by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, March 20, 2002 2:49 P.M. EST

Our Friends the French
Paris may refuse to cooperate with the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who is charged with conspiracy in connection with the Sept. 11 atrocities. The reason, Reuters reports, is that the country that invented the guillotine is opposed to the death penalty.

It certainly takes a lot of Gaul for Frenchmen and other Europeans, after complaining for months about U.S. "arrogance" and "unilateralism," to try to dictate to America what its policies should be on a domestic matter like capital punishment.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft hasn't decided whether to seek the death penalty for Moussaoui. One reason prosecutors may do so is Moussaoui's "depravity," as evidenced by this anecdote:

On Sept. 15, federal agents transporting suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui from his Minneapolis jail cell to a New York detention center made a detour, stopping first at the burning wreckage of the World Trade Center. According to the government's written record of the conversation, Mr. Moussaoui eyed the disaster scene and had this to say: "F--- you, f--- America." Then he laughed, according to the record, taken from officers who accompanied Mr. Moussaoui that day.

I'm Not the Man You're Looking For
Sudan hasn't captured al Qaeda leader Abu Anas Al-Liby after all, officials in Washington and Khartoum say. "Abu Anas Al-Liby is not in Sudanese custody," one U.S. official said, according to a New York Post wire report. No word on who the detained man actually is.

Osama bin Hurt?
"U.S. intelligence sources believe Osama bin Laden has been wounded during the war in Afghanistan and is never too far from his top aide, Egyptian physician Ayman al Zawahiri," the Washington Times reports. An unnamed official tells the paper that it is a "firm belief" that the terror mastermind was wounded, at least once and possibly twice, at some point during the Afghan war.

The report adds that intelligence officials believe bin Laden has been moving back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan. "Where bin Laden is depends on what Pashtun tribes he's with since he's been on both sides of the border," says one source.

USA Today, meanwhile, reports that there is "evidence that al-Qaeda members have fled from Afghanistan to Indonesia." The paper says that "Bush administration officials are pressing to get U.S. forces into the giant archipelago. But the administration faces opposition from an Indonesian government fearful of rising anger among its 200 million Muslims, and a U.S. Congress that severed ties to the Indonesian military in 1999."

Sorry Saudis
Turki al-Sudairi, editor of the Saudi newspaper al-Riyadh has issued a backhanded apology for publishing a pair of articles claiming that Jews use the blood of Gentiles to make pastries for the Purim holiday. Here's the Jerusalem Post's translation of the correction:

"I checked the article and found it not fit for publication, because it was not based on scientific or historical facts, and it even contradicted the rituals of all the known religions in the world. . . . The information included in the article was no different from the nonsense always coming out in the yellow literature, whose reliability is questionable. The understanding of the this [sic] serious mistake regarding the information escaped Ms. [Umayma Ahmed] al-Jalahama [the author], as did the understanding that Jews everywhere in the world are one thing, while the Jews belonging to the Zionist movement that wants to annihilate the Palestinians are something else and completely different."

So how did al-Jalahama's pieces get past eagle-eyed editor Turki al-Sudairi? The Los Angeles Times says he claims he was in Lebanon when they ran.

Meanwhile, the English-language Saudi paper Arab News deploys another anti-Semitic canard: that of American Jews' "dual loyalty." An article by James David, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who is fanatically anti-Israel, claims U.S. policy is actually set by a failed vice presidential candidate:

It seems that Senator Joseph Lieberman has convinced the President that Bagdad [sic] is a threat to the United States and launching a military attack seems to be the only alternative. . . .

When Joseph Lieberman says that it's necessary to attack Iraq because Iraq is a threat to the United States, does he really think that smart Americans believe this? . . . Senator Lieberman must take you and me for a fool. . . .

It's not the United States that Senator Lieberman is concerned about. We know that Iraq is not a threat to the United States. Iraq is a threat to Israel. Senator Lieberman and other pro-Israelis in Washington don't want anyone else in the Middle East to own Nuclear weapons except Israel. It's Israel, not the United States, that Lieberman is concerned about. And he is willing to risk American lives and American money to insure that Israel is the super power in the Middle East.

