by JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, May 2, 2002 3:30 P.M. EDT

Saddam Tops Off the Tank
Saddam Hussein "has illegally siphoned off as much as $300 million" in oil revenue under the U.N. "oil for food" program, The Wall Street Journal reports. Here's how the swindle works:

Iraq sells oil at a U.N.-approved price to dozens of middlemen, mostly little-known overseas companies. But Iraq also demands a secret, additional fee for each barrel. When the middlemen turn around and sell to big oil-trading companies, they pass along the illegal surcharge. The middlemen deposit the surcharge into Iraqi-controlled bank accounts; their legitimate payments go as required into a U.N. bank account for the humanitarian fund. As for the oil-trading companies, they in turn pass along the surcharge to their customers, the giant refining companies, though they typically don't break out the surcharge separately on their bills.

The surcharges range from 20 to 70 cents a barrel. When combined with oil smuggled to Jordan, Syria and Turkey, they allow Saddam to collect a cool $2.5 billion a year, which U.N. diplomats say "he uses to develop weapons of mass destruction and consolidate his power."

An Outlaw's In-Law
"The Justice Department has made public new information tying a wealthy Saudi businessman, who is Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, to several people convicted in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 or in unsuccessful plots to bring down airliners and assassinate the pope," the New York Times reports. The man, Mohamad Jamal Khalifa, was sentenced to death in absentia in Jordan on charges that he plotted to bomb movie theaters and other public places there. Where is Khalifa? That depends on how reliable the Saudis are:

Saudi officials told The New York Times last October that Mr. Khalifa had been arrested after the Sept. 11 attacks and was being held in jail. But the president of the Philippines said about the same time that Mr. Khalifa had offered by letter to help negotiate the release of two Americans being held hostage by a militant Islamic group in the Philippines.

The Cloak Police
The Saudi Commerce Ministry "is cracking down on factories producing versions of abayas (the obligatory all-covering black cloaks for women) that violate religious regulations," the Arab News reports. "A religious ruling, or fatwa, requires that decent women's cloaks should be thick and not revealing; loose so they do not show the form of the body; and open from the front only. The black dress should cover all the body, be devoid of decorations, drawings, writing and other marks that would attract public attention." Last October, the ministry banned an abaya that had the phrase "Dare you touch me?" printed in Arabic on the back.

How Congress Could Make Progress
Over White House objections, Congress plans to pass a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel's war against Palestinian terrorists--a worthy gesture, but a symbolic one. Here's something useful Congress could do: Yossi Klein Halevi observes in the Los Angeles Times that the United Nations will never investigate "how the Palestinian Authority, established and lavishly funded by the international community, abused its sponsors' trust by turning Jenin and other West Bank towns into centers for suicide bomb factories." Why doesn't Congress hold hearings on this topic?

Groundhog Day
Israel freed Yasser Arafat from his Ramallah compound today. The news reports don't say whether the Palestinian honcho saw his shadow when he emerged, so only time will tell if we're in for another six weeks of terror.

"Arafat toured the West Bank city of Ramallah like a triumphant hero on Thursday against a backdrop of smashed cars, trashed offices and blasted buildings after Israel lifted its siege of his headquarters," Reuters reports. Boy, that's some "triumph." And what makes Arafat a hero? All he did was sit in his office for a month; he would probably be dead or in exile had America not pressed Israel to leave him be.

The Jerusalem Post's Uri Dan says Arafat's days in power are numbered:

[President] Bush does not delude himself about Arafat's true character. Although he rescued Arafat from his isolation in the siege of Ramallah, Bush sees Arafat's true colors. . . .

After this concession made by Sharon to Bush, the prime minister doesn't intend to make the slightest concession to Arafat on the battlefield against terrorism. Arafat will try by all means to renew his terrorist offensive using suicide bombers--an offensive which reached a terrible peak in March, including the murder of 28 Jews in the Passover massacre in Netanya.

