The police have announced this evening that yesterday's attacker of a guard in the Old City of Jerusalem was a 29-year-old Israeli Arab from the Galillee, who left behind a baby daughter and pregnant wife. Ra'ed Salach's Israeli Islamists are hailing him as a martyr, while his family is claiming the whole thing is an invention of the two guards who murdered him in cold blood. The family's response is human, though the fact that the event was captured on video (most of the Old City is covered by video cameras for security reasons) sort of demolishes their version. The framing of the story in the BBC's terms (see my previous post) looks even less convincing than initially. What young husband and expecting father travels three hours by bus to attack a guard and shoot pedestrians, even if he does intensely dislike the policies of the government? There is a serious story here, but it's not the one the BBC told us.
Haaretz has the item here, though you'll notice that they simply regurgitated an earlier version of the story and replaced only the top few paragraphs. I haven't found anything on the BBC. The story no longer interests them, obviously.
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To my mind, it doesn't matter a whole lot to the judgement of the event if he traveled three hours by bus to do it or not. I can't see that it makes him a more sympathetic character if he carried it out as a premeditated attack than if he was suddenly seized with the idea on the spot, which is weird in its own right. Considering that one of the women trying to get aboard a plane with explosives in a baby bottle had committed her five-month-old to die as a martyr if the whole thing worked out, it's hard to say that people won't do such things as abandoning a wife and child in a crazy attack attempt. But I guess here we'll probably never know what was in the guy's mind.
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