Remember Yitzchak Rabin, Forget his Victims

The show is set as the ruling powers put on a show to remember the 12th anniversary of Rabin's death, in the way they did not bother to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Yerushalayim.

I do not weep for Yitzchak Rabin nor can I even begin to understand the mindset that says I must mourn for an elderly politician more than for the little girl riding a bus on which a Fatah suicide bomber dispatched by Yasir Arafat (Rabin's partner in peace) detonated himself. I reject the moral universe of anyone who places the life of a corrupt senile politician transformed into a martyr by a corps of press agents over the lives of the men, women and children murdered as a consequence of Rabin's policies.

Accompanying the "regime approved" memorialization of Rabin, are the usual bouts of hysteria over Yigal Amir. Currently a law has been passed denying Amir parole for life. He has been denied a furlough to attend his son's Brit or to have the Brit take place in his prison (a not uncommon practice in Israel even with serious offenders) and even the hospital where his wife was set to deliver his son was ordered not to accept her if she comes on the anniversary of Rabin's death.

I do not weep for Yigal Amir but when he met Yitzchak Rabin, he killed one man... if even that. The man on the other end of the bullet had and has on his hands the blood of every single terrorist atrocity since he gave Arafat and his Fatah cohorts a base inside Israel's borders. If Amir is to be damned like Kayin for all eternity, then what is one to make of the jubilant terrorists freed from Israeli prisons time and time again. What is one to make of the moral order that damns a man for one killing yet insists on releasing an army of killers and even arming them? That insists on celebrating the man who set loose an enemy army on Israeli soil as a saint?

The reality is that Rabin was neither a hero nor a saint. He was a corrupt politician, an overrated general and a notorious drunk and finally a senile old man, manhandled by his ancient political enemy turned ally, Shimon Peres into an agreement that has filled Israeli's cemeteries with the dead. At the memorial ceremony Ehud Olmert will no doubt proclaim that he walks in Rabin's footsteps. And indeed he does. For once Olmert will have told the truth, because Olmert's policies are nothing more than the continuation of the insanity of the Oslo accords.

The madness of constantly making concession after concession, of meeting terrorist atrocities with useless half-measures and cringing before the whip of international condemnation while lapping up every puddle of praise began with the Rabin government. Its legacy lives on in Olmert's plan to cut a deal with Arafat's powerless successor and transfer parts of Israel and Yerushalayim in exchange for a useless set of promises and a rain of rockets, bombs and bullets.

The commemorations of Rabin's death urge you to remember Rabin and forget his victims. I instead urge you to remember both. Remember the soldiers and civilians, the men and women and children, the injured and the dead, the amputees and the disfigured, the tortured and the slain. Remember that this evil was not inevitable, it was a choice. Rabin and his government made that choice then just as Olmert and his government are making it now.

If it is evil to set loose a gang of murderers in a neighborhood, to watch them kill and kill again with folded hands, then Rabin, Peres and Olmert are evil. If such an act is described by anyone as noble or virtuous, the person saying this has demonstrated their own complete divorcement from any concept of right and wrong. I do not mourn men who do evil and then put on saintly garb or worship at the altar or Tolstoy and Gandhi. I mourn those who die at the hands of their destructive policies.