Mayhem In Ephraim

Taiba is a Christian village east of Ramallah.The fifteen hundred people who live there are either Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Greek Catholic. Despite factional divisions among Christians elswhere, those in Taiba obviously have banded together for safety. Unfortunately, their coming together here didn’t protect them from the Muslims who surround them. Last Saturday night, when the Muslims struck, Taiba might as well have been located on the moon.

What triggered the event? Oh, the usual: an Islamic rage-reaction meltdown to the idea of their women’s sexuality. These people really do bear some behavioral resemblance to yellow jackets. Unfortunately, one cannot simply take medicine to counteract their poisonous sting.

A thirty-year-old Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir was discovered by her family to have been romantically involved with a Christian man from Taiba. Their solution to this treason was to make her drink a dose of lethal poison and then bury her body. When the Palestinian authorities began an investigation of this crime, including the exhumation of the victim's body, the result was a rampage by the Muslim men of Deir Jarir against the Christian village of Taiba.

Note the sequence here:

1.	the Muslim family discovers the woman’s behavior;
2.	the only possible recourse to their perceived shame is to murder their sister/daughter/cousin, etc. and to cover up the act;
3.	when the Palestinian authorities decide to investigate the matter, it becomes a village-wide response of rage. Now that the woman’s harlotry is public, what is there left to do
4.	but to mount an assault on the village of the Christian man with whom she was consorting?

No doubt the consensus of the people of Deir Jarir was that it was the fault of both the harlot and the PA — the first with her behavior and the second in their refusal to mind their own business. Now that events are public, honor must be restored.

So they set off, about five hundred men strong, and proceeded to ransack Taiba, looking for the woman’s consort. But Mr. Khoury had long fled his village so there was nothing left to do but bellow “Allahu akbar” (loosely translated, it’s an Arabic phrase meaning “kill anything that moves and steal whatever is not nailed down”) while pouring gasoline on and burning whatever had not been stolen or broken. All of which are honorable Islamic practices when calling on the neighbors. Personally, I much prefer the early Christian custom of taking two witnesses to reprimand a wrong-doer. But that's just my limited, Islamophobic view.

What, you ask, did this group of village elders do precisely?

	More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar [God is great], attacked us at night,’ said a Taiba resident, according to Jerusalem Post. ‘They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire.Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewellery and electrical appliances.’
	A statue of the Virgin Mary was destroyed. At least 16 houses were burnt down. The streets of Taiba were empty on Sunday as all residents stayed indoors while PA policemen roamed the streets. It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs,’ said another resident.

The Palestinian Authorities took their time arriving. Is this a surprise? By the time they got there, cars had been torched, sixteen houses burned, and the whole village terrorized. The PA did manage to prevent the mob from harming the Khoury Beer Factory. Evidently, Taiba beer is famous in the area. Not partaken of by the Muslims, of course, since the Koran forbids it and these are Allah-fearing men.

The PA had an interesting excuse:

Col. Tayseer Mansour, commander of the PA police in the Ramallah area, said his men arrived late because of the need to coordinate their movements with the IDF. "The delay resulted in the torching of a number of houses and cars in the village," he said.

As Wretchard at Belmont Club often says, Speculation Alert: The Jerusalem Post does not report whether or not it contacted the IDF to ask if this was the case, that movements needed to be “coordinated” with them, or if this was merely a delaying tactic of the PA to allow the marauders to have their fun first. It would be most interesting to know if the IDF has a policy of holding off to allow “the Arabs” handle their own conflicts — both villages are Arabic, after all — or if there was some other machination at play.

In a nice, ironic touch, it is claimed that Tabia used to be known as Ephraim:

According to some accounts, Salah a-Din, who led the war against the Crusaders, was responsible for the name change. He is said to have found the villagers there to be nice and kind – in Arabic, taybeen – and the name stuck, to become Taiba.

Ephraim is the village where Jesus reputedly retreated before he began his journey into Jerusalem to be crucified.


Hat tip: Little Green Footballs