Good Terrorist, Bad Terrorist
Where Arafat’s terrorism fits in.

By Steven Plaut, professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Haifa.
October 10, 2001 9:25 a.m.

eorge Bush, the American administration, and the rest of the West have adopted a new grand strategy based on the old "good cop-bad cop" routine familiar from every police drama on television.

The difference is that this one is more like "Good Terrorist-Bad Terrorist." According to it, there are certain bad terrorists, like Osama bin Laden, and — if you're British — the IRA. (If you are American, Puerto Rican terrorists are not only good but downright useful, especially in helping get Hillary elected when Bill releases them all.) To fight these bad terrorists, you need to conscript for your cause lots of good terrorists, including Syria, Iran, and the Saudis. So never mind that Iran blew up a building full of Argentinian Jews. Never mind Syria's track record, including massacring 10,000 of its own civilians in Hama; never mind that it's running Hizbollah. And never mind that the Saudis fund the Palestinian terror. (You know, Saudi Arabia — the place where you can be executed for celebrating Christmas.)

And as part of Good-Terrorist-Bad Terrorist, the Bushies have escalated their pressures on Israel. In order to fight a no-compromise war of annihilation against the Islamist fascists and terrorists in Afghanistan, the U.S. has decided that the only way to deal with Palestinian Islamist terrorists is by capitulating to their demands, coddling them, holding talks with them, and making goodwill gestures toward them. This is a central plank in the new Bush antiterrorist platform.

There would seem to be good Islamist fascist terrorists and bad Islamist fascist terrorists. The PLO and its affiliates are suddenly on the administration's list of good ones. When Ariel Sharon protested the U.S. pressures on Israel to appease the PLO as part of the worldwide antiterrorism campaign, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer dismissed this as "unacceptable" — not coincidentally, the very adjective used that same day to dismiss the Taliban's offer to review evidence against bin Laden.

As part of the war against terrorism, Israel is now expected to parley with the PLO, despite the fact that PLO atrocities continue every single day, because the best way to deal with good Islamist fascist terrorism is to meet its demands. And even as the PLO continues to murder Jewish civilians every day, Israel — under U.S. pressure — is expected to negotiate with the PLO about implementing the Mitchell Commission agreement, with its concessions to and appeasements of PLO terror (or what the BBC describes as "what Israel calls terror").

True, Ariel Sharon is conditioning such negotiations on a 48-hour period of tranquility, whose definition has been so debased that it now would describe any two days in which PLO terrorists miss the Jewish targets they're trying to murder. These days, significantly reduced violence is what happens when only a couple of Jewish mothers get murdered by PLO "policemen." The U.S. then congratulates Arafat publicly on really making a serious effort to stop the shootings and bombings. And on really trying to arrest those same Hamas and Jihad leaders, whom the PLO — unlike the CNN camera teams — just never can locate.

President Bush, who wants to destroy Islamist terrorism, has decided that the most effective way to do so is by sucking up to Islamist terrorists. He has suddenly "kashered" (made kosher) Syria and Iran. The Hizbollah, Hamas, PLO, and Jihad appear to be suddenly off the list of world terrorist organizations, or at least off the active list. Bush then decides to reward Islamist terrorism by declaring in the middle of his efforts to attack the Taliban that, yes, of course the U.S. has "always" favored creation of a Palestinian state, rewarding Arafat's year of atrocities.

Next, President Bush and his people announce that in any future "peace accord" between Israel and the Islamist fascists — er, I mean, the Palestinians — the PLO will have control over "the holy sites." He did not spell out which holy sites he had in mind, but it is pretty obvious that he did not mean merely the Al-Aqsa mosque and Temple Mount.

Now, need we really point out here that these holy sites are not exactly George Bush's to hand out? He certainly does not speak for Jews and Muslims, and indeed has no authorization to speak about holy sites for Christians either. I can just imagine the outrage of the Texas Baptists and Evangelicals and Hispanic Catholics there when they learn that the U.S. wants to hand all of the churches in the Holy Land to Yasser Arafat.

This war is either going to be a war against terrorism or merely a war against Afghanistan. If it is to be a war against terrorism, then the U.S. must stop sucking up to Arab terrorist regimes, and it must endorse a broadside assault by Israel against the Islamist fascists and terrorists of the PLO and its affiliates. Israel must be encouraged to deal with the PLO in exactly the same way the U.S. is dealing with the Taliban, and with the same international support.