by JAMES TARANTO
Monday, October 1, 2001 1:50 P.M. EDT

Sharpton Is (Gulp!) Right. Rudy Must Go.
Al Sharpton, New York's most flamboyant racial demagogue, was strangely quiet in the days following Sept. 11. Of course it couldn't last, for Sharpton is a loudmouth even by New York standards. Over the weekend he emerged, slamming Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and saying his leadership was superfluous. "We would have come together if Bozo was the mayor," Sharpton said. The most charitable way to take this remark is as a professional courtesy to a fellow clown.

Sharpton also sharply criticized Giuliani's effort to extend his term, which ends Jan. 1. A voter-approved term-limits law bars the mayor from seeking a third consecutive term, but last week, in the midst of a grassroots "keep Rudy" effort, the mayor proposed to delay the transition for three months. Two of the three mayoral candidates endorsed the idea, but Sharpton's man, Fernando Ferrer, said no. Sharpton said of Giuliani, "We elected you mayor, not messiah."

Awkward as it is to admit, Ferrer and Sharpton are right. Giuliani has performed magnificently in the face of an unprecedented crisis. But it is a fundamental principle of representative democracy that no man is indispensable. The orderly succession of leadership is a cornerstone of American politics, even during wartime. When FDR died in April 1945, less than a month before V-E day, Harry Truman took the reins and led the country to victory in World War II.

It's true that Giuliani is being forced to leave office because of a law that, in retrospect, seems ill-considered. As Myron Magnet observed last week, "The will of the people is for Mr. Giuliani to stay at the city's helm, as the mayor's 91% approval rating testifies. If Mr. Giuliani ran on Election Day, can anyone doubt he would win in a landslide?"

But preference must yield to principle. The last time we heard about "the will of the people," it was from partisans of Al Gore, who claimed that their man deserved to be president because he "won the popular vote," and that with a few changes to Florida's vote-counting procedures, Gore could be awarded that state's contested 25 electoral votes.

Conservatives rightly countered that America is a nation of laws, not men; that it's wrong to change the rules once the game is in progress. That argument is no less true today, when New York City has already held a primary to choose Giuliani's successor. However much New Yorkers might wish for Rudy to stay, the law says he must go--and the law must prevail.

Only a vulgarian like Al Sharpton would deny that Giuliani has handled the current crisis brilliantly. But the seeming opportunism of the mayor's seeking to extend his term is a blot on an otherwise fine record. Giuliani should instead announce that when he leaves office on Jan. 1, he will make himself available to help the war and recovery efforts in any way the president, the governor and the new mayor see fit to call on him. That would be an act worthy of a great leader.

The State Department's 'Sophisticated Analysis'
A car bomb explodes this morning in a residential area of Jerusalem, injuring two bystanders and damaging nearby vehicles. The terrorist group Islamic Jihad issues a statement saying it did it: "We stress that there are no red lines that restrict our holy war and any Zionist in any part of Palestine is a target for our heroic operations."

Which might remind some observers that Israel, too, is a battleground in the war against terrorism. But when officials at the U.S. State Department talk about terrorism against Israel--the only liberal democracy in the Middle East--they sound like campus leftists spouting the rhetoric of appeasement and moral equivalence. At a Thursday briefing spokesman Richard Boucher called on Israel to "refrain from provocative acts that can only escalate tensions and undermine efforts to bring about a lasting halt to violence." Then he drew the following distinction:

Essentially, there are, on some planes, two different things. One is that there are violent people trying to destroy societies, ours, many others in the world. The world recognizes that and we are going to stop those people.

On the other hand, there are issues and violence and political issues that need to be resolved in the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians. But we all recognize that the path to solve those is through negotiation and that we have devoted enormous efforts to getting back to that path of negotiation. And we have called on the parties to do everything they can, particularly in the present circumstance, to make that possible.

I guess that's about as close as I can come to the kind of sophisticated analysis I'm sure you will want to do on your own. But they are clearly issues that are different, not only in geography but also, to some extent, in their nature.

Robert Satloff, writing in The Weekly Standard, gets it right:

As a superpower, the United States can and should adapt different standards to different local problems around the globe. But precisely because today's terrorism is, by definition, global in scale, the fight against it will never be won until we express outrage at terrorism wherever it exists; refuse to truck with terrorists and their sponsors wherever they operate; and insist on a single standard against terrorism, applicable everywhere: No targeting of civilians. When that day comes, then maybe the world will react to an attack anywhere as it is reacting to the outrages of September 11.

