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Commentary;
Barak of IRIS hit on an important point made in Caroline Glick’s piece; Anatomy of a Massacre.
It now seems that while Israel’s “finest” and the regime have portrayed the bulldozer terror attack as “unavoidable,” “that nothing could have prevented Dwayat from using his bulldozer to murder three people,” or that after the Mercaz HaRav attack, government and police spokesmen uttered similar comments; “There was no way to prevent the attack” and “No one is to blame”, there is plenty of real and culpable responsibility to go around.
Glick cites the following;
It is a criminal offense to praise acts of murder. When hundreds came to pay their respects for Dhaim and proclaim him a hero, the police could have arrested and interrogated all of them. Among those who arrived at the Dhaim’s mourning tent was Wednesday’s terrorist, Dwayat. If he had been arrested then, it is possible that police would have discovered that this convicted rapist had recently become a jihadist. It is also possible that Dwayat himself would have been intimidated.
But rather than enforce the law, the police did nothing. Rather than arrest the hundreds who came to praise Dhaim, the police excused their inaction by bemoaning the fact that the due process rights of Jerusalem Arabs made it impossible to destroy the homes of Arab terrorists in the capital without proper legal authorization. That is, they justified their decision to do nothing by complaining that they can’t do everything.
The police’s permissive behavior is nothing new. In Dhaim’s and Dwayat’s Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, as in the Beduin settlements in the Negev and the Arab cities and villages in the Galilee, the police simply refuse to enforce the law. They do not patrol the streets. They do not arrest religious, educational and political leaders who solicit terrorism or incite hatred. They do not enforce building laws. They do not protect state and privately owned land from squatters. Today some 90 percent of Arab construction in Israel is carried out without permits. Whole towns in the Negev have been built on stolen state land. And the police do nothing.
As a consequence of police inaction, thieves, smugglers, terror solicitors and other dangerous criminals are allowed to operate in the open. Fearing the wrath of human rights groups on the one hand and Arab rioters on the other, the police simply do not enforce Israeli law in the Arab sector.
Had the police apprehended “convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer turned jihadist” Husam Taysir Dwayat at the Dhaim mourning tent, they undoubted would have discovered his sordid criminal background and that he held a job driving a bulldozer at the construction site of Jerusalem’s “Bridge of Strings” and main station for the Jerusalem light-rail line. They would have also undoubted discovered that Dwayat was being ordered by Muslim clerics “to atone for all of his sins” by committing an act of terror.
In short, there was plenty that could have been done after the Mercaz HaRav attack, which was not done. And as a result, 3 more Jews were murdered and numerous others injured. The resposibility for the bulldozer attack and its prevention lays squarely on the heads of both Israel’s police and corrupt, inactve, ineffectual governance. MB
To read Glick’s article in full, click; Anatomy of a Massacre, by Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post)
Related commentary;
Terror in Jerusalem (Jerusalem Post Editorial)