Trading terrorists for dead bodies is stupid

Critics of Israel's lopsided prisoner exchange with Lebanese guerrillas said on July 16, 2008 that such deals only encourage more hostage-taking, a fear underscored by Gaza militants who said the swap proves that kidnapping is the only language Israel understands.

A notorious Lebanese terrorist (Samir Kantar) who murdered a man, his four-year-old daughter plus a policeman was traded along with other militants and the bodies of 199 Arab fighters for two dead Israeli soldiers. It closed a painful chapter from Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon. But it also raised questions about whether Israel should reconsider its policy of bringing back every soldier from the battlefield at any cost. Israel has been carrying out unequal prisoner swaps for decades, including handing over 4,600 Palestinian and Lebanese captives in 1983 in exchange for six captured Israeli soldiers. In the past it's even traded live prisoners for dead bodies of its soldiers, as it did on the 16th.

If Hamas only insisted on the return of the 199 bodies of Arab fighters for the return of the two Israeli soldier’s bodies, that would be OK with me after all, what does Israel want with 199 Arab dead bodies? It is the return of the terrorist and live Arab prisoners that I take issue with.

This swap will confirm in the minds of militant groups world-wide that kidnapping is the way to pressure Israel and perhaps other countries also that such swaps will pay off great dividends for terrorists. No one should be surprised if Hamas will now raise the price for freeing a live soldier that was kidnapped. Hamas made it clear yesterday it intended to do just that. Currently, Israel holds about 10,000 Palestinians in prison so the prospect if quite real.

A Lebanonese spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said that that the only successful way to free the Arab prisoners is by kidnapping Israel’s soldiers and later swapping them for the Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Unfortunately, I don’t think they will just kidnap soldiers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they stoop to kidnap each the adult and two hundred prisoners for each child.

Israel needs to change the rules that have been dragged on for many years ago, which have led to many lopsided deals. I doubt that that will happen since the Israeli military still maintains that such deals drive home the Jewish state's deep commitment to its soldiers.

A spokesperson for Israel Defense Forces said, "This painful process exemplifies Israel's moral commitment to secure the return of all of their soldiers sent out on operational missions. It demonstrates a compelling moral strength which stems from Judaism and Israeli societal values.

This is a very dangerous precedent. By paying such a high price for dead bodies could provide an incentive for militants to kill future hostages. The Israelis are telling militants that they don't have to do their utmost to keep their captive soldiers alive since it will have no real bearing on the price Israel is willing to pay to get their dead soldier’s bodies back.

Terrorists could never do this to the United States. That nation generally does not negotiate with terrorists, which is the supposed current stance of the Bush Administration, however I know of two instances where such negotiations were undertaken.

Jill Carroll, an American journalist with the Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped in Baghdad on January 7th 2006 by a terrorist organization calling themselves ‘Revenge Brigades’. A video of Carroll and her captors was aired on Al Jazeera, in which the terrorist organization demanded that all Iraqi women in U.S. custody be released or Carroll would be executed. Six of the eight Iraqi women being held by Coalition forces at that time were released. The United States claimed that there was insufficient evidence to hold these women and their release was in no way related to the Carroll case, but the timing was highly suspect.

According to the Americans, the status of prisoners held by coalition forces is reviewed twice a week by a committee made up of the justice, human rights and interior ministries, and a representative of the US-led coalition. The status of those six women prisoners was reviewed just prior to the terrorists issuing their demands, and at that time there was found to be sufficient evidence to hold them. But just days after the demands were made; there was suddenly a lack of evidence to continue detaining those six female prisoners. While the Bush Administration continues to shout loudly to the American people that it does not negotiate with terrorists, the Administration, at the time when the trade was made, sent a mixed signal to terrorist organizations by releasing their female prisoners immediately after the demands were made. To quote a friend of mine who is an avid fisherman, “Something is fishy here.

In August 2006, a previously unknown group calling itself ‘The Holy Jihad Brigades’ issued a statement demanding the release of all Muslims held in U.S. prisons in return for the release of two journalists. In fact, the paper reports that the public demand was not serious and that the group's ‘real demands’ were that the U.S. press Israel to reopen the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Palestine and cease the shelling of "Palestinian activists'" residences.

