ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Lawsuit Brewing? Mark Jacobson, the Stanford professor who claims the U.S. can run solely on renewables, tells his critics he’s hired an attorney. By Robert Bryce

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Mark Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor who became the darling of the green Left by repeatedly claiming the U.S. economy can run solely on renewable energy, has threatened to take legal action against the authors of an article that demolished his claims last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper — whose lead author is Chris Clack, a mathematician who has worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado and now has an energy consulting firm — received coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets, including a piece from yours truly in this space. Clack’s paper went through rigorous vetting and numerous delays that lasted more than a year. Rather than accept any of the criticisms Clack and his nearly two dozen co-authors made, Jacobson responded with tirades on Twitter, EcoWatch, and elsewhere. He claimed that his work doesn’t contain a single error, that all of his critics are whores for hydrocarbons, and that, well, dammit, he’s right. Never mind that Jacobson overstated the amount of available hydropower in the U.S. by roughly a factor of ten and claimed that in just three decades or so, we won’t need any gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel because we will all be flying to Vegas in hydrogen-powered 737s.

But Jacobson has also made it clear that he’s considering litigation. After hearing rumors about his legal threats, I obtained redacted copies of two e-mails Jacobson sent to Clack and his co-authors last month. In one e-mail, sent June 27 at 6:11 p.m., Jacobson warned, “just to keep you informed, I have hired an attorney to address the falsification of claims about our work in the Clack article.” About an hour later, Jacobson sent another e-mail to them. It concluded with Jacobson saying, “Yes, and I have hired an attorney.”

No legal complaints have been filed yet. But by intimating legal action, Jacobson joins company with another thin-skinned climate catastrophist and hero of the green Left: Michael Mann. As readers may know, Mann, a professor at Penn State University — who, by the way, has a star turn in Leonardo DiCaprio’s new climate-disaster pic, Before the Flood — sued National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg, and Mark Steyn for defamation in 2012. The suit demanded a jury trial, and the litigation is still pending. (For Steyn’s paint-blistering take on Mann and climate McCarthyism, read his 2015 Senate testimony.)

Mann’s litigation and Jacobson’s implied threat to sue show how influential, well-funded climate scientist-activists are resorting to bully tactics to try to intimidate their intellectual antagonists. Rather than engage in civil, fact-based debate about climate change and climate policy, Mann and his fellow travelers have engaged in public smear campaigns against other scientists.

For a comment on this, I contacted Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado who has written extensively about climate issues. For his efforts, Pielke was the target of a years-long smear campaign that was engineered by John Podesta’s henchmen at the Center for American Progress. CAP’s Joe Romm, who refused to debate Pielke in public, published dozens of articles trashing Pielke. Later, a batch of Podesta’s e-mails, which were disclosed by WikiLeaks, showed Judd Legum, an editor at ThinkProgress (a CAP-affiliated site), bragging to California billionaire Tom Steyer that he and his colleagues, by trashing Pielke, had prevented Pielke from “providing important cover for climate deniers.” Pielke was also targeted by U.S. Representative Raul Grijalva, (D., Ariz.), who in 2015 sent a letter to the University of Colorado demanding to know how much money Pielke was getting from the oil-and-gas sector. (The answer: none.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Fifth American War The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

“In this latest arena of civil dissent, Donald Trump, the renegade liberal and most unlikely traditionalist, squares off against the elite that despises his very being not only for reasons of class and culture, but mostly for attempting to restore a traditional regime of citizenship, individualism, assimilation, territorial sovereignty, recognized borders, strong defense, deterrence abroad, and free-market capitalism.In sum, behind the daily hysterias over collusions, recusals, obstructions, and nullifications, there is an ongoing, often vicious war over the very nature and future of Western culture in general and America in particular.”
The wars between Trump, the media, the deep state, and the progressive party — replete with charges and counter-charges of scandal, collusion, and corruption — are merely symptoms of a much larger fundamental and growing divide between Americans that is reaching a dangerous climax.

On four prior occasions in American history the country nearly split apart, as seemingly irreconcilable cultural, economic, political, social, geographical, and demographic fault lines opened a path to hatred and violence.

