SCOTUS hands Terror Victims a win and the PLO and Palestinian Authority a defeat

 The US Supreme Court just restored a measure of justice—
for Ari Fuld and for us all

(June 22, 2025 / JNS)

In a decision that affirms both the power of American law and the dignity of American lives, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that the family of Ari Fuld, a U.S. citizen murdered in a 2018 terrorist stabbing in Israel, may pursue justice in an American courtroom.

In Fuld v. Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Supreme Court on June 20 reinstated the right of American terror victims and their families to sue the perpetrators of attacks committed overseas, so long as those groups deliberately maintain a presence in the United States.

It is a decision that resonates deeply with me. My daughter Alisa, then 20 years old, was murdered in a suicide bombing in 1995 while studying in Israel. Like Ari, she was an American citizen targeted simply for being who she was—Jewish, idealistic, full of life.

To read the entire article at JNS.ORG go here.

Thanks for reading, Stephen M. Flatow

 There's no such thing as a Palestinian terrorist

Readers of the NYTimes and Wash Post, note: The 6 escaped prisoners called "militants" by your media murdered innocent civilians.

My latest column at Israel National News

Which of the following actions by "ideologically-motivated" Palestinian Arabs should be considered terrorism?

 (A) Placing a bomb at a bus stop in downtown Tel Aviv, killing an Israeli teenage girl.

 (B) Kidnapping an Israeli teenage boy and shooting him point-blank in the head.

 (C) Throwing flaming bottles of gasoline at Israelis, in order to burn them alive.

 (D) Firing automatic weapons at Israeli civilian buses.

 The answer, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post, is “(E) None of the above.”

Fatah Terrorists

The terrorist attacks listed above were just a small sample of the violent crimes against civilians committed by the six Palestinian Arabs who recently escaped from an Israeli prison. Yet in the coverage of the escape by America’s two most prominent and influential newspapers, the word “terrorist” never appears.

 According to articles by the New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, the murderers are “prisoners,” “militants,” or simply “the six men.” Kingsley’s computer keyboard appears to be incapable of producing the word “terrorist” when Palestinian Arabs are involved. Maybe the tech support folks at the Times should have a look at his laptop. Clearly something is malfunctioning when no act of Palestinian Arab violence, no matter how heinous, is considered terrorism.

 Even when Kingsley gets around to describing the crimes they committed, he cannot bring himself to admit that it was “terrorism.” The six were “convicted or accused of militant activity,” he writes. No, they weren’t. The Israeli prosecutors’ bills of indictment did not use euphemisms such as “militant activity” to cover up the nature of the crimes, as Kingsley does. They were indicted for terrorism and murder.

 What about the terrorist groups to which the six belong? Kingsley of the Times re-brands them, too. Five are members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist gang that has murdered hundreds of Jews, including my daughter, Alisa, in 1995. Kingsley labels them simply “a militant group.”

 The sixth escaped terrorist was a leader of—here’s how the Times puts it—“the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group loosely linked to Fatah, the secular political party that dominates Palestinian institutions in the West Bank.”

 What’s all this gobbledygook about being “loosely” linked to Fatah? Why do Kingsley and the Times come up with these kinds of verbal gymnastics, instead of acknowledging the indisputable fact that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade is part and parcel of Fatah?

 Because Fatah is chaired by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Acknowledging that Fatah sponsors terrorism would force the Biden administration to end all relations with the PA. So, the PA and its sympathizers play a game in which they pretend that Fatah doesn’t really control the Al-Aqsa terrorists.

 If you doubt that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are really part of Fatah, don’t take my word for it. Consider what sources that are not friendly to Israel have to say on the subject.

 The official BBC News profile of the Brigades states: “The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades is an armed Palestinian group associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation.” Perhaps the BBC has no choice but to admit the truth, because it was its own team of journalists which in November 2003 uncovered the fact that Fatah was paying $50,000 monthly to the Brigades.

 National Public Radio has described it as “Fatah’s armed militant wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.” A Council on Foreign Relations report on the Brigades found that they are “aligned with Fatah” and “affiliated with former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s Fatah faction.”

 A June 2005 study by the U.S. government’s own Congressional Research Service reported: “On December 18, 2003, Fatah asked the leaders of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to join the Fatah Council, recognizing it officially as part of the Fatah organization.”

 How about the Palestinian Authority itself? What do PA leaders say about the Al-Aqsa gang? In June 2004, then-PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei openly declared in an interview with the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper: “We have clearly declared that the Aksa Martyrs' Brigades are part of Fatah. We are committed to them, and Fatah bears full responsibility for the group." (Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2004)

 The New York Times’ coverage of the escaped terrorists has been bad enough—but the way the Washington Post has handled the story has been even worse.