Bus to Nowhere
The terror group Islamic Jihad says it was behind today's suicide bombing in northern Israel that killed four Israeli soldiers and three civilians. "I looked toward the road and saw a cloud of smoke," the Jerusalem Post quotes Mohammed Agbariya, a resident of the nearby Israeli Arab village of Mus Mus, as saying. "When the smoke cleared, I saw a bus torn in two. I heard screams from the bus." Ha'aretz quotes Israeli army radio as saying that "a number" of the victims were Israeli Arabs.

Appeasing Arafat--or Cornering Him?
Picking up on a comment last year by Ariel Sharon, former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney argues that America is appeasing the Palestinian Arab leadership and selling out Israel in the same manner as the French and British sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938:

Tragically, efforts aimed at appeasing the Arab states by compelling Israel once again to make herself vulnerable to attack will catalyze the Arabs' appetite for war, all right, but not against Saddam Hussein. Like appeasement at Czech expense over sixty-years ago, it will more likely encourage them to engage in aggression against--and even perhaps precipitate the destruction of--a freedom-loving nation that made the mistake of becoming an inconvenient ally.

Echoing the point, surprisingly, is a piece in London's left-wing Independent by Stephen Pollard:

There's one clear lesson from yesterday's arrival in Israel of Vice-President Cheney, and the accompanying negotiations by General Zinni. Terrorism works.

Last week, President Bush informed Ariel Sharon at a press conference that "frankly, it's not helpful, what Israel has recently done". It is, you see, a moral and political imperative for the West to fight terrorism. But not for Israel. When the United States is attacked by suicidal terrorists, the rest of the free world quite rightly joins together to hunt down and destroy them. It's called fighting a war against terrorism. When Israel seeks to defend itself from suicide bombers, it's called being unhelpful, and the wrath of that same free world descends on her.

But the Israeli Web site Debkafile has a completely different take:

When US Vice President Richard Cheney began his whirlwind Middle East tour, only one regional leader was under US ultimatum. When he left, on Tuesday, March 19, there were two: Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. . . . [U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni] was instructed to give Arafat due warning: Take a week to toe the US line--or face the consequences. . . .

For the first time, Arafat has been given an American deadline--and a tight one at that. Defiance will bring him into a frontal clash with a determinedly anti-terror Bush administration. Even giving in with good grace may not bring him much more than a helping hand from Washington to step down off the world stage and end a forty-year career of almost uninterrupted terror with dignity.

Cheney broke new ground in yet a second key respect: He was presented by most world media as facing heavy inter-Arab and European insistence on action by the Bush team on the Palestinian issue, as their price for supporting America's war on Iraq. Had the US leader given in, Arafat would have cheered and the Iraqi campaign receded into an uncertain future.

Saturday Morning Specials
"Israel's rabbis have agreed to allow several worshippers to be armed in every synagogue during upcoming holidays," the Associated Press reports. "The Religious Affairs ministry agreed to a request by security officials that four people in each synagogue be given weapons and cell phones. Orthodox Jews are banned from even touching such items on holidays and the Sabbath, except in emergencies."

A Religion of Peace
The Jerusalem Post has a roundup of Egyptian press coverage of the prosecution of Egyptian homosexuals, which has brought Cairo much criticism from the West. Here's Ali Al-Sibki, a lecturer on Islamic culture at Cairo University, in a paper called al-Usb'u:

There is a dispute regarding how they should be killed: One opinion is that the penalty for fornication should be applied to homosexuals, as [the act involves] penetration of a bodily orifice prohibited by religious law.

Another opinion is that the perpetrator of the deed, and the one to whom it is done, should be killed; a third opinion is that the homosexual should be burned. A fourth opinion is that he should be thrown from the highest wall, because of the loathsome nature of the deed.

Civil Liberties, Arab Style
We hear a lot of carping about wartime threats to civil liberties, so it's worth considering how civil liberties are treated in the enemy's part of the world. In Syria, "lawmaker" Mamoun Homsi has been sentenced to five years in prison for "trying to illegally change the nation's constitution." A Syrian "court" also gave him a six-month suspended sentence for "defaming the government through his allegations of corruption and claims that Syrians lack freedom," the Associated Press reports.

