The leader of the free world, Truth Revolt, Bill Whittle, via You Tube, March 5, 2015
Scott Ott first described him thus… a brave, thoughtful, serious man doing a brave, thoughtful serious job. In his latest FIREWALL, Bill Whittle provides the amazing and disturbing contrast between The President of the United States and The Leader of the Free World
Dealing With the Iranian Death Cult, American Thinker, Warren Adler, March 2, 2015
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the resultant bloodbath should stand as an example of how a rigidly brainwashed death cult like Iran will choose the apparent path of negotiation while hiding its lethal ambition under a camouflage of lies.
*****************
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel laid out a strong case for mistrusting Iranian intentions, he did not define the bedrock reason why Iran cannot be trusted. To do that, one must understand the captive mentality of the cult phenomena and how it distorts reason, brainwashes its adherents, and creates unquestioning followers.
For those of us with strong cognizant memories of the events before, during and after the stunning Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, the current negotiations with Iran to prevent this terror-sponsoring cultist state from developing a nuclear weapon seems chillingly similar.
Prior to that “day of infamy” as then President Franklin Roosevelt so aptly characterized it, the United States was locked in tense and complicated negotiations with Japan to settle conflicts that divided our two countries. They were many, involving a clash of perceived power divisions in the Pacific with underlying territorial and psychological issues leaving both countries at loggerheads.
The United States, satisfied that it had broken the Japanese military codes, felt secure enough that it could divine the Japanese positions on its statecraft and military plans. The Japanese, who had entered into a tripartite agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, felt secure in their military might and those of their Axis allies in the face of a largely militarily unprepared America to extract whatever concessions they were seeking from the United States.
It is true that America is not negotiating alone with Iran, but its position in the discussion and eventual outcome, by virtue of its historical leadership role, makes the comparison worth noting.
America in 1941 was facing comparative angst. President Roosevelt, who had promised to stay out of the war, was dealing with a reluctant public that had little appetite to enter the fray, although he had been persuaded by Winston Churchill to assist the Allies by providing armaments through the Lend-lease program. Even as negotiations with the Japanese proceeded, the Japanese had no intention of rapprochement and had actually been planning the assault on Pearl Harbor for many months before.
Worse, the American intelligence community was divided in their assessment of Japanese intentions and had not a clue about its cultist discipline. They were monstrously naive about the power of cult psychology and, unfortunately, they still are. Iran is run by death cult adherents operating under the guise of religion with all power, despite all the outward signs of alleged diversity, vested in one man.
Japan at that time was also being manipulated by cultists enmeshed in the doctrines of State Shinto, based on a degraded interpretation of the samurai Bushido code. They later initiated the suicide bomber pilot program, finding recruits eager to kill themselves for the emperor by smashing their planes into American ships. If that isn’t death cult conduct, then I’d like to know what is.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler, a charismatic and ruthless megalomaniac, had turned the Nazi Party into a brutal master race entitlement cult determined to make “Deutschland Uber Alles” a reality. Indeed, by then the Nazis had brainwashed the German people into the fanatic belief that they were going to fulfill that destiny in a thousand-year Reich, and Hitler had demonstrated his military prowess designed to reach that goal. He held total sway over the Germans, not unlike Ayatollah Khamenei and his cult followers in their control over Iran.
Nothing happens in Iran without the ayatollah’s approval. Indeed, the Islamic terrorist tentacles of the Iranian regime is considerable and unlikely to be deterred by mere negotiations. “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are not just empty slogans. They are chosen statements of intent officially approved by the regime leader.
The State Shinto cult of emperor worship was manipulated by Japan’s power-hungry military to have the Japanese people believe in the inevitability of their own destiny to carve out their own empire in the Pacific. Indeed, they managed to persuade the revered Emperor Hirohito himself to agree to their machinations. His naive approval was all that was needed to bring the Japanese people on board, a typical cult scenario.
The weakest partner in this ménage a trois, Benito Mussolini, had earned himself some cred by an African adventure in Eritrea and North Africa.
Using the cult comparison, there seems to be little difference between Khomeini and Hitler, at least in terms of power. Hitler, like Khamenei today, calls the shots. Khamenei, his minions, and their vast network of Iranian-armed and financially-supported death cult Islamic terror cells is, by any rational measure, an existential danger to America, and certainly to Israel.
Indeed, nuclear bombs and long-range missiles in the hands of this cult could easily transform a mere perceived danger into a planetary disaster and fulfill their “death to” sloganeering. Such power in the hand of the Iranian death cult will create a destructive capacity that by comparison makes Hitler’s armies seem like toy soldiers.
