Wednesday, July 16, 2008

It is a sad sad day

It is a sad day today. Today Samir Kuntar is freed. In exchange for the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. I won't even start about how unfair it is, that two reservists kidnapped in Israel are being exchanged for a cold blooded murderer who does not regret what he has done. I won't even comment on the danger that this puts Israel in, we all understand that there will be future kidnappings and that there is no more incentive to keep Israeli prisoners alive, and that Gilad Shalit's life may depend on this. I'll try to avoid talking about this piece of crap government which allowed this to go through, because otherwise I will just end up cussing and cursing.

I will talk of Peres' pardon. He has granted pardon to Samir Kuntar. My first thought was "WTF???". Why pardon such a beast? Why give him the pleasure of feeling that he has been forgiven? He belongs in jail for the rest of his life, even if it's not an Israeli jail. (Zero chance of that happening). From what I read in the comments of every news site allowing talkback, just about everybody feels the same, and is outraged at Peres for pardoning Kuntar.
Then I thought, what difference does it make? Kuntar is being released, all the rest is just words. He is going to be hailed a hero on the other side no matter what we say.

That's the second thing. He is being hailed a hero in Lebanon. The world barely notices. Shouldn't Amensty care about this? Shouldn't they make sure that, murdered that he is, he is returned to Lebanon, but in a prison?? Shouldn't the UN care? On CNN, I actually heard his brother say that Kuntar "didn't mean to kill Danny Haran and his daughter, it was an accident."
No, an accident is when I spill tomato juice on my white shirt. Killing Danny Haran in front of his 4 year old daughter, so that his death would be the last thing she sees, and then smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt is no mistake. It is a heinous, cold-blooded, intentional murder.

How would the world react if the tables were turned? If we had kidnapped Samir Kuntar, who just patrolling along the border, in order to free a convincted murderer? How would they react if we gave back a dead Samir Kuntar in order to have the convicted murderer walk free in our streets??




Samir Kuntar's brother is saying "it happens all the time, they [the Israelis] say he's a terrorist, for us he's a hero", making the average CNN viewer think the usual, wrong, paradigm. "One side's terrorist is the other side's freedom fighter".

The real truth is that Samir Kuntar is a murderer, but for Hezbollah/Lebanon (is there a difference nowadays?), since he is only the killer of Israelis, he's a hero. Heck, they'll probably ask him to run for government.

It's a sad day for the world. It has sunken to new lows. Not that this wasn't predictable.

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