During the Jacksonian Revolution of the 1830s, factions nearly ripped the country apart over whether the East Coast Founders’ establishment of a half-century would relinquish its monopoly of political power to reflect the new demographic realties of an expanding frontier — and its populist champions often deemed unfit for self-governance. For the most part, the Jacksonians won.

Three decades later the nation divided over slavery, prompting the most lethal war in American history to end it and force the defeated Confederate southern states back into the Union.

The Great Depression, and the establishment’s inept responses to it, left a quarter of the country unemployed for nearly a decade — hungry and desperate to expand government even if it entailed curtailing liberty in a way never envisioned by the Founders. The result was eventually the redefinition of freedom as the right of the individual to have his daily needs guaranteed by the state.

In the 1960s, the hippie movement — fueled by furor over the Vietnam War, civil-rights protests, and environmental activism — turned holistic in a fashion rarely seen before. A quarter of the country went “hip,” grooming, dressing, talking, and acting in a way that reflected their disdain for the silent majority of “straight” or “irrelevant” traditional America. The hipsters lost the battle (most eventually cut their hair and outgrew their paisley tops to join the rat race) but won the war — as the universities, media, foundations, Hollywood, arts, and entertainment now echo the values of 1969 rather than those that preceded it.

Now we are engaged in yet a fifth revolutionary divide, similar to, but often unlike, prior upheavals. The consequences of globalization, the growth of the deep state, changing demographics, open borders, the rise of a geographic apartheid between blue and red states, and the institutionalization of a permanent coastal political and culture elite — and the reaction to all that — are tearing apart the country.

Despite its 21st-century veneer, the nature of the divide is often over ancient questions of politics and society.

The Deep State

Technological advances, the entrance of a billion Chinese into the global work force, and the huge growth in the administrative entitlement state have redefined material want. The poor today have access to appurtenances undreamed of just five decades ago by the upper middle classes: one or two dependable cars, big-screen televisions, designer sneakers and jeans, and an array of appliances from air conditioning to microwave ovens. The rub is not that a Kia has no stereo system but that it does not have the same model that’s in the rich man’s Lexus. Inequality does not mean starvation: Obesity is now a national epidemic among the nation’s poor; one in four Californians admitted for any reason to a hospital is found to suffer from diabetes or similar high-blood-sugar maladies due largely to an unhealthy diet and lifestyle choices.

In political terms, the conflict hinges on whether the powers of entrenched government will be used to ensure a rough equality of result — at the expense of personal liberty and free will. The old argument that a wealthy entrepreneurial class, if left free of burdensome and unnecessary government restrictions to create wealth, will enrich all Americans, is now largely discredited. Or rather it is stranger than that. The hyper wealthy — a Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Warren Buffett — by brilliant marketing and opportunistic politics are mostly immune from government audit, and from robber-baron and antitrust backlash. Instead, redistributive ire is aimed at the upper middle class, which lacks the influence and romance of the extremely wealthy and is shrinking because of higher taxes, ever-increasing regulations, and globalized trade.

It does not matter that the ossified European social model does not work and leads to collective decline in the standard of living. The world knows that from seeing the implosion of Venezuela and Cuba, or the gradual decline of the EU and the wreckage of its Mediterranean members, or the plight of blue states such as Illinois and California. Instead, it is the near-religious idea of egalitarianism that counts; on the global stage, it has all but won the war against liberty. We are all creatures of the Animal Farm barnyard now.

Indeed, if today’s student actually read Orwell’s short allegorical novel (perhaps unlikely because it was written by a white male heterosexual), he would miss the message and instead probably approve of the various machinations of the zealot pig Napoleon to do whatever he deemed necessary to end the old regime, even if it meant re-creating it under a new correct veneer.

