Kickin' it with Samir Kuntar

Samir Kuntar is sitting under a photo of himself standing next to Hassan Nasrallah and telling friends that he almost didn't come home.

As Israel was getting ready to free Kuntar last Wednesday, the Lebanese militant told guards that he didn't want to walk to freedom in a prison uniform.

When the Israeli guards refused, Kuntar said he told them to call off the deal.

"I've kept my dignity for 30 years," Kuntar said he told his jailers, "I'm not going to give it up in the last half hour."

The standoff lasted until the guards called their superiors, who eventually agreed to let Kuntar go free in civilian clothes.

Once free after nearly 30 years, Kuntar traded the civilian clothes for military fatigues and delivered a defiant threat to return to his militant mission.

In Israel, Kuntar is seen as an unrepentant child killer.

Here in his Druze village in the cool pine mountains outside Beirut, he is a hero.

"When he was little, he used to be humble with the spirit of a fighter," said a woman who works at the corner market near Kuntar's family home. "When he came out, he was the same way. He fought for his cause. He was patriotic."

Though Israel recently released long-secret court records with eyewitness testimony and medical reports to support Kuntar's conviction for shooting an Israeli dad in front of his daughter and then smashing the 4-year-old girl's head with his rifle butt, Kuntar denies killing either one.

From his 1980 trial to to this day, Kuntar has said that the two were killed by Israeli bullets in a firefight as he tried to flee. Kuntar contends that he meant to take hostages in an attack that went awry.

"This was a military operation," says Kuntar's younger brother, Bassam, who led a long PR campaign to free Samir. "We have to accept the reality of what happened, but we will never accept that this operation was aimed at children."

Asked if he has any regrets, even if he didn't kill the little girl, Samir Kuntar simply laughs.

"That's a funny question," Kuntar says in his first interview with an American newspaper reporter after nearly 30 years behind bars.

There is little remorse for the innocent Israeli lives lost in the notorious attack.

Instead, Kuntar says he is ready to go back and fight Israel.

Asked if he hopes to play a strategic role akin to Imad Mughnieyh, the Hezbollah mastermind killed by a car bomb in Damascus earlier this year, Kuntar again laughs.

"God willing," he says.

The jubilant reception Kuntar has received at home has shocked and disgusted Israelis who can't understand how Lebanon can honor a convicted child killer.

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Beirut-based political analyst and Hezbollah specialist, said people here simply don't accept Israel's version of events.

"I don't think all Lebanese believe he actually killed the child," she said.

For others, there is a certain callousness in their replies.

"How come they have the right to feel sad for one or three people when they killed thousands in the south," said the woman in the market, who criticized Israel for bombing Lebanon during the 2006 war in a 34-day campaign that killed 1,200 Lebanese citizens.

Just what role Kuntar will play in the coming days, weeks and months isn't clear.

For now, he is a potent symbol of Hezbollah's ascendant power.

And he is a reminder of the emotionally-charged divisions that will make it difficult for Lebanon and Israel to make peace any time soon.

Comments

[Todd]

Interesting reporting, Dion, way to bother making the trip. Isn't it telling that you are the first to visit Kuntar, despite the miles of poisonous column inches dedicated to the man in the corporate press in North America? Though I have to say, your epithet "beefy killer" might be the best dismissive I have heard, outdoing the cheapest of throwaways. Maybe it was your editor, so I won't assume. But I trust henceforth that McClatchey will refer to Ehud Barak as "beefy killer" and at least consider the phrase in Sharon's obit or comeback piece.

But I digress, I meant to say it was sad you totally miss the point about why Lebanon's everyman and his young son - who has lived through a savage bombing and has seen more than any war jock could dream of already in his young life - would be proud of a Palestinian/Lebanese fighter who was a dignified and important leader of resistance to occupation and dispossesion despite being in a cage for three decades. These folks have lost everything, more than once, and while there are complicating factors, the one constant is that Israel is overwhelmingly responsible.

Tell us why that is important to a society that is devastated by protracted war and occupation and imprisonment at the hands of Israel.

Even if the worst of the exaggerations about Kuntar were true, the reason one would fete him is not for this single act in dirty war, but for a lifetime of resistance under the most difficult circumstance - namely, in an enemy cage. Kuntar organized from inside the prisons and was a key figure in the lives of hundreds, if not many thousands of prisoners. In Palestinian and Lebanese political culture Israel's cages are the "university" for generation after generation. Hundreds of thousands imprisoned, everyone impacted.

Kids in Lebanon don't fetishize Kuntar's killing any more than Israelis do the hunter-killer exploits of Barak, Livni, Sharon, Rabin, Yaalon, Begin, Shamir, on and on. You would never suggest that little Jewish children swoon in the presence of Sharon because of his Qibya child killing, would you?

[Rob]

Who pays your salary, bubba? Nasrullah?

I'd say be ashamed of yourself, but I doubt you have the capacity.

[Brad Brzezinski]

Your statement that 1,200 civilians were killed is highly disputable.

A feature of the war was that the western media essentially got their numbers from Hizb'allah. Post war Lebanese-government stats seemed no more credible. Seeing as Israel went to pains to warn people of attacks, it is likely that cited numbers are simply part of the propaganda that our media unquestioningly accepts.

[Para]

Vile. Just vile.

[BillyDinPVD]

Kept his dignity for 30 years? The man smashed a four year-old girl's head with a rifle butt! If that's human dignity, we're screwed.

[The Wizard]

great! Maybe next this vile pig can party with Hitler or bin Laden

[Jimmy]

For the media-industrial complex, the world is a movie and terrorists have the James Dean role.
As for Kuntar's hero status in his Druze village, how many residents would dare say otherwise?
Btw, the "dismissive" (though accurate) "beefy killer" is more than compensated by the gratuitously soothing image of a village in the "cool pine mountains," not to mention the Goebbelesque triumphalism of the introduction.
Bias in the media is not the problem, the laughable pretense of objectivity is.

[huerfano]

Kuntar is a murderous thug. He fits right in with the rest of the murderous thugs in Hesbollah. May he rot in hell with his compatriots.

[interestinconundrum]

This "man" killed a 4 year old girl, up close, on purpose, with a rifle butt.
No cause in the world can justify that fact, no cause in the world.
May he receive his just reward here on Earth.

[Bruno Mitchell]

Isn't that cute, you made a new friend who can protect you when bullies pick on you in the school yard. Seriously, enjoy your new job as Devils Advocate.