19-Aug-08: Seven years and the same blind ignorance exacts its price

This being the week in which we mark seven years since our daughter's murder in a massacre in the center of Jerusalem for which Hamas took full and proud responsibility, the following op-ed article appears on Yediot Aharonot's YNet site.

Blind and ignorant
Gaza-bound activists exhibit total disregard for innocent Israeli terror victims
Frimet Roth
Published: 08.19.08

Seven years ago this week, the bombing of Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant took the lives of 15 innocent Jews. Among them was my daughter, Malki.

Seven is a significant number in Jewish tradition. The seventh day of the week is the Sabbath. The seventh year, the Shmittah, imposes a moratorium on farming in Israel along with unrestricted access to private fields for everyone. The bride circles the groom seven times under the wedding canopy. Seven is the number of Israel's native fruits as well as the number of divine commandments given to Noah and his descendants.

But seven is not unique in the life-long process of grieving for a child. It is just one more year of incessant pain and longing.

This year's anniversary of the Sbarro terrorist massacre, however, is likely to coincide with an event certain to exacerbate those sentiments.

Two boats chartered by the California-based Free Gaza Movement left Cyprus a few days ago. They are currently heading for Gaza. Dubbed the Free Gaza and the Liberty, the organizers say they are transporting 45 self-proclaimed humanitarians from 15 nations.

The identities of most of the participants and their date of arrival have not been released. Yet the media buzz is that they will dock on the date of the yahrzeit, August 21.

Among the handful of passengers names that have been publicized are those of an 84 year old Holocaust survivor; the sister-in-law of former British Prime Minister and now Middle East envoy Tony Blair; an Israeli left-wing activist; and a Catholic nun. Rumor has it that actor Leonardo DiCaprio is also on board and South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is one of several dignitaries to have endorsed the voyage.

REALITY REARS ITS UGLY HEAD
The participants in this lame-brained scheme are probably bubbling over with good intentions, convinced that the Gazans are pitiful victims. What is baffling is their indifference to the hard facts of the conflict into which they are plunging head first.

While Lauren Booth, Blair's sister-in-law, says she is eager to show the world the reality of what's going on in Gaza, it is evident that reality plays only a bit part in this Hollywood-style production.

Reality rears its ugly head, for example, in a piece of footage that these humanitarians probably did not watch.

A film circulated last week shows Gaza children at a summer camp graduation where some 200 boys strutted their newly-acquired skills.

With soldierly precision, the Hamas-trained pre-teens are shown marching and repeating after their instructor: "Kill!", "Slaughter!", "Blow Up!" and "Charge!"

Wearing T-shirts bearing the logo "Despite the Siege," they somersault over one another while older Hamas militants shoot into the air. Wooden rifles are used as props in some exercises while fingers pointed like guns feature in others.

Many more stunts not seen on the film were detailed in the international press:

"The youths leaped through hoops set on fire... an older youth lay on the ground as a minivan drove over him (and he) later smashed concrete plates set on fire with a quick snap of his hands... youths leaped off wooden bars, a few landing in a smoldering fire pit lit below them all while bearded gunmen fired their assault rifles in the air and around the youths' feet."

In the film, a journalist asks one camper what he would like to be when he grows up: "I want to be a military man, a holy warrior."

Any rational observer of these campers could not delude himself about the Gazans’ intentions. As the International Herald Tribune summed it up: "The goal of the Hamas camp was clearly to train the youth in military tactics and impart the militant Islamic ideology that has characterized Hamas."

The "Free Gaza" activists exhibit total disregard for the innocent Israeli victims of Gaza's past terror attacks. Their brash interference with measures that preempt more such tragedies declares that stance loud and clear.

Israel's vital security operations off the Gaza coast are designed to prevent the infiltration of terrorists, weapons and other materials of terrorist warfare into Gaza. Yet the protection of innocent Israeli lives apparently does not cut it with these activists as a legitimate humanitarian goal.

MAKING PEACE MORE ELUSIVE

And what of the Palestinians who suffer at the hands of their own regime, officially recognized as a terrorist group by major Western governments? Are the "Free Gaza" supporters at all disturbed by Hamas' recent brutal attacks on their own brethren, Fatah activists?

