Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

AP/ABC News: Study Questions US Strategy Against Al-Qaida, July 29, 2008

The United States can defeat al-Qaida if it relies less on force and more on policing and intelligence to root out the terror group’s leaders, a new study contends.

“Keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight,” said the study by the federally funded Rand research center, an organization that counsels the Pentagon.

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term “war on terror” and replace it with “counterterrorism.”

“Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.

“The United States has the necessary instruments to defeat al-Qaida, it just needs to shift its strategy,” Jones said.

Nearly every ally, including Britain and Australia, has stopped using “war on terror” to describe strategy against the group headed by Osama bin Laden and considered responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide attacks at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

Karadzic Sent to Hague for Trial Despite Violent Protest by Loyalists - NYTimes.com, July 30, 2007

BELGRADE, Serbia — Long one of the most-wanted fugitives in the world, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader blamed for inciting his followers to join him in a brutal ethnic war, was en route to The Hague early Wednesday, according to the Serbian war crimes prosecutor.

Radovan Karadzic arrived in Rotterdam on Wednesday before being transferred to a prison in the Netherlands.

About 15,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade on Tuesday night to support the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is facing war crimes charges.

A motorcade carrying Mr. Karadzic to the airport left hours after stone-hurling nationalists clashed with the police in central Belgrade at a rally to protest his arrest last week on war crimes charges, and his likely extradition to stand trial before an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Mr. Karadzic was escorted by masked Serbian security officers and taken from the Belgrade war crimes court at roughly 3:45 a.m., according to the prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic. Soon after, his plane was in flight, and it landed in Rotterdam, not far from The Hague, about two hours later.

He is the highest-level politician from the former Yugoslavia to be transferred to the court since Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, who was arrested in 2001 and died in his cell there in 2006 while awaiting a verdict.

The indictment of Mr. Karadzic charges that as president of the Bosnian Serb republic in the early 1990s, he helped orchestrate a 43-month siege of the city of Sarajevo, devised a systematic campaign to kill or drive out tens of thousands of non-Serbs from Serbian towns and villages, set up concentration camps and was an engineer of the massacre of nearly 8,000 unarmed men and boys captured at the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica, in Europe’s worst mass execution since World War II.

While Serbia waited to hear whether Mr. Karadzic had filed an appeal against his arrest, and supporters celebrated him as a hero, officials were preparing to transport him to The Hague. About 15,000 supporters, some bused in from across Serbia and Bosnia by the far-right Radical Party, gathered on Tuesday to protest the new government that arrested him on July 21.

Loyalists wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Karadzic’s image waved Serbian flags and chanted “Long Live Radovan!” and “Uprising! Uprising!” About 100 ultranationalists wearing masks, who had separated from the group, burned flares, attacked traffic lights with clubs and hurled stones at storefront windows. The police responded with tear gas, and the Serbian news media said more than 45 people suffered minor injuries.

“Karadzic is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s,” said Elena Pavovski, 24, a supporter of the Radical Party, whose members sang patriotic songs next to a banner on Republic Square that threatened Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic. “Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free.”

Tension Mounting in Serbia on Eve of Nationalist Rally - NYTimes.com, July 29, 2008

BELGRADE, Serbia — Tension was mounting here Monday on the eve of a rally called by an ultranationalist party that some feared could turn violent over the likely extradition of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader arrested last week on war crimes charges.

The fears have been fanned in recent days by death threats against Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic, and attacks on journalists by far-right nationalists.

The rally on Tuesday is being organized by the Radical Party, which has glorified Mr. Karadzic as a hero and opposes extraditing him to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague, where he has been indicted in connection with the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, in 1992-1995.

He is accused of authorizing the killing of civilians there and of masterminding the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, in 1995. He evaded arrest for more than a dozen years, living at least part of that time in Belgrade as a bushy-bearded practitioner of alternative medicine.

