21-Aug-18: A global day of tribute to terror victims? Yes, we were a bit surprised too.

Image Source: The UN

A media release from the United Nations explains that it has decided that today, August 21, 2018, should be known as the International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism.

Unless you're a diplomat accredited to the UN in New York City or one of the speakers in the multimedia presentation that is at the heart of the commemoration, you might not know.

We're not in those categories. So we knew nothing about the whole thing till we stumbled across a link this morning.

The goal, as explained by the UN Secretary General, is uplifting:

For the first time, we have gathered in one place the testimonials of individuals whose lives have been affected by terrorism, to hear first‑hand how this has impacted their lives, and what they have achieved.  I applaud the courage and resilience of everyone represented here.  I thank those who are with us here today and who are willing to speak out against terrorism, and I thank the thousands of others who stand up and speak out every day, everywhere. We are here for you and we are listening to you. Your voices matter.  Your courage in the face of adversity is a lesson inspiring us all. Commemorating the forthcoming International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism on 21 August is an opportunity to recognize, honour and support victims and survivors, and to lift up the voices of those left behind. The United Nations stands in solidarity with you.

How to say this politely? As terror victims, the parents of a child murdered by an Islamist terrorist in the service of Hamas, our experience hasn't brought us to feel that the UN - or really anyone else in the world of major organizations - stands in solidarity with us.

Actually, quite the opposite. We're working hard to get the mastermind of the terror attack that took our Malki's life to be extradited from her cosy, well-funded comfortable life as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's leading celebrity jihadist and brought to a federal court-house in the United States. So far, that process has been moving slowly as readers of our blog probably know.

We have not viewed it and don't know yet whether it's accessible online. But the multimedia presentation described in the UN's promotional materials reminds us of an opportunity we were given a few years ago to testify about what being victims of terror does to a person.

Arnold Roth was a guest of a European association of terror victims which undertook a project to record the experiences and thoughts of a couple of dozen assorted terror victims with very different outlooks. The film-making took place in Madrid, Spain, in March 2014. The timing coincided with major Spanish events commemorating what they call 11-M, referring to the events of March 11, 2004 when the catastrophic Islamist terror attack on Madrid's trains took place [see our blog post "8-May-14: Madrid moments"].

It wasn't, and still isn't, entirely clear what the eventual goal of the project was. It does appear that demonstrating 'resilience' against 'radicalisation' was involved. In some respects, it might still be a work in progress.

The 2014 project's English language portal is here, under the title "The Voices of the Survivors Against Radicalisation". (There's a fine summary video here.) As far as we know, not much marketing effort (and we're trying not to sound unkind to the good people involved in its making) was ever devoted to creating serious awareness. Or else we just missed it.

Since video presentations about being victims of terror are getting attention in New York City today, here in the clip below is what that project of four years ago did with Arnold Roth's testimony. It seems it was posted to YouTube about a year ago.



All the videos in that 2014 set were translated into a variety of languages. Not all the speakers spoke in English (most probably did not) and the intended audiences can choose from among Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, German and Italian sub-titled versions. Not a small undertaking.

While Arnold is comfortable speaking in public, and had a good idea of the points he wanted to convey - especially about how poorly terrorism is understand by commentators and politicians, and the sometimes disastrous ways terrorists are treated - the video doesn't quite deliver what he had in mind.

Once we saw the final product, we realized his aims were probably not a terrific match for what the sponsors of the project sought to achieve. For instance, he explicitly mentioned Hamas and Ahlam Tamimi - who plotted the assault on the Sbarro pizzeria - at several junctures for the obvious reason that they are central to the difficult times we have endured and they continue to play an embittering role in our lives today.

Those parts of the interview, however, did not survive the editing suite. This probably explains the slightly choppy nature of the final product and its abrupt changes of tone and subject matter.

If this momentous day, and the things it seeks to remember and to pay tribute to, got some attention where you live via the media or in other ways, we would be glad to hear about it.

10-May-16: Stopping to remember

A country stops to remember [Image Source]

Tonight (Tuesday) here in Israel, sunset marks the start of an extraordinary period of 48 hours.

An entire country first stops, remembers and mourns collectively and individually the thousands of lives taken from us in the several wars and many terror attacks that have for generations – starting long before Israel came into existence as a separate country - characterized the extreme animosity expressed towards us by the surrounding Arab states.

That’s Yom Hazikaron, Israel's national Memorial Day.

Then, barely pausing for breath, the mood changes dramatically as the sun sets Wednesday evening and we go straight into a day of national joy” Israel's 68th Independence Day, starting Wednesday night.

