wfn.org | Both Jews, Palestinians identify with terror victims

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Note #6836 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

13-September-2001
01319

Both Jews, Palestinians identify with terror victims

by Elaine Ruth Fletcher
Religion News Service

JERUSALEM - Ludivia and Gadi Talker clutched a large portrait of their late
daughter, Katherine, in their hands. The pretty girl with long dark curls
was only 15 when she went out one Friday night in June to a Tel Aviv
discotheque and met her death in a suicide bombing attack carried out by an
Islamic fundamentalist.

	The Talkers gathered Sept. 12 with about 200 other Israeli terror victims
in a show of solidarity with Americans who perished in Tuesday's attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

	In the past, Israeli terror victims have often complained of media
indifference to their stories. But in the wake of Tuesday's incidents,
foreign television crews from around the world descended on this assembly of
Israelis, as if their experiences could somehow help the world better
understand what happened Tuesday in New York and Washington.

	"What happened yesterday in the United States has made me relive the death
of Katherine all over again," said Ludivia. "No one can feel the pain those
American families are going through like we can."

	Tears in her eyes, Ludivia and her husband, Gadi, recalled the night of
their daughter's death, when they first learned of the suicide bombing on
the beachfront Dolphinarium discotheque in a television news bulletin.

	"I saw the television report and I cried out immediately 'Katherine,'
because we knew she was at the discotheque where the attack had taken
place," recalled Ludivia. "We waited at the hospital all night as the
victims came in, until 5:30 a.m., when a nurse finally said that we should
probably go look for her at the morgue.... And that's where we found her.

	"She was beautiful, intelligent and full of dreams. Since she died, I feel
like only half a person," she added.

	"I never believed in killing anybody," added Gadi, a truck driver. "I don't
want to see Israelis dying, or Palestinians. Both sides have parents,
children, mothers and daughters. Still, after you have been through
something like this, it's hard not to hate."

	In the West Bank, meanwhile, Palestinians sought to minimize the street
celebrations that had occurred on Tuesday in various West Bank neighborhoods
in reaction to the attacks on the American targets, saying that the majority
of Palestinians also denounced the terror acts.

	Some 20,000 Palestinian students in Catholic schools across the West Bank
and Gaza held special prayers and observed a moment of silence in memory of
the American victims.

	And Lutheran clerics in Bethlehem called on Palestinians to hold prayer
vigils for the victims and their families.

	"Those who celebrated represent a very small fraction of the Palestinian
people," said Father Majdi Siriani, the legal adviser to Jerusalem's Latin
(Catholic) Patriarchate and director of the church's education department.

	"I don't think anyone with human feelings could condone such a terrorist
act. Certainly all of those people living around me in Bethlehem were
transfixed by this tragedy. For people like me, the United States is our
second home. My parents live outside of Detroit, and I have relatives in New
York, Washington and Los Angeles. I'm afraid that many innocent people like
them are going to be harassed as a result of this."

	Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch, sent a message to U.S. Catholic bishops
expressing the solidarity of his church with that in the United States.

	"We condemn these horrifying crimes and we are shocked and deeply saddened
when we watched the extent of the catastrophe inflicted upon the innocent
people which was caused by horrible acts of terrorism," Sabbah said.

	The Rev. Riad Jarjour, general secretary of the Jerusalem?based Middle East
Council of Churches, called the attack "beyond belief."

	"The world - we all - stopped, horrified," he said. "Imagination cannot
picture what may be its repercussions as anger yields to cries for
vengeance."

	Jarjour said Christians in the Holy Land "are devastated by the bestiality
that can infect ordinary human beings and transform them into mass murders
and deranged suicides.

	"Evil raised its head. Its taunting must be resisted. Evil does not
overcome evil; it augments it. Christ taught us that."
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