Two teens confess to Fogel family murders
Two Palestinian students – 19-year-old Amjad Awad and 18-year-old Hakim Awad – have confessed to murdering five members of the Fogel family on March 11. “We would have killed the other two children, but didn’t know they were there,” one suspect told Israeli interrogators. They offered a detailed account of the massacre:
Immediately after entering the home, the youths set their knives on two brothers sleeping in their beds, four-year-old Elad, and 11-year-old Yoav, killing them both.
They then entered the parents’ bedroom, where they launched a knife attack on Ehud and Ruth Fogel. The parents fought back. During the struggle, one of the suspects used the stolen M-16 to shoot Ruth Fogel dead. Ehud died of his stab wounds during the fight.
The two men left the house, but then they heard three-month-old Hadas crying.
Awoken by the attack, the baby lay in her crib in her parents’ bedroom.
“They went back into the house and stabbed the baby to death,” a security source said.
Not only are the two unrelated suspects members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), so are several members of Hakim’s family, including his father and an uncle. Suspected accomplices are also under arrest.
Comments (38) »Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 2:58 PM | David Kuner
Explosion at Chabad House in Santa Monica
Officers were evacuating a 1-square-block area around the site of an explosion on the property of a Jewish religious facility in Santa Monica. No one was injured in the blast, which was reported about 6:45 a.m. Thursday and occurred in the 1400 block of 17th Street, said Sgt. Darrick Jacob, a watch commander with the Santa Monica Police Department.
Besides the evacuation zone, officers were diverting traffic in a larger area and bomb-sniffing dogs were on the scene to gather evidence and as a precaution in the event there were explosive devices in the vicinity, Jacob said.
Santa Monica police had at least 30 personnel on scene. The bomb squad of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was also taking part in the investigation and the local fire department was standing by.
At this time police do not consider the explosion to be a bomb. The local Chabad website wrote that the blast was caused by construction combustibles in a dumpster:
Comments (6) »“In response to news reports of a pipe bomb in our facility,” the website says. “During morning services today the police department came to Chabad House in response to a report of an explosion. The men that were praying did not hear or feel anything. Rabbi Levitansky grabbed one of the new Torah scrolls so they [could] finish services. Which they did at the corner of 17th and S. Monica.”
“The explosion was from a dumpster where someone trashed some construction combustibles,” the website explained. ”It exploded and landed on our neighbor’s roof. We do not know who placed the construction trash there.”
A police spokesperson has since attributed the blast to “mechanical failure.”
Thursday, April 7th, 2011 at 12:26 PM | David Kuner
Jewish ritual item mistaken for bomb causes terror scare
A teenage passenger using Jewish ritual items for prayer prompted a plane’s captain to call the bomb squad and divert a Kentucky-bound plane to Philadelphia on Thursday, Reuters reports.
A 17-year-old boy on US Airways Flight 3079 from New York to Louisville was using phylacteries (in Hebrew, tefillin), which are a pair of small black boxes that hold parchments inscribed with biblical passages that, using attached leather straps, observant men strap to their heads and arm as a part of daily morning prayer, as Deuteronomy 6:8 instructs, “Tie them [these commandments] as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.”
A passenger saw the boy using the tefillin, mistook them for some sort of device or bomb, and became alarmed.
The plane landed without incident, the passengers and crew were taken off the plane, and no one was arrested or charged with any crime, a spokesman for US Airways said.
Jewish traditions calls for observant men to prayer three times daily in quorums of 10; tefillin are used only during the morning service. This can be problematic during long flights, when men have need to pray in a quorum, but little space to do so. After security was tightened following 9/11 and other plane-related terror incidents, many rabbinic authorities have stated that Jewish men should avoid congregating in quorums on planes — both out of common courtesy for other passengers and out of respect for the airlines’ security measures.
The boy was likely praying in his seat, but nonetheless alarmed a fellow passenger. Apparently, there was no one in the flight crew who was familiar with the items — unusual considering that the flight originated in New York, where thousands of observant Jews fly daily.
Comments (0) »Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 7:17 AM | Stand For Israel
Man screaming “kill Jews” hauled off flight
MIAMI – A man who described himself as a Palestinian and said he wanted to “kill all the Jews” was hauled off a Detroit-bound Delta Air Lines flight in Miami and arrested, Reuters is reporting:
The plane was taxiing away from the terminal at Miami International Airport on Wednesday night when 43-year-old Mansor Mohammad Asad of Toledo, Ohio, began making loud anti-Semitic comments and chanting, apparently in Arabic, Miami-Dade police said in a statement.
“I’m Palestinian and I want (to) kill all Jews,” he said, according to witnesses.
The pilot returned the aircraft to the terminal and a Taser device was used to “neutralize” Asad after he charged an arresting officer, the police statement said.
We’re pleasantly surprised that that actually got him kicked off the plane. They probably worried that he’d snuck a bottle of soda on with him.
Comments (0) »Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 11:47 AM | Stand For Israel
Holocaust museum attacker dies in jail
The 89-year-0ld white supremacist charged with gunning down a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington last June died this morning at a North Carolina prison hospital, CNN reports.
James von Brunn was indicted by a federal grand jury in July on charges he murdered Stephen Tyrone Johns in the June 10 attack. Johns had worked as a guard at the museum for six years.
“He was just very sick,” said public defender A.J. Kramer of his client’s death. Von Brunn was shot during the attack when officers returned fire.
Von Brunn, a self-avowed white supremacist, was a known Holocaust denier who created an anti-Semitic Web site called “The Holy Western Empire.”
Comments (0) »Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 4:45 PM | Stand For Israel
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