A news story has not affected me so emotionally in a long time.  I’m not a religious person, but I like to say that I worship at the altar of Justice.  The case of Samir Kuntar is an example of injustice on such a scale as to infuriate me.  I find myself physically affected, as if I were watching a man attack a woman on the street and my body is preparing to launch into attack mode.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the facts of the case, the video below does a good job of summarizing, as does this quote from Mona Charen:

In 1979, as a 16-year-old, he and four others had traveled to northern Israel by boat from Lebanon and come ashore in the seaside town of Nahariya. At midnight, Smadar Haran recalled, they burst into her apartment building. Peering out to see what the noise was, Smadar, mother of two, slammed shut her apartment door when she saw the terrorists—but too late. Kuntar had glimpsed her. Her husband, Danny, helped Smadar and their younger daughter, 2-year-old Yael, to squeeze into a crawl space above the bedroom.

Smadar wrote later, “I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades.” As police began to arrive, Kuntar and the others dragged Danny and 4-year-old Einat down to the beach. With Einat watching, Kuntar shot Danny in the head and then threw his body into the surf. Kuntar then repeatedly smashed Einat’s head against a rock with his rifle butt, killing her, too. Yael did not survive the attack either. In an effort to keep the baby from crying and betraying their hiding place, Smadar had accidentally suffocated her.

This absolute monster has now been released in exchange for the mutilated bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.  So let’s think about it.  We take into custody a sick excuse for a human being, a man who takes pride in the fact that he repeatedly bashed in the head of a 4-year old girl with the butt of a rifle, and we clothe him and feed him and provide him with medical and dental care.  Meanwhile, the monsters of Hezbollah capture two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border terrorist attack (in which 3 were killed and 2 others hurt), and commit unspeakable acts upon these men, finally mutilating their bodies either before or after they were dead.

And what happens next?  We watch as the Regev and Goldwasser families are shattered as they discover on the day of the exchange that their sons are dead, while Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanon hold rallies welcoming this human debris back home.

If that doesn’t produce an emotional response from you, you have no sense of justice whatsoever.