Prisoner swap completed

Israel has just fulfilled its promise to release five Lebanese terrorists, including the notorious murderer Samir Kuntar , from Israeli prisons. Hezbollah has returned the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to Israel. They were kidnapped near the Lebanese border by Hezbollah guerilla group in 2006, and killed, however, the families did not know of their death until the prisoner swap on July the 16, 2008

It is a day of sadness for Israel -- and particularly for the Goldwasser and Regev families, who had hoped against hope that their brave sons might still be alive, and for the family of Danny, Einat and Yael Haran, brutally killed in a terrorist raid led by Samir Kuntar in 1979. Kuntar remains unrepentant for his crimes. In Lebanon, he and his four fellow terrorists were greeted as heroes

Please pray for the Goldwasser, Regev and Haran families today -- and for comfort for all of Israel on this difficult and dispiriting day.

Please do not read this story if reading of horrible, brutal murders bothers you. This story was given to the Washington Post by Smadar Haran Kaiser whose husband, Danny and their daughter, Einat were killed by Kuntar and a second daughter subsequently died as a direct result.

NAHARIYA, Israel

Abu Abbas, the former head of a Palestinian terrorist group who was captured in Iraq on April 15, is infamous for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. But there are probably few who remember why Abbas's terrorists held the ship and its 400-plus passengers hostage for two days. It was to gain the release of a Lebanese terrorist named Samir Kuntar, who is locked up in an Israeli prison for life. Kantar’s name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kantar murdered my family.

It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty, crueler even than the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was shot on the Achille Lauro and dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Kantar’s mission against my family, which never made world headlines, was also masterminded by Abu Abbas. And my wish now is that this terrorist leader should be prosecuted in the United States, so that the world may know of all his terrorist acts, not the least of which is what he did to my family on April 22, 1979.

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The next day, Abu Abbas announced from Beirut that the terrorist attack in Nahariya had been carried out "to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty" at Camp David the previous year. Abbas seems to have a gift for charming journalists, but imagine the character of a man who protests an act of peace by committing an act of slaughter.

Two of Abbas's terrorists had been killed by police on the beach. The other two were captured, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Despite my protests, one was released in a prisoner exchange for Israeli POWs several months before the Achille Lauro hijacking. Abu Abbas was determined to find a way to free Kuntar as well. So he engineered the hijacking of the Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt and demanded the release of 50 Arab terrorists from Israeli jails. The only one of those prisoners actually named was Samir Kuntar. The plight of hundreds held hostage on a cruise ship for two days at sea lent itself to massive international media coverage. The attack on Nahariya, by contrast, had taken less than an hour in the middle of the night. So what happened then was hardly noticed outside of Israel.

One hears the terrorists and their excusers say that they are driven to kill out of desperation. But there is always a choice. Even when you have suffered, you can choose whether to kill and ruin another's life, or whether to go on and rebuild. Even after my family was murdered, I never dreamed of taking revenge on any Arab. But I am determined that Samir Kuntar should never be released from prison. In 1984, I had to fight my own government not to release him as part of an exchange for several Israeli soldiers who were POWs in Lebanon. I understood, of course, that the families of those POWs would gladly have agreed to the release of an Arab terrorist to get their sons back. But I told Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, that the blood of my family was as red as that of the POWs. Israel had always taken a position of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. If they were going to make an exception, let it be for a terrorist who was not as cruel as Kuntar. "Your job is not to be emotional," I told Rabin, "but to act rationally." And he did..

So Kuntar remains in prison. I have been shocked to learn that he has married an Israeli Arab woman who is an activist on behalf of terrorist prisoners. As the wife of a prisoner, she gets a monthly stipend from the government. I'm not too happy about that.

In recent years, Abu Abbas started telling journalists that he had renounced terrorism and that killing Leon Klinghoffer had been a mistake. But he has never said that killing my family was a mistake. He was a terrorist once, and a terrorist, I believe, he remains. Why else did he spend these last years, as the Israeli press has reported, free as a bird in Baghdad, passing rewards of $25,000 from Saddam Hussein to families of Palestinian suicide bombers? More than words, that kind of cash prize, which is a fortune to poor families, was a way of urging more suicide bombers. The fortunate thing about Abbas's attaching himself to Hussein is that it set him up for capture.

Some say that Italy should have first crack at Abbas. It had already convicted him of the Achille Lauro hijacking in absentia in 1986. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now wants Abbas handed over so that he can begin serving his life sentence. But it's also true that in 1985, the Italians had Abbas in their hands after U.S. fighter jets forced his plane to land in Sicily. And yet they let him go. So while I trust Berlusconi, who knows if a future Italian government might not again wash its hands of Abbas?

In 1995, Rabin, then our prime minister, asked me to join him on his trip to the White House, where he was to sign a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat, which I supported. I believe that he wanted me to represent all Israeli victims of terrorism. Rabin dreaded shaking hands with Arafat, knowing that those hands were bloody. At first, I agreed to make the trip, but at the last minute, I declined. As prime minister, Rabin had to shake hands with Arafat for political reasons. As a private person, I did not. So I stayed here.

