In prisoner swap, Samir Kuntar is no hero to the Arab fight for justice
July 15th, 2008Samir Kuntar (Kantar, Qantar)) is no hero to Arabs and doesn’t deserve to be released from prison. Hezbollah demanded his release among other prisoners in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev and the Israelis approved it. They are assumed to be dead but you can’t trust Hezbollah any more than you can trust Israel to treat prisoners right.
But while Kuntar is a terrorist — he was a 17 year old recruit to the fight against Israel’s occupation — there is an imbalance and hypocrisy when it comes to the prosecution of Israeli killers who engage in terrorism to achieve their goals. A recent BBC Report shows that 9 out of 10 settlers accused of attacking Palestinians are never charged.
Kuntar, a Druse, was the leader of a group who went into Israel on July 22, 1979 to kidnap Israeli soldiers to use them to force Israel to release civllians and militants it captured. They were members of a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, only 13 years after Israel occupied the West Bank and drove out hundreds of thousands of civlians in the conflict in order to steal their homes, their land and build settlements.
Instead of achieving their military goals, Kuntar came across an armed Israeli family in Nahariya, and when confronted by the Israeli military, he killed the father. But in an act of pure evil, smashed the head of the man’s four year old child. The man’s settler wife (they are viewed as “settlers” by the pre-1948 Palestinians and Arabs) hid with another child that she smoothered to death in fear, trying to keep it quiet, accurately determining that Kuntar would probably have murdered her, too. At the time, the pro-Israel Western media spun the story to de-emphasize the role of Israeli provocations along the Lebanon border while exaggerating the Arab provocations.
The Palestine-Israel and Arab-Israeli conflicts have created a lot of grief, death and pushed many individuals into acts of pure ugliness on both sides.
As you read the reports of the prisoner swap, you can see both sides, pro-Israel and pro-Hezbollah, going to extremes to denounce and demonize the other while pretending their own are angels. Rarely, however, do you hear the voice of reason, especially from official Israeli spokespeople who NEVER acknowledge their own terrorist crimes and violence.
One Arab told me though that despite Kuntar’s vicious act, “the Israelis have done worse.” They have and it should be pointed out, as I do, but it is NOT an excuse either. You don’t justify murder by hiding behind another murder or crime.
There are no angels in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Not Hezbollah. Not Israel. But there should at least be some people who try to act like human beings. We need more of them. If Hezbollah were really decent, they would have demanded that Israeli release hundreds and even thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese who have been held in prison purely for political reasons. They could have demanded that Israel compensate the families whose homes were destroyed by Israel’s military as punishment for violence committed by members of their family that the families could not control, acts that the families had no responsibility.
But Hezbollah demanded the release of a prisoner whose crimes were so heinous to make the same point that Israel makes when it rampages through civilian neighborhoods and blows up buildings, allegeding those killed were “terrorists” even though in most cases, the people murdered are civilians whose only crime is they oppose Israel’s illegal occupation policies and the brutality of the Israeli military.
And instead of acknowleding their own violent record, Israelis hide behind the fabricated pretense of morality. If they really wanted to denounce Kuntar’s violent history — something he paid for by sitting in an Israeli jail for 30 years while dozens of Israeli soldiers who have done just as much violence walk this Earth free and with heads held high and celebrated as heroes.
The kidnapping of Goldwasser and Regev triggered the Second Lebanon War (2006), a war in which Hezbollah beat Israel on the public relations field — firing thousands of rockets into Israel in response to Israel firing thousands of rockets and missiles into Lebanese civilian areas. The two sides are guilty of war crimes in that war but in today’s world of public relations and media manipulation of the truth, and especially favortism for Israel in the biased mainstream American media, only Hezbollah gets blamed. Rarely is an Israeli soldier punished the way Palestinians and Arabs are punished for the same crimes by Israel.
Thousands of innocent Lebanese civilians and Palestinian refugees were killed in the indiscriminate bombings by Israel that used cluster bombs and missiles filled with “flechettes” or piece of metal shrapnel in its warhead. The use of such weapons are a violation of international law, but Israel always is excused from war crime violations.
Kuntar is a criminal and deserves to be behind bars along with a hundred or more Israeli soldiers who have murdered little children. Some have been charged in Israeli court only to be released on probation and treated like heroes.
One day, sanity will return to the Middle East and the crimes of both sides, Arab and Israeli, will be recognized for what they really are. Because when we separate the real terrorism from the legitimate basic human right to defend you family and property, we will see a distinctions and separate the Kuntars and the Sharons, from those Israelis and Palestinians who have acted out of desperation and not hate.
(Ray Hanania is an award winning columnist and author. He is managing editor of the Arab American Writers Syndicate, www.ArabWritersGroup.com and can be reached at rayhanania@comcast.net.)
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What do you mean “not a hero”? Look at the celebrations! Look at the Arabic language web!