The conservative effort to roll back the entitlement, bureaucratic, and redistributionist state has so far mostly failed. That today, coming off sequestration, we are on target to run up a $700 billion annual deficit, on top of a $20 trillion national debt, goes largely unnoticed. Eighteen trillion dollars in national debt later, Ronald Reagan’s idea of cutting taxes to “starve the beast’ of federal spending has been superseded by “gorge the beast” to ensure that taxes rise on the upper classes. To the degree that there is a residual war over entitlements, it is not over cutting back such unsustainable programs, but instead about modestly pruning the level of annual increases.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany Should Say Danke for U.S. Oil Angela Merkel’s slaps at Trump don’t help her country’s cause. America’s frackers do. By Isaac Orr

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

German Chancellor Angela Merkel used her closing speech at the recent Group of 20 summit to chide President Trump for withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. Yet the German people will benefit far more from the American president’s focus on facilitating U.S. energy production and boosting exports than from Mrs. Merkel’s climate policies. They have increased residential electricity prices for German households and failed to achieve any meaningful reductions in fossil-fuel consumption or carbon-dioxide emissions.

Germany has developed a reputation as a green-energy superpower, but in many respects it isn’t. Of all the energy used in Germany in 2016, 34% came from oil, 23.6% from coal, 22.7% from natural gas, 7.3% from biomass, 6.9% from nuclear, 2.1% from wind power, and 1.2% from solar. Waste, geothermal and hydropower accounted for the remaining 2%.

All told, Germany derived more than 80% of its total energy consumption from fossil fuels. That’s bad news for a country that depends on imports. About 97% of the oil, 88% of the natural gas and 87% of the hard coal Germans consume are imported.
Though they may find it difficult to swallow, the German people will benefit from Mr. Trump’s efforts to make energy resources accessible and affordable. Germans spent $73.5 billion on imported oil in 2013, when the price of Brent crude averaged approximately $108 a barrel. Since then, the U.S. embrace of hydraulic fracturing—also known as “fracking”—has resulted in a surge of U.S. crude oil on the world market, causing global oil prices to fall to about $47 per barrel. Some back-of-the-envelope math suggests Germans may now pay $41.5 billion less per year for their oil imports, constituting an average savings of around $1,107 (at current exchange rates) for each of Germany’s 37.5 million households.

Ms. Merkel’s climate and energy policies have caused residential electricity prices in Germany to spike by approximately 47% since 2006, costing the average German household about $380 more a year. The higher prices are largely due to a 10-fold increase in renewable-energy surcharges that guarantee returns for the wind and solar-power industries. These surcharges now make up 23% of German residential electric bills.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Administration Again Certifies Iran Is Complying With Nuclear Deal Announcement delayed several hours by internal administration debate by By Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration said it notified Congress late Monday that Iran is complying with the international nuclear deal reached two years ago, but the fate of the agreement remains uncertain as it is still under review.

The notification came despite a push by some within the administration to refuse to certify Iran’s compliance, people familiar with the deliberations said. That push began around midday and lasted into the evening.

The Trump administration has been reviewing the Iran deal for several months. President Donald Trump has attacked the agreement, reached in 2015, as a “terrible deal” for the U.S.

Despite the certification, the Trump administration will disclose on Tuesday that it is leveling additional sanctions related to Iran’s ballistic missile program and other behavior it considers destabilizing, senior administration officials said.

“Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit of the of the JCPOA,” a senior administration official said Monday evening, using an acronym to refer to the nuclear deal.

The official said the administration intends to pursue a strategy “that will address the totality of Iran’s malign behavior and not narrowly focus” on Iran’s nuclear program.

A second administration official said the U.S. will be “working with allies to build a case for serious flaws in agreement, while also at the same time looking for ways to more strictly enforce the deal.”

Officials said they intend to make sure Iran is complying with a “stricter interpretation” of the deal than that of the Obama administration.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, speaking in New York on Monday, said the Trump administration was sending contradictory signals and Iran doesn’t know “which to interpret in what way.” CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Funding Terrorism to Fight Terrorism Why are we funding Islamic terror in Israel? Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Master Sgt. Haiel Sitawe, the father of a newborn baby, and Kamil Shnaan, who was newly engaged, were murdered in an Islamic terrorist attack in Jerusalem. The two Israeli police officers were members of the Druze community in Israel. The terrorists who shot them were killed by other police officers.

