“I am delighted with this welcoming, I thank President Mahmoud Abbas and the Prisoners Ministry,” said Asrar Samarin, one of the freshly released. “They made a promise and they kept to it.”
His comrades said similar things to each of the dozens of journalists who crowded them. The lucky ones managed to get away quickly in cars and head home. Other remained in the Muqata as crowds crushed against the stage.
At about 2:15 a.m. the Muqata’s courtyard emptied. Then the sound of celebratory shooting could be heard in the streets of Ramallah, at first just single shots, then bursts of automatic fire.
The PA may have imposed a ban on shooting at celebrations, but when it comes to prisoner releases, it’s a whole different ballgame.
At the start of Avi Issacharoff’s piece he does manage to find the father of one of the releasees who says his son regrets what he did (murder a Jew) and says he won’t do it again. That’s nice. But when everyone else is jumping for joy and celebrating both the release of these people and what they did, how can we ever truly trust them?
It’s a leadership issue. They are lead by monsters. Cut the leadership out and perhaps we’d all have a chance.
The piece I wrote at The Times of Israel the last time we released murderers is still valid:
Why do we think people who daily teach their children to hate, and that it is their religiously mandated birth rite to force Jews from all of Israel can make peace with us?
Why do we prostitute our morals and our principles to appease a body of world opinion that is just looking for the next excuse to look the other way while Jews are slaughtered again?
No. Enough. As we say in Hebrew: ??.
