23-Apr-07: A Remembrance Day to Forget

Today - 23rd April - Israel marks Yom Hazikaron. This is the day of the year designated for remembering the dead of our wars of defence against those who want to see our borders and our children removed from the map. It's also (since 1980) the day we officially stop and remember the civilian victims of terror in our land. At 11 this morning, the entire country will come to a stop for two minutes of silence (see picture). The op-ed article below, originally published by FrontPageMag, is written by Frimet Roth, one of the two editors of this blog. Publications and blogs who choose to reproduce it are encouraged to please reprint in full the contents of the paragraph at the very bottom.

A Remembrance Day to Forget
By FRIMET ROTH

Does Israel have a nuclear reactor? Most of us can only guess at the answer. But there is no ambiguity about another potent reactor, Israel's Prime Minister. Ehud Olmert has honed "reacting" into a fine art to the exclusion of almost every other leadership strategy.

His handling of the Gilad Shalit case has made this painfully obvious. As far as anyone can tell, Olmert's efforts to get Shalit freed have been focused solely on the idea of a mass prisoner release. The public has grown accustomed to this routine: the Palestinians submit a list of prisoners whose release they demand; Israel peruses it and then duly responds. With each rejection, with each protestation by Olmert that he will never release murderers, it's plain that his inevitable cave-in has drawn nearer.

Is there no other way? Why haven't key Palestinian players been abducted for use as bargaining chips? Why haven't collective penalties, like disconnecting water or electricity, been meted out to Palestinian civilians. If they felt the repercussions of Shalit's abduction, they would take to the streets to demonstrate against their own leaders. We've seen them do this forcefully when the subject was unpaid public service salaries.

Israelis have come to accept as dogma that a mass release of Palestinian prisoners is the only way to bring Shalit home. And Olmert, nursing political injuries and maintaining a low profile, has carefully avoided any pro-active steps that might correct that misconception.

This year many bereaved families like mine will miss out on the customary collective hug and comforting words of past Remembrance Days. Instead we will be grappling with news of the impending release of our children's murderers: fresh salt on a chronic wound.

What this dreaded move tells me is that, in the eyes of some Israelis, my daughter's murderer is less evil than other murderers; that they don't deem him as worthy of lifetime incarceration as other mass murderers. The columnist Dan Shavit writing in YNet says it explicitly in a piece entitled "Return Shalit at any Price". A terrorist with blood on his hands, he writes, is different from your garden variety killer. He is a "pawn… bargaining chip… political merchandise", not merely a "regular criminal offender".

Abdullah Barghouti was convicted of murdering 65 innocent Israelis in addition to my daughter. I find it very difficult to comprehend why he should walk free because he also happens to be a card-carrying member of Hamas.

Other lame arguments for releasing convicted mass murderers have been making the rounds of opinion columns. One is that this is not the first mass prisoner release to be agreed by Israel so why the big deal? The obvious answer is that previous mistakes, deadly miscalculations, need to be avoided rather than repeated.

It is also argued that many of these prisoners conduct terrorist activities from prison in any case, so why bother to incarcerate them. The fact is that under our absurdly lenient prison policies, prisoners do enjoy outrageous perks. Celebrity murderer Marwan Barghouti, for instance, has conducted innumerable political meetings behind prison walls including a 30-minute phone call with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas from the prison warden's private office that attracted media attention. But the logical response to this is to right the wrong, not to exacerbate it.

No-one seriously disputes today that a substantial percentage of Palestinians release in previous deals - perhaps as many as 40 percent - have continued their terror activities. Proponents of the proposed release try to emphasize that not all do. Zvi Bar'el laconically writes in Haaretz: "Some of them returned to hostile activity and some did not." (Leaving us to wonder whether "hostile activity" is a euphemism for murder.)

Does Bar'el say this in order to reassure anyone? Has he forgotten that the Park Hotel and Cafe Hillel terror attacks were planned and executed by released security prisoners who had never even been convicted of murder? Those outrages took 27 innocent Israeli lives.

What can we expect then from someone like Barghoutti with 65 victims to his name already? A man who has proven that his passion is murder must never be set free.

