The Talmud says that after a person dies, G-d judges a person based on these questions:
Did you deal honestly in financial matters? Did you fix times for Torah study? Did you engage in procreation? Did you hope for Divine salvation? Did you pursue wisdom? Did you deduce one thing from another?
Then the Talmud says: Put all this aside. If one feared the L-rd, all is good; if not, not. It all comes down to fear of the L-rd.
I wonder what questions were asked of Ahmed Jibril, who died July 7. I wonder, well, actually I don’t wonder, how he well he did on the scale of fear of the L-rd.
Rather than cite questions that he might have been asked, let us cite facts that we definitely know. Among them:
Ahmed Jibril led an organization, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command.
In February, 1970, PFLP — General Command placed a bomb on Swissair flight 330 from Zurich to Hong Kong, with a stopover in Tel Aviv.
The crew discovered the bomb and attempted an emergency landing. It was too late. The bomb exploded midflight, the plane crashed and all 47 people aboard were killed.
Also in 1970, Jibril was behind the Avivim school bus massacre in Israel. Jibril’s victims included four adults on board the bus. The other victims:
• Yehuda Ohayon, 10
• Yaffa Batito, 8
• Mimon Biton, 7
• Haviva Biton, 7
• Hanna Biton, 8
• Shimon Biton, 9
• Shulamit Biton, 9
• Aliza Peretz, 14
Leah Revivo, age 9, who survived the attack, died at age 52 from an infection caused by shrapnel lodged in her brain during the attack.
In 1974, Jibril was behind the Kiryat Shemoneh, Israel massacre. This time, too, PFLP terrorists chose a school as their target, the Janusz Korczak middle school. Korczak was the heroic headmaster of an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto who had ample opportunity to escape death but would not abandon his children, who, like he, were dispatached to Treblinka. Jibril’s second group of children, this time in a school named after a hero of the Holocaust, was to be cut down, too.
Except it was Passover and the school was unoccupied. No matter. Jibril’s terrorists went elsewhere and killed 18 people, almost half of them children.
This was Jibril’s idea of “armed resistance”: kill children. But if it doesn’t work out, any Israeli will do. This was Jibril’s “liberation of Palestine.”
In 1987, entering Israel via gliders, one of Jibril’s men infiltrated an IDF camp and killed six Israeli soldiers and wounded eight.
Jibril wasn’t heard from for a long time, but when he and his Popular Front resurfaced, of all sides to choose, he chose the side of the mass murderer, Bashar al-Assad, leader of Syria.
In March, 2011, a civil war broke out in Syria. Jibril’s organization fought on behalf of the Assad’s government. It has now killed tens or hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.
Jibril, born in Mandatory Palestine, was raised in Syria. He chose the side of the butchers.
Terrorism does not end with the funerals, the truncated lives and broken families. As if the decapitation of Syria were not enough, recall that the consequent, mass flight of one million refugees from Syria into Europe has burdened Jordan and changed Europe, not to mention bequeathed to us all the images of “boat people” drowning in the Mediterranean, seeking to escape Assad.
Recall also that in the aftermath of the 1970 bombing of Swissair, mail delivery changed. It was discovered that Jibril’s people had planted an altimeter-triggered bomb in a postal package. This put a stop to airmail from Europe for some time.
It may have been the first time that a whole swath of civilian life became disrupted due to the actions of a terrorist. The role model for the draconian security measures imposed by 9/11 that we now all live with was Jibril and his “creative” bombing of Swissair.
Jibril’s son, whom he named Jihad Ahmed Jibril, was slated to take over the PFLP-General Command, but he was killed by a car bomb in Lebanon in 2002. The “family business,” violence, could boomerang.
I don’t know precisely what questions are asked of someone like Ahmed Jibril, or whether any questions at all are asked of someone like him.
Whatever the process of judgment upstairs for a mass murderer, it is clear downstairs that before he died on July 7, 2021, he could look back at his life and see only blood — and the deformation of humanity he had become.
We are all created in G-d’s image, but from creation onward, it is up to us what we do with G-d’s gifts. It’s clear what Jibril did with his.