Eve Spangler: The Deaths of Children, Counterpunch, July 18, 2008

We are not shown that far more Palestinian than Israeli children live in daily danger: lacking medical treatment in Gaza, on the verge of malnutrition, caught up in brutality at check points or simply walking home from school. We learn little of what every Israeli might easily know from consulting the B’Tselem web site (B’Tselem is dedicated to documenting and contesting human rights violations in the Occupied Terrirtories). Their data show, for example, that in the seven years between September, 2000 and August, 2007, the Israeli defense forces killed 4233 Palestinians and Israeli civilians killed an additional 41. During that same period, which includes the suicide bombings of the second Intifada, 320 Israeli soldiers and 471 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians. Even more to the point for people who wish to base their political arguments on the lives of children: during those same years, 857 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis and 119 Israeli children were killed by Palestinians.

And, of course the death toll is merely the tip of the iceberg. It does not count the school closures or ill-stocked clinics. It does not count the cost of watching the grown-ups in your world being humiliated. It does not count the fear that there is no reliable economy to sustain your future. It does not count the cost of sleep interrupted by missiles and rocket-fire.

Perhaps those 857 dead Palestinian children are best represented by the life and death of 9 year old Abir Aramin. On January 16, 2007, Abir Aramin was walking home from school when the Israeli Border Police, a branch of the Israeli army, swept through the town, as they had on many other days right around the time of school closing. Children fled before their jeeps. Abir took shelter against a store and was shot in the back of the head at close range. She died soon thereafter at Hadassah Hospital. She was the child of Bassam and Salwa Aramin. Her father, a member of Fateh, had been labeled a terrorist and served 9 years in an Israeli jail for his attempt to throw a grenade at an Israeli jeep. Upon emerging from prison, he became one of the Palestinian founders of Combatants for Peace and continues to work with his Israeli counterparts to bring an end to the occupation, even after Abir’s death. No Israeli soldier has been charged in the case.

An account of Abir’s death was written by Nurit Elhanan-Peled [Peled-Elhanan] , an Israeli mother whose daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber . Nurit Elhanan-Peled is one of the founders of Parents Circle-Family Forum, a grassroots organization for bereaved Palestinians and Israelis. She offers these observations:

“I sit with her mother Salwa and try to say, ‘We are all victims of occupation.’ As I say it, I know that her hell is more terrible than mine. My daughter’s murderer had the decency to kill himself … The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques at night. Abir is in a grave.”

What’s Driving the Jerusalem Attacks - by Uri Avnery, AW, July 28, 2008

From the utterances of the commentators this week, one can gather that they cannot even imagine the anger that accumulates in the mind of a young Arab in Jerusalem throughout the years of humiliation, harassment, discrimination and helplessness. It is easier and more amusing to go into pornographic descriptions of the 72 virgins waiting for the martyrs in the Muslim paradise - what they do with them, how they do it to them, who has enough energy for them all.

One of the main contributing factors for the stirring up of hatred is the demolition of “illegal” homes of Arab residents, who are quite unable to build “legally”. The dimension of official stupidity is attested to by the demand of the Shin-Bet chief, voiced this week again, to destroy the homes of the attackers’ families, for the sake of “deterrence”. Apparently he has not heard about the dozens of studies and the accumulated experience, which prove that every destroyed home becomes an incubator for new hate-driven avengers….

This week, a lot of proposals were presented, such as building a Berlin-style wall through the middle of Jerusalem (in addition to the one going around it). To punish whole families for the acts of their children, much like the Nazi “sippenhaft”. To expel the families from the city or to cancel their resident status. To demolish their homes. To take away their social insurance benefits, even if they have paid for them.All these “solutions” have one thing in common - they have been tried in the past, here and in other places, and found wanting.

Except one, clear solution: to turn East Jerusalem into the capital of the State of Palestine, to enable its inhabitants to set up their own municipality, while keeping the whole city as an urban entity united under one super-municipality in which the Arabs will be equal to the Jews….

The attacks are the result of despair, frustration, hatred and the sense that there is no way out. Only a solution that will remove these feelings can bring security to both parts of Jerusalem.

