Israel Matzav: I'm apologizing to President Obama, and Jonathan Tobin should too

Sunday, August 04, 2013

I'm apologizing to President Obama, and Jonathan Tobin should too

Last week, I blogged a brilliant piece by Jonathan Tobin, in which he took President Obama to task for asking Israel to release terrorists in exchange for nothing, which is something that Obama obviously would never do himself.

The fact is the United States would never consider such a request for a minute, no matter the diplomatic gains to be garnered from that sort of concession elsewhere in the globe. The American position is, as the Obama administration likes to put it, that anyone who attacks U.S. citizens will be chased down to the ends of the earth and either be snuffed by a drone attack that has the personal approval of the commander in chief or be locked away for good if they are captured.

Imagine the response from the 9/11 families or the survivors of any terror attack to the suggestion that the killers of their relatives be released. Would it be much different than those of Israelis as reported by the New York Times?

Well, yeah. Except that two days later, Obama freed five Taliban terrorists from Guantanamo in exchange for the Taliban opening 'talks' with the United States. Obama 'forgot' to ask for the return of an American soldier being held hostage by the Taliban at the same time.

The big Taliban jailbreak in Pakistan wasn’t the only major one. And like the Pakistani one, it was also an inside job.

Without much publicity or official announcements, the Unites States released five Guantanamo Bay detainees as a nod of willingness to open peace talks in Afghanistan. After officials in Kabul expressed desire for negotiations, the Obama administration released five members of the Taliban who were detained at the US detention center.

A top US official said that the prisoners were released under the condition that they will not engage in any violent activity.
That should work out well. As Zip points out, the Taliban had earlier offered to exchange them for a captured American soldier.

The Afghan Taliban have offered to hand over a US soldier held captive since 2009 in exchange for five of their own currently incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

It came as the US was trying to save peace talks with the Taliban which have been held up following angry complaints by Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

So I apologize to President Obama. Maybe he's not such a hypocrite at all. After all, he does the same thing that he asks us to do - release terrorist murderers in exchange for 'talks.' And just like our prison system, he gets a meaningless commitment that the terrorists won't engage in any violent activity. (Does our prison service even bother with that anymore?).

Granted, the Taliban are being sent 7,000 miles away from the US, while the terrorists we release are being sent about seven kilometers away, but why quibble over that small point? I apologize, and Jonathan Tobin, you should too.

What could go wrong?

Labels: al-Qaeda, Barack Hussein Obama, hypocrisy, Islamic terrorism, Jonathan Tobin, Palestinian terrorists, Taliban