Richard Silverstein, the issue that drives my wife in what she has published about Hot House, and that drives both of us in our various activities to memorialize our daughter's life, is straightforward.

As unfashionable as the word "evil" is in many quarters, it's about deciding whether people who do terror are evil or not. Everyone needs to decide where he or she stands on this. We have learned how confused many people are about this.

Films that focus, as Hot House does, on the murderers who practice terror provide them with an invaluable, indispensable and very potent platform for their hatred and zealotry. There are many more such films (and articles and interviews) than there are films (and articles and interviews) about their victims. The dialogue they generate contributes to the confusion I mentioned.

Today is the sixth anniversary of the massacre at Sbarro. Our daughter would now be 21 if she had survived, about the age of the woman in the film, the murderer, when she planned the massacre and executed it. There have been grotesque Palestinian Arab commemorations about what happened that day, right down to splattered ketchup on the walls and mock body parts, glorifying the murder and the murderers, and explicitly encouraging its repetition.

We, by contrast, choose to honor our daughter's life by creating a fund in her name that provides Jews, Christians, Moslems and Druze - in other words, anyone living in Israel however you define the territory, and who has a child with serious special-needs, and we have already given this support to thousands of them in the past 4 years - with practical help. The details are on the Malki Foundation website (www.kerenmalki.org).

What reaction does this evoke among the confused? Some of them hate it. It enrages them. I can exemplify this by quoting verbatim an anonymous email we received tonight, typical of the genre: "a good jew is a dead jew f**k your child" with letters in place of asterisks.

You didn't send this sort of email to us, and you certainly are as repelled by the know-nothing hatred it embodies as we are by it, and by the dozens of similar anonymous messages we, as parents of a murdered child, get each week.

But when you (Richard Silverstein) ask: "Why no recognition that there are victims on both sides each equally worthy of sympathy?", you are contributing to confusion far more than to clarity or to a constructive outcome. Getting to a solution isn't about sympathy. It's about understanding that terror - engaged in enthusiastically and with the full support of one side's religious and political establishment, and only one side's - changes everything.

For those for whom it *doesn't* change everything -- know that nothing will ever change.

It *will* change, but only after the Palestinian Arabs stop teaching terror to their children and stop encountering deep wells of understanding and curiosity from people in less troubled regions who ought to know much better.

Arnold Roth
Jerusalem