Karin Laub of the Associated Press has written a terribly biased report about the trial of Ahed Tamimi aka Shirley Temper.
The title of the piece, which refers to her as a “protest icon”, is perhaps the first clue this is no objective piece of reporting. But it get worse. A whole lot worse.
Palestinian protest icon Ahed Tamimi is to go on trial before an Israeli military court on Tuesday for slapping and punching two Israeli soldiers — an act Palestinians say embodies their David vs. Goliath struggle against a brutal military occupation and Israel portrays as a staged provocation meant to embarrass its military.
Israel’s full-throttle prosecution of Tamimi, one of an estimated 300 Palestinian minors in Israeli jails, and a senior Israeli official’s recent stunning revelation that he once had parliament investigate whether the blond, blue-eyed Tamimis are a “real” Palestinian family have helped stoke ongoing interest in the case.
The teen with the curly mane of hair who turned 17 in jail last month has become the latest symbol of the long-running battle between Palestinians and Israelis over global public opinion.
The case touches on what constitutes legitimate resistance to Israel’s rule over millions of Palestinians, already in its 51st year after Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in 1967.
This is highly misleading, especially given the Tamimis themselves see the entirety of Israel as the “occupation.” That includes Ahed. If Israel was to hand over all of the territories we liberated in 1967, the Tamimis would still be engaging in their violent shenanigans.
Ahed Tamimi’s supporters see a brave girl who struck two armed soldiers outside her West Bank home in frustration after having just learned that Israeli troops seriously wounded a 15-year-old cousin, shooting him in the head from close range with a rubber bullet during nearby stone-throwing clashes.
Frustration was not the trigger. We have video evidence that her mother instructed her to go over to the soldiers and cause trouble.
Israel has treated Tamimi’s actions as a criminal offense, indicting her on charges of assault and incitement that could potentially land her in prison for several years.
Tamimi’s middle-of-the-night arrest from her home in December and her pre-trial court appearances, flanked by Israeli guards and looking impassive, have evoked a sense of history on a loop.
Impassive? That word does not mean what Laub thinks it means.
Another generation of Palestinians seems locked in a cycle of protests and arrests by Israel, three decades after Palestinians staged their first uprising, throwing stones and burning tires in the streets.
Since the mid-1990s, several U.S.-mediated rounds of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on setting up a Palestinian state alongside Israel have ended in failure. Gaps in positions only widened in the past decade, as Israeli settlement expansion continued and the Palestinians failed to end a crippling political split between an internationally backed self-rule government in parts of the West Bank and the Islamic militant group Hamas which dominates Gaza.
Note how Laub starts with Israeli settlement expansion when explaining the failure of peace negotiations, while on the palestinian side, the issue is Fatah and Hamas not getting along. No mention of palestinian terrorist and incitement, or their rejection of Israeli peace offers and offers to negotiate.
Tamimi’s father Bassem, who threw his first stone at the age of 14 and was an activist in the first uprising, said he expects the military court will deal harshly with his daughter and that she might remain in prison for some time.
His wife, Nariman, is being prosecuted in the same Dec. 15 scuffle in their village of Nabi Saleh and has been locked up alongside their daughter.
Nope, not a “scuffle” (nor a melee). It was a one-sided attack on the soldiers, who showed remarkable restraint in not responding.
In Nabi Saleh, Bassem Tamimi has used the interest in his daughter’s case to generate more support, saying he has hosted hundreds of foreigners in his home since her Dec. 19 arrest. His living room is decorated with several “Free Ahed” posters and one of Nariman.
On a recent morning, he met with volunteer observers from Switzerland, Sweden, Colombia, Argentina and Britain, going over the details of Ahed’s case and explaining his political views, including his support for a bi-national state in which Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal rights.
Bassem Tamimi does not support a bi-national state in which Israelis have equal rights with palestinians. He is a vile antisemite who supports the murder of Jewish Israelis.
After the group left, Bassem Tamimi got word that Hebrew graffiti had popped up on several walls in the village, but that teenagers were trying to cover up the threatening messages.
He rushed to the area, a few hundred meters (yards) from an army watchtower at the edge of the village, to try to preserve what he felt were valuable tools in the PR battle with Israel.
The first slogan called for the death penalty for Ahed. A second read: “The Tamimi family has no place in the Land of Israel.” A third warned: “Greetings from the retaliation branch of the IDF.”
As he took photos and video to be posted on social media, a dozen teenagers, some masked, headed toward the watchtower for weekly stone-throwing clashes with soldiers.
Worried that they might try to spray over the graffiti, Tamimi shouted, “Leave it, leave it,” as the group walked past him.
What a coincidence this happened right as Laub was interviewing Tamimi. Does Laub not for a second think that this was staged? Of course not.
