I had responded to you comment very lengthly, but from some reason this respond was not approved, or failed to appear.

I’ll be brief now, but I hope it will be good enough.

Israel is not the best democracy in the world. in the corruption standards we are placed in the 30th place in the world (when 1st is the less corrupted). I believe corruption democracy can not live together.

Israel do control 2.5 million Palestinians without democratic rights. but Israel for the last 20 years through democratic struggles, try to find a solution to this problem.

You have to remember, that Israel is in a state of war from the day she was born. every 7 years we have here a war.

John Stuart Mill wrote in his book “On Liberty”, that liberalism and democracy is not good practice for small states surrounded by many enemies.
If you will look on the map, you will see that Israel is a very small state surrounded by vast Arab countries, which most of them wish to destroy her.

For such circumstances, Israel is a very liberal and Democratic place

I am doing the comment moderation at the moment and I can assure you that there is no censorship on Global Voices. We only bar spam and hate speech. I have just checked the spam filter to see if your comment was there for some reason, and I didn’t find it. Please note that the capcha system will bar comments if you don’t provide the right information and not always it gives you an error message.

Most of the Lebanese blogs that I read are full of expressions of shame and chagrin over the release of Kuntar.

Readers interested in following those blogs can find a summary on Mustapha’s blog, Beirut Spring.

Also, check Now Lebanon for sober editorials and comments from angry readers (there are many). Naharnet has some interesting comments, too.

Samir Kuntar was 16 years old when he shot a man in front of his 4 year-old daughter and then used the butt of his Kalashnikov rifle to smash in the little girl’s skull. He served less than 30 years of 4 life sentences. During those 30 years in an Israeli jail, he married and had conjugal visits; he was also permitted to study at the Open University – at Israeli taxpayers’ expense – and earn two university degrees.

I wonder if you, Moussa, or anyone participating in this thread, has read the first-hand account of Smadar Haran, the mother of that little girl and the widow of the man who was shot. Below is an excerpt; the full version was
published in the Washington Post

Read it and then ask yourselves: how in the world can this man be described as a hero? Are you all so blinded by hatred for Israel that you are unable to acknowledge Samir Kuntar is a murderous psychopath who committed his crime because he simply likes violence?

“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.”

I hope one day, our generation will know how to bring peace and prosperity to this miserable planet.

I think, the first and initial step, to bring it, is to hear others point of view and explain your point of view in love and in much respect to the other humenbeings.

Best,
Tal

Killing of every human being is horrifying. Even of soldiers :-(
Killing of innocent citizens is even more horrifying and most regrettable, and we have to do everything in our power to stop it.

But we must look at the over-all picture. Israel is in war and it is being attacked from populated places. Our opponents fire their rockets from inside a civilian population, to Israeli civilian population. Terrorists or Palestenians freedom fighters kill Israeli citizens deliberately and hide inside a Palestinians population.
It doesn’t make a lot of choices for Israel, but to get them in the place where they are.

This was the same in world war II. USA and Britian had bombard Germany and Japan. They were attacked, and their citizens terrorized (the British one), and the USA and Britain rightfully attack the Germans.But they did not gunned down civilians deliberately, as the Germans did! This make allot of difference. Right?

Nevertheless, we all have to find better ways to solve this conflict.

Very sorry for every life loss, may it be an Israeli or a Palestinian.

Tal

First of all, I disagree, but if even if it wasn’t deliberate, does that make it any less horrifying?

Samir Kuntar may say that he did not kill the girl, but he sure kidnapped her and her father. Right?

Samir is not the only Arab fighter (lets call them that, although their acts is usually the acts of terrorists), have killed many Israeli man women and children. In most of these cases they looked them in the eyes and killed them with cold blood.

In the long history of fighting, Israeli soldiers had killed Palestinians civilians. But for most of the times, It was not delibrate. pepole were killed in the fighting zone without deliberate will to kill citizens. There were cases in which the IDF killed citizens, which were near militery target, although he knew they are there. But this action was heavily criticized in the Israeli society, and the IDF do try to avoid killing Palestinians citizens.

But I think the the moral than your answer reflects, show little or no moral dignity. You call Kuntar a Hero, although you know he may killed in cold blood a girl and her father.

If here in Israel we knew someone has killed in cold blood a girl, we would not think he was a hero, but rather the lowest kind of murderer.
What does it say about the culture how make Kuntar a hero?