Ignore Jonathan Pollard’s terrible advice

 https://www.jns.org/opinion/ignore-jonathan-pollards-terrible-advice/

 The Pollards are convinced that his spying saved Israeli lives, and it’s possible he did. He’s also innocent of the charge that he indirectly betrayed U.S. agents in the Soviet Union. But the notion that he did no damage to the United States is simply untrue. His theft of the U.S. Radio and Signal Intelligence Manual cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. The sheer magnitude of the volume of material he stole gives the lie to his claims of merely helping Israel without hurting the country to which he had sworn loyalty. Also dubious is the notion, repeated more than once, that Israel would have known nothing about Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons without Pollard since it’s highly likely that the Mossad knew more about what was going on in Iraq than the CIA.

 Omitted from the account is the fact that the life sentence imposed on Pollard by an unsympathetic judge—egged on by a U.S. security establishment ought for revenge—was largely his own doing. His jailhouse interview with Wolf Blitzer, then a correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, in which he justified his crime, allowed the prosecution to claim that he had violated the plea bargain that would have netted him a much lighter sentence.

 Pollard clearly has an axe to grind against the organized American Jewish world, which was slow to embrace his cause. He depicts himself as a hero not only for helping Israel but by refusing to help anti-Semitic investigators pin crimes on other Jews. And yet, American Jewry had good reason for not embracing someone who was doing so much harm to the alliance they had nurtured. Nevertheless, American Jews and their organizations did take up Pollard’s cause once his disproportionate sentence (he received more severe punishment than anyone who had ever spied for a friendly nation), rather than his crime, became the issue. The idea that “no one in the Jewish community had an issue with the life sentence” is simply false.

 The idea that Pollard would, as he told his interviewer, tell a young Jew working in U.S. intelligence to do as he did is astounding. He not only seems unaware of how his crime cast a pall over every loyal American Jew working to defend the world’s greatest democracy, but seems to think it doesn’t really matter.