Last April, former President Jimmy Carter visited the Middle East in an effort to jump-start Arab/Israeli peace talks. One stop on his itinerary was a visit with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. “We asked about Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev,” Carter reported, referring to the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by the terrorist army Hezbollah. Assad assured America’s terminally naive former president that he had no idea where the two soldiers could be.

 

The incident leading to the kidnappings began in July of 2006, when Hezbollah terrorists rocketed Israeli towns near the border with Lebanon. Two Humvees carrying seven Israeli soldiers came under attack. Two soldiers were wounded, three killed and two others were captured by the terrorists and taken into occupied Lebanon. Israel responded with air strikes and a military incursion into southern Lebanon. The conflict ended when a negotiated UN ceasefire resulted in an Israeli withdrawal.

 

The two captured Israeli solders—the very pretexts for the war—were abandoned.

 

A Hezbollah representative told a Middle East newspaper that the Israeli prisoners were being treated humanely because “that’s how we’re treating the prisoners we’re holding now, because that’s in our religion.”

 

On July 17, after two long years, two black coffins containing the remains of Goldwasser and Regev were returned to Israel and their families in exchange for five very-much-alive Hezbollah butchers.

 

The day before the exchange, negotiated by Israel’s government and Hezbollah, the father of Ehud Goldwasser had this to say: “They were kidnapped alive. Hassan Nassrallah [leader of Hezbollah] announced to the world he kidnapped two soldiers alive… If tomorrow he brings them in coffins, it means that he killed them…and if he killed them, I am waiting for him to be punished.”

 

Mr. Goldwasser will be waiting a very long time.

 

One of the lucky killers released by the feeble Israeli Prime Minister Olmert was Samir Kuntar. In 1979 Kuntar and four others infiltrated Israel from Lebanon. The terrorists murdered a police officer and then kidnapped a 28-year-old man and his 4-year-old daughter.

 

Kuntar shot and killed the father in front of his daughter, then tossed the man’s body into the ocean. The killer ended his murder spree by smashing-in the toddler’s head, killing her. On Kuntar’s return to Lebanon, cheering crowds greeted him. “I return from Palestine, only to go back to Palestine,” said Kuntar to the crowd. “I promise families in Palestine that we are coming back, me and my brothers in the resistance.”

 

In the face of Israel’s feeble response to Hezbollah terror, the organized butchers have gained in political power. The Beirut Center for Research and Information conducted a poll which found that 87 percent of Lebanese support Hezbollah’s perpetual war with Israel. Recently, Hezbollah obtained veto power over Lebanon’s governmental decisions.

 

In a recent speech, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama said of the murders, “The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.” What Mr. Obama described above are the classic symptoms attributed to serial killers.

 

Obama has a prescription for dealing with these psychopaths, though: “It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.”  

 

Why didn’t we think of that? If we convert terrorists into social workers and community activists, their bureaucratic workload will overburden them to the point that strapping dynamite to their children or setting off car bombs in market squares becomes just one less unpleasant function to exercise.

 

For Jimmy Carter and many of the simple souls on the political Left (such as the rubes at The New York Times) the only way to deal with mass murders in the Middle East is through the “peace process,” which they view as an end in itself. After sixty-years of uninterrupted bloodletting since Israel’s founding in 1948, there has been plenty of process and precious little peace. Even now, our misguided Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is determined to “jump start” more process.

 

Part of this process was the Bush Administration’s insistence that the Palestinian Authority hold post-Arafat elections. Feeling the PLO no longer represented their genocidal goals, the Palestinian people voted to allow the terrorist group Hamas to govern their corner of Satan’s Little Acre. Then, of course, there are Iran’s overt nuclear program and missile tests.

 

The irony of all this is that the growing assortment of daggers poised at the heart of the Jewish State is the result of “process;” sharp, pointed, decades-long, ­negotiated process.

 

I will say this for Neville Chamberlain—at least he appeased Hitler in a timely manner.

 

The deaths of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev—as well as those Americans who died in Vietnam and are now dying in Iraq—underscore the reckless disregard with which weak peoples and their elected governments treat the defenders of our civilization.

It is one of the great blessings bestowed upon the United States and Israel that there are men—boys really—who are willing to give their lives to defend nations so hard-pressed to muster the will to defend themselves.

How long can the U.S. and Israel behave with such contemptible moral cowardice before they become unworthy of such men?

 

--Mr. Curmudgeon