The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Her Name Was Simona Rudina …

Posted on | May 16, 2011 | 13 Comments

Tel Aviv, June 10, 2001 (Photo by IDF)

. . . and she was just 17 years old. Simona was born in Lithuania, when that nation was still under the heel of Soviet despotism. When she was 3 years old, her family emigrated to Israel.

On the evening of June 10, 2001, Simona and some friends wanted to attend a dance party for young emigres from the former Soviet Union. As her father later explained, Simona and her friends hadn’t gone to the Tel Aviv beach in three months, because of the wave of Palestinian terrorism known as the Second Intifada. “With all the terrorist attacks, they were not comfortable walking along the seashore,” he said.

However, Simona had just passed a literature test with a high score — a cause for celebration — and so her father didn’t object to her going with her friends to visit a beachfront dance club popular with teens. “They tried on a whole pile of clothes, and finally Simona settled on Rita’s one-sleeved black blouse with sequins, and matching black pants,” her father recalled.

You may have noticed I’m speaking of Simona Rudina in the past tense. Go ahead and Google her name and you’ll find out why.

The beachfront disco that Simona visited that night in June 2001 was at the Dolphinarium, scene of one of the most heinous atrocities of the Second Antifada — a suicide bombing that killed 21 people, 16 of whom were just teenagers. Simona was killed, and her friend Rita was among the scores horribly wounded by the blast:

The terrorist mingled with a large group of teenagers, who were standing in line to enter the disco. While still in line, he detonated the explosives strapped to his body. The explosive charge contained a large number of metal objects – including balls and screws – designed to increase the extent of injuries.
Most of those killed were youngsters from the former Soviet Union who had planned to attend a dance party at the Dolphin disco.

Simona’s killer was Sa’id Hasan Houtari. Both Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad initially claimed credit for the bombing, but it was eventually determined that Hamas was responsible. News of this murderous atrocity “was greeted with jubilation in Ramallah and parts of Gaza, where people danced in the streets and fired guns in the air. ” Documents captured during Israel’s 2002 military invasion of the West Bank showed that the Palestinian Authority had paid $2,000 to the family of the suicide bomber Houtari, who was celebrated as a “martyr” by the Palestinians.

Terrorism Comes to Campus

Until Sunday, I’d never heard of Simona Rudina. Then I was exchanging Twitter messages with Gabriella Hoffman, whose column about Levi Johnston I’d linked in a post. She said her family had escaped Lithuania during the Soviet era. On a hunch, I asked a question:

You may recognize the name — I highlighted Shiri’s story last year on the blog — but Gabriella hadn’t, and so I sent her a link to a post about Shiri that Michelle Malkin wrote in 2007. To refresh your memory: Shiri Negari, 21, was one of 19 people killed when a Hamas suicide bomber blew up a bus in June 2002 in Gilo, Israel. So I sent the Malkin link to Gabriella and in a couple of minutes she replied:

Small world, you see? Here is a college student in San Diego whose cousin Simona was killed in one of the most infamous atrocities of the same five-year-long Palestinian terror campaign that killed Shiri Negari. And it turns out Gabriella introduced David Horowitz last year when he spoke at the University of California San Diego. That speech led to a rather famous YouTube moment when Horowitz asked a member of the UCSD Muslim Student Association a simple question: “Do you support Hamas?”

A very simple question, and you see that the MSA activist refused to deny her support for Hamas: The same organization responsible for the deaths of both Simona Rudina and Shiri Negari.

Murderers. Monsters. Butchers. Beasts.

How is it that American college campuses are home to officially-recognized student organizations whose members refuse to condemn the perpetrators of such hideous terrorism?

What Do They Want?

The bloodthirsty genocidal ambitions of these fanatics were made clear Sunday, when thousands of militants stormed the borders to mark the anniversary of Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence:

Israel’s borders erupted in deadly clashes on Sunday as thousands of Palestinians — marching from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank — confronted Israeli troops to mark the anniversary of Israel’s creation. More than a dozen people were reported killed and scores injured. . . .
At the Lebanese border, Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to force their way across. The Lebanese military said 10 protesters were killed and more than 100 were wounded. Israel said it was investigating the casualties.
In the Golan Heights, about 100 Palestinians living in Syria breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams, waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four people. The border unrest could represent a new phase in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
In the West Bank, about 1,000 protesters carrying Palestinian flags and throwing stones and occasional firecrackers and gasoline bombs fought with Israeli riot troops near the military checkpoint between Ramallah and Israel. Scores were injured, local medical officials said.
In Gaza, when marchers crossed a security zone near the border, Israeli troops fired into the crowd, wounding dozens.

(Via Memeorandum.) Donald Douglas at American Power has much more, including this Associated Press video:

This is how the terrorists commemorate what they call the “catastrophe” (nabka) of modern Israel’s founding. And by this, they make clear that their grievance is not a matter of West Bank settlements or other minor territorial disputes.

No, they are sworn to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and such is their hatred that many of their leaders have vowed they would kill every Jew on the planet if they could. You cannot negotiate with such people. How can you possibly make peace with them?

They don’t want peace. They want dead Jews.

Decades of anti-Israeli propaganda have poisoned their minds, so that Jew-hating and Jew-killing are now the sine qua non of political leadership in much of the Arab world. Jeffrey Goldberg notes that Syria permits no political protests against the Assad regime, yet was evidently willing to permit this anti-Israel demonstration. As Glenn Reynolds says: “I assume it’s meant to serve as a distraction to take the pressure off of Assad, but I wonder if Syrians will fall for it as easily as the news media have.” And beyond Syria, Israeli officials see the “fingerprints” of Iran on the nabka violence.

Confronted with such brutal cynicism — where leaders relentlessly incite Jew-hatred and then manipulate that hatred to gain or maintain power — Americans recoil in horror, unwilling to believe that so many millions of people could succumb to this murderous fanaticism.

But what else can we believe, when they dance in the streets of Ramallah over the deaths of innocent teenagers like Simona Rudina?

I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life . . .
– Deuteronomy 30:19 (KJV)

Category: Israel, Terrorism

Comments

Comments are closed.