[Notes below by Tom Gross]

FT EUROPEAN EDITION: NOT THAT IMPORTANT, IT’S ONLY EUROPE

The Financial Times omitted news of the attack from their daily round-up of “European news headlines” which were emailed to thousands of their subscribers the day after. (But the FT did find space to run another, different, negative story about Israel in its emailed headline list that day.)

If citizens of some other Western country had been blown up and burned alive within an EU member state one wonders if a leading paper such as the FT would have done omitted this from their European news headlines.

 

BBC: AN “AWFUL ACCIDENT”

If the bombing had not targeted Israelis, one wonders if a BBC news anchor would have described it as an “awful accident” rather than a terrorist attack during an interview with Daniel Taub, Israel’s ambassador to London.

The BBC TV 24 news anchor referred to it as an “accident” over three hours after other media reported that it was a bomb attack. From the beginning there was no question that it was a bomb attack, not an accident – and other media described it as such.

This broadcast occurred at 8:24 PM, UK time, on Wednesday night. (Video below, courtesy of CifWatch and Oy Va Goy blog, both of whose senior writers are longtime subscribers to this email list, as is Daniel Taub.)

***

On the BBC news ticker at the foot of another of the BBC networks, BBC World TV, the attack was for many hours referred to as “an explosion on a bus” rather than as a bomb or terror attack.

 

TAKING A LEAD FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES?

This is a little like when, in 2008, The New York Times characterized Samir Kuntar’s terrorist attack in which he butchered Israeli children as a “raid gone horribly wrong”:

www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/world/africa/15iht-profile.4.14519524.html

Samir Kuntar, perhaps Israel’s most reviled prisoner, will return to a hero’s welcome when he crosses into Lebanon this week, 29 years after he left its shores in a rubber dinghy to kidnap Israelis from the coastal town of Nahariya.

That raid went horribly wrong, leaving five people dead, a community terrorized and a nation traumatized. Two of the people killed were Israeli children.

 

AFP: WAS THIS EVEN AN ATTACK, LET ALONE TERRORISM?

The leading French news agency Agence France Presse also questioned whether it was an attack, by placing the word attack in quotes in its headline:

Three Dead in ‘attack’ on Israelis at Bulgaria Airport

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ STRANGE MORAL EQUIVALENCE

The New York Times reported this week in its story headlined “5 Israelis Killed in Bulgaria; Netanyahu Blames Iranians”

“… Bellicose adversaries, Israel and Iran have a long history of accusing each other of terrorist attacks.”

Only The New York Times could regard as equivalent the deliberate murder of as many Israeli holidaymakers as possible, with a legitimate act of self-defense: the assassination of a scientist working to make a nuclear bomb for a regime that has threatened to wipe Israel off the map, while denying the Holocaust – an assassination that it is far from clear Israel had anything to do with. It’s also not absolutely clear that the Bulgaria attack was ordered by Iran, although it seems the most likely explanation.

 

HER FINAL CALL: “I JUST FOUND OUT I’M PREGNANT AT LAST”

Four of the Israeli victims were in their twenties. One was the father of a four month old baby. Another was the father of a ten month old baby.

One victim was older. She was 42, and had been having fertility treatment for some time to try and get pregnant. Her final incoming call was the hospital calling her with the good news: she was pregnant.

Her final outgoing call was to her sister, to tell her the good news and how happy she was.

Her body was flown back to Israel last night and she was buried today.

***

The bus driver who was killed in the attack, Mustafa Kyosov, was a Bulgarian Muslim. He leaves behind a ten-year-old daughter.

***

Some of the injuries were particularly horrific and body parts were thrown as far as 80 meters away from the scene of the attack. Among the injured Israelis are teenagers.

***

Tourists from Slovakia, Italy and America who were standing near the bus at the airport were also among those injured, according to press reports.

 

VIDEO OF BOMBER

The Bulgarian authorities released this security video showing the suspect wandering into the arrivals hall at the airport, appearing to be just another European tourist in his plaid shorts, Adidas T-shirt and baseball hat.

But it is his bulky, oversized backpack that contained his bomb that stands out the most.

Israeli intelligence say he is believed to have had short hair and to be wearing a wig.

The Bulgaria suicide bomber was, of course, no lone wolf. Such a suicide operation needs money, intelligence, logistics, training, bomb making equipment and a safe house. And someone helped prepare his forged U.S. passport and driving license that the Bulgarian authorities found and led the Bulgarian Prime Minister to initially say the terrorist might have been American.

United States Ambassador to Bulgaria James Warlick attended a memorial service at the Central Synagogue in Sofia, home to most of the 5,000 Bulgarian Jews, and expressed his “outrage and horror at the terrorist incident that happened yesterday in Burgas.”

 

ISRAEL EXCLUDED FROM THE U.S.-SPONSORED GLOBAL COUNTERTERRORISM FORUM

This latest terrorist murders of Israelis comes only days after the Obama administration persisted in excluding Israel from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum” (GCTF) and “High Level Conference on Victims of Terrorism,” and just two days after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Israel telling PM Netanyahu to release convicted terrorists from prison as a “goodwill gesture”. (The U.S. State Department described the GCTF as a “major initiative” to build “an international counterterrorism network as nimble and adaptive as our adversaries.”)

Prime Minister Netanyahu said in relation to the attack in Bulgaria: “All signs point to Iran.”

This is the latest in a series of attempted bomb attacks in recent months against Israeli civilians ordered by Iran in Thailand, India, Kenya, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Georgia and elsewhere. (Please see previous dispatches, including one from last Sunday about the attempted Cyprus attack, for more detail.)

It also falls (perhaps not uncoincidentally) on the same day 18 years ago as Iran and its proxy, Hizbullah, bombed the Argentine Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people (including Holocaust survivors) and injuring over 500 others. No one has been charged in connection with that attack.

 

SENIOR AMERICAN OFFICIAL CONFIRMS HIZBULLAH WAS BEHIND THE ATTACK

A senior American official confirmed Israel’s assertions on Thursday that the suicide bomber was a member of a Hizbullah cell operating in Bulgaria.

Hizbullah is in effect a division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and gets it guidance, money and training from the regime in Iran.

Bulgarian and Israeli intelligence are believed to have now recovered body parts and intercepted communications leading them to the conclusion that the perpetrator belonged to Hizbullah.

***

Bulgaria has been co-operating closely in the aftermath of the attack.

I attach one article below – it is in a slightly edited and shortened form because I don’t agree with the tone of one or two of the sentences in it. It provides a useful reminder of the close relations between the Bulgarian and the Jewish peoples, and how Bulgaria (with Denmark) was one of the only countries where a significant proportion of the population helped try to protect Jews during the Holocaust.

-- Tom Gross