A German news agency has reported that Hezbollah men have executed eighteen Lebanese accused of spying for Israel. Lebanon has a judicial process, but it was not involved. Hezbollah alone directed and carried out the process of putting these eighteen to death. I have no idea if any of them were spies for Israel, but it seems most unlikely. Eighteen? All caught at work in the short time-frame of the fighting? And how come Hezbollah is allowed to take what here is laughably called the law into its own hands? My suspicion is that the eighteen merely expressed what many, even most, Lebanese think but dare not say, that Hizbollah has brought calamity down on the country, and is likely to make matters even worse in the future. But just imagine the scene – those eighteen dragged out to the firing squad with no hope of any fair hearing. And then the gunfire and the blood-stained corpses.
Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian terror group paid for by Iran, has copied this example. In a public square in the West Bank town of Jenin, five of their gunmen brought out for execution a twenty-two-year-old by the name of Bassam Malah, also accused of being an Israeli spy. Malah is said to have been an Israeli Arab from Umm al-Fahm, the largest Arab town in Israel. Again I have no idea if he was a spy, and there is presumably no means of ever knowing the truth. If he was, who knows what pressures were on him that might cause mitigating circumstances? Anyhow they shot him dead without a proper trial, effectively an act of plain murder. A crowd said to number several hundred was watching, and they shouted the Islamist war-cry of “Allahu akhbar” or God is the greatest, at the moment of execution. A photograph on the Internet shows the victim dead, face down on some sort of sheeting, hands tied behind his back. At first I felt an overwhelming shock of horror that human beings could believe that barbarity of the kind could possibly be justice. But it is hate that has made them so primitive, and they ought to be pitied for it, because they are destroying themselves.