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Revenge
Jul 15, 2003 8:30:21 GMT -5
Post by El Sid on Jul 15, 2003 8:30:21 GMT -5
Revenge - A Love Story An interview with the author, Laura Blumenfeld C&P'd by: ME! Date : 15 June 2003 Producer : Diana Lucas Presenter : Ruda Landman Genre : General Interest Part 1 Laura: 'I grew up in America with all those Hollywood movies about love overcoming hate and somehow I believed it. Maybe I wasn't supposed to, but I did. I believed in my parents' bedtime stories.' Laura Blumenfeld's storybook childhood in the suburbs of New York hardly prepared her for an event that threatened to destroy her family. But then perhaps it was her very belief in these fairy tales that makes her story one of hope ... We travelled to New York to meet Laura and hear the remarkable journey she has undertaken in the last 15 years. In 1986 Rabbi David Blumenfeld was a member of the New York Holocaust Memorial Commission. As part of his research for that project he led a delegation that was at Jerusalem. It was a trip that would change his life; and not only his, but also that of his only daughter, Laura. Laura: 'It was a Friday evening ... He was walking back from services at the Western wall and he was walking through the souvenir market place. And a gunman stepped out of an alley, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.' David: 'I began to bleed, I was bleeding, blood was coming down my forehead and I turned for assistance. The people in front of me they froze. The people at the back of me, they froze. I don't blame them frankly; they were really frightened. David Blumenfeld had been shot in the head by a member of a rebel faction of the PLO - the Abu Musa gang. They were targeting foreign tourists in Jerusalem. David was their first victim but he survived and, from the hospital, called his daughter. Laura: "And he said, 'Honey, you're going to hear something on the news and I just want you to know that no matter what you hear that I'm okay'. Because the first reports out of Israel were that an American tourist had been shot in the head and killed. And he wanted to make sure that I got the news from him and he was alive. This bullet, it didn't just graze my father's head, it kind of blew a hole through my whole worldview. And it destroyed something that ... I guess it took away a piece of my innocence. I was angry, but - more than angry - I was frightened. Laura was a student at Harvard College, New York. The date of her father's shooting: 7 March I986, would remain locked in her memory. Laura: 'If you are the man who marked his head...' This is the poem she wrote at the time, Laura: 'If you are the Arab, aimed in the near dark, grazing his temple, missing his life, this hand will find you, I am his daughter.' These words haunted Laura for a decade ... through a masters degree in International Affairs, through her parents' divorce, her job as a reporter at The Washington Post, and even as she married her storybook husband Baruch Weiss. Laura: 'This hand will find you, I am his daughter.' It was Baruch who suggested an extended honeymoon year in Israel. A year Laura saw as an opportunity for reckoning. Ruda Landman: 'You went to Jerusalem. What was the picture in your mind, what were you planning to do?' Laura: 'I had two fantasies - they really were just complete fantasies. I didn't think that I'd do either of them. But the one idea was that I would find this gunman, wherever he was, and knock him around; shake him up physically. I was going to find this terrorist and who Blumenfelds are, which again is a silly thing. We're a sort of weak, nerdy, bookish family. But still I was going to shake him up physically. The other dream, the other fantasy, which was even more naïve, was that I was going to reach inside of him and shake him up from the inside.' Ruda: 'What happened when you got there?' Laura: 'Well, I was very ashamed of what I was doing and I kept it a secret because it is very hard for any of us to admit that we have feelings of revenge, let alone that we are going to try to pursue them. I told my...' Ruda: 'Why?' Laura: 'Revenge is a very uncomfortable feeling. It forces the person to admit they have been crushed in some way and that they need to be rebuilt. And our society looks down on our revenge. I mean we are taught when you have been hurt there are two choices; turn the other cheek or an eye for an eye. And those are our only two choices. And I think both of them are unsatisfying in some kind of way. Turn the other cheek sounds good, but it in some ways it's not realistic in the world, because you have to strike back sometimes. An eye for an eye feels good for the moment until the person turns around and pops out your eye. So telling people that you are seeking or pursuing revenge is not a very popular thing. Most people get this little pinch between their brows and they would fold their arms. I kept it a secret from my colleagues; I told my colleagues at my newspaper I was researching a book on revenge. I didn't tell them I had written myself into the research. I didn't tell my friends, I didn't tell my mother ... of course she would try to stop me. But my husband knew. So we were off on a romantic honeymoon year. Although it was anything but romantic because my husband had just married a woman who was obsessed with revenge.' Baruch: 'Laura was struggling very much with the idea of what to do and what was the right thing to do. And she wanted to get revenge there was no question about that. But she also wanted to find the right way to do it.' Baruch Weiss might have been a Federal Prosecutor for the New York State, but he was no match for his wife's obsession. Ruda: 'Knowing what you know now, would you have tried to persuade her not to do it?' Baruch: 'Trying to prevent Laura from doing what she wants to do is not an easy thing to do. Laura can be very determined when she wants to do something." continued ............
