Time Immortal

Weird, I know, but there it is.

Consider, for a moment, one of the celebrities the Israelis turned over. Sumil Kuntar murdered an Israeli family including a little girl in a terror operation at Nahariya in 1979. The details are horrific, and I won’t revisit them.

On Thursday, this man told Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV network, “To tell you the truth, we envy our enemies — the way they care for a body and will go to the end of the world in order to get it back.” He added that, reading in jail, he had come to feel, by comparison, the “disregard for human beings’ value in Arab countries,” mentioning specifically Egypt’s indifferent attitude towards its own soldiers, missing in action.

I intended the paradoxical conclusion, which I invite my reader to puzzle over. Here is one terrorist who may possibly have benefited from taking stock in jail, and has at least shown a particle of real courage in mentioning something that he learned. All of Lebanon may have gone to hell, yet this one man could be worth saving.

Israel made a bad deal in releasing these five murderers back to Hezbollah, but it is perhaps hopeful to see at least one of them recognizing that his captors not only are reasonable, decent human beings, but that his own Arab and Islamic compatriots do not value human life, nor human dignity, in anywhere near the same fashion that the people of Israel do.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!