Shin Bet nabs man who allegedly planned to bomb Ashdod hotel
The Shin Bet security service said Sunday it had caught an Arab Israeli man who was planning to carry out a terror attack in a hotel in support of the Palestinian terror group Hamas.Honest Reporting: The Munich Massacre: The 1972 Slaughter of Israeli Athletes on German Soil
Adel Abu Hadayeb, 20, of the southern Bedouin town of Rahat, was indicted Sunday in the Beersheba District Court for allegedly planning to bomb the Leonardo Hotel in Ashdod, which was near where he worked as a gardener.
Abu Hadayeb became a supporter of Hamas after being exposed to online propaganda materials for the group, the indictment reads, and had already attempted to construct a bomb for the attack by the time he was arrested last month.
He also attempted to build a rocket, and had purchased some of the materials needed.
Grenades belonging to Adel Abu Hadayeb, 20, of the southern town of Rahat, who was indicted on July 21, 2019, for allegedly planning a terror attack in Ashdod. (Courtesy Shin Bet)
After his arrest, he led investigators to a stash of five grenades — two stun grenades, one smoke grenade and two tear-gas grenades — as well as a “Carlo” submachine gun he had collected.
In a statement, the Shin Bet said Abu Hadayeb’s alleged radicalization was part of a trend in which Israeli citizens were being “influenced by Hamas propaganda spread on social networks and through Palestinian media.”
Following the 2005 release of Steven Spielberg’s movie, Munich, the attack’s mastermind, Black September leader Mohammad Daoud Oudeh (a.k.a. Abu Daoud) told Sports Illustrated that the attack was financed by Mahmoud Abbas. Daoud died of kidney failure in Damascus in 2010.
Five of the Munich massacre martyrs, Andre Spitzer, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Eliezer Halfin, and Mark Slavin were buried together in Tel Aviv’s Kiryat Shaul Cemetery. Another fallen athlete, dual US-Israeli citizen David Berger, was buried in his hometown of Cleveland, where a sculpture of broken Olympic rings was designated as a national memorial by the National Parks Service.
Widows of the murdered athletes have campaigned for official IOC commemorations at subsequent games such as a minute of silence during the opening ceremony. Olympic officials repeatedly rejected the idea saying such tributes would inject politics into the games. Matters came to a head four days before the 2012 London games — the fortieth anniversary of the Munich massacre — when, during a lightly-attended ceremony honoring the Olympic truce, IOC President Jacques Rogge held a spontaneous minute of silence for the Israelis. The widows denounced Rogge for “trying to do the bare minimum.”
In Memoriam
With the passage of time, the individuality of each of the 11 has faded into a collective group of Munich massacre victims. But for the generation that didn’t grow up with first-hand memories of the shock and horror of the Munich massacre, it’s worth reminding ourselves that Moshe Weinberg, Yossi Romano, Ze’ev Friedman, David Berger, Yakov Springer, Eliezer Halfin, Yossef Gutfreund, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, and Amitzur Shapira were all accomplished athletes who followed their own individual paths to the top of their sports. We can only imagine how they might have impacted the sporting world had they not been cruelly cut down.
Pre-Mossad, IDF – England’s Jewish Brigade fought Nazis, got Jews toward Israel
Before the establishment of the Mossad and the IDF in 1948, a unit of 5,500 Jews known as the Jewish Brigade fought the Nazis as part of the British Army, and carried out underground operations to smuggle Jews across Europe to sail to British-occupied Palestine.
While the activities of Aliyah Bet, the Bericha (Flight) and subsequently the Mossad are well-known, the Jewish Brigade preceded these efforts both in smuggling Jews to Israel – as well as providing food, necessities and preparation for aliyah – under the noses of the British, and in using wildly creative schemes to succeed in those efforts.
Put differently, the movie Exodus about the ship the SS Exodus 1947, which embarked from the port of Sète near Montpellier, France, en route to Palestine, is famous, but the brigade is the story about how Jews were smuggled to the docks to board ships like the Exodus.
The brigade is also distinguished from these other efforts as its establishment was critical in the success of the future IDF. Jewish volunteers in the British Army in general served as a pipeline for an estimated 721 of the IDF’s first 2,180 officers, and the brigade contained a sizable number of those 721.
Graduates of the brigade who took leadership positions in the IDF rose to the highest ranks, with Mordechai Makleff and Haim Laskov both becoming chiefs-of-staff.