Editor's Note
This is the second of a three-part quinquennial retrospective of Best of the Web Today, which debuted on July 28, 2000. Part 1 appeared yesterday, and part 3, dealing with American politics since 9/11, will run tomorrow. We return from vacation Monday.

Oh, the Stupidity!
In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, "there were no Democrats, no Republicans. We were all Americans, standing together"--or so John Kerry claimed in a June 2005 e-mail to supporters. This was almost true. But there were those who were weirdly untouched by the enormity of the attack on America--who saw no reason to shy away from partisanship or ideological warfare, even for a little while.

We encountered one such in a Greenwich Village eatery later in September, a sour young woman who was dismayed that Democrats were expressing support of the president during a time of war. "They're kissing his butt," she sneered. We were appalled, and we let her know it. Similar sentiments almost immediately appeared at the margins of public debate, and we took note of some of them in a Sept. 14 item titled "America at Its Worst":

A few Democrats have been sniping at the commander in chief. "It's not a question of what he's saying. The content is fine. But the blandness with which it is delivered has caused considerable reaction," Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, tells the Boston Herald. Fellow Bay State Democrat Rep. Martin Meehan is still griping about Bush's failure to return to Washington immediately on Tuesday: "I don't buy the notion Air Force One was a target," he tells the Herald. "That's just PR. That's just spin."

College campuses are always a haven for anti-American sentiment; we remember hearing that during the Gulf War, Cornell prohibited its students from flying the American flag in their dorm-room windows. Even the destruction of the twin towers doesn't seem to have improved attitudes in the ivory towers. Up in Berkeley, the Daily Californian reports that at a candlelight vigil Tuesday night, "the crowd applauded when one speaker blasted the United States for originating state-sponsored terrorism." A letter to the editor from one Clare Fehsenfeld in the Badger-Herald, a student paper at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, asserts, "The strikes at the Pentagon (our center of war) and the World Trade Center (a monetary focal point) are telling. We had neither our democracy nor our freedom challenged, but rather our interventional [sic] and often coercive use of military and economic capital."

Other comments have been nothing short of obscene. Filmmaker Michael Moore explains on his Web site that his first reaction was to think the terrorists should have killed more Republicans:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

Why kill them? Why kill anyone?

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jerry Falwell as telling his fellow televangelist Pat Robertson: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " Robertson's reply: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government." The mirror image of the Falwell-Robertson calumny is a press release from the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which declares: "The terrorist disasters of September 11 may well have been the ultimate 'faith-based initiative.' "

It's worth noting that Falwell and Robertson both apologized, and that both remain fringe figures of the American right. Moore, on the other hand, did not apologize, as far as we remember; he did quietly remove the offending passages, and later the entire Sept. 12 posting, from his Web site. Much of the Democratic establishment later embraced Moore, as we noted recently: He had an honored seat next to former president Jimmy Carter at the Democratic Convention, and when his agitprop film "Fahrenheit 9/11" had its Washington debut, then-senator Bob Graham of Florida observed that "there might be half of the Democratic Senate here."

On Oct. 23, 2001, we started a feature called "Stupidity Watch" chronicling such nonsense; it began with contributions from America-hating cartoonist and commentator Ted Rall, "longtime journalist and iconoclast" Harley Sorensen and someone called Emil Guillermo. As the initial shock of Sept. 11 wore off, so too did our sensitivity to such extreme stupidity. Today we're a little embarrassed that we ever found any of Ted Rall's rantings interesting enough to acknowledge.

In our last "Stupidity Watch" item, on April 7, 2004, we began by noting that "this feature has been dormant for some time" and then quoted a column by Keiko Ohnuma of the Honolulu Advertiser:

Take the 9/11 terrorists: They thought they were defending their own family values against the corrupting influence of American materialism and imperialism. And it was to the great benefit of the people who controlled them to play to the desire to protect their own and buy their loved ones a seat in heaven through martyrdom.

You see what we mean. You can laugh at this stuff, as we did, or you can shake your head wearily, but it no longer has the capacity to horrify.

We have of late reprised this feature, but in a more jocose spirit, under the title "Spot the Idiot." This we owe to reader Jay Lessig, whose observation we quoted on Feb. 7, 2005: "Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots."

