9-Aug-06: Sbarro, Five Years Later

Exactly five years ago today, a young man with a guitar case on his back walked into a pizza restaurant in the centre of Jerusalem and changed our lives permanently.

Fifteen people, most of them women and children, were murdered that hot, summer afternoon when the Hamas operative, the son of a well-to-do restaurant owner and a recent convert to a virulently extreme form of Islam, detonated the contents of his guitar case. More than 130 people were maimed and injured. One of those injured, the young mother of a three year-old child, has never regained consciousness.

Hamas and Hezbollah, separate terrorist entities, share a common emphasis on racist hatred along with their pseudo-political rhetoric. How do we know? From the way they add ball bearings and nails to the bombs they detonate.

We see this daily as Katyusha rockets explode in the residential areas of northern Israel, releasing high-velocity metal particles, as many as 50,000 of them per payload, that rip through walls and flesh and children's bodies but which, as Human Rights Watch uncharacteristically points out, are of "limited use against military targets". It's an additive that military experts have never seen before in rockets, and which leaves them astounded. We saw it on 9th August 2001. Our murdered daughter's cell phone, in its protective ballistic nylon case, was shredded by the Hamas shrapnel built into the terrorist's bomb. The same shrapnel that killed and maimed so many that day.

Metal balls and nails are not an incidental characteristic of their weaponry, but a fundamental aspect of it. The terror groups don't plan to capture strategic pieces of Israel. They have no expectation of destroying our bridges or highways. Our infrastructure has never been a large part of their lust for violence. It's people they want to destroy: Jewish people and their lives. And in this, they are propelled by a contempt, a hatred, that is beyond the capacity of most of us to comprehend. Certainly beyond the capacity of most news-readers, editors and journalists.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways for people to respond. One is like the ISM. They know about as much as the rest of us do about Hizbollah's provocative attacks on northern Israel; about the thousands of missiles crashing into cities, towns and houses; about the innocent victims. They're not ignorant. Just ideologically extreme, incredibly naive and a danger to everyone and everything around them. And their action plan? To travel to Southern Lebanon and interfere, as much as they can, in what Israel is doing there. From today's Washington Post:

So far, activists who have shown up in Lebanon from the United States and Europe are part of an exploratory group, but Shapiro believes they can attract hundreds more, including from Arab states, once they come up with a strategy.

Here's a suggested strategy for Adam Shapiro and his fellow ISM moonbats: far more good could come from you positioning yourselves in Kiryat Shmonah and Maalot. Extremely dangerous, of course, and somewhat unlikely to impress Hizbollah or their Iranian and Syrian masters. But what an impact the loss of an ISM limb or two to some Hizbollah shrapnel might make. The column inches! The pictures!

That's one response, as we said. But here's another.

To express total rejection of Hezbollah's racist hatred, its radical Islamist demonization of everything good and cultured about our lives, its anti-humanism and its viciousness - go here now, today, on the 5th anniversary of the Sbarro restaurant massacre and donate a small sum to the foundation we established in memory of our daughter, Malki.

This won't change the destiny of the middle east; it won't end jihadism or racism; it won't halt the Katyushas or the Qassams. But what it will do is help Moslem, Druze, Jewish and Christian families in Israel in practical and meaningful ways to cope with the challenge of caring for a special-needs child where the child benefits the most: at home. Despite its very modest size and extremely lean cost structure, the Malki Foundation currently helps about 1,200 such families, a number that grows larger every week.

The Malki Foundation's activity will baffle the ISM and the other haters and racists. But anyone who knows anything about Israeli society will understand why and how it exists without much difficulty.

More on the Malki Foundation and about the beautiful life of our daughter Malki here.