From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, March 22, 2002 2:14 P.M. EST

Terrorist Welfare Queens
"Leaders of poor nations warned their rich counterparts that if they want a world free of terrorism, they will need to pay for it," the Associated Press reports from Monterrey, Mexico. No argument there--that's why America is increasing defense spending by tens of billions of dollars. But of course that's not what the Third Worlders gathered in Monterrey for the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development meant. "Drawing a direct link between poverty and violence," the AP dispatch explains, "leaders at a U.N. summit said increased aid to the world's neediest is more urgent than ever in the post-Sept. 11 world."

It hardly needs saying that this is nonsense. Inasmuch as there was an economic "cause" of Sept. 11, the problem is not poverty but the vast oil wealth controlled by various despotic regimes, especially in Osama bin Laden's home country, Saudi Arabia. What's more, it's ludicrous to blame poverty itself on a lack of handouts from the West. After all, rich countries didn't get rich by going on the international dole (who would have paid for it?). Poverty is a product of politics and culture; as President Bush observed in his Monterrey speech this morning, "When nations close their markets and opportunity is hoarded by a privileged few, no amount of development aid is ever enough."

In this regard there is plenty to fault in Bush's own record. Everyone knows about the decision on steel tariffs, for which a Wall Street Journal editorial slammed him yesterday. And The New Republic reported that the administration stiffed Pakistan, a crucial and fragile ally, by refusing to suspend tariffs and quotas on Pakistani textiles.

Still, the gist of the president's Monterrey speech was exactly right; he said, as the AP put it, that the U.S. would "use some $10 billion in additional foreign aid over the next three years to reward nations that are tackling corruption, bulldozing trade barriers and implementing democratic reforms." Free money won't ease either violence or poverty; aid must come with accountability. America learned that lesson with welfare reform; it's time the rest of the world learned it too.

Throw the Book at 'Em
Even in the worst of times, we observed back in September, some people are bastards. Here's more evidence: "Twenty-three people were arrested and accused on Thursday of seeking money and phony death certificates by falsely claiming their family members died in the World Trade Center attacks," Reuters reports. Fifteen of them pocketed some $760,000, while the others were nabbed before they saw a dime.

"The phony filings included a New York City man who reported his 13th child had accompanied him to a job interview at the Trade Center and perished. The man got $190,000 before investigators learned the child never existed, authorities said." A woman filed a claim on behalf of her daughter who died in 1994, and another woman tried to get money for her brother, who has actually been hospitalized for six years.

Pakistan Indicts Pearl Suspects
"British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh has been formally charged in Pakistan, along with three other suspects," for kidnapping and murdering Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, CNN reports. Saeed says he'll defend himself at his trial; if convicted he could face the death penalty. Seven more suspects are still at large.

Pakistan says it won't consider extraditing Saeed to the U.S. until after his trial is over. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, "received conflicting advice from his cabinet" about the extradition request, the New York Times reports (link requires registration). The Interior Ministry favored extradition while the Foreign Ministry opposed it. "The deciding voice belonged to generals in the intelligence agency, Pakistani officials said. Mr. Sheikh is a leader of the Army of Muhammad, or Jaish-e-Muhammad, a militant group that was for many years covertly supported by Pakistani intelligence officials."

A Religion of Peace
Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, a leading Egyptian cleric, has words of praise for suicide bombers. "Those who blow themselves up among aggressors, who demolish houses, kill men, women and innocent people and assault honour and property of Palestinians, are martyrs," the Arabic News quotes Tantawi, the grand imam of Cairo's al-Azhar University, as saying.

Ha'aretz notes that Tantawi (whose name it transliterates differently) has changed his tune of late:

Some two months ago, Tantaoui took part in an inter-religious council in Alexandria, at the end of which he signed the council's closing statement that, "the murder of innocents--supposedly in the name of god--is sacrilege of His holy name and disgraces the religion worldwide." However, after participating in the council, Tantaoui received death threats from Islamic extremists, which may have caused him to change his attitude.

Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report describes this heartwarming scene:

In a Gaza refugee camp, dozens of 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old boys, wearing green bandannas declaring, "Martyrs of al-Aqsa," took aim with AK-47s and M-16s. They were in a training camp run by the most dangerous gang in the intifada. "We are all sacrificing our lives," the kids chanted, "for al-Aqsa."

Al-Aqsa, of course, is the wing of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement that has perpetrated many recent suicide bombings, including yesterday's in Jerusalem, where the death toll has climbed to three. The New York Times (link requires registration) reports that Arafat denounced the attack, though he called it a "military operation" rather than a terror attack, and Fatah's West Bank leader, Marwan Barghouti, told the al-Jazeera TV network that, in the Times' words, "a truce was in the interest only of Mr. Sharon's troubled government, and that continued fighting was the Palestinians' surest path to statehood."

The Associated Press reports Israel has obtained documents that show Arafat personally approved payments to al-Aqsa terrorists. Kamil Hmeid, Fatah's Bethlehem leader, acknowledges the payments but says, "The money we receive is used for political and social activities only." Is al-Aqsa throwing barn dances and cocktail parties?

Ha'aretz adds: "One of Arafat's closest advisors said Thursday, after U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni told Arafat to crack down on the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, that the PA chairman replied: If I crack down on the Brigade, Hamas will get stronger--why should I want to do that?"

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

The Boston Globe reports:

Groups like the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have copied the militancy of Hamas and, to a lesser degree, Islamic Jihad. The groups are cognizant of the appeal that resisting the occupation holds for a population suffering from Israeli measures that have devastated the Palestinian economy and confined hundreds of thousands to their towns and villages.

This is not a quote but the words of Globe reporter Anthony Shadid. If you're not squeamish, check out this Reuters photo, which shows Israeli cops examining the severed head of the Aqsa terrorist who blew himself up yesterday. This barbarity is what the Boston Globe calls "resisting the occupation."

The Emily Litella Peace Plan--II
Last week we noted that the New York Times' Thomas Friedman, originator of the "Saudi peace plan," was having second thoughts owing to Saudi "backpedaling." The original plan, which Friedman hatched with the assent of Crown Prince Abdullah, called for the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, and Gaza and the West Bank, which Egypt and Jordan respectively had previously occupied.

Friedman voiced dismay that the Saudis had dropped the language of "normalization" and were speaking in the vague terms of "full peace" instead. Now Reuters reports that the Syrian information minister, Adnan Omran, is peddling the "information" that normalization was never part of the purported plan in the first place. "This term does not exist in diplomatic parlance or international law. It is a rhetorical word and an Israeli invention," he told Lebanon's Daily Star.

What's Cheney's Angle?
Commentators continue to disagree sharply over the meaning of Dick Cheney's Mideast diplomacy. Here's the Jerusalem Post's Janine Zacharia, writing in The New Republic:

Arafat, far from being chastened by Sharon's hard-line and America's tough talk, looks less inclined than ever to genuinely crack down on terrorism. After all, his decision to essentially give Palestinian terrorists a green light to attack Israel has paid handsome diplomatic dividends. Powell is talking to him on the telephone again. Zinni is embracing him and promising that U.S. monitors will watch over any cease-fire, something Arafat has demanded and Sharon fears. And even Cheney--one of Arafat's biggest detractors within the administration--has offered to meet with him, albeit only if he implements the Tenet plan.

But the Ottawa Citizen's David Warren has the opposite take:

A fundamental shift has just occurred in the relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Dick Cheney has taken over from Ariel Sharon as Yasser Arafat's jailer (or more precisely, probation officer). The Palestinians who thought they were fighting the Israelis now find themselves staring directly at the United States.

This is the meaning of the invitation the U.S. vice-president extended to Mr. Arafat to meet him on Monday in Cairo, before the Arab League Summit in Beirut on Wednesday and Thursday. The invitation is conditional. Mr. Zinni must first report that Mr. Arafat is making a "100-per-cent effort" to stop terrorist attacks on Israel. . . .

[Arafat] is no longer dealing with Israel, or Mr. Sharon. He is instead staring down a U.S. administration that is about to decide whether it can live with him any more, and frankly doubts that it can. Mr. Cheney had, according to my information, actually told several Arab leaders during his tour that he would be personally taking over Mr. Arafat's file. The news was intended to reach Mr. Arafat from them, first.