Our Friends the Saudis
On Sept. 24, 2001, we first used a headline that would become a running feature: "Our Friends, the Saudis." (We soon dropped the superfluous comma.) As apologists for Saddam Hussein are fond of noting, 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden (though the Saudis stripped him of his citizenship in 1994). And as we pointed out in that Sept. 24 item, the Saudi-backed Wahhabi strain of Islam has been feeding jihad world-wide.

Of course we're aware of all the "realist" caveats: We need Saudi oil; instability on the Arabian Peninsula is potentially worse than the status quo; you can't change the whole world at once and sometimes have to make a deal with the devil, etc. But we ought to have our eyes open about the nature of the devil with which we're dealing.

Our shining a spotlight on the Saudis did get their attention. On July 26, 2002, we noted that John R. Bradley, then an editor at the Jeddah-based, English-language Arab News, had launched a nasty attack on us--or at least it was meant to be nasty:

The reader must . . . navigate the minefield that is the spiteful ranting of . . . James Taranto, . . . whose earlier career was . . . defined by a complete lack of distinction and achievement. Perhaps Taranto is high on finally having got a platform to publicize his bigoted, right-wing drivel. . . . Taranto, snugly in the driving seat of his massively read website, has been "virtually" crashing it into any and every target he believes shelters his chosen enemy. . . . This is extreme opinion without reason, accountability or responsibility.

While Taranto's bile may exist only in cyberspace, and have only the intellectual capacity of a fifth-rate George W. Bush, this does not mean he is not causing damage down here in the real world. Americans wanting to find out more about the Middle East are likely to take Taranto's twaddle as somehow representative of more than just the author's own perverted self-indulgence. . . .

A piece Taranto published on July 23 is revealing of just how extreme and vitriolic a Zionist he is. . . . When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Taranto is about as biased and unethical an American commentator as you could hope to find. What Sharon is doing on the ground, Taranto is doing in cyberspace.

We were flattered, though we are modest enough that we must say the comparison to Ariel Sharon gives us far too much credit. He, after all, is a statesman and a hero to his nation, and he has waged a remarkably successful war against Arab terrorists, saving countless lives in the process. All we do is entertain and inform a few hundred thousand people.

A week later, on Aug. 2, we obliquely noted that Bradley had written a sequel, in which he cited Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs blog, which Bradley described as "a hate-mail oriented, extreme right-wing website that acts as a kind of magnet for Arab-haters." That article was titled "Why Is James Taranto Still Working for The Wall Street Journal?" To which the answer is: Why not? It's a living!

Why isn't John Bradley still working for the Arab News? A very odd follow-up, in which we ended up coming to the defense of our old foe, appeared in this column on July 26, 2004--two years to the day after we noted Bradley's first column about us. We saw this curious report in the Arab News:

A former Managing Editor of Arab News is currently under investigation for pedophilia and the solicitation of male minors for sex. While these alleged crimes occurred during the editor's tenure at the paper, he has since resigned and relocated to another country.

The paper didn't name the erstwhile managing editor in question, but Bradley had held that title, and when we began poking around the Arab News Web site, we discovered that every article he had written had been scrubbed from the archives. We wrote Bradley (with whom we had actually exchanged some friendly e-mails since 2002) and asked him to comment on the allegations. Here's part of what he said:

If it is meant to hint that I may be the subject, it clearly shows that the Saudi royal family are very concerned about my forthcoming book on Saudi Arabia. . . .

I expected that I would face some kind of smear campaign when the book comes out. But it appears that they have started early. I have absolutely no comment to make specifically on this absurd allegation, other than to emphasize that it is ridiculous and utterly contemptible.

"Is this a scandal or a smear campaign?" we asked. "Notwithstanding our past disagreements with Bradley, we're inclined to think the latter." The article on the molestation charge, incidentally, has also now disappeared from the archives, and to judge from the Amazon.com reviews of Bradley's book, it is very hard on the Saudis. Sometimes you have to break a deal with the devil.

Journey to Reuterville
Far more dangerous than the hard anti-Americanism of the far left (and some elements of the far right) is the moral relativism that prevails among Western liberal elites, especially in journalism. Exhibit A is Reuters. As we noted on Sept. 24, 2001:

Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity. . . . "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist," Jukes writes in an internal memo. "To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."

