The Almagor Victims of Terror Association plans to launch an online database of
the terrorists with descriptions of their crimes in an effort to prevent future
prisoner swaps, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
The head of Almagor, Meir
Indor, believes by connecting the names of the terrorists to the specific terror
attacks they committed, the public will be less likely to support prisoner swaps
in the future.
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“We are taking the law into our own hands so that terror
victims can get updates on the terrorists who are responsible for specific
attacks,” said Indor.
The database, called “Justice for Terror Victims,”
will collect information that is available to the public, such as arrests and
court transcripts, and compile it in a searchable database.
The Foreign
Ministry and some private bloggers have partial lists, but this is the first
initiative to have a comprehensive center of information.
More than a
dozen volunteers working around the clock in shifts of three have already
compiled full entries for 270 terrorists released as part of the Gilad Schalit
deal.
It will be uploaded later this week onto the organization’s
website, al-magor.com.
The prisoner list released ahead of the Schalit
swap by the Prisons Service had dry descriptions for each of those released such
as “involvement in unknown terror organization” and “assisted in
murder.”
Indor believes that more specific descriptions, such as “the
driver who brought the suicide bomber to Sbarro,” will resonate with the public
on a deeper level and encourage more of an outcry against future swaps, which
was fairly muted in the Schalit deal.
“Personalization works,” said
Indor, noting that one reason the Schalit campaign was so successful was that it
created an image of Schalit the average Israeli could relate to as a son and a
soldier.
He added that the database, which will start with the terrorists
released as part of the Schalit swap, will be updated if there are future swaps
or if a terrorist is rearrested for committing similar crimes.
Indor said
there was an incident during the Schalit affair when the media, using
unauthorized lists from Arab media, incorrectly reported the planned release of
some terrorists, creating unneeded turmoil for the families of the victims. A
centralized database could minimize such occurrences in the future.
“The
worst is to sit and not know. Terror victims want to know if their murderer got
out or not,” said Indor.
He acknowledged that funds were a serious
obstacle for keeping an updated database, or for translating the database into
English.
Part of Almagor’s strategy is to inspire public pressure both on
the government not to release terrorists, as well as other governments to issue
international arrest warrants through Interpol for released
terrorists.
Almagor was founded in 1986 as a response to the “Jibril
Deal,” when 1,150 terrorists were released in exchange for three soldiers
kidnapped during the First Lebanon War.
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