Ps83..Do not keep silent, O GOD! Do not hold Your peace, And do not be still, O GOD!
2 For behold, Your enemies make a tumult; And those who hate You have lifted up their head.
3 They have taken crafty counsel against Your people, And consulted together against Your sheltered ones.
4 They have said, "Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, That the name of Israel may be remembered no more."
5 For they have consulted together with one consent; They form a confederacy against You:
6 The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites....
 

    Thank you, Geraldo Rivera, for crystallizing exactly what is so infuriatingly dishonest about media coverage of the war in Israel.
 
    You had a Fox show March 10 in which you were broadcasting from Jerusalem. As guests, you had a "Doctor" Rashid from the Palestine Liberation Organization and former U.S. secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.
 
    At one point, you asked Rashid about the fighting, and he gave a long soliloquy about how a certain percentage of the deaths were Palestinian women, a certain percentage were young people and a certain percentage were persons who, he claimed, had no connection with the intifada at all.
 
    Of course, you did not question his statistics. But you went even further. You used those numbers to ask Eagleburger whether, in fact, the numbers did not prove there was more of a "moral equivalence" on both sides of the conflict than the American media will admit.
 
    Eagleburger did not exactly answer, but please allow me to essay an answer: Mr. Rivera, there is no equivalence at all. The Palestinians are purposely targeting small children, teenagers and the most defenseless of Israelis at their most vulnerable, non-warlike tasks.
 
    Sunday was no different. A Palestinian gunman shot and killed a 16-year-old girl and wounded six others near a high school. Two hours later, a suicide bomber blew himself up near a bus slightly injuring some passengers.
 
    Just two days before your broadcast, the terrorists sent one of their members to a Jewish school to incinerate a sleeping teenager in his bed and machine-gun to death four other teens while they were praying.
 

Israel acts in self-defense
 
    Palestinian bombs are set off in schools, in cafes (routinely) and on buses. With rare exceptions, the Palestinian terror offensive aims explicitly at civilians or at soldiers on leave or lounging on rest breaks.
 
    In self-defense, the Israelis attack terrorist bomb-making cells, hideouts of terrorist commanders and police stations harboring PLO "policemen" who either supply terrorists or fail to halt terror.
 
    To be sure, civilians are sometimes hit in the crossfire, and it is terrible when they are. And civilians who run from place to place in battle zones also are sometimes shot by the Israelis. This is deeply regrettable and should not happen, yet understandable in the heat of battle.
 
    But while it is distressing to mistakenly kill civilians during a gun battle or to follow the universal rule of war and shoot suspicious men in battle zones before they shoot you, it is totally different to purposely target civilians sleeping and studying and dancing without any firearms nearby. To fail to see the stark moral difference in the two situations is breathtakingly simple-minded and lazy.
 
Media miss the point
 
    In a way, you can hardly be blamed, Mr. Rivera. You put into words the doctrine that has governed U.S. media coverage of this war for months: Report that there have been lots of deaths on both sides, note that more Palestinians than Israelis have died and point out that there is too much killing. All true, but it misses the point.
 
    The Palestinians purposely kill civilians, especially children. The Israelis hunt down killers and sometimes hit civilians during the heat of battle (which is, again, distressing, but not the same as cold-blooded murder).
 
    As long as the American media fail to point out the difference, U.S. policy in the region will be seriously skewed toward the all-too-familiar concept of "blame the victim," which we have already seen coming from Foggy Bottom.
 
    Luckily for the world's decent people, most of President Bush's top policymakers -- Vice President Cheney arrives in Israel today as the U.S. pushes a cease-fire -- realize that Israel is the victim of a terror war, not the proponent of one.
 
    But, Mr. Rivera, you do a disservice to humanity when you fail to understand the world as it is, especially in its moral dimension. You insult the innocence of the victims at prayer when you compare them in moral significance with trained terrorists killed in the act of murder. And you are certainly not reporting or analyzing news, but rather putting forth a confused and fundamentally evil view of the world, where victim and killer have equal moral worth.
 

    GAZA, April 3 -- The leaders of Hamas, the militant Islamic movement responsible for the most deadly suicide attacks in Israel in the last week, are pleased and satisfied just now.
 
    "Our spirit is high, our mood is good," said Ismail Abu Shanab, one of the organization's leaders.
 
    If Israel attacks Gaza, as it has areas of the West Bank, he and the other leaders would likely be principal targets. For now, they live and operate here openly.
 
    By their estimation, the organization's two recent attacks -- the one at a Seder on Passover night in a Netanya hotel that killed 25 people, and the other in a Haifa cafe that killed 15 -- were the most successful they have ever made. That is true partly, Mr. Shanab said, because Hamas is now using weapons-grade explosives instead of home made bombs manufactured using fertilizer, a fact the Israelis have confirmed.
 
    "Forty were killed and 200 injured -- in just two operations,'' another of the leaders, Mahmoud al-Zahar, said with a smile.
 
    What's more, Hamas believes that the Palestinian Authority has given up on negotiating with Israel, negotiations that Hamas virulently opposed. That has led to a budding alliance between Hamas and Fatah, the organization headed by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, despite years of bitter and sometimes violent feuding.
 
    Mr. Arafat "is Palestinian and I am Palestinian," said Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas. "We have the same problem now. Israel is our enemy."
 
    Sammy Abu Samhadanah, a Fatah commander here, said Hamas was carrying out attacks "because they did not want a peace agreement.
 
    "But now," he added, "we have a common enemy."
 
    Hamas, the second most popular Palestinian movement, behind Fatah, is directed by a "steering committee," as Dr. Zahar put it, with five principal members. Interviews with four of them -- a cleric, an engineer and two medical doctors -- showed a leadership unyielding, determined and increasingly confident of achieving their goal, the eradication of Israel as a Jewish state.
 
    They are almost welcoming of the Israeli attacks in the West Bank because they believe that the military campaign will generate more recruits for Hamas. Already, the leaders say, they have more than enough recruits for suicide attacks.
 
    The political leaders, as they call themselves, are obviously prosperous and live in large, comfortable homes here in Gaza City with big families. The exception is Sheik Yassin, who uses a wheelchair and lives in a compound in the slums of the city with guards, assistants and office workers. Dr. Zahar, a surgeon, has a table tennis set in his vast living room, for his seven children. All of them offer their opinions in calm, cheerful tones suggesting that they view their positions as unremarkable.
 

    The leaders insist that they are not involved in directing specific attacks. But they say they do decide when their followers should attack and when they should back off. Last fall, just after Sept. 11, the steering committee decided that "our resistance in Israel might be confused with what was happened in the U.S.," said Mr. Abu Shanab, the engineer. So the suicide bombing and other attacks were stopped.
 
    "It lasted three weeks," said Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the fourth leader. But then after a particularly bloody day in Gaza during which Israelis killed several Palestinians, Dr. Rantisi added, the attacks resumed. On Oct. 3, gunmen burst into an Israeli settlement in Gaza, Alei Sinai, where they shot and killed a young couple and wounded 15 others. Hamas took responsibility.
 
    Dr. