Hamas War

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Death Penalty For Terrorists!

Recently, ever since the murder of three generations of a family, the Israeli media has been campaigning for the death penalty for murderers of children.

Why don't they include terrorists in this?  Why didn't they campaign for the death penalty when Arab terrorism was murdering generations of the same family?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

when it comes to muslim terrorists, i dont think you are going far enough. they should be buried with a pig, or something which will deny them martyr or legend status.
you know, we are in agreement way too often these days...

Sammy Finkelman said...

They don't include terrorists in this because - that would be controversial. Then also, you could think of arguments against this - although there are also good arguments for. And arguments even for a death enalty that could be suspended by the government - or also carried out if events might seem to warrant it.

And of course there are people who will make special excuses for these murders - they are after all, nationalist or political and therefore should be punished less severely than others since they don't reflect someone's personal disposition so well. (This is said of Arabs. In the case of Jews murdering Arabs, which actually doesn't happen very much if at all, they would say this can't be tolerated at all because it is interfering with the ability of Israel to govern itself and with the ability of the responsible government to make its own decisions, so political and nationalistic motives are worse than any other kind. Such crimes by Jews are to be treated as a form of treason! And if there aren't any Jews committing them, and no such treason to be found, well, some people will say, let's create some cases so that anybody tempted will get the message.)

One problem here with teh death penalty for some terrorists would be that the process of deciding on this would take time, and in the meantime a terrorist sentenced to death could become - the truth is, only an *excuse* for a terrorists act, but people will say a cause.

The newspapers and commentators don't want to get into this and just talk about a plain vanilla case of aggravated murder.

But actually yes, if not for ordinary terrorism, maybe it could be put on the books and aimed at the likes of Iran or Hezbollah.

Of course Israel does extra-judicial executions, but this kind of thing couldn't hurt. They would have moe to worry about.

By the way O.J. Simpson qualified for such a thing in california in 1995, but the prosecutor decied not to try. They didn't even try him for only one of the murders, as is sometimes done in such cases in ordere top preserve the posisbility of trying him again after an acquittal.

So having the death penalty on the books, wouldn't necessarily guarantee that an effort to impose it would be made. Don't prosecutors in Israel have enormous discretion?

Batya said...

Sammy, why shouldn't terrorists be killed? It's certainly better than the present situation when they're freed to kill again and inspire others. It costs the Israeli Government, my taxes, a fortune when they're kept locked up. So we lose in both cases.