Reuters is the most self-righteous about it, but many other news organizations also use terms like militants, commandos, guerrillas and even dissidents to refer to terrorists--even though in some cases these terms are not only overly solicitous to the enemy but factually inaccurate (a guerrilla attack, for instance, has a military target, while a terrorist attack targets civilians).

This sort of moral equivalency takes other forms as well. One is the approach the press took to the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Here was a group of rogue soldiers who violated the law and would be punished for it, but news organizations obsessed over it, as if it proved that America was no better than its lawless foe.

When we first noted the Abu Ghraib story on May 3, 2004, we made the crucial distinction:

Enemy propaganda notwithstanding, this underscores the fundamental difference between America and totalitarian regimes like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Evil is part of human nature, and Americans are as susceptible to it as anyone else. But in a civilized country like ours, the state uses its power to prevent and punish brutality. In a regime like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the state uses its power to inflict brutality. Those who seek to blur this distinction are acting in the defense of institutionalized evil.

Much of the press subsequently went crazy, seeming to take as much relish in recounting the sordid details of Abu Ghraib--often in stories about totally unrelated subjects--as the abusers there had taken in their actions. This we dubbed "The Press Corps' Porn Addiction" on May 26. Eventually the press mostly dropped the subject (though it still pops up now and then), and it's telling that John Kerry never sought to use it as a campaign issue. He presumably realized what many in the press didn't: that Americans, while they may have been appalled by the misdeeds of those soldiers, had little interest in having their noses rubbed in them.

One more example of this baneful moral equivalence came up on May 21, 2004, when we quoted this passage from a New York Times report:

Iraq has become one of the most dangerous places in the world from which to report, with enormous potential for journalists to be deliberately targeted by either side or caught in the crossfire.

"We guess the weasel word potential makes this something less than a direct accusation, but the Times certainly seems to be implying that coalition troops are trying to kill journalists in Iraq," we wrote. "Is there any evidence for such a thing, or is the Times simply becoming more brazen in its anti-American slanting of the news?"

The offending passage soon disappeared from the Times' Web site, and as far as we know it never saw print. This innuendo has been aired elsewhere since--and it's possible that we saved someone at the Times from suffering Eason Jordan's fate.

The Former Enron Adviser
If we were giving a prize for the most ridiculous comment of the past five years, it would be no contest. The winner would be the man who wrote this sentence on Jan. 29, 2002:

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

The author of this incredible statement was New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. What makes it all the more incredible is that Krugman himself is a former Enron adviser.

Krugman's Enron connection had come to our attention less than two weeks earlier. In our Jan. 17 column, we noted that a Times news story had mentioned in passing that Krugman was paid $50,000 "to serve on an Enron advisory board in 1999."

Krugman came under attack from blogger Andrew Sullivan, and we thought Sullivan was being overly excitable. On Jan. 21 we defended Krugman:

Sullivan has done a manful job of trying to come up with an ethical transgression, unearthing an article Krugman wrote for Fortune while still on the Enron payroll in 1999. It's a puff piece on Enron, and it stands in sharp contrast with Krugman's current views on the subject. . . .

But whatever the merits of Krugman's views, before or after the turn of the century, he does seem to have complied with the rules of journalistic ethics. He disclosed his relationship with Enron in the Fortune piece and again in a January 2001 Times column. When he joined the Times as a columnist in 1999, he gave up the Enron gig, as the Times' conflict-of-interest policy requires.

But when the facts available to us change, we change our mind. On Jan. 25, we did just that:

Sullivan's position looks much better today, after Krugman's stunningly dishonest and defensive column in response. . . . Krugman resorts to the Hillary Clinton defense, that he's the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy:

A bizarre thing happened to me over the past week: Conservative newspapers and columnists made a concerted effort to portray me as a guilty party in the Enron scandal. Why? Because in 1999, before coming to The New York Times, I was briefly paid to serve on an Enron advisory board. . . .

It's tempting to take this vendetta as a personal compliment: Some people are so worried about the effect of my writing that they will try anything to get me off this page. But actually it was part of a broader effort by conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left, hoping that some of it would stick.

