The Death Penalty for Terrorists & Other Assassins

by Sha’i ben-Tekoa

Before the savagery of Tishrei 22, 5784, a.k.a. October 7, 2023, there were some 500 gentile Jew-killers behind bars in Israel sentenced to life imprisonment, provided with a healthy diet, leisure time, free medical care. How many are there now after Israel agreed to give hundreds of them the Yahya Sinwar treatment by letting them go free to murder Jews again, only Israel’s Prison Service knows for sure.

Israel saved Sinwar’s life at Jewish state expense by removing a brain tumor and then released him to orchestrate the horrors of that satanic Sabbath/Simchat Torah orgy of murder, rape, and mutilation. This behavior is certainly no shining example of Israel being a “light to the nations,” and that too is for sure.

Liberal opponents in the West of the death penalty flatter themselves for their high-minded compassion for human life. They judge capital punishment as retrograde [“Killing is wrong at all times, and executing the murderer does nothing to restore his victim to life…”] when a sober analysis of this moral calculus exposes its essentially rotten underbelly.

That nightmare of a day — because Israel was housing thousands of Arab terrorists — their soulmates in Hamas justified their atrocities as attempts to rescue brother “freedom fighters”-in-arms from the hands of the evil Jews.

But if Israel had executed all these assassins after their crimes, their comrades would have had no excuse for their psychopathic jamboree. If Israel had let Sinwar die of his tumor, there might not have been a mini-holocaust on Tishrei 22.

 As official Israel’s leading politicians and military experts have commonly been post-religious people, they have spurned the Jewish ethic (Genesis 9:6) that murderers be killed by other men.

 It was secular Zionists who created the State, whose role models were 19^th century men of the European Enlightenment who had jettisoned Christianity and its Bible, whose first two-thirds propagate Jewish ethics and morality, including capital punishment.

 Following them, Israel also opposes capital punishment, the degenerate liberal fashion in the gentile world, when a truly Jewish ethical system sees in the institution of capital punishment a blessed milestone in human history.

G-d instituted this punishment after the Great Flood, after he had turned the whole world into a gigantic ritual bath to cleanse it of man’s worst sin called hamas, man’s unjustifiable violence against other men.

Before the Flood, men were like animals in their aggression against one another because there was no law and order, and it is logical to assume that G-d called for capital punishment after the Flood executed by men in this verse because before the Flood, there was no law and order, no guilt, no consequence for murder.

The Torah teaches that G-d made man of clay like a potter so that every man is the handiwork of the great Potter in the sky, so to murder another man is to destroy the handiwork of G-d Himself. And for that, the murderer forfeits his life and the right to continue living in the beautiful world G-d gave him.

It is also unnecessary to “justify” capital punishment as a deterrent, when that is less about justice than the science of statistical probability deterring murder in the future, which arguably is irrelevant. If Mr. A murders Mr. B, you do not execute Mr. A for the probability it may in the future deter a hypothetical Mr. C from murdering a hypothetical Mr. D.

 No, you do execute Mr. A because he murdered Mr. B. Period. Mr. C and Mr. D have nothing to do with what A did to B.

And as for another of Israel’s national sins which is related to this unJewish behavior: the flight from the Jewish people’s true identity as a “kingdom of priests” and is not hungry for the love of its antediluvian, sadistic, Ishmaelitic neighbors.

Consider Israel’s most long-preferred prime minister Binyamin ben Bentzion Netanyahu who published a book in 1993 entitled in English, A Place Among the Nations which is the antithesis of the Torah prophesy in Numbers 22 uttered by the gentile prophet Balaam that this will be “a people that dwells alone.”

The Prime Minister in his autobiography calls himself a secular man, and as such is not tethered to that Jewish religious concept. He wants acceptance, wants Israel to be treated as just like one of the nations.

In 1993, this writer saw an interview on American TV with Shimon Peres saying, “The purpose of Zionism was the normalization of the situation of the Jewish people.” Same thing. Despite the political differences between left-wing and rightwing Zionists, both shared the vision of a future state of non-religious Jews.

Secular Zionist ideology thus led inexorably to aspiring to friendly relations with the Arabs in the vicinity. Israeli policy toward the Arabs has always been a form of hoped-for behavior modification; be nice to the Arabs and they will become friendly.

 Some of the DNA of this ideology was on display and tragically so on 10-7 when the very kibbutzniks in the Gaza border communities had been so nice to the people in Gaza thinking this would change them but then got the worst of their insane violence. They had given Gazans work, treated them with respect, did favors for them. And what they got in return was an bacchanal of horror and cruelty beyond imagination.

In a nutshell, the secular Zionists thought that a new Jewish identity, the New Jew, would have no religion, only a normal secular, national identity, just like the goyim in Europe.

Unfortunately, this posture blocks Israelis from seeing the enemy who is wholly religious in identity and motivation. The “Palestinian” identity was the invention of Egypt’s Nasser in 1959, later joined in fostering this lie by the traitorous Israeli Left. The Oslo mastermind, Yossi Beilin, often said that if Israelis define the conflict as religious, there can be no peace, so let’s call it a nationalist, political conflict amenable to negotiations and compromise.

 But Israel’s is not fighting a normal war between nations; it is under attack by the Jihad, which is Islam’s war against all infidel religions, starting with Judaism.

Israel’s latest war fought on seven fronts had nothing to do with the absence of a state for millions of Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” when there is nothing Palestinian about them. The “Palestinian” identity is a verbal hologram, which is something that looks like it is there when it really is not.

 This a religious war, whether secular Israelis, like our prime minister and military and intel people, like it or not.

 And no amount of deal-making and commerce envisioned by the adherents of the fanciful Abraham Accords is going to change that.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.