Last year at exactly this time, Arnold Roth was an invited keynote speaker at Toronto's community-wide commemoration of Israel’s national days. After participating, we can say that Toronto does a really fine job: a formal occasion, very well attended, and marked by full-hearted solemnity and celebration. It felt a tremendous privilege to take a role.

In his speech, Arnold reflected on what some consider the strangeness of a day of deep sadness being bracketed closely with national jubilation. His speech, under the title Remembrance and Redemption, is the subject of the video embedded below. In it, he touches on the song that Malki, our murdered daughter, composed in the last year of her life: several versions of it, all freely downloadable, are here, along with some of the background to its creation and aftermath.

He also shared aspects of a not-so-pleasant experience - as Israel's representative - addressing an international conference on terror and its victims, convened in New York City by the Secretary General of the United Nations in 2008. (A Haaretz report of that conference and of Arnold Roth's speech is here.) That speech is the source of the audio track accompanying a short introductory film clip that was shown to the audience in Toronto and which takes up the first 4m 20s of the YouTube video below.

This video was first published a year ago on the blog of the Malki Foundation, a really fine charity worthy of your attention and support. (Full disclosure: we are among its founders. Our roles - Frimet's and Arnold's - are honorary. From its inception, the foundation has always had a top-notch, but tiny, professional management team which does a great job.)

To put some concrete data around the pain that Israelis will be remembering tonight and tomorrow, the official military data (via Ministry of Defense) refer to 16,307 bereaved families: 9,442 bereaved parents, 4,917 widows and 1,948 orphans (below the age of 30). Soldiers who fell from 1860 to May 6, 2016 number 23,447. More than one-and-a-half million people will be visiting some 52 military cemeteries across Israel tomorrow.

The first official memorial events will begin shortly after the first siren blast this evening (Tuesday, May 10 at 8:00 pm. There will be a two-minute-long siren tomorrow (Wednesday, May 11) at 11:00 am, when anyone who cares to look will be able to observe that remarkable sight of highways throughout the entire country stopping to flow, pedestrians standing with heads bowed, a nationwide hush in the midst of a bright, sunny, warm and busy day in a Middle Eastern country that has not forgotten to honor those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice.

03-May-16: Impossibly painful loss and those who survived: Remembering the Holocaust

Melbourne, Australia, where we lived from soon after we married until August 1988 when we moved in Israel, is frequently said to have one of the largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors per capita of any community outside of Israel.

Jewish Care, the Victorian Jewish community's welfare arm, has created and now begun showing this short film, focusing on the recollections of about a dozen quite elderly Melbourne Jews who survived and rebuilt their lives Down Under, as a tribute to the imperative that we never forget.

Video clip from Jewish Care, Melbourne, Australia - 16 minutes

For viewers who are not made of rock, it may be moving in the extreme to see how, confronted with recollections of the terrible losses they suffered almost eighty years ago, the men and women speaking into the camera relive the reality and the extreme trauma in ways that remind us how such tragic events are never forgotten by those who suffered them.

These people were once young, once had bright futures, once had loving relationships with parents, lovers, siblings, spouses, friends. We don't possess lexicons rich enough to capture what it must have felt like to be part of the uniquely cruel process that forever and in unimaginably cruel ways took all these relationships and experiences away from them forever.

We are left to recite the dry facts: that between 1933 and 1945, the German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party carried out the systematic persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews. This genocide is now known as the Holocaust. All we, the survivors and children and grandchildren of the survivors, can and must do, is remember.

The internationally recognized date for Holocaust Remembrance Day corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, a date selected because it marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom HaShoah. This year it starts tomorrow evening, Wednesday, May 4 and ends the following evening.

14-Nov-14: Ensuring the memory of the Rue Copernic terrorist attack victims lives on, and why that's so important

We posted here in the early hours of this morning about the Canadian Supreme Court's decision yesterday in a terrorism case that will mean the deportation back to France of a prime suspect in the unsolved attack.

Victims of terrorism know - in ways that other people sometimes intuit but more often don't notice or ignore - that those who execute acts of terror are remembered, quoted and photographed far more than the innocent victims of their savagery.

So it is with no small amount of quiet satisfaction that we publish here several photographs that arrived by email this morning. They come from the fine people who stand at the helm of the active and effective French terror victims representative organization, the Association française des Victimes du Terrorisme, the AfVT. They record a media conference and memorial event organized by the Association and the French Jewish Liberal Union on October 2, 2013 inside the restored Rue Copernic house of worship, the Union Libérale Israélite de France synagogue. Among its goals, to pay tribute to the lives lost more than three full decades earlier to the bombers.