With this, Krugman earned the title "former Enron adviser," and we intend to keep calling him that until his dying day. Krugman, who was hired to write a column about economics, has instead become primarily a political columnist, and his lack of expertise in this area has made him an especially effective tribune of the know-nothing Angry Left. On Sept. 1, 2004, we quoted from a Byron York report in National Review Online about a Krugman appearance in New York during the Republican National Convention:

Krugman says he believes the United States needs a "mega-Watergate" scandal to uncover a far-reaching right-wing conspiracy, going back forty years, to gain control of the U.S. government and roll back civil rights. . . . Krugman told the crowd that the president is simply a front man for larger and more sinister forces.

"We probably make a mistake when we place too much emphasis on Bush the individual," said Krugman, who received a standing ovation when he was introduced. "This really isn't about Bush. Bush is the guy that the movement found to take them over the top. But it didn't start with him, and it won't end with him. What's going on in this country is that a radical movement . . . that had been building for several decades, finally found their moment and their man in Bush."

Krugman described the conspiracy as "the coalition between the malefactors of great wealth and the religious right." He offered no further details about who, precisely, is in the conspiracy but said that "substantial chunks of the media are part of this same movement."

Put aside the canard about the right's objectives--no mainstream conservative actually wants to "roll back civil rights"--and what you have here is a description of something perfectly ordinary: like-minded citizens organizing politically to achieve their goals. Krugman looks at democracy and sees conspiracy. What Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics is alive and well on the far left--and the op-ed page of the New York Times.

The Road to Baghdad
Our colleagues at The Wall Street Journal had been calling for the liberation of Iraq since long before we were their colleague. In November 2002 we reprinted a Feb. 21, 1991, editorial written by the late Bob Bartley that made the case for finishing the Gulf War:

The only logical conclusion of events so far is that Saddam must go. His removal from Baghdad--by death, flight or, preferably, capture--is the sine qua non of international peace and security in the Gulf. If this can be accomplished by liberating Kuwait and promoting a coup, so much the better. But there is also much to be said for doing directly what must be done. As the likely battle develops, we would hope that the offensive would not stop at some Elbe in the desert simply because that fulfills the immediate military mission. The first political goal is to remove Saddam from military command and political power, and we hope our commanders would not pass up any opportunity they have to get that job done.

Alas, the Journal was ahead of its time, as it had been on June 10, 1981, when, virtually alone in the journalistic and political worlds, the paper endorsed Israel's destruction of the Osirak nuclear plant. (Today, bizarrely, some Americans complain that Saddam lacked weapons of mass destruction; sensible people regard this as a blessing for which we owe Jerusalem great thanks.)

We like to think we made a small contribution to the debate over whether to liberate Iraq. Three items in particular stand out. The first appeared on March 18, 2002, almost exactly a year before the liberation began in earnest. Vice President Cheney had just visited the Arab world, where, not surprisingly, he had encountered little enthusiasm for the project of democratizing Iraq.

"In one Arab nation after another," the Associated Press reported, "Cheney has found leaders primarily focused on resolving the corrosive Israeli-Palestinian crisis, no matter how much he tries to change the subject to a tougher stand on Baghdad." We asked:

Whence these Arab dictators' sudden interest in 'resolving' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which they've been happy to have unresolved for decades? . . . When dealing with dictators, it's safe to assume that their overriding priority is to preserve their own power. . . . The thought of an American-backed government in Baghdad must terrify the region's tyrants."

We returned to the subject three days later:

Efforts to solve the problem of Palestine are futile so long as the entire Arab and Muslim world (with the noble exception of Turkey) is ruled by dictators who are murderously aligned against the Jewish state. The road to Middle East peace may end in Jerusalem, but only after going through the rest of the region's capitals. First stop, Baghdad.

We grinned broadly when, not long after, Bob Bartley, appearing on the editorial board's CNBC program, used a more elegant formulation: "The road to peace goes through Baghdad."

