From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, April 2, 2002 3:19 P.M. EST

Our Friends the Saudis
It's not just Saddam Hussein who's paying off families of Palestinian suicide bombers, Stephen Schwartz reports in The Weekly Standard. The Saudis are in on the action too:

The kingdom pledged $400 million last year for the support of "martyrs' families," according to the Saudi Embassy's Web site. At $5,300 per "martyr," that works out to about 75,000 martyrs, suggesting the Saudi princes anticipate a lot more suicide bombings than Israel has yet suffered.

You don't have to kill Jews to benefit from Saudi largess. Reports columnist Robert Novak:

Bill Clinton not only received a $750,000 speaking fee for going to Saudi Arabia in January but came back with a hefty pledge for his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., according to high-ranking Saudis. Estimates range from less than $1 million to $20 million.

A Clinton library spokesman told this column he had heard nothing about this contribution and would not tell us if he had. But Saudi sources say the pledge was made by the royal family, following a similar gift to the elder George Bush's presidential library. The Bush library lists a contribution by the family of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to Washington, among "gifts of $1 million and above."

When Clinton was president, the Washington Times reports, he did a favor for the Saudis too:

The Clinton administration shut down a 1995 investigation of Islamic charities, concerned that a public probe would expose Saudi Arabia's suspected ties to a global money-laundering operation that raised millions for anti-Israel terrorists, federal officials told The Washington Times.

Federal agents raided 14 Islamic businesses in Virginia that are suspected of sending money to terrorists, but the feds aren't saying what they found.

Feminist Fantasyland
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat, has a Middle East peace plan: "The women of all these countries should all go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace." The suggestion is ditzy enough, but she made it in an interview with the Arab News, a Saudi paper. We'd love to see Kaptur organize a strike by Saudi women, who for the most part are not permitted to work.

Women throughout the Arab world are not exactly liberated. Next door in the United Arab Emirates, a Dubai court "has ruled that a husband has the right to beat his wife in order to discipline her--provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body," Gulf News reports.

Not that equality of opportunity is unheard of among Arabs. Reuters reports from Beirut that "one of Lebanon's most prominent Shiite Muslim cleric[s] has given his blessing to female suicide bombers like one who struck in Jerusalem on Friday, calling them authors of a 'new, glorious history for Arab and Muslim women.' " Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah made the remark in an interview with al-Jazeera.

The suppression of women is a central part of the barbaric and inhuman culture that prevails in much of the Arab and Muslim worlds. But Kaptur must be living in a feminist fantasyland if she thinks women somehow stand apart from that culture. In recent weeks we've heard not only of women suicide bombers but also of mothers beaming with pride in their sons who've blown themselves up in order to murder Jews. Everyone remembers that Palestinian woman featured in Sept. 11 footage, dancing in the street over the attack on America. And the Lebanon Daily Star reports from a Palestinian refugee camp:

During one of the camp's marches, a 12-year-old girl grabbed a microphone and started shouting slogans, which demonstrators repeated. "(King) Abdullah, son of Hussein, you are worth only two bullets," she declared. "If Arafat is killed, we are going to blow up embassies and highjack [sic] airplanes."

Kaptur's image of women as pacific creatures interested only in gentle persuasion is ludicrous. Women are human too, and are just as prone to evil as men are. In the real world, man's inhumanity to man knows nothing of the politics of "gender."

OK, So Maybe He Is Sending Mixed Signals
Asked by a reporter yesterday why he hasn't called Yasser Arafat a terrorist, President Bush gave a rather confusing answer:

Chairman Arafat has agreed to a peace process. He's agreed to the Tenet plan. He's agreed to the Mitchell plan. He has negotiated with parties as to how to achieve peace. And, of course, our hope is that he accepts the Tenet plan. That's what General Zinni is in the Middle East doing, working to get this Tenet agreement in place, which is a series of concrete steps to reduce the violence in the Middle East.

If Arafat has "agreed" to the Tenet plan, why do we need to "hope" he "accepts" it? Besides, the Jerusalem Post reports that "Arafat will not agree to any discussions on the Tenet cease-fire plan until the IDF withdraws from his compound and area A," according to a Palestinian source.

In any case, as Israel releases information it gathers in raids on Palestinian Authority facilities, it will become increasingly hard to maintain the fiction that Arafat is not a terrorist (unless, of course, one adopts the Arab view that murdering Jews is different from murdering anyone else). A report from the Israeli Defense Forces--available here in Microsoft Word form and excerpted here--describes some of the documents found in the office of Fuad Shoubaki, the "chief procurement and finance officer of the Palestinian Authority":

One document captured in Ramallah, for example, is a request from Al-Aksa officials, dated September 16th, asking Shoubaki for money to prepare bombs--"the costs of making one explosive charge is at least 700NIS [700 new Israeli shekels, or about $145]. Each week, we require 5 to 9 charges for cells operating in the various regions".

