Alaa Abu Jamal was dying to be a martyr — literally. So on Tuesday, October 13, he rammed his car into a crowd of Jewish pedestrians at a bus stop in Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood, which is home to mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews. He then jumped out and proceeded to hack at two injured Jews with a meat cleaver. This Palestinian Arab terrorist murdered an elderly rabbi and severely wounded other Israelis before he was shot by an alert security guard. The entire attack was captured on a security camera.

What could have driven Abu Jamal to do such a beastly thing? Surely, it couldn’t have been desperation born of poverty and unemployment (the media’s favorite justification for Palestinian terrorism). Abu Jamal, it so happens, worked for Bezeq, the Israeli telecommunications company whose uniform he wore during the attack.

A clue about the Arab man’s true motivation emerged soon enough. Abu Jamal was a cousin of the two terrorists, Uday Abu Jamal and Ghassan Abu Jamal, who murdered four ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and a Druze police officer who came to their rescue at a synagogue in Jerusalem last year. Both terrorists were shot dead before they could kill more Israelis.

In an interview broadcast on Israeli TV shortly after that attack, Alaa Abu Jamal recalled how elated his family was to hear of the killing. “There were calls of joy among us and they passed out candies to the visitors who came and there was support for the two martyrs,” he explained. One of the cousins, 32, had been married with three children, but martyring himself while murdering Jews clearly took precedence over raising his children, who will doubtlessly be encouraged to emulate their “martyred” father. “Thank Allah for someone who dies as a martyr, that’s a great thing,” Alaa Abu Jamal said.

On Tuesday, Alaa decided to accomplish his own “great thing.” His friends and relatives must be passing out candies happily as we speak.

That’s what Israelis are up against: cold-blooded murderers who consider butchering random Jews to be the greatest accomplishment of their lives and a great honor to their family. It’s this culture of death and destruction that has left Palestinian society mired in a medieval mindset of martyrdom. In what other culture do family members celebrate relatives who murder random people? Is this what’s going to be the Palestinians’ unique gift to the world?

Many of the other stabbings have taken place in land that is clearly Israeli territory — from western Jerusalem to Ra’anana to Tel Aviv — so the media’s narrative about Palestinians fighting “settlements” and “occupation” also won’t wash.

The attackers — males and females alike, many of them teenagers — have routinely been described as “lone wolves,” but that’s a misnomer. They have hardly acted alone. Taught to hate Jews through poisonous cradle-to-grave incitement, they have the support of Palestinian society at large. On television channels, in mosques, and on social media, Palestinians have been calling on their brothers and sisters to murder Jews, along with giving detailed instructions on how best to stab them to death.

They’re allegedly acting in defense of the al-Aqsa Mosque, which is — of course — under no threat from Israel. The meme of al-Aqsa being attacked by Jews dates back at least to 1929, when the odious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (one of Hitler’s closest allies) used the same excuse to incite murderous violence against the Jews of the British Mandate.

Nearly 100 years later, the spirit of the mufti is alive and well. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (who many claim is a “moderate”) frequently echoes him. “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah,” Abbas said recently on the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel. Peace in our time? It looks as though for many Palestinians, “peace” will come only when all the Jews are dead. The Grand Mufti would be proud.

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