Thursday, March 24, 2022

Surveillance authorities did not do a proper job keeping eye on Beer Sheva jihadist

The Shin Bet was assigned to keep track of the terrorist who murdered 4 people in Beer Sheva. But it turns out they didn't do a good job:
The terrorist who killed four people in Beersheba on Tuesday was under Shin Bet surveillance at the time of his stabbing and car-ramming attack, Israeli television reported Wednesday.

Mohammad Ghaleb Abu al-Qi’an, 34, killed two women and two men in Tuesday’s attack in the southern city before he was shot dead by armed civilians. A former school teacher from the Bedouin town of Hura, he previously served time in prison for plotting to join the Islamic State Jihadist group in Syria.

According to Channel 12 news, the Shin Bet did not detect any signs Abu al-Qi’an was planning an attack, and also believed he had moderated his past views.

The unsourced report said the lack of any prior indication that Abu al-Qi’an intended to carry out an attack has boosted the security establishment’s assessment that he acted alone, but noted that investigators were still examining if his brothers were aware of his plans or assisted him.

Police arrested two of his brothers after the attack on suspicion of knowing his intentions and failing to prevent an act of terrorism
. The two have reportedly denied knowledge of Abu al-Qi’an’s plans or assisting him.
A really serious failure on the part of the authorities was not trying to wean him off of Islam while he was in prison. Nobody has the courage to move past political correctness. And it's led to the Negev district becoming a war zone in its own way:
Muhammad Alab Ahmed abu al-Kiyan’s brutal murder of four people in Beersheba on Tuesday, and the serious wounding of two others, needs to wake this country up to the anarchy and utter lawlessness that holds sway in the Negev.

Hair-raising stories abound of women afraid to leave their homes at night in Beersheba, of outrageously reckless drivers on Negev roads, of Bedouin gangs stealing military equipment from inside IDF bases – sometimes right off of tanks and armored personnel carriers.

The Negev is Israel’s Wild West, and it has been so for years. Laws that apply in other parts of the country that regulate matters, such as the possession of weapons, where homes can be built, obedience to basic traffic laws, polygamy and where cannabis can be grown, are simply not enforced among Bedouin in the Negev. It’s as if this large region is extra-territorial.

And this is a process that has been going on, unimpeded, for years. Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a classic bit of chutzpah, tweeted after Tuesday’s attack that Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s “weakness” can be blamed for it.

“After they abandoned the Negev to [the Arab political party] Ra’am and the Islamic Movement, they are abandoning the lives of the Negev residents to bloodthirsty Islamic terrorists.”

As if Netanyahu was not the prime minister for 12 consecutive years from 2009-to 2021 during which time the Negev increasingly turned into a lawless land.
Admittedly, there's a valid argument to make there, unfortunately, that Netanyahu may have enabled it. But that doesn't mean Bennett and Lapid should evade criticism and condemnation for their own failure in the present to crack down on crime in Negev regions. If the Post won't take the proper steps to pan them as well, what good is does it do to point this out on their part?

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