Arabisch..?click!EURABIA...What does it mean to be 'civilized'? On Wednesday, Naomi Ragen published this article summing up quite well what it felt like to be an Israeli and to watch mass murderer Samir al-Kuntar released in exchange for
two black boxes containing the
mutilated remains of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
Oh, you will hear the boosters of the Israeli government sigh: What can we do? We are civilized and they are not. We care about our soldiers and their families.
No, I'm afraid you do not. If you cared, then you would have a death penalty for people like Kuntar, so that they too can be released in caskets. And if you cared, you would be intelligent enough, seeing our soldiers brought back to us dead, to have put a bullet through the despicable
baby-killer Kuntar and then turned him over to his friends.
Civilized is a euphemism for weak and helpless. Civilized is not a moral value, because we all know what Western civilization is capable of. Concentration camps. Civilian round-ups, the gassing of children. All this under the banner of laws and policemen and governments. On the other hand, the moral thing to do to a tried and convicted murderer like Kuntar is to spill his blood, because he has spilled the blood of others. That may not fit in with current civilized niceties, but let no one say it is immoral.
When it comes to immoral, to release Kuntar to a hero's welcome and the opportunity to murder others is on the top of the scale.
My government, the Israeli government, arranged this. They let it happen. They oversaw it and implemented it.
I am deeply ashamed to be an Israeli today. And I'm not very proud of being a Jew either, if this is how a Jewish country behaves. To lead the world in ever more despicable acts of appeasement is nothing to be proud of. The torch we always carried, the "light unto the nations" has been blown out by
the hot-air of our politicians.
If we cared about our soldiers, we would not be showing our enemies that kidnapping and terrorism pay. We would not be setting the stage for the next murderous terrorist raid and hostage standoff. We would be passing laws with a mandatory death penalty for convicted terrorists with blood on their hands, as well as their accomplices. We would be making these laws retroactive. Then, we would be cutting off all water and electricity to Gaza until Gilad Shalit is released. If that didn't work, we'd begin executions within one week, increasing the number convicted terrorists facing firing squads with each passing day until Gilad is returned to us safe and sound. And if that didn't work, we would begin daily bombings of Gaza, with the same number and frequency of attacks that our own city Sderot has suffered over the past three years from the Gazans.
Not civilized? Perhaps. But moral. Extremely moral.
