A pillar of moderation

Yesterday, writing about the speculation surrounding a possible prisoner release to gain the freedom of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, Backspin quoted, Dan Meridor:

“Those who don’t know can talk,” Dan Meridor, Israel’s intelligence minister, said Monday on state radio. “Those who know should keep silent.”

Now the NY Times reports that PM Netanyahu is playing down talks of an imminent deal.

Seeking to lower expectations of an imminent deal with the Islamic group Hamas to exchange a captured Israeli soldier for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Tuesday that no agreement had yet been reached.

“There is still no deal, and I do not know if there will be one,” Mr. Netanyahu said as he toured the national police headquarters here.

What’s very interesting about this article though are the statements of Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.

Reflecting the awkwardness that a deal for Sergeant Shalit might pose for the Abbas government, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister and a political independent, made no direct mention of it in a speech on Tuesday at an international conference in the West Bank town of Jericho on the rights of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Yet he called for the “immediate release” of “pillars” of the prisoner population like Mr. Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat, a leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was convicted of ordering the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001. And repeating a point often made by Mr. Abbas, Mr. Fayyad said there would be no final agreement with Israel until all Palestinian prisoners were freed.

First of all the so-called sensitivity of the prisoner issue for the Palestinians (referenced elsewhere in the article) is bogus. Prisoner releases were part of Oslo as a way of acknowledging the changed nature of the PLO. People who were jailed for political activities in support of the PLO were to be released because since the PLO was presumed to have given up terrorism (not true, but the charade was maintained) Israel declared that it was no longer an illegal organization. How could Israel keep people working for a legal organization in jail?

But now most Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are there not merely for political activity, but terrorism or aiding and abetting terrorism. These are people who by their actions rejected the idea of coexistence with Israel. For the PA to make an issue of their release shows the official rejection of the basic elements of coexistence by even the “moderate” Palestinian leadership.

Fayyad made this worse in two ways. It’s one thing to tell his own constituents that all prisoners must be released, but he told this to an international conference. I doubt that anyone at the conference raised an objection.

Worse yet, is that he called Barghouti and Saadat “pillars.” These guys are murderers. And the moderate Western educated Prime Minister of the Palestinians lauds them. What a pillar of moderation.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.