While Israel will compensate the families of the dead police officers, the Palestinian Authority will compensate the families of the terrorists. And American taxpayers will compensate both.

This is typical of a foreign policy in which we fund both the terrorists and the terrorized.

Sooner or later, we are going to have to choose a side.

This mad policy is facing its biggest threat with the Taylor Force Act. The bill, named after a murdered Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran stabbed to death in Tel Aviv, would strip funding from the Palestinian Authority unless the terror state stops giving money to terrorists and their families for their crimes.

The Taylor Force Act has plenty of support in Congress. But the Palestinian Authority has made it abundantly clear that it will not stop paying terrorists to kill Israelis. PA terror boss Abbas is gambling that our politicians will blink first rather than stop sending him hundreds of millions of dollars.

And the tragedy of it is that he appears to be right.

Everyone condemns the Palestinian Authority’s policy of funding terrorists. Typical adjectives include “abhorrent” and “abominable”. But don’t expect them to actually cut off the cash.

Senators are scurrying to neuter the Taylor Force Act. There are dire warnings that if we stop funding the biggest Islamic terrorist group in Israel, it will collapse and make way for more terrorism.

If we don’t stop giving Islamic terrorists money to commit terrorism… the terrorists will win.

This sums up the insanity of our foreign policy in which we fund terrorism to fight terrorism, and in which the “moderate” Islamic terrorists of the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood are our best hope for restraining the really scary “extremist” Islamic terrorists of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Senators have been complaining about the act’s “All or nothing” approach. All or nothing means that the Palestinian Authority would have to stop funding terror or lose funding. And since the Palestinian Authority won’t stop funding terror and they don’t want to cut its funding, they hate all or nothing.

AIPAC hasn’t gotten behind the Taylor Force Act. Instead it’s holding out for some “revised” version that would make it meaningless while attracting bipartisan support. Meaningless pro-Israel measures that pass with huge majorities are AIPAC’s bread and butter. They’re its political Potemkin villages.

The ideal Taylor Force Act, according to AIPAC, most Democrats and some Republicans, would condemn terrorism without cutting a cent in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. It would contain a national security waiver and plenty of gimmicks that would actually increase funding for terror.

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

More Migrant Riots Hit France Flood of migration continues all over Western Europe despite rising dangers. July 18, 2017 Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

The European migration experiment is failing miserably. Self-declared “refugees” and migrants from Africa and the Middle East are importing their violence, chaos and regressive norms of behavior into formerly harmonious countries all over Western Europe. As Seth J. Frantzman wrote in the Jerusalem Post last December, “They hate the very society they have often chosen to migrate to. Their new society tolerated their intolerance and taught them that this new country provided such unfettered freedom that it should be destroyed.”

For example, while many French people were busy celebrating Bastille Day – a year after the tragic Islamist massacre in Nice – riots and violence reportedly broke out on the nights of July 13 and 14 in suburbs of Paris heavily populated by migrants. A policeman was badly wounded and 897 cars were burned. Hundreds of individuals were placed in custody.

There was also a riot in the streets of Paris a few days ago by a mob of angry Congolese. They were infuriated by a scheduled concert at Paris’s Olympia music hall by a Congolese artist thought to be too close to the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo they detest. The concert was cancelled as a result of the clashes and threats of more violence. The Congolese living in Paris brought their tribal hatreds to the land that gave them the opportunity to leave such hatreds behind. They abused the freedoms they were afforded, turning on those freedoms by violently preventing an artistic performance from taking place.

These are far from isolated incidents of migrant violence in Western Europe this year. Indeed, all is not well for the Western traditions of pluralism and individual liberties in the multicultural sewer Europe is fast becoming. The number of vehicular killings, stabbings, shootings, sexual assaults, riots and car burnings has risen exponentially in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, as the tide of migration has intensified. No-go zones have multiplied. Free speech is becoming a casualty of hecklers’ veto and misplaced multicultural sensitivities. Yet Europe continues to admit even more migrants without any adequate vetting.

