Israel Matzav

Almagor to publish online database

The Almagor terror victims' organization is publishing an online database which it hopes will deter future trades like the terrorists for Gilad trade.

The database, called “Justice for Terror Victims,” will collect information that is available to the public, such as arrests and court transcripts, and compile it in a searchable database.

The Foreign Ministry and some private bloggers have partial lists, but this is the first initiative to have a comprehensive center of information.

More than a dozen volunteers working around the clock in shifts of three have already compiled full entries for 270 terrorists released as part of the Gilad Schalit deal.

It will be uploaded later this week onto the organization’s website, al-magor.com.

The prisoner list released ahead of the Schalit swap by the Prisons Service had dry descriptions for each of those released such as “involvement in unknown terror organization” and “assisted in murder.”

Indor believes that more specific descriptions, such as “the driver who brought the suicide bomber to Sbarro,” will resonate with the public on a deeper level and encourage more of an outcry against future swaps, which was fairly muted in the Schalit deal.

“Personalization works,” said Indor, noting that one reason the Schalit campaign was so successful was that it created an image of Schalit the average Israeli could relate to as a son and a soldier.

He added that the database, which will start with the terrorists released as part of the Schalit swap, will be updated if there are future swaps or if a terrorist is rearrested for committing similar crimes.

There are two other related issues that I hope Almagor can overcome. One is that Arabic names are transliterated into English (and Hebrew for that matter) with multiple spellings that make searches difficult. And a second is that Arabic names have honorariums that are sometimes used and sometimes not used.

For example, after the terrorists for Gilad list was announced, I got an email from a columnist whose name many of you would recognize, who asked me how I knew that Abed Alaziz Salaha, the terrorist whose bloody hands were photographed at the Ramallah lynch in 2000, was being released. His name, wrote the columnist, did not appear on the list. Well, it did. But to find it, you had to know what sentence he was serving, when he was born and when he was arrested. His name appeared as Abd al-Aziz Yussuf Mustafa Salehi.

But it sounds like a great idea, and it's something a lot of bloggers have been seeking. I just hope they can do it in a way that's user friendly.

Labels: Almagor, terrorist database, terrorists for Gilad trade

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:46 AM