Sunday, September 15, 2013

15-Sep-13: Hard truths, un-minced words

From the current edition of the Jerusalem Report
Readers of This Ongoing War might be interested to read "Battle of the bloggers", a full-length feature article by Tibor Krausz in the current (September 23, 2013) edition of the Jerusalem Report (subscription needed):
In the early afternoon of August 9, 2001, Palestinian terrorism became terribly personal for Arnold and Frimet Roth. The Jerusalem couple’s precocious 15-year-old daughter, Malki, was meeting a friend at the Sbarro Pizzeria in the center of the city when a Hamas suicide bomber detonated his nails-packed explosive belt inside the crowded eatery, killing 15 diners, including Malki, her friend, and five other youngsters.
Malki had played the flute, written happy songs about life, volunteered as a youth leader for nine-year-olds, and helped care lovingly for a blind and severely brain-damaged younger sister at home. On the mouthpiece of her cellphone, which was later retrieved from the pizza parlor’s rubble, Malki had written a note to herself: “Never speak badly of anyone.
The massacre was global news for a few days, and then faded from the headlines and collective memory. Malki and the other murdered Israelis soon became mere statistics in the ever-mounting death toll of the second intifada.
But not to the Roths. The couple, from Australia and the US, who immigrated to Israel with their children in 1988, decided to honor their daughter’s memory in two distinct ways. They set up Keren Malki, a foundation that provides specialized equipment and assistance with home-based therapies to thousands of parents, many of them poor and marginalized, a third of them Arab, who look after a severely disabled child.
And they also started blogging...
While the full article is behind the magazine's paywall, Tibor Krausz who wrote it has posted the full text on his personal website here.

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