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BY JAMES TARANTO Thursday, August 1, 2002 3:22 p.m. EDT

Palestinians Whoop It Up

It happened on Sept. 11, and it happened again yesterday: Palestinian Arabs took to the streets whooping and hollering for joy over the murder of Americans, this time at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "About 10,000 Palestinians handed out sweets, sang songs and chanted anti-Israeli slogans as they marched through Gaza city on Wednesday to celebrate the bombing that killed seven people at Jerusalem's Hebrew University," Reuters reports. Here's a picture of this obscene spectacle.

Reuters quotes a statement from Hamas's Qassam Brigades: "The price of the Israeli crime to assassinate the leader Salah Shehada is more than 100 Israeli soldiers and that will come in 10 martyrs' operations." Note that Hamas's objection is to the killing of an Arab terrorist, not to the collateral civilian deaths that prompted so much hand-wringing last week. The Iraq Daily, published by Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information, calls yesterday's atrocity "a courageous, promising reprisal."

The Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz have biographies of the murder victims. Five of them were Americans: Marla Bennett, 24, of San Diego; Benjamin Richard Blutstein, 25, of Harrisburg, Pa.; Dina Carter, 38, a librarian on campus; Janis Ruth Coulter, 36, of Brooklyn, N.Y., who worked for the university's New York office and was in Jerusalem for a student-orientation ceremony; and David Gritz, a 24-year-old Frenchman who also held U.S. citizenship. Two Israelis also died: David Diego Ladowski, an immigrant from Argentina, and Levina Shapira, a Jerusalem native.

MSNBC.com reports on President Bush's reaction: " 'I'm just as angry as Israel is right now,' he told reporters, although he didn't explain the reason for his anger." Are the guys at MSNBC really so clueless that they need an explanation?

Breaking Up the Party

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has adopted new measures proposed by his security cabinet, including "using lethal means to break up demonstrations in support of suicide bombers," the Jerusalem Post reports. Michael Kleiner, a member of the Herut Party, which is part of Sharon's Likud movement, says in a press release (translated by IMRA): "The time has come for the entire public to give the government support to bomb the Palestinian cities from the air. Gaza is our Afghanistan.. Ramallah is our Sarajevo. Arafat is our Bin Laden."

A New York Sun editorial calls yesterday's bombing an "attack on America" and urges America to retaliate:

There is no shortage of targets. There is the Iraqi regime that is rewarding the families of suicide bombers. There is the Saudi regime that is paying the terrorists' salaries. There is the Iranian regime that is funding them and inspiring them. There is the Syrian regime that is giving them safe haven and allowing the transshipments of their arms. There is Yasser Arafat, who is their titular leader. There is the Egyptian regime, which is arming and training for its own attack on Israel and which just yesterday was disclosed to be harboring a figure in the September 11 plot. The correct American attacks would be calibrated to the individual countries.

At the very least, could we have a moratorium on talk by U.S. officials of a Palestinian state? A people that takes to the streets to celebrate the wanton murder of civilians simply is not capable of self-government at this time. The Sun is right to point out that the root cause of the Middle East war is not the lack of a Palestinian state, but the existence of a Saudi state, an Iraqi state, an Iranian state and so forth that fixate on hating the Jews in order to divert attention from their own manifest incompetence, corruption and evil.

The only way to make the Mideast safe for democracy is to make it unsafe for dictatorship and terror. As the Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi argues in the Los Angeles Times, this is not a fight from which the U.S. can shrink:

We [Israel] are the front line in a global war against a new barbarity. Humanity is poised between breakthrough and breakdown, between unimagined scientific and medical advances and the forces of terrorist dissipation and religious reaction that would send us back to the Middle Ages.

Not surprisingly, the Jews once again find themselves the primary targets of those intent on world domination. As history has repeatedly proved, what begins as a threat to the Jews ends with a threat to civilization.

And anyone who thinks the Arab terrorists' goal is anything less than genocide should take note that, as Arutz Sheva reports, "Hamas spokesman Abdel Aziz Rantisi . . . said that terrorist attacks will continue until all Jews leave Israel."

