by JAMES TARANTO
Monday, April 29, 2002 11:09 A.M. EDT

The 'Crazy Thought' Peace Agreement
Back in February, we noted a series of incidents in which the Palestinian Authority had released terrorists from West Bank jails, claiming that they weren't safe there from Israeli attacks. "Here's a crazy thought," we wrote: "Why not just turn the Palestinian terrorists over to the U.S.? America has shown at Guantanamo Bay that it's quite capable of looking after the safety of prisoners."

Now our crazy thought has become a diplomatic triumph. The Israelis and Palestinians have accepted a Bush administration plan to end the siege of Yasser Arafat's compound at Ramallah. The sticking point had been Israel's demand that Arafat turn over six terrorists--the four men who were "convicted" in a Palestinian "court" last week of assassinating Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi; Ahmed Sa'adat, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; and Palestinian Authority financial chief Fuad Shubeiki, who Israel believes orchestrated the attempted smuggling of weapons on the Karine A.

Under the U.S.-brokered plan, Ha'aretz reports, "American and British guards will be dispatched to the region to ensure that the killers of assassinated tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi remain behind bars in their Palestinian jail."

The Washington Post reports that "after weeks of unsuccessful public overtures," President Bush "used quiet telephone lobbying of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon" to reach the agreement. The Jerusalem Post reports that Mayor Hana Nasser of Bethlehem is proposing a similar solution to the standoff at the Church of the Nativity. It's not clear if this would require a phony trial, as in Ramallah.

Our Friends the Saudis
Fox News has obtained documents captured by Israel in the West Bank that show "the Saudi Arabian government paid more than $5,000 each to families of suicide bombers and other Palestinians killed in the terror campaign against Israel." The documents "contain a list of 102 deceased Palestinians whose families have each been paid 20,000 Saudi riyals--the equivalent of $5,340--by the Saudi Interior Ministry," Fox News reports. "The names on the list were of suicide bombers and Palestinian commanders who had been killed in attacks against Israeli targets. It included the names of some of the highest-profile bombers who have been killed in recent attacks, among them children and women."

The New York Post reports Adel al-Jubeir, a Saudi foreign-policy spokesman, "refused to discuss" the documents, instead issuing a generic denial of support to suicide bombers.

The Israeli group IMRA reports that on April 19 Saudi government television aired a sermon by Shaykh Salah Bin-Muhammad al-Budayr, preacher and imam of the holy mosque in Medina:

O God, O revealer of the Book, mover of clouds, and vanquisher of infidels, defeat the usurper Jews. Show us the marvels of your power on them. . . . O God, shake the land under their feet, instill fear in their hearts, and make them booty for Muslims and a lesson to others. O God, shake them up. O God, destroy them. O God, scatter them. O God, annihilate them soon.

A correction: We erred on Friday in describing another Saudi cleric's call for enslavement of Jewish women as part of the recent Saudi "martyrs" telethon. Although the cleric hosted the telethon, he made the comments to which we referred in a government mosque in Riyadh.

Control Freak?
"Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's representatives asked that women be barred from air traffic control duties when he traveled Thursday to Central Texas for a summit with President Bush," the Dallas Morning News reports, citing "several Texas aviation officials," who say they complied with the request. The Saudis, the Federal Aviation Administration and the State Department all deny the claim.

This story has something of the feel of an urban legend. The News doesn't quote anyone with direct knowledge of the purported request; the local officials hedge their statements with words like "Apparently, what happened . . ." and "My understanding is . . ." Although the report was both bizarre and unsubstantiated, it was plausible enough to be all over the news this weekend--which tells us something about how Americans perceive our Saudi "friends."

Israel Averts a Sept. 11
The Israeli Defense Forces "foiled an attempt to carry out a massive bombing at the Azrieli Towers skyscraper complex in Tel Aviv," the Jerusalem Post reports. A Friday raid on the West Bank town of Qalqilya uncovered the plot. "During the raid, the area commander of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ra'ad Nazel, 33, was killed."

It isn't the first time the Israelis have foiled a plot to destroy the Azrieli Center, which looks eerily like the World Trade Center. Back in August, a pair of PFLP men were captured crossing into Israel from Jordan; a month later they were indicted for planning to bomb the Azrieli towers.

Someone refresh our memory: What exactly is the difference between Palestinian terrorists and al Qaeda?

Those Five-Year-Old Zionist Aggressors
In the Jewish West Bank town of Adora, two terrorists disguised as Israeli soldiers went on a shooting spree Saturday morning, and among their victims was five-year-old Danielle Shefi. The Jerusalem Post describes her father's account:

Ya'acov Shefi, a policeman who serves in the Hebron district, was attending prayers in the community's synagogue when he heard gunshots. . . .

He went to a neighbor's house in order to find out what had happened to his family, and learned his daughter had been killed and his wife and two sons wounded. "I saw my wife Shiri being carried out on a stretcher, and she called out 'they murdered our children,' " he said.

She told her husband that terrorists entered the bedroom and sprayed them with gunfire. The children hid underneath the bed, she said, and she told them not to cry. Seconds later, the terrorists left the house.

By Palestinian lights, murdering children is an act of heroism. "A Palestinian freedom fighter and four Jewish terrorists were killed and 7 others injured in an armed clash west of Hebron Saturday," says the Palestinian Information Center, not mentioning that one of the "terrorists" was a toddler. The Jerusalem Post adds that "both Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attack." Murdering a five-year-old Jewish girl is such a glorious accomplishment that at least one of these groups is falsely claiming "credit."

