Newly-appointed Deputy Knesset Speaker Moshe Feiglin has warned one of former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin’s grandchildren that her remarks about him are grounds for libel.

Noa Rotman, after hearing that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed Feiglin as of one several deputy speakers, wrote on Facebook, “Feiglin is the man who established Zu Artzeinu, the movement that was responsible or the incitement that brought democracy in Israel to a new low and brought about the murder of the Prime Minister of Israel.”

She added that the appointment left her with the feeling of a being outside her own country.

Feiglin wrote on Facebook Tuesday that Rotman’s logic also could be used to conclude that the “architects of the Oslo Accords are responsible for the murder of 2,000 Israelis been killed in post-Oslo terrorist attacks.”

He added, “I feel sorry for Rotman, but if she continues with this kind of approach, I will be forced to sue for libel.”

Terrorism broadly takes two forms: against random individuals who happen to be at a market place or on a bus at the wrong time; or against specific individuals because of who they are. The latter in turn divides into two: against broad categories of people (the military, Jews, people who wear eyeglasses) and against specific public figures, either individuals or institutions. In effect, these last are assassinations (defined by Merriam-Webster as “to murder (a usually prominent person) by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons”).

Horrific as the first two genres are, assassinations are the most terrifying and effective. Whereas the first two can happen to anyone and have the effect of creating a universal but vague dread, the third focuses on a small pool of targets and sends a specific signal to others not to follow in their footsteps. In general, therefore, assassinations inspire the most consequential fear, intimidate the most, and have the greatest consequences.

Actual public Western victims of Islamist violence have included:

1980: Ali Akbar Tabataba’i, Iranian dissident, in the United States* 1980: Faisal Zagallai, Libyan dissident, in the United States 1990: Rashad Khalifa, Egyptian religious innovator, in the United States* 1990: Meir Kahane, Israel politician of American origins, in the United States* 1991: Hitoshi Igarashi, Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses* 1991: Ettore Capriolo, Italian translator of The Satanic Verses 1993: William Nygaard, Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses 2004: Theo van Gogh, Dutch artist* 2010: Kurt Westergaard, Danish cartoonist 2010: Lars Vilks, Swedish artist 2010: Jyllands-Posten, Danish newspaper 2012: Charlie Hebdo, French satiric magazine 2013: Lars Hedegaard, Danish historian and political analyst Notes: * indicates a fatality. Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, head of the Libyan government, was an Islamist in 1980. I do not list here victims of Muslim but non-Islamist assassinations, such as Malcolm X in 1965. For the record, a Palestinian Christian killed Robert Kennedy in 1968.

Statistical comments:

(1) Other than one isolated attack in 2004, this listing of 13 inexplicably divides into two distinct periods, seven in 1980-93 and five in 2010-13.

(2) Listed by their identity, the victims include 8 connected to culture and the arts, 3 political figures, 1 religious one, and 1 analyst. Of the eight cultural attacks, 4 involved cartoons, 3 Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, and one a movie, Submission.

(3) Geographically, 8 took place in Europe, 4 in the United States, and one in Japan. Of the European cases, three took place in tiny Denmark. Britain and Germany are conspicuously missing from this list. Oddly, the 4 American instances took place in either 1980 or 1990.

(4) State involvement can be discerned only in the first 3 cases (Iranian, Libyan, and Saudi, respectively).

(5) In terms of deadliness, 5 attacks led to a fatality, 8 did not.

And a personal note by way of conclusion: the Feb. 5 attack on Hedegaard – a friend and colleague at the Middle East Forum – inspired me to compile this listing in the hopes that aggregating these loathsome crimes will help wake more Westerners to the danger within.

Originally published at the Gatestone Institute.

Palestinian terrorist group, The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) has responded to the assassination of Hamas no. 2 Ahmad al-Jaabari, verbally at least, Palestinian news website, Ma’an reported.

“With this assassination, Israel has opened the gates of hell,” PRC spokesman Abu Mujahid told Ma’an.