Disorder on the Court
A melee broke out at a Kabul basketball game between Afghan and American teams, the Associated Press reports:

The incident Thursday began when an American player fell on the court near the seating area of the Kabul stadium. An Afghan spectator stepped forward and kicked the player in the head, Flight Lt. Tony Marshall said.

An Afghan guard with the U.S. team moved in to try to push the crowd back. He cocked his Kalashnikov and it went off unintentionally, hitting an Afghan spectator in the leg, Marshall said.

Maybe He Was Reaching for It to Turn It In
Robert Shockley wanted his 20-year-old son, Gabe, to quit his job at an Orange City, Fla., Blockbuster video store after the store was robbed in January. When Gabe refused, his protective pop started standing guard every night while his son closed the store. On Monday the hero dad foiled another attempted robbery. Here's how the Orlando Sentinel tells the story:

From his DeLand home Tuesday, Shockey recalled the events. The door burst open and two men rushed in. Ski masks covered their faces. One brandished a rifle and both were shouting violent, obscenity-laced threats."They made it clear that they would kill us," Shockey said. . . .

The gunman first pointed the rifle at Robert Shockey and then at an employee, identified only as Brian. While the rifle was pointed at the young employee, Shockey reached for the pistol tucked in his belt against the small of his back. He drew the weapon.

"I shouted, "Freeze!" he said. The man with the rifle--standing only about 6 feet away--turned and pointed it at Shockey. . . .

Detectives say Shockey fired at least two shots, hitting the gunman once in the throat and once in the chest. The man detectives say was an accomplice then reached for the rifle, so Shockey fired again, hitting him in the chest.

Robber James Franklin Wince died; his alleged accomplice, Darius Bennett, is charged with his murder. As for Shockley, "He is going to get the good-citizenship award," says a sheriff's department spokesman.

One gun-confiscation advocate disagrees:

Arthur Hayhoe, the executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said this case is "a tough call" for a group that favors strict gun laws.

He said he won't "second-guess" a parent defending his son, but Hayhoe is troubled with the second shooting.

"It's still a shooting of an unarmed person, and that's always troubling," he said. And he predicted the story will wind up in the National Rifle Association's publication, The American Rifleman, and its column, Armed Citizen, which recounts the stories of people who use guns to defend themselves.

Never mind that the "unarmed person" was reaching for a gun.

Brady Evades Brady-like Law
Celebrity antigun activist Sarah Brady "bought her son a powerful rifle for Christmas in 2000--and may have skirted Delaware state background-check requirements," the New York Daily News reports. The store where she bought the gun ran a background check on her but not on her son. While the federal Brady Law exempts intrafamily gift purchases, Delaware's background-check law does not. Brady also complains in her memoir that when the gun-store owner phoned in the background checks, "it seemed to me he spoke unnecessarily loudly, repeating and spelling my name over and over on the phone."

Lesson: Look Both Ways
Thirty-six-year-old Susie Stephens of Winthrop, Wash., died the other day when she was struck by a bus while crossing the street in St. Louis. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Stephens was "one of the country's top experts on bicycle and pedestrian safety."

Bad Aim at the AP
"Black Male Suicide Rates Increase," declares the headline on an Associated Press dispatch about a new study. The headline is misleading in several ways. For one thing, the AP story gives no overall statistics for black male suicide rates, only gun suicides by black males between 15 and 19. With that qualification, the headline is sort of true--except that the story is eight years old. The rate did increase to 13.9 per 100,000 in 1994 from 3.6 in 1979--but it then dropped to 8.4 in 1997, the last year studied.

Dear Mom and Dad, Your Kid's a Blimp
School districts in Florida and Pennsylvania are sending notes home to parents, informing them that their children are too fat. The Associated Press reports:

"When an examination reveals a child has vision problems, hearing problems, we inform the family. We weren't doing anything for weight," said George Ziolkowski, director of pupil personnel services for the 6,800-student East Penn district, about 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia. "If we have information that may have some bearing on a child's future health, why just put it in a drawer?"