Meanwhile, our friends the Saudis have jailed "a poet who penned verses blasting Saudi Arabia's Islamic judges as corrupt and serving 'tyrants.' "

Can We Ship Them Some Antiglobalization Protesters?
"An international conference on the effects of globalization on Muslim communities" will be held next month in Mecca, the Arab News reports.

'Just a Political Statement'
During the fall semester, the University of Colorado's Muslim Student Association was hit by vandalism and threatening phone calls. Campus police investigated it as a "hate crime." Now the campus Jewish organization, Hillel, has found its Israeli flag defaced with anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian messages, but the cops say it's not a hate crime. "This case was just a political statement," Lt. Tim McGraw tells the Colorado Daily. "There wasn't any threat."

Doves or Ostriches?
"The Boston antiwar movement, largely silent through battles in Afghanistan, is drawing new converts and planning new protests," the Boston Globe reports. Curiously, these purported peaceniks don't seem to be opposed to military action altogether:

The State of the Union address, in which Bush called Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an "axis of evil" that was threatening to the United States, seemed to awaken activists who had been in line with military strategy thus far, believing that attacks on the Taliban and Al Qaeda terror network were justified as retribution.

A curious view, this, in which military action is justified for "retribution," but America is obliged to keep its head in the sand regarding potential threats such as Iraq's development of nuclear weapons.

Discriminating Against the Military
The law school at Washington University in St. Louis wants to encourage its graduates to go into public service, so it has a Loan Repayment Assistance Program that helps graduates pay off their debts if they take government jobs. Excluded from the program, however, are graduates who go into the military. Why? Because the faculty objects to the congressionally mandated ban on homosexual servicemen. Rather than writing their congressmen and urging a change in the law, they're punishing their own students who wish to serve the country.

Progressive Indeed
A group of self-described progressive lawyers has issued a statement denouncing President Bush:

Today the United States is resorting to high-handed and arbitrary practices everywhere in the world in pursuit of hegemony. This is not only contradictory to the aspiration and desire of humankind to establish an international order of peace, progress, reconciliation and cooperation but also a criminal act of wantonly violating the international law.

The U.S. is gravely breaching the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, the principles recognized as the supreme principles governing the international relations.

From the onset of its coming to power, the Bush administration has openly interfered in internal affairs of other countries, placing its partisan and individual interests above the international law under the pretext of the "top priority to national interests."

It is listing those countries that go against the grain with it as members of "axis of evil." This is an expression of the most blatant violation of the dignity of sovereign states and interference in their internal affairs in the history of international relations.

Can you guess which organization put out this statement? No, it wasn't Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Sorry, not Ramsey Clark's International Action Center either. It was the Jurists Association of North Korea.

A Collection of Pearls
The Wall Street Journal plans to publish an anthology of stories by Daniel Pearl, the reporter who was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan. "In addition, the anthology will feature anecdotes from editors and co-reporters on the stories, and will likely include the e-mail correspondence that Mr. Pearl had with his WSJ colleagues," the New York Observer reports (second item).

"We wanted it not just to be a record of his writing," Deputy managing editor Steve Adler tells the Observer, "but of what his life was like at The Journal, and what it was like working with him." Profits from the book--which will be available from the OpinionJournal bookstore--will go to the Daniel Pearl Memorial Trust, to benefit Pearl's widow, Mariane, and their unborn son.

Salman Yes, Cyborg No
"Salman Rushdie is once again free to fly on Air Canada after the airline backed down on Tuesday from its policy of refusing to carry the author, who is under a death threat for allegedly blaspheming Islam," Reuters reports.

But the National Post reports Steve Mann, a University of Toronto professor who calls himself a "cyborg" is suing the airline for subjecting him to an extensive search when he tried to board a plane "wearing his computerized glasses, headgear and electronic body suit":

Mr. Mann says he was so traumatized by the incident he checked himself into hospital upon his return to Toronto. His lawsuit will allege the airline discriminated against him because he is a cyborg--and will seek damages for loss of income and mental anguish.

"I know there are a lot of people out there who will read this and say 'This doesn't affect me, I'm not a cyborg,' " says Mr. Mann, "But the way I was treated by Air Canada, it could happen to anyone."

