By Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer(A7)
We know the drill by now. It’s like watching a rerun classic movie for the twentieth time:
1. An Arab terrorist stabs or shoots one or more Jews to death.
2. The deceased’s family wails in mourning. Television captures all the emotion live, while the newspapers print the photographs.
3. The Prime Minister and one or two cabinet ministers vow to catch the murderer(s). “They will face justice,” they vow.
4. A nation mourns. Hundreds attend the funeral. Girls and women wail. Family weep. Someone recites Kaddish.
5. Hamas, Hezbollah, or someone else takes credit. Arab Muslims in Gaza, Jenin, and Ramallah hand out candies.
6. The Prime Minister vows the murderer(s) will be caught and will not get away unpunished.
7. Eventually, the murderer(s) are caught. (If they resist arrest or shoot, sometimes we are spared the rest of the list. Not this time.)
8. The Prime Minister boastfully declares victory: “As promised, they were caught. No one gets away unpunished.”
9. A year later, the apprehended are convicted and sentenced to ten years, twenty years, or life in prison.
10. Between three and ten years later, they are released to Gaza or South Lebanon or the “Palestine Authority” as part of a prisoner release that sees Israel release between ten and a thousand Arab murderers and related terrorists in return for one or two living Jewish hostage prisoners and the remains of one or two deceased Jews.
11. An Arab terrorist stabs or shoots one or more Jews to death. Sometimes the murderer turns out to be one of those who had been released in Step #10.
This cycle has got to stop.
How? There are no easy answers nor certified solutions. But one thing is clear: Israel needs to implement capital punishment— the death penalty — for these attacks.
All people live with hope. Terminally ill people hope new medical breakthroughs will assist them and new medical trials will discover even better treatment options. Applicants for jobs hope they will be hired even when their credentials do not appear stellar. Gamblers, despite their crushing losses, continue hoping their luck will change, their number this time will win.
And Arab murderers, when they murder Jewish civilians, premeditate their acts with the hopes — even the expectations — that (i) they will not be caught; (ii) if caught, they will not be convicted; (iii) if convicted, they will not be sentenced to serve too long; and (iv) even if sentenced to serve long, they surely eventually will be released in a prisoner exchange as heroes while, in the meantime, Abu Mazen (“Mahmoud Abbas”) and the “Palestine Authority” will pay significant ongoing cash payments to the terrorists’ families.
The death penalty, once implemented, will help eliminate some of the hope. The Arab who murders will die at Jewish hands before any prisoner release ever unfolds.
With that death penalty, serious consideration should be given to two adjunct aspects:
1. The hanging or firing squad should be done low key, the way America knocked off and disposed of Bin Laden. Finish him off at night, and perhaps dump him into the Mediterranean.
2. Whether he is buried in land or dumped in the sea, include a pig or at least a slice of pork, ham, or bacon with the corpse.
Let every potential Arab Muslim murderer know that, from this day forward, it won’t be 72 virgins awaiting him but locked doors.
Beyond that, it seems that it is insufficient to destroy the families’ houses. So go the next step and exile all family members to Gaza or South Lebanon or Detroit or Paterson, New Jersey. Seize all their assets. Uproot them — the whole family.
Other ideas are welcome, reasonable ideas. Indeed, a blue-ribbon think tank should be assembled — privately, not by the feeble government — comprised of hardened thinkers, think-tank-quality scholars like Dr. Mordechai Kedar and Caroline Glick and Kalman Liebeskind, to come up with additional ideas. If other proposals are better, we can delay on the porcine for now. But we begin with the death penalty. It must be implemented according to the same principle as Democrats voting in Chicago: early and often.
The time for the death penalty, long overdue, at least is now.