 Post correspondent Ellen Francis called them “prisoners” and “fugitives”—not even “militants,” much less “terrorists.” In her reporting, Islamic Jihad is not even “a militant group” (as the Times calls it)—it’s just “the Islamic Jihad movement.” And Fatah is not even mentioned by Francis—it’s merely “the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.” Readers of the Post were not given the slightest indication as to what those two groups are all about.

 Earlier this summer, a poll by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at Oxford, found that just 29% of Americans trust the news media. The United States placed dead last, out of 46 countries surveyed, in media trust.

 Perhaps the blatant attempts by America’s two most influential newspapers to cover up the nature of Palestinian Arab terrorism might help explain why so many people distrust the media.

 

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is an oleh chadash and the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

 Searching for new ways to fund a terrorist regime.

By Stephen M. Flatow

The United States doesn’t finance schools in Iran or North Korea. So why should it pay for those under the Palestinian Authority, which not only sponsors terrorists but spreads some of the most vicious anti-American propaganda in the world?

(March 15, 2021 / JNS)

Question: How do you get the American government to finance a terrorist regime when U.S. law prevents it from doing so?

 Answer: Twist the meaning of words, claim that the law doesn’t say what it obviously says and pretend the regime doesn’t sponsor terror. In other words, play the usual games.

 Those games are in full swing now in the campaign to put American taxpayers’ dollars into the pockets of the Palestinian Authority.

 Last week, The New York Times published a gigantic feature story about a Palestinian Arab school located in the village of Jaba near Bethlehem that supposedly will be in dire straits unless it starts receiving large amounts of American aid, and fast.

Jaba School, NY Times

The article, by Times correspondent Adam Rasgon, never considers the question of why the P.A. chooses to fund terrorists rather than its own schools. Last year, the P.A. distributed $15 million monthly —monthly!—on salaries for terrorists who are imprisoned in Israel. Just one month of those funds could have built quite a few schools.

Instead, Rasgon’s entire article was based on the premise that America has some kind of obligation to pay for the P.A.’s schools.

 The United States does send humanitarian assistance to various impoverished countries, but not to anti-American, terror-sponsoring regimes. The United States doesn’t finance schools in Iran or North Korea. So why should it pay for schools under the P.A., which not only sponsors terrorists but spreads some of the most vicious anti-American propaganda in the world?

 Moreover, what exactly is being taught in the school that the Times wants American taxpayers to support? P.A. school textbooks are notorious for glorifying terrorism and vilifying Israel and America. Are we supposed to believe that the Jaba school will be the first P.A. school to use a moderate, peace-promoting curriculum?

 One of the main commentators quoted in the Times article was Joel Braunold, who was described as “an expert on U.S. law surrounding foreign aid to the Palestinians.” Braunold made it clear he is troubled that U.S. law, specifically the Taylor Force Act, prohibits sending aid to the P.A. so long as it pays terrorists.

So Braunold plays word games to get around that inconvenient law.

 He asks: “Would funding construction of this school, which is controlled by the Palestinian government, be considered direct support of the Palestinian Authority? It may or may not be. It is up to the Secretary of State to decide.”

 Braunold is obviously hoping that the current Secretary of State, unlike his predecessor, will change the plain meaning of the term “direct support” so that the Taylor Force Act can be discarded, and the U.S. can start sending checks to the P.A.

 Braunold and the Times are not the only ones playing word games in order to get aid to the P.A. Recently, David Makovsky—former right-hand man to ex-Mideast envoy Martin Indyk—has been promoting the idea that the P.A. should dress up its payments-to-terrorists program as “a welfare system” that would pretend to hand out money based on financial need (instead of based on how many Jews the recipient murdered). Makovsky was doing what we call “saying the quiet part out loud”—giving away, in public, what he hopes the P.A. will do in order to perpetrate a farce on American taxpayers.

 One last word about Joel Braunold, the “expert” who was quoted prominently in the article about the school. The Times correspondent, Adam Rasgon, somehow “forgot” to mention that Braunold is the managing director at a left-wing think tank, the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, which just happens to advocate U.S. funding for the P.A. (Key activists at the center in years past have included J Street leader Jeremy Ben-Ami and Sara Ehrman, one of the founders of Americans for Peace Now.)

 I would welcome a serious and robust public discussion about the question of American aid to the P.A. and the Taylor Force Act. What I don’t like are the dishonest tactics being used by some of those who are promoting the Palestinian cause.