Would any group members consent to live, for even a day, under the Islamist totalitarian regime they are now bolstering? Would they send their own children to the sort of camps that Hamas runs?

Organizers of this puerile project say their cargo includes 200 hearing aids intended for Gaza children who have been injured by explosions and sonic booms. Again, they seem unaware of the facts: Israel routinely admits Gazans into its hospitals to receive cutting-edge medical care free of charge and transfers many tons of humanitarian aid daily into the Strip.

With a little further investigation, the "Free Gaza" meddlers might also have learned about my daughter's camp experiences.

On the day of her murder, Malki was headed to a Jerusalem suburb to attend a meeting of counselors preparing for their summer camp. The activities included swimming, hiking, singing, dancing, drama and sports. Malki had also returned only several days earlier from the north of Israel where she had been a volunteer counselor at Etgarim, a camp for physically and mentally disabled children. Her smile beams out from the photos we have of her there, hugging campers with Down Syndrome.

But introducing information like this into the mix would confuse the Gaza-bound activists. Their support for this terrorist enclave can only survive as long as they remain blind and ignorant.

This folly will render the prospect of wholesome camps for Gaza children more unlikely and the chance of a lasting peace here ever more elusive.

IF YOU CARE to make a positive and constructive contribution to the care of Israeli children with special needs - whether they're Christian, Moslem, Jewish or Druze - you can't do better than direct your donation to the work of Keren Malki. It's the foundation we (the bloggers of This Ongoing War) created in our daughter's memory. It's efficient, effective, non-sectarian, non-political and unique in the good work it does.

15-Aug-08: The collective punishment collective

A startling encounter here in Jerusalem is behind what we're writing today.

Last month, one of us spoke to a group of visiting church leaders from the United Kingdom. On the whole this was a thoughtful group with the usual spectrum of know-nothings at one end to fairly well informed and engaged individuals at the other. And all the political viewpoints you might expect.

One of these clerical individuals, though from the UK, is currently based in the Holy Land and ministers to one of the tiny-and-getting smaller local Christian communities. Not that Israelis Jews have any special problem with people of other faiths establishing their churches and teaching their creeds here. But as some of our readers will know, this land includes people who are not Israeli Jews, and some of them have a far more aggressive viewpoint when it comes to tolerating people of confessions different from their own.

The minister and his wife later joined us for dinner. During what turned out to be a pretty tense exchange of views, they expressed deep anger for what they believe Israelis are doing to the beleaguered Arabs of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. They also observed that they had had a hard time trying to find Israeli Jews with whom they could have ordinary conversations in the five months they have lived here.

Both of those viewpoints caused us some astonishment. We'll focus only on the first for this item.

The couple had visited Gaza a day before our suburban Jerusalem encounter. And what they wanted us to know about that excursion was that Israelis treat the Gazans terribly. The gates between Gaza and Israel are closed for much of the time, causing great inconvenience, and this was deliberate. In fact, it was part of what they called collective punishment.

We pretty largely failed in trying to have them see a context to these awful things. As we see it, that context includes thousands of rocket, mortar, sniper and knife attacks on Israelis, Americans, fellow Gazans and practically anyone else and anything else. Plus routine acts of murder, pillage and systematic demonization and elmination of all traces (human, institutional and material) of anyone or any thing different from the Hamas-dictated norm.

The church couple couldn't have been less interested in contextualization of what they say is deliberate, systematic humiliation.

Personally, through being connected by blood to parents, aunts, uncles and other close family members who themselves survived the Nazi nightmare, the concentration camps, the death squads (our children's grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family, lived most of his life with a Wehrmacht bullet embedded in his upper leg) and the liquidation of the Jewish communities of Europe, we have an allergic reaction to people applying the term "collective punishment" to what's happening in Gaza.

Words matter. And abusing words is a step away from abusing - but we mean really abusing - people. But somehow as the frustration and passions of Israel's enemies keep rolling along and growing in intensity, the abuse and misuse of key terms gets more and more offensive.

Which brings us to an op ed appearing in an Irish paper today:

Role of Hamas in 'collective punishment'
OPINION: Fri, Aug 15, 2008

ON MAY 27th, 1942, the Deputy Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated by the Czech underground as he drove to his office in Prague, writes SEÁN GANNON (chairman of Irish Friends of Israel).