“Cowardly settlers had better flee to shelters where we will bury them and they will never be able to leave,” Abu Mujahid added. ”The occupation has started the battle and we will respond very fiercely to their crimes.”

Meretz MK Zahava Galon says killing Jabri was not worthwhile and that Israel should negotiate immediately to stop the violence.

Chadash MK Dov Hanin asked, “When will they learn that after each assassination there will be revenge.”

Israeli leftists and Arabs decry defensive IDF operation on Gaza, calling for demonstration tonight in front Likud Tel-Aviv HQ.

Attorneys for Pathologist Yehuda Hiss, considered the man who knows “where all the bodies are buried” (including the questionable circumstances of the assassination of a prime minister some seventeen years ago) are saying the rumors about his being fired by Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman s on Monday are premature.

Hiss has been a controversial figure for years, and his Abu Kabir forensic lab has been involved in a number of strange controversies and scandals revolving around the collection of bodies organs as well reports of missing body parts and other organs from dead bodies that passed through his lab.

Families have complained for years that the bodies of dead family members they received back were missing organs, and the bodies were stuffed with other materials to hide the missing parts.

Initially the Health Ministry wanted to try to reunite the found body parts and bury them with their original bodies, but the job of identifying each unlabeled organ and sample to their their original owner has proven to difficult to do.

Hundreds of people have contacted the Health Ministry to try to reclaim body parts over the past few months since the initiative “Final Resting Place” was launched, where the Health Ministry tries to link as many parts to their owners as they can so they can get a proper burial.

But due to the difficulty in identifying all the parts to their original bodies, the Health Ministry created a mass grave for many of the 8288 body parts, many of them not documented, that Hiss and his lab had collected over the years.

Some are upset their family member’s body parts went into a mass grave.

Others have wondered why it took so long for Hiss to be fired, and that is a whole other story.

The outspoken statements we cited here, at the Jewish Press, by Hagai Amir, brother of Rabin’s assassin Yogal Amir, took me back to my own personal encounter with the Rabin assassination. It didn’t exactly change my life, but it taught me several crucial lessons.

On that fateful Shabbat in November, 1995, when rumors reached Manhattan’s Lower East Side that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been wounded by an assailant’s bullets, we were at the Seuda Shlishit (third meal) in the Chassidic shteibel where I davened for more than two decades. (I also belonged to another, more left-wing, modern Orthodox shul. I’m a difficult person to classify.) Between conversations and nibbling, one of my neighbors bent over and whispered, smiling, “At least in this shul we know no one is going to recited Tehillim for his speedy recovery.”

My immediate, totally uncalculated reaction was to open a siddur (prayer book) and begin to recite Tehillim. I couldn’t behave otherwise. That‘s my nature – if someone will tell me NOT to jump off a bridge, I’m already up on the railing, hat in hand.

Even if I had known on that Shabbat that Rabin’s murder would mark the end of my career in Hebrew language journalism, I definitely would have continued to recite those chapters of Tehillim, and not just to be different than the other Jewish guy who said whatever he said.

Still, if on that Shabbat you would have asked me if I supported Yitzchak Rabin’s politics, I would have certainly replied in the negative. There are even those that claim that Yitzhak Rabin himself already didn’t completely agree with his government’s course of action, and was possibly even considering how to change direction, when the murderer’s bullet stopped him.

However, it’s not those old arguments that I want to relate, rather my inconspicuous and non-dramatic connection to the big story. Maybe one day some historian will come across this article and I will merit having my name mentioned in a footnote in some important book about the murder.

I have already gone over broad details of quite a few accounts of Rabin’s murder, and considering the fact that I am a peaceful individual by nature, even a bit of a coward, certainly not the type to run ahead and climb all kinds of barricades, I have been incredibly close to several high profile murders.

