From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Monday, April 1, 2002 1:37 P.M. EST

It's America's War, Too
Anyone who doubts that Israel and America are fighting the same enemy should read this report in the Lebanon Daily Star, quoting Brigadier Sultan Abul-Aynayn, the chief of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction:

"If one hair on the head of Arafat is harmed, the US had better protect its interests around the world. I mean what I am saying. The US should protect itself if anything happens to Arafat," he said. "We are not like Osama bin Laden, but we have our own style of response."

He added that the Palestinian diaspora could be mobilized to launch attacks against "Zionist and US interests."

"Our reach is long, and with this continuous struggle we have the right to respond."

London's left-wing Independent carries a pro-Saddam opinion column that concludes with a bomb threat against Britain:

The majority world view sees the US as in the vanguard of sustaining an unjust world order. And that is exactly what Noor, a young British woman, said to me on the phone late last Friday night before adding: "And you know I too can kill myself in Oxford Street, no problem, I am very angry and very upset for Iraqis."

In the face of such barbarism, negotiation is futile, indeed counterproductive. The New York Times' Thomas Friedman (link requires registration) gets it exactly right:

The outcome of the war now under way between the Israelis and Palestinians is vital to the security of every American, and indeed, I believe, to all of civilization. Why? Quite simply because Palestinians are testing out a whole new form of warfare, using suicide bombers--strapped with dynamite and dressed as Israelis--to achieve their political aims. And it is working. . . .

Let's be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated. . . .

First, Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay. Second, America needs to make clear that suicide bombing is not Israel's problem alone. To that end, the U.S. should declare that while it respects the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism, it will have no dealings with the Palestinian leadership as long as it tolerates suicide bombings. Further, we should make clear that Arab leaders whose media call suicide bombers "martyrs" aren't welcome in the U.S.

Although President Bush hasn't yet taken as hard a line as Friedman urges, his comments Saturday show that he understands which side America is on in the Israel-Arab battle:

I think Chairman Arafat can do a lot more. I truly believe that. I believe he needs to stand up and condemn, in Arabic, these [suicide] attacks. . . . There is no normalcy when, day after day, killers destroy innocent lives. All the leaders must join with governments such as ours to strongly condemn and stop terrorist activities.

America also supported a United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Israel to withdraw its troops from the disputed territories. This prompted a lot of criticism on the Sunday morning gabfests to the effect that the administration was sending "mixed signals." While there's a bit of truth to that, it's less than meets the eye, as a U.N. press release explains:

Prior to the vote, the Council President, Ambassador Ole Peter Kolby of Norway, said it was the common understanding of the members that the draft's operative paragraph 1, which listed the specific demands to the parties, did not indicate any sequence of the elements contained in it.

Here's the paragraph in question:

1. [The council] calls upon both parties to move immediately to a meaningful cease-fire; calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, including Ramallah; and calls upon the parties to cooperate fully with Special Envoy Zinni, and others, to implement the Tenet security work plan as a first step towards implementation of the Mitchell Committee recommendations, with the aim of resuming negotiations on a political settlement.

The U.N. is whistling past the graveyard, as both sides are sure to ignore this plague-on-both-your-houses resolution. But it's far from a ringing condemnation of Israel. Little wonder that Syria, the council's lone Arab member, abstained from the vote.

Clueless Around the World
"Many world leaders called me today to ask whether Arafat is holed up in two rooms, or in three," Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tells Arutz Sheva. "That's what interests them, and not the number of civilians murdered in the terrorist attacks."

Such cluelessness isn't limited to world leaders. "Who can blame the Israelis for wanting to lash out?" asks an astonishingly condescending New York Times editorial (links require registration). "We share Israel's rage." After characterizing Israel's efforts to defend itself as a mere tantrum, the Times goes on to call for Israel to "look beyond its current fury to find a political solution to this conflict."

"Perhaps A clear strategy lies behind Israel's military assault on Ramallah and the headquarters there of Yasser Arafat, but if so it is difficult to discern," declares a similarly daft though slightly less obnoxious Washington Post editorial. "It is hard to see how a military assault on one of the largest Palestinian cities, and the takeover of Mr. Arafat's compound, will be any more effective in stopping the violence than were Israel's previous offensives over the past year."

Both these editorials appeared Saturday, which means they were written the day the Israeli assault began. The editorialists might have profited from holding off on their analysis rather than committing their knee-jerk reactions to print. Ample new information has come out since that explains what the Israelis are trying to accomplish.

Sharon himself explains to the Times' William Safire: "The goal of our operation is to uproot terrorist activity throughout the territories. We have no intention to stay, only to stop these terrible things. In the past month, we have 115 Israelis killed, 1,656 injured; in the past year, 401 killed, 3,538 injured. We are creating a buffer zone, of some depth, along what used to be the green line. We are acting in this buffer zone already. In the past two weeks, we managed to stop, arrest or get rid of 25 suicide bombers or shooters on their way to kill our people." This is hardly the explosion of "rage" the Times editorialists described.

One difference between this Israeli action and previous ones is that Israel has targeted Arafat's headquarters. The Israeli group IMRA picks up a March 23 report in Ha'aretz (the Hebrew-language edition, presumably):

Leading terror suspects escaped, and were smuggled into Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah and to the local hospital--IDF troops did not enter these sites. Capture of the suspects might have altered the results of the operation.

It's hard to see how Israel is supposed to find a "political solution" with the Palestinian Authority, which, if the reports coming out of Ramallah are to be believed, is little more than a vast criminal enterprise. Among those who may be holed up with Arafat, according to a Sunday Ha'aretz report, are the suspects in the October assassination of Israel's Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi.

Arutz Sheva has a list of weapons Israeli troops have confiscated, including a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, 43 RPG rockets, two 60mm mortar bombs, 22 AK-47 rifles, "Norwegian sniper weapons" and much more. The Media Line reports that Israeli soldiers in the Arafat compound "discovered hundreds of thousands of counterfeit Israeli currency bills in denominations of 50, 100 and 200 [shekels]":

Israeli intelligence sources told The Media Line that they suspect that Arafat also had printing plates for counterfeiting American currency, but these have not yet been discovered.

Israeli and Western intelligence officials have long suspected that Arafat might have a counterfeit money operation, like the one he maintained in Lebanon during parts of the 1970's and early 1980's.

An updated TML report says the IDF also found $100,000 in phony American currency in Arafat's headquarters. Maybe it's time to send the Secret Service to Ramallah.

"The compound also yielded a large collection of documents that links the PA leadership with the terrorist attacks inside Israel," Ha'aretz reports, though without elaborating. The New York-based Jewish Week reports that "Yasir Arafat and his PLO were actively involved in terror against Israelis more than two years before the current war of attrition, according to documents seized from Orient House, the semi-official Palestinian office in East Jerusalem closed last summer by Israel."

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

No Terror in Reuterville
Consider this Reuters dispatch from Jerusalem:

Israel pledged to leave no stone unturned to halt a "campaign of terror" against it after a suspected suicide bomber killed at least 12 people in the port city of Haifa Sunday.

Why the scare quotes around campaign of terror? It's Reuters being "evenhanded" again. But can anyone really claim the Palestinian Arabs aren't waging a campaign of terror against Israel? Here's a roundup of the attacks since Friday afternoon:

  • A suicide bomber in the West Bank city of Efrat blew himself up outside an emergency room yesterday, injuring four. David Bedein notes that this attack "was directed against the medical services that Arabs receive from private Jewish funds."

Now, let's go back to that Reuters dispatch, which concludes as follows:

The blast occurred as the Israeli army battled Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's security forces outside his West Bank offices and was part of a major surge in violence since a Palestinian uprising against occupation began 18 months ago.

Why no quotation marks around Palestinian uprising against occupation? Reuters, it seems, is evenhanded only when it is at the expense of the Jews.

Talk About Biased Journalism!
Buried in a Jerusalem Post report about the shooting of a Boston Globe reporter by Palestinian Arabs in Ramallah is this shocking detail:

The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] arrested a delegation of some two dozen foreigners, journalists and suspected Palestinian fugitives, on suspicion they tried to help the fugitives escape the Palestinian Authority's Mukata compound in Ramallah yesterday.

The army declared the area a closed military zone, but the journalists forced their way past tanks and soldiers, into the headquarters to support beleaguered PA Chairman Yasser Arafat.

"The reporters ran inside the building, and the soldiers did not want to shoot at them," said OC Planning Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland. "When they came out, there were double the number that had gone in. Some [of those coming out] were wanted fugitives. They used Israeli openness." The army arrested all the journalists and suspected fugitives for questioning, Eiland said.

We certainly hope it turns out to have been the left-wing nuts and not the journalists who were helping the fugitives escape.

Palestinians Kill Their Own
"Two masked Palestinian gunmen in Tulkarm shot to death eight Palestinians prisoners a short time ago," the Jerusalem Post reports. "The Palestinians, who were dragged out of an recently abandoned Palestinian Authority lockup into the street and gunned down, were suspected of aiding Israel, Israel Radio reported." Another three suspected "collaborators" were found dead elsewhere on the West Bank.

We eagerly await the chorus of condemnation from the Europeans, who view capital punishment as an abomination. Don't they?