A handwritten document found in the same office, translates this request to monetary terms using a simple method of calculation: an average of 7 bombs a week = 5000NIS a week or 20,000NIS per month.

Shoubaki also provided ongoing funding for the activity of the Al-Aksa Brigades in the Bethlehem region, when he transferred monthly salaries to the organization's activists in the area. Also, he was involved in purchasing weapons, which were stolen towards the end of the year 2000 from an IDF base in the area. These weapons were later used to carry out attacks against Israeli civilians in the area of Jerusalem.

Shoubaki was active in other regions as well and had been involved in smuggling arms from Jordan and Egypt (via underground tunnels).

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades carried out two attacks in 2001, four in January 2002, six in February and nine in March. The Media Line reports that "Israel has uncovered documents in recent days that irrefutably link Yasser Arafat with acts of terror being committed by the Fatah Tanzeem militia and by other terror organizations," including "signed orders by Arafat to pay Tanzeem members who were known hit-men" and "signed orders by Arafat to give official officers' commissions in the Palestinian Army to members of the Tanzeem militia, which is an un-uniformed army that is illegal under international law."

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

Rum, Straight Up
At his Pentagon briefing yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld avoided direct comment on the Israeli-Palestinian battle but he tied the axis of evil to the fighting in the Middle East:

Murderers are not martyrs. Targeting civilians is immoral, whatever the excuse. Terrorists have declared war on civilization, and states like Iran, Iraq and Syria are inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing. The president has declared war on terrorism. It's a war unlike any other America has ever fought--not only in the nature of the battle and the weapons and tactics employed, which will undoubtedly change from place to place, but in this conflict, the battlefield is but one front of many.

Two cheers for Rumsfeld's straight talk. We'll make it three when he mentions our friends the Saudis.

'A God-Sent Issue'
Associated Press reporter Donna Bryson, reporting from Cairo, files an appropriately skeptical dispatch on anti-Israel "demonstrations" in Arab capitals:

The crowds are large and their chants fiery, but Arab protests--such as those against Israel's pressure on Yasser Arafat--are often used and even choreographed by the region's governments to send messages abroad and keep anger over domestic problems in check. . . .

Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim said the government was happy to let its people vent their anger over the plight of the Palestinians instead of focusing on unemployment, inflation, lack of economic or political opportunity or other problems.

"It is a God-sent issue for the government for the time being, to sidetrack and deflect attention from problems at home," Ibrahim said. But "whenever it threatens to spill outside the university gates, then the ugly face of the security forces is shown."

Meanwhile, several Belgian provinces have voted to sever ties with Israel as a protest against the Jewish state's defending itself. The Lebanon Daily Star quotes Mahmoud Jazzar, a refugee who attends Beirut Arab University: "We salute Belgium and wish it would join the Arab League instead of all those useless Arab member nations."

Which raises an interesting question: If Belgium left Europe and joined the Arab world, would anyone notice it was gone?

Kuwait Just a Minute
Saddam Hussein has raised the possibility of using oil as an "economic weapon" against America and other countries that support Israel. This is a laughably stupid idea. The Arab world produces virtually nothing other than oil and terror, and it needs the money it gets from exporting oil in order to pay for exporting terror. As a Kuwaiti delegate to the Organization of the Islamic Conference said in response to the Iraqi proposal, "How can we support our Palestinian brothers if we do not have revenues?"

The references to the Kuwaitis' "Palestinian brothers" is itself quite rich. Kuwait expelled its Palestinian residents--some 300,000 of them--after the Gulf War. The Palestinians backed Saddam in that war.

Terror Attack Roundup
Yesterday's car bombing in Jerusalem claimed the life of an Israeli policeman, the Jerusalem Post reports. Meanwhile, Ha'aretz has a man-bites-dog story from Ramallah, where police are investigating whether a pair of Palestinians were killed by Jewish terrorists. "Police, however, are not ruling out the possibility that the attack was carried out by Palestinian gunmen, who mistook their victims for Israelis."

More Dispatches From Reuterville
Reuters refuses to call either Osama bin Laden or the Palestinian suicide bombers terrorists, unless it puts the words in quotes. But here's a recent Reuters headline: "Palestinians Kill Collaborators; Tanks on Move." The "news" service accepts at face value the Palestinians' description of their fellow Arabs--killed with no due process--as "collaborators." And here's a paragraph from another Reuters dispatch:

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said the military campaign is aimed at "rooting out terrorists." Palestinians say Israel wants to destroy their struggle for independence.

Sharon's characterization gets scare quotes; the Palestinians', which is surely no less tendentious, doesn't. If evenhandedness were really Reuters' goal, it wouldn't be so blatant about expressing its bias.