Sharon's defense policy has demonstrated that Israel has a military solution to Arafat's terrorism. Operation Defensive Shield, for the time being and only partially, has smashed Arafat's daily murder campaign. The IDF and GSS combatants, in hard fighting from Bethlehem to Ramallah, and particularly in Jenin and Nablus, have again proven that there is a way to break and uproot the terrorist infrastructure. This is a difficult campaign which is still in progress and which proves--contrary to the analyses of commentators and defeatists--that there is mainly a military solution to Palestinian terrorism, as Israel has repeatedly demonstrated during the last 50 years.

Therefore, the next time there won't be anyone to save Arafat from the fate to which he has sentenced himself--to disappear from the political stage--not even President George W. Bush.

The Washington Post reports that the so-called peace activists who've held what one calls "a big, gigantic, stinky slumber party" in Arafat's compound are trying to steal credit for the deal freeing Arafat. "I have no doubt that Sharon was planning to come in here and deport or exile the president [Arafat]," says an Israeli "activist" named Neta Golan, 30. "We made the operation complicated for him, if not impossible."

A Barghouti Confession?
"The head of the Fatah movement in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti, told Shin Bet security service interrogators Thursday that he had been involved in planning terror attacks, in which dozens of Israeli civilians were wounded or killed," Ha'aretz reports:

According to Shin Bet sources, Barghouti explained how funds were channeled from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to those carrying out the attacks.

The Shin Bet said that by questioning Barghouti and other senior Fatah officials, it has become clear that Arafat authorized the transfer of monies to Fatah activists with the knowledge that it was to be used for terror attacks.

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

Palestinian Chutzpah
In an interview with CNN, Arafat blames Israel for the siege at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity:

You remember the whole world moved when the Buddha statues had been [destroyed] in Afghanistan. The whole world moved. Why are they not moving against what is happening at this holy sacred place for the whole Muslims, for the whole Christians, all over the world?

Arafat also blasts Israel for fighting a battle in "the old city of Nablus." He says: "Did you know, the old city of Nablus (has existed) since when? Since the father of Joseph was living with his sons beside it. You know that, historically? And they have destroyed it." The real story is in this Jerusalem Post piece from October 2000: "Scores of Palestinians stormed into the Joseph's Tomb compound in Nablus and destroyed the site yesterday, after IDF and Border Police units evacuated the shrine early in the morning."

Similarly, in an interview with ABC's Ted Koppel, Arafat accuses the Israelis of having "burned" Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque. He appears to be referring to a 1969 arson fire there--but as a 2000 correction in The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the arsonist was actually a Christian fundamentalist from Australia.

Boy Bombers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on the Palestinians' use of children in the battle of Jenin:

Abdul Rahman Saadi, a slight boy with braces who said he wanted to grow up to become an electrical engineer, proclaimed earnestly, "This will not shake our morals."

Abdul said his battle assignment was lobbing homemade pipe bombs into buildings occupied by Israeli soldiers. He said he and six other boys, ages 10 to 14, surrendered to Israeli troops on the last day of fighting after they were surrounded.

A Price on Sharon
UPI reports that a group of Yemeni businessmen have put a price on Ariel Sharon's head. Anyone who kills the Israeli prime minister, they say, will collect $573--roughly 1/43630th of America's $25 million bounty on Osama bin Laden.

Libertarians and Boycotts
We've come in for some gentle criticism from libertarian friends over a couple of issues: our suggestion that the Commerce Department's Office of Antiboycott Compliance look into a Texas auto-parts dealer's boycott of Israel (since ended) and our urging Microsoft and Yahoo to police neo-Nazi and other hate speech in their online user groups and profiles. Sasha Volokh makes the anti-antiboycott case:

The freedom to not support people you don't like is one of the most sacred liberties, and those who identify with persecuted groups should be most concerned about protecting that freedom, if not by trying to get the law repealed, at the very least by not suing and not threatening legal action under unjust laws that help their cause. They came for the Israel boycotters, and I did nothing, because I was not an Israel boycotter.

Walter Olson's Overlawyered.com echoes the point. Volokh and Olson make a reasonable argument in the specific case of the Texas company, whose refusal to sell parts to an Israeli customer could be classified as an expressive act. The real purpose of the law, however, is to prevent companies from cooperating with Arab efforts to boycott Israel.

