It’s been less than four months since American Jewish peace activist Richard Lakin was murdered by Palestinian terrorists, and already his name has been forgotten by the news media and the international community. But unexpectedly, Lakin was back in the news earlier this month – thanks to the Palestinian Authority.
Lakin, 78, a civil rights veteran from Connecticut, “taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children” in Jerusalem and “never missed a peace rally,” according to his rabbi. The cover photo on Lakin’s Facebook page featured a Jewish child and a Palestinian child under the heading “Coexist.”
None of that made a difference to Baha Alyan and Bilal Ghanem, the two terrorists who boarded the Jerusalem bus on which Lakin happened to be riding on the morning of October 13. Nor were the terrorists deterred by the fact that he was obviously an elderly man. They stabbed him in the face and chest. But that wasn’t enough. They also shot him in the head.
Normal, civilized people would consider such violent behavior repulsive. Not the students at Hebron University, however. Hundreds of them took part in a “human reading chain” on February 1 to celebrate and glorify the two murderers.
Hebron University is located in territory occupied by the Palestinian Authority, which is to say that it operates at the sufferance of (and probably with some assistance from) the PA. If the PA disapproved of glorifying the murderers of an elderly American, they could have shut down the event within minutes.
Instead, the PA’s official news agency helped publicize the event and held it up as model to emulate, by distributing a long, sympathetic report about it. It declared:
Baha Alyan was powerfully present today in the plazas and corridors of Hebron University, and in its passageways and gardens, as an intellectual, a reader, and above all – a Martyr (Shahid) and a fighter, and this was in order to fulfill one of his greatest dreams: to create a reading culture in a society which suffers from the bitterness of occupation and cultural and economic colonialism in its most criminal forms.
WAFA followed that summary with long quotes from the organizers of the reading chain, heaping praise on “Baha, the intellectual, the Martyr and the fighter, who believed in life, loved Palestine and acted to strengthen the role of the young, [who] passed away covered in wreaths of flowers, but his ideas did not perish, and his body, which is held frozen in the Israeli [mortuary] refrigerators since Dec. 13 of last year, after his father refused the occupation’s conditions for handing him over, is still pulsating with the warmth of life!”
Alyan was killed while carrying out the Jerusalem bus attack. Ghanem, however, was wounded and captured. It turns out he previously served time in an Israeli prison and was released. Now Ghanem is back behind bars – but how long will it be before he is released in some prisoner exchange?
At a Congressional hearing on February 2, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann claimed the Obama administration opposed Israel’s release of killers of Americans among the terrorists included in the Gilad Shalit deal.
Some of us find that claim a little difficult to believe. But there is one way Wiegmann and the Justice Department can prove they are telling the truth: announce, right now, that they are asking Israel to extradite Bilal Ghanem to the United States for prosecution. Put him in jail here –so we never have to worry that he will walk free again.
And since Richard Lakin was a veteran peace activist, I am counting on Americans for Peace Now and J Street to join me in calling on the Obama administration to demand that Lakin’s killer face American justice.