Immoral Prisoner Swap

Goldi Steiner & Nomi Winkler - Canadian Jewish News - [Letters] August 15, 2008

In freeing the loathsome Arab terrorist, Samir Kuntar, (and others) in exchange for the bodies of our two martyred soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, this deplorable act of the Israeli Government has set the country on a bloody course; more and more kidnappings and killings of its soldiers and civilians, followed by more and more such criminal exchanges. (Does anyone doubt that Kuntar and his depraved cohorts will fulfill their insatiable desire to murder more Jews?!)

We read the words "justice, mitzvah, obligation, compassion" in association with this event, an event which has contaminated the sacrifice of these two young martyrs by forever linking their deaths with this scandalous act of their government, and its aftermath.

What about directing those admirable concerns at the fate of Jonathan Pollard, a Jew who also risked his life in the service of Israel and has paid for his sacrifice with

23 years

in an American prison - unjustly sentenced to life, imprisoned and abused by our supposed "best friend and ally" the United States and betrayed and abandoned by Israel, the country he officially served!

Where is the compassion, the cry for justice and moral outrage over this monumental injustice?

How can we Jews, especially since the Holocaust, especially since the establishment of the modern State of Israel, go about our daily lives when such a blatant miscarriage of justice continues to poison the Jewish world! What value is served by a community that says Yizkor for Ehud and Eldad and ignores its moral obligation to rescue the living Jonathan?!

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