How Long Do You Have To Pay For The Murder Of A Child?

Wow, this is indeed an emotional subject; maybe too much for a blog comment to address but I'll try.

Let's consider a few mitigating factors that I believe shed some much-needed context upon this scenario:

• Kantar was 16-years old at the time of the raid, a member of a 4-person guerilla raid organized by the PLF.
• The raid was an effort of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Kantar's homeland: Lebanon.
• In letters smuggled out of the Israeli prison, Kandar admitted being part of the raid but denied killing any civilians.
  (source: NPR broadcast).

Compare those contextual details to the U.S. Marines who killed 15 innocent civilians in Haditha back in November 2005:

At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in the Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24 Iraqi civilians.

The unit that arrived in the farming town of Haditha found babies, women and children shot in the head and chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls, ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to death certificates issued later.

The next day, Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman in Iraq, released a terse statement: Fifteen Iraqis "were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately after the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."

I'm not justifying Kantar but in comparison to the Haditha incident, it seems rather tame both in scope as well as in motive/intent.

Wow, this is indeed an emotional subject; maybe too much for a blog comment to address but I'll try.

Let's consider a few mitigating factors that I believe shed some much-needed context upon this scenario:

• Kantar was 16-years old at the time of the raid, a member of a 4-person guerilla raid organized by the PLF.
• The raid was an effort of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Kantar's homeland: Lebanon.
• In letters smuggled out of the Israeli prison, Kandar admitted being part of the raid but denied killing any civilians.
  (source: NPR broadcast).

Compare those contextual details to the U.S. Marines who killed 15 innocent civilians in Haditha back in November 2005:

At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in the Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24 Iraqi civilians.

The unit that arrived in the farming town of Haditha found babies, women and children shot in the head and chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls, ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to death certificates issued later.

The next day, Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman in Iraq, released a terse statement: Fifteen Iraqis "were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately after the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."

I'm not justifying Kantar but in comparison to the Haditha incident, it seems rather tame both in scope as well as in motive/intent.

I agree, the situation in Haditha is bad, probably worse, and in that case I too support locking up the Marines involved forever. It's just not called for. Period. I understand they get frustrated, they get angry, and so on...so what.

Now, as far as Kantar is concerned, I don't consider his age during the raid to be a mitigating factor, nor his protestations via letters. Millions of criminals around the world claim they "didn't do it". And resistance by killing a four-year-old little girl is still horrible. I have no issue with resistance movements that target the military of the invading force, as long as they limit their actions to the military, but murdering children is just...WRONG.