Topic: Decline of the West
The anti-Semitic conspiracy mongers who run around insisting that the sinister Jews secretly control US foreign policy have some explaining to do. Specifically, they need to explain how it is that the all-powerful Zionists and their American sock puppets have not succeeded in getting Jonathan Pollard released from prison.
Pollard, you will recall, is an American Jew and former employee of the US Naval Intelligence Command who was arrested for spying on behalf on behalf of Israel in 1986. Though he and the government concluded a plea agreement by which Pollard would plead guilty to one count of espionage, a crime carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison. He agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation and damage assessment of the affair in the expectation of a reduced sentence. But this plea agreement fell apart, the government alleging that Pollard had violated its nondisclosure provision. Accordingly he was given a life sentence and has been behind bars, in solitary confinement for much of the time, for the past twenty-seven years.
The Pollard case became a cause célèbre. Many people in both Israel and the United States condemned the harsh sentence, pointing out that in other cases where the espionage benefitted a friendly foreign power, the government demonstrated considerable leniency. The State of Israel, while denying until 1998 that Pollard was an officially recruited intelligence asset, has pressed repeatedly for his release. In 1995 he was actually granted Israeli citizenship in anticipation of a release deal that later fell apart. On the other hand, many Americans—not all of them enemies of Israel or anti-Semites— have opposed Pollard’s release, arguing that espionage is a serious crime requiring serious punishment and noting that Pollard and his wife violated the terms of the original plea agreement.
The latest twist in the Pollard case is the work of the Obama Administration. In a desperate bid to get the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks off square one, Secretary of State John Kerry floated a deal by which Pollard would be released in exchange for Israel’s release of several hundred detained Palestinians, including many who were convicted of murderous terrorism. Probably this idea was unwelcome to the Israeli government but typically it was the Palestinians who torpedoed it.
There’s not much doubt that the politics of his case explain why Jonathan Pollard is still behind bars. The US government is highly sensitive to the incendiary charge that Israel controls US foreign policy—a belief shared by various haters of Israel and Jew bashers on both the Left and the Right. Moreover, the US State Department and the US intelligence community have a hard time seeing why they should do Israel a favor in this instance—an understandable attitude. And even if one leaves political considerations aside there remains the fact that Pollard is guilty by his own admission of a serious crime against the United States of America.
Some of Pollard’s partisans have portrayed him as a hero: misguided, perhaps, but a man with his heart in the right place. Not only is this wrong as a matter of fact but it’s faulty from a public-relations standpoint. Though most Americans view Israel favorably, few have sympathy for a man they regard, colloquially, as a traitor. The argument that justice should be tempered with mercy is well and good. The claim that Pollard’s good intentions somehow trumped his clear duty to the United States is one that average Americans, perhaps not intimately familiar with the particulars of his case, summarily reject. And rightly so.
As for the anti-Semites and Jew bashers, no doubt they’ve spun some absurdly convoluted conspiracy theory to explain the fact, inconvenient to them, that despite Israel’s supposed control of the US government, Jonathan Pollard is still in prison. Yes, those wily Zionists may pretend that they want him released but in reality the Jew bankers who control the Federal Reserve and the City of London…well, you know.
My own view is that Pollard put himself in this trick bag. Nobody twisted his arm and forced him to betray America's secrets to a foreign power. That he spied for Israel rather than China or the USSR only slightly mitigates his guilt. Yes, his sentence was harsh, perhaps unduly so. But life is often unfair and if Pollard had honored his oath and kept faith with his country he’d be a free man today. He’ll be eligible for parole next year, at which time I believe Pollard should be released. By then he will have been imprisoned for nearly thirty years—condign punishment for a weighty crime. Therefore let justice be tempered with mercy. Let Jonathan Pollard go, I say, and let us close the book on this sad and painful case.