Goring Personal Oxen

"I was sure they were going to kill me. I saw 40-50 Arabs running fast towards my car with large rocks and concrete blocks in their arms. I was the only car on that stretch of road at that moment, and I considered attempting to speed up to get away from them. But I didn’t think I had time to get out of there. And it happened a mere 500 meters away from a checkpoint manned with IDF soldiers."
"So, I took the gun out of my holster and held it up so that they could see it through the window. At first, this worked, because they all paused for a second as soon as they saw it. That didn’t last, though, and they resumed running towards me."
"When they were about 10 meters away, I opened my window and shot in the air. The shot sent them running back into the village. So then I floored it to the checkpoint. When I got there, I realized I wasn’t the first one who had encountered the attackers. A woman was sitting on the ground in shock; a guy had a bloodied face. People were hysterical; women were crying. The soldiers were comforting them."
"In the midst of all the chaos, I asked the soldiers if they were going to do something. They said they weren’t at liberty to leave the checkpoint."
Josh Hasten, Israeli-American freelance journalist

American-Israeli Journalist Josh Hasten, who had a close call on the Tekoa-Jerusalem road on Wednesday. Photo: Facebook

At that very same checkpoint just before Josh Hasten was confronted with an obvious life-threat, an Israeli woman driving her usual route to work described to the soldiers what she had experienced. Between the east Jerusalem Arab village of Sur Baher and the Har Homa Israeli neighbourhood she had been accosted by dozens of young Palestinians. She had driven into an ambush of rock-throwing Palestinians. Her car's windows were shattered.

One of the men opened her car door as she skidded to a stop and began pulling at her and beating her. She managed to free herself, slam the car door shut and drive away to reach the checkpoint where she informed the IDF soldiers stationed there what had occurred, and was taken by ambulance to hospital. Fortunately for her the physical wounds she had sustained were relatively light, the damage done to her confidence in her safety as a citizen of Israel, however is another thing altogether.

Particularly with the knowledge of the growing number of attacks targeting Israeli Jews resulting in the death of an older man on his way to prayer, the shooting death of a married pair of 30-year-olds in the presence of their four young children, the stabbing death of a young man and a rabbi who came to his defence, where the young man's wife ran from the scene, a knife in her back, pleading for help only to encounter other Palestinians who jeered and laughed at her, recommending she succumb to death.

There were more, and there will be yet more.

The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas's response to all of this is to deplore Israeli barbarity and incitement to violence. Insisting that it is Israel that is responsible for the violence, not the hard-done-by Palestinians. The youth who have been raised on a steady diet through school curricula of hatred toward Jews is the work of the Palestinian Authority. The glorification of 'martyrs' who 'resist' the 'occupation, the claims of Israeli brutality all feed a miasma of 'refugee' victimhood.

Mahmoud Abbas's own refusal to continue with peace talks, claiming that the Palestinian demands have not been met, so the peace talks are a useless exercise, uses all means at his public relations disposal to portray Israel as the aggressor, not the Palestinians, despite that it is Palestinian violence that Israel must shield itself from. Abbas speaks hatefully of Jewish feet dirtying the area around the al-Aqsa mosque by their presence on the Temple Mount.

Encouraging and inciting Palestinians to scream curses at Jews appearing at the most sacred site in Judaism disputed by Arabs as the Noble Sanctuary. Where Palestinian youth, groomed to hate and to destroy by their engineered culture of paranoid victimhood, equip themselves with rocks inside the mosque, desecrating their own house of worship, destroying its sanctity as they commit violence against others, even as Muslims the world over, supported by the international press characterize the mayhem as representing Israel's provocation of helpless Arabs.

Palestinian Arab young men with masks, inside Al-Aqsa Mosque (some wearing shoes), stockpile rocks to use for throwing at Jews who visit the Temple Mount, September 27, 2015 -- Gatestone Institute