“When people lose hope, they risk crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean because it is worse to stay at home, where they run enormous risks,” Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, said. “If we don’t confront this soon, we will find ourselves with millions of people on our doorstep within five years. Today we are trying to solve a problem of a few thousand people, but we need to have a strategy for millions of people.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Organizing for Anarchy His party may be falling apart, but Obama’s community organizing group is going strong. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Former President Obama’s army of community organizing thugs shows no signs of slowing down efforts to protect Obama’s policy legacy and undermine the Trump administration.

Obama directs Organizing for Action, a huge, well-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit with more than 30,000 volunteers nationwide that doesn’t have to disclose its donors and that is at the head of Obama’s network of left-wing nonprofit groups. OfA, which grew out of Obama’s electoral campaigns, has upwards of 250 offices across America. His other nonprofit, the Barack Obama Foundation, is building Obama’s $675 million presidential library in Chicago. The library is slated to be a hub of left-wing activism.

Obama now owns and lives in a $8.1 million, 8,200-square-foot, walled mansion in Washington’s Embassy Row that he is using to command his community organizing cadres in the war against President Trump. Obama’s alter ego, Valerie Jarrett, has moved into the house to help out. Jarrett also resided in the White House when Obama was president.

No ex-president has ever stuck around the nation’s capital to vex and undermine his successor. Of course, Obama is unlike any president the United States has ever had. Even failed, self-righteous presidents like Jimmy Carter, who has occasionally taken shots at his successors, didn’t stay behind in the nation’s capital to obstruct the policy-making of the new administration.

OfA, which functions as a kind of shadow government, has been on the front lines attacking President Trump in order to defend the Obama administration’s awful legacy. Both OfA and George Soros-funded MoveOn.org have been leading the way in packing town hall meetings with unruly protesters. Many protests OfA has been involved in have turned into riots.

In 2013, Michelle Obama appeared in a video introducing the group to the public. She said OfA was “the next phase of our movement for change,” and that it would help Obama supporters “finish what we started and truly make that change we believe in.” She congratulated supporters for having “already begun to change our politics,” and declared that “the mission of Organizing for Action” is to “change our country” in accordance with her husband’s vision of how to “bridge [the] divide” between “the world as it is and the world as it should be.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, Organizing for Action activists organized protests across the country. After President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning visitors from seven terrorism-plagued Muslim countries, OfA organized “spontaneous” demonstrations at airports.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton Donors Have Picked Their 2020 Democratic Presidential Nominee By Michael Sainato •

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Since Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss to Donald Trump, her donors have strategized with Democratic leadership about how to revive the failing party. Billionaire George Soros held a closed door conference with wealthy donors in November 2016 that addressed how to “take back power” and was attended by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. On the weekend of Trump’s inauguration, David Brock hosted a retreat for the most prolific Democratic donors to figure out how to “kick Donald Trump’s a–.” On July 15, Page Six reported that Sen. Kamala Harris, a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, met with top Clinton donors in the Hamptons. Many figures in Clinton’s inner circle attended, including Clinton’s 2008 Campaign National Finance co-Chair Michael Kempner, donors Dennis Mehiel and Steven Gambrel, and Democratic National Committeeman Robert Zimmerman. Harris also attended a separate luncheon hosted by one of Clinton’s top lobbyist bundlers, Liz Robbins. http://observer.com/2017/07/donors-george-soros-steve-mnuchin-kamala-harris/

Harris’ meetings with Clinton’s donors signal that they are rallying behind her as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. Harris has emerged as a leading figure in the Trump Resistance; Politico reported that the hearings regarding Trump’s connections to Russia have enabled the Democratic Party to frame her as Trump’s most aggressive critic. In response to one of the hearings she was involved in, she launched the slogan “courage not courtesy.” However, despite this catchy slogan, Harris has historically lacked the courage to hold her donors accountable when they have broken the law.

The nomination of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin provoked criticisms over his tenure as CEO of OneWest Bank. In 2013, California prosecutors claimed to have discovered over 1,000 foreclosure law violations, but the California Attorney General’s office failed to file any action against the bank. At the time, Kamala Harris was California’s attorney general. Many questioned why Harris didn’t take any action given the evidence her office uncovered.

