Violent Attacks Continue In Jerusalem

Rash Of Violent Attacks On Jewish Targets In Jerusalem

[This is a lengthy article but it details just how widespread the violence has become in Israel]

Violent protests continued into the early morning hours of Sunday in Jerusalem as angry Palestinian demonstrators clashed with Israeli police at multiple sites in the capital. In some of the worst such violence in years, there was also a spate of attacks on Jewish targets in the city, though with no immediate reports of serious injuries, and clashes at hot spots in the Galilee too.

The protests have been escalating for days, since the brutal kidnapping and murder last Wednesday of a Palestinian teenager, which police increasingly believe was carried out by Jewish extremists in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers on June 12 by a Hebron-based Hamas cell.

Clashes between police and protesters, nearly all of them young Palestinian men, occurred in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Kalandiya, Isawiya and A-Tur. A few protesters were arrested late Saturday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.

Reports of violent incidents throughout the capital mounted overnight.

Firefighters were battling a blaze between Har Homa and the Mar Elias Monastery in southern Jerusalem that authorities believe was started by a firebomb aimed at Jewish drivers on the nearby road.

Two cars, one of them belonging to a United Nations agency, were destroyed in a fire caused by a firebomb thrown at them in the Nof Tziyon neighborhood. No one was wounded in the incident.

In Sharafat, an Arab village near the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, some 200 demonstrators clashed with police. A similar altercation between police and dozens of rock-throwing Palestinians took place in the Antonia neighborhood in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Also in the Old City, a Jewish woman was lightly injured early Sunday when she was attacked by a group of Palestinian men, who fled when her husband arrived and fired his gun into the air. Police said they were pursuing the attackers.

A firebomb was thrown at a thoroughfare in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, and two grenades were hurled at security forces near Rachel’s Tomb, on the road to Bethlehem south of Jerusalem. No one was injured in either incident.

A Jewish vehicle was reportedly attacked by masked Palestinian men near the contentious Maaleh Hazeytim neighborhood on the Mount of Olives east of the Old City.

According to the Haredi news site Behadrey Haredim, some 15 Palestinian men entered Yeshivat Hatfutsoth, a religious seminary on Mount Zion, on Saturday and threw stones into the seminary dining hall. The yeshiva’s students responded by throwing chairs, food and boiling water at the intruders.

Several Palestinians sustained burns and fled the scene, the website reported.

“This is a precedent,” yeshiva head Rabbi Avraham Goldstein was quoted as saying. “This is the first time something like this has happened on Mount Zion. We have good relations with all the religions in this place, and we hope the police will treat this incident with utmost seriousness.”

At least two Israeli buses were also pelted with stones on Saturday night, one in East Jerusalem near Mount Scopus and the other near the West Bank village of A’uja, just north of Jericho. In the Mount Scopus incident, the driver and two passengers sustained light wounds and were evacuated by MDA to the nearby Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus. In the second incident, the driver was lightly wounded and damage was caused to the bus and a nearby car.

Palestinians reported on Saturday night that dozens of Jewish demonstrators had entered the Arab neighborhood of Beit Tzafafa, in southern Jerusalem, and threw rocks at Palestinian homes and vehicles. Police reportedly responded with crowd-dispersal weapons.

Earlier Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with top security officials, and instructed them to meet violence and unrest with a firm hand, adding that lawbreakers would be dealt with severely.

In Nazareth, as many as 1,000 protesters took to the streets on Saturday evening in a rally marked by some outbursts of violence, including rock throwing directed at police and the firebombing of a municipal garbage can.

Rocks were thrown at vehicles driving on Route 2, the main Tel Aviv-Haifa coastal highway on Saturday night. No one was hurt in the incident.

Police forces were deployed to the Galilee town of Taybe on Saturday to keep Road 444, which cuts through the town, from being blocked by protesters. Demonstrators nevertheless took to the streets in the evening, after breaking the Ramadan fast, lit tires on fire, threw stones at the entrance to the city and barricaded a handful of smaller streets.

