Yesterday, Nimer Mahmoud Ahmad Jamal, an Arab Palestinian father of four, left his kids at home and set off to murder some Jews and, he hoped, get killed while doing it. He succeeded at the entrance to Har Adar in both these personal goals, and he managed to give Palestinian Arabs two murdered Jews, a murdered Israeli Arab, and, of course, one “martyr” to celebrate. Which they did enthusiastically.
As I’ll show below, some, such as Times of Israel’s Avi Issacharoff, think personal issues of this man’s life can entirely explain what he did. I take a very different view, which I summed up in a tweet:
Jihadi Islamic ideology removes inhibitors to murder (sub human) Jews.
EU and others provide financial incentives to murder Jews. https://t.co/CMbjyqqsIR
— Dr Brian of London 🇮🇱 (@brianoflondon) September 26, 2017
Avi Issacharoff has written up the details of the murderer’s dysfunctional home life:
The Shin Bet stated that the terrorist Nimer Mahmoud Ahmed Jamal, a 37-year old father of four, had “significant” personal and family problems “including a problem of violence in the family. It also turns out that the assailant’s wife fled to Jordan several weeks ago and left him with the children.”
That is to say, this was not the case of another young Palestinian who had imbibed hatred and anti-Israel incitement via Palestinian media and social media, like hundreds we have seen in the past two years, but rather a different kind of terrorist, older, a father of children, who had undergone a major personal crisis and ultimately combusted and carried out an attack.
Throw in some more details, such as his wife fleeing to Jordan and leaving him with the kids, and the only thing missing from this country and western song is a dead dog. Avi comes to this conclusion:
Ultimately, the terrorist’s motivation — be it personal, nationalist or religious — is less relevant.
Incitement against Israel by the Palestinian Authority does continue, and will continue in the near future. And even as it continues, it has to be said, so too does the PA’s activity to prevent attacks. Even after the PA announced an end to its security coordination with Israel in July, the PA’s security apparatuses do plenty to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians, and even on Israeli troops.
Avi Issacharoff is a Jewish Arab: what I mean is, he speaks Arabic; his family are Jews who left behind dhimmitude in one of the Arab countries; and he has spent plenty of time with Arabs. He’s one of the original creators of the TV show “Fauda,” and his knowledge of Arabs here in Israel is certainly deep. However, in all his writing, I’ve noticed a constant downplaying or flat-out ignorance of the one and only fundamental difference in upbringing and even genetics between Arabs and Jews here in Israel: Islam.
I agree with Avi: Nimer Mahmoud Ahmad Jamal’s motivation may well be mostly explained by the sum total of all the personal problems in this terrorist’s life. Islam as a foundational principle for the society he lived in provided everything necessary for his personal choice for resolving his situation to be the murder of Jews.
He wanted suicide: but suicide is forbidden in his society. However, death in glorious battle against the hated Jews is praised above all else! That’s not to say that non-Muslims don’t flip out and do evil deeds, but only in Islam is the evil act of murder inverted to become the highest achievement a person can aspire to. So high, in fact, that it cancels out all earlier transgressions and gives him (and his family) a direct pass to paradise.
And even if he was not a pious Muslim all his life, his entire upbringing, practically every street he walked on, every town square, every public building bore the name of a “glorious martyr” who’d achieved his society’s highest goal: the murder of Jews.
Islamic society, and especially the one we have living near us in Israel, goes to great lengths to desensitise its population to murder in two highly interwoven ways. First, they make participation in slaughtering animals routine, something we’ve virtually eliminated in the Western world (we don’t even let kids kill and dissect a frog or a fish in science lessons, as I did when I was at school). Second, their entire religious and political identity is steeped in the opposition of “them” and “us.” Almost every single page of the Qur’an makes a sharp distinction between believers and non-believers. Here in Israel, that’s Palestinian Arabs vs. Occupying Jews.
You desensitise kids to killing animals, then you teach them that “the other,” the Jew, is less than a human. Bingo: you have created millions of ticking time bombs. Many will never cross the line and act on this latent programming, but more than enough will to cause Jews to permanently raise our defences to levels the rest of the world will only start to understand after a few more years of attacks.
Throw in a nice financial settlement package for the family, and you’ve pretty much removed all barriers to this man’s actions and made this kind of senseless, barbaric and evil attack a recurring likelihood.
This is why living next to Islam is so dangerous for non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are always at risk from both a determined, organised effort to follow the commandments laid out in the later passages of the Qur’an, and from individuals in whom sudden Jihad syndrome breaks out.