This Ongoing War: A Blog: 16-Sep-09: On unity of purpose

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

16-Sep-09: On unity of purpose

We are small geographically and close-knit emotionally. When tragedy strikes, we all grieve as one.

So it has been this week in the wake of Assaf Ramon's death. We had barely recovered from the loss of his heroic, trail-blazing father in the 2002 Columbia space-shuttle disaster. Now in disbelief we are trying to fathom how fate could single out the same family a second time and in so similar a manner.

The same unity of purpose has accompanied the tortuous saga of Gilad Shalit's captivity by Hamas. We have all shared his parents' pain and their urgent desire to bring him home. And we have all been intensely frustrated by our government's egregious failure to rescue him.

How puzzling it is then that Shalit activists have now chosen to shatter that unity. Rather than galvanize more Israelis to demonstrate against our government's inertia, they have chosen to alienate a vast sector of the nation. At their upcoming event they will make bedfellows of the Palestinians whose relatives Hamas seeks to free from Israeli prison in exchange for Shalit's release.

You have to wonder about their sanity. Those with whom the Shalit camp is collaborating are the very Palestinians who raised and educated their terrorist-children. These parents are the ones who infected them with a passion for our own murder.

Moreover, in joining forces with those terror-enablers, Shalit activists are proclaiming that, in their eyes, Israeli victims of terror are inconsequential.

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THIS ONGOING WAR is not part of the activity of the Malki Foundation which was founded by us, Frimet and Arnold Roth of Jerusalem, on September 11, 2001. But it is inspired by the same tragic circumstances. The Malki Foundation (also known by its Hebrew name: Keren Malki) is a memorial to the life of our daughter, Malki who was murdered at the age of 15 in a massacre in the centre of Jerusalem carried out by Hamas.

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