What history has taught us is that cults that have gained total power over their adherents will always use any means to gain their ends. They will employ any tactic that hastens their victory. They will lie, cheat, charm, brutalize, and kill anyone who stands in their way. They will demolish any obstacle that confronts them and inhibits their goals. They will dissimulate and deceive.
The idea that sanity will prevail when it comes to cult leaders is a false notion. Hitler, by the evidence of his suicide, appeared to have understood that death was a finality. Islamic terrorist’s have been brainwashed to believe that death, by sacrificing oneself to what they believe is their Prophet’s desire, is a continuation of physicality, offering perpetual pleasure through eternity in some imagined paradise.
The comparison with Pearl Harbor may seem farfetched and hysterical to some, but as 9/11 has illustrated, a cult in which adherents have no fear of death is a weapon of enormous power. Those who believe that leadership sanity and logic will prevail if Iran gets its bomb and actually uses it against their “Death to” objectives should understand that retaliation, which will surely come, could be welcomed by the Iranian perpetrators of the Jihad cult as a glorious suicide mission guaranteeing an entry ticket to their imagined paradise.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the resultant bloodbath should stand as an example of how a rigidly brainwashed death cult like Iran will choose the apparent path of negotiation while hiding its lethal ambition under a camouflage of lies.
Dr. Jasser gives reaction to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech, You Tube, March 3, 2015
(Dr. Jasser is an American citizen and a Muslim. Is he also an “Islamophobe?” Please see also The ‘Islamophobia’ scam returns.– DM)
The ‘Islamophobia’ Scam Returns, Front Page Magazine,
(I hadn’t been aware that the scam had gone away. — DM)
[A]s far as the hard-Left Center for American Progress (CAP) is concerned, people aren’t suspicious of Muslims and Islam because of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, but because of “the efforts of a small cadre of funders and misinformation experts” which were “amplified by an echo chamber of the religious right, conservative media, grassroots organizations, and politicians who sought to introduce a fringe perspective on American Muslims into the public discourse.”
****************
In recent weeks, the terror group calling itself the Islamic State (aka ISIS and ISIL) has beheaded journalists and social workers, burned a pilot alive, and forced hundreds of captive women into sex slavery – all while citing Islamic texts to justify their actions and appeal for new recruits. A Muslim in the latest Islamic State beheading video cited two Qur’an verses (8:12 and 47:4) to refute “those who say [beheading] is cruel.” In New York Wednesday, a Muslim was found guilty of plotting to bomb the New York subway system. The previous day in London, a woman from Nigeria pleaded for asylum, as she faces certain death if she returns to her homeland: an Islamic court has sentenced her to die for being a lesbian.
All this and a great deal more like it – a daily horror show of jihad attacks and plots, boasts of coming catastrophic attacks in the West, declarations of imminent conquest, and more, all carried out by people claiming to represent the truest and purest form of Islam – is why, according to a poll released last summer, only twenty-seven percent of Americans have a favorable view of Muslims. Yet as far as the hard-Left Center for American Progress (CAP) is concerned, people aren’t suspicious of Muslims and Islam because of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, but because of “the efforts of a small cadre of funders and misinformation experts” which were “amplified by an echo chamber of the religious right, conservative media, grassroots organizations, and politicians who sought to introduce a fringe perspective on American Muslims into the public discourse.”
This claim appears in the CAP’s new edition of its “Islamophobia” report, “Fear, Inc. 2.0: The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate in America,” by Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer. It might seem to be peculiarly tone-deaf of the CAP to release this report while the Islamic State is horrifying the world and attacks by lone jihadis (and regular threats that more are on the way) are becoming more frequent in the West, but that is most likely why they felt they had to release it now: with reality threatening to break through their fog of disinformation, they have to pour on more dry ice.
It wasn’t accidental that Hitler’s Reich had an entire Ministry of Propaganda: lying to the public is a major job, as the cleverest of propaganda constructs is always threatened by the simple facts. CAP is trying to compel non-Muslims to disregard what they see every day — Muslims committing violence against non-Muslims and justifying it by referring to Islamic texts — and instead embrace a fictional construct: Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance. This takes a relentless barrage of propaganda, and “Fear, Inc. 2.0” is just the latest in a steady stream from CAP and its allies, which are exponentially wealthier and better-funded than the groups CAP vilifies in this report.
“Fear, Inc. 2.0” is filled with assertions that white is black, and that your lying eyes are deceiving you. We’re told that I myself am “the primary driver in promoting the myth that peaceful Islam is nonexistent and that violent extremism is inherent within traditional Islam.” CAP doesn’t offer any evidence for this being a “myth” – it doesn’t have to, as its Leftist constituency takes that as self-evident.
