by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, April 16, 2002 2:53 P.M. EDT

Heard on the Street
"The cause of Israel drew a multitude of Americans yesterday to the historic West Front of the U.S. Capitol, where Israeli flags fluttered by the score, thousands of signs signaled support, and speakers at the podium and in the crowd voiced vigorous defenses of the country's right to strike back against Palestinian bomb attacks aimed at its civilians," the Washington Post reports.

Local officials estimated the size of the crowd at 100,000, with an estimated 1,200 charter buses carrying out-of-towners to the capital for the rally. The crowd was fired up; a few churls even booed Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, when he observed--accurately--that there are innocent Palestinians among the casualties of the war in the Mideast.

Arab leaders, listen up: The American street is enraged, and you'd best ask yourselves: Why do they hate us? If you're honest, you'll acknowledge that we're fed up with your one-sided policies toward the Middle East. And if you're not honest, you risk paying an immense price. America's leaders cannot ignore the anger of the street; if they do, the street may bring down the moderate pro-Arab government currently in the White House. It is long past time for Arab leaders to appease the American street. If they let this crisis fester until Americans get desperate, there's no telling what we might do.

U.N. to Jews: Drop Dead
The United Nations Human Rights Commission has endorsed Palestinian terrorism and denounced Israel for defending itself, Canada's National Post reports. By a 40-5 vote, the commission approved a resolution approving of "all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. The resolution makes no exception for terrorism. Only Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany and Guatemala voted against the resolution. Six European countries--Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden--endorsed the murder of Jews. Italy abstained.

The United Nations won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.

The Toronto Globe and Mail notes that the resolution condemned "mass killing" by Israel during Operation Defensive Shield--and never mind the lack of evidence that any such killing took place. The British press--last seen spreading phony charges of torture at Guantanamo Bay--has been crying "massacre" over the assault on Jenin, site of a "refugee camp"-cum-terror nest. "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed," shouts the always-hysterical Independent, though the "evidence" consists of rumors that "hundreds of corpses" are "entombed beneath the dust." The London Times echoes the claim: "The hundreds believed dead were not all fighters. Buried under the rubble are the bodies of women and children whose houses caved in around them." How does the reporter know what's buried under the rubble?

The Guardian buries in its dispatch this crucial detail, which explains why the Israelis had to wreak as much destruction as they did:

Palestinians admit the camp was liberally mined two or three days before the assault. But the strategy failed because Israel had no compunction about razing homes to make roads for its tanks.

"The thing we did not count on was the bulldozer. It was a catastrophe. If the Israelis had only gone one by one inside the camp, they would never have succeeded in entering," said Mr Damaj.

The Washington Post and Newsday have far more balanced reports on Jenin. "Lives Reduced to Rubble," the Post's headline reads: "Jenin Camp Is a Scene of Devastation But Yields No Evidence of a Massacre." And Newsday says: "No Sign of Massacre in Jenin Camp: Destruction and death evident in Jenin, but no mass killings." It's possible that recovery efforts will uncover evidence of a massacre, but the U.N. commission vote makes clear the Austrians, Belgians, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedes regard Jews as guilty until proven innocent--if then.

The European Union is giving financial as well as moral support to Arab terror, the National Post notes. While the European Parliament has voted in favor of economic sanctions against Israel (its approval is nonbinding), "the EU has decided to pay US$43-million in monthly installments to subsidize the Palestinian Authority's 'administrative and budgetary expenses.' " Why are the Europeans so blindly pro-Arab? Mark Steyn attributes it to "the familiar European urge to appease":

France has nearly five million Muslims. If, from one million Palestinians, Hamas and Co. can recruit enough to blow up a couple of dozen Israelis every other day, how many recruits could they find in France from an unassimilated population five times the size? The Europeans are scared of their Muslim populations, scared of what perceived slight might turn them from shooting up kosher butchers to shooting up targets of more, shall we say, concern to the general population.

When the war with Iraq starts, we'll find out. No wonder Paris and Brussels are as keen to postpone it as Baghdad and Riyadh. The "whole world" is agreed that if anybody has to be blown up it might as well be the Israelis. Ah, those Jew troublemakers: Why won't they just lie there and take it?

Arafatuous
Yasser Arafat's "condemnation" of terrorism may have satisfied Colin Powell's formal demands, but no one really believes he meant it. The Lebanon Daily Star reports on a press conference by Brigadier Sultan Abul-Aynayn, the Lebanon commander of Arafat's Fatah faction:

Concerning Arafat's recent call to stop suicide bombings, Abul-Aynayn said the president had not denounced the bombings themselves, but rather the killing of innocent civilians and organized Israeli terrorism against the Palestinian people.

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

Albawaba.com reports that Faruq Qaddumi, political chief of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, "with Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi Saturday in the Islamic Republic's capital Tehran, where both men called for the Palestinian armed struggle against Israeli occupation to continue."

A Religion of Peace
The Israeli Defense Forces have arrested Nasser Yatima, a Hamas operative from Tulkarm, who "has admitted to providing the bomb belt used in the Passover Massacre in Netanya on March 27," the Jerusalem Post reports. Yatima says he hid the explosives in a mosque.

CAIR's Phony Poll
The Council on American Islamic Relations put an online "poll" on its Web site yesterday asking readers if they think Ariel Sharon should be tried for war crimes. Early results were overwhelmingly in favor; with 513 votes, InstaPundit reports, 94% were in favor of putting the Israeli leader on trial. But when InstaPundit and other sites reported on the poll, their readers went to CAIR's site and cast their votes. By this morning, there were 11,951 votes, and the numbers were reversed--94% were against trying Sharon.

