This Ongoing War: A Blog: 22-Dec-09: Freeing the kidnappers and the terrorists is unbearably expensive

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

22-Dec-09: Freeing the kidnappers and the terrorists is unbearably expensive

"The Palestinian motivation and justification today for continued kidnappings is the direct result of the earlier prisoner releases... Israel's release of prisoners in exchange for hostages is not seen by Palestinian society as merely the last stage of one kidnapping, but as the first stage of the next kidnapping." [From the PMW special report]

An invaluable analysis of Palestinian statements about the strategic value of hostage-taking was released yesterday by Palestinian Media Watch. It demonstrates that, for a democratic and rational society, freeing the kidnappers and the terrorists is unbearably expensive.

Israeli society is in the grip this morning (and over the past three years) of a debate over whether to free hundreds of barbarians, murderers and other assorted thugs from its jails in order to get the release of a kidnapped serviceman, Gilad Shalit. One of those slated to be released murdered our 15 year-old daughter. By and large, this debate is being conducted without taking into account those internal Palestinian Arab messages. It saddens us deeply to see how ready our thought-leaders and opinion-makers are willing to take immensely self-damaging steps in pursuit of a dream. We who have already experienced the nightmare reality hope and pray that somehow a catastrophic outcome will be averted.

PMW, led by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, does an outstanding job of identifying from Arab-language sources the internal messages of the Palestinian Arab world and its organizations. Public statements by Hamas and Fatah, massaged into smooth and comforting English, are almost invariably contradicted by the unvarnished, frequently vicious Arabic original. Sadly, only a handful of reliable sources - of which PMW is one - trouble themselves to figure out what is really going on.

Click here to go to PMW's special report on the Palestinian Arab hostage strategy and the bitter philosophical ugliness that underlies it.

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