This Ongoing War..
21 March '14..
While politicians from the EU parliament in Brussels are here tonight to tell us the murderers of our family members must walk free because this "is central to the peace process", one of the world's major sources of syndicated news reports implies the killers are not killers at all.
An Associated Press article, "Jailed militant key to Mideast talk", published on Wednesday, is the latest in a series that paint Marwan Barghouti as a Mandela-like man of peace who, if only he were sprung from jail, would take his natural place in the pantheon of Palestinian Arab statespersons and blaze a path to wherever it is they believe the Palestinian Arabs are heading. (CIFWatch documented similar media efforts in an excellent analysis last year.)
We personally sat through the murder trial of Marwan Barghouti back in 2004. The hearing was in Tel Aviv, in the Magistrates Court complex that rarely gets the kind of lavish media attention in evidence that week. Aljazeera's TV crew were there along with reporters from all over. A motley assemblage of lawyers from Israel, the PA and overseas were too, intent on defending the 'great' man from the lowly offenses of which he was charged. Some of the most entertaining moments on the trial's first day involved one of those would-be advocates, an unusually boorish individual intent on making a splash, being physically picked up by the security people and thrown out the door of the court room and onto the floor of the adjacent lobby.
Two main factors (among many) persuaded us to be there. One: Marwan Barghouti had personally given post-massacre shelter and money to members of the Hamas gang that planned and carried out the bombing of the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in which our teenage daughter was murdered three years earlier. He was, in legal terms, an accessory after the fact to the terrorism.
And one of the five victims for whose murder Barghouti was charged was a very Jewish-looking, traditionally bearded man, driving his car in 2001 along one of Judea's intercity desert roads and shot dead from a distance by Barghouti's sharp-shooters and a volley of 13 bullets. Only this was no Jew. He was in fact a young, bearded Greek Orthodox monk, Tsibouktsakis Germanus, also known as Father Herman, from the ancient monastery at Wadi Kelt. Shot dead while looking Jewish.
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