Rachel Neuwirth

Claims that America is engaged in a total war against terrorism are greatly exaggerated. President Bush cannot selectively fight some terrorists, while ignoring or even supporting other kinds of terrorists, and still claim to be fighting a War on Terror. Bush cannot declare that we oppose all who practice terrorism, including all their supporters, in theory, and then employ a double standard in practice. We cannot say that the 9/11 bombers are terrorists, but that those who blow up buses in Israel are not terrorists because they are engaged in a political process, as was claimed by Secretary of State Colin Powell. This double standard has been a long-term element in U.S. policy, and is not limited to the current Bush Administration and the equivocation in its so-called war on terror.
President Bush is seeking Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. But at the same time President Bush is protecting Yasser Arafat, the father of modern terrorism, by demanding that Israel not harm him or even exile him. On 9/11 bin Laden caused the death of 3,000 Americans plus the wounding of many more. Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, Arafat has killed about 1,300 Israelis and wounded upwards of 7,000. In proportion to population, this is the U.S. equivalent of 70,000 dead and 380,000 wounded, many of those horribly so.
And yet Arafat’s Palestinian Authority receives some $200 million in American aid annually plus the promise of another Arab state at Israel’s expense, if only Arafat pretends to favor peace for a short while. This appeasement of terrorism harms America's national security as well as being wrong in principle.
American double standards are clearly revealed in the history of Yasser Arafat and his consistent coddling by U.S. officials, which began in the 1960s.
Arafat officially began his terror career in 1959 when he formed the Fatah organization, with its "constitution" explicitly calling for the destruction of Israel. In 1968, he succeeded in taking over the Palestine Liberation Organization, an organization set up by the League of Arab States, whose "covenant" also declared the destruction of Israel to be its goal. These declarations of total war were made years prior to the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s acquiring those territories now in dispute. During the 1960s he was already hijacking airliners. In 1970 he tried to seize control over Jordan and was only driven back after a bloodbath known as Black September, in which thousands were slaughtered. He then moved to Lebanon where he instigated a long civil war in which over 100,000 were killed in a country of only about three million. His thugs attacked residential neighborhoods using women and children as human shields, a tactic he used later in his intifada against Israel. Lebanese Christians suffered greatly and many were forced to flee to other countries.
Forcible U.S. opposition to Arafat’s crimes was notably absent, but when Israel responded to cross border attacks with a counteroffensive against the PLO and Syrian occupiers of Lebanon, the U.S. suddenly found its voice and demanded an Israeli withdrawal. The U.S. intervened to rescue Arafat when Israel was close to defeating him, bringing him to safety in Tunisia, where he continued his war of terror against Israel.

In 1972, Arafat’s PLO slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, marring international games dedicated to world peace, without generating an adequately forceful response from the U.S. Perhaps Arafat was becoming confident about U.S. tolerance towards terror, because in 1973 he got away with the kidnap-murder of two American diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan. Ambassador Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore were murdered on direct orders from Arafat. The CIA even taped Arafat giving the order to his thugs. Yet the U.S. did nothing, not even publicly fingering Arafat for this act of aggression against the United States, carried out on the grounds of a supposedly sacrosanct diplomatic mission.
In 1978, Jimmy Carter's administration began writing speeches for Arafat to give, containing expressions such as ‘no more terrorism’ and ‘peace with Israel,’ in return promising U.S. recognition for the PLO. Even then, it took Arafat ten years before he reluctantly muttered the soothing words demanded of him by the State Department. Immediately, the U.S. began pressuring Israel to begin negotiations with the PLO.
During the Clinton years Arafat was the most frequent foreign guest at the White House and received some $100 million in annual aid, even while he continued his terror campaign against Israel. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for simply signing his name to the Oslo Accords -- after which he violated every one of its provisions, and launched a massive new terrorist intifada. George W. Bush stopped the visits, but doubled the aid to $200 million, again sending mixed signals.
About a year ago three American representatives were slaughtered in Gaza by terrorists linked to Arafat. They were traveling to a refugee camp to recruit candidates for an education program in the U.S., an act of American generosity. Under U.S. pressure Arafat went though the motions of looking for the killers but refused genuine cooperation with U.S. authorities. Arafat has won out again. He defied the U.S., allowed the killers to go free, and suffered no reprisals at all from the U.S. -- not even a cut-off of aid. His popularity among his depraved followers has been boosted by his success in committing aggression against the U.S. and getting away with it.