Volokh cites three cases in which companies "were fined between $4000 and $104,000 by the Commerce Department for having certified to their Saudi customers that the products they shipped neither were Israeli nor had Israeli components." There's no indication that these companies were politically motivated; rather, they were complying with Saudi demands. This application of the law does not infringe on the "freedom to not support people you don't like"; it merely forces companies to act consistent with U.S. foreign policy. Since that policy aims at hindering the efforts of Middle Eastern dictators to destroy the only free country in the region, it's hard to see how repealing the antiboycott law would serve the interests of liberty.

Over on InstaPundit.com, Glenn Reynolds declares himself "vaguely uncomfortable" with our effort "to drive hate groups off the Yahoo and MSN discussion services. Now Justin Adams explains why: It's better to have these groups out in the open than hiding underground where we don't know what they're talking about." Fair enough, but we've never actually called for a ban on hate speech. Microsoft and Yahoo, however, have declared that they forbid such speech on their sites--an example of exercising the "freedom to not support people you don't like."

Berkeley Bigots
Blogger Rory Miller posts a pair of images--the art for a flier that's being posted around Berkeley, Calif., depicting a pair of Ku Klux Klansmen lynching a man who declares "I am Palestinian," and a photo of that flier, pasted on a Berkeley phone booth, with the words KILL JEWS written on it in red.

Second Thoughts
Maybe we were too hard on Garry Trudeau yesterday. We accused the "Doonesbury" cartoonist of likening Ariel Sharon to a suicide bomber in his strip yesterday, but maybe we didn't get the joke. A look at the strips from Monday, Tuesday and today suggest that the week's theme is clueless reporters, not brutal Israelis.

In yesterday's item on "ecofeminist" Carol Adams, we should have referred to Daily Northwestern letter writer Mischa Gaus as "the delightfully named Mischa Gaus," since, as several readers have pointed out, his name is awfully similar to the Yiddish word meshugass, which means "crazy." We also should have used male pronouns to refer to Gaus, since Mischa is a man's name. And we heard from Carol Adams herself, who asks us to point out that the statement "All women live in sexual objectification as fish do in water" is Catharine MacKinnon's, not Adams's.

In response to our suggestion that it would be fun to place phony orders for delivery to Yasser Arafat's compound, we heard from John Lynch, who describes himself as the "Best Darn Delivery Driver in Durango, Colo.":

As a pizza delivery driver, I can tell you that the only person who suffers from a fake pizza order is the delivery guy. The supposed recipient of the pizza simply says "I didn't order it." When this happens to me I am stuck having wasted my time, gasoline and mileage on a fraudulent order. Please don't encourage this practice!

On the other hand, summoning a noncombatant pizza driver to a dangerous area such as Mr. Arafat's compound should be worth a significant tip (preferably in U.S. dollars), but I don't think Mr. Arafat tips very well, if at all.

We meant our suggestion to be tongue-in-cheek, and we're sorry if we've burdened any Palestinian pizza guys with unwanted pies.

Stupidity Watch
"Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi explains why he didn't airbrush the World Trade Center out of his film: "In a movie about a hero, I didn't want the terrorists to have won by taking it out of the background." We don't quarrel with his decision to leave the towers in, but wasn't the actual destruction of the towers more of a victory for the terrorists?

Slate's Timothy Noah quotes the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre as likening gun grabbers to Osama bin Laden. At the NRA's national meeting, LaPierre declared:

Andrew McKelvey's network kind of operates and sounds a lot like Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda. An extremist billionaire with a political agenda, subverting honest diplomacy, using personal wealth to train and deploy activists, looking for vulnerabilities to attack, fomenting fear for political gain, and funding an ongoing campaign to hijack your freedom and take a box-cutter to the Constitution of the United States. That's political terrorism. That's political terrorism, and it's a far greater threat to your freedom than any foreign force.

We agree more with LaPierre than McKelvey on the gun issue, but likening the antigun lobby to a terrorist network is beyond the pale.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
"No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks." The first part of that age-old jingle, at least, is now a reality at Florida's Anthony Elementary School, where, the Associated Press reports, "police have charged a 7-year-old with felony aggravated battery after he allegedly stabbed four elementary school classmates with a pencil":

The boy began yelling during class after he was asked to share his crayons, police said. The 7-year-old then began chasing students and stabbed a classmate in the back, causing a puncture mark.

