{Originally posted to The Lid website}
As Europe continues to complain about President Trump’s sanctions on terrorist supporting Iran, it is important to point out their failure to learn from the past. At the same time, they are pushing back against the sanctions and supporting a deal that gave Iran the funds to support terror, fifteen families, indeed an entire nation is mourning a horrible terrorist attack that happened a few weeks before 9/11/01.
Seventeen years ago on August 9th, 2001 Palestinian terrorists blew up a pizza place in the heart of Jerusalem killing 15 people including seven children and a pregnant woman. They wounded 130. A month later, other Islamist terrorists blew up the World Trade Centers in NY, the Pentagon Building in Washington DC, and were foiled in their attempt to destroy the Capital building by the brave passengers of Flight 93.
It is important to remember these acts, not merely to memorialize the innocent victims whose only crime was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but as a reminder that Europe’s rejection of President Trump’s actions prove terrorism is still suckling at the teat of political correctness and Western World appeasement.
From ” A Personal Account of the Bombing” by Rabbi Binny Freedman
Her eyes, I think, will stay with me forever. Imploring, beseeching, full of so much sadness. I think the shock of where and how she was, was sinking in. I can’t begin to describe all that was in those eyes.
Yesterday; Thursday, August 9th the 20th of Av, on my way to work, I found myself walking down Yaffo street. Hungry, I decided to stop and grab a quick bite… at Sbarro’s Pizza.
In the past 5 years I have frequented this establishment exactly twice. Walking into Sbarro’s there is a larger area for sitting in the front, but the back looked a bit cooler and quieter, so I decided to grab a seat in the back. That decision saved my life.
Waiting on-line, when they brought me the baked Ziti I asked for, it was cold. So I asked the woman behind the counter if she’d mind warming it up. “Ein Ba’ayah”, no problem, she said with a smile. I will always wonder if that was her last smile on earth… A couple of moments later, a fellow from behind the counter came to the back with my baked Zitti. Then he started to speak to someone at one of the tables..
Searching Baby Carriages For Body Parts
At about 2PM, I both felt & heard a tremendous explosion, and day turned into night. And then the screaming began. An awful, heartrending sound; the sound of people coming to terms with a whole new reality, of people not wanting to comprehend that life has changed forever. Those of us sitting in the back were spared, but I was afraid of panic, so I started yelling at everyone to quieten down; not to panic. The ceiling looked like it might cave in, but there is always the danger of a second explosion, detonated on purpose shortly after the first… But then I smelled smoke, and was suddenly afraid the restaurant might be on fire. So we started climbing our way through the wreckage to the front.
..There are no words to describe what the front of Sbarro’s Pizza looked like in the immediate aftermath of that explosion. A woman was lying near the steps to the back. Her eyes were staring straight at me, following me. So full of pain and longing, sadness and despair. I dropped down beside her trying to elicit a response to see if she could speak. And then I watched the life just drain out of her. I tried to get a pulse, to no avail. She died there, on the steps in front of me. She was lying by the table I had decided not to sit at…
Terrorist Ahlam Tamimi helped to plan the Sbarro attacked and drove the murder to the pizza shop in Jerusalem in August 2001.
On the day of the massacre (9th August 2001), she transported the bomb (10 kg) from a West Bank town into Jerusalem, concealed inside a guitar case. Taxi cabs brought her and an accomplice by the name of Al Masri, a young, newly religious fanatic, to an Israeli security checkpoint and from there into Jerusalem.
Six years later in June 2007, a smiling Tamimi was featured in a New York Times review of a Cinemax documentary about Israeli prisons, the article didn’t mention that she helped to kill fifteen innocents. But that’s how the liberal media and politicians treat terrorists, or as they like to call them “militants.”
After the blast, bodies lay sprawled on the ground. Many of the wounded, huge nails embedded in their skin, were covered in blood and their clothes had been blown off by the force of the explosion.
“All the glass blew out ‘boom!’ I saw two dead people, one with brains spilling out of his head, another with blood pouring out of his nose,” said 16-year-old Eliezer Vanzoari, his own arms smeared with blood. “I started to help move the people. I was shaking all over.”
An off-duty soldier, Naor Shara, happened to be walking by at the time. “The worst thing I saw, which I think will haunt me all my life,” he said “is a baby that was sitting in a stroller outside a shop and was dead. After the explosion, the baby’s mother came out of the store and started screaming hysterically. She saw her baby before her eyes dead.”
Sarit Barashy, who was shopping nearby, said: “I heard a loud boom and I came out of the store and saw a woman with a baby covered with blood. The street was full of blood.”
Ahlam Tamimi was captured, jailed for the murders, but released from an Israeli jail in 2011 as part the prisoner exchange for the kidnapped Israeli, Gilad Shalit. To this day she has shown no remorse for her mass-murder. Today she lives in Jordan with a TV show on the Hamas TV network. And the world is silent.