In an effort "to make up for his death", the SS rounded up the residents of the nearby village of Lidice. Some 200 men were immediately executed. The women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most subsequently died; 80 per cent of their children were gassed at Chelmno in July.

Two years later, a partisan bomb killed 33 members of an SS police battalion as it marched through central Rome. In reprisal, the city's Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, ordered that 10 Italians be executed for every dead German. The following day, 335 people were taken down to the Ardeatine Caves and shot in the back of the neck.

Such were the type of atrocities that the framers of the Fourth Geneva Convention had in mind when they outlawed "collective punishment" in 1949. Article 33's stipulation that no person "be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed" refers to the active imposition of criminal penalties in reprisal for another party's guilt.

Therefore, its constant invocation by critics of Israel in the context of its lockdown of Gaza represents little more than a cynical exploitation of the language of international law, part of a well-established strategy which seeks to de-legitimise Israeli security detail by defining it in terms of policies properly opposed by all right-thinking people: "apartheid" (the security fence); "war crimes" (the targeted killing of terrorist leaders); even "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" (almost every IDF operation).

For example, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign claims that Israel's rather erratic restrictions on electricity and motor fuel exports to Gaza constitute "collective punishment" and a violation of international law.

However, the legality of economic sanctions in conflict situations is enshrined in the UN Charter despite their unavoidable impact on civilians. The UN embargo against Saddam Hussein's regime caused enormous suffering among ordinary Iraqis while its sanctions against al-Qaeda and the Taliban had what the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs called "a tangible negative effect" on the lives of innocent Afghanis. Yet no one accuses the Security Council of imposing "collective punishment".

Furthermore, although the Fourth Geneva Convention does not technically apply to its conflict with Gaza (which is neither a high contracting party nor, despite Israel's control of its borders, Israeli occupied territory), Jerusalem is fully compliant with its requirements.

The convention does not obligate the supply of goods and services to enemy populations (Israel rightly declared Gaza a "hostile entity" in September 2007) other than "essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under 15, expectant mothers and maternity cases".

The 1977 First Additional Protocol does not list electricity or fuel among the "other supplies essential to the survival of the civilian population", for which transit must be facilitated. In any case, even these can be embargoed where there are serious grounds for believing they will be intercepted by enemy forces. And although this is obviously happening in Gaza (Hamas seized 14 truckloads of Red Crescent relief last February and has been repeatedly accused by the Palestinian Authority of diverting fuel destined for Gaza's power station and hospitals to its own private depots), Israel continues to allow the transfer of hundreds of tonnes of aid into the territory each week.

Israel's travel ban on Gaza students with overseas scholarships has also been described as a form of "collective punishment". Condemning this policy on these pages, the former director of the Irish Fulbright Commission, John Kelly, highlighted the case of seven Fulbright scholars whom he suggested were denied permission to travel to the US to study because three of them were affiliates of Gaza's Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold linked to a number of recent terrorist offences. Three of the 14 Fulbright scholars who applied to leave Gaza this year were indeed refused for security reasons. But the central issue is not whether such students pose a risk in themselves but whether access to an overseas college education represents "an exceptional humanitarian cause" for which Israel should break its legitimate blockade. As the universal right to an education does not extend to higher studies, it clearly does not.

This is undoubtedly a tragedy for the hundreds of students in receipt of foreign university fellowships barred from leaving Gaza, and Israel is presently reviewing its policy and examining applications on a case-by-case basis.

But ultimate responsibility for the plight of those denied permission to travel lies not with the Jerusalem government, but with their own Hamas rulers who, in waging an indiscriminate terrorist war against all Israelis, are the region's real perpetrators of "collective punishment" crimes.

To which we say the collective punishment collective will remain unmoved.

They have little historical context, no sense of proportion when countenancing the deaths carried out deliberately and enthusiastically by a terrorist regime and - sorry to say - a dysfunctional moral sensibility.

But most of all, they simply don't know how to distinguish among humiliation, deliberate humiliation and hate-driven terrorist murder. This makes their wrong-headedness something much more dangerous, much more sinister, than simply being ill-informed.

5-Aug-08: Refugees?