Crossing the Line

A Jerusalem Post report on the bombing contains a vignette of almost touching naiveté:

Prof. Robert Wistrich, who is about assume the position of director of the university's Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, said the bombing crossed a red line.

Wistrich, who had been meeting with two German colleagues near the when the blast shook the campus, said that many of the people at the university had thought that although most of the red lines had been crossed, there was some residual respect that put the academic world beyond the limits.

"This is a grim message that no target is off limits," Wistrich said.

But why should it surprise us that Palestinian terrorists fail to respect higher education? As we noted back in September, Al-Najah University, in the West Bank city of Nablus, opened an exhibition celebrating last year's massacre at a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem.

The Massacre That Wasn't--XVIII

The Big Lie technique has its limits. Remember the "massacre" at Jenin, endlessly hyped by Britain's yellow press and various "human rights" outfits? Even the U.N., which is notorious for anti-Israel bias, now says it didn't happen. "A U.N. report on Israel's military attack on a Palestinian refugee camp does not back up claims of a massacre, but it does criticize both sides for putting civilians in harm's way," the Associated Press reports.

Reuters adds an anti-Israel spin to the same story: "A new U.N. report on Israel's attack on a Palestinian refugee camp avoids calling the episode a massacre" (emphasis ours).

The same day word of the report came out, the far-left site Counterpunch.org posted an article cheering an effort by some European academics to boycott Israeli institutions. In what would stand as an example of atrocious timing if the Counterpunchers cared a fig for the truth in the first place, the article, by one M. Shahid Alam, begins (again, emphasis ours): "In early April 2002, moved by the massacres in Jenin and the wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure in West Bank cities by invading Israeli forces, two British academics, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, circulated a call . . . for an academic boycott of Israel."

Hamas, of course, has done the Roses one better by actually bombing an Israeli university. Ha'aretz quotes a Dutch foreign-exchange student at Hebrew University: "Three professors from Amsterdam University, where I study, signed a petition last week calling for cutting off all contacts with the Hebrew University because of the occupation. I wonder what they're thinking now."

We wonder if they're thinking now.

Terror Telemarketing

The wife of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader in Gaza, got a phone call from "a recruiter of suicide bombers," who "asked about the possibility of her son staging such an attack." Sorry, not interested, said Mrs. Rantisi; get someone else's kid to blow himself up. The Jerusalem Post reports the Palestinian Authority apparently was bugging the phone, and Israeli troops captured the tape of the call in Yasser Arafat's office. IMRA reports Israel Radio plans to broadcast it this evening.

It's My Party and I'll Die If I Want To

The Palestinian social calendar has been awfully busy of late. The indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute picks up a July 8 report from Babil, an Iraqi newspaper (sixth--er, make that VIth--item):

The Ba'ath Party and the Arab Liberation Front held a big rally in Jenin to honor relatives of martyrs and to distribute President Saddam Hussein's gifts amounting to $10,000 for each martyr and $25,000 for each suicide martyr. The hall was decorated with pictures of President Saddam Hussein, Iraqi and Palestinian flags, and slogans hailing the unity between the two nations.

Britain's Guardian, reporting on yesterday's U.S. Senate hearings on prospective U.S. military action against Saddam, says a nuclear engineer who defected from Iraq told lawmakers that Saddam "will have enough weapons-grade uranium for three nuclear bombs by 2005." The Guardian's Hugo Young lays out a strong case against the Iraqi dictator:

Nobody pretends that Saddam Hussein is other than a murderous tyrant. He has committed terrible crimes against his own people. He's a threat to his neighbours and a source of instability, one of many, in the region. There are signs he has restored some of the chemical and biological weapon-making capacity that was destroyed under the lengthy aegis of UN inspectors. It may well be the case that he is trying to acquire the capacity to build nuclear weapons.

But Young, bizarrely enough, opposes intervention against Saddam on the ground that it is not "necessary, prudent or justified." But in the same paper, William Shawcross has an altogether more clearheaded analysis of the subject.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2002

Answers

Bomb em from the skies. No need to send any ground troops. Let the ground troops stay on the outskits and shoot anything that moves.

Obliterate them.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2002