Instant Retribution in the Middle East

Sometimes the forces of evil get punished quickly, cleanly, and without outside agency. Schadenfreude permitted. Two items just now in the news:

"Arab attacker killed by his own rock": An unnamed Palestinian teenager hurled heavy stones at Israeli-owned vehicles along a highway in the West Bank on the evening of January 13, managing to hit one car, driven by a resident of a nearby town, Emmanuel. Israeli paramedics then received a report of an unconscious Arab teen badly wounded by the highway and found he had suffered a serious head injury; their efforts could not save his life and he died soon after. A forensic report showed that the cause of his injury was the stone thrown at the Emmanuel man's car, which hit the tire and bounced back at high speed, hitting the teenager in the head, fatally injuring him.

"Al Qaeda bungles arms experiment": U.S. intelligence found that Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) closed a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, perhaps killing forty or more operatives. It appears the cause of the problem was that a sealed area with biological or chemical substances had been breached. London's Sun reported bubonic plague as the cause but a senior U.S. intelligence officer dismissed that possibility without offering an alternative hypothesis. (January 20, 2009)

مصور صحفي تشتعل فيه النار ويصاب بجروح متوسطة خلال تغطيته لمسيرته في غزة: A report in Filastin al-Yawm tells of a Palestinian cameraman, Abd ar-Rahman al-Khatib, covering a public burning in Gaza of the U.S. and Israeli flags, himself got burned on his face, hands, and feet. (January 30, 2009)

Palestinian cameraman Abd ar-Rahman al-Khatib got burned along witih the U.S. and Israeli flags.

"Terror suspect killed as bomb he was making accidentally explodes": "A suspected member of al-Qaeda was killed Sunday," reports Deutsche Presse Agentur, "when an explosive device he was making went off accidentally in southern Yemen, the defence ministry said. The suspect, identified as Anwar Muhammed al-Taghshi, died instantly as the bomb exploded in his hideout in the al-Wadhea district of the southern province of Abyan, the ministry said in a statement. It said al-Taghshi was on the list of most wanted al-Qaeda members sought by police in Yemen. The suspect 'was preparing the bomb to use it in a terrorist operation when it exploded and killed him instantly'." (May 3, 2009)

"[Crashed] Iran plane was carrying arms for Hezbollah": According to Corriere della Sera, an Iranian Tupolev plane that crashed two weeks ago on its way to Armenia, killing 168, resulted from an explosion of fuses being delivered to Hezbollah. (August 2, 2009)

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