Now I am ready and willing to come to the United States to testify against Abu Abbas if he is tried for terrorism. The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer have said they are ready to do the same. Unlike Klinghoffer, Danny, Einat and Yael were not American citizens. But Klinghoffer was killed on an Italian ship in Abbas's attempt to free the killer of my family in Israel. We are all connected by the international web of terrorism woven by Abbas. Let the truth come out in a new and public trial. And let it be in the United States, the leader in the struggle against terrorism.

Smadar Haran Kaiser is a social worker. She is remarried and has two daughters.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

I am writing this paper not to explain the Holocaust but only to explain how I became involved in a lifelong study including the Holocaust, the Jewish people, their history, the formation the State of Israel and the prophecy of the Jewish people that has occurred before our very own eyes.

When I was in high school, I was disappointed that in American history , we never got to WW II. I had relatives that were in that war and my interest in history made me want to know even more about WWII.

After I finished college (pharmacy school ) at MUSC, I was in a book store one day and was not even thinking about WWII, my eyes fell on a big book simply named WWII, It was about 4 ½ inches thick and I bought the book and over the next month I consumed it. I found out, two things that stood out to me. First, I learned that you could not record the history of WWII in a single book, as it was too voluminous . Secondly, I learned a little about the Holocaust. I don’t think I had ever heard about the Holocaust, if I had, it made no impact on me. But for some reason I could not get these atrocities perpetrated on an entire race only because they were Jews, out of my mind.

I began to read every thing I could get my hands on about the Holocaust and then every thing I could find about SS troopers, the Nazi party and the Third Reich. You can not become involved in a study about the Holocaust without being involved in a study about the Jewish people, their history, going back 4000 years. The study must also include the history of the Jewish people in the land of Palestine, the dispersal of the Jews all over the world in AD 70. This study can not end without studying and realizing the many things that had to come together for the formation of the State of Israel, the many battles they were in and of course the prophecy that has taken place before our very eyes.

As I have said , this has been a life long study and has lead me to having a library of thousands of books, tapes, videos, cds and DVDs. This information also came from the many hours of study in the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC , the Holocaust museum in Miami, the Yad vashem the Holocaust museum in Israel, as well as many other museums and libraries.

In 1990 the Iron Curtain fell and gave hundreds of thousands of Jews in the former Russian block countries as well as Russia a chance to immigrate to Israel. There was only one hurdle , they did not have the money as Russia and the Russian block countries had kept the Jewish people in their community villages to the point that they were very destitute and poor. Hundreds of thousand of Jews have been able to, make what they call their “alilah” (going up in Hebrew) because of a few organizations such as the International Fellowships of Christians and Jews which raised, for this purpose, more than $70 million dollars last year alone. The Fellowship is about 85% Christian and about 15% Jews. This is a guess on my part based on what I have heard from others.

There were only about 650,000 Jews in the State of Israel when it was formed in May of 1948. Harry Truman was first to send the new country a telegram welcoming them to the League of Nations. Israel won its first war against many odds against their Arab neighbors which became their War of Independence. Today (2008) the population of Israel is prox 7.2 million with 20% being Arabs.

In 1992, I had just read: “22This is what the Sovereign Lord says see, I will beckon to the Gentiles, I will lift up my banner to the peoples; they will bring your sons in their arms and carry your daughters on their shoulders,” (Isaiah 49:22) when only a week later I saw a program on TV which was called On Wings of Eagles sponsored by The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. It was about Christians, in other words, Gentiles, if you will, giving to help destitute Jews in the former Russian block countries to migrate to Israel. I could not believe my eyes. I had ask the Lord many times why he had kept my mind on the study of His Chosen People, which included some 4000 years to the present, most all of my adult life. In the program they had a number of Christians ministers who were endorsing this program founded by a Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein. I tried every way I could to shoot down this program, I even called Dr Pat Robertson and Dr John Hagee both of whom had endorsed the program and had asked their Christian supporters to support Rabbi Eckstein in his endeavor to help the Jews of the “North” to migrate to Israel and both of them told me that their ministries had added On Wings of Eagles to their budgets. I even called the Better Business Bureau to find out what I could about The International Fellowship of Christian and Jews in Chicago but found out nothing bad as I had expected. I did not want to believe what my heart was telling me. I called the IFCJ, which is their acronym, They answered every question I had for them. I found out that every nickel someone gives for this worthy cause goes to help a Jew to get to Israel. Dr John Hagee told me they were having a conference in Washington, DC in a few months, that I might want to go and I could really find out something about these people. I did go to the 3 day conference and was very impressed.

While I do not claim that the Lord has ever spoken to me, on the plane, coming back home it seemed as if the Lord told me that I now knew the reason He had led me to a life long study of the His Chosen People.

I quit counting at about 500, I do not know how many talks I have made about the Holocaust, Jewish History etc, at high schools, colleges, churches, civic organizations etc. This all started in 1968 when I would be invited to jr highs and high school to talk on drugs abuse, I had bought my first drug store at the age of 26 in 1967 and as a pharmacist I was very pleased to do this, however I was not a very good speaker but I did not know what God had in store for me. I had made over 400 talks when I started sending younger pharmacist that worked for me to make these talks on the dangers of the misuse of drugs. In 1993 my topic change to the Holocaust etc. You know the saying, those who forget to remember history are doomed to repeat it. It is amazing how many high school senior history classes or even freshmen or sophomore college history classes could not tell me what Auschwitz meant to them.