He is a hero, and a perfect hero for you! Enjoy him!
May he meet his 72 virgins in our days. Amen.
And while you’re at it, look at other heroes of the Arab nation:
Haj Amin Al Husseini.
Dalal al Maghribi.
Izzadine al Kassam.
Samir Kuntar fits right in there! If you don’t realize it, stick your nose in your armpit and take a deep breath.
Well at least the muslims don’t eat pigs. It shows that they are against canabalism.
…I don’t think whoever monitors these comments reads them very carefully…
Anyway, a well-written article. Thank you.
What the Arab world considers a hero is pathetic and sad. I like how you defend his heroic title by insulting those who don’t share your ill-informed opinions.
They are just feeding the crowd with what they want to hear, everyone knows that this is how the Arab media operates.
No, unlike you, the rest of us actually have values and standards. We don’t follow sheep.
Esra’a:
Yes. The crowd wanted to hear that he is a hero. The crowd wanted to hear that an Israeli murderer is just a murderer, but a Hezbollah murderer is a hero. I wonder just how many people worldwide stood and cheered when Kuntar promised to carry on the fight? How many people are there who really do think this guy is a hero, and want to be like him?
No, Esra’a, except for a small minority, you don’t follow sheep. You follow rabid dogs.
Hence the Kuntar celebrations.
Once again, Omri exemplifies the extent of his brain by “supporting” his sorry excuse for an argument by providing nothing more than an insult.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the educational level of the followers of Hezbollah. These are the kinds of people who support them.
Ray, you are so out of touch with Arab opinion.
And when it comes to “explaining” why people “appear” to show support for Arab heroes or popular figures that the West and Israel hate, why is the response consistently that the Arab masses are stupid and un-educated, and that they are happy in the streets only because they are being “tricked” by getting what they “want to hear?”
Yaman,
I don’t see anyone denying the fact that this happens. Pro-Palestine, staunch anti-Israelis, can still be strongly against Hezbollah and their tactics. Why can’t people respect that?
You say Israel arrests innocent civilians, which is true, but Iran does that on a daily basis too, and they just so happen to fund Hezbollah. The IRI is by far one of the most criminal governments in the world. Do you think that they would fund justice? Is their agenda bigger than what they seemingly want for Palestine? What is your take on that? You seriously think their mission is freedom for Lebanon and Palestine without the slightest political and religious bias that may put other innocent Arab and Muslim lives at risk? (let’s say, those in the opposition.)
If they don’t want freedom for their own civilians I cannot imagine them wanting freedom for Palestinians, so why are they funding the “freedom fighters” here?
Do you trust that freedom can be won in the hands of militants?
Of course, I didn’t say any of those things and never would. I didn’t even mention Iran in my comment, so I don’t know why you introduced this straw man.
I find it very odd that you have a story about freedom that can be won without militants, when no “free” country in the world believes otherwise. In fact, it is a uniting theme in all “free” countries in the world that militancy in fact created, maintains, and safeguards their freedom.
But in all of this discussion you are ambiguously referring to different kinds of “freedoms”: freedom from imperialist occupation is different from freedom for individuals or citizens to do things without being harassed, imprisoned, etcetera, by local authorities. You are confusing the “freedom” which is local sovereignty with the “freedom” that refers to individual rights. They are in fact different, and are not necessarily tied to one another. Saying that it’s impossible for Iran to support freedom, meaning Palestinian independence from Israeli apartheid, because it does not support individual freedoms for its citizens might appear to point to a hypocrisy, but it is in fact an oversimplification of very complicated relationships and a collapsing of two different kinds of freedom with one another: of course it is in Iran’s interest for Iraqi, Lebanese, and Palestinian sovereignty not to be subverted by the United States and Israel. That interest is related to its own security and sovereignty, and is unrelated to individual rights or freedoms.
The key point here, though, in respect to Ray’s article, is that he believes Israeli court claims for no apparent reason and with no evidence. He already accepts the characterization of Kuntar as a monstrous militant based on nothing but the perception that has been spread by Israeli and Western media.
Here is another take on Kuntar’s conviction:
It’s not just Kuntar receiving the “hero” status, why is Hezbollah as a whole being generally portrayed as freedom fighters and heroic, to me they are serving a much larger political agenda than what they claim. And I don’t rely on any Western or Israeli sources for this piece of information, I have reasons to be worried (as a Bahraini citizen.)
Hezbollah is an occupying force. How can I mention them without mentioning Iran, their biggest supporters and funders? They are directly affiliated. Iran also funds Shiite militant behavior in Bahrain, in an effort to reclaim this country back – physically and ideologically. How do you know that in 10 years this country will also not be under a fierce occupation by Iran and their militants? Or is it only those “imperialists” that we have to worry about? Hezbollah poses equally dangerous threats in this region. The mission of Hezbollah is essentially Iran’s. If the future is in their hands, I have no hope at all for future generations, who will be smothered in blood.