15-Dec-13: Confirmed by Kerry: More unrepentant killers to walk free in two weeks

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The terrorism-addicted Palestinian Arabs have reason to be pleased with themselves again.

There's further evidence that their very public strategy of (a) denying over and again that the 'peace' process is going anywhere; (b) shrugging off any responsibility since it's permanently Israel's fault for reneging or behaving badly; (c) extorting the release of convicted murderers from Israeli jails as a condition for turning up to the US-sponsored 'peace' talks  and (d) receiving them as heroes (literally) with ceremonial pomp and orchestrated street celebrations presided over by Mahmoud Abbas - works.

Here's the evidence via a Haaretz report:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that the third group of Palestinian prisoners will be released as planned on December 29. Speaking at a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv before departing to Vietnam, Kerry said the U.S. is "not talking at this point about any shifts (in the schedule)." Over the last week, Kerry attempted to convince the Palestinians to agree to delay the prisoner release by a month, fearing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after the planned release, would declare another wave of settlement construction which could derail the peace process. Kerry had offered the Palestinians that the fourth group of prisoners will be released sooner so more than 60 Palestinian prisoners will be released at the end of January at once. Kerry had wanted the prisoner release to take place at the same time as the presentation of the "framework agreement" which he plans to formulate with both sides in the coming weeks. The Palestinians rejected Kerry's offer and claimed it was a violation of the agreements that were reached in order to restart the peace talks. The Palestinians stressed that if the prisoner release would not take place on the date planned they would see themselves as free to pursue unilateral moves in the United Nations.

What's ahead? Yet more celebrations in the streets of the PA's fiefdom, grandly welcoming home another 26 convicted murderers, and another chapter in the ongoing macabre charade in which their cowardly acts of homicide are elevated to national celebrity, with the perpetrators rewarded with fat lump-sum payments, and salaried appointments to unwarranted and entirely inappropriate ranks, typically a deputy directorship in a government ministry or appointment as brigadier-general in the PA security forces.

Citizens of EU countries might not entirely realize the role they play, assuming they pay taxes in their own countries. The European Court of Audits reported just this past Thursday that the billions they funnel into the PA's operating budget for salaries of public servants go in large measure to people who (and there is no dispute on the facts) don't turn up to work and don't deny it. This has gone on for years. The current crop of post-audit headlines will certainly have no impact. Business as usual in the world of the Palestinian Authorities means funneling resources into their thriving terrorism industry while political leaders from elsewhere politely look away. John Kerry certainly knows this. The evidence is he could not care less.

Let no one forget: the victims of the men about to walk free were civilians. All were unarmed. Not one came close to being a strategic target. Every one of them was a murder victim, and not one of the murderers - lawfully convicted, but released via a non-judicial administrative commutation of sentence driven by entirely-political considerations - has served the term to which he was sentenced.

The US has succeeded in imposing on Israel what would be politically, morally and legally unjustifiable and indefensible in the American system.

Image Source: Reuters

At least one of those victims was a US citizen. That inconvenient fact [reported here] is simply ignored by the Washington civil servants who are charged with paying attention to such matters. The reporters and editors of the mainstream US media ought to be asked why they don't take the matter up. Plainly they have not.

As for the fresh injustice meted out to the victims of these murderers' crimes, no one on the political horizon gives any sign of caring at all. Our letters to Kerry, asking that he makes time to speak face-to-face with victims of the Palestinian Arab terror industry, are repeatedly fobbed off. (We will however be writing to him again. There are principles at stake here, even if he and his advisers are blind to them.) 

Finally a reminder that the State Department of the United States, the political office presided over by Kerry, remains officially incapable of deciding whether those killers - the convicted murderers of elderly pensioners, of Holocaust survivors, of US citizens, of women, of children, of fellow Arabs - who are going to walk free two weeks from today are (a) freedom fighters, (b) political prisoners or (c) terrorists? Hard to believe? Click here to see the background.

For what it's worth, this too is a matter about which reporters and editors of the mainstream US media have distinguished themselves by simply averting their gaze.