More Gun Clubs
Awhile back we mentioned that students at Mount Holyoke, a women's college in Massachusetts, had started a campus chapter of the Second Amendment Sisters. In the Philadelphia Daily News, Michael Brown of Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws notes that gun clubs are shooting up on other campuses. The Harvard Law School Target Shooting Club claims a membership of 115, and another club has started at Reed College, "often referred to as a bastion of extreme liberalism."

There's even an art-school gun club, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. "Club founder Justin Sirois considers the club a 'work of art' and is proud to disprove the 'sissy' stereotype of art students."

Profiling vs. Preferences
Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy draws an intriguing but flawed parallel between racial profiling and racial preferences:

A notable feature of this conflict [over profiling] is that champions of each position frequently embrace rhetoric, attitudes, and value systems that are completely at odds with those they adopt when confronting another controversial instance of racial discrimination--namely, affirmative action. Vocal supporters of racial profiling who trumpet the urgency of communal needs when discussing law enforcement all of a sudden become fanatical individualists when condemning affirmative action in college admissions and the labor market. Supporters of profiling, who are willing to impose what amounts to a racial tax on profiled groups, denounce as betrayals of "color blindness" programs that require racial diversity. A similar turnabout can be seen on the part of many of those who support affirmative action. Impatient with talk of communal needs in assessing racial profiling, they very often have no difficulty with subordinating the interests of individual white candidates to the purported good of the whole. Opposed to race consciousness in policing, they demand race consciousness in deciding whom to admit to college or select for a job.

There's a crucial difference, however, between racial profiling and racial preferences. It's true that both impose a cost on a selected group of people (law-abiding blacks and white applicants, respectively). But racial profiling, assuming it is indeed an effective law-enforcement strategy, benefits everybody by reducing crime. (Whether it is effective and whether its effectiveness justifies its unfairness are questions for another day.)

Racial preferences, on the other hand, are a zero-sum game, imposing a cost on one group for the benefit of another group. Society as a whole gains no tangible benefit from favoring one person over another on the basis of race or ethnicity.

NOW: Numbers Overwhelm Women
"Men's Share of Housework Remains Same Since 1985," reads the headline on the National Organization for Women's "outrage of the week," which reports on a study from the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. The ladies at NOW should do less housework and more homework, because they seem to have trouble with math. According to the study, the average American man spends 16 hours a week doing housework, the same as in 1985. The average American woman now spends 27 hours a week doing housework, down from 31 hours in 1985.

That means that in a household consisting of an average man and an average woman, the man now does 37% of the housework, an increase from 34% in 1985. More information on the study is available from a University of Michigan press release, headlined "U.S. Husbands Are Doing More Housework While Wives Are Doing Less."

Life Imitates Monty Python
"Health instructors and a citizens panel" want teachers in Montgomery County, Md., to "demonstrate how to use condoms" in class. It reminds us of the sex-ed sketch in "Monty Python's the Meaning of Life." A teacher at a boys' school pulls down a Murphy bed in front of the class, his wife walks in, and the two disrobe in preparation for a live sex demonstration. Just one problem: None of the students show the least bit of interest.

He's Hopping Mad
In 1985 Rodolfo Hernandez was sentenced to death for murdering an illegal Mexican immigrant during a robbery. Now he wants taxpayers to shell out $8,000 to buy him a prosthetic leg--so that he can walk to his execution. "I came in with two legs, I want to go out with two legs," Hernandez, who lost his leg to diabetes, tells Reuters. But he'll have to use crutches or a wheelchair, for Texas authorities decided he didn't have a leg to stand on. There's no word on the French reaction.

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Chris Fehr, Christian Peck, Ken Jorgensen, C.E. Dobkin, Aaron Gross, Chuck Herrick, John Parker, Paul Deffebach, Damian Bennett, Raghu Desikan, Kathleen Hoffart, Yehuda Hilewitz, Ron Ackert, Jerome Marcus, Michael Segal, David Simon, Natalie Cohen, Hershel Ginsburg, Gregory Brunt, Seth Gitell, Norman Podhoretz, Anthony Brunsvold, Scott Wood, Michael Homburger, Drew Parkhill, Jim Carty, Gregory Taylor, Spencer Brown and Edward Himmelfarb. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Michael Medved: American politics should be uglier (link requires registration).
• Pete du Pont: Among the EU-niks.
• John Fund on California's riven Republicans.