The second item appeared on Jan. 27, 2003, after Congress had approved the war but while the U.N. was still dickering over inspections. "Start a War? No, End One" was the title, and we pointed out that the Gulf War had never formally ended:

There was no surrender or peace treaty . . .; instead, the allies accepted a cease-fire predicated upon Iraq's compliance with a series of demands, embodied in various U.N. resolutions, concerning disarmament, human rights, sanctions, reparations to Kuwait, repatriation of war criminals, etc. These restrictions are supposed to be temporary: Baghdad's compliance was to restore both peace and Iraq's sovereignty.

Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with the U.N. demands has turned the Gulf War into a 12-year-long cold war. America must now decide whether to prolong the war or to end it--and the only realistic way of ending it is regime change, which will probably require military conquest.

Finally, on March 6, 2003, we reprinted (on the site, but not in this column) a speech we'd made two nights earlier at New York's Fabiani Society, in which we made the case for liberation. We made three arguments. First, we recapitulated the point that the Gulf War in fact had never ended, that far from "rushing to war," the American-led coalition was finally finishing a war that had dragged on for 12 years.

Second, we argued that liberating Iraq was crucial to defeating terrorism:

Terrorism does not occur in a vacuum; it is a product of the tyranny, misrule and fanaticism that prevail in much of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Saddam Hussein's continued defiance of the U.N.'s demands and its failure to do anything about it make a mockery of international law. What lesson can terrorists take from this but that this is a world without authority, a world in which the civilized nations will not act to protect themselves from those who would murder the innocent in the name of jihad?

Furthermore, the need to contain Saddam Hussein distorts American policy toward the entire region. Many critics of Washington's Iraq policy point out that al Qaeda actually has much closer ties to Saudi Arabia than to Iraq. This is undoubtedly true. Osama bin Laden is a Saudi native. Fifteen of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis. Riyadh exports the extremist Wahhabi brand of Islam throughout the world.

Yet Saudi Arabia is our ally. We even station troops on Saudi soil, to protect the Saudi royal family from Saddam Hussein. With Saddam gone, we'll be able to reassess our relationship with the Saudis and with other "friendly" dictatorships. The fewer enemies you have, the more selective you can afford to be about your friends.

Third, we argued against the notion that liberating Iraq would generate more terrorism:

If there are al Qaeda cells waiting to attack America, does anyone really think they'll pack up and go home once they're convinced we're going to leave Saddam alone? Of course not. Al Qaeda cannot be appeased. "Retaliation" for an attack on Iraq would be a pretext, not a provocation, for any al Qaeda attack. . . .

So at most, the threat of retaliatory terrorism might be an argument for delaying action in Iraq in the hope of buying more time to weaken al Qaeda. But . . . the case for delay is a double-edged sword. If we wait to deal with Iraq until we've finished dealing with al Qaeda, we give Saddam a powerful interest in keeping bin Laden strong. If Iraq and al Qaeda don't already have a tactical alliance, this seems like a excellent way of driving them into each other's arms.

We concluded by noting that American inaction had turned Iraq's dictator into a hero among anti-American Arabs:

As long as Saddam is in power, he remains a symbol of defiance against the feckless free world. He personifies the disorder that prevails throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. This is what breeds terrorism. This is why liberating Iraq is a crucial part of the project America began on Sept. 11, 2001.

Twenty-eight months later, there is indisputably progress in the Muslim world. Iraq and Afghanistan have held free elections. Syria's occupation of Lebanon has ended. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, among others, have made at least some moves toward democracy. The Palestinian Arab terror war against Israel has largely subsided.

Some claim that events have proved us wrong on the third point--that liberating Iraq has in fact generated more terrorism. This argument has several strands, which we'll try to disentangle.

The idea that postliberation terror attacks outside Iraq were provoked by its liberation does not seem credible. Yes, the attackers of Madrid and London cited the Western presence in Iraq among their "grievances"; but the attackers of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, New York, Washington, Bali and elsewhere also cited the status quo ante liberation--i.e., U.N. sanctions and the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. Thus we stand by our 2003 argument that " 'retaliation' for an attack on Iraq would be a pretext, not a provocation, for any al Qaeda attack."

What about the violence inside Iraq? The Baathists who are waging an "insurgency" obviously wouldn't have to resort to terror and guerrilla tactics if they still controlled the Iraqi state--but that regime engaged in terror and murder on a much larger scale. Surely Iraqis are much better off now that they have a democratic government that is fighting these thugs, and the American military likely would have suffered far more casualties had Saddam's army been able to mount a serious defense.