Rue Copernic synagogue, October 2013

Last year's ceremony at the Rue Copernic synagogue: From left to right, Ms Patricia Barbé, whose father Jean-Michel Barbé was one of the murdered victims, Mrs. Monique Barbé, Jean-Michel Barbé's widow; Mr Micha Shagrir, from Israel, whose wife Aliza was murdered; and Mrs. Corinne Adler who as a young girl was celebrating her bat-mitzvah inside the synagogue when the bomb exploded. Standing behind them is Guillaume Denoix de Saint Marc who serves as president of the AfVT (Please note that all the photographs are Copyright © 2014 Michel Pourny / AfVT.org, and are published here with their permission.)

Rue Copernic, October 2013

The bombing on narrow Rue Copernic has been called "one of the first contemporary terrorist strikes on a synagogue outside the Middle East" and "the first fatal attack against the French Jewish community since the Nazi occupation in World War II." The first, but unfortunately not the only or the last. Other attacks on France's Jews in recent decades are listed in a 2012 Bloomberg article here.          

Chart is based on Europol 2013 data. France takes a prominent role [Source]

France has seen many terror attacks, and their rate does not seem to be declining. According to a Europol report published in May 2014, France has substantially higher rates of terrorism within its borders than anywhere else in Europe (see "France is the terror capital of Europe, EUROPOL figures show"). 

It's a reflection of a larger problem; an analysis in the Wall Street Journal last month says

European authorities are ill-prepared to cope with what they themselves have identified as a top security threat: scores of suspected militants who are flocking home from the front lines of Syria’s bloody civil war, replete with battlefield training and European passports... French President François Hollande has warned the French public of “young men who are indoctrinated, brainwashed, and who can come back home with the worst plans in mind.” Islamic State has responded by calling on European nationals to mount terrorist attacks on their native soil... And yet France - a country that has some of the continent’s toughest antiterrorism legislation in place, and has poured financial and military resources into combating Islamist insurgencies abroad - is straining to cope with new threats... Easy, borders-free travel within the European Union makes it possible for suspected militants to hopscotch through the region, undetected.

The reality is, though there is a great deal of denial about this, that most authorities in most places are ill-prepared to cope with the threats posed by terrorists, certainly including the determined, ideologically-driven jihadists among them.

We say a fundamental part of preparing our societies for the challenges ahead is in honoring the memory of the victims, and protecting and upholding the core values of justice. Those constitute the most striking difference between the terrorists and those who will repulse and defeat them. That's why we salute those who who remember the victims and who continue to pursue the bombers who brought their barbarism to Paris's Rue Copernic.

29-April-13: Connecting a stolen life to constructive and meaningful actions (VIDEO)

Two weeks ago, Israel passed through two of the most intense and momentous days in its national calendar.  Yom Hazikaron (in English: Remembrance Day, or more formally "Day of Remembrance for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism") is Israel's official Memorial Day, followed immediately afterwards by Israel's Independence Day, Yom Ha'atzma'ut. This year, Israel celebrated the 65th anniversary of its hard-won independence.

We wrote (see "14-Apr-13: In tonight's official commemoration of Memorial Day, a focus on the life of one girl and what is being done in her name") on the eve of Yom Hazikaron that

An evening of song in memory of Israel's Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror will be broadcast live from the Knesset on Israel television's Channel 1. The event is produced jointly by the Knesset, the Department of Families and Memorial at the Ministry of Defense, and the Department of Terror Victims at the National Insurance Institute (Bituach Leumi), entities operating throughout the year for the deceased and their families. An annual event, the theme of this year's ceremony is "In their Deaths, they Bequeathed Us", focusing on unique individuals and the organizations set up in their memory. Keren Malki, and the special life of Malki z"l, are amongst a select few to be featured this evening. 

We  now have a video clip that shows what the large by-invitation-only crowd, assembled in the forecourt of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, saw that night, and that was broadcast at the same time on Israel TV's Channel One.

The video (hosted on Vimeo) starts with the last minute of a musical performance; the video tribute to the Malki Foundation and to Malki begins at about 1m 05s into the clip. The people you see speaking here are the authors of This Ongoing War.

There's more background about the work of Keren Malki at www.malkifoundation.org; we hope you will take a moment to visit the site.

