Another so-called “price tag” attack occurred this morning in a village near the West Bank city of Salfit. “Israeli settlers,” according to reports, “set fire to the main entrance of the Broqeen Mosque, and a number of Palestinian cars parked nearby.” The International Middle East Media Center reports on the incident and gives a list of previous settler attacks:
Local sources reported that several armed Israeli settlers invaded the village and tried to burn down the mosque, but were only able to set its entrance ablaze. The settlers then burnt a number of parked cars within the vicinity.
The recent attack is part of a larger “Price Tag” campaign against the Palestinians, their holy sites, and their lands. The settlers blame the Palestinians for any evacuation of illegal settlement outposts in the occupied territories, and they even deface and vandalize homes and vehicles that belong to Israel’s Peace Now Movement, and its activists.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, November 8 and 9, extremist settlers killed one Palestinian, and set three Palestinian cars ablaze near the southern West Bank city of Hebron. The settlers also fired tear gas at a family of Palestinians in Ertas village, near Bethlehem.
A ten-year old child was among those attacked, and he was transferred to a hospital in Beit Jala after being rendered unconscious by the gas.
Earlier in November, a number of Israeli settlers set fire to a tractor belonging to a Palestinian farmer, after trying to attack him in the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
On Sunday, October 2nd, 2011, a group of extremists Israeli right-wingers burned a mosque at the entrance of Toba Zanghriyya village in the Galilee, and wrote “Price Tag” and “Revenge” on its walls.
On Monday, September 5th, 2011, a group of extremist Israeli settlers broke into a mosque in Qasra village, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, and torched it after destroying its property and writing anti-Arab slogans on its walls.
On Tuesday June 07, 2011, settlers burnt a mosque in Al Mughayyir village, near the central West Bank city of Ramallah, and wrote racist graffiti on it walls.
On Sunday, October 25, 2010, extremist Israeli right-wingers attacked an ancient mosque in Ma’alul village near Nazareth, inside Israel. They removed the stones and spray-painted slogans of the Israeli settler movement on the walls.
On Sunday, October 3, 2010, a group of fundamentalist Israeli settlers broke into a mosque in Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, and set it ablaze.
On Tuesday, May 4, 2010, a group of fundamentalist settlers torched the main mosque of the Al Lubban Al Sharqiyya village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
This is what Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin rightly called terrorism. “This is not a ‘price’ or a ‘tag,’ this is terror,” he wrote. “These villainous criminals who harmed houses of prayer, fields, homes and property belonging to Palestinians, are Jewish, and this is Jewish terrorism that should be called nothing less.”
As this WAFA report explains, “About half of the Palestinian households were directly exposed to violence by occupation forces and settlers before July 2010, the highest in Gaza Strip, 49.1% compared to 47.8% in the West Bank.”
Part of why these attacks have been so prevalent and why scores of settlers feel free to march onto Palestinian property armed with guns and planning arson is because they accurately assume they will face very little consequences, if any. Countless videos on YouTube show Israeli occupation forces acting indifferent towards aggressive settlers harassing Palestinians. But that’s not all: a two-tiered justice system is firmly in place which harshly punishes Palestinians and grants Israeli settlers to behave in this way. Take, for example, the Dromi law, “named for the farmer Shai Dromi who in January 2007 shot to death Khaled el-Atrash,” a Palestinian who broke into his farm at night. Dromi was acquitted of the manslaughter charges basically on grounds of self-defense. The Dromi law states that “a person will not bear criminal responsibility for an act that was required immediately in order to curb someone who breaks in, or tries to break in, in order to commit a crime.” But when Israeli settlers broke into a Palestinian home this summer, “shouting,” “kick[ing] cans of milk,” and “overturning sacks of flour and rice” before “stoning them [the Palestinian family] (one little girl was injured), threw a baby (wrapped in its blankets) out of a cradle” the unarmed Palestinians did not have the right to defend themselves. In response to the attacking Israeli intruders, the Palestinians threw stones back at them. And then they were arrested.
Without a realistic concern that they will face legal consequences for acts of aggression, Israeli settlers will continue their terrorism.
So, when, pray tell, will the West start calling these "settlers" something along the lines of Judaists?
The West was all too eager to use a manufactured label like "Islamist", but such derogatory labels were reserved for Muslims only.
Terrorist Christian abortion clinic bombers or religious Evangelical politicians and terrorist J.e.w.s or members of the Shas party seem to have escaped such labels. Why is that, do you suppose?
Instead we read headlines like, "Islamists gain a majority in new elections".
Let's ponder the double standard, shall we?
Nine times more Jewish civilians have been murdered by Palestinians in the West Bank than Palestinians murdered by Jews in the West Bank.
During the past 11 years, out of 50 Arabs killed by Jewish civilians, 27 were self-evident cases of self-defense against armed Palestinian assailants.
By contrast, the 215 Jews murdered in the West Bank (254 if Gaza is included) involved almost without exception clear-cut circumstances in which Palestinian assailants targeted their victims, often in home invasions involving the slaughter of entire families like the Fogel Massacre, Shefi family massacre, gang assaults on hikers or attacks on civilian vehicles. Other sources, like the Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the United Nations (OCHA) confirm the relatively few murders committed by Jews and the much higher number of lethal assaults by Palestinian killers.
thats actually totally untrue. You must be an israeli blogger
Ed Erias must be a pseudonym that Mark Regev, a recent Zionist newcomer from Australia and Israel's government spokesperson and habitual liar (in the full legal sense), uses.
Reliable data from the Israeli human rights center BTselem is available here:
http://www.btselem.org/statistics
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x…
B'Tselem's Annual Casualty Figures Questioned
Usually even factual non-biased statements about these type of events will not get past the censor , oops I mean moderators of MSM publications. I love the fact Antiwar.com is brave enough to shine the light of truth on all things govt. and the very very sensitive middle east.