Sunday, October 08, 2017

08-Oct-17: Terrorists and justice for their victims

Over on the Ynet site they publish a valuable opinion piece today ["A life sentence should be for life"] by Shlomo Puterkovsky:
Op-ed: We owe the victims of terrorist attacks and their families to make sure that their killers remain in prison until the last day of their sentence. In fact, we owe this to all those affected by gruesome murders cases.
He focuses attention on the issues that are at the heart of our recent post ["03-Oct-17: Released in Shalit Deal, a pious Pal Arab murderer is going back (too late) to life in an Israeli prison"] about the murderer of Baruch Mizrahi. The victim's widow Hadas has been speaking to the media here about the desirability of Israel activating the death penalty. 

Puterkovsky, an influential columnist who contributes Hebrew-language commentary to Yedioth Aharanot, a major Israeli newspaper, says
we cannot ignore the real problem here. We cannot honestly tell ourselves that yes, the murderer has been appropriately punished, when we know that too many times murderers are freed after unreasonably short periods of incarceration. We cannot stand by as widows and orphans yell for justice, and turn away from their pain.
His comments are worth reading and he's right that the problem ought not to be ignored as it has been. But he doesn't mention what we think is the most important aspect of all. We posted the following comment under his article today:
Any analysis of this highly consequential issue has to start with recognizing that Israeli politicians simply don't acknowledge the moral and common sense obligation of consulting with the families of the terrorists' victims. 
In the six years leading up to the freeing of the mastermind of the Jerusalem Sbarro massacre and of my daughter Malki's murder, no political figure ever responded to the numerous calls my wife and I made for the killer to be left in prison to serve her 16 life terms. None of them ever responded to our serious criticisms afterwards. And none of them has ever acknowledged the colossal harm to all Israelis, but particularly the victim families, of dealing with life-and-death issues like this one in such a high-handed and unjust way. 
Unjust? Yes, it's a word that's connected to "justice". At heart, this debate is about justice. *Real* justice - and not the bogus justice that sloganeering politicians chronically claim to be serving.
Arnold Roth, Jerusalem 
Justice is very much on our minds at this point in our lives. We continue to work for the extradition and criminal prosecution under US Federal law of the mastermind we mentioned above. We mean Ahlam Tamimi. The FBI has declared her a fugitive from justice  ["01-Apr-17: Ahlam Tamimi, Most Wanted Terrorist - now in Arabic"] even as she lives freely and in the open in nearby Jordan where she enjoys the little-publicized support of the Royal Courts and of Jordan's king and his family.

Justice: It's a word that is thrown about by too many people with too little regard for its actual meaning. It's a message we have tried to advance a lot in recent years, here in our blog and on whatever public platforms we have managed to get. It's not enough. We have to do better.

A small selection of our previous posts on the subject:
A reminder that we have created an email list (contact us at thisongoingwar -at- gmail.com to be added to it) for people who are ready to give a hand in our efforts to bring Ahlam Tamimi back in front of a court of justice.

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