The boy also stabbed three other children, causing red marks, authorities said.

There's no question this kid needs a good whuppin', but isn't it overkill to charge him with a felony?

The AP also reports that "a Pennsylvania school suspended an 11-year-old girl for drawing two teachers with arrows through their heads." The folks who run Mellon Middle School in Mount Lebanon, Pa., called the drawing a "death threat."

Federal judge Katharine S. Hayden of Newark, N.J., has thrown out a lawsuit "filed by the parents of a kindergartner who was suspended for playing cops and robbers at school," according to another AP report. "Scot and Cassandra Garrick sued the Sayreville school district in June 2000 after their 6-year-old son and three classmates were disciplined for playing the game and pointing their fingers as guns."

And in Summerfield, N.C., Billy Taylor, a sophomore at Northwest High, was given a writing assignment: an essay "about indifference as a social conflict"--whatever that means. Taylor didn't know either, the Greensboro News and Record reports, and the proctor wouldn't help, so Taylor just wrote an essay criticizing the topic. School officials reviewed the essay and suspended him for one day, even though it was a statewide test and "the state's code of ethics on testing says school employees may not look at test questions or answers before or after exams." They slapped Taylor with a one-day suspension, then revoked it the morning it began.

Victims of Vegetarians
ABC News's Lee Dye reports on Steven Davis, an Oregon State University animal science scholar who argues that animals are killed to produce food--even vegetarian food:

Nobody's hands are free from the blood of other animals, not even vegetarians, [Davis] concluded. Millions of animals are killed every year, Davis says, to prepare land for growing crops, "like corn, soybean, wheat and barley, the staples of a vegan diet."

The animals in this case are mice and moles and rabbits and other creatures that are run over by tractors, or lose their habitat to make way for farming, so they are not as "visible" as cattle, he says.

And that, Davis says, gives rise to a fundamental question: "What is it that makes it OK to kill animals of the field so that we can eat [vegetables or fruits] but not pigs or chickens or cows?"

Remember that the next time you tuck into a tofu salad.

But Do They Know Where Scotch Comes From?
The BBC reports on a survey of eight- and nine-year-olds in Scottish cities, which found 70% of them thought cotton comes from sheep, more than half think oranges are grown in Scotland, and 30% don't know that eggs come from chickens.

Yankee Ingenuity
"By implanting electrodes in rats' brains, scientists have created remote-controlled rodents they can command to turn left or right, climb trees and navigate piles of rubble--and maybe someday, with the rats outfitted with tiny video cameras, use to search for disaster survivors," CNN reports.

Patently Silly
On April 21, 1998, William A. Fraser was awarded U.S. Patent No. 5,741,336 for "a system for securing a hairpiece to a defined portion of a person's scalp." Just one hitch: In order to keep your wig on, you have to have magnets surgically implanted in your scalp. Who says a bald head can't be attractive?

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to S.E. Brenner, Raghu Desikan, Jerome Marcus, C.E. Dobkin, Robert LeChevalier, Erik Fortune, Michael Segal, Damian Bennett, Marie Bourgeois, Zalman Shmotkin, Randy Schwartz, Elliot Ganz, Jay Brinker, Robert Garrick, Dan Rabinowitz, Jim Orheim, Anne Freedman, Larry Lindeman, Michael Kurtz, Michael Schefer, Ken Convoy, Robert Owen, Gary Leff, Ira Lilien, Shmuel Weinstein, Ashley Tate, Joe Littrell, John Lott, Gary Pastorius, Leland Hein, Paul Niehaus, Allan Toole, Steven Johnson, Gerald Caponetti, Sam Gaines, Michael Moynihan, Fred Furia and Jim Wakely. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Francis Fukuyama: Sept. 11 killed libertarianism.
• Collin Levey: A co-op board bans smoking--and strikes a blow for freedom.
• Claudia Rosett: In China, Hu's on first--or is it WHO?
• Max Boot on the history of America's small wars.