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Revenge
Jul 15, 2003 8:31:53 GMT -5
Post by El Sid on Jul 15, 2003 8:31:53 GMT -5
Part 2
The subject of revenge became Laura's quest during that year. It took her to Iran, where she discussed blood money with the Grand Iotola. To Albania - the revenge capital of the world, where revenge is written into their law books. To a jilted Hashish smuggler in Egypt ... and all the time her own revenge was never far from mind.
Eventually she tracked down the name Omar Khatib. The Khatib family was well known for the support of the PLO. She suspected Omar, the youngest son, was her gunman. The family lived somewhere on the West Bank in Kalandia.
Laura: 'I basically went out on my own. I got on a bus, a Palestinian bus, in Jerusalem and got off in the West Bank, half way between Jerusalem and Ramala and basically went door to door with this list of names. There were no phone numbers, no addresses; there were no street names. Until I stumbled into the right home."
Ruda: 'Laura, what did you feel like, doing that? There was great tension in the area. You were there, a woman on her own.'
Laura: 'Well, you use the word 'tension', I can feel my forehead starting to crumple up in a way I remember it feeling the day I actually found the home of the shooter, because, you know, I did try to hide my feelings but then at a certain point my body just took over and I was terrified every time I went out to do this."
Ruda: 'And so, you knocked on the door, someone opened.'
Laura: 'Yes, it was a hot July afternoon and I remember standing in the blazing white sun and knocking on the door and a woman opened up, an older woman, and she invited me in and she smiled and she offered me some cold sweet orange soda. I sat down on the couch and cousins and nephews and grandchildren and brothers and sisters all sat around me. There were about fourteen or fifteen members of the family.'
She said only that her name was Laura that she was a journalist researching revenge in the Middle East and asked about their youngest son Omar. They told her he had been in jail for the past I2 years.
Laura: 'The mother said he shot a man in the head. And I said, 'Who?'. And there was a boy who was about twelve years old sitting next to me on the couch and he shrugged and he kind of looked at me with this look of commiseration and he said, 'Some Jew'. And there was a little bit of some kind of smiling and tittering around the room. And at one point the mother reached out and kind of slapped me on the knee like, 'Isn't this funny?' And then they started talking about it some more and then I realized, as they were describing, that they were describing my father. And it wasn't so much the shooting ... my father lived thank goodness. It was the dehumanisation; it was the way they talked about it with this kind of lighthearted way. I think that terrorism is about killing people, but more importantly terrorism is about dehumanising now. On all sides, whoever we are talking about, wherever we are talking about in the world. How is it so easy to kill somebody? It is because you stop thinking of them as a human being."
Through the following months Laura visited the Khatib family again and again until eventually Omar's brother, Imad, agreed to smuggle in a letter from Laura, a letter she had to think long and hard about and not reveal her identity.
Laura: 'I really wanted to know 'Why did you shoot my father, you bastard?' And so, again, my husband advised me... when he is talking to witnesses - often hostile witnesses - what he tries to do is, just relax them. That is the most important thing. So my letters were very pandering and very friendly, chatty, almost silly. But the idea was to get him to try to relax and get him to start talking."
Omar wrote back. His first letter was an eight page political manifesto. He wrote about being a 'martyr to the cause', calling his victim nothing more than a 'chosen military target'.
Laura: 'I was disappointed and kind of disgusted that there was not more of a human being there. I mean, my hope was to humanise my father in his eyes. But first I had to find a human being to connect with."
continued ............
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Revenge
Jul 15, 2003 8:33:29 GMT -5
Post by El Sid on Jul 15, 2003 8:33:29 GMT -5
Part 3
But Laura persevered and gradually the tone of his letters softened.
Laura: 'Over time, though, he did become more and more of a human being. He told me about his life. When he was a little boy, when he was four years old, he crawled under his mother's bed during the 1967 war and he could hear the Israeli soldiers outside and was frightened and his cousins crawled under the bed with him. And suddenly he was a person. And it became more complicated.'
Laura constantly found herself veering between two poles. On the one hand she was the objective reporter looking for facts and understanding, as she did in the other stories she was covering for the Washington Post in Israel. On the other hand, she was the daughter craving revenge.
