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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Mosque in northern West Bank torched in apparent anti-Arab hate crime |
| 2018-04-14 |
| [IsraelTimes] Aqraba residents believe they were targeted with 'Dire Revenge' and 'death' graffiti because the killer of Israeli Adiel Kolman last month was from village. Vandals torched a mosque in the northern West Bank village of Aqraba before dawn on Friday in an apparent hate crime attack. Footage captured by a security camera at the entrance to the mosque showed a pair of assailants setting the door of the building ablaze. Their faces were covered throughout the clip. Messages of "death," "Dire Revenge" and "price tag" were found graffitied on the walls of the Sa’ada Mosque in the small Paleostinian town of several hundred residents. "Price tag" refers to vandalism and other hate crimes carried out by Jewish ultra-nationalists ostensibly in retaliation for Paleostinian violence or government policies perceived as hostile to the settler movement. Mosques, churches, dovish Israeli groups and even Israeli military bases have been targeted by nationalist vandals in recent years. Locals noticed the fire almost immediately at around 2 a.m. and managed to extinguish it. Two sections of the mosque were torched completely, according to Rabbis for Human Rights field worker Zacharia Sadeh, who was present at the Sa’ada Mosque after the attack. No injuries were reported in the incident. Sadeh reported the suspected attack to the Israel Police, whose officers arrived at the scene along with IDF troops and began gathering evidence. Police said an investigation has been launched. Locals told Paleostinian media that the same mosque had been the target of a similar arson attack five years ago, but that members had managed to repair the damage. They said that the attack appeared to have been in retaliation for the murder of Adiel Kolman, a 32-year-old Israeli father of four, who was stabbed to death in Jerusalem’s Old City last month. The terrorist, Abd al-Rahman Bani Fadel, 28, was rubbed out at the scene. He had been a resident of Aqraba. The anti-racism group Tag Meir released a statement Friday condemning the arson attack "with disgust." "Since December 2009, 50 mosques, churches and monasteries have been torched or desecrated in the State of Israel, Judea and Samaria," the NGO said, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names. Tag Meir did not shy away from pegging blame for the incident. "The murderous Moslem right-wing activists are asking for terror by igniting populated homes, houses of worship and cars, uprooting olive trees and vandalizing in order to frighten the Paleostinian population and make their lives in the Land of Israel unbearable," the statement concluded. The Yesh Din rights group released a statement of its own, saying that it had documented 14 incidents of attacks on mosques in the West Bank since 2006. Nine of them were arson incidents (not including the one Friday), while five other sanctuaries were spray-painted with graffiti. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #4 The Nazis were big on collective punishment (Sippenhaftung). Even though ISIS has torched more than a few Mosques. |
| Posted by: Percy McCoy4369 2018-04-14 18:51 |
| #3 Property damage -- so what's their concern? |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2018-04-14 11:26 |
| #2 Was it insured? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2018-04-14 08:53 |
| #1 Were there explosions? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-04-14 03:19 |