Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Attempted assassination tonight in Jerusalem of Temple Mount activist R. Yehuda Glick

Yehuda Glick, right-wing activist advocating the presence of Jews on the Temple Mount, was shot and seriously injured tonight just outside the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, about an hour after a conference about the Temple Mount. Moshe Feiglin, a right-wing Member of Knesset, spoke to a reporter for Reshet Bet and said that the would-be assassin, who spoke with Glick before shooting him, had a heavy Arabic accent. The assassin shot him and then raced away on his motorcycle, and the police in Jerusalem are now searching for him. Glick was taken to the Shaarei Zedek Hospital, where he has been operated on and is in serious condition.


Yisrael Medad, who is the Director of Information and Educational Resources at the Begin Center, just posted a photo that he took of Glick at the event. He wrote: "Here's my snap from this evening's assembly with Yehuda at the lectern."

This is the announcement for tonight's event:


Translation:

Israel Returns to the Temple Mount

Conference of Seekers of Zion - Conclusions, Accomplishments, Lessons, and Goals

5 Marheshvan 5775, October 29, 2014, 6:30 pm
Menachem Begin Heritage Center, 6 Sh. A. Nachon St., Jerusalem

Rav Eliezer Rabinowitz - Who will ascend to the Mount of the Lord?
Dr. Haggai Ben Artzi - Professional Guiding on the Temple Mount
Rav Eli Ben Dahan, Deputy Minister of Religions
MK Miri Regev, Chairman of the Knesset Interior Committee
MK Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Chairman of the Knesset
Matan Peleg,  Chair of the Movement "Im Tirzu" - Between Rishikesh and the Temple Mount
Yehuda Glick - Return of Israel to the Temple Mount
The writer Tuvia Tenenbaum - Catch the Jew on the Temple Mount

Awarding of certificates of "Seekers of Zion"
to devoted volunteers for the return of the People of Israel to the Temple Mount

The conference was sponsored by:
  • the Foundation for the Heritage of the Temple Mount and the Temple
  • HaLiba, The Initiative for Jewish Freedom on the Temple Mount
Report from the Jerusalem Post:
Rabbi Yehuda Glick, spokesman for the Joint Committee of Temple Organizations – is in serious condition after being shot in front of the capital’s Menachem Begin Heritage Center Wednesday night. 
According to police, the shooting took place at approximately 10:30 p.m. outside the memorial center, located near the Old City, by a suspect riding a motor bike who fled the scene. 
Glick, who has a long history of advocating for Jewish prayer rights at the Temple Mount, spoke Wednesday evening at the Begin Center alongside MKs Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, Moshe Feiglin and Miri Regev at an event titled “Israel Returns to the Temple Mount.”  
MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud) who was with Glick, said that a motorcyclist drove up to Glick as he put posters from the event in his car and asked if he was Yehuda Glick. 
When Glick affirmed his identity, the motorcyclist shot him and fled.

“Shots were fired and the victim was rushed to an area hospital in serious condition,” said Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. “Special patrol units are searching the area for the suspect and we are investigating the background of the incident.” 
“It was an assassination attempt,” a Jerusalem city official said. “This is very serious.”
I have been at the location where Glick was shot many times. The Cinematheque is just down the hill from the Begin Center, Gan haPa'amon (the Liberty Bell Park) is across the street, and the Tahana Rishonah (the renovated old Jerusalem main railway station) is about five minutes away. This is a busy area, and many other people could have been injured or killed by the attacker if he had chosen to attack people at random (including Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset). The circumstances of the attack make it very unlikely that Glick was simply a random victim.

The situation in Jerusalem has been terrible for the last several months, since the three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered in June. When I visited for three weeks during the Jewish holidays this year, the situation seemed to have eased a bit, but recently it has worsened again, after a terrorist attack last week (October 22). A Palestinian man drove into people at one of the stops on the light rail, killing two of them, a three-month old baby and a young woman converting to Judaism.

This is from the New York Times report on the attack:
JERUSALEM — A Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem plowed his car into a group of pedestrians at a light-rail station in the northern part of Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing a 3-month-old Israeli baby and injuring eight other people. The police said they were treating the crash as a terrorist attack. 
The driver tried to flee on foot and was shot by police officers, according to Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the police. The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, later reported that he had died of his wounds. 
Mr. Rosenfeld said there was a “strong possibility” that the driver had deliberately run people over. 
Footage from a security camera showed the car swerving off a main road and speeding across the light-rail tracks toward the station. The footage was broadcast on Israeli television. 
The baby who was killed was identified as Chaya Zissel Braun. Her grandfather, Shimshon Halperin, told reporters, “She was a pure girl, with a holy soul, who had done no wrong and was murdered for no reason.” 
Palestinian news outlets called the crash an accident and identified the driver as Abd al-Rahman al-Shaloudy, 20 or 22 years old. 
Mr. Rosenfeld said the driver had served time in an Israeli prison for security offenses. Palestinian reports said Mr. Shaloudy had been released in December 2013 after 16 months in prison. 
Mr. Shaloudy was a resident of Silwan, a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood in territory that Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 war and later annexed, a step that has not been recognized internationally. An influx of right-wing Jewish settlers who have acquired property in the area in recent years have made the neighborhood a flash point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 
Mr. Shaloudy was reported to have been the nephew of a leader in the military wing of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that dominates Gaza, who was killed in 1998. 
Mr. Rosenfeld said that intensive police operations were taking place in several areas. A police helicopter hovered above Silwan on Wednesday night. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel ordered a reinforcement of security forces in Jerusalem and issued a statement accusing President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority of inciting violence against Jews in Jerusalem. 
In a speech over the weekend, Mr. Abbas called on Palestinians to use all means to defend Al Aksa Mosque, regarded as Islam’s third-holiest site. His call followed a series of violent confrontations in the mosque compound between Muslim worshipers, protesters and the police. 
Many of the recent clashes have centered on visits to the compound by hard-right Israelis who have been increasingly demanding the right to pray there. The mosque is on the Temple Mount, revered by Jews as the location of ancient Jewish temples and the holiest site in Judaism. 
Tensions have been running high in Jerusalem since early July, when Jewish extremists murdered a local Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir. The killing was in retaliation for the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank by Palestinian militants affiliated with Hamas. 
Some Palestinians drew a line between Wednesday’s crash and a case a few days ago when a Jewish settler ran over and killed a Palestinian girl, Inas Shawkat, 5, in the West Bank. The settler fled the scene but reported the episode to the Israeli police when he reached the nearest Jewish settlement...
From my Twitter feed, it's clear that tensions were already very high in Jerusalem, and this will only make the city more jumpy. The Israeli Police have closed the Temple Mount to everyone tomorrow - neither Muslims nor Jews can go there.
Reaction from Moshe Feiglin:

Yisrael Medad says:











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