We've never quite understood how it is that so many bashers-of-Israel refuse to see the malevolence and fratricidal character that infects Arab society in general, and especially Palestinian-Arab society. It stares them in the face. But they'll turn it on its head time and again if that's what it takes to blame "the Zionists".

As bitter as their endless complaints are against Israel, against the Jews, against the west, against the weather, Israel's enemies suffer far more from their own brothers, from their own leaders and from the deep problems of their own societies than from any external cause.

Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian who writes for the Jerusalem Post, consistently sees and reports things that almost no one else does. Trouble is, these things are so embarrassing to the Palestinian Arabs and their fellow-travelers, that Abu Toameh's stories get a tiny fraction of the media exposure they deserve.

He wrote this week on the strange refusal of the Palestinian Authority to receive and shelter the Fatah 'activists' who fled Gaza on Saturday with Hamas bullets and mortars whizzing past their heads. No aspect of this, the insightful journalist says, came as a surprise to many Palestinians.

The PA's inner circle in Ramallah turned to Israel on Sunday to ask that Fatah men fleeing for their lives from the Gaza Strip be sent right back home. Abu Toameh says that, though this is "tantamount to a death sentence", it "did not stop the PA from asking the men to return" to Gaza.

After reciting some of the plainly dishonest reasons given by the Abu Mazen clique to justify their stand, Abu Toameh says:

"The last thing Abbas needs is another 180 bitter Fatah thugs from the Gaza Strip patrolling the streets of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Nablus and imposing a reign of terror on the local population... The Palestinians in the West Bank have never been enthusiastic about the presence of their brethren from the Gaza Strip among them... Arafat deployed dozens of policemen from the Gaza Strip [back in 1994] in a number of West Bank cities. This resulted in an "intifada" by the residents of these cities, many of whom openly rejected the presence of the Gazans in their communities... West Bank families refused to rent out apartments to the "undesirables" from the Gaza Strip. The experience was repeated in June 2007 when hundreds of Fatah members fled the Gaza Strip following Hamas's violent takeover of the area. Most of those who arrived in Ramallah are still finding it impossible to rent apartments in the city... Even the 150 Fatah men who fled to Egypt following the Hamas takeover have not been welcome there or in any other Arab country. In a recent letter to Abbas, the Fatah men, all former residents of the Gaza Strip, complained that they were being held in "military bases" belonging to the Egyptian army and were being treated as criminals rather than political refugees."

The always-on-the-mark British columnist Melanie Phillips, writing this week in The Statesman, says the events of the last few days

have given a new meaning to the term ‘Palestinian refugees’... 11 people died and dozens more were wounded, [resulting] in 180 Fatah refugees fleeing from what they called a ‘war of genocide’ by Hamas against Fatah supporters. And where did they flee to? Why, to Israel, of course -- which allowed them in and proceeded to treat 23 of them (some of whom were wounded by the Israeli army after they approached the crossing into Israel) in Israeli hospitals. These refugees say they cannot return to Gaza because they will be killed.

She lays out the logic for anyyone wanting to try to figure it out:

Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel fled from other Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel into Israel, which is providing them with sanctuary and medical treatment, while the president of their putative state who bases his claim against Israel on its alleged refusal to admit Palestinian ‘refugees’ refused to allow actual Palestinian refugees fleeing Palestinian violence access to that same putative state, while Israel agonises over whether to grant them permanent asylum.

And did we mention that at least 12 of those who were wounded in Saturday's fighting were under the age of 15?

For those of us completely fed up to the back teeth with the agenda-driven and less-than-honest reporting and editing of non-objective writers, photographers and headline-crafters, it remains only to quote Melanie Phillips again:

What is that unfamiliar sound emanating from all those who routinely scream that Israel kills Palestinian children? It is called silence.

For those of our readers connected to ISM, AFP, BBC and especially UNRWA - you're invited to send us clippings and links to show how we've missed the mark. We'll be waiting.

4-Aug-08: On Al-Jazeera and professorial mindsets

Two days ago, a newspaper called "The National", published in one of the Gulf states, carried a serious analytical piece critical of Al-Jazeera. In particular, it focused on the way Al-Jazeera covered the release of Samir Kuntar, the convicted terrorist murderer of a four year old Jewish child whose head he bashed to pieces. (We wrote about this sickening individual two weeks ago - see "22-Jul-08: The once and future child murderer".)