According to a news report in WorldNetDaily, the FBI is finally opening an investigation into the 1973 case of Arafat’s killing of American diplomats. Will Arafat be tried for killing these two Americans? Don’t bet on it, because he has already killed over 100 Americans with impunity, many of them American Jews visiting Israel.
Continuing U.S. funding of Arafat alone makes a mockery of Bush’s claims to be fighting terrorism. But there are many more instances of hypocrisy. A few examples:
The Saudis have long supported terrorism by their funding of madrassas, which are Islamic schools that teach an extreme form of Islam. They also funded terrorist cells in other countries. Egypt, too, supports terrorism, but mainly against Israel. Egypt has long been complicit in allowing Arab terrorists to smuggle weapons into Gaza via tunnels between the Egyptian side of the boundary into the Gaza side. This violates Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, which has enabled Egypt to receive about $2 billion in annual military and economic aid, along with U.S. weapons and training since 1978. There are U.S. personnel in the Sinai to monitor Egyptian compliance with the peace treaty. How come these American monitors are blind to these flagrant violations by Egypt? Meanwhile, the government-controlled Egyptian media spews a constant torrent of anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish and even anti-American invective with impunity while Egypt continues to receive billions in U.S. aid.
Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser, during the 1960s, used poison gas in Yemen in his attempt to expand his power in the region. The U.S. was busy courting him and other dictators as part of our cold war policies, and it was easy to ignore flagrant human rights violations. (We also largely ignored Saddam’s gassing of the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s.)

In our so-called war on terror we also lack the intellectual honesty to even name the enemy, although there are small signs that this may finally be changing. The enemy is not terror, but those who practice terror: the Jihadists and Islamic extremists.
Why does the U.S. refuse to seek a U.N. declaration against Islamic terrorism? The likely reason is that it would be opposed in the U.N. by the large Islamic block and their supporters. If so, it is still worthwhile to expose the U.N. for its moral bankruptcy. But the State Department prefers to perpetuate its pretense of the U.N.’s moral credibility.
We also fail in other respects. First, we have not properly defined what we stand for. The Islamic enemy cites examples of Western decadence as justification for their ‘holy war.’ Simply saying that we stand for ‘freedom’ and ‘free enterprise’ has limited value because for many religious Muslims those terms may seem foreign. It suggests that we are simply imposing our system upon them by force.
Surely the U.S. information agencies can do a better job of communicating the alternative that America's principles of freedom, openness, the rule of law, respect for human rights, equality, and tolerance present to the peoples of the Islamic world, and their manifest superiority to the hatred, intolerance, lawlessness and cruelty of the Islamist fanatics.
In addition, we have failed to cultivate responsible Islamic clerics and intellectuals. There are Muslims who understand very well the sickness that prevails in so many Islamic societies. It is their voices that need to be heard, boldly challenging the extremists on a religious basis, point for point. They must show the way out of this dead end and back towards an enlightened form of Islam. Such actually existed for a time centuries ago, when there was true creativity and a lively interchange of ideas across different cultures. Once Muslims hear from devout and learned men and women of their own faith that human rights, the rule of law, and respect for other religions and cultures are not incompatible with their Islamic heritage, most will eventually reject the teaching of the hatemongers among them. Why not use our information forums and financial resources to help the courageous and lonely Muslim moderates to get an enlightened message to their own people?
However, our own leaders act as if they are unaware of this battle of ideas, and instead allow the extremists to have access to the highest levels of our government. Grover Norquist is a conservative activist who used to be involved in economic issues, but recently has been using his influence to help Muslims with radical and even pro-terrorist ties to gain access to high Administration officials. This in turn has allowed the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to help place Islamists among those selecting clerics for Muslim inmates in our prisons and soldiers in our military and to demand all manner of rights and concessions for Muslims in America while playing the role of victims of discrimination.
The final question is what have we gained by compromising on terrorism in the interest of expediency, by weakening our loyal ally, Israel, while pandering to Israel’s Arab enemies? Except for Israel, how many countries in the world can we count as true and staunch allies? When Tony Blair leaves power, Britain may become like Germany. The same is true for allies such as Italy and Australia, where the current political leadership faces strong public opposition to support of the war in Iraq.
Defending ourselves effectively requires moral clarity. We can at least draw the boundary line between civilized conduct and outright barbarism, and insist that others observe this basic standard. We must reject the thinking expressed by the unfortunate words of our very own Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” We must be consistent, even if it is embarrassing to ourselves at times. By being honest we will astonish our enemies, amaze our friends, and win grudging respect for our integrity. We can then speak more effectively and directly to the peoples of the world and over the heads of their governments and a biased media.
Even if it is beyond our power to be the world’s policeman, the United States, as a superpower, is more free than other nations to speak the truth without having to fear reprisals from powers stronger than ourselves. Unless we do so, we will have seriously compromised our self-declared “war on terror.”

Rachel Neuwirth is a California based writer.