Two brothers have been accused of planting the bombs that went off during the Boston marathon, resulting in the deaths of four innocent people, including one child, and injuring over 200.

The mother of the two brothers is Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. In an interview, she speaks of her sons Tamerlan and Tzhokhar Tsarnaevso to CNN.

“If they are going to kill him. I don’t care. My oldest son has been killed, and I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And, I don’t care if I am going to get killed too. Okay? And I will say Allahu Akbar! That’s what I’m going to say!“  – Zubeidat Tsarnaeva

The surviving brother, all of 19-years old, has said the actions they took were to defend Islam. His words, combined with his mother’s words make it clear what the motive was. It is, once again, a message from a culture that cares more for martyrdom than life. I watched this video, wondering if maybe it is a hoax. CNN wasn’t particularly reliable when reporting about the Boston marathon manhunt…maybe, maybe this is just another case of bad reporting?

Why would a woman, days after losing one son, say she doesn’t even care about losing a second son also? I cannot, for the life of me, understand this woman. There is a line from an article I once wrote that goes through my head again and again, ”Such anger they must have, such hatred.”

This morning, driving in, Amira was talking about a class she is taking in university and the various discussions they have about violence and terror. Some of her classmates and her oh-so-left-leaning-professor expressed satisfaction that so many Arabs are refraining from committing violent acts (well, not counting the rock-throwing and fire-bombing, of course).

“No one ever told me ‘Kol HaKavod’ for not killing anyone,” my beautiful daughter said to me and I smiled. Kol HaKavod’s direct translation is “All of the honor” – these words indicate high praise in Israel – good work, you did the right thing, good for you. When a younger child makes a mess and an older child cleans it up, you tell him, “Kol HaKavod.” You didn’t have to and despite that, you did – good for you.

When Davidi spent his entire winter vacation studying and taking the course to ride on the intensive care ambulance – I told him, “Kol HaKavod,” – I’m proud of you.

I can’t get past the thought that this idiot woman thinks saying “Allahu Akbar” is her Kol HaKavod. Your sons MURDERED four people…people who were loved. Families devastated. There’s a woman who spends every day in the same hospital as Zubeidat’s son – only this woman visits with her two boys – both have lost a leg because of her sons’ actions.

If you praise your god for actions that lead to the deaths of innocents, to the permanent maiming of dozens – there is truly something wrong with your “god.”

May God watch over the people of Boston and those injured. May He grant them health and love and justice. For Zubeidat and her sons, I pray that God grants them a just sentence – in this world and in the next.

Visit A Soldier’s Mother.

Flora Cohen presently lives in Nahariyya, Israel. She has three children and 16 grandchildren. However, she was born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco. Flora was born and spent her childhood living under French colonial rule. Under French rule, Flora claims that Morocco was a modern European state, full of cafés. However, in other respects, the Moroccans did not enjoy the same opportunities that the Europeans did. Living as part of the Jewish minority there was not easy, since being a Jew was a dirty word both in French and Arabic.

While the situation on the whole was tolerable when the French were still in control of Morocco, Flora does not believe the situation was good in retrospect. Flora recalled that not every one was permitted to attend school; that required having the right connections. In her family, all of the boys managed to go to school, yet out of all of the girls in her family, only she was able to go to school. One of her sisters tried to go to school, yet was continuously rejected and thus was forced instead to go to a vocational school where she learned how to sew, instead of learning how to read and write.

Kindergartens only existed for the very rich and women thus had to stay at home to raise the children, despite the fact that it was very difficult to finance having nine to ten children without the woman working. Eighty percent of the students in Morocco were forced to quit their studying following the 8th grade because their families needed them to work for financial reasons. Flora blames the French for this, since they were the ones in control of the country, not the Arabs.

While the French were still in control, Jews were able to coexist for the most part with Arabs peacefully. Flora knew Arabs in her area who were very good people and got along with the Jews well. But there still were incidents.

