Israel Matzav

What releasing 'prisoners' means to terror victims

August 9 is the 9th anniversary of the Sbarro suicide bombing in which 15 Israelis were murdered, and over 100 were wounded including one who remains in a coma to this day.

This August 9 finds our government under pressure to release 1,000 terrorists, many of whom have Jewish blood directly on their hands, in exchange for one kidnapped IDF soldier. Frimet Roth, the mother of Malki HY"D (may God avenge her blood), explains the danger of what she calls terrorism denial, which underlies the entire campaign to exchange Hamas murderers for Gilad Shalit.

Terrorism denial is the foundation on which the Free Gilad Schalit campaign has been built. At some point, its legitimate effort to pressure all involved parties to free Schalit was hijacked. Today its goal is nothing short of maligning and undermining Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for his unwillingness to release every last prisoner demanded by Hamas.

This campaign could not have galvanized so many - some estimate 200,000 joined its eleven-day march to Jerusalem last month - without the groundwork laid by terrorism denial. Were the faces of the 1,000 innocent Israelis murdered during the second intifada still fresh in Israelis' minds, warnings about the dangers of a mass prisoner release would not be dismissed as casually and as persistently as they are being now.

The statistics are chilling. According to government numbers, some 45 percent of released terrorists return to terrorism, while the rate of recidivism among Hamas members is 63%. And yet these numbers impact fewer and fewer Israelis.

Instead we hear Mayor Yoel Levi of Ramle, in an address to the Schalit march participants, calling the warnings against a prisoner release "scaremongering".

And we hear Noam Schalit, Gilad’s father, refer to them as "doomsday scenarios from twenty-five years ago."

In the current climate of terrorism denial, such attitudes gain traction with ease. It is left to the bereaved families to fight this dangerous phenomenon. We, who feel the pain of terrorism every minute of every day, must remind Israelis what "releasing the prisoners" to free Gilad Schalit entails. We must refresh the short collective memory of who those prisoners are, what they did and what can we expect them to do in the future.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:41 PM