“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris told The Hill. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

Harris’ vague defense is insufficient. The Democratic Party has branded her as a leader of the Trump Resistance without addressing why Harris avoided a criminal investigation that involved donors to her campaign.

In 2011, Mnuchin’s wife at the time, Heather Mnuchin, gave $8,750 to Harris’ 2011 campaign. OneWest Bank donated $6,500 to Harris’ 2011 election. Heather Mnuchin also donated $850 to Harris’ 2014 election for California attorney general.

In 2014, the Center for American Progress graded California’s campaign donor recusal laws a “C.” The state’s lax laws allowed Harris to decide not to recuse herself from deciding whether or not to prosecute OneWest Bank.

Mnuchin donated to multiple Republicans’ campaigns in 2016, but Harris was the only Democrat he donated to.

Harris also has ties to billionaire Democratic Party donor George Soros, who was one of the two owners of OneWest Bank at the time. Coincidentally, before Harris passed on the opportunity to file action against OneWest Bank, Soros was pouring money into California criminal policy initiatives that Harris was pushing.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Professors Want Academia To Stop Citing Straight White Men By Tom Knighton

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

If you’re writing an academic paper on any given subject, you need to do your research and get your facts straight. No, I don’t mean about the topic you’re writing about. You see, you’re not a good academic if you don’t discover who the authors referenced in your footnotes like to sleep with.

Think I’m making this up? I wish:

Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that [citing the work of straight, white men] perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that scholars or researchers disproportionately cite the work of white men, thereby unfairly adding credence to the body of knowledge they offer while ignoring the voices of other groups, like women and black male academics. Although citation seems like a mundane practice, the feminist professors argue that citing someone’s work has implications on his or her ability to be hired, get promoted and obtain tenured status, among others.

“This important research has drawn direct attention to the continued underrepresentation and marginalization of women, people of color. … To cite narrowly, to only cite white men … or to only cite established scholars, does a disservice not only to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism …,” they wrote in the paper published recently in the journal Gender, Place and Culture.

These two individuals actually want people to count up their citations, and then to calculate if “too many” reference white men who like women.

Yes, Martin Luther King, Jr. would get booted off campus as an oppressor for saying this today:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Of course, academia has most assuredly been trending Left towards this type of authoritarianism for decades, so watching these institutions destroy themselves with their own idiocy is kinda fun for me.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jerusalem’s Temple Mount Shut Down After 5 Dead in ‘Allahu Akbar’ Terror Attack

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Early Friday morning, three Arab citizens of Israel attacked Israeli police on the Temple Mount, killing two. This led Israeli security forces to close Jerusalem’s holiest site for Jews and Muslims, sparking outrage as Muslims intended to worship there on their holy day, Friday.

“We cannot allow for agents of murder, who desecrate the name of God, to drag us into a bloody war, and we will deal with a heavy hand against all the arms of terror, and its perpetrators,” Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said in a statement. “The state of Israel will defend its sovereignty and its citizens with a strong hand, and will not allow anyone to provoke the region into a bloody war.”

A video of the scene captured an assailant yelling “Allahu Akbar!”

Israeli police said the armed attackers had been spotted around 7 a.m. local time approaching the gateway from within the sacred compound which Jews revere as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, The New York Times reported. Police pursued the assailants inside the compound and both groups opened fire, killing two police and three assailants.

Police identified the slain officers as Hayil Satawi, 30, from the northern Israeli Arab town of Maghar, and Kamil Shnaan, 22, from another northern town, Hurfeish. Officials said both officers were Druze, members of an Islamic sect which most Muslims consider outside of Islam.

Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, identified the attackers as Muhammad Ahmed Jabarin, 29; Muhammad Hamid Jabarin, 19; and Muhammad Ahmed Mufdal Jabarin, 19. All three were residents of Umm el-Fahm, a large Arab town near the border of Israel and the West Bank. It was not known if they were related, but their names indicate membership in the same large clan.