According to the report, the mediators contacted a representative of a European country who in turn contacted U.S. and British diplomats. The paper's sources said in the report that members of a senior FBI delegation, who had arrived in the area a few days earlier, were also involved in the negotiations.

The announcement that the two journalists had converted to Islam as a reason for their release was only a camouflage to conceal the fact that the U.S. had agreed to the hostage-takers' demands, according to the sources cited in the article. A few days later, the Rafah crossing was reopened for a few hours daily, and the Israeli forces stopped shelling residences of activists.

I am happy to say that the demand of ‘The Holy Jihad Brigades’ that the U.S. release all of their Muslim prisoners was not met.

Other countries also negotiate with armed militants. The Italian government confirmed the release of five Taliban prisoners in exchange for the freedom of a kidnapped Italian reporter. Governments generally end up negotiating with their enemies.

Unfortunately, if we give terrorists what they want, they will come back again and again. This will cause more harm than good. They will kidnap, threaten or kill just to get their compatriots back.

Quite frankly, I don’t take issue with respect to armed militants making such demands if all they want are the militants who are our prisoners providing the militants that are released weren’t captured in our country or had killed innocent civilians. During World War Two, it was common knowledge that there were prisoner exchanges especially if the prisoners were ill. It was generally known that the prisoners released would not return to the battlefield and that commitment was met by all the adversaries. That has been going on for centuries.

Militants fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are for the most part, citizens of those two countries and according to them, they are fighting their invaders. It is hard to think otherwise.

However, as I see it, if militants who are citizens of the country they claim they are defending, then go into another country to kill civilians, they should not be classified as militants. They are terrorists.

The notorious Lebanese terrorist who killed an Israeli man, his four-year-old daughter and a policeman may have been a militant in Lebanon but when he crossed into Israel to murder the man and his daughter to make a point, he became a terrorist. Let me tell you more about his crime. He and his fellow terrorists took the father and child out of their home and marched to the beach when the police began arriving. They shot the father first so that the sight of the dying father would be the last thing his four-year-old daughter would see before the creeps shot the little girl to death. This terrorist should never have been released by the Israelis, especially when it was only for the return of the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers.

The Lod Airport massacre was a terrorist attack that occurred on May 30, 1972, in which three members of the Japanese Red Army, on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, killed 26 people and injured 80 others at Tel Aviv's Lod airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport in which I and my wife have flown in and out of several times).

Because airport security was focused on the possibility of a Palestinian attack, the use of Japanese terrorists took the guards by surprise, and their commitment to a suicide mission simplified the planning. The three Japanese terrorists were Kozo Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Okudaira, and Yasuyuki Yasuda and they had been trained in Baalbek, Lebanon. Two of them were killed in the attack and Okamoto survived. He was tried by Israeli courts and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1972. He should have been hanged but Israel doesn’t have the death penalty so his life was spared and as it turned out, he only spent 13 years of his life sentence in prison.

Okamoto was released in 1985 along with over a thousand other Arab prisoners in custody of the Israelis in an exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. He settled in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. He was arrested in 1997, but in 2000 was granted political refugee status in Lebanon. Four other Japanese Red Army members that were arrested at the same time were extradited to Japan.

When I learned of this, I was furious. That terrorist who was equally responsible as the other two terrorists for the murder of 26 innocent civilians had only served 13 years in prison. That meant he had served two years imprisonment for each of the 26 dead civilians whom he helped slaughter.

When the United Nations invited me to give a speech at the U.N. Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders being held in Milan, Italy in 1985 shortly after the release of those terrorists, I decided to speak about what should be done with terrorists once they are caught. In my speech, I said that if they are convicted, and the appeal process is finished, they should be immediately hanged, then cremated and their ashes flown out to sea and dumped into the sea so that no one would have a grave to mourn over. The Italians loved my speech. They broadcasted it all over Italy that night. Newspapers all over the world printed various portions of my speech.