Our Friends the Saudis
Saudi Arabia's defense minister, Prince Sultan, says in an interview with the government-controlled Okaz newspaper, "We will not accept in our country even a single soldier who will attack Muslims or Arabs." The Washington Times adds, however, that "Prince Sultan's comments may have been for domestic consumption. U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity Friday, said they have received tacit assurances that Saudi Arabia will allow U.S. troops to use a command center at a base in Saudi Arabia as a staging ground for military action against Saudi exile Osama bin Laden."

On 'Night Patrol' With the Taliban
London's Sunday Telegraph has a horrifying interview with Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, former bodyguard for top Talib Mullah Mohammad Omar. Hassani describes going on "night patrol" as a Taliban secret policeman:

Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. "As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there's someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house," he said.

"Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed," Mr Hassani said, "and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water--like a knife cutting through meat--until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.

Reuters, the wire service that regards terrorism as too strong a word to describe airline hijackings and mass murders of civilians, describes the Taliban as "puritanical."

Talking Traschen
Back on Sept. 20, we noted what still stands as the ill-timed quote of the century: Jennie Traschen, an associate professor of physics at the University of Masschusetts' Amherst campus, picked Sept. 10, of all days, to make the following pronouncement: "The [American] flag is a symbol of tyranny and fear and destruction and terrorism." Traschen was speaking in favor of a measure banning the display of the flag on Amherst's Main Street. The Amherst Board of Selectmen, also possessed of exquisitely bad timing, went on to pass the antiflag ordinance that same night.

Traschen, of course, had no way of knowing that she was verbally attacking America on the eve of a terrorist attack. Now, though, she has no excuse. Yet she has penned an article for the Daily Hampshire Gazette that offers no apology for her hateful slur against America. She writes:

I requested space for this commentary because the Bulletin printed a very misleading "quote" from me two weeks ago that was extracted from a statement I made at a meeting of the Amherst Select Board Sept. 10, the night before the attack. My comments were part of a public discussion about the display of 29 additional flags in downtown Amherst. This "quote" was further distributed around the Internet, showing up recently on the Wall Street Journal online Opinion page.

We don't know why she puts the word quote in quotes, since she doesn't deny saying what she was quoted as saying. Nor does she offer any explanation that would make the statement seem less obnoxious than it is standing on its own; she merely recites a rote denunciation of America's purported Cold War sins. The best that can be said of her is that she evidently is ashamed enough of her original comment not to repeat it.

Traschen also claims that "I have received a large quantity of hateful e-mail and phone calls. Most of these have been ugly and violent in tone. Many recent ones, from readers of the WSJ site, have also been obscene." We have no idea if she's telling the truth, and we don't wish to cast aspersions on our readers. But it's worth making this point: If you want to tell Traschen what you think of her opinions, that is your right as an American. But please remember that she is an American too.

Her views are ignorant and pathetic, but she has every right to express them. Those of us who love America have truth on our side; we do not need to resort to obscenities or threats. Tolerating the likes of Jennie Traschen is a price we pay for our own freedom, and, as distasteful as this trade-off may seem, it is well worth it.

Second Thoughts
Another reason to be mindful of the rights of those who express repellently idiotic views is that they can change their minds. Here are a pair of nice mea culpas: Charles Deemer, a Portland, Ore., playwright, pens an "open letter to the peace movement"--a movement he says he's leaving--in an alternative paper called the Willamette Week:

When a nation is under attack, the first decision must be whether to surrender or to fight. I believe there is no middle ground here: You either fight or you don't fight, and doing nothing amounts to surrender.

I realize the great danger of fighting is turning into the enemy. But the certainty of not fighting is being defeated by the enemy. I believe one side or the other is going to win this war. I don't think "a draw" is possible. And I believe there is much more opportunity to create "a radical peace," creating a more just world, if the U.S. coalition wins rather than the terrorists.

Down under, meanwhile, one Helen Darville, who does not dispute a friend's characterization of her as being "Australia's loudest, most visible Israel-basher" pre-Sept. 11, publishes in the Sydney Morning Herald what she calls "the beginning of an honest attempt to document a series of wrenching personal and political shifts":

I was so into siphoning blame away from the perpetrators of violent crime that friends tell me my views were parodic, almost Pythonesque. Society did it. Arrest society.

Hence my willingness to take swipes at Israel and the Jewish lobby, to accuse both (without distinction) of paranoia, of reverse racism, of exploiting the Holocaust for political and territorial gain. "It's so much easier to clobber the Palestinians," I wrote in 1995, "if the world feels sorry for you over something that happened 50 years ago."

The images of Palestinians cheering as planes carved into skyscrapers made me sick at heart. One fat woman in ugly specs will stay with me for a long time. Don't go there, I chanted under my breath as she ululated with joy. Don't go there. That's where the Nazis went, and that way lies madness.

If only the State Department were so quick to catch on.

