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A "Prisoner Exchange"?
(Daily Mail-UK) Melanie Phillips - Media coverage describes a "prisoner exchange" - more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails for one Israeli prisoner held by Hamas. But Shalit was a hostage, kidnapped in an act of illegal aggression by an organization whose aim is the destruction of Israel and which allowed him not one visit by the Red Cross during his five-year incarceration. By contrast, the released Palestinians have not just been tried and punished according to due process of law, but include among their number some of the masterminds behind some of the worst terrorist atrocities in Israel's history. The equivalence being drawn in the coverage of this deal reflects the morally bankrupt "tit-for-tat" analysis of the Arab war against Israel employed by so many in the West. From the moment Israel was re-established in 1948, it has only ever launched military operations against the Arabs in response to actual or imminent Arab attacks. Yet many refuse to acknowledge the difference between murderous aggression and the defense against it. They refuse to acknowledge that Hamas sets out to murder as many young Israelis as possible, whereas Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. The refusal to acknowledge this crucial moral difference has meant that many view Israel as the aggressor in the conflict, and the victimization of Israelis is largely glossed over. What Israel is up against is what Britain and the West are now up against - an Islamist cult of death, in which the murder of innocents is a cause for exultation and mass killers are lionized as heroes and religious martyrs, not just by Hamas but by the Fatah leadership in the West Bank too.