“There are only a few protesters lighting tires and throwing stones at the entrance to the town,” one resident told the Hebrew-language news site Walla. “Most residents are in their homes, walking in the streets or sitting in cafes.”

Heavy rioting was reported in the Wadi Ara region of northern Israel, home to a large Arab Israeli population. Police said they were pelted with stones and responded with crowd control weapons in several incidents in the area on Saturday.

Demonstrations also took place on Saturday outside Kalanswa, east of Netanya, following violent clashes with security forces early Saturday. Hundreds of people chanted slogans, hurled rocks and burned tires in several demonstrations in the area. Police arrived at the scene and, after calling on the demonstrators to disperse peacefully, attempted to break up the crowds with anti-riot gear.

Roads in and out of the two towns were closed off by security forces. A police spokesperson said that officers would allow “any legitimate expression of protest, but any disorderly conduct will be met firmly and decisively.”

The mayor of Kalanswa attempted to calm Arab residents, calling on them to avoid rioting and leave the streets.

On Saturday morning, a 20-year-old motorcyclist was attacked by demonstrators near the entrance to Kalanswa while driving along the road into the town. He was hospitalized in moderate condition at Meir Hospital in nearby Kfar Saba.

The incident followed several attacks on Jewish drivers by masked men on road 5614 into Kalanswa, which was blocked due to burning tires overnight Friday.

The masked men began asking drivers stuck on the road if they were Jewish. Two of the drivers who answered back in Hebrew were dragged from their cars and beaten. One of them managed to get back in his car and drive away while the other escaped on foot. His car was set on fire.

A police officer in uniform was also attacked on the road. He escaped on foot and his vehicle sustained damage.

Several Molotov cocktails were thrown at the Jewish village of Mei Ami in the Wadi Ara region on Saturday. Police were called to the scene.

An unnamed senior police source was quoted in Israeli media on Saturday as saying that clashes in East Jerusalem and in Israel’s Arab communities were expected to escalate in the coming days, with “more and more people joining the riots.”

Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said earlier Saturday that there would be zero tolerance for people who decided to take the law into their own hands. Aharonovitch said police would not allow violent disturbances to go unanswered and promised that justice would be served to “troublemakers.”

Gaza Rocket Salvo Strikes Southern Israel

At least nine rockets launched from the Gaza Strip landed in open areas in southern Israel Sunday.

Five landed in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council and four in the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or property damage. A small fire broke out, but was quickly contained, according to Israeli news source Ynet.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged ministers to act “calmly and responsibly” in the face of the most recent escalation of violence, but also reiterated that Israel would not hesitate to wield military force to restore calm to its southern communities.

Overnight Saturday, Israel Air Force jets struck 10 “terror sites” in the central and southern Gaza Strip overnight Saturday following escalated rocket barrages on Israeli communities in recent days, including a series of rockets aimed at Beersheba on Saturday, one of which was intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system.

On Saturday evening, Hamas upped its rhetoric, threatening to reach “all” of Israel’s cities with its rockets.

'Jewish Extremists' Arrested In Killing Of Jerusalem Teen

Several suspects have been arrested and interrogated in connection with the murder of 16-year-old Muhammed Abu Khdeir, whose burned body was found in the Jerusalem forest on Wednesday morning.

Police on Sunday said only that a “dramatic development” in the investigation has led them to believe that the act was most likely carried out by Jewish extremists in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers earlier in June. A gag orders on details was still in place but AP quoted an unnamed Israeli official as saying that the suspects were Jewish extremists.

Ukraine: Kiev's Ticking Time Bomb

The eventual fall of Kiev will spell the end of EU-NATO expansion. The inability of NATO to prop up one of its client states will destroy confidence across all other prospective members tempted by NATO’s assurances. Both its methods of overthrowing the Ukrainian government during the “Euromaidan” protests, and its attempts to consolidate power afterward are well documented and being judged by an increasingly astute global public. The ability for NATO to perpetuate itself through these methods, driven by its current hegemonic agenda is as tenuous as ever. Should the expansionist momentum NATO established after the fall of the Soviet Union be ground to a halt altogether, decline and regression are sure to follow.