 So, please, don’t tell us that the United States has some kind of obligation to finance P.A. schools. Tell us what’s being taught in those schools if you want us to fund them.

 Don’t tell us that the Secretary of State can arbitrarily change the meaning of U.S. law. He cannot.

 Don’t give the P.A. advice on how to pull the wool over the American public’s eyes so that it can get our money. And don’t pretend that an advocate for Palestinian funding is some kind of neutral “expert.”

 Most of all, stop searching for new ways to get American dollars to a terror-sponsoring regime. Instead, try searching for ways to force the P.A. to change its terrorist ways. That would be a real step towards Middle East peace.

 Stephen M. Flatow is a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

The Shiva Call

The Shiva Call

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-shiva-call/2018/01/28/

I got into Ben Yishai’s car outside my Jerusalem hotel with butterflies in my stomach. We were headed north to make a shiva call in the Shomron. A few days earlier, a terrorist attack took the life of 35-year-old Rabbi Raziel Shevach. Twenty-two bullets punctured his car as he drove on Route 60 to his home in the community of Havat Gilad.  Before he lost consciousness Rabbi Shevach called his wife and told her to call an ambulance. He died in that ambulance on the drive to the hospital.

On the way, Ben Yishai pulled off the road so we could look down on Nablus, the site of biblical Shechem. I had never seen it before. It’s a large city, with prominent buildings, soccer pitches, a sprawling UN facility, and Joseph’s Tomb.

Joseph’s Tomb is frequently in the news. Local Palestinian Arabs have tried to burn it down several times. They painted it green to turn it into a mosque, but it’s white once again. It’s been the site of bloodshed over the years. Rabbi Hillel Lieberman was murdered there as he tried to rescue Torah scrolls from a fire after control of the city had been turned over to the PA. And IDF soldiers lost their lives when their commanders didn’t act fast enough to come to their aid when they came under fire from terrorists.

After recent declarations by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, it’s hard to believe he once condemned an attack on Joseph’s Tomb, saying it “violate[d] law and order, and…distort[ed] our culture, our morals and our religion.” Apparently that statement was not taken to heart by his constituents; over the past two years there have been many attacks on the site and on worshipers – and just last week security personnel discovered an explosive device that had been wired for remote detonation right outside the tomb as masses of people would be arriving to pray there.

As you look down on the southern part of the city, you notice a change in the architecture and layout. Suddenly, white multi-storied buildings give way to an area of low structures seemingly packed together like sardines in a can. What you are looking at is the Balata refugee camp. I cannot answer the question why, 20 years after control of the city was given to the Palestinians, Balata’s residents, some 30,000 of them, continue to live in the camp.

Back in the car we continued on to Rabbi Shevach’s community of Havat Gilad, which is called an “outpost” because it’s not recognized as a settlement by the government that sits one hour away in Jerusalem. Outside the shiva house, a family friend explained to me that because it is built on private land bought many years ago by a businessman in memory of another terror victim, its status is in limbo.

Rabbi Raziel Shevach HY"D and his family.
Photo courtesy Shevach family

Since it’s an outpost, the community of 40 families with 130 children is not directly connected to Israel’s electric grid. Don’t misunderstand; they have electricity in Havat Gilad. But imagine a long extension cord running from Yitzhar, a settlement about two miles away, to Havat Gilad. That’s how the residents get their electricity.

However, that will now change according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who ordered the Defense Ministry to connect the community to Israel’s national electricity grid. Said the rabbi’s widow in response, “It’s a joke that you’re trying to give us electricity when there is an entire village that needs to be legalized. I want to know that in 10 years’ time they will not move my husband’s grave because we waited too long [to legalize it].” I couldn’t laugh.

The community had no cemetery until the residents, at the request of Rabbi Shevach’s family, leveled a hill to create one. It’s not a pretty site, but neither is Havat Gilad after a rain.

The ground outside the shiva house was muddy, and the rugs that had been put down under a quickly erected blue plastic tarp to protect visitors from the sun sank into the mud.

The concrete patio in front of the house had muddy puddles and some young girls did an admirable job using a squeegee broom to move water into a drainage pit. It seems they were experienced at it.

An hour after the end of shiva, all the chairs were neatly stacked, the water and food pots and pans, were cleaned and removed. If you didn’t know that many hundreds of people had gone through the front door of the house over the preceding week, you could not tell from the way things looked now.

Survived by his widow, Yael, and six orphans – Renana, 10, Naomi, 8, Miriam, 6, Malka, 5, Ovadia, 3, and Benayahu, 10 months – Raziel Shevach was an incongruous man. He always dressed in a black suit, I was told, but wore a large white knitted kippah. He was a quiet man with a perpetual smile on his face who possessed many talents. He was a student, a teacher, the community rabbi, a mohel whose fees were turned over to the community children, a shochet, an emergency first-responder, and, to hear his neighbors talk of him, one of Hashem’s gifts to His people.

