Leftists Visit, Hug Mother of Fogel Murderer
by Gil Ronen
Several ultra-leftist groups organized a visit to the Arab village of Awarta on Saturday, April 16, in support of the villagers and against the IDF's activities there in the search for the murderers of Ruth and Rabbi Ehud Fogel and their children Yoav (11), Elad (4) and Hadas (three months).
The leftists visited several homes in the Samaria village, including that of the Awad family, which spawned the murderers. The identities of the confessed murderers were released for publication on Sunday, the day after the visit. The murderers were already in IDF custody at the time of the leftists' visit and their arrest - including the fact that they are relatively young - was already widely rumored and hinted at by the press.
A photograph from the visit which can be viewed here, posted by one of the activists on her Internet blog, shows Raya Yaron, spokeswoman of Machsom Watch, comforting a woman described as being 37 years old and "in a deep depression." The blogger explained in her post that the woman fainted during the leftist women's visit and was distraught over the arrest of her husband, her two sons and a daughter.
The woman is easily recognizable as Nuf Awad, mother of Hakem Awad, whose photograph was featured on the front page of Arab newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida Monday.
"It is impossible that my son did this," she is quoted by the paper as saying. "My son doesn't know how to slaughter a chicken" (the translation is from the Seventh Eye media-watch website). The two murderers confessed, however, to slaughtering five human beings and investigators reported that they expressed no remorse, and even said that had they realized there were two more children sleeping in the house, they would have killed them as well. They saw no problem in slitting baby Hadas's throat, they explained, since she was a Jew.
Another leftist visitor, Yaakov Manor of the Center for Alternative Information, described the visit thus on the AIC's Hebrew website:
"The horror that we witnessed at the home of the family of Muhammad Awad cannot be described as anything but a pogrom - a primitive and brutal act of revenge intended to strike fear and awe into the hearts of the residents...."
"The father, Muhammad, 45, the son Majdi, 20, a third year university student, the son Amjad, 19, a freshman university student, and the son Hakem, 17, were arrested."
At about the same time that Manor wrote the post, a court lifted a gag order and allowed the press to publish the names and photos of the murder suspects. One of them was 17 year old Hakem Awad. The other was his cousin, Amjad Awad, who is apparently not the same Amjad mentioned above as brother of Hakem.
Machsom Watch is a women's group that interferes with soldiers looking for weapons and explosives at checkposts and is a member of the Women's Coalition for Peace. Both are radical groups that espouse a pacifist, anti-religious and anti-Western brand of gender feminism, and both received considerable funding from the New Israel Fund as recently as 2007, according to NGO Monitor.
Despite allegations of siding with Israel's enemies, the New Israel Fund is still perceived as a legitimate body by many liberals in Israel and outside it.
As reported on Arutz Sheva, Israel Online Ambassadors said Sunday that these leftist groups had crossed a red line. “The time has come to make leftist groups that support murderers illegal. Whoever supports baby killers has no place in a democratic society,” the group said in a statement.
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