Phony Peaceniks
Over the weekend Washington was the scene of what news accounts described respectfully as a "peace protest." This characterization is worse than a euphemism; it is a lie. The rally was organized by the International Action Center, an outfit headed by LBJ attorney general turned lunatic Ramsey Clark. A review of the IAC Web site makes it clear that the group doesn't care a fig for peace; its agenda is to support every enemy America has: Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Fidel Castro, even North Korea's Kim Il Jong.

These people, of course, have every right to express their anti-American views. But if a neo-Nazi group were to hold a rally in Washington, the press would not shrink from describing the group accurately. To call a group of virulent America-haters "peace activists" is irresponsible journalism.

Blacks for Racial Profiling
The Boston Globe reports on two polls that find black Americans are more likely than other racial groups to favor profiling and stringent airport security checks for Arabs and Arab-Americans in the wake of this month's terrorist attacks." A Gallup poll found 71% of blacks, vs. only 57% of whites, said Arabs, including those who are U.S. citizens, should "undergo special, more intensive security checks before boarding airplanes."

Security Pays
USA Today takes a look at what it calls "the world's most security-conscious airline"--Israel's national carrier, El Al. The airline's security precautions, on which it spends about $90 million a year, has had some business benefits: "After a year of heavy losses, El Al's bookings have soared since Sept. 11, with many passengers too fearful to fly other airlines. In stark contrast to other airlines, El Al shelved its plans to lay off 500 people and withdraw some of its Boeing 747-200 aircraft."

Zero-Tolerance Watch
A Northwest Airlines pilot in Rapid City, S.D., "became enraged"--and justifiably so, in our view--"after airport security confiscated his fingernail clippers and scissors," the Associated Press reports. We understand the need for tighter airport security, but this is beyond ridiculous. Even if fingernail clippers can be used as a weapon, what would a pilot do with them? Threaten himself? This is beginning to remind us of the zero-tolerance hysteria that gripped America's schools in the wake of Columbine.

Instapundit.com calls our attention to a nice little article by a psychologist (no kidding) named Helen Smith, who makes the same connection:

What these rules actually do is punish the average citizen who is not doing anything wrong. But that's actually part of the dynamic. There are far more law-abiding citizens: by punishing them the authorities reassure other law-abiding citizens that they are acting. If they only acted against people who were actually violent, most ordinary citizens (i.e., voters) wouldn't notice. Unfortunately, these policies also leave the rest of us with a false sense of security. At least, that is, until the next mass murder takes place and we are left shaking our heads, wondering why our symbolic solutions have done nothing to solve the problem. Of course, this is what these kinds of symbolic solutions are all about--the appearance of doing something. Whether or not that something works to reduce random acts of violence is not even the question.

Clinton Disbarred
On this, the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court opens its session by giving us a timely reminder of how nice it is to have a serious man as president. The court has suspended Bill Clinton from practicing law before it, and, as CNN reports, "such suspensions nearly always lead to permanent disbarments." The suspension was routine (Clinton had earlier had his Arkansas law license suspended as part of a perjury plea-bargain, and the Supreme Court almost always follows the lead of state courts on such matters) and symbolic (Clinton wasn't going to argue any cases before the court anyway). But it's still an important statement about the importance of the rule of law.

The Big Me--II
Another reminder of the degeneracy of the Clinton years came in a New York Times report (link requires registration) on how ex-presidents have responded to the current crisis. The first George Bush has been quietly advising his son; Gerald Ford has offered to help in any way he can, and Jimmy Carter has been a class act, declaring in a Sept. 13 speech: "Although I have had some differences with other presidents, including President Bush, it's one of my deepest commitments to support him as he makes decisions as difficult as any president has ever faced." Ronald Reagan, of course, is stricken with Alzheimer's disease.

And Bill Clinton? The Times reports he "is described by friends as a frustrated spectator, unable to guide the nation through a crisis that is far bigger than anything he confronted in his eight-year tenure." As one unidentified friend puts it: "He has said there has to be a defining moment in a presidency that really makes a great presidency. He didn't have one."

Gore: 'We Are United'
Clinton's vice president is a better man than his erstwhile boss. Speaking to Democrats in Iowa, Al Gore declares: "We are united behind our president, George W. Bush, behind our country, behind the effort to seek justice not revenge, to make sure this can never ever happen again and to make sure we have the strongest unity in America we have ever had."

A New Standard
Check out The Weekly Standard's redesigned Web site. Long an online laggard, the Beltway's conservative weekly has a slick new look, daily articles and special features for subscribers. We haven't had a chance to explore the site fully, but on first glance it looks awfully nice.

(Ira Stoll helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Jim Orheim, Rosslyn Smith, Reagan Lynch, C. Marc McConnell, Isabel Lyman, Will Cate, Damian Bennett and Frank Stirk. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)