Crocodile Tears for Gilad

On 28 August it was the 23^rd birthday of Gilad Shalit, the young Israeli soldier who was captured from inside Israel on 25 June 2006 and has since been held captive by Hamas without any of the rights normally accorded to prisoners of war.
Seth Freedman wrote about Gilad on CIF yesterday. The line he took is entirely predictable: Israel had it coming:

Whether or not efforts are successful to bring Shalit home alive and well, future kidnappings will only be prevented once and for all when Palestinian militants are denied the fuel for their fundamentalist fires. If Israel’s behaviour is whiter than white, it will be far harder for Palestinian radicals to justify their own illegal acts of war; until then, there will be more Gilad Shalits snatched ….

Here at CifWatch we had to hold our noses when we read Seth Freedman’s article. For you don’t have to look very hard to see that he does nothing to oppose the kind of people (here we call them terrorists, unlike CIF and the BBC where they are ‘militants’) who captured Shalit. In fact he opens the door to terrorism. Only a few days ago he whitewashed Fatah. And he regularly advocates the end of the Jewish State¹ – how many Israelis (Jews and non-Jews alike) would have to die in the Armageddon that would be needed to achieve that?
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¹Eg here is what he wrote on 26 June 2008: “but surely if there was no zionism, there’d be no objection to letting the palestinians be part of the future state, and hence they’d not be “the same battered Palestinian population on its doorstep”. once you remove zionism from the equation, the rest of the racist policies currently in place ought to collapse like a house of cards, and the country becomes a democratic state for all its citizens.”