Reflecting on a momentary slip by Secretary of State Kerry

...Perhaps it's mere human error, a momentary slip. Perhaps he meant 2012 when numerous Israeli deaths were the result of terrorist acts emanating from the Gaza Strip or in Bulgaria, and not 2013. And maybe the fact that Kerry's staff at State still cannot say - after so many months - whether those terrorists they have impelled the Israelis to release are actually political prisoners etc is simply because they're distracted with higher-order matters, have important jobs to do and so on.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
02 February '14..

There are hundreds of us Israeli families who have been twice-damned by those who embrace the usefulness of terror.

First, we're damned through the unbearable loss itself: a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse, a sibling, an aunt, uncle, cousin, friend. We understand that some see no difference between this and a loved one dying of an illness or an accident. But consider that in most bookstores there is a section that deals with coping with grief after a death by accident or illness. A smaller but not insignificant one focuses on how one goes on and tries to recover after losing a loved one to a crime. But literature to help people through the extreme trauma of murder by terrorist with all the various shadings and nuances and political dimensions that this entails? Doesn't exist. Skipping over a lot of the detail that accompanies this comment, let's just say that being a victim of terrorism involves a matrix of complexity and pain that, no matter in which country you live, modern society is just starting to address - at best. Dealing sensitively, respectfully and humanely with it remains a challenge

And secondly we're damned by how politicians deal with us and our losses. From our own personal experiences over the past dozen years since our child's life was stolen from us, we have seen how the usefulness dimension that comes from the utterly cynical exploitation of terrorism's perpetrators.

For the Palestinian Arabs - in both the Hamas and the PA strands: the greater the savagery of the barbaric act of terror that put the perpetrator into prison or a grave, the more praiseworthy the lethal deed and the more urgent the need to have his or 'heroism' acknowledged by friends and by foes: a kind of theatre of the macabre.

(Continue)

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