Turning Plowshares into Swords

By Naomi Ragen

To live in Jerusalem is to face the fact that here, in the
holiest city in the world, there are vast numbers of inhabitants
who are the kind of human beings willing, able, and committed to
performing acts of sickening bloodshed, breaking every rule that
human beings have created for themselves or learned or been
taught. Worse, they involve G-d in their offenses, desecrating
His name and His city in their maniacal search for the ultimate
act of barbarism to promote their religion/politics/personal
agenda.

Take Mr. Duwait. A convicted rapist and felon who sat in jail
for two years, a resident of the East Jerusalem Arab village Sur
Baher, a relative of the terrorist who killed young yeshiva
students in Mercaz Harav, he climbed unto a huge tractor and
with astonishing barbarism plowed down a major Jerusalem
thoroughfare, sowing unimaginable destruction. As journalist
Tom Gross put it:

"Terrorists purposely target civilians, and this terrorist was no
different. He chose his victims carefully, starting his attack by
motioning with his hand for a woman motorist to drive before him.
Then he rammed her car with the bulldozer's shovel.

He then used the bulldozer to plow into two public buses carrying
passengers, including many women and children which he could
clearly see through the buses' large glass windows. One of the
buses was completely overturned, the other crashed. He then
crushed a number of cars with their drivers still in them, and
targeted several pedestrians chasing them down and running them
over. A half-dozen cars were flattened and others were overturned
by his Caterpillar vehicle as panic spread throughout the center
of Israel's capital. Traffic was halted, and hundreds of people
fled through the streets as medics treated the wounded.

One car was dragged several meters by the bulldozer. A baby was
pulled out by a passerby before the vehicle was crushed, with the
child's mother still inside. She died.

By the time his rampage was over, three Israeli civilians were
dead and over 66 were wounded. Broken glass and blood were left
down a stretch of one of Israel's busiest streets.

All the time the terrorist screamed "Allah Akhbar" (God is great
in Arabic) as he did so.

The terrorist was shot dead by a security guard working for a
nearby bank as he approached Jerusalem's main working class food
market, Mahane Yehuda." {And by a young soldier, the
brother-in-law of the soldier who took out the Mercaz Harav
terrorist. Imagine the woman with such a husband, and such a
brother!)

Bathsheva Unterman, the 33 year-old kindergarten teacher who
unstrapped her baby and handed her to a passerby through the car
window before being crushed, had been through many treatments
and waited many years for her daughter to be born. Her baby was
unharmed. Not so the baby in the overturned bus, who remains in
critical condition.

Duwait's family has not expressed sorrow for the victims. But
what they do want to know is why it was necessary to have killed
Duwait. That way, I suppose they'd be waiting for another Israel
soldier to be kidnapped and murdered to set their darling free.

What is the moral of this story? As Rabbi David Booth said: "It
was a case of someone turning a plowshare into a sword." The
killing here yesterday was no random act. It was deliberate and
personal. It was -and is- family against family. On one side,
there are their families, who raise their sons to be mass
murderers and child killers, instilling in them a hate-filled
culture and a religion with no respect for human life,
encouraging them to kill and be killed.

And then there is our family, who raise our sons to risk their
lives to save the lives of others, instilling in them a culture
and religion filled with the true love of G-d and mankind and
life. Our family will triumph over their family. Our sons over
their sons. And when they sit in their tents of mourning,
keening over their dead, perhaps they might reflect on how it is
they have raised sons who must be hunted down and killed like mad
dogs. Perhaps, if that happens, they will need to mourn no more.



Naomi is always right on and as a concerned citizen and Mother her view
is based both in Torah and in Israel.
Naomi for Prime Minister!