The World Loves a Good Celebration

"Good morning to you, good morning to your pride, and to your hands preparing to throw stones and ignite the gasoline in the Molotov cocktails, greetings from the Good Morning Jerusalem program."
PA TV’s Friday morning broadcast

“I’m coming towards you, my enemy,
“We’re going down from every house with cleavers and knives,
“With grenades we announced a popular war.
“I swear, you won’t escape, my enemy,
“from the revolution and the people.
“How will you escape the ring of fire,
“while the crowds are blocking the way?”
Fatah Facebook page 

Four rabbis dead, shot and hacked to death at the Kehilat Bnei Toprah synagogue in east Jerusalem. The Palestinian hero-martyrs who responded to the incitement from their leaders to exact revenge on Jews for presuming to believe that they too had the moral and civil right to pray on the Temple Mount at Judaism's most sacred shrine -- just as Muslims are entitled to at their third-most sacred shrine at the same site that they have named the Noble Sanctuary where a mosque and a shrine were built over the ancient ruins of the Temples of Solomon -- performed their duty to Islam.

One of the many rabbis who were wounded when the attackers armed with a gun, with meat cleavers and knives stormed into the synagogue to attack the 25 worshippers assembled for early morning prayers is being treated for brain injuries sustained by a meat cleaver hitting him from the back multiple times as he knelt in prayer. The two Israeli-Palestinian cousins who lived in east Jerusalem were themselves killed by responding Israeli police, but not before they killed an Israeli-Kurdish policeman, as well.

There is much sympathy pouring into East Jerusalem. As, for example, the statement by the Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour in his letter of condolences to the two men's families: "I ask Allah to wrap them abundantly with mercy, and with his contentment, and that he will give all of you patience, recovery from the agony and good comfort." Surely this will comfort the families of the martyrs, though it will do nothing for the families of the butchered, both dead and alive.

And, thanks to the ongoing encouragement from Hamas, the attacks do not stop. Each of the attacks represents a reason for celebration, after all, when congratulations pour in to the homes of the attackers, on the success of their sacrifice in the name of all that is holy in Islam against the perfidious Jews who wish to pray also at their holy site, thus despicably defiling the Islamic holy site which sits upon the sacred Judaic symbol. Proving, no doubt, that sanctified piety is more common to Muslims than Jews?

Again, on Monday evening, two Jewish yeshiva students were the victims of stabbings near the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's Old City. Both were evacuated to the Sha'are Tzedek Hospital after the first-responding rescue service medics provided initial medical aid. This time three Arabs launched the attack: "Three suspects have been arrested in the Old City, one adult and two minors, who are being questioned in the attack", explained Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld.

This most recent attack comes as no surprise in the atmosphere of high tensions where Arab leaders have called upon Palestinians to step up attacks against Israelis.Both the official Palestinian Authority (PA) TV and Fatah have called upon Palestinians to carry out violent terrorist attacks in and around Jerusalem, according to Palestinian Media Watch. Fatah posted a threatening video on its Facebook page.

There have certainly been occasions when Israeli Jews have perpetrated violence against Israeli Arabs. They have been condemned and held accountable by Israeli justice authority.

But among Arab Palestinians, public celebrations mark the occasions of violence against Jews. As mourning for the Jewish and Kurdish dead grips the larger public, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas spoke of the synagogue slaughter in conjunction with "attacks" on the al-Aqsa mosque, a slur referring to Jews appearing on the Temple Mount, their presence construed as an intent to contaminate the site and prepare to demolish the mosque to make space for a synagogue.

The attacked East Jerusalem synagogue was characterized as a "prayer settlement" and "command center" from which to plan attacks against Palestinians, with "Zionist rabbis" identified as "the greatest terrorists" in the "racist" Jewish state, whose fate was well deserved. A journalist in Qatar wrote of the attack as a predictably useful response "to those who bake cookies with Palestinian blood"; the blood libel useful to haters of Jews from the Medieval era to the present.

The Palestinian Authority is free of racism, announcing that no Jews may be permitted to live among Arabs in their new Palestinian State should it ever come to fruition. The non-racist countries of the greater Middle East expelled their Jewish population that had lived among Arabs in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere for thousands of years in rage over the creation of the State of Israel. Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi womb of fundamentalist Islam has proven its non-racist character

Jordan's former minister of information concluded that "this act of heroism healed many wounds and gladdened the hearts of many." And so it most certainly must have, for the celebrations have been widely shared and ecstatic in the success realized as a result of the bloody slaughter.The United Nations too, by default through UNRWA has been celebrating the wild success of the latest terror attacks against Israeli Jews. Their locally engaged employees post caricatures of the events that speak volumes.

Luay Shehab is a UNRWA school principal in Nablus. He triumphantly shows photos of dead Israelis on his Facebook page.