Bomber Decries ‘Dehumanizing’ Security Check That Prevented His Synagogue Entry

“Prioritizing Jews’ wish to live when others seek to kill them flies in the face of established norms.”

Jerusalem, August 22 – A would-be terrorist attacker denounced safety procedures at a Jewish house of worship this morning, asserting they made him feel “less than human” by reducing him in that moment to nothing but a potential threat and dismissing the rest of his emotional, biographical, and intellectual being as irrelevant.

Ahmad Subhi, 24, failed to gain access early Thursday to a synagogue in the center of the city in advance of morning services, where he hoped to set off his explosive belt packed with ball bearings and metal shards and kill or maim as many Jews as possible. A security guard refused to allow him into the building unless he passed through a metal detector and underwent other screening measures. The frustrated bomber later abandoned his effort to enter the synagogue and called Gisha, one of several dozen prominent NGOs that monitor and critique Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian movement that the Jewish State’s leaders call essential for national security.

A a press conference this afternoon, Mr. Subhi decried the inhuman treatment that faced him in undergoing such a check. “I am not some animal,” he insisted. “I’m a human being with inherent dignity and rights, and those cannot be waved away because some people think it’s more important to keep Jewish pigs from getting the bloody, violent deaths they deserve. This is just one more demonstration of the inhumanity of the Occupation. It cannot continue.”

Gisha spokeswoman Zamar Tandberg called on international organizations and governments to pressure Israel to end what she called the “barbaric practice” of preventing people from going where they please only to protect lives. “Israel is going to have to live with the consequences of its misguided policy that makes Jewish lives a priority over others’ political or religious sensibilities,” she stated. “Prioritizing Jews’ wish to live when others seek to kill them flies in the face of established norms. I find it incomprehensible that in living memory of the Holocaust, which should have demonstrated the inescapable nature of that phenomenon, Israel is still trying to upend the status quo that has defined humanity for thousands of years.”

Police came to the press conference and arrested Mr. Subhi for various terrorism-related offenses, setting off protests from the Gisha activists on scene as well as from Amnesty International, Peace Now, Btselem, Breaking the Silence, Human Rights Watch, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and the UK Labour Party.

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