Pollard Push

Kenneth Lasson
Op-Ed
jewishtimes.com
22 October '10
Posted before Shabbat

A new momentum is building on behalf of clemency for Jonathan J. Pollard, who is now serving his 25th year in a federal prison for having passed classified information to Israel.

The current initiative was generated by a small group of Pollard activists, working quietly but intensively behind the scenes, garnering support from members of Congress, large religious and communal organizations, and grass-roots American citizens.

Among the more tireless volunteers has been Dovid Nyer, a 25-year-old from Monsey, N.Y., who has spent countless hours during the past four months contacting congressional representatives around the country. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has been the most sympathetic — agreeing to take the lead in soliciting his colleagues for their signatures on a carefully crafted letter to be sent to President Obama.

It says that Pollard did wrong, but that his life sentence was grossly disproportionate — much greater than that of “many others who were found guilty of similar activity on behalf of nations adversarial to us, unlike Israel.” (The average penalty for the offense is two to four years.)

To date almost two dozen U.S. representatives have signed on.

Last week Mr. Pollard’s lawyers, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, filed a formal petition for clemency with the White House following revelations of apparent government malfeasance made public by senior officials with first-hand involvement in the case. They include Lawrence J. Korb, former U.S. assistant secretary of Defense under the late Caspar Weinberger at the time of Pollard’s arrest. Mr. Korb wrote a letter to Mr. Obama two weeks ago in which he said that the harsh sentence meted out to Pollard was not because of his offense, but the result of Weinberger’s “visceral dislike” of Israel. (Weinberger later conceded that the Pollard case was a “minor matter” that had been “made much more important than it was.”)

(Read full Op-Ed)

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