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Ryan Jones is a Gentile believer from the United States who has lived and worked in Israel for the past six years. He is the News Editor of .
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By Ryan Jones
May 22, 2003
Courtesy of Jerusalem Newswire.
Recent events have rekindled simmering feelings in Israel that its chief ally and supporter - America - actively applies a glaring double standard when it comes to how to deal with the terrorist threat facing the citizens of both nations.
This issue was thrust back into the limelight last week after tens of people were slaughtered in Riyadh in a well-executed Al Qaida homicide bomb attack. Following that atrocity, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell intimated that while the Riyadh bloodbath was clearly terrorism, no such component existed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"I don't attribute [the attack] to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I attribute it to terrorism," Powell said during a press conference in Amman, Jordan.
A short time later, President George W. Bush vowed that the killers involved in the attack would "come to know the meaning of American justice." His meaning was clear.
Statements such as these have left people in Israel wondering if Washington views American lives as more valuable and more worthy of justice than the lives of Israeli Jews.
It has also called into question with the average Israeli the veracity of Washington's proclaimed friendship, as similar attacks against the region's Jews are met, not with calls for justice, but with demands on Jerusalem to show restraint and practice appeasement.
The most recent example of Washington's position following a major Palestinian terror attack took place on March 6 of this year. A day earlier a Palestinian man strapped with explosives murdered 17 people on a public bus in the port city of Haifa.
In the aftermath of that attack, media reports indicated major pressure from the Bush administration for Israel to not "overreact" to the massacre of its citizens, even as U.S. forces massed to launch their invasion of Iraq in order to ensure American security.
The begging question is whether American security has been compromised by terror to the level Israeli security has?
Per capita, far more Israelis have been killed in terror-related attacks over the past two years than have Americans. The current Palestinian terrorist campaign has forced the average Israeli to live with the threat of a ghastly and untimely death every day and in every corner of the country.
By comparison, the average American does not yet face this level of threat. The conclusion is that the terrorist threat to the average Israeli is exponentially greater than that to his/her American counterpart. Reason would suggest that the greater the terrorist threat, the greater the demand and support for Bush's brand of justice should be.
Washington, however, has hinted over the past decade that it does not exactly view Palestinian terror as "terror."
Speaking on the issue of Palestinian terrorists last year, Powell noted, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," and said that the terror groups plaguing Israel constitute "gray areas ... that might need to be treated politically."
Powell furthered this policy last week when he gave the Palestinian Authority the green light to conduct negotiations with groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, instead of crushing them.
By its behavior, Washington has displayed a certain degree of acceptance for the Palestinian assertion that terror against Israel, even if it is the wrong way to go, is justified political opposition to "Israeli occupation."
Meanwhile, Washington openly rejects Al Qaida's political reasoning that its terror campaign is aimed at ending U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, particularly its large military presence in Saudi Arabia.
In other words, the U.S. recognizes that Al Qaida terror is rooted in a hatred for all things non-Muslim, but fails to extend this same understanding to Palestinian terror against Israeli Jews.
Washington likewise behaves differently towards Palestinian terrorists who harm American interest than it does to terrorists from other Arab states.
This assertion finds backing in the fact that the U.S. not only allowed Yasser Arafat and his PLO to get away scot-free following the murder of U.S. Ambassador to the Sudan Cleo Noel in 1973, but some decades later elevated the Palestinian terror chief to the status of international diplomat.
Washington has also failed to demand the extradition of Palestinian terrorists who have murdered American citizens along with their Israeli victims over the course of the current Oslo War.
These incidents give the feeling that the American administration is willing to excuse terrorism that falls under the category of the "Palestinian cause" from the ultimate justice being meted out on Al Qaida.
Terrorism experts from both Israel and the U.S. have argued that Islamic terrorists are all cut from same cloth - all are indoctrinated to see anything non-Muslim as the enemy and to seek its destruction.
If this is true of Al Qaida, and Washington certainly believes it is, then it is also true of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and even Arafat's own Fatah organization.
For the same reason that Bush sitting down to tea with Osama bin Laden will never increase American security, nothing short of the outright elimination of the Palestinian terror groups will bring Israelis the kind of peace they desire and deserve.
Like Al Qaida, these groups have made it clear their core reason for existence is based on hatred for Israel because it is Jewish and not Muslim. Not because Israel won't give them this or that scrap of land, but because it exists in the first place against the teaching of their "prophet."
Views expressed by the author do not
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