Ali Gharib, Going Undercover at Mad Pastor Hagee’s Christians United for Israel Summit, AlterNet, July 26, 2008

For Christians United for Israel and its founder, John Hagee, this year’s Washington-Israel Summit was supposed to serve as a rallying call for Christians to stand up for Israel. The controversies surrounding Hagee’s teachings that inspire his politics, particularly his End Times theology and its implications for the Jews he purports to love and protect and his religious interpretations of the Catholic Church and Hitler, were meant to take a backseat to the conference’s aims of demonstrating political support for Israel and actions against its enemies.

Hagee did not want the events at this year’s summit to be brought to the wider public. All but one event in the two-day session at the cavernous Washington Convention Center were closed to the press. Press passes were issued to Tuesday’s Night to Honor Israel — a bizarre fete attended by an announced crowd of 5,000 — but access to participants and speakers by journalists was strictly monitored and restricted. The reasons became abundantly clear in the question-and-answer session after the first panel, when a woman asked how she would know if it was time to start up a “Christian militia” to return the country to conservative values. “Let’s not use the term militia,” Hagee responded, firmly establishing a thread that could be observed over both days of meetings: Control the message.

Armed with a full-fledged participant’s pass and a Christians United for Israel (CUFI) notepad included in my registration pack, I attended both full days of the summit undercover and spoke freely with participants and speakers. The picture that emerged was very different from the one put on for the world on Tuesday night. Message control was constantly stressed to participants to conceal some of the more controversial themes of Hagee’s teachings and theology. But in candid interviews, conducted both as a fellow participant and as a member of the press, Hagee’s fervent following stayed on message with the full spectrum of his teachings, not just those slices made available publicly.

Away from the watchful eye of Hagee’s Manhattan PR firm (many interviews with participants were broken up), some summit attendees, despite specific and repeated instructions not to talk to the press, were eager to discuss the End Times — a belief in final judgment and the end of the World — and what it meant for Jews.

Attendee Dean “Vernon” Melvin of New Mexico told me about Jesus’ second coming and the subsequent end of the world. “When Jesus returns in the sky above us,” he said, “those of us who are already saved and have died will come up out of our graves and go into the sky with him.”

Randy Driskill divided Jews into only two categories: “The Orthodox believe that their messiah hasn’t come yet. The messianic think Jesus is their savior.”

The “Orthodox Jews,” said Driskill, had “scales over their eyes. They’re blinded by scales right now,” he told me with a deadly serious look on his face. “That’s why they don’t accept Christ.”

Report: Ex-Mossad chief says strike on Iran could ‘affect us for 100 years’ - Haaretz, July 28, 2008

Former Mossad Chief Ephraim Halevy told Time magazine in an interview published Thursday that an Israeli attack on Iran “could have an impact on us for the next 100 years” and should only be considered as a last resort.

Halevy, who currently heads the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, added that an Iranian attack on Israel would probably have little impact, because Iranian missiles would largely be intercepted by Israel’s advanced anti-missile defense system.

Another former senior Mossad official, who reportedly served during Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s administration, told the American magazine that “Iran’s achievement is creating an image of itself as a scary superpower when it’s really a paper tiger.”

An additional Israeli source told Time that Israel sees the period between the U.S. elections in November and the president’s inauguration in January as the “window of opportunity” for a possible attack on Iran. The source explained that any military move against Iran would not be carried out before the elections, because it would negatively impact the presidential candidates, especially Republican candidate John McCain and “No Israel leader wants to be blamed for destroying the Republican chances,” Time cited the source as saying.

However, the magazine quoted intelligence sources as saying that an Israeli attack on Iran would likely stall the Islamic republic’s nuclear aspirations only by “a year or two.”

Launching a long-range strike against a multitude of hidden targets in Iran entails huge risks and uncertain rewards, which makes the cost-benefit analysis weigh against an air strike on Iran, according to some senior Israeli officials who urge caution.

Aleksandar Hemon, How Radovan Karadzic Made Bosnia Suffer, NYTimes.com, July 27, 2008

ON Oct. 14, 1991, Radovan Karadzic spoke at a session of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Parliament, which had been debating a referendum on independence from the rump Yugoslavia. Mr. Karadzic was there to warn the Parliament members against following the Slovenes and Croats, who had broken away earlier that year, down “the highway of hell and suffering.”

