Wednesday, March 01, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
A death penalty bill for terrorists passed a preliminary hearing in the Knesset today, and we can expect the normal outrage to ensue.
I don't think that such a bill would serve as a disincentive to terror - after all, terrorists expect to be killed during their attacks - but there are a couple of subplots to this story that are more important than the story itself.
One is that the chances that the bill actually passes is fairly low - and that is because the religious parties in the coalition are against the death penalty. As JPost writes:
Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef has ruled that the death penalty violates Halacha. The Shas Party, which represents the Sephardi haredi (ultra-Orthodox) electorate, said it would support the bill only in its preliminary reading at this point, out of coalition obligations, but that it would follow Yosef’s ruling in the future, which is unlikely to change, according to Yishai Cohen, a reporter for the Kikar HaShabbat news site.Supporters of the law, without Shas and UTJ but with Yisrael Beytenu, would likely have 52 votes. Assuming that Shas and UTJ abstain and the opposition parties oppose the bill, there would be 50 votes against it. This means that if either of the haredi parties, or even if any of the two factions that make up UTJ – the Lithuanian Degel Hatorah and the hassidic Agudat Yisrael – vote against the law, it would not have a majority in the Knesset.
The parties that are decried as the most extreme factions in Knesset may be the ones who block the bill. This violates the Western media narrative, where the extremists could never agree with the "progressives."
So they almost certainly will not report that.
Another story is the Palestinian reaction to the bill. See what Hussein al-Sheikh, Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the PLO, tweeted:
He calls all of the potential targets of the death penalty "freedom fighters."
Even though the bill is aimed only at murderers.
Most of the murderers in Israeli prison are members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad or other groups opposed to the PLO. But when given a choice, the leaders of the Palestinians always side with the terrorists against Israel.
Meaning, even the most moderate Palestinian leader is a de facto supporter of terrorism, and considers the most heinous murderers of Jewish children to be "freedom fighters."
Good luck finding a word of criticism against Al Sheikh or any Palestinian leader in the mainstream media. That is a story that must be silenced, at least until antisemitism is so normalized that the Palestinian position supporting terror becomes itself mainstream.
