Peres's "victims of peace"

Finally, he finds the time to pay his respects to the dead
August 7, 2005
by The Perescope

A terrorist dressed in an Israeli army uniform opened fire with an automatic weapon on innocent passengers in a bus last Thursday afternoon. The driver and three passengers, two of whom were sisters, were killed. The terrorist was lynched by the angry crowd that gathered outside the bus when his ammunition ran out.

All told there have been tens of thousands of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians since Shimon Peres launched his Oslo fiasco in 1993. As of last Thursday, a total of 1,329 Israelis had lost their lives in the years since Yasser Arafat and the PLO "renounced" terror.

As a sign of solidarity with the bereaved families, it is customary for a minister in the government to attend the funeral of every victim of terror. Ministers take their turns in this solemn responsibility. Shimon Peres has been a minister for over eight of the twelve years since he initiated his Oslo debacle. But he had never attended even one funeral among the 1,329 that took place as a direct result of his diplomatic failure. Not one.

Two consecutive presidents of Israel has made it their responsibility to visit every bereaved family during its period of mourning, but Shimon Peres has never deigned to visit even one such family, much less all of them. It's just been beneath him. The many dead that Oslo left in its wake have been mere details for a busy, traveled statesman like Shimon Peres, who has preferred to brush them off like dandruff. "Victims of peace" is the contemptuous, Orwellian term he once coined for them.Until now.

Why now? Because the terrorist who opened fire in that bus last week was a Jew, and his four victims were Israeli Arabs. For the first time since the Palestinian terror war against Israeli civilians began five years ago, a single Jew (albeit an AWOL soldier with a psychiatric record) murdered innocent Arabs. So Shimon Peres broke with his coldhearted precedent and paid a condolence call on the elders of the Israeli-Arab town of Shfaram, together with his protégé, Interior Minister Ophir Pines (pronounced not like the tree, but like a certain human organ, believe it or not). It's not clear if Peres actually visited with the bereaved families themselves, but he did make himself available to television cameras as he called upon local dignitaries to reassure them of his commitment to peace and reconciliation between Arabs and Jews.

Meanwhile, the families of Peres's other 1,329 "victims of peace" are still waiting for him to console them and admit responsibility for the disaster that he unleashed on the citizens of the entire country, Jews and Arabs alike.