With NATO’s brand of hegemonic expansion swept aside, the world will be tasked with describing a new order with which to replace it. The multipolar world preferred by nations like Russia, China, and other BRICS members is already poised to serve this role. With the devastation of the West’s unipolar model on full display in eastern Ukraine, the cause of establishing a multipolar world gives added impetus to those resisting Western advances both within Ukraine, and beyond.

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States Fighting EPA's Global Warming Decrees

The “climate” regulatory regime unveiled by the EPA last month calls for massive reductions in emissions from power plants. Under the scheme, described as “ObamaCare for the atmosphere,” emissions of what scientists refer to as the “gas of life” — exhaled by humans and required for plants — must be slashed by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Obama explained the economic effects of his plot in a 2008 interview: “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” At least in that instance, he was telling the truth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that the scheme could cost $50 billion per year in lost GDP and over 200,000 jobs annually, in addition to a plunge in household disposable income of over half a trillion dollars a year.

If states refuse to submit to the administration’s widely ridiculed edicts, the EPA claims it has the power to step in and create its own “plan.” More than a few state governments, however, are already fighting back — or at least pretending to in an effort to appease the groundswell of opposition — against what elected officials say is brazen anti-constitutional federal and executive overreach. Multiple avenues to stop the plot are being pursued, ranging from congressional action and federal lawsuits to state nullification efforts. Some analysts also suggested forcing the agency to prepare a legally required “impact statement” outlining and justifying the human devastation set to be wrought on America under the scheme.

With the GOP-controlled House of Representatives complicit in the administration’s scheming — the House has the constitutional power to cut off all funding for Obama’s “climate” antics, yet has refused to do so for reasons that remain unclear — attention is increasingly shifting to state capitols. Shortly after the latest EPA plot was unveiled, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, citing higher energy costs, lost jobs, and lost business, promised to “oppose these regulations using every means possible.” Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett vowed to “fight these regulations every step of the way.” Other governors and state lawmakers offered similar rhetoric, but many of those same states are already working on their own plots to needlessly reduce emissions of the essential-to-life gas.

Under growing public pressure, though, lawmakers and some governors, especially from coal states, are actually turning up the heat. On July 1, for example, The Hill reported that nine state governments joined a lawsuit against the EPA climate regime by Murray Energy that seeks to overturn the “illegal, irrational, and destructive cap-and-tax” plot. The states include West Virginia, Alabama, Alaska, Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wyoming. The suit, filed on June 18 in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, aims to have the courts restrain Obama’s EPA and stop it from issuing and enforcing unlawful decrees.

“As the chief legal officer for the State of West Virginia, I respectfully request that you withdraw the Proposed Rule immediately because EPA lacks the legal authority to adopt that Rule,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey wrote in a letter to EPA boss Administrator Gina McCarthy, saying the plot should be nixed to “avoid needless litigation.” The EPA is not allowed to “blatantly violate the law in order to achieve its policy goals,” Morrisey added in a statement. The letter also cited the arguments made by the nine states in their recent court filing.

At the state level, nullification of unconstitutional federal statutes and edicts has been spreading like wildfire. Under heavy pressure from struggling constituents, lawmakers in both Arizona and Idaho have been working hard this year to nullify all EPA decrees in their states. Nullification was a favorite solution touted by some of America’s most prominent Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Still today, liberal- and conservative-leaning states are nullifying unconstitutional federal acts ranging from attacks on gun rights to marijuana prohibition. Even disgraced Attorney General Eric Holder has been forced to acknowledge the viability of the tactic.

It has become clear that what more than a few U.S. lawmakers have referred to as “the imperial presidency” will not stop abusing regulatory agencies such as the EPA until forced to do so. As such, the best strategy would be for House Republicans to cut off all funding to the EPA and other unconstitutional agencies enforcing unconstitutional executive decrees. In addition, state governments ought to use nullification to protect citizens from federal abuse and tyranny. The climate, which has always changed and always will, should be the least of Americans' worries. Without serious action, the administration’s accelerating wars on coal, guns, the Constitution, state sovereignty, the economy, jobs, and more will continue to wreak real havoc on Americans and the world.

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