Speaking of Those Civilized Europeans . . .
An arson fire destroyed a synagogue in Marseilles, France, last night, the Associated press reports. In Brussels, someone threw five Molotov cocktails through the windows of another synagogue. Yesterday "a gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop near Toulouse, in southern France," and "Le Journal du Dimanche, a Sunday newspaper, reported that a Jewish couple in their 20s suffered injuries from an attack Saturday afternoon in the town of Villeurbanne, in the Rhone region. The woman, identified as pregnant, was reportedly hospitalized overnight."

A Religion of Peace
The Lebanon Daily Star reports from a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Lebanon: "A woman who gave her name as Umm Wissam brought her 10-year-old son forward and said: 'See this child? I am ready to use him as human bomb right now if I have to.' " The Christian Science Monitor profiles 14-year-old Shireen Oudeh, who lives in a West Bank refugee camp and aspires to be a suicide bomber: "If Sharon is calling us terrorists, we should show him the terror," she says. Asked if she wants to blow herself up, she replies: "If I had the means, I would have done it yesterday."

Ahead of the Times
Yesterday's New York Times included the following correction (links require registration):

An article on March 10 about Jaffar Umar Thalib, a militant Muslim cleric in Indonesia, referred incorrectly to the number of Muslims killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. It was not 800. There has so far been no official count of Muslims who were among the 2,830 dead or missing confirmed as of March 21.

We noted the error three weeks ago.

Stupidity Watch
Maybe Ariel Sharon is the one who's sending out suicide bombers to murder Jews. That at least is the theory of documentarian Stuart Tanner, producer/director of a PBS "Frontline" show called "Battle for the Holy Land." Here he is, in a Washington Post online chat:

What's interesting about spending some time in the area is that you become aware of deeper and in some sense darker aspects of the conflict. To give you an example, the suicide bombing on Wednesday, the "Passover massacre," as the Israelis call it, whose interests did that serve? I'd say it certainly undermined the whole Arab summit and peace proposal. It strengthened Sharon's claim that Palestinians are not interested in peace. And it further damages the image of Chairman Arafat. And therefore sometimes you get darker currents of conspiracy theory, whereby people begin to think that maybe these attacks are allowed, because the timing of them would suit Israel politically so strongly.

Tanner goes on to theorize that maybe the massacre was the work of more-militant Palestinian groups "that want to damage Chairman Arafat themselves." Given that one such group, Hamas, has actually claimed responsibility for the Passover massacre, this seems a lot less far-fetched than the theory that Israel was behind it.

Bye-Bye, Zubaydah
"Pakistani authorities have handed over to the United States a man thought to be the biggest catch yet in the war on terrorism: Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaida leader believed to be leading an attempt to reconstitute the group in Afghanistan," the Associated Press reports. Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian, "is believed to have played a role in a foiled plot to blow up the U.S. embassies in Sarajevo and Paris last fall, as well as the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon."

See You in September
"Britain's most senior general has secretly instructed regimental commanders to prepare for an invasion of Iraq this autumn," London's Daily Telegraph reports (link may require registration).

Terror in Kashmir
"Suspected Islamic militants threw several grenades and exchanged gunfire with police Saturday at a 150-year-old Hindu temple in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir," the Los Angeles Times reports. "Ten people were killed and 20 were injured."

It's Him Again
Bill Clinton is at it again, giving a long, self-justifying interview to Newsweek:

Is there one thing you didn't do that you really wish you had on terrorism?

There is one thing I wish I had been able to do. [In fall 2000] I had two options, OK? We knew more or less where [bin Laden] would spend the night. But keep in mind, we were told he was going to be at that training site [in August 1998] and he left a couple of hours before [the missiles hit]. So what did I have? A 40 percent chance of knowing we could have hit it. But there were a very large number of women and children in that compound and it's almost like he was daring me to kill them. And we know at the same time he was training people to kill me. Which was fair enough--I was trying to get him. I felt it would hurt America's interests if we killed a lot of Afghani [sic] women and children and didn't even get him.

What does he mean, "fair enough"? Is he really suggesting that assassinating the leader of a democracy is morally equivalent to killing a terrorist?

Elsewhere in the interview Clinton says he thinks the things he did in office are far more important than the war against terror:

I think 30 years from now when people will look back on it, that the things that we did to deal with the domestic and foreign issues we dealt with--with Russia, with China, with NATO, with NAFTA, in the Balkans, what we did in getting rid of the horrible fiscal problems of the country and a lot of the domestic things we did--I think that it will be just fine. I do not believe this will be viewed 30, 40, 50 years from now in the same light as World War II.

He adds that if he had it to do over, he wouldn't pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich--not because it was the wrong thing to do but because "it wasn't worth the damage to my reputation."