But CAP flatters me, as it flatters all of us named in “Fear, Inc. 2.0,” simply by suggesting that we have such persuasive power that we can create a nationwide climate of hate and fear against Muslims. I cannot accept their proffered honor of being the “primary driver in promoting the myth that peaceful Islam is nonexistent.” Innumerable others have noted the same reality, including Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.
But neither Nyazee nor Ibn Rushd are prominent enough to claim the role of “primary driver in promoting the myth that peaceful Islam is nonexistent.” How about the Ayatollah Khomeini, who said: “There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.” Better yet, how about Muhammad himself, who is depicted in a hadith saying: “I have been commanded to fight against people, till they testify to the fact that there is no god but Allah, and believe in me (that) I am the messenger (from the Lord) and in all that I have brought.” (Bukhari 1.31).
Another “don’t believe your lying eyes” moment in “Fear, Inc. 2.0” occurs when the report charges the David Horowitz Freedom Center with “promoting the myth that Muslim extremists infiltrated an array of political organizations on both the left and the right.” How about the White House? In December 2012, while the Muslim Brotherhood was still in power in Egypt, the Egyptian magazine Rose El-Youssef boasted that Brotherhood infiltrators in the Obama Administration had changed American policy “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
It may have been an empty boast, but that would be hard to prove in light of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Similarly, the CAP report claims (quoting Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor) that the notorious captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document detailing U.S. Muslim groups’ strategy to work toward “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house” was “the daydream of one enthusiast.” Brown doesn’t explain why a copy of this “daydream” turned up in the offices of the Holy Land Foundation (once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, shut down for funding Hamas) years after it was first written, but an even more telling indication that Brown and CAP are the enthusiasts doing the daydreaming when they dismiss this report is the fact that the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Muslim groups work indefatigably to oppose virtually every counter-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented. Stigmatizing defense against the jihad threat as “bigotry” isn’t trying to “sabotage its miserable house”? Pull my other leg.
I hope the next CAP report will focus on how the “Islamophobes” are so devastatingly effective that they have even been able to infiltrate mosques and Islamic schools, so as to convince young Muslims that the Islamic State is authentically Islamic and has a claim on their loyalties: over 20,000 foreign Muslims have now traveled from all over the world to join the Islamic State, indicating either that imams and other Muslim authorities are singularly failing to communicate to all too many young Muslims the true, peaceful Islam that CAP will charge you with “hatred” and “bigotry” for not believing exists, or that the “Islamophobes” have a reach far greater than Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer ever imagined even in their worst fever dreams.
I also hope that new CAP report will address motive. Nowhere does “Fear, Inc. 2.0” explain why these fiendish “Islamophobes” would care to devote their lives to spreading hatred and fear of a noble, oppressed minority group. Apparently they want us to believe that it’s for the money, but since CAP’s budget is so very much larger than those of all the “Islamophobic” groups combined, if money is all it’s about then the “Islamophobes” would be well-advised to run up the white flag and pick up a copy of How to Get Rich By Betraying One’s Friends and Principles, by David Brock. So is it racism? Then where are the supposedly well-organized, well-heeled groups of smear and fear merchants who are dedicating their time to vilifying Hindus, or Buddhists, or Mormons, or Hard-Shell Baptists?
The effect, intended or not, of the CAP report and others like it is clear enough. When CAP and its cohorts smear those who speak out against jihad and Islamic supremacism as “bigots” and “hatemongers,” they intimidate others into backtracking, apologizing, and looking the other way when they should instead be pressing the Muslim community to address the jihad problem realistically and back up its pro-forma condemnations of terrorism with honest work against the Islamic teachings that jihadists use to justify terror.
The perfect world for the likes of Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, Ken Sofer and other Islamophobia-mongers would be one in which no one speaks up against jihad violence and Islamic supremacism: they have never, ever seen a counter-jihadist for whom they had any positive words. This would render the U.S. and the West in general mute and hence defenseless before the advancing jihad. As the blood and chaos spreads, will Duss and his cohorts stand up and take a bow?
Life under the US umbrella
By Caroline Glick Friday, March 6th, 2015
(“…Netanyahu built sufficient bipartisan Congressional support for an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons to protect Israel from the Obama administration.” – LS)
South Korea lives under a US security umbrella. Both on a conventional and nuclear level, South Koreans are dependent on the US to deter North Korea from attacking them and overrunning their country.
Last Friday, US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman scolded South Koreans for being too nationalist. In her words, “Nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it’s not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy.”
