Boteach calls for Death Penalty in Israel

The death penalty for terrorists -Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

It is time that we articulate what few wish to, namely, that Israel must finally institute a death penalty for convicted terrorists.

To be sure, human life is of infinite value and every human being is equally a child of God. No country upholds this statute more than Israel, which is why it is prepared to set killers free just to retrieve the bodies of its fallen soldiers. Israel could have defeated Hizbullah and Hamas with ease had it not always limited its overwhelming firepower to protect innocent civilians. A country this virtuous naturally balks from putting anyone, even terrorists, to death.

But there exist those fiends whose crimes are so heinous that they have erased the image of God from their countenance and have forfeited any reasonable right to walk God's earth. Worse, keeping terrorists alive in prison just invites further kidnappings of innocent civilians and soldiers who are hunted down by Hamas and Hizbullah to exchange for their terrorist brothers.

[H]umanitarian considerations do not, cannot, apply to terrorists like Kuntar who infiltrate a country looking to dash children's brains against rocks. And keeping them alive once they are caught simply draws a bull's-eye on countless other innocent civilians who become magnets for trade.

Indeed, keeping terrorist mass-murderers alive in prison bespeaks a contempt for life, demonstrating as it does that civil societies lack the moral courage to draw a line and declare that the lives of mass murderers, after a fair and impartial trial, will always be forfeit.

There are times when a country must temporarily violate a principle to ensure it is upheld. Police cars speed to catch those who themselves speed on highways, thereby endangering other motorists. Surgeons cut open people's chests with knives to save their blocked arteries and stopped hearts. And just governments must sometimes take the lives of unrepentant terrorist mass-murderers to protect and uphold the infinite value of human life.
[Jerusalem Post]