Flora’s grandfather and his brother were murdered by Arabs, thus leaving her grandmother a widow with two children. The family wasn’t even able to retrieve the bodies for a proper Jewish burial. In June 1948, bloody riots erupted in Oujda and Djerada, resulting in the death of 44 Moroccan Jews while many more were wounded. An unofficial boycott was initiated against the Moroccan Jewish community that same year. Eighteen thousand Moroccan Jews went to Israel during that period. But since the situation was still not as bad as in other Arab countries thanks to the French, most of the Jews stayed in Morocco a bit longer than in other Arab states.

Nevertheless, it was a common practice in Morocco for some Muslims to abduct young virgin Jewish girls, forcefully convert them to Islam, and to make them marry Muslims. Indeed, one of Flora’s relatives suffered this fate and thus did not come to Israel from Morocco with the rest of the family. In addition, Flora mentioned that one woman from Fez also was going to be forced to marry a Muslim and she decided to commit suicide rather than endure this fate. Many Moroccan Jews who participate in Jewish heritage trips to Morocco visit her grave. For this reason, Jewish girls were married off at a very early age, in order to avoid that horrible fate. This had the negative effect of inhibiting the development of Moroccan Jewish women.

Once Moroccans rose up against the French in their struggle for independence, the situation dramatically deteriorated for Moroccan Jews. Terrorism was widespread within the country and Jews were also the victims of such violence, not just the French, since the Jews supported the French. Flora claimed that the situation in Morocco was very much similar to the situation in Israel during the Second Intifada. There were explosions everywhere. Supermarkets were blowing up. People were scared to go out.

Flora said that her brother was almost murdered by Arabs, but that another Arab saved his life by lying and claiming that he was an Arab Muslim from Fez. Soon after this incident, the family decided that they had to leave Morocco and make Aliyah to Israel, even though they weren’t allowed to bring more things with them than what could fit into just one suitcase. This is when most of the Jews in Morocco made Aliyah to Israel.

It took time for her family to leave the country. They spent two months stranded in a special camp in Casablanca, before they were permitted to leave. In August 1956, Flora and her family were able to fly to France, where they were forced to stay for another month before they were permitted to move to Israel. When they arrived in Israel, they were placed on trucks and taken to Moshav Barak. In the moshav, there were no paved roads and no indoor bathrooms. Since they were assigned to create the moshav, they had to do much physical labor. It took a couple of years for her family to get established, yet in the end, her life significantly improved upon making Aliyah to Israel. 

In the moshav, her family had a house and was treated with dignity. The Ashkenazim and Mizrahim got along well together. She was very happy to come to Israel. In the end, she married an IDF soldier and raised her family near Haifa, before moving into a bigger house in Nahariyya. She reports that she is very happy with her decision to come to Israel.

Visit United With Israel.

If you want to affect how people think about an issue, putting your case onto the cover of the New York Times Magazine must be one of the most effective things to do. And, given the intense competition, one of the hardest. So if the editors of the NYT (108 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization; 30 million unique visitors per month to its website; the largest local metropolitan newspaper in the United States – according to Wikipedia) give you the cover of the prestigious Magazine, it’s a massive vote of confidence, a huge privilege, a platform of the most effective kind that (probably) can’t be bought for money.

Friends have pointed us to this week’s NYT Magazine cover story, published Sunday. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. It’s a place the author calls “spirited,” where “on warm summer evenings, life… could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone.” He says “a pilgrimage” to this magical place “has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s”.

How can you not be captivated?But there is much wrong with the picture he conjures up. We know this because for years we have been tracking the media’s romance with the community called Nabi Saleh. Sitting here and looking over the online version of it, we are furious with anger about what the article says, and what the writer and his editors carefully avoid saying.

Start with some background: the Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh describes the village of some 550 people in notably gentle terms. Centered on an old religious shrine to the prophet Shelah whom we encounter in Genesis as the son of Judah and grandson of the patriarch Jacob, it was a hamlet of a mere five houses in the late nineteenth century when the Turks ruled the area. It grew slowly under the Jordanian military occupation that started in 1948; then declined when Israel took control of Judea and Samaria in 1967, and flourished and multiplied in the past two decades. Today, it’s the scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s English-language version, a place where things are done to passive inhabitants for no apparent reason.