Laura: 'I was using journalism as a kind of cloak to get to him. Journalism kept undoing me because I was forced to look at his life and understand his life.'
And Laura tried to make Omar understand his victim's life.
Laura: 'Over the course of these letters I told him: 'Guess what? I interviewed David Blumenfeld, the man you shot. He's not a military target, in fact he's not a member of the military, he's not even Israeli. He's an American and he's not against Palestinians. He's not interested in denying your rights. He has two children, a son and a daughter and he taught them the same thing.'"
Facilitating Laura's growing friendship with Omar was dangerous for the Khatib family. He was not allowed letters or telephone calls, only monthly visits from the family. And that's how the letters were smuggled in and out of jail.
Laura: 'He would fold this tissue paper up into thousands of little pieces and tie it up with ... I think he used ... it looked like dental floss. Seal it in plastic with a lighter and then under his tongue and then spit it through the chicken wire when a guard wasn't looking. So they took a lot of risks too, you know, for us to be able to communicate.'
But while Laura learnt more about Omar, she was revealing nothing about herself.
Ruda: 'What did this do to you personally? ... living through a year that was so tense and fraught?'
Laura: 'I was always worried about being unmasked and I also got confused about who I really was. At one point I was sitting with the family and they were talking about their daughter who was going to be having the first grandchild, she was pregnant. And they said if we have a boy, let's name him after grandpa Immad and if it's a girl we will name the baby Laura. Again, talk about confusion! I remember my face turned red and it was hot and then I said, 'You know, I may end up leaving the country before I get the chance to meet Omar'. And Omar's brother said: 'Laura, whenever you come back you will always come back to see us, because Laura is no longer just another Laura. Laura is one of us; Laura is part of our family. And his wife took the ring off of her finger and she reached out and she held it out for me and I looked at it and I understood what it meant."
Ruda: 'What did it mean?'
Laura: 'Well, it was almost like some kind of ceremony. They wanted me to put it on my finger and I did and my hand was shaking. I remember because I was afraid they would see it shaking. Because here I was, trying to stand up for my family, becoming part of like my enemy's family.'
Laura and Baruch 's year in Israel was up, and they returned to New York. But her correspondence continued with Omar. In July I998 Omar was up for a parole hearing. She needed to be there to finally face her father's shooter. This time her mother came along.
Laura: 'Omar had written to me. In a letter he had said that he would never hurt anyone again if he was ever released. So, sitting on that bench outside the courtroom, I looked at my mother and I said to her, 'Is it true? I want to believe it is true because I want the world to be that way. But am I crazy? Am I naïve? You know I want to believe that Omar can be good.' And she looked at me and I remember her face was sad, but it was the most hopeful words I have ever heard her say and she said to me, 'Honey, that is all we have in life.''
Norma (Laura's mother): 'I have never seen such depth of emotion in terms of what she was doing and what it meant to her. And I guess, as a mother, my feelings were very much, you know ... 'My child is involved in something here that is so significant to her.''
Laura: 'And then I just decided, okay, I'm going to go that way. I'm going to try to do something; I'm going to try to transform my enemy rather than destroy him. And, I think, I talked about how we have this stark choice that we are taught in life. Turn the other cheek or an eye for an eye. I'm going to try a third way called transformation. And transformation basically says revenge doesn't have to be about destroying your enemy, it can mean transforming him and, if that's not possible, transform yourself.'
Without a glance at Omar, Laura approached the bench and asked to speak. She was so insistent the judges eventually allowed her. They billed her as anonymous.
continued ............
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Revenge
Jul 15, 2003 8:38:09 GMT -5
Post by El Sid on Jul 15, 2003 8:38:09 GMT -5
Part 4
Laura: 'The judges said to me, 'You can speak in English, it's okay.' They understood that I was American. I said, 'No, I want to speak in Hebrew.' Right away Omar understood that there was something very wrong if Laura wanted to speak in Hebrew, that Laura wasn't the Christian journalist that he had thought she was all along. And he jumped out of his seat and said, 'What is happening, what is happening?' And they told him to sit down and be quiet. I said, 'I don't know all the facts of this case, but I have come to know the family of this man and through them I have come to know Omar himself. And I believe that he is sorry for what he has done and that he is not going to repeat any more acts of violence'. I felt like this was the defining moment of my life. I was so nervous, my back muscles were clenched, I was kind of stooped forward because I did not turn around because I did not want to see any of the faces of Omar or his family. But I kept going. I said, 'I also know the victim David Blumenfeld and he feels like if he's truly sick - because he was suffering from chronic asthma - if he is truly sorry and no longer a danger to society, twelve years is enough… it is time for him to go home.'
