Because December 7, 1941, was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR quite aptly called it a day that would live in infamy. For Israel, July 15, 2008, is just such a date. That was the day that Ehud Olmert’s government swapped child murderer Samir Kuntar and four of his Lebanese cohorts to Hezbollah for the corpses of Israeli army reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Israel agreed to do this even though the Arabs reneged on their promise to disclose the present whereabouts of Israeli airman Ron Arad.
While one can sympathize with the families of Goldwasser and Regev, who desired closure and only wanted to give the young men a proper burial, one can’t help wondering what’s gone wrong with Israel’s leadership. Have they decided for some odd reason to take their lead from people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama?
Once you begin trading live terrorists for dead soldiers, what have you done but encouraged your sworn enemies to abduct and murder your soldiers as well as your civilians? How do you trade for the corpses of Goldwasser and Regev, but not for the dead bodies of the next two Israelis or the next dozen or the next hundred? Once you open the door to such depraved swapping, how do you ever close it? How do you tell the next set of Jewish parents that the remains of these two were worth infinitely more than the corpses of their own sons and daughters?
Frankly, I have no idea how Israel has so far resisted the urge to unleash nuclear bombs on the likes of Syria, Iran and the Palestinians. But be that as it may, I do have a couple of suggestions I wish they’d take to heart. One, I wish they’d finally institute capital punishment. Until the day they begin to execute terrorists, they will leave themselves open to more of this same sort of emotional blackmail.
Until they can bring themselves to exterminating the likes of Samir Kuntar, who went home to a hero’s reception, the Israelis will continue to find themselves swapping human garbage for human cadavers. Furthermore, the next time Kuntar murders a Jewish child, and assuredly this unrepentant savage will, the child’s blood will not only be on his hands, but on the hands of Prime Minister Olmert, President Shimon Peres and the rest of the gutless politicians currently running things in Israel.
My second suggestion is that Israel announce that from this moment on, the remains of any suicide bomber, in fact of any Muslim terrorist captured and executed in Israel, will be buried carefully wrapped in pigskins. Not only should that policy act as a deterrent, but what could be a more appropriate fate for swine?