, ministers mulled proposals to accept Syrian children injured in the gas attack — beyond a 4-year-old policy to take in Syrians from rebel areas near the border for temporary medical treatment — but made no final decision. A similar proposal that got consideration in the wake of the siege of Aleppo has yet to be implemented
“As Israelis and Jews, the use of gas takes us back [in time],’’ said Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz, alluding to the Holocaust, during the cabinet meeting. “Our obligation as Jews and Israelis is to offer aid to the victims of the gas attack. There are many children and the elderly…. We must not stand idly by.”
The angst points to a tug of war between two schools of thought on how to grapple with Syria, a dilemma that former National Security Advisor Giora Eiland described in an interview with Israel Radio as a “struggle between the Jewish heart and mind.’’