Now if you go to the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia, you see a quite different emphasis. It’s not at all a direct translation of the English version. It’s created by different people for a different audience and different sensibilities. The Arabic Wikipedia entry depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that boasts of having taken a prominent role in two Intifadas, providing “hundreds of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the altar of freedom.” The most prominent of the prisoners (Wikipedia’s description) is a woman called Ahlam. Her surname is shared with almost every other inhabitant of the village: Tamimi.

But it is Bassem Tamimi who is the focus of the article. He calls the Intifada launched by Yasser Arafat in 2000 “the big mistake… Politically, we went backward.”The NYT writer helps us understand what kind of backward he means:

Much of the international good will gained over the previous decade was squandered. Taking up arms wasn’t, for Bassem, a moral error so much as a strategic one. He and everyone else I spoke with in the village insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just don’t think it works.

Or to say it another way: they are entitled to kill the Israelis and have done so again and again, but it’s not effective. A different kind of warfare therefore needs to be adopted.

Half-way through the essay, he introduces a figure who embodies that “big mistake”:

In 1993, Bassem told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh.

That’s all he writes about Ahlam Tamimi but we can tell you more. She is a Jordanian who was 21 years old and the news-reader on official Palestinian Authority television when she signed on with Hamas to become a terrorist. She engineered, planned and helped execute a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on a hot summer afternoon in 2001. She chose the target, a restaurant filled with Jewish children. And she brought the bomb. The outcome (15 killed, a sixteenth still in a vegetative state today, 130 injured) was so uplifting to her that she has gone on camera again and again to say, smiling into the camera lens, how proud she is of what she did. She is entirely free of regret. A convicted felon and a mass-murderer convicted on multiple homicide charges, she has never denied the role she embraced and justifies it fully.

A Toronto Jewish couple found dead in their Florida townhouse in January were asphyxiated, police said.

Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy of Hallandale Beach, Fla., said Wednesday that there were at least two perpetrators, and police have “no reason to believe the people responsible were known to [the couple].” The January murders of Toronto snowbirds David “Donny” Pichosky and Rochelle Wise in South Florida were “senseless,” Flournoy added.

Wise, 66, was a retired preschool administrator at Bialik Hebrew Day School in Toronto and a former director of a day camp. Pichosky, her husband of four years, was a retired businessman who volunteered with Jewish seniors. The couple belonged to Toronto’s Sha’arei Shomayim Congregation. Their deaths shocked Toronto’s Jewish community.

Investigators quickly ruled their deaths a double murder but chose not to release the cause of death after receiving the results of toxicology tests. Flournoy and other member of his team visited Toronto in January to gather leads.

In February, police released video surveillance footage shot the day before the couple’s bodies were discovered of a woman carrying an unidentified item toward the back of the townhouse Wise and Pichosky shared.

Police are awaiting the results of further forensic testing, Flournoy said. There are also numerous surveillance tapes to be studied. He refused to comment on whether anything was stolen from the home.

CrimeStoppers and private donors have offered a reward of $51,000 for information that would help solve the case.

The murder of a retired Canadian Jewish couple—David “Donny” Pichosky, 71, and Rochelle Wise, 66—remains a mystery, two weeks after their bodies were discovered in their winter home at the Venetian Park Apartments in Hallandale, South Florida.

Hallandale police detectives are scheduled to arrive in Toronto today, Sunday, where they will meet with police and question the couple’s family, friends, and business associates.

“We want to establish who the victims knew and who they had daily contact with,” Hallandale police Chief Dwayne Fluornoy told the Sun Sentinel.

Fluornoy will join two of his detectives and the commander in charge of the investigation on the visit to Toronto.