Then CAIR started engaging in some funny business. First the number of votes somehow declined to 2,083, with 93% in favor. Then the poll disappeared altogether, replaced by this message:

CAIR is investigating several nefarious attempts by users trying to manipulate the votes. Thank you for your patience while we isolate and correct the problem. Please be advised that such systems that help in weighing public opinion should not be misused.

This is astonishingly dishonest. It's true, of course, that such polls can never be taken seriously because they do not poll a random sample of the public. But what CAIR calls "nefarious attempts" to "manipulate the votes" are simply people with Web sites encouraging their readers to weigh in. CAIR did not want to measure "public opinion"; it wanted to measure the opinion of its constituency--aggrieved Muslims--knowing full well what the outcome would be. Its objection is precisely that the public dared to weigh in.

Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark
Radix Protector, an Israeli company that makes data-protection devices, prints on its Web site a letter from Jens Peter Hansen, who heads a Danish union that is engaged in an anti-Semitic boycott. Here it is, verbatim:

Just now we're ready to buy 60 pieces off your "Radix protector net solution."

But for the moment, when the Israeli militaire is behaving so rough in the Palestinian Areas, nor I or my Union feel that it's is right to make business with companies from your contry.

We hope that this ugly war vil stop soon--and also we hope that Israel and Palestine will agree on peace.

The Radix guys mischievously include Hansen's e-mail address and phone number.

The Axis' Watering Hole
London's Daily Telegraph reports from the circular bar on the 44th floor of Pyongyang's Koryo Hotel, "renowned as the meeting place of choice for arms traders in the Far East":

Wandering past a low-slung plastic-topped table opposite the bar, I caught the eye of Udai who would not--he said he could not--reveal his surname. He claimed to be from Baghdad, so I asked if he was in Pyongyang to purchase arms, missile parts, components--anything that would break the arms embargo against his country.

"Maybe, maybe not," he said with a smile. "I come to Korea often but I cannot say why. It's a secret." With that enigmatic aside, he returned to his whispered conversation with his Korean companions. . . .

Foreign diplomats in the North Korean capital estimate that each year Pyongyang sells at least $500 million-worth of weapons parts, mostly components for short-range missiles and guidance systems to pariah regimes.

In February, Jimmy Carter said it was "overly simplistic and counterproductive" to characterize North Korea as part of an "axis of evil."

Dutch Treat
"A 13-year-old Dutch boy admitted he had made a bomb threat that prompted some U.S. financial institutions in the Washington D.C. area to close temporarily on Monday," Reuters reports. If the Dutch boy goes on trial, we'll bet he claims he only meant to paint the banks.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
Two weeks ago we noted that a Howell, Mich., school was cracking down on the sale of "fake drugs." Twenty elementary-school students were suspended for buying or selling packets of "happy powder," consisting of sugar, Kool-Aid and cinnamon. Now, the Ann Arbor News reports, "several area school districts" are following Howell's lead and declaring that "substances that look like drugs will be treated the same as the real stuff." Does this mean no more salt and sugar in the school cafeteria?

The Whine Spectator
Adee Thal, a student at Brown University, says she's the victim of discrimination. Why? Because hardly anyone cared that April 10 was "Disability Awareness Day":

I was one of the speakers on the evening student panel that was held in Starr Auditorium, a large auditorium with a holding capacity for many students. Only about thirty students showed up. Of these thirty students, the majority of them were friends of the panelists, including my own. I wonder if they would have shown up had I not told them to. . . .

If it were an awareness day for another minority--whether racial, religious or sexual--there would have been a greater turnout. There would have been greater attention given to the events by the student body, as well as by the faculty. . . . Brown University is known as an elite institution of higher learning. It is renowned for being liberal, striving to be politically correct and "embracing" differences. It is an outrage to see how much the community overlooks students and faculty members with disabilities. What many people do not realize is that disabled people are indeed a minority--perhaps the most ignored minority at Brown and in society at large.

At the bottom of the Web page is the following response: "Perhaps no one attended your panel because they didn't know about it. Advertising was terrible--I know I'm not the only one who didn't find out about the panel until after the fact." In the hothouse atmosphere if a politically correct campus, such common sense is likely to fall on deaf ears.

West Goes South
Cornel West, the former scholar who is leaving Harvard's Afro-American studies department to go to Princeton, "said in an interview that a series of slights over the last six months by Harvard's new president, Lawrence H. Summers, had culminated in the president's failure to send him a get-well message until only a few weeks ago, more than two months after he underwent surgery for prostate cancer," the New York Times reports.

Reporting on West's departure last week, the Harvard Crimson noted that he "is on a medical leave of absence this semester." The Crimson also reported that West "was arrested yesterday [Thursday] for participating in an act of civil disobedience outside the State Department in Washington" as part of a tiny anti-Israel protest.

If this is the sort of thing West does when he calls in sick, the folks at Princeton had better keep an eye on his attendance.

(Thanks to Paul Music, Gil Reich, Damian Bennett, Darren Gold, C.E. Dobkin, Hillel Jacobson, Russell Depalma, Charles Johnson, Judith Weiss, Douglas Welsh, Sukumar Muralidharan, Marie Bourgeois, Diane Ravitch, Ari Charney, Raghu Desikan, Rob Harvie, Zalman Shmotkin, Erik Fortune, Aaron Gross, Gordon Kaplan, Michael Segal, Paul Ruschmann, Jeffrey Shapiro, Edward Schulze and Jerome Marcus. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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