There are those who opine that many of Israel's prisoners are involved in terrorism only peripherally and that the definition of "terrorist" has been stretched unreasonably to include them. Dan Shavit makes this preposterous comment about Israel's traditional attitude towards prisoners with 'blood on their hands': "[It] is an elusive definition that can be interpreted in flexible ways and is mostly "literary" rather than "legal".

To Shavit, I would say: The makers of the bombs that murder our children, in my case Abdullah Barghouti, are not "literary" killers; They are the primary culprits.

The reality is that Izzadin Al-Masri and Ahlam Tammimi - who jointly executed the Sbarro bloodbath in which my daughter died - would have vented their hatred of Jews even without Barghouti's input. But they would have carried a knife or a gun, instead of a guitar case packed with ten kilograms of explosives and with nails, nuts and bolts for heightened lethality. Barghouti alone turned their attack into a massacre.

I can never forgive the Prime Minister of the state I embraced nineteen years ago for rewarding my child's murderer with freedom. But I wonder why the rest of my people are willing to forgive him. He is demolishing Israel's justice system. He is erasing court decisions that were based on careful thought and deliberation and replacing them with his whim. Can we survive, in the words of our sages, in a society of "leit din v'leit dayan"-"no laws and no judges"?

A convicted murderer is a convicted murderer regardless of the political context. But especially, in our current precarious reality, surrounded by avowed enemies who regularly reiterate their bloody intentions, releasing convicted murderers is nothing short of insanity.

***

Frimet Roth is a freelance writer based in Jerusalem who frequently contributes articles dealing with terrorism and with issues connected with special-needs children. She and her husband founded and run (as unpaid volunteers) the Malki Foundation (www.kerenmalki.org) in memory of their fifteen year-old daughter who was murdered at the age of 15 in a terror attack on a Jerusalem restaurant in 2001. The foundation provides concrete support for Israeli families of all religions who care at home for a special-needs child.

21-Apr-07: Tomorrow is Israel's Memorial Day. Guess what the Palestinians are doing?

From Haaretz: No fewer than three Palestinian militant groups - Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - claimed responsibility for a Qassam rocket attack today on houses in the Israeli town of Sderot. In a joint statement, they said the attack was to avenge the deaths of three "militants" killed earlier Saturday in the West Bank.

The terrorists fired three Qassams into southern Israel tonight (Saturday evening). One rocket landed right next to a Sderot residence destroying a wall and wounding two people. Two additional rockets landed in open areas near the town. Four people were treated for shock.

An Israel Air Force aircraft immediately fired a missile at a car in the northern Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian man and wounding a second occupant. An IDF spokesperson said tonight that the dead man, a 37-year-old Gaza resident, was one of the members of the terror gang that mounted the attack on the Sderot houses.

"We condemn this," said Saeb Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. "This undermines our efforts to bring about a cessation of hostilities. As such, I believe this is very, very bad."

Erekat was, of course, talking about Israel's success in quickly and effectively striking the vehicle of the terrorists who executed the rocket attack. He did not even pretend to condemn, criticize or otherwise speak against the firing of rockets into Israeli town.

As for what he calls his "efforts to bring about a cessation of hostilities", no journalist - as far as we can tell - broke out in hysterical laughter. A pity.

14-Apr-07: Objective British Reporting and Other Oxymorons

Experience over the past five-and-a-half years since our daughter's murder has taught us some lessons about the professional competence of journalists.

We have been involved in perhaps 250 or 300 interviews and reports - we don't keep track of the exact number but it's in that vicinity. We've written here and on the Malki Foundation website about the inaccuracy, irresponsibility, incompetence and sheer idiocy of a certain proportion of the reporters and journalists we have met. Not all, and not even most. But enough to make it clear to us that the credit most people tend to give to the media (that they report objectively and fairly) is often wrong, and that's a serious problem for all of us.

For anyone still caught up in the illusion that the news media are interested in presenting an impartial and accurate version of the facts, there's no better antidote than what Britain's reporting community has just done.

Friday, 13 April 2007 | The National Union of Journalists has voted to boycott all Israeli goods for “aggression” in Palestinian territories. After almost an hour of debate at today’s Annual Delegate’s Meeting in Birmingham, the conference voted 66 to 54 in favour of the ban [and] to “condemn the savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza” over the last few years. Paragraph four read: “That [this] ADM calls for a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions and the TUC to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government.”

