19-Aug-15: The road to Malachi's death and the decisions that made it possible

Malachi Rosenfeld [Image Source]

Moderates are ruling in Ramallah. There are no Gazan rockets this summer (well, not so many). Hamas is ready for peace. Other than an outbreak of extremist violence among Israelis, things are basically calm. Why get upset?

Now back to reality.

Some weeks ago, we wrote here ["19-Jul-15: Another catastrophic outcome of the 2011 Shalit Deal"] about the cold-blooded shooting attack on four young Israeli men heading home after an evening of playing basketball. 

Malachi Moshe Rosenfeld Hy"d, 26, son of Eliezer and Sarah, a resident of Cochav Hashachar, an outstanding student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, died of gunshot injuries. He was riding home with three friends on the night of June 29, 2015 after playing basketball when their vehicle came under shooting attack ["29-Jun-15: Drive-by shooting attack near Shvut Rachel tonight"]. All four were wounded in the hail of weapons fire. Malachi died the next day.

The attack, the woundings, and the death of Malachi were yet more direct consequences of the tragically misconceived Shalit Deal. 

Several Palestinian Arab men, members of a terror-focused gang called the Hamas Silwad Cell (Silwad is a town), were arrested shortly after and confessed to that murderous assault as well as several earlier shooting attacks on Israelis. The commander of the cell is Ahmad Najar, a terrorist in the service of Hamas. 

Under the name Ahmed Mustafa Saleh Hamed al-Najar, he was convicted in December 2003 of involvement in multiple killings by shooting and was sentenced to seven life terms by an Israeli court. That sentence was - astonishingly - commuted by the government of Israel and along with 1,026 other convicted terrorists, among them the killers of our daughter Malki, he walked free in the disastrous Shalit Deal. We explained in that earlier post that

A condition of the commuting of his sentence (all these commutations were conditional) was that he be expelled to Gaza. But he soon shifted his base of operations from there to Jordan where he is said to have "been working to organize and fund terror attacks".

Ynet reports this morning that indictments were filed on Monday against the Silwad suspects arising from Malachi Rosenfeld's murder. With the exception of Ahmad Najar, the head of the gang and a Shalit Deal beneficiary, they can expect to go on trial shortly. (He remains free just across the river, as does the woman who engineered the murder of our daughter.) In the supporting material, the Shin Bet "reveals" what anyone who cares to look into how the Shalit Deal process worked, along with the effects of the notorious Rewards for Terror scheme conducted by the Mahmoud Abbas regime (the Palestinian Authority), already knows:

Ahmad Najar, the head of the terror cell that murdered Rosenfeld, was imprisoned in Israeli jail for the murder of six Israelis in 2004. After his release as part of the Shalit deal, he received a monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority, which he used to train and arm his terror cell. After his release, Najar moved to Jordan. For the attack, he recruited his brother Amjad, who withdrew the money the PA deposited for Ahmad in a bank account in the West Bank... [Ynet]

Far too often, well-intentioned people, often with laudable humanitarian inclinations, express sympathy for the deaths of innocents in the ongoing war of terror waged against the world's only Jewish country (and its people) without connecting the lethal dots. Malachi Rosenfeld, one of the most recent of those murder victims, is dead because a convicted murdering terrorist with zero remorse and having been sentenced to spend the remainder of his life behind bars was let loose nearly four years ago by a decision taken here in Jerusalem. And month after month, thousands of other convicted and unrepentant terrorists are the recipients of rich cash rewards from the Abbas-dominated PA, and invented PA jobs along with a monthly PA cash payment specifically calibrated to reflect the tremendously high regard held for them and their barbaric deeds by Palestinian Arab society.

Ynet could have pointed out, but unfortunately did not, that Najar was not unusual. Every convicted and imprisoned Palestinian Arab terrorist prisoner receives cash and concrete rewards from the perpetually-bankrupt Palestinian Authority. Funding from (mainly but not only) European countries and from the European Union are essential to the continued viability of the Rewards for Terror scheme. Here's some background reading from our past posts -

• 20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name? 
• 28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea 
• 4-Sep-12: Where's the shame? How much of your tax dollars went to fund the pension of our child's murderer? More than you probably thought
• 21-Jul-13: In the debate over whether Israel should free convicted terrorists, one key argument is mostly ignored
• 08-Feb-15: Foreign money and the Palestinian Arab terror it buys
• 02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists

Note also that many of these murdering (and would-be murdering) terrorist recipients of regular cash gifts are loyal to the Hamas arch-enemies of the Palestinian Authority, The money keeps arriving anyway, and in quantities that greatly exceed regular PA salaries.

Perhaps Malachi died as a victim of a tragedy. And perhaps that tragedy was engineered by humans who knew what they were doing. Or - worse - who considered the possibilities and concluded that the price was affordable.

The likelihood that mainstream media anywhere will point this out to their news consumers in Hebrew, Arabic, English or any other language is close to zero. It falls to people like us who have lived through it, to speak up and explain that, more than any other aspect, this is the tragedy of living at a time when the corrosive effects of terrorism are so poorly understood.