May the names and memories of the dead always be for a blessing:
- Giora Balash, 60, of Brazil
- Zvika Golombek, 26, of Carmiel
- Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, 31, of the U.S.
- Tehila Maoz, 18, of Jerusalem
- Frieda Mendelsohn, 62, of Jerusalem
- Michal Raziel, 16, of Jerusalem
- Malka Roth, 15, of Jerusalem
- Mordechai Schijveschuurder, 43, of Neria
- Tzira Schijveschuurder, 41, of Neria
- Ra’aya Schijveschuurder, 14, of Neria
- Avraham Yitzhak Schijveschuurder, 4, of Neria
- Hemda Schijveschuurder, 2, of Neria
- Lily Shimashvili, 33, of Jerusalem
- Tamara Shimashvili, 8, of Jerusalem
- Yocheved Shoshan, 10, of Jerusalem
The primary blame for this massacre goes to the terrorists that planned and executed this massacre, Hamas the terrorist group that the bombers associated with, and Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinians which still celebrates the murderers as heroes. But there is blame to go much further than that.
Radical Islamist terrorism has been suckling at the teat of the appeasers who run most of the western world. The governments who believe it’s possible for murderous terror organizations to have a separation between their military and political wings, which make deals with terrorist funding countries such as Iran and back terrorist supporting organizations such as the Palestinian Authority to have a seat at the United Nations table.
Thanks to decades of appeasement the radical Islamist world learned terrorism is a legitimate means of political expression. That same appeasement directly led to 9/11/01, al Qaeda, ISIS, and every other Islamic terror organization in the world today.
The Sbarro bombing was not the first of these horrible murders or the deadliest. A little over a month later another terrorist attack, this time in the United States captured the world’s attention and drove the United States to become actively involved in the war against terror. And 9/11, for the first time in its history a US president treated a terror attack in Israel the same as any other act of war against civil society (at least until the Republicans lost Congress in 2006 and things began to revert).
After election day 2008 under the leadership of new President Barack Obama the US reverted to the pre-9/11 US mentality and even began to blame Israel, the victim, for terrorist attacks in the holy land. Even worse this country stopped fighting a war to wipe out the fanatical Islamists. Fifteen years after Sbarro, and almost 15 years after 9/11/11, we had a President who believed in leading from behind, and the Islamists had the United States on the run.
For the eight years of the Obama administration, Palestinian violence was encouraged by a president doing all he could to force Israel to make one-sided concessions to the supposed “moderates” in Fatah, despite their refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish State, and continued the killing of innocent Israelis. Via both of his secretary of states, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, Obama pushed peace with President Abbas’ Fatah Party, even though they didn’t want peace, and idolized & paid mass-murderers like the one who blew up a Sbarros pizza place in Jerusalem, as heroes.
Thankfully America has a new President, Donald Trump who believes that America should lead the world in the effort to destroy the terrorist menace everywhere in the world (including Israel). He also fights for the incitement of terrorism anywhere in the world to be stopped.
Until the world recognizes the fruits of their appeasement, by not funding or recognizing any terrorist organization or state as legitimate, horrors like the Sbarro bombing, 9/11, San Bernardino, Paris, Orlando, and others will continue to happen in Israel, Europe, the US and elsewhere throughout the world.
The supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority run by President Abbas and his Fatah Party takes some of the aid money provided to it by western nations to pay blood money to terrorists and their families including almost $300K the Sbarro bombers:
- The suicide bomber was Izz al-Din Al-Masri. His family has received $50,124 as a reward for his suicide bombing.
- The terrorist who planned the attack and brought the bomber to Sbarro was Ahlam Tamimi (described above). For her time in prison, she has been rewarded by the PA with salary payments of at least $52,681.
- The suicide belt was built by Hamas bomb- builder Abdallah Barghouti. Barghouti was arrested in May 2003 and received 67 life sentences – 15 of them for building the bomb used to murder the people in Sbarro. He has received salary payments from the PA of at least $191,526.
By September 2018, the PA will have cumulatively rewarded Barghouti, Tamimi, and the family of Al-Masri with at least $294,332, but Europe says or does nothing.
For the past three months, Hamas has been attacking every Friday after prayers–the terrorist organization has accelerated its attacks via rocket attacks on an almost daily basis. The only reaction from the Europeans is to blame Israel for protecting herself reenforcing the Hamas belief that terrorism is a legitimate form of political expression.
One reason President Trump withdrew from the Iran deal was the rogue regime’s funding of terrorism throughout the world. Rather than recognizing that Iran is funding terrorism with the money, it received from Obama (and there is no way to discern whether Iran is keeping its end of the deal because the lack of real inspections), Europe is doing what it always does appease. Rather than go along with President Trump’s new sanctions, Europe is fighting back—too oblivious to realize that all they are doing is feeding the terrorist monster.