On Oct. 22, a Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into a crowd at a Jerusalem light rail station, murdering two people, one of them a 3-month-old baby. On Nov. 5, another terrorist used his van as a weapon against pedestrians at another light rail station in the Israeli capital, killing one person and wounding more than a dozen others.
The seeming randomness of the attacks is particularly terrifying – exactly as the killers intend. The attacker doesn’t need any bomb-making skills or expertise as a sniper. He doesn’t have to elude security checkpoints or Israeli army patrols. All he has to do is get in his car and step on the gas pedal. He can strike anywhere, any time.
And yet Israelis are going about their daily lives as they always do. They’re not going to stop taking the train. They know that a crowd at a bus stop or outside a movie theater or on a corner waiting for the green walk signal could be targets too. Life has to go on.
Israelis don’t worry because they have no choice. Visitors worry because they do. They can and will soon return to their home countries, where standing on a street corner is not a life-endangering action. That is a difference between the lives of Americans and Israelis that can’t be bridged.
Yet there is another, and very important, difference. The average Israeli can’t do much about Palestinian terrorism. But the average American Jew can.
Israelis have little choice but to rely on the police and the army to continue doing everything possible to preempt the terrorists in their on-going genocidal war against them. American Jews, however, have the ability to take political action that could make a real difference in the fight against Palestinian terrorism.
Let us recognize that “car terrorists” do not simply appear out of nowhere.
Abdel Rahman al-Shaludi, who carried out the Oct. 22 attack, had twice served time in prison for terrorist activities. His uncle, Mohiyedine Sharif, was a senior Palestinian terrorist who was killed in an intra-Arab feud in 1998.
Ibrahim al-Akari, who perpetrated the Nov. 5 attack, was the brother of Musa al-Akari, who was convicted in the kidnap-murder of an Israeli border policeman and was freed in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.
Al-Shaludi and al-Akari are the products of a society, and a culture, in which murdering Jews – whether by bomb, knife, or automobile – is praised and rewarded. What influenced Abdel Rahman al-Shaludi and Ibrahim Akari to become “car terrorists”? One source was the Palestinian Authority’s leadership and social media. Exhibit A: Sultan al-Einen. He’s a senior adviser to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, which is the largest faction of the PLO (the PA’s parent body) and is also chaired by Abbas.
Palestinian Media Watch has compiled a long list of statements by Einen praising terrorists. But the one that attracted the most attention was his public praise, in May 2013, of a terrorist who stabbed to death an Israeli father of five. Einen said the killer was a “heroic fighter” and called for “blessings to the breast that nursed him.”
In response, five members of Congress – Republican Ed Royce (Calif.) and Democrats Eliot Engel (N.Y.), Nita Lowey (N.Y.), Ted Deutch (Fla.), and Brad Sherman (Calif.) – wrote to Abbas, demanding that he fire Einen.
Abbas ignored the letter.
After the car attack by al-Shaludi two weeks ago, Einen publicly hailed him as a “heroic martyr” and charged that Israel “murdered him in cold blood.” Fatah’s Facebook page is replete with cartoons extolling “car terrorism” and urging viewers to “Hit the gas at 199 [km/h] for Al-Aqsa.”