One wonders how parents could be unaware without such a note of their kids' corpulence.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
In Hurst, Texas, sanity is back. "Taylor Hess, who was expelled this month after a bread knife was found in the bed of his pickup on school grounds, is going back to school, and Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district plans to rewrite its zero-tolerance policy on expulsions," the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports. Hess's yearlong expulsion was reduced to five days, and with time served, he was back in school today. We noted the case Tuesday.

Parents of third-graders at Pitcher Elementary School in Kansas City, Mo., say their kids were subjected to strip-searches at school after $5 disappeared, the Kansas City Star reports:

Parents have complained that children told them earlier this week that boys had to drop their pants to be searched by an adult male, while girls were searched by other girls. District policy does not allow strip searches and specifies that any other search cannot be done in front of other students.

And in a case of too much tolerance, the Escambia County, Fla., school system "must rehire a school employee who reported to work with cocaine in his system--50 times above the cutoff level for a positive drug test," the Pensacola News Journal reports. "An independent arbitrator ruled this month that a penalty less severe than termination was warranted and wants Sites rehired with full pay and benefits." As Overlawyered.com notes, "Under zero tolerance rules, of course, schools can suspend or even expel a student for possessing aspirin or other ordinary over-the-counter drugs."

There Oughta Be a Law
"A day after the Senate voted to abolish the enormous campaign contributions known as soft money, Democratic Party officials said [yesterday] that they recently received a $7 million check, the largest known donation in the history of American politics," the New York Times reports (link requires registration). "The Democrats also recently received a $5 million check from another Hollywood executive, Steve Bing, party officials said."

The Asteroid Menace
Blogger Brink Lindsey thinks we were wrong to scoff at CNN for reporting on asteroids passing within hundreds of thousands of miles of the earth:

A quarter-million miles is nothing in astronomical terms. With just an infinitesimal change in the shape of that rock's orbit, we would have been hit with the equivalent of a 4-megaton nuke. That asteroid came close.

Near-miss stories like this one are the natural-disaster equivalents of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It was easy not to take the terrorist threat seriously back then. . . . Remember the bozo who tried to get the deposit back on the truck that carried the explosives? What a hoot. But if only we'd been shocked out of complacency back then.

Lindsey acknowledges that "I know virtually nothing about this subject--just like I knew virtually nothing about Islamist terrorism as of September 10 last year. I think that, this time, I'm going to make an effort to think about the unthinkable and learn more about this issue." Stay tuned.

How Far We've Come
Andrew Sullivan offers this perspective on recent history:

Perusing former president Nixon's deranged and taped harangues against Jews, gays and weed today, reminds me again of what a disgraceful president he was--catastrophic in domestic policy, mediocre abroad. But it says something, doesn't it, that a website like this that routinely defends Jews, gays and weed would now be regarded by many as conservative. Progress, no?

Sullivan is on to something. If someone back in 1970 had put this forth as a prediction, even the savviest political observer would have responded: "What's a Web site?"

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Harrison Roberts, Michael Segal, Yehuda Hilewitz, Damian Bennett, Randy Schwartz, Aaron Rosenbaum, C.E. Dobkin, Shelley Taylor, Chuck Gitles, David Merrlil, Aaron Gross, Jose Guardia, David Simon, Asla Aydintasbas, Ken Jorgensen, Craig Markva, Mike Morgan, Marie Bourgeois, Noah Pollak, Roger Heinig, Jane Weidman, Glenn Giesey, Sara Sheaffer, Shelby Johnson, Bob Krumm, Grant Brenna, Michael Butler, L. Lane, David Sterling, Reagan Lynch, Richard Bohannon, Pat Rowe, Eric Vetter and Eric Timmons. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

  • Review & Outlook: Those who warned of "kangaroo courts" were guilty of a rush to judgment (link requires registration).
  • Daniel Henninger: Rusty's live with Larry while Andrea's in prison for life.
  • Peggy Noonan: The pope's statement on the abuse scandal was necessary but not sufficient.

And on the Taste page:

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