Now at that point the judges just told me to be quiet and to sit down. They said, 'You do not have a right to speak on behalf of the victim. 'Sit down that is enough young lady. Be quiet, sit down.' And I yelled back, 'I do have a right to speak, I do have a right to speak.' And finally the judge said, 'Why?' And finally I said, ' I am his daughter.'
Norma: 'I could hear her choking almost on the emotion and I was just saying, 'Don't cry baby. Go ahead, say what you want to say and don't cry'.
Laura; 'And the judge said to me, 'How can you do such a crazy and dangerous thing? When did he find out who you were?' And at that point Omar jumped up and he said in Hebrew, 'Right now, I am finding out. Right now, I am finding out, right now!' He was pointing at the ceiling. And I remember him clattering in his chains and he was shocked. And the judge said, 'Why did you do this?' And I felt like finally I could talk about why I did what I did. And I said to him, 'I wanted them simply to know me as Laura; not as a victim, not as a Jew, and I wanted them to understand that this violence that is going on, we are not just disembodied Arabs and disembodied Jews. These are real people. These are people with families and you cant' just kill us.' And I turned around finally and I faced Omar and I said to him - this was the first time that I was ready to look him in the eye - and I said, 'I want you to understand this is a commitment now and a promise between our two families - between the Blumenfeld family and the Khatib family - on your honour, that you will never hurt anybody again.''
Omar was not granted parole, but Laura's revenge had it's own surprising consequences.
Laura: "He wrote my father a letter and he said, 'Laura was the mirror that made me see your face as a person deserving to be admired and respected. And I am sorry I missed her message from the beginning.'"
Four years later Laura took her father back to Israel, to meet the Khatib Family. For all of them it was an emotional visit, with Omar's absence very present.
Laura: 'It's just hard to believe that something like this can be true. Thank you, all of you really. Thank you, Daddy, for coming too.'
Although the Israeli government wouldn't allow David and Laura to visit Omar in prison, he was allowed to watch their visit on camera.
Omar: 'He's inside my home..."
Omar looks at the man he's only seen once before, sixteen years ago, over the barrel of gun and notes that his target is getting old.
Omar: 'He's getting so old...'
And David recorded a message for Omar, a message of inspiration -
David: ' Hello Omar ...
Omar: 'I am looking at him as if he were my father talking to me. I concentrated on all of his words as if they were getting directly to my heart. I admire him so much.'
Ruda: 'It sounds too good to be true.'
Norma: 'Doesn't it? I agree. It does sound too good to be true, but I think that there is some things in life that are too good to be true. But they are true. I agree with you.'
In August last year Omar was released. In an interview with an Israeli newspaper he spoke about his new commitment to peace.
Laura: 'And on the cover there is Omar, standing in the spot where he shot my father, under the headline, 'Sorry I shot you Mr. Blumenfeld.''
David: 'He's a brave soul because in the end, in the Israeli newspaper with his picture on the front page, he speaks about the future possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. I really, actually I pray for him. I hope he's going to be safe. I hope he is not going to be killed.'
A few months ago, Laura phoned Omar. It all looked so unreal from her home here in the leafy suburb of Washington. 'Could this tale be true? ... a bed-time story in a darkened world?', as she writes in a postscript in her book. He reassured her it was real enough, and their interaction has changed him fundamentally.
Laura: 'I asked him, 'But is this true? Is this real?' Even I myself have wondered again, because of all the kind of violence and hatred in the world. And he said, 'Laura, of course it's true. We are living witnesses that this is true and wherever I go I tell people of our story ... the story of Laura and Omar. Of course it is real.'
You could call it their own fairy tale, a story that has inspired thousands. Her book "Revenge" has been published all over the world, it's message Laura can vouch for.
Laura: ' The only antidote to revenge is acknowledgement. So often when people say that they want revenge, they don't really want to hurt the other person. What they want is for the other side to acknowledge what they did was wrong, and for the other side to acknowledge the legitimacy of your own pain. And I know that that has been successful to a certain degree in South Africa, and if the Israelis and the Palestinians would acknowledge each others' legitimacy, that would take them way down the road to peace.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
Inspiring stuff this, IMHO
Sid
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Revenge
Jul 15, 2003 9:33:40 GMT -5
Post by JWK on Jul 15, 2003 9:33:40 GMT -5
inspiring indeed! I want to read the book now
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Revenge
Jul 15, 2003 10:57:07 GMT -5
Post by daSilva on Jul 15, 2003 10:57:07 GMT -5
All is not bad in the world. I'm glad that she humanized Omar and in the process forgave him. Thx.
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