Murder and Boon, this wasn't

Thursday, 3rd July 2008

There is still considerable uncertainty over the appalling bulldozer attack in Jerusalem yesterday that left three dead and some 60 people injured. There are conflicting accounts of who finally shot dead the attacker, an Arab from east Jerusalem. Amid claims that the police were slow to act, the Jerusalem Post reports:

A preliminary evaluation held by Jerusalem police on Wednesday found that three police officers had attempted to stop the driver before he was eventually shot dead by Special Patrol Unit officer Eli Mizrahi, who was dispatched to the scene on a motorbike. But a video of the final moments of the attack shows a soldier in civilian clothing shooting Dwayat from close range with a handgun while standing outside the cabin. Only then is Mizrahi seen firing a number of rounds into the slumped body of the terrorist.

Despite the fact that the Israeli press refers to the attacker as a terrorist, it is at present not clear whether his motives were indeed political or whether he simply ran amok for personal reasons. There is no suggestion that he was part of a terrorist organisation. He had a criminal record including drug offences, which might mean he was a likely terrorist recruit or it might not.

None of that stopped the Daily Telegraph this morning from concluding that the real blame for the attack lay with... the Jews. In a story as sloppy as it was tendentious, it reported of the attacker that

his family told a tale of a young man who may have soured after having his heart broken by a young Russian Jewish woman

and furthermore that

a radical Jewish group seized her one night and returned her to her family.

But as Adloyada has noticed, the Israeli paper Yediot Achranot’s website Ynet has a rather different take on this aspect of the killer’s personal history:

Meanwhile police have confirmed Dwayyat also had a criminal record, and had served two years in prison after being convicted of raping a Jewish Israeli woman he had been romantically involved with.

It appears to have been beyond the Telegraph reporter to have asked the police to check out the relatives’ claims, which she simply accepted at face value and reported as such.

There is however one other piece of information which certainly does not figure in the Telegraph’s account. According to the off-duty soldier who shot the killer:

At one point he yelled out, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and stepped on the gas pedal...

If that is indeed so, that would suggest that this was indeed a terror attack --maybe a case of what Daniel Pipes has called ‘sudden jihad syndrome’.

One thing’s for sure – Murder and Boon it wasn’t.