Some nations do execute terrorists. Their reasons were the same reasons I proposed in my speech. Once a terrorist is executed, he is no longer a bargaining chip.

Terrorist, Kantar, the brutal child murderer who instead of being rejected upon his return to Lebanon, was cheered and greeted like a rock star. This is disgusting and deplorable. Worse yet, once in Lebanon, he said, and I quote; “This time yesterday I was in the hands of the enemy. But at this moment, I am yearning more than before to confront them."

I was right in my pronouncement at the U.N. conference in Milan. Execute them before they are bargained away to freedom so that later they can then commit more acts of terrorism.

The United States executed one of its home-grown terrorists, Timothy McVeigh after he was convicted of placing a large bomb at the entrance of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that was at that time, a United States Federal Government complex in downtown Oklahoma City. His execution was quite proper considering that he killed 168 men, women and even babies and injured 800 others. His partner in crime, Terry Nichols was sentenced to natural life in the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado in which he spends 23 hours in solitary confinement. That is a fitting penalty for this terrorist also. A third conspirator, Michael Fortier, who testified against McVeigh and Nichols, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for failing to warn the U.S. government of the plot.

Omar Abdel-Rahman, Islamist terrorist, nicknamed ‘The Blind Sheik’; involved in World Trade Center bombing planning in 1993, Wadih el-Hage, conspirator in the 1998 United States embassy bombings, Zacarias Moussaoui, conspirator in the September 11, 2001 attacks, Richard Colvin Reid, Islamist terrorist, the ‘Shoe Bomber’, Eric Robert Rudolph, Christian Identity terrorist, Olympic Park bomber, Ramzi Yousef, Islamist terrorist, 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Jose Padilla, convicted of aiding terrorists, are all imprisoned in the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado for the rest of their lives.

I can’t imagine any terrorist organization anywhere in the world successfully negotiating any of these terrorists out of that prison.

One way to stop terrorists from demanding the release of terrorists in custody is to tell the terrorists that if they kill their hostage, one of the terrorists in custody will be promptly executed. If a second hostage is killed by the terrorists, then a second terrorist in custody will be executed. The terrorists will finally realize that their actions would be tantamount to arranging for the executions of their friends. The authorities could legally do this if the terrorists were sentenced to death and their sentences were put on hold and to be enforced at any time the authorities wish to enforce it. There was a mass murderer in Japan who spent a great many years in prison under a sentence of death. He could have been hanged at any time the government felt like it. He wasn’t hanged and he eventually died of old age.

When Saddam Hussein was in power, he had three terrorists who had killed civilians with bombs, taken to the desert, strapped with explosives and then while two of them watched the first terrorist blown to bits, the third one watched the second one blown to bits before he too was blown to bits. Iraq had very few terrorists in that country after that while he was in power. One country had an unusual way of dealing with terrorists. They buried the terrorists alive in the coffins of their victims. I don't believe there are terrorists in that country either. One Mid-eastern country said that they would hack off the arms and legs of terrorists while they were still alive.
They too don't have terrorists in their country.

Terrorism has become a part of modern life. Hijackings, bombings, and assassinations on different continents of the world may seem like isolated attacks, but they reflect an easy reliance on violence as a way to promote social, political, and religious change. They are elements of a pervasive ‘end justifies the means’ philosophy being followed to its most perverse conclusions. Terrorism has been called a ‘new form of warfare.’ But terrorists turn the notion of war on its head. Innocent non-combatants become the target of terrorist attacks. Terrorist warfare holds innocent people hostage and makes soldier and civilian alike potential targets for their aggression. Unfortunately, hundreds of innocent victims pay the ultimate price in support of the terrorists’ aims.

I said it in 1985 at the U.N. conference in Milan and I will say it again. Terrorists who commit acts of terrorism where innocent victims are killed, should not be treated as human beings but rather as the wild animals they are. And like wild animals, they should be put down. Not like the Iraqi dictator would do it but put down in any case and their bodies cremated and their ashes dumped into the ocean many miles from land. It may not necessarily reduce terrorism but you can be sure of one thing; they won’t be released back into society so that they can wreak havoc again on innocent citizens.