Some follow-up thoughts on Lileks' bleat today. If people aren't aware, this is what Kuntar did, as described by the remaining family member, the wife and mother:
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.
But the next part is the most tragic, and it illustrates the point I made the other day with regard to shouting out to the universe:
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.
In any event, had an Israeli, soldier or civilian, deliberately shot an Arab parent to death in front of his young child, and then smashed in her skull with a rifle butt, in front of eyewitnesses, he would have been arrested, tried, and probably sentenced to life in prison, by the Israeli government. He would have also been condemned by Israeli society as a vicious monster. In contrast, this bloodthirsty psychopath was welcomed as a hero in Lebanon.
As long as this asymmetry of attitude toward wanton and deliberate murder, and worship of death and those who brutally bring it persists in the Arab world, there will be no peace in the Middle East, regardless of how much we appease them, even if we allow them their only true goal, which is the destruction of the state of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. As someone once said, Arabia has always had bloody borders.
[Update in the afternoon]
"Bodies' abuse made ID difficult."
Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, former Chief Rabbi of the IDF, who was present during the transfer of the fallen soldiers yesterday, said that "the verification process yesterday was very slow, because, if we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead, we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I'll leave it at that."
What is he complaining about? It's not like they had women's panties on their heads, or a Torah was flushed down a toilet.
I agree with you completely, Rand. It is sickening that these foul murderers were not executed.
It makes one heartsick, to think that entire cultures of people could be so vile. Because eventually you must ask yourself, "What is to be done?", and with each act fewer and fewer of the "good" options seem viable.
Brock:
I know what will sort out this problem. So do you. The problem will end when the West turns every one of their filthy anthill cities into dust, smoke and a glowing, smoking, glass-lined hole; when all their unholy places have been turned into smoking rubble; and when every last one of the filthy, stinking, intolerant, unthinkingly violent neck-chopping sons of bitches is dead. Every last one.
The West has known this for over thirteen hundred years now, and we have been at war with demonolatrous followers of a paedophiliac Dark Ages barbarian warlord for all that time. Time to finish the war. And we'll win.
Fire is a great cleanser. By the way, "filthy" was not intendend to mean physical filth; just the sick, vampiric darkness at the enemy's heart.
We won't make the same mistake in Texas even if the ICJ demands otherwise.
Hmmmm.
*shrug*
1. Part of the problem is that the Arab world didn't experience the effects of WWII's Total War theory. All they have to go by is the kid glove treatment they've gotten.
2. Olmert is a complete ass.
3. Israelis want to die.
The Palis should have been returned in the same condition the Israeli soldiers were recieved in.
We'll have to see why the bodies were mutilated. It's possible that they were cut up into order to be easier to transport or to hide evidence of how they died or who killed them. While still loathsome it is a lesser offense than deliberate torture of the soldiers while alive or desecration of their bodies after death for propaganda purposes.
> We'll have to see why the bodies were mutilated.
No, we don't.
Once you pass certain points, it doesn't really matter how far you've gone.
FWIW, this pathological need to excuse, to argue "it could have been worse", etc is part of why folks cavort on the other side.
Stop rationalizing evil. Don't explain. Don't justify or excuse. Don't tell us how you're a good person, smart, or floss regularly; the rationalizing shows otherwise. (And don't say that you weren't.)
Just stop.
The only relevant questions are (1) are you going to do something useful about it and (2) when?
Leave the "understanding" to those who might want to come back from the other side. If they figure out in time, great. If not, their problem.