The three Sefardi haredim who confessed to kidnapping and murdering 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir in a gruesome racist revenge attack on July 2, 2014 are – perhaps – about to face penalties for their crimes.
Above: Muhammad Abu Khdeir
Verdict Due Tomorrow In Hate Crime Murder Of Jerusalem Arab Boy
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
The three Sefardi haredim who confessed to kidnapping and murdering 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir in a gruesome racist revenge attack on July 2, 2014 are – perhaps – about to face penalties for their crimes. The Jerusalem District Court is scheduled to rule tomorrow on their guilt, the Times of Israel reported based on a Hebrew language report in Ha’aretz.
The three, all from the same extended Sefardi haredi family, cruised East Jerusalem looking for vulnerable Arabs that would be easy to kidnap. After a failed attempt to kidnap a young mother and her child, the trio spotted 16-year-old Abu Khdeir sitting on a stoop in the pre-dawn darkness waiting for his father. The two were planning on walking to the neighborhood mosque for pre-dawn prayers.
Although 16, Abu Khdeir looked much younger and in the hazy light from a streetlight could easily have appeared to be 12.
The trio, two of which were yeshiva students at the time of the murder, lured Abu Khdeir to their car and forced him inside. The suffocated him and savagely beat him, and then in the Jerusalem Forest at the edge of the city, they beat him some more and then burned him alive.
The leader of the trio is 31-year-old Yosef Ben David. The other two are older teen boys who were minors at the time the crimes were committed and who are not being identified due their age.
Ben David’s attorney Asher Ohayon told the court Ben David was not mentally competent and is therefore not culpable for his actions, but Ohayon reportedly did not submit a report from a psychiatrist to back that up, and Ben David has made no attempt to prove his innocence. He and the two minors reconstructed the kidnapping and murder for Israel’s Internal Security Service (better known as the Shabak or the Shin Bet) shortly after their arrests.
Ben David’s two alleged accomplices claim Ben David forced them to help him kidnap Abu Khadeir. They say Ben David gave them energy drinks and (apparently unidentified) pills. One of the two minors claims that he and the other minor did not know Ben David planned on committing murder and says the they only thought he intended to kidnap.
Abu Khdeir’s family reportedly attended all court sessions and frequently complained of a double standard in how the court and the government deals with Jewish and Arab terrorists. For example, homes of the families of Arab terrorists are routinely destroyed while the homes of Jewish terrorists never are.
(A High Court judge ruled in a separate case last week that there was no need to destroy the homes of Jewish terrorists because there is a deterrence factor in Jewish society that does not exist in Arab society. Most Jews condemn Jewish terrorism, the High Court judge claimed. But while that may be true in most cases it is not true in all, and it is especially true if Jewish society is broken into its constituent parts. Condemnation for Jewish terrorism is much less prevalent in West Bank Jewish settler society, for example, or in wider haredi and Zionist Orthodox society than it is in Jewish Israeli society at large.)
After the last court hearing Abu Khdeir’s father Hussein noted that failure to act strongly against Jewish terrorism provokes Palestinian violence and acts of terror.
“Why did they not destroy the houses of these three murderers until today? If this was Arab [terrorists] they would long ago have demolished their homes. It is because they burned my son alive that people go on stabbing sprees today,” Hussein Abu Khdeir said.
Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Sha’ar and Eyal Yifrach were kidnapped and killed by two Hamas-affiliated terrorists while hitchhiking in the West Bank 2-1/2 weeks before Abu Khdeir was kidnapped and murdered. But the three bodies were not discovered until several days before Abu Khdeir was murdered. Until those bodies were found, Israelis clung to hope that Fraenkel, Sha’ar, and Yifrach were still alive. The kidnapping and murder of Abu Khdeir was carried out in response to learning Fraenkel, Sha’ar, and Yifrach had in fact been murdered.
The Hamas murders of Fraenkel, Sha’ar, and Yifrach and the reprisal murder of Abu Khdeir caused a spiral of events that led to the Gaza War later that summer.
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