Beer Baron

This Day (May 8) in 2001, the walls of a remote cave in the Judean Desert were covered with the blood of two Jewish boys — deliberately smeared there by their Palestinian killers in a final act of barbaric triumph. Koby Mandell (13) and Yosef Ishran (14) had gone hiking near their homes when they were ambushed. The terrorists bound their hands, stabbed them repeatedly, and beat them to death with rocks. The mutilation was so horrific that forensic teams needed dental records to identify the bodies. This was no random act of violence. This was the sadistic murder of two innocent Jewish children during the early days of the Second Intifada — the terror campaign Yasser Arafat deliberately launched after rejecting Ehud Barak’s generous peace offer at Camp David (a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital). Just months earlier, Arafat had chosen the path of blood instead of peace. Koby and Yosef paid the price with unimaginable cruelty. Seasoned Israeli investigators were shaken to their core. These weren’t soldiers. They were children, simply hiking near their village in their ancestral homeland. Their mothers waited in agony as the search dragged on. When the bodies were found, the scene was almost unspeakable. Nothing about this is or has ever been “resistance.” Aiming to destroy the world's only Jewish state and wipe out all Jewish men, women and children has been the goal. Never forget Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran.