As many of you know, my office building overlooks the Central Bus Station in Yerushalayim. At approximately 3:00pm I was listening to a shiur on Hilchos Leil HaSeder on my head phones whilst doing a transfer to production of a large web application when the whole building shook and I heard the sound of a loud blast even through the considerable insulation of my headsets.
Initially I thought nothing of it as there are many such blasts, maybe two or three times a week. They are blasting a kilometre underground, under our building in fact in order to construct a tunnel that will run from the new underground Central Train station in Yerushalayim to Tel Aviv.
But within 10 seconds I knew that this blast was different. People rushed to the window to see. With the windows open you could hear the screams of the injured and shocked and the shouts of the security services going into action. Within 15 seconds the screams were drowned out by the wailing of the sirens from a stream of Magen David Adom ambulances whose station is only a few hundred meters away as they rushed to the site of the peguah (terrorist attack). They drove on the wrong side of the dual carriage way as cars, buses and lorries swerved to the side to make room for them to pass. Within 5 mins there was a steady swirl of ambulances and police cars as they moved into the area and flowed out again with injured, rushing to the hospitals.
Ironically I had been not a few yards away from a chafetz chashud (an unidentified package) at a bus stop on the other side of my building at 12:15pm, less three hours before the real thing. I had gone out to get some lunch just as the bomb disposal team turned up and police blocked off the area for 20 mins. This time it was a kid who had forgotton his bag at the bus stop.
Whenever there is a peguah you immediately reach for your mobile phone and dial everyone in your family, even the ones who are supposed to be somewhere else. Being so close to the site of the terrorist attack, I managed to do this before the inevitable happens. 10 mins after a peguah the whole of the mobile phone network collapses under the strain and you receive the message “No Service Available – Please try again later”.
This time, the Orange network came back after about half an hour.
We have just heard on the news that the one dead victim was a British woman although it is as yet unclear if she was living here or a tourist.
The Daily Telegraph is reporting this news item.
The BBC doesn’t deem it worthy of any mention.
Today in the Daily Telegraph there was an opinion piece by MP Louse Bagshawe who has suddenly woken up to the blatant anti-Israel bias of the BBC.
Just read the comments below this article if yoru stomach can take it. One of them asks to know what the racial origin of teh MP is and if she is a Jewes! Others express the opinion that the Jews deserve being murdered as they stole the land from the Arabs who have been living there for 2,000 years! (sic).
But these were published below as comments to the article. This little ditty from Reuters was within their article about the terrorist attack, the text of which was also copied and used by hundreds of news outlets all around the world.
Reuters reported this:
(Direct quote including the double quotes:)
Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.
As I said, it was copied and used in many different news outlets.
Sky news initally quoted it but then deleted it from their web page.
Yahoo still has it on their web page.
That's it. That sentence has crossed a red line between Anti-Israel bias and out and out Jew hatred.
Now I've seen it all. There is no hope left for the British press.
