RED POLLARD: Ralph Peters has a very brave column in the New York Post arguing against the release of Jonathan Pollard, the American spy convicted of selling secrets to Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The most admirable part of the piece is that Peters (who I'm assuming from his name is not Jewish) makes several arguments that, many will wrongly argue, only a Jew should be making. For instance, rather than buy the argument that Pollard was a "Jew first and American second," he opines that Pollard betrayed both his country and his co-religionists. Then there's this:
Some American Jews may not understand what a precarious time this is beyond Manhattan's bridges and tunnels. The appearance that a number of appointees at the upper reaches of the Pentagon allow their loyalty to Israel to excessively influence American foreign policy decisions does not play well in the hinterlands.
The author's credentials give him the credibility to say such things- Peters, a former military intelligence officer, is a hawk (really, an ally of those very "appointees")who has long been an ardent supporter of both the US and Israel, and has gone out on a limb in favor of Israel enough times that we know he's no anti-Semite.
The Pollard case is sort of a more serious, geopolitical version of the Pete Rose question- a man is serving a "life sentence" that some consider unjust- and while no one that I know of has called for the death penalty for The Hit King (as Peters has for Pollard), I feel Pollard is even more deserving of his present fate than Rose is of his.
As Peters says, "Pollard needs to spend next year in prison, not in Jerusalem."