King Abdullah II was urged on Sunday to pardon a Jordanian soldier who is serving a life sentence for killing seven Israeli schoolgirls in 1997.It remains to be explained exactly what kind of people would become happy that a mass murderer is freed in their country.
"After around 12 years in prison, Ahmad Dakamseh deserves your majesty's special pardon," a group of 70 Islamists, unionists, lawyers, human rights activists and former officials said in a signed letter to the king.
In March 1997, Dakamseh fired an automatic weapon at a group of Israeli schoolgirls as they visited Baqura, a scenic peninsula on the Jordan River near the Israeli border, killing seven and wounded five others as well as a teacher.
The attack came almost three years after Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty, only the second between an Arab country and the Jewish state.
"Following the recent release of Arab prisoners, we hope to see Dakamseh free again," they said, referring to Israel's prisoner swap with Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group last week.
The signatories Islamic Action Front secretary general Zaki Bani Rsheid, former prime minister and intelligence department director Ahmad Obeidat, Jordan Bar Association head Saleh Armouti, and Hani Dahleh, president of the Arab Human Rights Organisation.
"The current political stage requires a policy that would make people happy and ease their socio-economic and political pressures. Pardoning Dakamseh will have a great effect on people," the letter said.
Notice that the president of the Arab Human Rights Organization is one of the people urging the release of this murderer. Apparently, the "human rights" of Arab murderers to walk around free is more important than the rights of Jewish schoolgirls to live.
Let's hope that King Abdullah will remain as aghast at this crime as his father was and let the killer rot. At the time, King Hussein went to Israel to pay his condolences to the families and truly condemned this act, not like the fake "condemnations" that we are used to hearing from Palestinian Arab leaders.
On the other hand, Daqamesh's mother defended him on Al Jazeera TV:
"I am proud of my son, and I hold my head high. My son did a heroic deed and has pleased Allah and his own conscience. My son lifts my head and the head of the entire Arab and Islamic nation. I am proud of any Muslim who does what Ahmad did. I hope that I am not saying something wrong. When my son went to prison, they asked him: 'Ahmad, do you regret it?' He answered: 'I have no regrets.' He treated everyone to coffee, honored all the other prisoners, and said: The only thing that I am angry about is the gun, which did not work properly. Otherwise I would have killed all of the passengers on the bus."Although at his trial, his mother was quite willing to say something different in order to get him a lighter sentence: "I know my son is mentally ill because he used to have fits of rage and faint."
At least one terror group has named itself after Daqamesh, showing yet again that even the most heinous murderers of Jews are heroes in some Arab quarters.