Stupidity Watch
Our critics have occasionally made fun of us for asking rhetorical question: Doesn't so-and-so know there's a war on? Fair enough. But we've found someone who actually doesn't know there's a war on. He's Dr. Sidney Wolfe, a co-founder of the Naderite group Public Citizen. He objects to President Bush's choice of Dr. Richard Carmona to be surgeon general, saying Carmona's "expertise in bioterrorism and his penchant for heroism" are irrelevant to the job. After all, Wolfe says, "It's not like there's an ongoing war in this country."

Slate's "In Other Magazines" column--it bears three bylines, but we're guessing Jeremy Derfner wrote this item--makes the following idiotic claim, referring to an article in U.S. News & World Report:

It also includes a statistic to prove that Israeli violence only encourages Palestinian terrorism: Throughout the intifada, the Israeli kill ratio has stayed put at 3-1, which means that when Israeli troops kill more people, so do Palestinian suicide bombers. (Full disclosure: This piece was written by Jeremy Derfner's uncle, Larry Derfner.)

By this "logic," if the police solve every murder, that proves that catching murderers only encourages murder. After all, the ratio of captured murderers to murders stays put at 1-1.

Cole Man
It hasn't gotten much ink in the news stories on the capture of al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah, but blogger Eric Olsen notes that, as this January Washington Post piece says, Zubaydah "is believed to have served as field commander for the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole."

Questions We Wish Had Been Answered
From the Washington Post's report on yesterday's hearing in the case of Marin mujahid John Walker Lindh:

The judge also stunned the defense team into silence by asking the question that pundits across the country have been debating since Lindh's capture.

[Defense lawyer George] Harris was arguing that Lindh did not go to Afghanistan to be a terrorist. "The defendant contests that he ever intended to be part of a conspiracy to kill civilians or Americans. . . ."

"Well, what was he doing out there?" [Judge T.S.] Ellis interrupted.

As defense lawyers goggled, he withdrew the question. "You don't have to answer that."

The Profiling Debate
On Thursday we criticized Heather Mac Donald's claim that a new study of speeding by New Jersey motorists shows that "there's no credible evidence that racial profiling exists." We have posted Mac Donald's response; to read it, click on the headline of this item. We stand by our criticism of her original article, but we agree with many of the more modest claims she makes in her response, to wit:

It's undoubtedly true that antiprofiling crusaders, for political and ideological reasons, exaggerate both the prevalence of profiling by police and the extent to which cops engage in profiling because of malevolent motives. The New Jersey study does provide some evidence for the proposition that profiling is rare. We also agree that the Justice Department, which tried to suppress the new study, appears to have done so for politically correct reasons, and that it should have released it. And we heartily endorse Mac Donald's conclusion:

Rather than debating whether racial profiling is a good or bad thing, we should first determine whether it is even going on. More hard science is needed on the interaction between police and citizen behavior.

Our central disagreement with the original article is that it presented this single study as if it were conclusive when in fact, as Mac Donald acknowledges, there is more work to be done. It also seems to us likely that racial profiling exists, even if it is less pervasive than the antiprofiling advocates claim.

Who's 'Divisive'?
Florida's charming and much-maligned secretary of state, Katherine Harris, is running for Congress, and her opponent, Jan Schneider, is making the case against her. Fair enough--that's what opponents do. "Katherine Harris is divisive, and this district doesn't need that," the Washington Times quotes Schneider as saying. "If she goes to Washington, she will undermine all collegiality." The group before which Schneider made the accusation of divisiveness? The Hillary Rodham Clinton Fan Club.

Deaf by Design
Here's one of the sicker stories we've heard in a while. The Washington Post's Sunday magazine reports on a deaf lesbian couple who are trying to have a deaf child:

Several months before his birth, Sharon and Candy--both stylish and independent women in their mid-thirties, both college graduates, both holders of graduate degrees from Gallaudet University, both professionals in the mental health field--sat in their kitchen trying to envision life if their son turned out not to be deaf. It was something they had a hard time getting their minds around. When they were looking for a donor to inseminate Sharon, one thing they knew was that they wanted a deaf donor. So they contacted a local sperm bank and asked whether the bank would provide one. The sperm bank said no; congenital deafness is precisely the sort of condition that, in the world of commercial reproductive technology, gets a would-be donor eliminated.

So Sharon and Candy asked a deaf friend to be the donor, and he agreed.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
"Twenty elementary school students are on an extended Easter break after being suspended for buying or selling bags of 'happy powder,' " the Detroit News reports. The powder, distributed by students at Northwest Elementary in Howell, Mich., consisted of sugar, Kool-Aid and cinnamon; the kids will miss three days of school. "The issue is with how they were selling it in school," Superintendent Chuck Breiner tells the paper. "The way it parallels drug trafficking troubles us greatly."

Funny, we always thought the problem with drug trafficking was drugs.

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