He thundered, “Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.” Throughout his tirade, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his audience, but then let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word “annihilation.” The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, was visibly distressed.

It was a spectacular, if blood-curdling, performance. Mr. Karadzic, who was arrested last week after 13 years in hiding, was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which already controlled the parts of Bosnia that had a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the Parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. His very presence rendered the Parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the Parliament represented.

An IDF soldier and a Palestinian man arguing as West Bank residents wait to cross a closed checkpoint into Hebron on Sunday. (AP) Haaretz, July 27, 2008.

No Judge and No Law, The Magnes Zionist, 27 Jul 2008

There is an article in Haaretz today (in Hebrew) about the findings of the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din (”There is Law”), that less than 10% of the complaints of Palestinians against West Bank settlers result in indictments. Most of the files are closed by the police for lack of evidence, because the perpetrators are unknown, etc.

Here is the blurb concerning the report from Yesh Din’s website :

Yesh Din’s monitoring of the handling of investigations into offenses committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank exposes that the rate of failure of the Samaria and Judea (SJ) District Police investigations is at 90%. This and other statistics are published in a data sheet which tracks 205 investigation files opened in recent years and which have been followed closely by Yesh Din. Out of the 205 investigations opened into offenses committed against Palestinians which Yesh Din is following, police processing and prosecutorial review have concluded in 163 files. Out of those 163, only in 13 (8%) of the cases were indictments filed against defendants. One case file was lost and never investigated, and 149 (91%) investigation files were closed without filing any indictments against suspects.

Additional findings in the data sheet show that out of the 149 investigation files that were closed, 91 were closed on grounds of “perpetrator unknown” (61%) and 43 cases were closed on grounds of “lack of evidence” (28%).

To read Yesh Din’s Report, please click here . From its monitoring, it seems that the police “investigations” are the stuff of farce. On rare occasions, appeals have been successful. But one can only marvel at the amount of Sysiphisian labor performed by the tiny Yesh Din organization. They work so hard in the face of such adversity.

According to Haaretz, the response of the state’s attorney in charge of law enforcement in these cases was to challenge Yesh Din’s statistics – not 13 but 30 indictments resulted. That means 78%, rather than 92%, of the investigation files were closed without an indictment.

Whew, now I can sleep at night….

Of course, I don’t believe the state’s attorney. If you read Yesh Din’s report, you will see that no official statistics are kept that track complaints of offenses against Palestinians; they are mixed with settler’ offenses against the police. Yesh Din documents its cases; when they have requested the state’s attorney’s documentation, they have been stonewalled.

On the Wild West Bank, settlers move against Palestinians with impunity. Small wonder that most Palestinians don’t even bother to report complaints to the police

Gershom Gorenberg, The Extremists of Your Own City Come First, southjerusalem.com, July 24, 2008

This week Nadav Shragai - the Ha’aretz reporter who often writes like a spokesman for the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza - provided a feature on Ze’ev Hever, a.k.a. Zambish. Hever, a convicted member of the 1980s Jewish terror underground, is the head of Amana, the organizational child of Gush Emunim. Amana builds settlements. Hever worked closely with Ariel Sharon to expand the settlement map. Outside of Sharon himself, he may have done more than anyone else to move Israelis in the West Bank - though admittedly there’s lots of competition.

Now Hever is thinking of moving out of Kiryat Arba, Shragai reports. Young fanatics are slashing his tires and posting posters denouncing him for negotiating on the outposts. The young fanatics believe the old fanatic isn’t fanatical enough.

Yesterday the army did make a minor gesture toward controlling the outpost settlers: It removed a bus being used as an ersatz mobile home from Adei Ad, an outpost near Shilo, between Ramallah and Nablus. Settler extremists reportedly retaliated with a series of violent incidents. Settlers from Yitzhar, near Nablus, tossed stones at Palestinian cars on a main road. Ha’aretz reported:

Regarding the trailer’s removal, a Yitzhar resident said: “The police and the Civil Administration think they can come and evacuate like a ‘hit and run.’ So we decided that for every attempt to evacuate, we would exact a price throughout the area. The tiniest evacuation will result in incidents all day long, so it will be clear we don’t give up easily.”

