From the Editor

Kudos to John Derbyshire

The central theme of this issue of Outpost is the folly of the notion that a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is a reasonable target that bears any prospect for making the Middle East a better place for Arab or Jew, let alone both. It is appalling how rarely in the media even sharp critics of Arafat's policies make this broader point. It is thus all the more welcome to hear the forthright words of National Review's John Derbyshire: "We are all supposed to support the notion of a Palestinian state. Why? We know perfectly well what it would be like. Why should we wish for another gangster-satrapy to be added to the Arab roll of shame, busy manufacturing terrorists to come here and slaughter Americans in their offices? I don't want to see a Palestinian state. I think I'd be crazy to want that."

And here, an even rarer voice, that of an Arab-American, Joseph Farah:

"On April 9, thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush in the Arab town of Jenin.

"While the operation was 'sophisticated,' according to the Israel Defense Forces, and included a building loaded with explosives in strategic locations, flanking rifle fire used to pin down the Israelis and a suicide bomber to trigger the key blast, there is something about this incident that illustrates why a Palestinian state is not in the best interests of the world, nor even those who would live in such a state.

"The most 'clever' part of the operation was dispatching toward the pinned down soldiers the suicide bomber -- a boy about the age of 10. Why was this clever? Because the Arab leadership who sent him understood that Israeli soldiers, even those under the stress of battle, would not shoot a 10 year old child. Thus the boy exploded and killed the soldiers, too.

"It's this kind of immorality -- repeated a thousand times a day in Yasser Arafat's territories -- that makes Palestinian statehood a bloody awful idea."

Do the Arik Sharon Hokie Pokie

The inimitable Steven Plaut sums up current Israeli government policy:

     You put your ground troops in,
     You take your ground troops out,
          You put your ground troops in,
          Then you move them all about,

     You do the hokie-pokie
     And you shake 'em all about
          And that's all it's all about!

Or, as Member of the Knesset Michael Kleiner puts it: "Every military operation that ends with the IDF deployed along the Oslo lines is ultimately an ineffective operation."

Black Comedy from the State Department

A bald-faced lie, a lie "so incredibly blatant that the liar knows he is going to be caught -- but for some reason doesn't care." That's how the Independent Media Review and Analysis's Aaron Lerner, not given to hyperbole, described the just-released U.S. State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism--2001.

Regarding Israel, the report is ludicrous. It counted 6-8 terror attacks, when there were in fact 94 terror attacks resulting in Israeli deaths. Lest one think the State Department has a high threshold for defining terror attacks (i.e. they must result in many deaths), the State Department counted 45 terror incidents in India, one of them a grenade thrown at the private residence of the Forest Minister that landed outside of the gate and resulted in no injuries or property damage. But the murder of tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi does not count as a terror incident for the State Department.

Equally egregious, the report holds Israel partly responsible for the terror against it, because its incursions into Palestinian Authority controlled territory hampered Arafat's ability to counter it! The report contains not a word about Arafat's own complicity in terror attacks although the State Department has acknowledged the U.S. accepts as authentic the documents Israel retrieved proving that Arafat financed them.

To top matters off, in a truly breathtaking display of moral equivalency, the State Department's Counter Terrorism Coordinator Francis X. Taylor took the occasion of the report's release to announce that Jewish militants in Israel who have mounted violent attacks on Palestinian civilians "were every bit as much terrorists as people who strap on dynamite and walk into crowded restau-

(Continued on p.11)

Outpost               - 2 -               June 2002