15
Jul
2008
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In prisoner swap, Samir Kuntar is no hero to the Arab fight for justice

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Samir 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.)