(Spectator-UK) Stephen Daisley - This is a story about two people going to jail and the countries sending them there. Both are Palestinians and were sentenced on Monday in courts. Jamil Tamimi was sentenced at Jerusalem district court in Israel for the murder of British student Hannah Bladon, 21. On Good Friday 2017, she was riding the Jerusalem light rail to church when Tamimi stabbed her seven times. Tamimi had just been released from a psychiatric hospital and reached a plea bargain with prosecutors on the grounds of mental illness, reducing his sentence from life to 18 years. Issam Akel did get a life sentence. He was convicted at Ramallah high court in the Palestinian Authority of attempting to sell land to a Jew. Isn't saying Israel and the Palestinians have different values perilously close to saying one country's values are superior to the other's? It is and they are, as these two convictions underline. Israel showed leniency to a vulnerable person who committed a horrific crime. The Palestinians showed no mercy to a member of their own population who committed the crime of selling real estate to a Jew. The primary victims of the Arabs' century-long war against a Jewish homeland have been the Arabs themselves. And we avert our eyes and let them get on with it. To do otherwise would mean confronting awkward facts. Why talk about the Palestinians jailed for selling land to Jews when we can demand Israel release the Palestinians jailed for killing Jews? Why talk about the stipends paid to the families of terrorists who murder Israelis when we can condemn Israel for the security fence built to stop the terrorists getting in? Why talk about the Palestinians' insistence that the West Bank be rendered Jew-free before they pledge to accept a state there. Why, in short, face up to the real "obstacles to peace" when we can pretend building houses in the West Bank is what's really holding things back?
2019-01-08 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive