The heroine of Palestine’s heroines? Really?
Murderess-Hero Dalal Mughrabi
Who someone admires is revealing. After all, what parent wouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief knowing that his daughter’s heroine was Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin (depending on one’s political preferences), rather than the all-too-common Paris Hilton or Kardashian sisters? So, too, do a society’s heroes reveal much about where its priorities and values lay.
Hence the tragedy of the veneration of Dalal Mughrabi, one of the more twisted proto-feminists in history’s annals. Mughrabi was the leader of what became known as “the Coastal Road Massacre,” a 1978 terrorist attack in which 38 civilians–among them 13 children–were murdered.
Mughrabi, then around 20, headed a group of 12 terrorists who floated on rubber dinghies from Lebanon and landed on Israeli beaches early on the Sabbath morning of March 11, 1978. The group’s ultimate intentions, according to news reports at the time, was to get to Tel Aviv, where they’d take tourists and foreign ambassadors hostage in order to force the release of Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel.
The charred remains of the bus in which dozens were immolated stands at a memorial in Holon, Israel.
Things didn’t go quite as planned: They murdered an American on the beach, hijacked a cab (killing its passengers), and hijacked two buses driving on Highway 2, the main road that runs along the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa. News reports described Ms. Mughrabi’s work:
The bus continued driving south on the Coastal Road (Highway 2) while the terrorists fired and threw grenades at passing cars, shot passengers and dumped at least one body out of the bus. At one point, they hijacked another bus and forced the passengers from the first bus to board it. An explosion caused either by an exploding fuel tank or a grenade set the bus on fire, killing 38 civilians, 13 of them children. 71 Israelis were wounded.
The passengers had been burned alive. Mughrabi and several of the other…
Read More » Comments (6) »Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 2:00 PM | Stand For Israel
Man who escaped Nazis as toddler knighted for charitable work
Young Jewish girls and teenagers arrive through the "kindertransport" at the Port of London in February, 1939.
One of the thousands of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust because of the kindertransport was knighted over the weekend by Queen Elizabeth. Erich Reich, 74, was among hundreds of unknown Britons who are honored by the queen for a lifetime of good work, Ha’aretz reports.
The kindertransport was a rescue mission that brought some 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and other countries occupied by the Nazis to England. England agreed to accept the children in the weeks after Kristallnacht, a massive, coordinated attack by Nazis and mobs throughout Germany on the night of Nov. 9, 1938. Ninety-one people were murdered outright, between 25,000-35,000 rounded up and sent to concentration camps, and 267 synagogues were destroyed, along with Jewish homes and businesses that were ransacked or destroyed. Desperate to get their children to safety, thousands of parents agreed to send their children alone to England, hoping that they would be able to be reunited with them once they escaped the Nazis as well.
The vast majority of the children survived the war, but few parents survived. Some children were raised in England as orphans (the Jewish community there supported and absorbed them) and some made their way to Israel.
Reich, who was born in Vienna in 1935, arrived in the UK as a toddler – at the end of August 1939. He has helped raise around 60 million pounds for charity (about $97 million) through his company, Classic Tours, which organizes international fundraisers.
“It is a tribute to the work of my team at Classic Tours who tirelessly support my original concept to help charities fundraise through overseas challenge events, and to my kindred spirits and fellow survivors of the Holocaust who benefited from, and in turn give back to, the Kindertransport movement,” Reich told London’s Telegraph.
“I want to thank the people of Britain for allowing the Kinder to come to the U.K. and for this amazing honor,” he…
Read More » Comments (2) »Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 9:18 AM | Stand For Israel
Holocaust museum racing to identify all Nazi victims
JERUSALEM | Motivated by the principle that “every victim has a name,” Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum has identified nearly 4 million Jews who lost their lives to Nazi Germany’s genocide and is trying to identify the rest while survivors are still alive.
“We are in a race against time,” said American-born Cynthia Wroclawski, outreach manager of the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project. “Our mission is to reach people who have information.”
Ms. Wroclawski said 3.6 million names – just over half the estimated Jewish death toll – have been registered to date.
The monumental task began in 1955, two years after Yad Vashem was established by Israel’s parliament, and accelerated in the 1990s in part because of technical advancements such as the creation of a computerized database.
Once completed, the list could help put to rest arguments over whether the death toll has been inflated for political reasons, such as to justify the creation of the modern Jewish state.
Read the rest at the Washington Times.
For information on how you can help needy Holocaust survivors, read about IFCJ’s Guardians of Israel program.
Comments (0) »Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 11:14 AM | Stand For Israel
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