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that "Palestinian security forces in the Gaza Strip have intercepted around 20 youngsters planning assaults on Israeli settlements since the deaths of three boy suicide attackers Tuesday":

Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, a senior Hamas official, used the occasion to tell children to stay away from Jewish settlements. "I call on our children, who love God and who love Hamas, not to go to settlements," he said.

Hamas's view, apparently, is that only adults should murder Jewish children. Reuters also reports from Baghdad that "boys dressed as suicide bombers" participated in Saddam Hussein's birthday festivities yesterday, once again belying the notion that "desperation" rather than incitement is behind suicide attacks.

Freedom of What?
In a bizarre juxtaposition, London's Independent yesterday published a pair of editorials on free speech. One of them defends Tom Paulin, the poet and Oxford don who has called for the murder of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. "Freedom of speech is an attractive proposition when we agree with the views uttered, but its real test, as Voltaire recognised, lies in accepting that those with unsavoury views should have the right to express them," the Independent declares.

A noble enough thought, but what are we to make of the other editorial, which attacks David Blunkett, Britain's home secretary, for saying that some British institutions were being "swamped" by asylum seekers? The Independent objects to the word "swamped," which it says is "provocative term, nearly always used in a negative context."

"On highly sensitive issues the language used by politicians is as important as the policies," the Independent explains. "Decent policies . . . do not excuse indecent language." Calling for the murder of Jews, apparently, meets the Independent's test of "decency."

French Fried
Someone has put on the Web a copy of a hilariously vicious spoof, a satirical French tourism ad that ran on "Saturday Night Live" April 19 (as it happens, the eve of France's embarrassing election). Here's a partial transcript:

The French
Cowardly yet opinionated
Arrogant yet foul smelling
Anti Israel, Anti-American
And, of course, as always, Jew hating. . . .

With all that's going on in the world
Isn't it about time
We got back to hating the French?

Stupidity Watch
One Bruce Tyler--apparently a Cornell professor--is quite put out that anyone would make fun of Osama bin Laden. He writes to the Ithaca Journal (the third letter):

You published a political cartoon on April 12 depicting a scientist in a "military lab" examining a test tube saying, "There's no sign of human DNA in this sample," and next to him an officer on the phone declaring, "We may have found bin Laden."

This cartoon is inappropriate and offensive. Too many times have certain groups declared their enemies to be non-human. This serves no cause but that of barbarism. We cannot ignore the real social processes behind our enemies' actions, as well as our own. Any activities carried out by bin Laden are those of a human being, acting in a world created by humans, including us.

While the tragedies of Sept. 11 quite justifiably cause us--and many people around the world--great pain, we cannot forget that they were carried out by human beings, and as such we cannot distance ourselves from them as much as we might like, since we are also human. Cartoons such as this serve only to create a climate of misunderstanding and hate; what we need is peaceful justice and understanding for all members of the human race.

Death Is Irrevocable. So Is Life.
Several readers took issue with our Friday remarks on capital punishment. Judge Jed Rakoff threatened to declare the federal death penalty unconstitutional because some people sentenced to death have later been exonerated. By this reasoning, we argued, imprisonment would also be unconstitutional, since innocent people have spent time behind bars.

The readers' retort was that the death penalty is different; as the ACLU puts it, "Unlike all other criminal punishments, the death penalty is irrevocable." This seems like an obvious point, but it's actually much less compelling in practice than in theory.

It is of course true that a sentence of death is irrevocable--once it's been carried out. But the same is true of a prison term or any other deprivation of liberty. In Massachusetts, a state that lacks capital punishment, Gerald Amirault has been in prison on phony child-abuse charges since 1986. If he were freed tomorrow, he would still have irrevocably lost 16 years in the prime of his life.

To be sure, if Amirault had been executed instead of imprisoned in 1986, all hope for any measure of justice in his case would have been extinguished. But America's justice system does not execute criminals hastily. In practice, a death sentence amounts to a long prison term during which there are ample opportunities for an innocent inmate to exonerate himself, or for a judge to discover or contrive a technical problem with the original trial and invalidate the sentence, if not the conviction.

Contrary to the ACLU, a death sentence in America is actually more revocable than a prison term. "Because of the complexity and the potential punishment, defendants in death penalty cases are in some jurisdictions afforded better than average lawyers and greater than average resources," acknowledges David Feige of the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit criminal-defense law firm, in a New York Times op-ed. "Many appellate courts look more closely at a case when the defendant has been sentenced to die."

In 1997 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered that Gerald Amirault stay in prison in the interest of "finality." Would the court have been so untroubled by the punishment of an innocent man if his life, rather than just his freedom, had been at stake?

Correction
Friday's item on the comb-over patent misstated its expiration date. The patent expired in 1994, 17 years after it was granted. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, ratified in 1994, changed the patent term to 20 years after filing.

Patently Silly
On Nov. 16, 1999, Frank John Stefanik and Michael Stefanik of Ohio received U.S. Patent No. 5,984,311 for "a license plate observation game [which] is played by passengers traveling in an automobile by reading information on official bureaus of motor vehicle license plates, recording that information and scoring points directly from the recorded information or derivatives thereof." The patent was filed in March 1998, so in less than 16 years you'll be able to play the "license plate game" without paying royalties to the Stefaniks.

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