He brutally murdered three people, two of them women, crushed to death as they sat in their cars. He injured dozens more. He fought to the death those who tried to stop him, so he could go on murdering to his last breath.
Relatives of Hussam Dwaith, the bulldozer driver who killed three and injured dozens in a terror attack on Jerusalem's streets, have said that he had never recovered from a doomed romance with a young Jewish woman and a spell in prison.
Though he had since married and had two young children, his family told a tale of a young man who may have soured after having his heart broken by a young Russian Jewish woman.
"She came here, she lived here in his parents' house with him, she stayed for a month," his cousin Osama Dwaith, 35, told The Daily Telegraph as mourners gathered outside the family home.
But then, he said, a radical Jewish group seized her one night and returned her to her family.
Shortly afterwards, Hussam Dwaith was jailed for a year on drugs charges.
"The problems started after he was in jail. After he came out of jail, he was always alone. He is a good man but after prison, he was confused and nervous," his cousin said.
The Telegraph's reporter doesn't look any further for "explanations", despite the many contradictions in this family story, referring elsewhere in the story only to police comment on the terrorist's apparent lack of political affiliation.
However, the normally reliable Ynetnews, the website of Yediot Achronot, one of Israeli's most widely read newspapers, gives us a very different picture. Far from being dumped, or kidnapped by Jewish radicals, it seems that his relationship with the Jewish girl landed him up in jail because he'd raped her:
Meanwhile police have confirmed Dwayyat also had a criminal record, and had served two years in prison after being convicted of raping a Jewish Israeli woman he had been romantically involved with. He married and had two children upon his release.
So the Telegraph asks us to believe that this relationship with a Jewish woman (and a family-supplied suggestion of a Jewish vigilante kidnap, not reported in any other media coverage) is the key motive in a murderous rampage years later, and after a subsequent marriage and family.
Readers can make up their own mind whether they think this is as relevant as the way in which he went about his murders and ran down buses filled with children and crushed cars driven by women with babies beside them. Or the reasons why he was jailed, which the Telegraph doesn't bother to check out with police sources.
Fox News is usually reviled in the UK mainstream media as an example of relentlessly biased reporting, held up against the supposedly disinterested and balanced reporting of the BBC and the UK liberal media. Compare the news clip from Fox at the head of this post with the approach taken by the Telegraph.....
Honest Reporting, another organization routinely reviled by the Guardian and similar UK media outlets has already shown, via Melanie Phillips (yet another reviled figure in the UK liberal media) picked up just how balanced the original reporting of this terrorist attack was on the BBC.
Meanwhile, the UK media reporting the murders, despite speculating at length on whether the terrorist did or didn't belong to this or that terror group, and whether the incident would or wouldn't threaten the current truce with Hamas, told us virtually nothing about the victims.
Such as the fate of 33 year old Bat Sheva Unterman, whose six month old baby girl was rescued by a passerby after she herself was crushed to death by the murderer's bulldozer.
Or the work of Elizabeth Goren-Friedman, aged 54, who was a teacher at a school for the blind.
Or the fact that Jean Relevy, aged 68, died without seeing the grandchild whose birth he was looking forward to.
The Guardian, as you might expect, told us nothing about the victims, and ended its report suggesting that it will lead to more restrictions on Palestinians living in Jerusalem and working in the city and across Israel.
UPDATE: At 11:00am on Thursday, the link to the Telegraph story from its home page omits any reference to the perpetrator as a terrorist murderer and reads: Bulldozer man "heartbroken over Jewish girl"
Sadly, the Telegraph - which used to be the one broadsheet which took some trouble to be objective in its reporting of the Middle East conflict - has, under its Middle East correspondent Tim Butcher (who also broadcasts pieces hostile to Israel on the BBC, natch http://adloyada.typepad.com/adloyada/2005/11/tim_butchers_is.html), yet another mouthpiece of chattering class demonisation of Israel.
What a shame.
Posted by: Huldah | July 03, 2008 at 11:29 PM
My letter to them just now:
Sir, According to Ms Wheeler, Hussam Dwaith’s family a young Russian-Jewish girl, “…she lived here in his [Hussam Dwaith’s] parents' house with him, she stayed for a month”. Presumably it was during that month that Mr Dwaith brutally raped her—a fact that Mr Dwaith’s family do not mention although they dwell on the repercussions of that rape and Mr Dwaith’s drug use: "The problems started after he was in jail. After he came out of jail, he was always alone. He is a good man but after prison, he was confused and nervous," his cousin said.
In other words, Mr Dwaith’s family is OK with him raping a young girl but not OK with him going to prison for it. Wouldn’t that make them accessories at the least?
And what does it say for The Telegraph that your paper feels that the brutal rape of a young girl is too minor a detail to put into your human interest story about a terrorist?
Posted by: Inna | July 04, 2008 at 03:13 AM
Where did they get that she was a young Russian? I saw her talking on TV (they just showed her from the back). She didn't look or sound in any way Russian, or particularly young for that matter. She said they were together for six and a half years and she had even considered becoming Muslim for him. That was probably before he started beating her up and raping her.
Posted by: Imshin | July 04, 2008 at 06:27 AM
By the way, Dwaith's father says he wasn't a terrorist, but a drug addict, a problem son who had never given him a moment's rest. He called the authorities to check what was in his son's blood.
Apparently, Dwaith never went to the mosque nor was he in any way interested in politics. There is a possibility he was not a terrorist, but a violent, drug-crazed criminal. However, it was announced that it was a terrorist attack, so perhaps the police/shabak know something they're not telling us.
BTW, a new 'Human Right's' bill in Israel has recently completely blocked what was previously an already limited ability for non-state employers to check a potential employee's criminal record. Dwaith's employer had no way of knowing this man was a drug user who had been to prison for violence. If the employer had known this, he probably wouldn't have been let loose on the main streets of Jerusalem with a bulldozer.
Posted by: Imshin | July 04, 2008 at 06:58 AM
MInd you the story about the young mother with the baby he murdered is so cold0hearted, it couldn't have been done in a drug-induced violent fit: He saw she wanted to drive into the parking lot, so he backed up, and gestured her to cross into the lot. When she drove forward he put his foot down and smashed into her car. She was killed. Her little baby survived the wreckage.
Posted by: Imshin | July 04, 2008 at 11:05 AM
Muslims Against Sharia unequivocally condemn murderous attack in Jerusalem.
We call for swift extermination of all terrorist groups that claimed responsibility for this attack.
We implore Israeli government not to provide financial help for the family of the murderer. Any such help will be an open invitation for future attacks.
http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2008/07/terror-group-claims-jerusalem-attack.html
Posted by: Muslims Against Sharia | July 05, 2008 at 06:06 AM