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What Gilad Shalit Tells Us about the Respect for Life in Europe, Israel and Palestine
(Telegraph-UK) Richard Landes - It is a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations. And yet when that same Europe turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for - Israel - is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies. Palestine is a place in which killing daughters and wives and homosexuals for shaming the family with (even suspected and loosely interpreted) inappropriate sexual behavior is a regular feature of society, where "collaborators" are summarily executed.