13-Apr-13: Struggling to keep a daughter's memory alive

Yom Hazikaron 2012 at the Kotel [Image Source]

Algemeiner published this Yom Hazikaron tribute on Friday, written by Frimet Roth.

After a child’s murder, a search for justice

FRIMET ROTH

It has been a struggle to keep my daughter’s memory alive. Israeli society prefers to forget terror attacks and forge ahead. Foreign journalists marvel at the haste with which every trace of carnage left at a site is removed; at the quick return of traffic and normality. But for 24 hours each year, we lift the lid on our grief and let the tears flow.

My precious Malki died at the age of fifteen in the terror attack that has come to symbolize the Second Intifada: the bombing of the Jerusalem's Sbarro Restaurant in August, 2001. That massacre snuffed out the lives of fifteen Jews, among them eight children, the youngest of whom was two.

I suggest we focus this Remembrance Day on the 129 Israeli children killed by Palestinian terrorists during the past thirteen years. The world is preoccupied with mourning Palestinian children and has forgotten the atrocities committed against Jewish children. We must remind them.

Malki left us only her writings and her art. They offer a glimpse into the soul of a sensitive, religious, idealistic, artistic and talented Israeli teen.

Malki's diary entry from February 2001

She kept a diary between September 2000 and June 2001. There, interspersed with long, involved accounts of school, Ezra (a youth organization in which she was a young leader) and family activities are the details of each terror attack perpetrated during those 10 months.

On April 29, she wrote:

“I woke at 10. Levona and I went first to R.L. [a teacher] whose mother passed away last week (it is very sad because she is an only child, unmarried and has no father. She sat shiva alone!) She was in a very good state. Spoke a lot, told about her mother. Then we went to the Gerard Behar Center Library. We spent 6 hours there without food or drink!!! We finished biology. In the evening I went to a lecture given by Rav Elon with Shulamit, Leah, Efrat Shafir and Chen [her friends].  I didn’t exactly understand the lecture but it was fun. I met Zvi [her brother] there and we stayed for Arvit. “Sunday is now completed…”

Then, apparently later and in a different colored pen, she added:

“Aryeh Hershkowitz, may his death be avenged, was shot dead a month ago. Now his son was shot dead near Ofra!!! Only the little brother can say Kaddish.”

On the first page of her diary is a printed list of personal details: name, address, phone number and so on. And finally partner’s name. Here Malki wrote:

“Still unknown, but will arrive, G-d willing, with time.”

We would never have imagined that our pain could deepen. But one and a half years ago, prime minster Netanyahu taught us otherwise.

Discarding reasoned judicial rulings, verdicts and sentences along with his vaunted ideals, he caved in to Hamas pressure and released hundreds of convicted terrorist murderers in the Gilad Shalit deal.

He then assured the public that he had contacted the victims of those evil-doers to explain his decision, when in fact he had not - and never did.

Malki’s murderer, Ahlam Tamimi, the self-confessed engineer of the Sbarro bombing, was among those Palestinian prisoners. Several months after she had walked free, Mr. Netanyahu inexplicably decided that reuniting Tamimi with her father and brothers in her hometown, Amman, was not enough. He buckled under again, this time to the demand of Tamimi’s fiancé, Nazir Al-Tamimi, to be permitted to enter Jordan in order to marry.

The conditions of Al-Tamimi’s release had expressly forbidden his exiting the West Bank. But justice no longer seems to interest our prime minister very much. The evil couple were married at a well-publicized extravaganza before throngs of Hamas supporters and are now expecting a baby.

In a 1985 speech before the American Bar Association, the late Margaret Thatcher said:

“We have behind us many fine declarations and communiques of good intent. We need action; action to which all countries are committed until the terrorist knows that he has no haven, no escape. Alas that is far from true today.”

Here in Israel where the threat of terrorism is constant, terrorists fear little. In fact, they can be as cocky as Malki’s murderer: “I do not regret what I did… I will be free again,” she told interviewers twice during her imprisonment. She knew our prime minister better than we did.

Let us all resolve today to prevent a recurrence of the Shalit Deal outrage. State leaders must be compelled to find other means of resolving crises. They must be reminded of the significance of justice: murderers belong in prison serving the sentences meted out to them by our judges and juries – not by our prime ministers.

While we cannot return our murdered children, we can restore our discarded justice.

Frimet Roth is a freelance writer in Jerusalem. Her daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in the Sbarro restaurant bombing (2001). With her husband Arnold. she founded the Malki Foundation (www.malkifoundation.org); it provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.