The couple’s funeral service drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 1,000, according to The Canadian Jewish News. Rabbi Chaim Strauchler, spiritual leader of Shaarei Shomayim Congregation, said at the double funeral at Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel, “We are overwhelmed by tragedy, and we are beset with questions.”

The couple’s bodies were discovered on Jan. 10. So far, police have not disclosed how they were killed and any possible motive. Fluornoy has rvealed that police have not yet “zeroed in on a person of interest,” but asserted that they were pursuing “solid, good leads.”

“Although we haven’t been able to discuss much, we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress,” Fluornoy said last Thursday.

Rochelle Wise’s son, Jamie, told the guests at the funeral that he was “confused, frozen, angry, shocked and broken… searching for information, answers, resolution and justice. These questions won’t stop, and shouldn’t stop, until justice is found.”

In his eulogy he recalled how his mother would “inspire, teach, and encourage people to dream… to see the potential within them.”

Wise worked as preschool administrator at Bialik Hebrew Day School and was a founding director of Crestwood Valley Day Camp.

Her husband of four years David Pichosky was a retired businessman who volunteered with seniors at Baycrest. He had spent more than 20 winters in Florida.

Jamie Wise said his mother had “truly found her bashert” in Pichosky, whom he recalled as kind and gentle, according to The Canadian Jewish News. He read from a note Rochelle Wise had left him and his sister, in which she wrote: “Please remember what I taught you about love and kindness, respect for others, and your responsibility to the Jewish community. Remember to acknowledge daily the gifts and blessings God has given you.”

Wise’s daughter, Dina Shapiro, recalled her mother as an “incredible, loving, formidable, charitable woman” who was devoted to her family and her work.

Last Tuesday evening, Fluornoy met with more than 75 members of the Venetian Park condo association, to assure them that they had no reason to live in fear.

Fluornoy asked residents with surveillance cameras to notify police so that they could review the footage.

“Venetian Park is well off the beaten path,” Fluornoy said. “For someone to come here accidentally or unintentionally … I don’t see that happening.”

Buddy Tyler, a neighbor, said he thinks what Fluornoy means is that the killings were not a random act of violence.

Daniel Alexander, who has lived at Venetian Park for just six months, said the chief’s words disturbed him.

“I wish I had more explanation, more details on the case,” Alexander said. “Unfortunately, I’m more concerned than before, because we don’t know who did it, how they did it… It raises more concerns.”

MK Michael Ben-Ari of the Otzma l’Yisrael party led a protest on Monday against the illegal Sudanese and Eritrean aliens living in southern Tel Aviv. Hundred of people participated in the rally.

Ben-Ari and Aryeh Eldad have made the expulsion of the illegal aliens a centerpiece of their political campaign.

The protest called, “Blowing up the Silence” was initiated after an Eritrean alien was caught brutally raping an 83 year old woman. The suspect, who was tied to the assault by his DNA, has reportedly has been arrested a number of time for other sexual assaults.

As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book The World Turned Upside Down, Northeastern University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), paralleling the moral incoherence of anti-Israel activists demonstrating elsewhere in American and European cities, sponsored a November 15 Boston rally in support of Gaza and, presumably, its genocidal thugocracy, Hamas.

The members of SJP who attended the demonstration, along with their fellow travelers of anti-Semites, Israel haters, and such psychologically mystifying groups as Jewish Voice for Peace, apparently were not sufficiently concerned when some 12,000 rockets and mortars were launched almost daily into southern Israeli towns from Gaza by Hamas over the past seven years, aimed at civilian targets for no other reason than the intended victims were Jews.

Once Hamas began to deploy more sophisticated, and lethal, Iranian-supplied Fajr-5 rockets, able to reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Israel finally retaliated, as it had in 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead, with targeted strikes against Hamas, the inevitable civilian casualties were immediately elevated by Israel’s worldwide critics to “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” and “disproportionate” responses to what they evidently believe to a mere inconvenience for Israelis upon whom rockets and mortars have incessantly rained down.