Meanwhile, also at Yitzhar, the army has dismissed the settlement security coordinator. According to Ma’ariv (dead tree edition), the man had advance knowledge that a member of the settlement had built a home-made rocket and were going to fire it, apparently emulating Hamas et al in Gaza. The security coordinator did nothing about it, and refused to help in the investigation. The settlement doesn’t accept the dismissal, and has retaliated by throwing out the soldiers there to protect them….

Itai Engel, Karadzic’s insane asylum, Haaretz, July 25, 2008

In the end we each had our pictures taken next to the car that, for a month, had sheltered us from Karadzic’s bullets and murderers, and with which we smuggled out and saved civilians from his ethnic cleansing. That car had more luck than brains, certainly more luck than fuel, and somehow it always succeeded in rescuing us at the last moment, against all odds and all laws of mechanics, to the point where we thought that God Himself was watching over us from the skies above Bosnia.

One morning when we went out to the parking lot, we saw that a shell had exploded a meter from the car and scorched it completely. Apparently, despite our feelings to the contrary, there really was no God in Sarajevo. God wasn’t in Bosnia at all in 1992. He was replaced by someone who played God: a Serbian psychiatrist named Radovan Karadzic.

…Without getting into terms and definitions, in Bosnia there was systematic genocide. They called it ethnic cleansing. The idea, as explained to me with cold logic by Serbian citizens whom I met later in the war, is nevertheless somehow connected to us. “We don’t want to be stuck the way you’re stuck, in Israel,” they said. “You occupied territories and got stuck forever with an occupied population inside those territories. For decades you have been dealing, and will deal, with terror that originates on their side and, in addition, with international complaints about violating human rights.”

In order not to get “stuck,” the Serbs carried out ethnic cleansing. Every area that was occupied was entirely cleansed of its Muslim residents. There were two ways of doing this. The first was to load the residents onto trucks and, in a mass transfer, to drive them several hundred kilometers away, and fence them in an abandoned and isolated area. The second way was related to Karadzic’s sick worldview: neither transfer nor expulsion, but immediate extermination of everybody.

And thus it happened that in a city called Srebrenica, all 8,000 Muslim residents were massacred within a 24-hour period. In one of the horrible pictures that came out of there shortly after the ethnic cleansing, Radovan Karadzic is seen embracing and kissing his chief of staff, Ratko Mladic; next to them, Serbian soldiers and militiamen are raising glasses of slivovitz.

A fate similar to that of Srebrenica befell Gorazde, Zepa and innumerable other Muslim villages in Bosnia. But Karadzic’s declared ambition to totally terrorize the country’s Muslims led to a situation where even massacre was not just an act of killing for its own sake. When the Serbian militiamen entered a Muslim house, several would grab the man inside, and one after the other, before his horrified eyes, they would rape his wife. After the rape, the woman would see her husband being decapitated.

The Muslim women who were raped were held by the Serbs in a prison camp for several months, after which they could no longer undergo an abortion if impregnated. To these thousands of villagers, who had led a conservative Balkan lifestyle, the fetus they carried was the seed of Satan. There were women who, right after birth, abandoned the baby and fled. Some killed the newborn with their own hands, and some, despite the horror and disgust, decided to raise the baby. But then, when they returned to their village after captivity, they discovered that the residents, sometimes even their own families, were unwilling to take them back with the satanic Serbian baby in their arms.

Victor Peskin, Serbia’s tipping-point arrest, open Democracy, July 22, 2008

Each year since the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, the anniversary underscores the failure to apprehend its two alleged architects, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Days after the thirteenth commemoration of the murder of around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries, there was a break in this particular cloud: namely, the arrest late on 21 July 2008 of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, found to have been living in Belgrade.