There's nothing wrong with individuals forming views which are extreme or idiotic. That's a privilege every one of us has in free and open societies. Nor is there anything especially bad, in our view, with journalists taking a political stand. If the rest of us can do it, why not reporters and photographers?

What bothers us very much, however, is the inane and entirely self-serving stance taken by editors and ombudspersons in the news media, and most of all in the British news media, that they adhere strictly to professional standards and that to impugn their objectivity and fairness - as so many friends of Israel have found it necessary to do in recent years - is to reveal a certain unacceptable bias and subjectivity. The very first item in the NUJ's so-called Code of Ethics is

1. A journalist has a duty to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards.

Well, friends, the charade is over. Unless and until repudiated by its members, the decision of the representative organization of the reporting profession in the UK stands as an indictment of every last one of them.

It's also fair warning that, at least in relation to matters concerning Israel, we are dealing with people with partisan, prejudicial viewpoints that make their reporting and their photography, their headlines and their choice of interview subjects as biased and as agenda-driven as those of that other master practitioner of the agenda-driven journalistic craft, Joseph Goebbels.

Harold Evans, the distinguished British journalist (sorry if this, too, sounds oxymoronic but it's an appropriate way to describe Evans) said this in 2004 in an address to the Foreign Press Association in London:

"Fifty-three journalists died last year... Most of them were murdered for trying to tell the truth about the world. Truth seems to me to be more and more a casualty of a partisan press… The men and women who lost their lives gave them for the highest aspirations of journalism. Every time a fellow journalist distorts the facts, every time a journalist intrudes on private grief, every time a journalist torments the facts to fit a preordained thesis, he betrays those who died and shames the profession."

Britain's journalists have some serious and immediate soul-searching to do. And no, we're not holding our breaths.

10-Apr-07: Regarding Abdullah Barghouti

Haaretz is reporting today that a list of 45 prisoners in Israeli jails has been given to the Israeli government by the Hamas regime which controls the Palestinian Authority. Haaretz says these are "part of the deal to free captured Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit."

One of the names on the list is Abdullah Barghouti, described as "a senior leader in Hamas' military wing". It's a name that is known to the authors of this blog.

Barghouti built the bomb that ended the life of our daughter, Malki. A Kuwaiti who settled in the West Bank village of Burqa in 1999, he has been frequently described in the media - and from his own mouth - as the brains behind the Sbarro restaurant massacre on 9th August 2001.

Arrested and put on trial in Israel, Barghouti pleaded guilty and told the court he "did this to kill as many Israelis as possible". He was rewarded in December 2004 with a sentence of 67 life-terms in an Israeli prison (report). In a later interview, he said: "I do not accept responsibility for their deaths. I feel pain, of course. They are little children. But the government of Israel is solely responsible."

Below is an open letter we wrote a year ago about Abdullah Barghouti. It was originally published on the website we created in our daughter's memory. We wrote it as an open letter in response to the screening of a Bob Simon segment called Terror Behind Bars on the CBS "60 Minutes" television program. That segment focuses on three Palestinian mass murderers - Barghouti and two others.

An Open Letter from Frimet and Arnold Roth21st April 2006

This coming weekend, the high-profile television program "60 Minutes" is going to give public exposure to a convicted murderer and terrorist called Barghouti. Speaking from an Israeli prison, the interview will show him taking credit for a massacre at a restaurant in the center of Jerusalem in August 2001 and another at the Hebrew University's cafeteria a year later. In front of a huge audience throughout North America, he will say of the number of people killed in the attacks he masterminded: "I feel bad because the number is only 66."

Our daughter Malki, fifteen years old, was one of Barghouti's 66.

We, together with our neighbors living here in Jerusalem and throughout Israel, belong to the much larger number of living people about whom Barghouti feels so bad.

We have nothing to say to Barghouti, and he has nothing to say that deserves to be heard. His opinions are worthless to us and to anyone with a sense of morality. His life is a disgrace to the society which nurtured him.

But while we have no interest in him, we are very interested in the leadership of the society which has turned Barghouti into a hero - in their opinions and even more in their actions.