The South Koreans interpreted her remarks as criticism of their President Park Geun-hye for her refusal to reinstate reunification talks with North Korea due to Pyongyang’s refusal to discuss the dismantlement of its nuclear program.
Sherman negotiated the US’s nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal.
Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs.
Sherman is now the US’s chief negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran.
This week President Park traveled to Saudi Arabia, where she signed a deal to build two nuclear reactors for the oil giant.
The truth is that the North Koreans didn’t need nuclear weapons to deter South Korea from attacking it. Pyongyang possesses one of the largest, most powerful artillery arsenals in the world and it has enough artillery pieces pointed at Seoul to bomb the South Korean capital into the Stone Age.
North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is not directed primarily against Seoul. It is directed against Washington. And, as the US’s timidity in its defense of South Korea, and its constant attempts to placate Pyongyang indicate, Washington has been deterred.
The day after Saudi King Salman signed his nuclear deal with Park, US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Riyadh to meet with him and with the foreign ministers of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman.
According to news reports, Kerry offered the Arab leaders to place them under the US nuclear umbrella to protect them from Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
There can be no doubt that in his conversations with the South Korean leader, King Salman discussed what life is like under an American security guarantee. And it is hard to see that he considers it a good bargain.
It is not merely that the US is deterred by North Korea, and therefore is willing to humiliate and endanger South Korea to avoid having to contend with Pyongyang. It is that US President Barack Obama has destroyed the credibility of US security guarantees by repeatedly failing to stand by them.
During the Cold War, West Germany and the rest of Western Europe were able to function under the US’s nuclear umbrella because the Soviet Union was deterred from invading Germany by the US’s nuclear threat. Moscow believed the US was serious when it promised to bomb the Soviet Union with nuclear warheads if it sent tanks into West Berlin.
Obama wouldn’t even undertake limited air strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad after he crossed Obama’s declared redline and attacked his opponents with chemical weapons.
Obama failed to live up to his own redline because he didn’t want to upset Assad’s protectors in Tehran. To build up the credibility of his intentions to appease Tehran, Obama betrayed the Syrian people and his own pledge to defend them against chemical strikes. So even without nuclear weapons, Tehran is deterring Obama.
Beyond that, just as Pyongyang doesn’t require nuclear weapons to destroy South Korea, Iran doesn’t need to attack Persian Gulf states with nuclear weapons in order to dominate them and cause their collapse.
Iran can subjugate and destroy these regimes simply by using its proxies against them and threatening their economies with its control over both the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Aden. Iran can bring the Saudis to their knees without getting anywhere near a nuclear tripwire.
And like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Arab leaders are convinced that as she did in 1999 with Pyongyang, Sherman and her boss, Kerry, are now paving the way for Iran to develop nuclear weapons.
If the Arabs scoff at the US offer of a nuclear umbrella, Israelis don’t even have the luxury of snorting at the offer because there is no reason to believe that even a credible nuclear umbrella would deter Iran from attacking Israel with nuclear weapons.
In Israel’s case there are any number of scenarios under which Iran will see an advantage to attacking Israel with nuclear weapons, either directly or through one of its proxies that now encircle Israel along three borders.
And so we are left with the question of how to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
As Netanyahu explained in his address before the joint houses of Congress on Tuesday, the deal that Obama is now offering Iran “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb; it paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
By leaving Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact, and pledging to end the limitations on Iran’s nuclear program within a decade, Obama is enabling Iran to acquire nuclear arms both by cheating its way there as the North Koreans did, or by waiting out the deal and emerging immediately after as a nuclear power.
Either way, the deal as presently constituted empowers the regime. It enriches the ayatollahs and legitimizes their regime and their hegemonic actions and aspirations.
The problem with seeking to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is that according to arms control expert Graham Allison from Harvard University, and others, Iran passed the point of no return in terms of nuclear know-how in 2008. It has mastered the technology and the science and therefore has wherewithal to develop nuclear weapons, and rebuild nuclear infrastructures that may be destroyed or damaged in aerial and other attacks.
Given this dismal state of affairs there are three ways to approach the problem.
The first path is similar to Israel’s counterterror strategy of “mowing the lawn.” In counterterror parlance “mowing the lawn” involves destroying as much of the terrorist infrastructure that the terrorist foe possesses in as short a period as possible, and then repeating the process after the terror group reconstitutes its capabilities.
In the case of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a “mowing the lawn” approach would involve using force to destroy as many Iranian nuclear installations as possible in as short a campaign as possible in order to set Iran’s production schedule back for as long as possible, and then repeating the process, when Iran reconstitutes its capabilities.
The second path to block Iran’s nuclear advance is to use coercive diplomacy including harsh economic sanctions and other punitive means to force Iran to dismantle its nuclear installations and couple that coercive diplomacy with an intrusive inspections regime to ensure long term compliance.
