ABBAS DECLARES THREE DAYS OF MOURNING FOR CONVICTED MURDERER

Israel is accused of a ‘barbaric act’ because a Palestinian minister, who had been convicted of murdering two Israeli children, died of a heart attack while participating in a riot and clash with Israeli soldiers

In 1984, Ziad Abu Ein was freed from an Israeli prison as part of the Oslo Accords. He had been serving time for planting a bomb that killed two Israeli children in 1979. He returned to the Palestinian territories where he was hailed as a hero. He was appointed Minister Against the Separation Wall and Settlements by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Abu Ein died of a heart attack last week after clashing with Israeli soldiers as he participated in a Palestinian riot. Abbas declared three days of mourning for the convicted child murderer.

MURDERED STUDENT’S FATHER: PALESTINIAN MINISTER NO ‘MARTYR’
By Joel Himelfarb

Newsmax
December 19, 2014

Many Palestinians have sought to portray Ziad Abu Ein – a Palestinian Authority (PA) minister who suffered a fatal heart attack last week after joining a crowd of Palestinian rioters who were marching towards a group of Israeli soldiers and refusing orders to stop – as a "martyr" victimized by Israel.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Abu Ein (who apparently died after inhaling tear gas) was killed in a "barbaric act, adding that "we can't remain silent." Abbas declared a three-day mourning period.

But Ein was no innocent victim, argues New Jersey resident Stephen M. Flatow, writing in the New York Jewish Week. While the PA denounces Israel for assassinating one of its deputy ministers and the international community portrays the incident as a diplomatic breach, "those of us who have felt the pain of Palestinian terrorism remember who Ziad Abu Ein really was, and will shed no tears over his passing," Flatow wrote.

Flatow, whose daughter Alisa was killed an April 1995 terrorist attack in Gaza, emphasizes that press accounts generally ignore or gloss over Ein's record as a terrorist.

On May 14, 1979, Ein was involved in placing a bomb at a marketplace in Tiberias in northern Israel, which killed two children and wounded 36 – some of them horribly maimed.

"I was hit in the chest and knocked down," recalled Chaim Mark, who had emigrated to Israel from Connecticut along with his wife Chaya. The couple were leaving a restaurant in the central marketplace of Tiberias when the bomb exploded.

"When I got up, I saw my wife with a leg and arm nearly blown off," Chaim recounted. Chaya Mark spent a year and a half in the hospital and underwent numerous surgeries. She was left severely handicapped.

Ziad Abu Ein – allegedly the terrorist who planted the bomb – fled to Chicago. After he was arrested in the United States, he simultaneously denied his guilt and defended the bombing.

But this did not stop "anti-Israel activists" like James Zogby from rallying to Ein's defense, saying he was being wrongly accused of "political crimes" and that he was being mistreated by U.S. prosecutors because he was an Arab, Flatow writes.

The U.S. Supreme Court did not agree, and Ein was extradited to Israel in December 1981 and tried and convicted of murder.

But he didn't stay behind bars for long. In 1984, Ein was one of a large groups of terrorists freed in a prisoner exchange deal.

After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords in September 1993, "the Palestinian leadership began rewarding veteran killers," Flatow writes, and Ein later rose to become deputy minister of prisoner affairs.

That means "part of his job involved paying salaries to Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel, and the families of terrorists who were killed while murdering Israelis," Flatow adds.