Rav Shevach’s senseless murder will not change anything for Palestinian Arabs, who praised it, other than lead to more death; the terrorist who murdered him has already been found and, in the IDF’s lexicon, “neutralized.” The residents of the Balata refugee camp will continue to be “refugees” under the thumb of the PA with the help of the United Nations.

We can hope the government recognizes Havat Gilad as a legal community, but as Kfar Darom and all the communities of Gaza were uprooted, including their graves, that does not guarantee anything. So you return to Jerusalem, you thank Ben Yishai for the ride, and you put a big smile on your face as you hug and hold tight your Israeli grandchildren, just as Raziel Shevach had held his children a week earlier.

May the memory of Rabbi Raziel Shevach be a blessing and may God avenge his blood.

Making terrorists pay —unless they’re Palestinian Arabs

Making terrorists pay —unless they’re Palestinian Arabs 

By Stephen M. Flatow 

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/21588

The headline was enough to alarm anyone who has a heart: “Israel’s Army Wants a Dead Palestinian Man’s Family to Pay for the Jeep That Crushed Him,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency announced last week.

Those cruel Israelis!  Here an Israeli army jeep goes and “crushes” an apparently innocent “Palestinian man,” and the Israelis have the nerve to demand a pound of flesh from his family, too. The cruelty! The chutzpah!  It’s enough to make you want to sell your Israel Bonds.

Until that, is, you get to the third paragraph of the JTA article. Then you discover that there’s more to the story than the headline indicated. A lot more.

The headline told us only that he was a “Palestinian Man.” Not a terrorist. Not an attacker. “Palestinian Man” clearly suggests that he was an innocent Palestinian civilian.

But way down in the third paragraph, we discover that a Palestinian Arab terrorist named Abdullah Ghneimat, age 22, threw a firebomb at an Israeli jeep. To put it another way, Ghneimat attempted to burn some Jews to death.

So, the JTA’s headline should have read “Palestinian Terrorist.” Or “Palestinian Firebomber.” Or “Palestinian Attacker.” In other words, language that would have accurately described what he was doing. That one little word changes the entire story. Ghneimat was not the victim. He was the aggressor. He was an attempted murderer.

After throwing the firebomb, Ghneimat ran. The Israeli Army jeep pursued him. During the chase, the jeep “flipped over a wall,” according the article. Meaning that the Israeli soldiers were almost killed. Fortunately, the hand of justice intervened. The would-be murderer was killed instead of his intended victims.

Now comes the chutzpah—and it’s not Israeli chutzpah. The firebomber’s family sued the army! Well, why not? No doubt they’ve read about plenty of frivolous lawsuits in which the families of rock-throwers and bomb-throwers end up with large settlements, because the Israeli authorities are afraid of International criticism, or just don’t want to be tied up in court for years.

In this case, however, the Army seems to have responded by counter-suing the terrorist’s family, demanding that it pay for the $28,000 damages that their son caused to the jeep.

That makes perfect sense. In every civilized legal system, if someone damages another person’s property, then the attacker—or the attacker’s estate, if he’s deceased—is liable to pay compensation.

In fact, I would take it a step further. The dead terrorist’s estate, or his legally liable relatives, should also be compelled to pay for any medical treatment that the Israeli soldiers in the jeep retired. Whatever injuries they suffered were due directly to the terrorist’s actions.

I wish this could all be attributed to a careless headline-writer at the JTA. But it’s not. The opening sentence of correspondent Ron Kampeas’s article reads: “Israel’s army is reportedly suing the family and village of a Palestinian man to pay for the jeep that crushed him during clashes.” So, the headline accurately reflected the article’s pro-Palestinian slant.

And a word about that term “clashes.” That’s standard language among journalists who cannot bring themselves to write of Palestinians as aggressors. A “clash” sounds as if both sides were equally guilty. The term disguises the nature of what happened. We all know what happens in these so-called “clashes,” because it has happened in thousands and thousands of instances over the years. Israeli soldiers don’t go around looking for people with whom to “clash.” Palestinian mobs hurling deadly rocks and firebombs attack Israeli soldiers. The soldiers then defend themselves and try to arrest the would-be murderers. That’s not a “clash.” That’s Palestinian aggression and Israeli self-defense.

Call me naive, but I expect better from a veteran correspondent for a Jewish news agency. I’m not saying that I expect him to take Israel’s side. Heaven forbid! I only expect him to be a responsible journalist.

