The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Terrorism

September 11- The Memories Continue

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As a child I remember hearing my parents and their friends talk about how the impact that President Kennedy’s assasination had upon them. They talked about how they remembered where they were and what they were doing when it happened.

The child I used to be had trouble understanding that, although the events of my own life taught me otherwise. I can tell you where I was when I learned that President Reagan had been shot. I can tell you what I was doing when we lost the Challenger and Columbia and I can tell you what I was doing on 9/11.

I spent some time trying to decide if I wanted to write a new post for 9/11. I mulled over whether I would just show the firemen raising the flag or post the video of the attack on the towers.

Tomorrow the family will do what we always do. Mom and dad go off to work and the kids will go off to school, it will be business as usual.

In other homes around the country children will mourn the loss of their father/mother/brother/sister/husband/wives. They’ll be faced with the hard reality that time never stops. Tragedy may strike, but the world continues. It is a hard and bitter lesson.

Tomorrow I’ll coach soccer practice and thank god that the boys and I live in a country where we can do this. I’ll listen extra carefully to their conversation to see if any of them discuss the day, and then figure out if we need to talk about it at all.

Regardless of what happens I’ll spend time thinking about the day and I’ll probably take a moment to watch the video. The horror of that day never goes away. I have seen the towers collapse more times than I can count, but it always bothers me. And the day that it doesn’t will be the day I wonder about myself.

I’ll probably spend a few minutes in silent prayer hoping that the country comes together and that whomever is elected president exceeds all expectations. The best thing that we can do to honor the memories of those we lost is work to improve things here. We won’t forget them.

For those who are curious here are some related posts.

As The Bodies Fell- He Played
We Remember
Football Saves Lives
911- Five Years Later An Angry Rant
September 11 Musings

Smooth Stone has a fine memorial post to Welles Remy Crowther, a victim of the terrorists. It should be noted that Smooth’s post was part of the Project 2,996 blog.

The Value of a Mistake

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Rabbi Daniel Gordis’ has issued another dispatch called When Mistakes Are Worth Making that I suggest you read. It discusses the value of the Kuntar exchange, the disengagement and why these mistakes were necessary.

“So, in the face of all the good arguments about how no self-respecting country trades a almost two hundred dead bodies and several living terrorists including Samir Kuntar (who, we should recall, shot a man at point blank range in front of his four-year-old daughter, and then killed the girl by smashing her skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle – and all this at the ripe old age of 17) for two soldiers who were almost certainly dead, how does one justify this decision? Wasn’t it certainly a mistake?

Yes, in strategic terms, it was probably a mistake. But sometimes mistakes are worth making. Take the Disengagement. It is now clear that the Disengagement from Gaza was a horrifying, costly and still painful mistake. But – and I realize that this is not a popular position – it was a mistake that Israel needed to make. It was the mistake that proved, once and for all, that the enemies we face have no interest in a state of their own. They just want to destroy ours. That is what Israelis learned, now without a doubt, as a result of the Disengagement. There’s almost no one left around here myopic enough to imagine even for an instant that further retreats will get us peace. OK, there are still a few arm-chair peace-niks in the States, insisting that there is simply no conflict that cannot be resolved. But here? Precisely the opposite. Now we know that the right was correct – further retreats will only embolden our enemies. They’ll demand more. And more. Until we’re gone.

The benefits of that lesson are understandably of no consolation to the families who paid so dearly in the summer of 2005, who are still living in temporary housing, whose marriages didn’t survive, whose livelihoods have never been restored, whose children hate the country that did that to their parents – but despite all that, the Disengagement was probably a horrifying mistake that Israel needed to make. For now we know, even those of us (and I include myself) who were naive enough to imagine something else. Peace is not around the corner. Peace is not a year or two away. Peace is not possible. Not now. Not a year from now. Not a decade from now. Because their issue isn’t a Palestinian State it’s the end of the Jewish one. We learned that through the mistake we made in 2005, a mistake that we probably needed to make.

And that’s why we had to make the trade this week. Yes, according to a variety of strategic criteria, the trade was problematic. It may raise the price for Gilad Shalit (not that those negotiations have been going anywhere, of course). It may affect future prisoners of war.

But if it was a mistake, it was a calculated mistake, a mistake well worth making.It was a mistake worth making when we think about what is the real challenge facing Israel. The challenge facing Israel isn’t to win the war against the Palestinians. The war can’t be won. We can’t eradicate them, and they won’t accept our being here. The challenge that Israel faces is not to move towards peace. Peace can’t be had. No – the challenge facing Israel is to learn how to live in perpetual, never-ending war, and in the face of that, to flourish, and to be a country that our kids still want to defend. And that is what we did this week.”

And Murderers Are Set Free

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Ynet reports:

The bodies Israel Defense Forces soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were handed over to the Red Cross on the Lebanese side of the border at around 9 am Wednesday, more than two years after they were kidnapped into Lebanon on July 12, 2006.

The prisoner exchange deal with Hizbullah was executed following months of German mediation, and after the government ratified the deal and President Shimon Peres pardoned Lebanese murderer Samir Kuntar.

Kuntar will return to Lebanon along with four other Lebanese prisoners, as well as the bodies of 199 Hizbullah members.

My heart goes out to the Goldwasser and Regev families.

It is a sad day when murderers are pardoned and given license to walk freely among us all. It is a sad day when those who rejoice in evil deeds and revel in the blood of the innocent stroll out of prison.

There was a time when I believed that if we only treated people with respect and dignity they would extend the same courtesy to us. It made sense to me. Be nice and others will be nice to you.

But it is a fantasy that doesn’t extend to the real world. Evil exists. There are far too many examples of people who do not feel, who are capable of doing horrible things that you and I could never imagine.

We can review serial killers. We can talk about Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy, BTK etc. We can look at examples of leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc.

The truth is out there. And that sad and lamentable truth is that there are those who will kill you and your family without compunction. You don’t let these people go. You don’t set them free. You don’t give them the ability to hurt others.

It is not smart. It is not wise and it is most definitely not humane. Save your sympathy for others. Save your tears for those who deserve them. There are monsters who walk the earth during the day and the night and Israel just released some of them.

3 killed In Palestinian Bulldozer Attack

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Update: AussieDave at Israellycool has more on the situation. Click here.

Ynet reports about a new terrorist attack. Reportedly he was heading towards Mahane Yehuda. Thankfully he was killed long before he got there or things could have been much worse.

“Three women were killed and at least 30 more people were injured when a bulldozer driven by a Palestinian resident of east Jerusalem trampled over pedestrians and vehicles and plowed into two buses in downtown Jerusalem at around noon Wednesday.

Magen David Adom reported of casualties on Rashi, Jaffa and Sarei Yisrael streets.

The driver, who reportedly had a criminal record and was the holder of an Israeli (blue) identification card, was shot dead by a SWAT officer near the old Shaare Zedek Medical Center. The terrorist was identified as 31-year-old Hossam Dawiath, a father of two from the village of Tzur Baher. “