Hamas is demanding the release of arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti. That he has spilled American blood has never interested any American administration.
My mother was a great woman. She was born in a little town in southern Germany. The main road of Thungen that passed by their quiet home was naturally renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse after the fuhrer came to power. She had to change schools because Nazi Youth were harassing her daily. One of her greatest memories was throwing a snowball with a rock in it at one of their members. She remembered, until her dying day, blood on the young Aryan’s forehead.
An uncle of hers who never married owned a successful silver mine in Utah. He left money in his will for my mother and much of the Bamberger family. He passed away in November of 1937, and my mother arrived in New York on the S.S. Washington a month later, having money waiting for them and never being a burden on the state. She learned English, became a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and could belt out the National Anthem with the best of them. There were three things she used to tell me:
Marry a Jewish girl
Don’t ride a motorcycle
Don’t hate anybody.
I am grateful and very fortunate to have fulfilled the first commandment. As for the second, other than a quick spin on a scooter, I have not had the pleasure of a Harley or Kawasaki. As to the third, hate is a very dangerous emotion. It is like nuclear energy. You can take an amount of highly enriched uranium and use it to provide electricity to tens of thousands of homes for months at a time. Or you can release all of the energy in a millisecond and incinerate a hundred thousand people. There are those who channel hatred into getting better and stronger, while there are those who are consumed by it and lose themselves out of their burning distaste for another.
Around six months after our oldest son, then 7, and I were wounded in a suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem, there was an article in the Hebrew press with all of the details of the bomber and those who prepped him. It was like sitting in their safe house in Ramallah in the days before the 21 March 2002 attack. I did some searching, and a local lawyer got me four indictments: the two women who brought the bomber downtown, the head of the cell who was a Palestinian Authority (PA) intelligence officer, and a Fatah operative. Another lawyer told me that Palestinian terrorists after they are captured, sing like birds. So the indictments, having many overlapping features, were all based on the signed confessions of the four of them. Each indictment included a statement of fact that the intelligence officer and Fatah thug met with Marwan Barghouti on 20 March 2021 to tell him of their plans. He gave them $600 and asked if they needed anything, to which they replied that they did not. The following afternoon, a PA policeman detonated a large nail-filled bomb on King George Street. Our son and I were wounded. A young couple, the woman pregnant with twins, was killed, as was one other passerby.
Marwan Barghouti was captured shortly after these events. He was tried in a civilian court and found guilty of five counts of murder, our case not being included in the indictment due to its having happened close to the indictment preparation. He received five life sentences and has been in jail ever since. Periodically, there is an effort to spring him into some hostage deal, as in the one for the soldier Schalit. Hamas has now demanded his release. In the past, I used to send off frantic emails to the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the FBI, as we and several other Americans were on the receiving end of his attacks. These organizations do not care, and one US ambassador to Israel told me point-black that the US will never arrest or try Barghouti. They want him available to lead, so he needs to stay in or near Israel.
The Palestinians, along with major black organizations in the US, always seem to choose losers as their heroes. Ramallah is dotted with squares and streets named after people who blew up and murdered women and children. Hamas is still running at 70% favorability among Palestinians after it documented the murder and rape of over a thousand people. I don’t care what happens in Gaza: when Hamas started the war, they lost all say on how it would be prosecuted. Of late, Israel has been blowing up UNRWA schools with lots of terrorists hiding inside. Israel listed the names of 19 terrorists eliminated in the most recent strike when the beautiful people in the West turned off the men-beating-women Olympics in order to complain about the strike. Michael Brown and George Floyd? Both were criminals; the former tried to grab a cop’s gun, and the latter had a rap sheet from here to the moon. They can’t find more inspiring people to idolize and praise?
Barghouti is also a piece of garbage. He has been compared to Nelson Mandela, which is appropriate as he used to hang out with Arafat and Castro and had ANC members doing his dirty work. Barghouti has never renounced violence because he understands that his value to the Palestinian people is to kill Jews. If he declared himself a pacifist or expressed regret for his past activities, he would be forgotten in a second. He must remain a terrorist in order to remain relevant. Hamas does not really want him out, but they want to show the PA that they have more power and can even get the PA’s criminals out if they wish. As a member of the Palestinian parliament (stop laughing), Barghouti had an obligation to alert Israel of the attack in which we were injured. He obviously did nothing of the sort and helped defray expenses, including the driving lessons for one of the women escorts. She said in a video that the PA paid for her driving lessons so as to get a bomber into downtown Jerusalem.
I hate Barghouti and all those involved in the attack in which we were harmed. I hate those who killed innocent Jews on 10/7, and I couldn't care less about the Gaza body count. They could have chosen not to attack, and the body account would be zero. When Israel announced the death of a Fatah terrorist in jail, I thought that it was the guy from our attack. Before I could get Jack Daniels onto the table, my lawyers had clarified that it was his cousin. I keep the booze on ready standby for someone involved in our attack dropping dead.
Somewhere up there, I hope that my mother can forgive me for not fulfilling her wish of not hating anybody. There are people who have no place in society, and I will not turn the other cheek. I will wait for their demise and celebrate it with great joy.
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