Remembering Abigail, a victim of hate

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Two American young women died violent deaths in Israel in recent weeks. Much has been written about Rachel Corrie, the 23 year old radical, killed accidently when she chose to throw herself in front of a bulldozer as she tried to protect tunnels used by Palestinian terrorists. For some reason, the media hasn't given as much attention to the other victim, a teenage girl riding a bus. Let me tell you about her.

Wednesday, March 5, 2003, Abigail Litle, a 14-year-old American living in Haifa, a Christian attending a predominantly Jewish school, was going about her routine. She was taking the bus from her high school to a tutoring appointment for help with her dyslexia. Riding with her was a schoolmate, Juval Mendelevich. Juval was on his cell phone, telling his dad how his day had been. It was their last conversation.

Just one week earlier Abigail and Juval had gone on their first field trip with their school's "Children Teaching Children" program, designed to bring Arab and Jewish teenagers together, in hopes of tearing down the wall of prejudice between the two communities. At an Arab-Israeli school, Abigail befriended an Arab girl. They were to meet again the following Monday.

But a hate-filled murderer got on the bus that Juval and Abigail were riding. Right after Juval's dad heard his son say, "I love you," Mahmoud Hamdan Kawasme detonated an explosive package filled with nails, killing 16 innocents and maiming many more. Mahmoud left behind a note praising the 9/11 attacks. Later that week, Mahmoud's mother threw a party celebrating his "martyrdom" and told the press she was proud of her son.

Abigail's parents are friends of mine from college. Phil and Heidi Litle were three and two years ahead of me at MIT, respectively. Phil and Heidi are possessed of a deep and abiding Christian faith, and they influenced a generation of Christians at MIT to pursue a closer walk with Jesus. They first came to Israel when Abigail was a baby and her older brother Josiah was a toddler, so that Phil could pursue a graduate degree at Technion, Israel's most prestigious engineering school. They fell in love with Israel and its people, and so they stayed and had three more children there. Phil took a position as an administrator with the Baptist denomination, serving the small evangelical Christian community in the country. The Litles worship as part of a congregation led by an Israeli Arab, side by side with Jewish, Arab, and Gentile followers of Jesus.

Abigail had all the hopes and dreams of a typical American 14 year old. She wasn't some agent of "the Zionist entity" seeking to "oppress" the Palestinians. She was a bridge across ethnic and religious divides. She saw people as individuals, not as racial stereotypes. And two weeks ago, she was murdered, she and Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, by a Palestinian who had been indoctrinated by official Palestinian media and by official Palestinian schools to believe that killing Jews is honorable and blessed by God. Abigail's life was gone in an instant.

In the two weeks since this happened, I haven't said much to folks here in Tulsa about it. Friends of the Litles from MIT have gathered online to pray for them to be comforted in their grief. I've started to write something several times, but I've been reluctant to take the private mourning of friends and turn it into just another op-ed piece.

The outpouring of attention on Rachel Corrie's death has changed my mind. Rachel Corrie made a choice. She made common cause with an organization that believes that the Holocaust was just a good start. She chose to defend tunnels used by Palestinian terrorists by throwing her body in the way of a bulldozer. She paid for her foolish choice with her life. We can mourn with her parents over a life cut off in its prime, but we must recognize that Rachel Corrie was led astray by naive idealism and sacrificed her life for an unworthy cause.

Some stories about Corrie's death have sought to draw parallels with Abigail's murder. Rachel Corrie has more in common with Mahmoud Hamdan Kawasme than she does with Abigail Litle. There can be no moral equivalence between those who die committing or defending terrorism and those who are killed by terrorists as they innocently go about their everyday lives.

Abigail Litle's story deserves more attention than it has received here in the US. It would be wrong to shrug our shoulders and regard Abigail's death as nothing more than a tragic accident. The Haifa bombing was not an isolated incident. It is part of a coordinated campaign, prosecuted by terrorist groups with close ties to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Between the previous homicide bombing in January and the March 5 bombing there were nearly 100 attempted bombings thwarted by Israeli security forces. Abigail's death is the result of a policy of appeasement forced on the Israeli government by American pressure.

Please join me in a brief "what-if" scenario: Following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the US government, under pressure from the United Nations and our European allies, set up an autonomous white-supremacist homeland in the Ozark foothills of eastern Oklahoma. Instead of facing justice, Timothy McVeigh and his associates were allowed to move into the homeland, which has its own armed police force, governmental institutions, schools, and mass media. The schools are named in honor of white supremacist "heroes" and "martyrs" -- Adolf Hitler High School, Terry Nichols Elementary -- and are used to brainwash young minds into hating all other races. The leaders of the autonomous government proclaim peaceful coexistence to the outside world, while spurring their own people to seek the extermination of "inferior races" and providing logistical support and financing for homicide bombings in Tulsa. Attempts by the American government to destroy the terrorist infrastructure and stop the attacks are met with global condemnation and demands to cede more land to the terrorists in order to keep the "peace process moving forward." Within days of another homicide bombing in Tulsa, the British Prime Minister calls for implementing a "road map" which will lead to a fully independent white separatist state in the heart of America.

Would Americans tolerate such a situation? Or would we insist that our government aggressively defend its citizens and dismantle the terrorist threat, regardless of the pontifications of world opinion leaders?

This scenario is not hypothetical for Israel. It is time that the United States stopped forcing Israel to treat the sponsors of terrorism as legitimate partners in peace. It is time that we support the right and responsibility of Israel's government to protect its citizens, Jewish and Arab alike, from these threats.

"Any culture that deals with its problems by turning to violence and destruction of innocent people on a bus is in need of correction."
Rev. Philip Litle, Abigail's father