Christians also victims
of Islamic terror

Editor's note: William J. Murray, head of the Religious Freedom Coalition, is visiting the West Bank to take aid to Palestinian Christian families, many of whom have been the victims of discrimination, harassment or worse. He is filing reports on his travels exclusively for WorldNetDaily.

JERUSALEM – As a Christian couple here can painfully testify – it is not only Jews who are being attacked and killed by Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.

Berhanu Bogale and his wife, Kidist, lost their daughter Galila to a Palestinian-Muslim suicide bomber on June 18. The attack was on a city bus, just two stops from her home. The bus was full of mostly school-age children from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. By today's standards, a Muslim suicide bomber killing 19 people, including many children, is not a big news story. To many of today's news networks, there is a lack of interest because, after all, those who die are "just Jews."

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But most often those killed in these bombings are not "just Jews." Many of the civilians, including women and children, who die in the attacks are immigrant workers, Israeli Arabs and Christians. This bombing was no exception.

Galila Bogales

The Bogales are not Israeli Jews; they are Christians and members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Bethlehem. The morning of the bombing, Berhanu offered to drive his daughter Galila to school because he himself had to go to town. She refused, saying she wanted to ride on the bus with her friends, almost all of whom were Jewish. The 11-year-old left her parents' third-floor apartment in Gilo at about 7 a.m. with a backpack loaded with schoolbooks. Less than a half-hour later, she was dead.

Muhamed al-Ral, an Islamic law student at An-Najah University in the West Bank, made his way that morning from Nablus and somehow got into Israel with his bomb belt. He boarded the front of the bus at 7:50 at Patt Junction in Beit Safafa, an Israeli Arab neighborhood just opposite Gilo. He immediately exploded himself, killing 19, including Galila, and injuring 74 others.

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Berhanu said Galila was a smart girl. They worried about her riding the bus, but she told them not to worry because she knew a safe place to sit. She told her mom and dad that the bombers always went for the middle of the bus and that is why she sat in the front.

As Berhanu told the story, Kidist began to sob. Near the door a candle burned beneath a photo of Galila taken just a week before she was murdered. The photo, poster sized, showed her leaving the apartment with her backpack on.

Berhanu and Kidist heard the explosion because it was so close to their apartment. When they arrived at the Jerusalem coroner's office, he refused to show them Galila's body. She had been near the center of the explosion and he wanted to spare them the sight, instead assuring them that she was killed so quickly that she never felt any pain.

Galila had no animosity toward anyone. She was accepted by her Jewish friends even though she wore a small gold cross to her public school. She had seen the poverty of the Muslim Palestinians grow during the intifada and because of her Christian faith believed they should be helped. She asked her father and mother from time to time to give her old clothing to the Palestinians rather than to put the clothes in the trash.

Galila's story was not carried by ABC, CBS or NBC. For most of the media, this is a war between Jews and Palestinians. When Christians are killed in the bombings, their stories drop off the edge of the earth.

There are other Galilas, other young girls who may one day follow her fate. Their names may not be Galila, and they may not be Christians living in Israel. Perhaps the next girl with a story like hers lives in Los Angeles, Chicago or Miami.

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William J. Murray is chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the restoration of religious freedom in the United States as envisioned by the authors of the Constitution.