The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto suggests that the accidental killing of American activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli tractor in March 2003 may have given the Palestinian who perpetrated yesterday’s tractor attack in Jerusalem the idea for turning a tractor into a deadly weapon.

Come on.

On a related note to my post yesterday about the battle over language in the Middle East conflict (“Arab” vs. “Palestinian”), now that we know the perpterator of the attack was Palestinian, we can say so.

And my colleague Dan Sieradski was exacting enough to point out that the deadly weapon used in yesterday’s attack was neither a bulldozer nor a tractor, but a backhoe loader. Given that it’s part tractor, I think we’ll still be safe if we keep calling it a tractor. And if someone calls it a bulldozer, we may just let it slide.

Marc Perelman reports in the Forward that “a recent flurry of signals from Al Qaeda leaders has fueled concerns among terrorism experts that Al Qaeda could be setting up to launch an attack on Israel.”

The worries about an impending attack actually grow out of the apparent struggles of the terrorist network, visible in mounting criticism from former members and leading Muslim theologians.

In recent weeks, the CIA chief has claimed that Al Qaeda had suffered setbacks in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and lengthy exposés in The New Yorker and The New Republic have detailed the inner debates raging within Al Qaeda, especially due to resentment over its indiscriminate killing of Muslims.

This perceived weakening has some experts predicting that Al Qaeda leaders would seek to repair the group’s image — and prove the skeptics wrong — with a spectacular attack on Israel, the one target on which all Muslim extremists seem to be able to agree.

The New Republic and the New Yorker both have long articles about Al Qaida’s problems in the Muslim world.

With the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy upon us, former AIPAC and Israeli embassy official Lenny Ben-David is highlighting a series of dispatches that RFK wrote during his 1948 visit to Israel.

Click here to read the actual dispatches, which appeared in the now-defunct Boston Post.

The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people. It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.

Ben-David has an essay in the Jerusalem Post arguing that RFK was a genuine friend of Israel, who paid for this support of the Jewish state with his life.

And this from Sasha Issenberg in the Boston Globe:

The shooting of Robert F. Kennedy is widely remembered as part of the wrenching domestic turbulence of the 1960s. But some scholars are beginning to see it as something quite different yet no less significant: America’s first taste of the political violence of the Middle East.

Marty Peretz offers an amen on his blog.

And over at the Forward, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, writes:

Kennedy’s assassin was a Palestinian resident of Silwan in East Jerusalem, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. He chose to kill Kennedy on that exact date because it coincided with the first anniversary of Israel’s stunning victory during the Six-Day War. Sirhan hated Kennedy because he had supported Israel; in fact, that was exactly what Sirhan said when he testified at his own trial. He remains in prison, serving a life sentence for the murder.

Why is it important that we remember this barely-remembered historical tidbit about the death of Kennedy? Because one man’s hatred of Israel utterly re-directed American political life and the story of the presidency.

The New York Times has had several items of interest over the past few days:

• The last Jews of Baghdad have become the fearful few.
• P. W. Singer and Elina Noor argue that the U.S. is making a strategic mistake by describing terrorists as jihadists.
• Organizers of the Salute to Israel Parade wonder why Israelis never seem to turn out.
• Thomas Friedman says Mr. Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America.
• A look a The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, that is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.
• The U.S. State Dept. reinstated seven Fullbright scholarships awarded to Palestinian students after it had withdrawn them last week citing Israel’s refusal to allow the students to leave the Gaza Strip.
• The public editor of the New York Times discusses how the paper was taken to task over an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Islamic world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that the candidate had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult. (Click here and here for response in the blogosphere).

Don’t expect him to get honored at an ADL dinner, but Al-Qaida’s second-in-command wants the world to know — Israel is not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Check out the report from the Associated Press:

Ayman al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television of starting the rumor [about Israel]. “The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said.

In an audiotape last week, according to the AP report, the Al-Qaida leader had plenty of negative to say about the regime in Tehran:

Al-Zawahri denounced what he called Iran’s expansionist plans, saying Tehran aims to annex southern Iraq and Shiite areas of the eastern Arabian Peninsula as well as stre ngthen ties to its followers in southern Lebanon. He warned that if Iran achieves its goals, it will “explode the situation in an already exploding region.

The rhetoric is a stark change for al-Zawahri, who in the past did not seek to exploit Shiite-Sunni tensions. When the former head of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was waging a campaign of suicide bombings against Shiites in Iraq, al-Zawahri sent messages telling him to stop, fearing it would hurt al-Qaida’s image.

Gunaratna said the change in tone could be because of al-Qaida’s failure to win the release of al-Qaida figures detained by Iran since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, including al-Qaida security chief Saif al-Adel and two of bin Laden’s sons.

Gunaratna said that up to 200 al-Qaida figures and their families are under house arrest in Iran and that Tehran has rejected al-Qaida attempts to negotiate their release.

Al-Qaida doesn’t have the strength to launch attacks in Iran, but it intends to do so “in the future,” he said. “If al-Qaida becomes strong in Iraq … Iran believes al-Qaida in Iraq could become a major threat.”

Joshua Faudem’s documentary on the bombing of Mike’s Place, “Blues by the Beach,” is coming out at the end of the month. It’s being released exclusively online, not in theaters or on DVD. Here’s the trailer.

Click here to purchase the full film.

Here’s a press release: (more…)

First the Jerusalem Post published an article about two weeks ago questioning whether Walid Shoebat, the self-described terrorist-turned-Israel supporter, was ever really a terrorist. Today he fires back with his own Post article, saying yes he was:

Despite all the evidence I provided the Post about my ties and that of my family to terror, the paper preferred to absolve me from my terrorist past and to believe my relatives, whose own links to terrorism seems irrelevant and who are glad to deny my terror links and my own confession.

Ha’aretz reports that the Prime Minister’s Office in Israel recently posted three videos to YouTube showing images from the terror attack earlier this month at Jerusalem’s Mercaz HaRav yeshiva:

The three videos were posted under the titles “Stop the Terror, Stop the Bloodshed,” “Act NOW: Stop The Bloodshed - Stop the Terror,” and “Emergency call, March 7, Jerusalem.”

While the person named as poster, AtiyaRachel, was not identified as having any connection to the government, TheMarker has learned that the Prime Minister’s Office was actually behind the uploads to the popular video site.

This is the first time that a government body has used the site in response to a terror attack.

Here are the videos (warning: graphic images)…

The Jerusalem Post features two opinion pieces calling for greater displays of Jewish unity — Gil Troy asserts that Israel’s secular leaders need to take a greater part in the public mourning of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva and a Baltimore-based Orthodox rabbi says denominational leaders need to find a way to pray together in one sanctuary.

Troy:

The mass funeral on Friday March 7, outside the stricken yeshiva, was broadcast live on Israeli television, uniting the entire house of Israel in mourning. As the cameras showed one sobbing mourner after another, many viewers sitting comfortably in their own homes cried too. Alas, through the tears, one noticed something missing. In the clump of eulogizers at the front, not one leading secular politician stood, and not one secular leader spoke. That even Jerusalem’s mayor, Uri Lupolianski, is Orthodox, added to the one-sided impression. The mourning for this national tragedy appeared on television as a funeral limited to the religious community.

President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the cabinet ministers represent the entire country. All Israelis pay their salaries, whatever ideology the citizens may embrace. As part of the national mourning process, secular representatives of the government should have attended. Even if their security details advised against appearing, true leaders need to show leadership sometimes. Democratic leaders who fear their constituents are failing at an essential part of the job description and should consider early retirement.

The rabbi (Murray Singerman):

There is another path, one which could shore up the breach, slacken the flow of Jews deciding to opt out, and attract back those who have already left. Rabbis of different denominations should reach across the divide and find theological solutions to not only work together for the social betterment of the community, but most importantly for Jewish unity, worship together.

For the sake of the future of the Jewish people, it is time for our rabbinic leadership to reach out to other denominations and find the will to pray together in one sanctuary. This would create a new paradigm of worship, in which rabbis, standing before the Almighty, will show their congregants that a Jewish world can stand together, not just apart.

Students of history will scoff at such an effort. The pessimistic historian will cite millennia of Jewish theological rifts. The optimist, however, will ignore these precedents, if only because a Jewish optimist is committed to ahavat hinam, boundless love for other Jews.

Remember Commentary’s “World Terrorism Wall Map” giveaway? Now, in Slate, Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger take a look at Israel’s growing terrorist-tourism industry:

So, what can a country do when its tourist industry is eclipsed by terrorism? The answer, it seems, is to market terrorism to tourists. In perhaps one of the strangest twists of Middle East politics, terrorism is being used to lure visitors back to Israel. Our itinerary—which promised participants such highlights as an “observation of a security trial of Hamas terrorists” and briefings on “the realities of Israel’s policy of targeted killings” — was not, at first glance, for the casual visitor. But in a way, it was. Israel has a long tradition of combining tourism and lobbying. Most famously, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a helicopter tour to George W. Bush during his 1998 trip to Israel while Bush was still governor of Texas. The two hit it off, and the visit is widely credited with reinforcing Bush’s sympathy for Israel’s security situation.