What was particularly revealing, and chilling, about the Boston rally was the virulence of the chants and messages on the placards, much of it seeming to suggest that more sinister hatreds and feelings – over and above concern for the current military operations – were simmering below the surface. Several of the morally self-righteous protestors, for instance, shrieked out, to the accompaniment of drumbeats, “Long live Intifada,” a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1,000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others.

That pro-Palestinian student activists, those who purport to be motivated by a desire to bring “justice” to the Middle East, could publicly call for the renewed slaughter of Jews in the name of Palestinian self-determination demonstrates quite clearly how ideologically debased the human rights movement has become. Students on U.S. campuses, who never have to face a physical threat more serious than getting jostled while waiting in line at Starbucks, are quick to downplay Israel’s very real existential threats and the necessity of the Jewish state to take counter measures to thwart terrorism. And quick to label the killing of Hamas terrorists by the IDF as “genocide,” these morally blind individuals see no contradiction in their calls for the renewed murder of Jews for their own sanctimonious cause.

Of course, the notion of murdering Jews to extirpate Israel is not a unique one, since words to that effect are regularly uttered by, among others, Iran’s raving president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who dreams of such apocalyptic final solutions. What is unique is the morally-defective logic that would enable otherwise sane people to justify a second Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews, on the basis of Israel having defended itself from years of rocket attacks and having killed murderous terrorists in the process.

Making the Middle East free of Jews is exactly what Hamas, the group of genocidal brutes cheered on by the Boston demonstrators, ardently longs for; in fact, Hamas’s charter expresses as one of its core tenets that Israel should be eliminated and that Jews should be murdered.

Another deadly chorus emanated from protestors during the rally: “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” This is an oft repeated but disingenuous and false notion – that stateless terrorists have some recognized human right to murder civilians whose government has purportedly occupied their territory. That is clearly not any longer the case in Gaza, where every Jew was removed in 2005 and where there is a blockade in effect to prevent the influx of weapons, but clearly no occupation.

It may be comforting for Israel’s ideological foes to rationalize the murder of Jews by claiming some international right to do it with impunity and a sense of righteousness. But as legal experts have pointed out, the rally participants and their terror-appeasing apologists elsewhere are completely wrong about the legitimacy of murder as part of “resistance” to an occupying force.

Article IV of the Third Geneva Convention, the statute that defines combatants and legitimate targets in warfare, is very specific about who may kill and who may be killed, and it does not allow for the murder of either Israeli civilians or soldiers by Palestinian suicide bombers who wear no identifying military uniforms and do not follow the accepted rules of wars. Nor, certainly, does it recognize the legitimacy of launching more than 12,000 random rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza aimed at Israeli neighborhoods, a violation of the Geneva conventions that require “distinction” in the targeting of opponents and clearly a more salient example of “collective punishment” than, say, the Gaza blockade itself.

A man and a woman in the Toulouse area were arrested on suspicion that they helped Mohammed Merah “commit crimes” that may have included the murder of four Jews.

According to L’Express, a French daily, French authorities arrested the two on Tuesday morning. Reports in the French media said there was no use of force.

The French news service AFP named one of the suspects as Charles Mencarelli and reported that he had been arrested in Albi, about 45 miles northeast of Toulouse. AFP described Mencarelli as not having a permanent address. His life partner was arrested at her home in Toulouse, according to the report.

The pair will be brought for arraignment within 96 hours of their arrest, according to  L’Express, during which time they will be interrogated about their links with Merah. They are not suspected of belonging to a jihadist network, an unnamed police source told L’Express.

Merah, a 23-year-old radical Muslim, killed a rabbi and three children in a pre-planned attack on the Otzar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse on March 19. The slayings came a few days after Merah gunned down three French soldiers in two drive-by shootings from a scooter near Toulouse. He was shot dead on March 22 by police as they stormed his home.

Tuesday’s arrests were headed by France’s domestic intelligence service, DCRI, and the country’s top SWAT team, the anti-terrorist SDAT unit.