Charming terrorists

Anne Applebaum in the "The Discreet Charm of the Terrorist Cause" notes that the sympathy of Muslim for the Muslim terrorists in Britain isn't entirely unusual:

The notion that events in distant deserts should lead the middle-class inhabitants of London or Leeds to admire terrorists seems inexplicable. But why should this phenomenon be so incomprehensible or inexplicable, at least to Americans? We did, after all, once tolerate a similar phenomenon ourselves.

I am talking about the sympathy for the Irish Republican Army that persisted for decades in some Irish American communities and is only now fading away.

Alas, Applebaum limits her critique to the IRA. Had she cast a wider net she would have written (with outrage) at the sympathy given to Palestinian terrorism. And Michael Kelly had it right when he discussed the consequences of that terror on Sept 12, 2002:

If it is morally acceptable to murder, in the name of a necessary blow for freedom, a woman on a Tel Aviv street, or to blow up a disco full of teenagers, or to bomb a family restaurant -- then it must be morally acceptable to drive two jetliners into a place where 50,000 people work. In moral logic, what is the difference? If the murder of innocent people is for whatever reason excusable, it is excusable; if it is legitimate, it is legitimate. If acceptable on a small scale, so too on a grand.

It is the Western tolerance of Palestinian terror that has taught Bin Laden well.
Applebaum's column would have been better if she too had mentioned Palesitnian terror against Israel. Unfortunately she didn't.
Outrages against Jews were omitted in another item on the Post's editorial page. In "A constitution for Iraq" the editors of the Washington Post rightly fret about some of the less promising developments or possibilities of the Iraqi constitution writing committee. But despite their concern for the possible lack of women's rights or that the clerics will be able to overrule the constitution there is not a word about the denial of the rights of Iraqi Jews to return as citizens.

Also, the draft would prevent tens of thousands of Iraqi Jews who emigrated to Israel in the 1950s from getting back their Iraqi citizenship. It says only Iraqis who lost their citizenship after Saddam's Baath Party came to power in 1963 "will be allowed to get it back."

(Actually they didn't simply emigrate. They were forced to leave.) So once again the Arab hatred of Jews is unmentioned and thus tolerated.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by David Gerstman at August 3, 2005 06:48 AM