One Shabbat afternoon, when I was 6 years old, in Ramat Chen, Zhurabin shot his cousin over something the cousin he had done in the Irgun. It was a dark Shabbat in 1960, I believe, about 35 years before the gloomy Shabbat of the Rabin murder. I was looking out my bedroom window on the second floor on HaSeren Dov Street and I saw the wounded uncle limping down the sidewalk to Dr. Gorelick’s house at the corner of Aluf David Street.

He left a trail of big, thick beads of blood on the gray, cement sidewalk, tiny red puddles that turned brown, but didn’t disappear for many years. Red and gray were the colors of the Zhurabin murder attempt. I think he was put into a mental institution and after that we were told not to mention the whole affair in front of his children, even though they were bullies and occasionally deserved pushback. (If they didn’t pick you to play little-goal soccer—the soccer equivalent of stickball—you didn’t play.)

When I was 16, I hung around with some friends in Bat Yam, among them Rachel Heller, a thin, shy, teenage girl. I really have nothing significant to say about besides her name and what she looked like. Several years later, when I was already in New York, distributing Ma’ariv and Yedioth newspapers every Friday night, I suddenly saw that a guy named Amos Barnas admitted to murdering her seven years before. I didn’t remember this entire affair until 1981, when I saw Heller’s picture and did a double take.

Before this, in 1980, I was driving a yellow taxi cab and I left off a passenger at the Dakota Building at 72nd Street and Central Park West, just a day before Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon on the very same sidewalk.

By the way, does anyone know why all American assassins have two first names? Lee Harvey Oswald. James Earl Ray. John Wilkes Booth. Charles Julius Guiteau (killed Garfield).

More than a dozen Iranian citizens arrested in connection with the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists have confessed, Iranian state television reported.

The Iranians were shown in a television report describing how they were trained at an Israeli military camp near Tel Aviv. One of the suspects said the operation was being sponsored by the United States and Israel, according to The Associated Press.

“The assassination control room was in Tel Aviv, but it was receiving the orders from Washington and London,” according to the TV report.

The alleged spies, who were arrested in June, include eight men and six women, the AP reported.

At least five nuclear scientists have been assassinated in the last two years. Iranian officials have said they believe that Israel and its Mossad intelligence agency were behind the killings.

In May, Iran executed a man convicted of spying for Israel and assassinating an Iranian nuclear scientist. Majid Jamali Fashi, 24, was sentenced to death in August 2010 for the murder of Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University killed by a remote-controlled bomb in a January 2010 attack.

In April, more than 15 Iranian and foreign nationals reportedly were arrested for carrying out alleged terrorist missions for Israel in Iran, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s official news service. The group was accused of spying for Israel, the attempted assassination of an Iranian expert and sabotage.

President Barack Obama has invited his newly elected Egyptian counterpart Mohamed Morsi to visit the US for an official visit in September. Deputy Secretary of State William Perez said he delivered this message during his meetings with Morsi on Sunday.

This will be the first visit ever to the US by a Muslim Brotherhood member in an official capacity.

Obama congratulated Morsi after his victory in Egypt’s first-ever free presidential elections. Obama also confirmed the U.S. commitment to democratic development in Egypt and to its the economy, offering American support.

One of the issues Morsi is certain to bring up as part of the preparation for his visit, would be his pledge to seek the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman from U.S. custody.

Sheikh Abdel-Rahman, better known as the “blind sheik,” is serving a life sentence at a federal penitentiary in North Carolina for his role in planning the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City.

The WSJ’s Matt Bradley reported that the Sheikh’s detention “has become a cause célèbre among hard-line Salafi Islamists” who pushed Morsi over the top in his runoff against former PM Ahmed Shafiq.

Sheikh Abdel-Rahman is the leader of the Egyptian terrorist group Al Gama’a al Islamiyya, accused of masterminding the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The blind sheik managed to leave Egypt unscathed after the assassination, and moved to Afghanistan, where he joined with Osama bin Laden.

In 1990, Sheikh Abdel-Rahman moved to New York where, in 1995, he was convicted on charges of “seditious conspiracy” in connection with the Trade Center bombing.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he opposes releasing the sheik.