Here's a prisoner that the US didn't want released

From the Washington Times (h/t My Right Word):

U.S. law enforcement officials expressed outrage over the release from prison of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and vowed to continue efforts to bring to justice the man who ordered the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent.'

Caro Quintero was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the 1985 kidnapping and killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena but a Mexican federal court ordered his release this week saying he had been improperly tried in a federal court for state crimes.

The 60-year-old walked out of a prison in the western state of Jalisco early Friday after serving 28 years of his sentence.

The U.S. Department of Justice said it found the court’s decision “deeply troubling.”

“The Department of Justice, and especially the Drug Enforcement Administration, is extremely disappointed with this result,” it said in a statement.

The Association of Former Federal Narcotics Agents in the United States said it was “outraged” by Caro Quintero’s early release and it blamed corruption within Mexico’s justice system for his early release.

The reason I bring this up, of course, is that it is generally believed that the impending release of over 100 terrorists from Israeli prison in return for "peace talks" was pushed by the Obama administration and reluctantly accepted by the Israeli government to keep good relations with the US. Israel has released prisoners in lopsided swaps before, but never for literally nothing.

It is worth reading this article from Adi Moses, one of the victims of a murderer slated for release, and compare the depravity of freeing scores of similar terrorists against releasing a Mexican drug lord:

You know the story of my family. In 1987 a terrorist threw a firebomb at the car my family was traveling in. He murdered my mother and my brother Tal, and injured my father, my brother, his friend and myself. It is a story you know. But me, you do not really know. I was eight years old when this happened.

While my father was rolling me in the sand to extinguish my burning body, I looked in the direction of our car and watched as my mother burned in front of my eyes.

...In the room next door, my brother Tal is screaming in pain. I call out to him to count sheep with me so he can fall asleep. Three months later, little Tal dies of his wounds. I am seated, all bandaged up, on a chair in the cemetery and I watch as my little brother is buried.

...I am thirty-four years old but the last few days I have returned to being that eight-year-old facing that burning car and waiting for her mother to come out of it. Yitzhak Rabin, who was minister of defense at the time of the attack, promised my dad they would catch the terrorist. And they did. And they sentenced him. To two life sentences and another seventy-two years in prison. And you Cabinet ministers? With the wave of a hand you decided to free him – he who caused all of this story.

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Western money goes to terrorists, not peace

From the Wall Street Journal:

A report by Palestinian Media Watch recently revealed that British taxpayers have been paying salaries to terrorists. It revealed that £3 million every month is paid by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in salaries to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The salaries come from the PA's general budget. That "general budget" is kindly provided by the U.K., among other EU countries.

Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family's way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick "suicide bomber" on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East.

Meanwhile:

The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, where students from Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority learn together, may not open its gates in the next academic year.

Located in the southern kibbuz of Ketura, the institute was established in 1996 as an engine for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace. This is the only place in the Middle East dealing with the common environmental problems of Israel and its neighbors.

“From my point of view it's a severe blow,” explained Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed, director of the institute's Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation. “We won’t have partners on the other side, the environmental problems won't go away and it will be increasingly difficult to solve them.”

The institute, Abu Hamad says, doesn't only promote international cooperation, but peace between peoples as well.

“We need $1.5 million to begin 2013. Some donors promised us hundreds of thousands of dollars over a span of years, but those contributions have shrunk or vanished."

Yes, the terrorists get paid far more every month than a real example of cooperation and peace needs to start its academic year.

No one in the "pro-Palestinian" crowd supports the existence of real peace programs between Israel and the Arabs. Because they aren't "pro-Palestinian" at all - but anti-Israel.

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Both those stories are worth reading in full for other reasons.

The British story notes how Britain's International Development Minister Alan Duncan adamantly refuses to accept the evidence and insists that paying these prisoners - whose payscale increases with the time they are in prison - is really "social welfare."

The Arava story notes that the institute has to hide the fact that it is in Israel when recruiting students from Jordan.

(h/t Ian, Zvi)

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