Released terrorist feted in Shuafat
Released terrorist feted in ShuafatFlash 90

“Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof…Justice, justice, shall you pursue.” צדק צדק תרדוף – Shoftim (Deuteronomy)

“He who becomes compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate.” – Midrash Rabba, Ecclesiastes 7:16

One needn’t be a strict devotee of the Old Testament and Talmudic lore to recognize the timeless wisdom of their words. In fact, as the years fly by, its basis, their essence, as well as beauty, reads like a roadmap for human behavior. Simply speaking, view it as “past is prologue.”

So much so, the opening dictums are but a sliver of the above truism; it is a life-long blueprint which applies to Western civilization, that is, if we are to survive and not become relegated to the dustbin of history. America and Israel, whither one goes, the other follows — yes, the twin pillars shoring up Western civilization, and this analysis is pinpointed towards a most heated/raucous debate within Israel.

For context, the reader may refer back to “Islamists can’t be trusted”, a recent analysis at American Thinker, as well as two others:

The fiery exchange is framed along this explosive trajectory: Should blood-thirsty, incarcerated terrorists be freed to effectuate the release of hostages, unfathomably taken by the very same monstrous barbarians, whose nihilism knows no bounds?

It is incumbent upon realistic thinkers to state the obvious:

For many years, akin to a ceaseless ping-pong match, legislation in the Knesset — toward enshrining the long overdue, lawful/righteous death penalty — has been bandied about for a particular class of heinous crimes, with terrorism in the forefront. Regardless, it has never been formally passed/instituted. Again, the wisdom laid out within the Old Testament couldn’t be more timely, nor clearer.

As excerpted from that article:

Israel has confronted terrorist attacks for many decades, but in all of those years, the Knesset and the public have not seriously considered whether the justice system should sentence convicted terrorists to death. Instead, despite allowing punishment by death for a narrow range of crimes that might plausibly be applied to terrorism offenses, Israel has continued to apply a de facto moratorium on the death penalty.

A recent Knesset bill that would introduce the death sentence for terror-related murder in Israel has broken the decades of relative silence on the matter. With the backing of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, members of the Yisrael Beyteinu party proposed the bill and saw it through preliminary approval in a plenary session of the Knesset. It is now pending before the committee on constitutional and legal matters for further debate and preparation for additional readings.

The proposal has two elements. The first amends Israel’s Penal Law to stipulate that a person convicted of murder while committing a terrorist act may receive the death penalty. The second part relates to Judea and Samaria aka the 'West Bank', which Israel has controlled since the Six-Day War and which is ruled under a separate legal regime based on the international law of belligerent occupation. Article 209 of the Decree on Security Instructions (issued by the military commander of the above mentioned region) already allows the death penalty for murder, or what the law calls “intentional manslaughter,” provided that the sentence receives unanimous approval from a panel of military judges.

The proposed bill orders the defense minister to direct the commander to change the decree, so that a decision of a majority of a panel of military judges can issue a death sentence. Furthermore, the bill proposes that the military commander of the 'West Bank' will have no power to mitigate a final death sentence.

Under this legislation, which would reverse the decades-long and de facto license for Islamists to hunt down Jews with almost no fear of death, central life-saving imperatives would be accomplished.

If implemented, the back and forth “bargaining” with nihilists of the nth magnitude (the release of hostages, dead or alive, for scores of incarcerated terrorists) would be a moot point! After all, the death penalty mitigates insanity, as well as the ability to create a false symmetry, an “(im)moral equivalency” between hostages and their blood-thirsty captors! Not only that, it is indisputable that “negotiating” with terrorists ensures more of the same endless terror!

Overall, countless Jewish lives would be spared (as well as a host of minorities living in Israel who seek to reside in the only freedom-based country in the hell-hole of the Middle East), sans continuous wars. (Israel’s “Stockholm Syndrome” leaders dare not triumph over their enemies/tormentors, comporting as a collective of abused children toward their abusers.)

Indeed, the aforementioned strategic imperatives should be plain as day.

After all, the following analyses would have been totally unnecessary, if the above weren’t the case.

Albert Einstein, the undisputed genius of all time, nailed it: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”


Adina Kutnickiis an investigative journalist, living in Israel since 2008. Her work concentrates on militant Islamic jihad and its western knock-on effects. She is the co-author of BANNED: How Facebook Enables Militant Islamic Jihad, She blogs at: Adina Kutnicki, A Zionist & Conservative Blog (www.adinakutnicki.com).

A version of this article appeared on The American Thinker.