http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303734204577466304136240464.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
THIS IS RATHER MEAN SPIRITED AND MISSES ONE MAJOR ISSUE, NAMELY THE LENGTH AND HARSHNESS OF THE SENTENCE WHILE OTHER FAR MORE DANGEROUS SPIES HAVE WALKED FREE. HOWEVER, POLLARD’S SPYING WAS INDEFENSIBLE AND INEXCUSABLE AND FOR ME HE IS NOT A HERO. REMEMBER THAT MANY SPIES FOR THE SOVIET UNION ALSO SPIED FOR WHAT WAS THEN AN ALLY NATION. EFFORTS TO MAKE HIM AN ISRAELI NATIONAL HERO ARE WRONG, AND EFFORTS TO PIN HIS RELEASE TO IMPLEMENTING A TWO STATE SOLUTION ARE PIG HEADED AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE……RSK
The Mendacious Movement to Free a Convicted Spy
Pretending that Jonathan Pollard is a martyr makes a mockery of Israel.
“But the Israeli peace camp not only wants the president to force Israel out of the territories and to shrink the Jewish stake in Jerusalem. It also wants Mr. Obama to cleanse Zion of the shame of spying on its patron and its single solitary true friend in the world. Well, he may just do that—not now, not yet, but after the elections if he wins them—allowing Shimon Peres the favor of bringing home the kosher bacon. And then Mr. Obama would be in a position to demand Israeli withdrawal to the fatuous 1949 lines, borders that Mr. Peres sees as appropriate for the “new Middle East” of his feverish imagination.”
There is no end in sight for the campaign to persuade President Obama to let convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard go free. It is also almost impossible to recall the beginnings of this campaign. But it started with his life sentence. All that one can say is that the agitation, a phobic mixture of fantasies of Pollard’s innocence and imaginings of anti-Semitic motives on the part of an indeterminate officialdom, has been relentless—sometimes more noisy, sometimes less, but relentless.
All kinds of comparisons are being made. One is to the great democrat, Natan Sharansky, who was kept in the Siberian gulag for 13 years and released because there was no evidence at all of his espionage against the Soviet Union. His dignified supporters, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were not hysterics, and the struggle for this particular “prisoner of Zion” was the cutting edge of the whole “let my people go” campaign that ultimately brought a million Jews from their Russian internment to Israel. One more factor: Ronald Reagan made Mr. Sharansky his own cause, like bringing down the wall of shame in Berlin.