Knowingly transforming a Palestinian terrorist into an innocent Palestinian civilian who was crushed to death by brutal Israelis, is not responsible journalism. It’s advocacy. And that has no place in news reporting.

Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.

When Dentists become Terrorists

One of the biggest lies about terrorism is that terrorists come from poor and underprivileged backgrounds.  Here's my take on the issue as Israeli authorities have arrested three dentists for their role in planning terror attacks.

When Dentists become Terrorists
From the the Jewish Press

The news that three recently captured Palestinian terrorists are dentists has been greeted with chuckles and smirks. It’s not what one expects. A man-bites-dog kind of story. Late-night television talk show hosts will probably get some joke material out of it.

But before laughing and turning the page, it might be worthwhile to take a moment to consider the deadly serious implications of this peculiar story.

For many years, supporters of the Palestinian cause, especially in the mainstream media, have pushed the idea that poverty causes terrorism. That explanation was convenient for several reasons. First, it pins the blame for terrorism on Israel. In other words, if Palestinians resort to violence because they are “desperate” or feel “hopeless,” then Israel’s policies can be blamed for making them feel that way. Second, attributing terrorism to poverty offers an easy solution: give the Palestinians lots of money, and terrorism will stop.

This, in fact, is the entire premise of U.S. aid to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority receives $500 million in American taxpayers’ money each year and an astonishing $11.5 billion since 1993. Imagine the better uses that money could have been put to.

Earlier this year, a Washington Post correspondent reported, with surprise, that the latest Palestinian suicide bomber in Jerusalem “doesn’t fit the profile of a desperate Hamas operative” because he was affluent and educated. Abdel Hamid Abu Srour’s uncles “are prosperous merchants…. He did not grow up in a refugee camp. He went on shopping trips to Jordan.”

Relatives described Abu Srour as “a Palestinian preppy, the scion of a well-to-do and well-known clan of eight prosperous brothers, who own and operate a string of furniture outlets and are rich enough to take their young sons for holidays in Jordan and set them up with their own shop selling clothes.”

One uncle, Mahmoud Abu Srour, told the Washington Post reporter: “We are
financially comfortable, you could say very comfortable.” At a family gathering to mourn Abu Srour’s death, his teenage cousins “wore pricey watches, skinny jeans and fancy sneakers.”

The Abu Srour case is reminiscent of the arrest last year of Ayman Kanjou, another stereotype-busting terrorist. If you think Palestinian terrorists must be young, unmarried men who have little to lose, meet Mrs. Kanjou: a middle-aged Israeli Arab woman with five small children, who was caught crossing through Turkey on her way to join the ISIS terrorists in Syria.

She comes from a “respected” family (according to Israeli prosecutor Shunit Nimtzan). She is a college graduate (Al-Azhar University in Cairo), which cannot be said about many Muslim women. And she has a Ph.D.! She had $11,000 in cash with her on her way to join ISIS (doesn’t sound like poverty to me). Surely she was alienated from her family, a rootless malcontent in search of belonging? Not quite: her father, age 74, actually accompanied her on the trip.

In fact, if you go back and look at other major terrorist cases in past decades, you’ll find a similar phenomenon. Recall the 415 Hamas terrorists whom then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported to Lebanon in December 1992, after a series of terrorist attacks against Israelis. The Chicago Tribune reported at the time that “many” of the deported terrorists were “businessmen, academics, lawyers, [and] doctors.” Likewise, the co-founder and longtime leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was a practicing pediatrician. By day, he treated Palestinian children. By night, he organized the murder of Israeli children.

Now we have the terrorist-dentists.

A 36 year-old Palestinian dentist named Dr. Samer Mahmoud al-Halabiyeh was arrested by the Israeli authorities, after he was discovered to be the head of a terrorist cell which carried out the May 10 attack in which one Israeli was seriously wounded. Other members of the cell included his brother, a 42-year-old dentist named Dawoud Alhabiya, and a third dentist, Daganeh Jamil Nabhan, age 36. The three dentists were found to have a stockpile of 56 bombs they were planning to use to murder and maim Israelis.

They’re not desperate teenagers. They had no reason to feel “hopeless.” On the contrary: they were gainfully employed and could look forward to a secure and comfortable future. But, like all Palestinian terrorists, their ideology is more important to them than their personal financial status.

Whether they are teenagers or men in their 30s and 40s; whether they have troubled personal lives or stable, happy personal lives; whether they are unemployed or successfully practicing medicine, all Palestinian terrorists have one thing in common: they try to murder Jews because they want to murder Jews.