The critical article was penned by someone called Sultan Al-Qassemi, a man whose home is in the United Arab Emirates and who is chairman of Young Arab Leaders. The fact that we know about it is due to the excellent work of MEMRI , the Middle East Media Research Institute. It's an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East, and publishes some of what it finds. No one else comes close to the range and quality of the work they put out. Without them, we would be exposed to a mere fraction of the news and analysis that's published in the Arabic-speaking world. More power to MEMRI.

Sultan Al-Qassemi quotes a revealing statistic. A Jordanian poll says 98 percent of political science and media professors in the Arab world claim to watch at least three hours of Al-Jazeera daily, labeling it as the 'the most respected news agency.'

He says:

"What is frightening about that number isn't that 98 percent of Arab
political science professors admit to watching three hours of television a day,
but that they watch three hours of the same television each day. The problem
with watching Al-Jazeera in Arabic isn't just that the channel gives ample airtime to militants and terrorists to share their 'perspective,' but because its conspiracy theories and controversies give the station so much influence on the easily swayed Arab mindset. "

He refers to Al-Jazeera's 'Code of Ethics' posted on its website. "The very first pledge by the Qatar-based channel" he says "includes 'giving no priority to political considerations over professional ones.'

An example of what nonsense this is can be seen from what how Al-Jazeera dealt with Kuntar's release from an Israeli prison:

"The station not only repeatedly interviewed 'the hero' but brazenly threw
Kuntar, live on international television, a surprise birthday party to celebrate
the occasion. The party, organized by Al-Jazeera came complete with fireworks, a
full band, and a giant birthday cake along with the picture of the Hizbullah
leader Hassan Nassrallah. "The channel's Beirut bureau chief, Ghassan
Bin Jiddou, sporting a pink tie for the occasion, repeatedly addressed the
terrorist as 'my brother' saying: 'You deserve even more than this.'

Reflecting on whether Qatar, Al-Jazeera's sponsor, comprehends the dangers that come from associating with events like a birthday party for a convicted child murderer, Sultan Al-Qassemi suggests that

"All Arabs should re-examine their understanding of what characterizes a hero;
take a look at your own child and imagine just how frightened the four-year-old
[murdered Jewish child] must have been... Although we may never know what
psychological pressures Kuntar endured during his incarceration in Israel's
prisons, we do know that he was allowed to marry and to graduate from Israel's
Open University with a degree in political science, rendering him an ideal
Al-Jazeera viewer... The privileged treatment that Kuntar received courtesy of
Al-Jazeera was the coup de grace to their claims of neutrality... Which
brings to mind a friend of mine's adaptation of the famous Joseph Goebbels'
dictum that characterized so much of Nazi Germany's propaganda: 'When you
want to get away with a lie,' he said, 'you must repeat it many times
over and believe it to be the truth. Only then will others believe
you.' "It certainly works for Al-Jazeera. Just ask 98 percent of Arab
political science professors."

Sultan Al-Qassemi's incisive comments are timely. Later this week, we mark the seventh anniversary of a terrorist massacre in a Jerusalem pizza restaurant that ended the beautiful life of our fifteen year-old daughter and her best friend and 13 other innocent people. What's the right way to honour their memories and violent deaths?

We don't expect the show-business giants of Al-Jazeera to understand this. Nor do we think that "98 percent of Arab political science professors" will comprehend the following: As they have done each year for the past seven years, the teen leadership of the EZRA youth organization here in Jerusalem's northern suburbs will hold a public charity bazaar on the afternoon of Monday 11th August. All proceeds - from the sale of arts and crafts, back-to-school equipment, music disks, fast food, a pet-the-animal corner and other similar attractions - will be given to charity, including to Keren Malki, the foundation we created in our daughter's memory. (Please point your friends to the Keren Malki website.) Visitors to the bazaar can also donate blood.

Did we mention that the annual bazaar is to honour the memory of our daughter Malki Roth and her friend Michal Raziel? (The simple brochure, in Hebrew, is here.)

For those of us who don't operate global news networks or teach politics in Arab universities, this is just another reminder of how different our society and its values are compared with theirs.

Can you imagine Al-Jazeera trying to make sense of a society that commemorates the victims of a terrorist massacre this way?