Memo to world: Stand aside while Israel tackles terrorism

Mobile (Alabama) Register
http://www.al.com/opinion/
Opinion   April 3, 2002

Senators calling on the Bush administration to do more to 
push a negotiated peace in the Middle East are dead wrong 
on the issue. 

What the Bush administration ought to do is to say nothing 
more about the need for Israel to restrain itself. The only 
American role in the region right now should be to firmly and 
unambiguously tell all other countries to stay out of the 
conflict. 

This message should be sent to all Arab countries, and it also 
should be sent to all the hand-wringers in Europe who harbor a 
growing number of anti-Semites while agitating for policies that 
would amount to Israel's suicide. 

As George Melloan so aptly wrote in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, 
"This war won't end until one side or the other wins." 

The reason it won't end until one side wins is because Yasser 
Arafat and his legion of Palestinian terrorists will not accept 
peace even when it is offered to them on terms so generous as 
to almost defy belief. Offered the first official homeland in 
their history, the Palestinians instead demanded, in effect, 
that Israel recede all the way into the sea. 

Concurrent with those outrageous demands, the Palestinian 
Authority has fomented a wave of terror against innocent 
Israeli civilians. Israel has no choice but to destroy every 
apparatus of Palestinian state control, re-establish martial 
law in the West Bank and Gaza, and send Yasser Arafat to a 
prison-like exile. 

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell ought to be directed 
to rein in all the Arabists at the State Department, rather 
than to continue giving voice to their claptrap about how 
Mr. Arafat is not a terrorist. 

If Mr. Arafat were not a terrorist, he would not have been 
kicked out of Jordan 30 years ago. If he were not a terrorist, 
he would not have closed the Palestinian schools in September 
2000 and used state-run media to urge children into the street 
to protest a mere visit to the sacred Temple Mount by an 
unpopular Israeli official. And if the Palestinian dictator 
were not a terrorist, he would not have tried to smuggle 
50 tons of weaponry from Iran earlier this year. 

But because he and his cohorts are indeed terrorists of the 
worst sort, Israel has the right to snuff out every last 
vestige of their rule.