JERUSALEM (AP) — A 12-year-old Palestinian girl who was imprisoned after she confessed to planning a stabbing attack in a West Bank settlement will be released early, Israel's prison service said Monday, capping a saga that drew attention to the dual legal system in the West Bank.... An amateur video clip shown on Israeli TV showed the resident asking the girl, who was wearing her school uniform, whether she had come to kill Jews, and she said yes. She later pleaded guilty to attempted manslaughter in a plea bargain and was sentenced to 4½ months in prison.Even more than the facile reporting that details Palestinian knife attacks in which understandably concerned Israelis shoot the attackers dead (tally since October 2015: 160 Palestinians; 26 Israelis ... who in his right or even enraged mind brings a knife to a gun fight?) ... even more than the glib gobbling of aggrieved Israeli pablum ... is the worldwide willingness to arrest, incarcerate, or torture people who are allegedly PLANNING one kind of mayhem or another.
The same stuff is happening in my country, so I am far from willing to claim the high moral ground: People who plan or conceive of bad things are open to arrest or worse.
Lord, I do hope the government doesn't find a way into my brain and its imaginative activities! I realize I probably deserve to be locked up in order to assure the safety of a society made edgy by those who claim to want to protect its citizens ... but the dictatorship potential is really more than I can stomach easily.
If you are planning something naughty ....
And the U.S. complains about the rigidities of the Islamic State.
"A Singer Must Die"
ReplyDeleteNow the courtroom is quiet, but who will confess.
Is it true you betrayed us? The answer is Yes.
Then read me the list of the crimes that are mine,
I will ask for the mercy that you love to decline.
And all the ladies go moist, and the judge has no choice,
a singer must die for the lie in his voice.
And I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty,
you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty.
Your vision is right, my vision is wrong,
I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song.
Oh, the night it is thick, my defenses are hid
in the clothes of a woman I would like to forgive,
in the rings of her silk, in the hinge of her thighs,
where I have to go begging in beauty's disguise.
Oh goodnight, goodnight, my night after night,
my night after night, after night, after night, after night, after night.
I am so afraid that I listen to you,
your sun glassed protectors they do that to you.
It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace,
their knee in your balls and their fist in your face.
Yes and long live the state by whoever it's made,
sir, I didn't see nothing, I was just getting home late.
Leonard Cohen