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| PM Binyamin Netanyahu: "In a live address to the country [on July 1, 2010], Netanyahu said all Israelis wanted Shalit back safely but past experience showed that many Palestinians released had returned to carry out attacks on Israelis". Source: Haaretz newspaper under the headline "Israel willing to pay heavy price to free Gilad Shalit - but not any price" |
By FRIMET ROTH
Dear Prime Minister
Netanyahu,
We could say "I told you so". But we will pass; the words offer no comfort. One of the
terrorists you freed last October in the Shalit deal, our daughter’s murderer,Ahlam Tamimi, has resumed her terrorist activities. And she is flaunting them
before the world.
She is not alone. Earlier
this month, Haaretz learned from the IDF’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. AviMizrahi, that prisoners freed in exchange for Shalit are plotting to abduct
Israeli civilians or soldiers and hold them hostage outside the West Bank.
But those freed
prisoners are obviously on the IDF’s radar screen. Israel has arrested and
re-imprisoned some for terrorist activities. Tamimi, on the other
hand, was repatriated at your command to her home in Jordan where she is beyond
Israel’s reach. “Exile” is what you called this arrangement, Mr. Netanyahu.
Last month, Tamimi
began hosting a weekly show on the Hamas satellite TV station Al Quds which is
beamed to every Arabic speaking country. She says the program, Nasim al-Ahrar
[Breeze of the Free] will champion the cause of Palestinians imprisoned in
Israel. Airing on Friday nights, it enables Tamimi to incite others to attacks
similar to the one she perpetrated – the massacre of fifteen men, women andchildren at Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant.
Upon learning, while
imprisoned, that her efforts as strategist, scout, bomb transporter and escort had
killed eight children, Tamimi said she had presumed there were three. “Eight?”
she asked, smiling broadly, when she heard. “Eight then,” she repeated.
This child-killer’s
hour-long TV shows are posted on You Tube. Seated in the Al Quds studio,
composed and measured, Tamimi fields phone calls from prisoners’ families
throughout the Arab world and hosts studio guests. She revels in her newfound
celebrity.
On her first segment,
Tamimi welcomed Saleh Arouri, director of the Hamas prisoners’ portfolio, who
told viewers that the way to secure the release of more Palestinian prisoners
from Israeli jails is by continued "resistance" and kidnappings of
more IDF soldiers.
Tamimi, who ought to
know, says her program is broadcast to Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Horrified
by this news, we contacted the spokesperson’s office at the Israel Person
Service. They responded that all Palestinian prisoners, presumably including
mass murderers, are given access to ten channels of which four are Arabic. Cancelling
this long-standing privilege, we were told, is regarded by prison authorities
as impossible because, in their words, “it would not stand up in court”.
They assured us the prisoners
have no access to Al Quds, and that the IPS has not detected broadcasts of
Tamimi’s program on any of the permitted channels. They did concede that while
future broadcasts of her program are entirely possible, all the IPS would
do was carry out routine spot checks of program content.
This is disturbing for
anybody concerned about incitement to terror by a mass murderer who was
sentenced to 16 life sentences.
Such mollycoddling of
terrorists is a precedent that you, Mr. Netanyahu, have set, even while you
continue the pretense of being tough on terrorists.
For instance, two weeks
ago, in the context of the Iranian nuclear threat, you vowed to AIPAC never to gamble with [Israel’s] security. "I
will never let my people live in the shadow of annihilation", you
declared.
And last week, reacting
to the Toulouse shootings which you proclaimed were a “despicable murder”, you told
the French government: “I promise that Israel will help France in the task of
apprehending the murderer.”
Do you honestly
consider yourself a bulwark against terrorists? You, who discounted the statistics
about recidivism among past released terrorists. You, who paid no heed to the
fact that some 30 terrorist attacks, in which 177 Israelis perished, committed
since the year 2000, were carried out by Palestinians freed in previous deals
or as goodwill gestures.
 |
| Netanyahu doctrine, mid-nineties edition |
You even dismissed the principles promulgated
by your own book. In “Fighting
Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists" (1995) you wrote:
“Prisoner
releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that… their
punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such demands
are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the terrorist blackmail they are
supposed to defuse.”
You forgot your vow in
1998 to your Likud colleagues,
at the time of the Wye Plantation agreement: “We will never release convicted terrorist murderers”.
You ditched your pronouncement
of July 2010 that “arch-terrorists” would not be part of any deal to rescue
Gilad Shalit.
Finally, you ignored
the letter my husband and I wrote and had hand delivered to you six months
before you signed the Shalit deal. In it, we begged you to exclude from the
swap one uniquely demonic terrorist: Ahlam Tamimi.
Mr. Netanyahu, to this
day you have not responded to our plea. In fact, you have never
written to us about the travesty of justice committed by our government. In
October 2011, after the first tranche of the Shalit release, you assured the
public that you had sent a letter to every victim affected by the Shalit deal.
We checked, and it appears not one of us received such a letter. When we inquired at the
Prime Minister’s Office, your staff insisted that “many” such letters had been
mailed at the post office. The letters’ tracks, they said, had then been lost. One
of your spokesmen prepared to quote me a precise number of letters sent, but we
heard somebody in the background call out to him “Don’t give a number!”
At this foreboding
juncture in our history, the Jewish people need a leader for whom their safety
and welfare are top priority. A principled, honest, steadfast leader who, like US
president Teddy Roosevelt, speaks softly and carries a big stick.
You, Mr. Netanyahu, do
not fit the bill.
Frimet Roth is a
freelance writer in Jerusalem. Her daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15
in the Sbarro restaurant bombing (2001). She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation in her memory. It provides concrete support for
Israeli families, irrespective of their religious or national affiliation, who choose
to care for their special-needs child at home.
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