Proof against Iran - fueling world terrorism

Posted by Bible Probe on April 29, 2006 at 16:25:35:

JPOST.COM
By DAVID HOROVITZ

Matt Eisenfeld and Sara Duker, pictured in Jerusalem not long before the bombing.
Photo: Eisenfeld Family

In the beginning, everybody told them they were wasting their time. "You're crazy," Vicki Eisenfeld recalls being warned, over and over. "Nothing will come of it."

But 10 years after Vicki and Leonard Eisenfeld's son Matt, 25, a Yale graduate and rabbinical student, was murdered along with his fiancee Sara Duker in a No. 18 bus on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road, their dogged struggle against the Hamas terror group that killed him, and against the Iranian government that trained and financed those behind this and so many bombings, doesn't look quite so foolhardy anymore. There are even those who wonder whether it might help expedite regime change in Teheran.

"We had the choice of doing nothing or doing something," says Leonard simply, sitting alongside his wife on the sofa of their home in West Hartford, Connecticut. And that was no choice at all. So they set out to create what Leonard calls "a financial deterrent to terrorism."

Adds Vicki: "We were looking for a civil way" to take on the bombers and their sponsors. "No physical aggression. Using the law the way it is meant to be used."

The words and the way she delivers them are strikingly gentle, determinedly civilized - and thus make all the more resounding a contrast to the death-cult aggression that stole away their son and his wife-to-be, and plunged the family into this unholy maelstrom.

The extraordinary progress the Eisenfelds have made has its roots in the garrulousness of Hassan Salameh, the Hamas operative who organized the February 25, 1996, attack. Not long after the blast, Salameh was shot by an Israeli soldier and arrested as he attempted to flee from a West Bank roadblock. Now serving 46 life terms in a Negev jail, Salameh explained every aspect of the bombing and its planning - from the time he joined Hamas, through his terror training, to the logistics of the attack and the recruitment of the bomber.

Crucially for the purposes of the Eisenfelds' legal action, he conclusively described Iran's direct role, detailing how he was smuggled out of Gaza into Egypt, to Sudan, and, via an Iranian army plane, onto a terror training base outside Teheran and back again with instructions for his bombing campaign. In Iran, "We trained in weapons, setting explosives, ambush," Salameh is quoted as having said under questioning. "We had 10 instructors, all Iranian."

"Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing," says Leonard Eisenfeld. But through Salameh, "we were able to demonstrate that he was trained, armed and funded by Iran."

Yitzhak Rabin had been killed less than four months before the bombing, which was one of four attacks in little over a week that took some 60 innocent lives. Says Leonard Eisenfeld: "Shimon Peres told me that the Iranians had set out to destabilize Israel in the wake of the assassination."

In what was by no means the only bitter irony of this whole tragic affair, it turned out the bomb that killed Matt, Sara and 24 other people on that bus was American-made - containing plastic explosive produced exclusively for the US Department of Defense. It was originally placed into a land mine designed to destroy Soviet T-54 tanks, given to Egypt as part of US military aid, deployed in a Sinai minefield, and stolen. "Evidently Iran doesn't only train suicide bombers," says the Eisenfelds' lawyer Steven Perles acidly. "It trains land-mine defusers. They got a mine out of the ground in Sinai and used it to kill a bus full of people in Jerusalem."

The information Salameh volunteered ultimately helped the Eisenfelds' legal team obtain a judgment in the US courts for both punitive and compensatory damages against the Iranian government. Collection, however, was a whole other story.

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