30-Jun-06: Two funerals

We paid our respects at the Asheri funeral

Along with several thousand other people, we went to the quiet and very painful funeral in Jerusalem yesterday of a boy of 18.

He was a spiritual young man who enjoyed being alone in the hills. He impressed all who knew him as a gentle soul, in touch with nature and in love with the land of Israel.

His name is Eliyahu Pinchas Asheri, and like the prophet Elijah whose name he shares, he was borne heavenwards in a fiery whirlwind. The whirlwind that took this sweet young man was an act of murder in cold blood at the hands of Palestinian Arabs. No provocation; no reason beyond the simple fact of his being a Jew and the Arabs being filled with hatred and in a position to kill him. That's all it takes.

His parents spoke at the funeral - each of them a broken vessel, grieving and lost. The Asheris spoke in gentle tones, asking their son to intercede with the master of the universe, begging him to bring peace. They spoke about the future - a better future, a future of peace between Israel and its neighbours, between Israel and its Maker. In the picture above, his mother Miriam in a blue dress, ripped at the front to symbolize her loss, stands by the simple stretcher (no coffins in Israeli funerals) on which his lifeless body rests. Her dignity, and that of her husband, were simply inspiring.

Judy Lash Balint was there too:

There were no shouts for revenge; no machine guns fired into the air; no religious figures whipping up the crowd into a frenzy of hatred. Only the soft sounds of weeping from dozens of girls and women and the flipping of pages of Tehillim (Psalms) as speaker after speaker poured out their anguish at the loss of another young soul to the barbarity of Arab terror.

Our neighbors pay their respects to
a terrorist

In another place, 90 minutes drive from here, there was another funeral yesterday: different people, different atmosphere, different everything. Reuters provided us with some pictures - see the picture at right. Yes, there was a mother, might have been a father, certainly plenty of bereaved friends and probably family. But this one was a lot noisier - guns firing into the air, participants screaming for anger and revenge. The dead person in this funeral was called Mohammed Abdel Al, "a member [in fact a leader] of the ultra hardline militant group Islamic Jihad [who] was with a group of other activists near Gaza's disbanded airport when an Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire at a cell of militants which tried to fire an anti-tank missile at troops based around the airport" according to The Independent.

[Is this the person with a similar name mentioned in yesterday's report (29-Jun-06: The Face of the Enemy)? We can only hope.]

In simpler terms: a terrorist murderer, a leader of the notorious Islamic Jihad which has more innocent blood on its hands than almost any other terror group.

When the mainstream media give you a photo, you may think you understand what's being depicted. Often, however, you don't. Superficially, these two pictures depict similar moments in people's lives, the grief of a mother, tears and sadness. But the differences between the two are profound and extreme. The differences are far more important than the similarities.