The question of foreign fighters in Iraq is a more complicated one. The "flypaper" theory holds that Iraq is acting as a magnet to jihadis who otherwise would wage war elsewhere; better that America and its allies meet them on the battlefield than in our own cities. The liberation's critics contend that Iraq has made jihadis out of Arabs who otherwise might not have joined the war.

There may be truth to both of these suppositions. But in either case it's clear that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous. Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, and a pullout would leave a political vacuum that could well turn Iraq into a haven for terrorists seeking to attack the West, à la Afghanistan after the Soviets left. Thus victory in Iraq is absolutely crucial to winning the wider war against jihadi terror.

Karine, Jenin and Corrie
America may be the most philo-Semitic country in the world, and decades before 9/11, Israel was defending itself against Arab Muslim terrorists. Nonetheless, the Jewish state too often gets a bum rap from many in our media, and an even worse one from the media in Britain and other Western countries.

We noted one excellent example of this on Feb. 4, 2002: "Unlike Reuters, the Minneapolis Star Tribune is willing to call al Qaeda a terrorist organization. But if you murder only Jews, you are not a terrorist--at least in the eyes of those who edit Minnesota's largest newspaper." Ombudsman Lou Gelfand quoted assistant managing editor Roger Buoen: "We . . . take extra care to avoid the term 'terrorist' in articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the emotional and heated nature of that dispute." As if the dispute between al Qaeda and the civilized world is not emotional and heated.

This column is a strong and unapologetic supporter of Israel, and we've often held the feet of fellow journalists, as well as of the Bush administration, to the fire for failing to acknowledge that Israel has the right, indeed the duty, to defend its citizens from terrorists. On Jan. 4, 2002, we noted the story of the Karine A, a Palestinian Authority ship the Israeli navy had seized. It was carrying "long-range Katyusha rockets, LAW anti-tank missiles, Sagger anti-tank missiles, long-range mortars, mines, and much explosives," all apparently from Iran, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The Bush administration's response was less than resounding: "Powell Wants Explanation From Arafat," read an Associated Press headline we noted on Jan. 11. This seemed to call for mockery, so we invited readers to submit explanations Yasser Arafat could give the secretary of state, which we published on Jan. 14. Some examples:

• There has been a really bad roach problem in Gaza, and they don't trust the locals with poison.
  
  
• It's all a simple ordering error. Arafat, seeking a nonviolent, creative outlet for the Palestinians under his authority, had requested a "shipload of art supplies." Someone in purchasing read it wrong and sent in an order for a "shipload of arms supplies."
  
  
• Arafat needed the weapons to seek out and capture the real murderer of Nicole Simpson.
  
  
• The guns were for the 21-gun salute that Arafat will have to celebrate his next Nobel Peace Price.

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

On April 18, 2002, we began what turned out to be a 23-part series called "The Massacre That Wasn't," in which we debunked claims that had been parroted by the Western (mostly British) press about an Israeli antiterror raid in Jenin:

A headline in today's London Independent promises "Fresh Evidence of Jenin Atrocities." The evidence? An autopsy conducted on a Palestinian man killed at the "refugee camp" found that he had been shot twice, once in the foot and once in the back. Oh, and a Scottish doctor says: "It is not believable that only a few people have been killed, given the reports we have that a large number of people were inside three and four-storey buildings when they were demolished."

That's it. One guy with two bullet wounds and some old "reports" is the extent of the Independent's "fresh evidence." But then the guys at the Independent seem to consider themselves independent from the need for evidence. As we noted Tuesday, they've already declared the Jewish state guilty of "a monstrous war crime" based on nothing more than Palestinian rumors.

Eventually it became clear that only a few dozen Arabs had perished in the Jenin battle, and we ended the series on July 14, 2003, by simply quoting a Jerusalem Post headline: "Palestinians Confirm No Massacre in Jenin--Study." What would we do without studies?