The third means of curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions involves overthrowing the regime by providing active support – including organizational support and arms to regime opponents.
When Netanyahu spoke to the joint houses of Congress on Tuesday, he directly advanced the first two paths toward preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and indirectly advanced the third.
Netanyahu provided a sober-minded, carefully constructed argument for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He then demonstrated why Obama’s nuclear negotiating strategy enables Iran to become a nuclear power. In so doing, Netanyahu built sufficient bipartisan Congressional support for an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons to protect Israel from the Obama administration.
Whether Netanyahu will order such a strike, or when such a strike could be most effective, is impossible to judge. But he did secure Congressional support for it.
Netanyahu also created an opening for lawmakers who are frightened by the deal Obama is now negotiating to prevent him from completing it. Whether or when they will use the opportunity is still unclear. Obama has tremendous power and leverage over Democratic lawmakers and he has no compunction about using it to get his way.
On the other hand, buoyed by Netanyahu, Republicans also have power. If they use it judiciously, they will be able to secure 67 votes in favor of legislation that would require Obama to receive Senate approval for his nuclear deal, and would place harsh economic sanctions on Iran if it doesn’t meet the behavioral benchmarks of ending its sponsorship of terrorism, ending its meddling in the internal affairs of other states, and ending its threats to annihilate Israel that Netanyahu laid out.
Beyond that, by making clear that it is pure folly to assume that Iran will magically transform itself into a responsible actor on the international stage after securing the deal, Netanyahu provided the rationale for a strategy of regime change. Whether a future administration will adopt this option or not is unclear, but it is now evident that given the fact that Iran has the technological and scientific capacity to develop nuclear weapons, the only way in the long term to prevent that from happening is to overthrow the regime.
Obama and his advisers argue that there are only two options – their agreement, that enables Iran to build a nuclear arsenal in the coming years, or war. What Netanyahu made clear is that this is a false choice. The US is stronger than Iran. It has more leverage than Iran. All it needs to get a better agreement is a massively diminished desire to conclude one.
Five wounded in car-ramming terror attack in Jerusalem | The Times of Israel.
Palestinian driver runs over pedestrians, then assaults them with butcher’s knife before being shot; police on heightened alert in capital
March 6, 2015, 10:31 am
A Palestinian man in a private vehicle hit the five, who included a bicycle rider and a pedestrian, as they stood on a sidewalk. According to initial reports, the man then emerged from the vehicle with a butcher’s knife and attempted to stab passersby, but was swiftly shot and incapacitated by a Border Policeman and a Light Rail security guard at the scene.
The five victims suffered light-to-moderate injuries. They were treated at the scene by paramedics before being evacuated to the hospital.
The attacker was seriously injured. He, too, was taken to the hospital. Police identified him as a Palestinian man in his twenties from East Jerusalem.
“The swift and determined response stopped the attack as it was beginning and prevented more innocents from being injured,” said Moshe Edri, a regional police commander.
The attack took place near a Border Police base on Shimon Hatzadik Street, on the line separating West and East Jerusalem.
“A young man rammed his car (into pedestrians), and then got out and tried to stab people” before being shot and wounded, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement.
Friday’s attack mirrored a spate of similar assaults on Israelis involving cars late last year, in the same part of Jerusalem.
In late October a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, who had served prison time for terror activities, slammed his car into a train platform in that part of the city, killing a baby girl and a young woman from Ecuador.
Two weeks later, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a crowded train platform in East Jerusalem and then attacked people with an iron bar, killing one person and injuring 13. Both attackers were shot by police and died of their wounds.
Since then, there had been a relative lull in tensions in the city, though last week, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and his bodyguard leapt from a car and apprehended an 18-year-old Palestinian after he stabbed an Israeli near City Hall.
Friday’s attack raised tensions in Jerusalem during the Purim holiday, and came a day after the Palestinian leadership said it would end security cooperation with the Jewish state in the West Bank.
Following the attack Barkat said that security in the capital would be heightened but that Purim events would go forward as planned.
“We will not allow terrorism to disrupt our daily lives and we will continue to fight it without compromise,” he stated.
Barkat also praised the response of security forces at the scene, “who brought the incident to a swift end and prevented further harm.”
The terrorist group Hamas praised the attack which it said in a statement was a “heroic action” and “a natural response to Israeli crimes.”
Officials say it is difficult to prevent such attacks, which appear to be carried out by “lone wolf” assailants who are not thought to be dispatched by a terrorist organization.
AP and AFP contributed to this report
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments