A video showing the newly elected Arab mayor of Hebron Tayseer Abu Sneineh boasting about murdering Jews to his constituents was released on social media last week, just two days before UNESCO voted to exclusively recognize the Muslim history of the city while simultaneously designating it a world heritage site.
Abu Sneineh ran his successful campaign just a few months ago based on his past merits: in 1993, he was elected to the to the Waqf (the Muslim authority) which administers the mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs. He is also member of the Fatah party, formerly known as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), headed by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas. But the accomplishment of which he spoke most proudly throughout his campaign was spilling Jewish blood with his own hands in the streets of Hebron, the city he now runs.
In May 1980, after careful planning, Abu Sneinah and three others attacked a group of Jews returning from Friday night prayer. Using automatic weapons and hand grenades, the terrorists murdered six Jews and injured 20 in the most deadly terror attack since the 1967 war. The victims were young yeshiva (Bible school) students, two of them Americans and one Canadian. The four terrorists were sentenced to life imprisonment, but were released in the early 1980’s in a prisoner exchange deal.
With no pretense of remorse, Abu Sneinah boasted to his constituents about his role in the murders as seen in a video just released last week which showed Abu Sneinah speaking to a group of Hebron Arab residents, describing how he and his cohorts waited in order to kill the most Jews.
“We looked for a large group of settlers so that there would be a big political response. We found this place and started deciding when we would carry out the operation. We chose the moment when Mustafa Khalil, prime minister of Egypt, would be holding political discussions in Herzliya. We decided that the terrorist attack would be carried out that night. We followed them and planned the attack for eight months. There were days when there were a lot of settlers, and others when there were less. I told my friends [other members of the terrorist group] that if there were less than 50 we would wait for the following week. We climbed down the steps: 100 or 50 meters… At this point, we threw four bombs on them. We shot at the first target and exchanged our ammunition with a machine gun and decided that we should conserve the ammunition. We were very enthusiastic… We had made our presence felt.”
Abu Sneinah was elected on May 14. As if coming as a Divine reminder, the election fell on the Hebrew date 17th of Iyyar, exactly 37 years after the murders.
It is interesting to note that the video was released on social media two days before the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted to name Hebron an endangered World Heritage Site located in and belonging solely to Palestine. Their vote included a detailed description of Islam’s connection to the city while entirely ignoring 3,000 years of Jewish connection to the site, or the detailed account Bible of the Patriarch Abraham purchasing the Machpelah (the double cave) that is the focus of the holy city.
