Olmert on Kidnapped Soldiers: Better for the Two to Remain Captive Than for Other Soldiers to Die

PM’s Remarks Anger Soldiers’ Families

Full Text;

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert should talk less and do more to secure the release of kidnapped IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, Goldwasser’s mother, Miki, told Army Radio on Tuesday morning.

On Monday, Olmert told a group of high school students that Israel had pulled out of this summer’s Lebanon war despite the fact that Goldwasser and Regev had not been rescued in order to save other soldiers’ lives.

If Goldwasser and Regev were still alive, Olmert said, it was better for them to remain captive “a little while longer” than for other soldiers to die in an attempt to rescue them.

“[Olmert] spoke without weighing his remarks,” Miki Goldwasser said, adding that the prime minister’s manner of expression was well-known.

Eldad Regev’s father, Benny, said that it was wrong of Olmert to “making light” of the fact that his son and Goldwasser were still held hostage.

“It wasn’t right to talk about [their captivity] as ‘one day more or less’,” Regev told Army Radio.

Commentary;

This instance serves as a paradigm of how far the political leaders of Israel have fallen.

This author is 58 years old and can recall numerous citings of daring operations, such as the rescue at Entebbe some 30 years ago in 1976, which freed 103 Jewish captives, or the 1981 bombing of the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor.

But today, the Olmert regime and Israel’s governmental leaders appear to consider Jewish lives, the lives of IDF soldiers expendable, apparently other considerations are transcendent over Jewish civilian or military lives. Thus comes Olmert’s distorted comment to the high school students,the very same students who will be subjected to Yuli Tamir’s textbook brainwashing concerning Israel’s borders; “it was better for them to remain captive ‘a little while longer’ than for other soldiers to die in an attempt to rescue them.”

But in Torah, we learn in Sefer Bamidbar, in Perek 21, posukim 1-3 Parsha Chukat, that when the Canaanite King of Arad (some say that it was Amalekim speaking in the Canaanite tongue) attacked the Jews and took a captive, the Jews prayed to Hashem and then went to war to recover the Jewish captive. It is from here and other citings that we learn about Pidyon Shvuyim (The Redemption of Captives). It’s a shame that either Mr. Regev didn’t bring a Torah basis behind his displeasure with Olmert’s statement or that the Jerusalem Post staff person writing the above article didn’t see fit to include it.

But this generation’s regime and political hacks of Israel care only for their own self-perpetuation and continuance of political power and know not and give not an instant’s thought to the Mitzvah of Pidyon Shvuyim, once a precept upon which the IDF was built. Isn’t it time that they were put out of power? MB