The Jerusalem Post recently revealed that Palestinian terrorists released in the Gilad Schalit deal return to terrorism. Some may recall the Israeli soldier held for five years by that Better Business Bureau of Islamic terrorism, Hamas before being released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. According to that same report in the JPost, one of the recidivists was Omar Abu Snina, who had a memory card he “had sent family members in the West Bank which included detailed instructions related to kidnapping soldiers, illegally obtaining weapons and establishing a terrorist cell.” Nothing says good business like a kidnapping deal that trades a soldier for another potential kidnapping plot.
One is keen to ask at this juncture (rather unfairly), “Guys, why’d you pay wholesale?”
Don’t get me wrong, what the Gilad Schalit affair did to Israel made The Iranian Hostage Crisis look like an extended weekend sleep over. Still, it irks me that this is one almost undeniable truth about politics: Trade-offs are often ugly and in no way constitute “solutions.” I tend to think of trade-offs in the sense Thomas Sowell might, which is to say that a trade-off admits that everyone cannot win when it comes to prescribing a policy.
In the United States, where 20% recidivism in terrorists released by our government “isn’t that bad,” maybe it’s time we’re really frank about the differences on our terrorism policy and those who have taken the notion of fetishizing human rights to the point of cultural suicide. Even when The One took office and closed Guantanamo was forced to keep Guantanamo open, stopped droning militants in the Af-Pak and accelerated the drone program in the Af-Pak to the point where the weather there is partly cloudy with a 40% chance of hellfire missile strike (and hey, coming soon to Yemen), you start to get the impression maybe even he gets it, even if some members in his administration and base don’t. (I think it goes without saying, but the somewhat jarring concurrence of U.S. policy aggressively prosecuting terrorists gives us license to drop these painful bits of knowledge on the “Arms Are For Hugging” leftists the next time they get in your face about how everything will be wine and roses with the forces of evil should The One be re-elected.)
The point is that leopards do not change their spots. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and mass-murdering, religious, fanatical douche-bags have to return to their “roots” and disappoint those who should know better (and we could extrapolate this to hostile regimes as well). In my last humor article here, I spent a little time expounding on Thomas Sowell’s tragic vision of man. Well, that wasn’t just for giggles or to sound erudite in television review, but rather to point out the uncomfortable truth that the difference between us and liberals is in admitting we cannot escape the tragic vision. Trade-offs and the pointing out of human fallibility do not fill auditoriums or get you a million likes on Facebook. It does, however, make one comfortable in a society so completely judgementaphobic that it’s afraid of its own shadow.
I suspect that during this electoral cycle you will not, outside of the low-hanging fruit of the bin Laden raid, hear much from your liberal friends about how we’re on the warpath . . . to peace. If they’re smart, they won’t be so oblivious as to make such a statement. That said, when they do inevitably blunder into extolling The One’s herculean efforts for “peace,” despite those efforts entailing multiple wars, try not to be too hard on them. The pressure of reality forces us to examine whether the so-called deals we make with the devil are worth it. Worse, if there’s to be no deal, that conflict may be inevitable. Just ask the Israelis.