The news of Karadzic’s detention is stunning enough (see Dejan Djokic, “Radovan Karadzic’s capture: a moment for history”, 22 July 2008). What makes it even more timely and important is that it reinforces the signal sent a week earlier, on 14 July, by an application for an arrest-warrant against Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on the charge of war-crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur (see “The Omar al-Bashir indictment, the ICC and Darfur”, 15 July 2008). The respective bodies seeking the opportunity to try al-Bashir and Karadzic may be different - the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) respectively - but taken together, these initiatives highlight the centrality of transnational justice institutions and processes to conflict- and post-conflict situations in different parts of the world.

The wrong climate

Radovan Karadzic is being held at the special court building in Belgrade, where he awaits transfer to the ICTY in The Hague to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes: a series of atrocities that one tribunal judge famously said were “truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history”. Since the death of Slobodan Milosevic in custody in The Hague in March 2006, the importance of Karadzic and Mladic (the former Bosnian Serb military commander) to the tribunal’s mission has grown; the other outstanding suspect, Goran Hadzic, is regarded as a less important if also heinous figure. Now, the upcoming trial of Karadzic will give the ICTY a chance to redeem itself after the missteps of Milosevic’s unsatisfactory and in the end truncated four-year trial.

Dick Norton posted a good piece on Samir Kuntar (al-Quntar) on his blog on July 15, 2008. Israel is releasing Kuntar as part of its deal with Hezbollah. In return for Israel’s release of Kuntar and four other Lebanese prisoners–as well as the bodies of eight members of Hezbollah and those of four Palestinians–, Hezbollah is giving Israel what remains of the bodies of Israeli army reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev–as well as the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah provoked by the latter’s abduction of Rosenwasser and Regev. Smadar Haran Kaiser describes Kuntar’s role in slaughtering her family on April 22, 1979 in the following article published in the Washington Post on May 18, 2003:

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

At his trial in 1980, Kuntar claimed that Israeli gunfire killed Danny Haran as soldiers burst in the Haran home and that he did not smash Einat Haran’s head with his rifle butt as her mother claims. Kuntar obviously wanted to minimize his own guilt in this case and his testimony does not seem credible.

According to Haaretz, the government of Lebanon has declared Wednesday a national holiday to celebrate the “liberation of prisoners from the jails of the Israeli enemy and the return of the remains of martyrs.” Also according to Haaretz, Kuntar and the other prisoners are to be welcomed at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport by Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, President Michel Suleiman, and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.

Such a welcome for a man involved in the murder of a four-year-old girl is obscene. It is sickening. Such a welcome for a man involved in an attack that forced a mother to cover her little daughter’s mouth so she would not scream and reveal her presence is obscene. It is sickening.

Haaretz also describes people in Gaza celebrating Kuntar’s release. This too is obscene. This too is sickening.

Jaber Weshah, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, used to be Samir Kuntar’s cellmate. Haaretz quotes him as saying: “Today is a true day of joy for all Palestinians and all freedom lovers across the world.” This too is obscene. This too is sickening. By celebrating Kuntar’s release, Palestinians simply reinforce right-wing Israeli attempts to deflect the world’s attention from what Israel does to the Palestinians every day.

According to Haaretz, “Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called Kantar an ‘Arab nationalist hero’ and said his release was a great day for the Arab nation.” This too is obscene. This too is sickening. The fact that Kuntar’s release is being celebrated by Palestinians is a great victory for all those determined to deflect attention away from the everyday agony of the Palestinians. It is a great victory for those who seek to make the world forget what Palestinians endure at checkpoints. It is a great victory for all those who seek to portray Palestinian resistance to occupation as mere barbarism.

All of us who condemn what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem must also condemn the murder of little Israeli girls by men like Samir Kuntar. And we must condemn all portrayals of such men as great heroes.

Ann Scott Tyson, Gates Warns of Militarized Policy - washingtonpost.com, July 16, 2008

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned yesterday against the risk of a “creeping militarization” of U.S. foreign policy, saying the State Department should lead U.S. engagement with other countries, with the military playing a supporting role.

“We cannot kill or capture our way to victory” in the long-term campaign against terrorism, Gates said, arguing that military action should be subordinate to political and economic efforts to undermine extremism.