Israelli far left embraces the families of mass murderers

**Mediocrates** · 04-22-2011, 11:30 AM

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143663
http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2011/0...es-of.html?m=1
http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2....html?spref=tw

From news article:
Several ultra-leftist groups organized a visit to the Arab village of Awarta on Saturday, April 16, in support of the villagers and against the IDF's activities there in the search for the murderers of Ruth and Rabbi Ehud Fogel and their children Yoav (11), Elad (4) and Hadas (three months).

The leftists visited several homes in the Samaria village, including that of the Awad family, which spawned the murderers. The identities of the confessed murderers were released for publication on Sunday, the day after the visit. The murderers were already in IDF custody at the time of the leftists' visit and their arrest - including the fact that they are relatively young - was already widely rumored and hinted at by the press.

A photograph from the visit which can be viewed here, posted by one of the activists on her Internet blog, shows Raya Yaron, spokeswoman of Machsom Watch, comforting a woman described as being 37 years old and "in a deep depression." The blogger explained in her post that the woman fainted during the leftist women's visit and was distraught over the arrest of her husband, her two sons and a daughter.
The woman is easily recognizable as Nuf Awad, mother of Hakem Awad, whose photograph was featured on the front page of Arab newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida Monday.

Another leftist visitor, Yaakov Manor of the Center for Alternative Information, described the visit thus on the AIC's Hebrew website:
"The horror that we witnessed at the home of the family of Muhammad Awad cannot be described as anything but a pogrom - a primitive and brutal act of revenge intended to strike fear and awe into the hearts of the residents..."
"The father, Muhammad, 45, the son Majdi, 20, a third year university student, the son Amjad, 19, a freshman university student, and the son Hakem, 17, were arrested."

From news article:
A number of the NGOs involved are funded by European governments and the New Israel Fund (NIF). For example, the hosts of the "solidarity visit" were: Coalition of Women for Peace (funded by NIF, Switzerland, and government-funded groups from Netherlands and Germany), Combatants for Peace (Spain), Gush Shalom (funding unknown), and Humans without Borders (funding unknown). A photographer was sent by Rabbis for Human Rights (funded by NIF, EU, Ireland via Trocaire, Spain, Norway via Norwegian Church Aid).

A "solidarity visit" participant described the arrest of one of the murderers as a "pogrom, primate and brutal vengeance intended solely to impose fear in the heart of the residents." (See below for the analysis of Israeli journalist Kalman Liebeskind.)The NGOs have not apologized or retracted their statements following the arrests.

From news article:
For years I've believed - and have said in print - that for all my disagreements with far-left Israelis, they were a legitimate voice and deserved respect for criticizing from inside the war zone: if proven wrong, they'd be here to pay the price; when Palestinian or Hisballah murderers do their best to kill random Israeli Jews, the far-left Israelis are here along with all the rest of us. This creates a qualitative distinction between them and their foreign fellows in malice.

I'm no longer convinced. As I've long been documenting in this blog, the contribution Israel's radicals make to the Big Lie against Israel is immense; sometimes the entire anti-Israeli argumentation comes from them. Absent them and the hatred of the Jewish State wouldn't go away, but its purveyors could present far fewer arguments.

This week we've had a further example which to my mind crosses all the lines of simple human decency. The Hebrew part of the Internet has been all a-buzz about the story of the Israeli radicals who went to the West Bank town of Awarta to give succor to the families of the murderers of the Fogel family, while disseminating unforgivable slander against the IDF and the law enforcement agencies.

There are two extraordinarily incriminating pieces of evidence for the malice of the radicals. The first is a report by Yaakov Manor, of the Alternative Information Center. It was written in Hebrew, and published on their website. It describes the violence of the Israeli forces, and attributes it to their need for revenge. It is based largely on eye-witness reports of local townspeople, the exact same people who had been obstructing the investigation for most of the month. The head of the town informs Manor that the reason the IDF spent so much time in town was to prepare the confiscation of agricultural land. Then Manor went to visit the family of Hakem Awad, one of the suspected murderers. Here's the English translation

It gets worse. Hagit Beck, a member of Machsom Watch, describes on her blog how she and some other women went to visit "the 2 homes which had been ransacked". The second of the two was the home of Hakem Awad. (Isn't in interesting how in spite of all the horror, the reports all seem to focus on the same one or two homes?). The blog-post has been put up also on the Machsom Watch website: they're obviously proud of it. While in the house, Raya Yaron, the Machsom Watch spokeswoman, tried to comfort Shama Awad, mother of suspected murderer Hakem Awad, and wife of one of the men suspected for destroying the evidence. If proven in court, this will mean Shama Awad hid her murderer son from the police for most of a month, knowing fully what he had done. This is the woman Raya Yaron is embracing, and Hagit Beck is celebrating.