On Aug. 12, 2002, in an item called "Complaining Without Context," we considered a highly misleading New York Times op-ed by Azzam Al-Araj, a Palestinian Arab who lives in Tulkarm, describing his difficulty in getting out of the disputed territories to attend a conference in Spain. Araj described his trip troubles without making any mention of Palestinian terrorism, which of course necessitated the security measures he found so vexing. We filled in the gaps the Times editors had left:

Monday, June 17
Al-Araj: "As I was leaving, I heard that the army had decided to return."

The context: "A suicide bomber detonated a large bomb near a Border Police patrol outside the Israeli Arab village of Mardza early Monday, killing himself but causing no other casualties," Ha'aretz reported. "The Qatar-based Arabic news channel Al Jazeera reported Monday that the bomber, a 16-year-old from Jenin, was infected with the HIV virus. Soon after the explosion, Haifa police went on special alert after they received a 'hot and precise' warning that a terrorist planned to strike at an area of restaurants or another densely-populated region in the northern city."

Tuesday and Wednesday, June 18 and 19
Al-Araj: "Unfortunately, the Israeli Army had closed the bridge to almost everybody. I parted company with the driver and spent two nights sleeping on the side of the road, waiting for the bridge to open."

The context: "Nineteen people were killed Tuesday in a Palestinian suicide bomb attack on a rush hour bus," CNN reported. "A Palestinian suicide bomber dashed to a bus stop at northern Jerusalem's French Hill intersection [Wednesday] night and blew himself up, killing at least seven people, including a five-year-old girl and an infant girl," the Jerusalem Post reported.

Thursday, June 20
Al-Araj: "On Thursday morning, it was announced that 250 people would be allowed through."

The context: By using the passive voice, Al-Araj leaves the impression that it was the Israelis who were preventing him from passing. More likely it was the Jordanians. The Jerusalem Post reported last week: "Whereas previously Jordan issued as many as 5000 'no objection' passes per day to Palestinians, most of whom possessed Jordanian passports, since June 12 they they have issued 1,200 per day, only 300 of which are honored, claim Palestinian Authority officials." In an effort to get the Palestinians through, Israel "has begun to facilitate talks between the Palestinians and the Jordanians," the Post adds.

Americans who support Israel are often hit with the old anti-Semitic charge of "dual loyalty." On March 17, 2003, we highlighted the case of an American who could be described as having dual disloyalty:

Terror Advocate Dies in Accident
Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old terrorism advocate from Olympia, Wash., died in a bulldozer accident yesterday. Corrie was at fault in the accident, which occurred when she either stood or crouched in front of an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer in Gaza, the Jerusalem Post reports:

The bulldozers were part of an IDF tunnel- and mine-clearing operation. The Rafah refugee camp borders Egypt, from which Palestinian terrorists smuggle in weapons and explosives. And according to interim peace accords, Israel has the right to operate in and secure the area.

Corrie not only backed anti-Israeli terrorism; she also hated America. An Associated Press photo shows Corrie, her face contorted with hate, burning a "mock U.S. flag" at a pro-Saddam rally last month. . . . Reuters reports on a "symbolic funeral" that drew some 1,000 Palestinian Arabs. One of them tells the "news" service: "We fly a U.S. flag today to show our support to all American peace lovers, those like Rachel." If she were still alive, no doubt she'd have burned the flag.

It's a shame that Rachel Corrie died the way she did. It's shameful that she lived the way she did.

We frequently returned to the Corrie story, because we felt it important to counter the far left's efforts to misrepresent her as a "martyr" for "peace" who was "murdered" by Israel. This brought vicious hate mail, sometimes orchestrated by various anti-Israel Web sites, which we duly ignored.

One complaint, however, did merit our attention. After we reprinted an anti-Corrie Jerusalem Post op-ed by Ruhama Shattan on the first anniversary of Corrie's death, we received an angry call from a Corrie aunt. In the interest of fairness, we offered the Corrie family the opportunity to respond, and in April 2004 we published a piece by Brij Patnaik, a cousin of Corrie. We didn't find it persuasive, as we noted. But we certainly sympathize with the family's desire to cast their loved one in a favorable light.

In any case, there's no denying that Rachel Corrie's death, caused by her own recklessness, was a tragedy. Had she lived, she might one day have seen the error of her ways.