Disgusting Dissenters
We've heard a lot of talk since Sept. 11 about wartime threats to free speech. Most of this has been pure nonsense, from people who are dissenting to their heart's content and wish they were immune from criticism. But here are a couple of cases in which the civil-liberties alarmists might have a small point:

A few days after Sept. 11, one Reggie Upshaw allegedly told a crowd near Times Square: "It's good that the World Trade Center was bombed. More cops and firemen should have died. More bombs should have been dropped and more people should have been killed." According to the Associated Press, "police said the crowd gathered around Upshaw and made threatening remarks." Upshaw was charged with with disorderly conduct and inciting a riot.

On Oct. 4, William Harvey was arrested near Ground Zero after he "allegedly said the attacks were revenge for American treatment of Islamic nations. Dressed in military fatigues and holding a sign with Osama bin Laden's face superimposed over the twin towers, Harvey attracted about 60 people, some of whom threatened to kill him, police said." A judge ruled that in light of the time and place of his speech, Harvey should have known "that public inconvenience, annoyance and alarm would result."

There is an argument that under what is known as the "fighting words" doctrine, these two men's speech was not protected by the First Amendment. And it's hard not to sympathize with the desire to beat these guys up. Still, both of them plainly were making a political point, repugnant as it may be. On balance, the First Amendment probably ought to win out in these cases.

Violence on the Right
On Friday we challenged Paul Krugman to come up with an example of right-wingers in America committing acts of violence comparable to the various antiglobalization riots that have attended recent meetings of international organizations. Reader David Kimmell took up the challenge:

In your otherwise justified skewering of Paul Krugman, I strongly disagree with your last line. An example to me of far-right-wingers running wild would be the murder of doctors and extreme harassment of abortion clinic personnel that some pro-lifers undertake. If you look closely, their justifications for those actions bear a striking resemblance to those we are hearing from the terrorists for their murders of innocents.

A fair point. The federal government, incidentally, has used the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act to prosecute antiabortion extremists--not only murderers but also organizers of peaceful, though disruptive, protests. How about taking the same approach to the antiglobalization crowd?

Taking the Fifth
The new Fortune 500 list is out, and Enron has jumped to No. 5 on the list from No. 7 two years ago. Howzzat again? Fortune, which ranks corporations by their revenues, explains:

To begin with, Enron, going by the restated financials it issued for the first nine months of last year, inarguably was a huge company. In fact, its $139 billion in revenues for nine months exceeded General Electric's full-year revenues of $125 billion.

Then, on Dec. 2, Enron went into bankruptcy (a fact that doesn't disqualify it from the 500 list), and it has yet to report fourth-quarter results. The missing quarter, in which we knew revenues had fallen dramatically, gave us a problem. So we took a stab at estimating full-year revenues and concluded they might reach a maximum of $160 billion. But rather than create a precedent of using revenue estimates on the Fortune 500 list, we decided to rank Enron based on its nine-months revenues of $139 billion--and that figure is what makes it fifth on our list, behind Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, GM, and Ford. (Had we used the $160 billion estimate, Enron would still have trailed Ford.) Given the questions that hang over Enron's profits, assets, and stockholders' equity, we didn't think we could report plausible figures for those categories.

Baiting the Cops
"Two people left a 15-mile-long- trail of doughnuts after they took a Krispy Kreme truck from a parking lot and fled," Reuters reports from Slidell, La. "They abandoned the truck when they were spotted by police responding to reports of a dangerous driver who was losing his doughnuts."

Police following a trail of donuts? This one's gotta be an April Fool's joke.

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to C.E. Dobkin, Erik Fortune, Jerome Marcus, S.E. Brenner, Michael Segal, Raghu Desikan, R.J. Menscher, Steven Wallach, Greg Dougherty, Paul Music, Dan Friedman, Dawn Eden, Robert LeChevalier, Natalie Cohen, Michael Zukerman, Rafael Harpaz, Yehuda Hilewitz, Jose Guardia, Michael Simons, Judith Weiss, Marie Bourgeois, Diane Ravitch, Ira Stoll, Jeremy Winer, Damian Bennett, Mike Daley, David Merrill, Rob Harvie, Kyle Olson, Richard Miniter, Ryan Serote, Pat Rowe, Glen Smith, Ted Villa and Kevin Gowen. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

  • Paul Johnson: Through history, holy days have often served as opportunities to wage war (link requires registration).
  • Robert Bartley: President Bush has had a bad patch. Is he beyond it?
  • Brendan Miniter on military chaplains.
  • Plus: A Seattle Times editor says The Wall Street Journal was "misleading and fundamentally unfair." You be the judge.

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