So today - a glorious day of 70 degree sunshine - I'm riding home on the bus from my day of new immigrant tasks (visits to multiple ministries, hour long waits, bureaucracy up the wazoo, setting up accounts, signing documents, additional banking snafus) when a series of emergency vehicles race by. First one, then another, a third, a fourth, a fifth. I gasp. A terror attack. It must be, because there's not a fire truck among them, just police and Mogen David Adom (Israeli Red Cross).

Nothing on twitter. Nothing on The Muqata (the Facebook page that tracks terror here). I return to the unending business of paperwork, phone inquiries, language barriers, impenetrable websites.

Just now I checked The Muqata and there was, in fact, an attempted stabbing in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot. Thank God the victim was unharmed.  But I was right. The sirens meant there had been an attack. That's life and sometimes death here.

You don't know about it because you don't hear about it. The media doesn't report it.  All you hear is unceasing vilification of Big Bad Israel, most evil nation on earth, apartheid home of oppressors who must be boycotted, sanctioned, stabbed and, yes, driven into the sea.

That is the recurring message of the Palestinians; in their schools, in their media, in their homes.

You don't see that. It isn't reported, because you've been BDS'ed (Bamboozled and Distracted, Shamelessly) by the most successful propaganda campaign in modern history.

Ah well.  Life goes on here. Except when it doesn't. But I have Hebrew to review, internet to install, and paperwork to do.



Ministry of Immigration