The political leadership of the Palestinians was decided by a process that seemed democratic when their elections took place two months ago. Whether or not a democracy can truly function when gangs of heavily armed Arab thugs rule the streets of their towns and villages is a fair question. But the legitimacy of the Palestinian government is not for us Israelis to determine. The Palestinians and most of the media called it a democratic process, and no one seriously suggests today that the Hamas leadership lacks political legitimacy. Their stated viewpoints therefore have to be heard and analyzed.

For those like us with a special sensitivity to terror, the Palestinian leadership today is the world's outstanding embodiment of unadulterated terrorism: a government which actively supports terror, promotes terror, honors terror and justifies terror. We hear them speak, and we hear the voice of terror. The current minister of the interior in the Hamas government says he will not arrest those who carry out terror attacks against us. His actions make clear that he should be believed.

As ugly and repugnant as the words of Barghouti will likely be to the viewers of "60 Minutes", we urge them and CBS not to focus on the man. He is irrelevant, except that he creates a context. Barghouti's evil deeds are the concrete expression of the desires of a government which wants to be accepted as an equal by the community of nations. The anger and revulsion which his interview creates should be redirected at them - at the terrorists in business suits who plot and scheme every day to increase Barghouti's 66 to the largest number they can think of.

It's hard for us to imagine the government of Israel giving serious consideration to handing Barghouti his freedom and a license to go out and kill more innocents. It's not at all hard for us to imagine politicians and media analysts calling on Israel to do just that.

7-Apr-07: Useless Rockets and Even More Useless Journalism

Though it's the Passover festival here, or more likely because of it, there has been more of the usual murderous attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Israeli towns.

The news reportage is about the same as usual too. Meaning confusion between cause and effect, and deliberate - or incompetent - obfuscation about the underlying reality. Bottom line: unless you're really determined to understand what's happening here, you'll fall victim to a dishonest narrative that is constantly spun by far-off news editors, local Arab 'fixers' who accompany reporters in the field, and agenda-driven reporters and photographers.

To illustrate: Reuters is reporting today that the Israelis are up to their usual kill-innocent-women-and-children "games":

"On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz authorised the army to carry out limited operations just inside Gaza against militants, despite a ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and the Palestinians in November. Some militant groups have carried on firing rockets into Israel from Gaza despite the truce, and Peretz said the Jewish state would "not allow the continued strengthening and arming" of militants in the coastal strip."

"Despite a ceasefire agreement" indeed. The ceasefire agreement they mention went into effect in November 2006. Since then, about 200 Qassam rockets have been fired into Israel, or about one a day.

A rocket a day, ladies and gentlemen, the last one having been fired into Israel last Tuesday. Thank goodness, minimal damage to life and property were caused because the Israeli side is taking steps to protect the towns and people who have the misfortune of being within striking distance of the Gaza areas controlled by the PA.

The head of the Palestinian regime, Mahmoud Abbas, is also quoted today making some statements about those Pal-Arab Qassams. If you're expecting a condemnation of Qassam firings as a cold-blooded act of hatred, terror and war, then you're obviously new to the news media.

Reuters version:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on members of his presidential guard and national security forces to step up efforts to prevent the rocket fire so "that our people can lead a safe life".

The Yediot Aharonot version (not quoted anywhere else in the world today as far as we can tell):

At a graduation ceremony for his presidential guard, Abbas was quoted by the official WAFA news agency as saying it was necessary that "all parties work with maximum effort, especially the presidential guard and national security forces, to spread security and safety in the homeland, end security anarchy and stop useless rockets.

Why is it that the brand-name newsagencies throw out such absurdities as the suggestion that Israeli actions are coming in the face of "a ceasefire agreement" without mentioning the rocket-per-day reality that has been an integral part of that "ceasefire"?

Why are Abbas's words this morning about "useless rockets" (the only justification stated for stopping them) not reported anywhere other than by Israeli sources. Why are there are no references to the Israeli children killed by those "useless rockets"?

And why is it that blogs like this one, and some parts of the Israeli news media, are the only sources anywhere for people who want to get the other side of this story?

Try searching online now for non-Israeli reports of Qassams falling onto Israeli towns in the last week. Then ask yourself what this conspiracy of silence is really telling us.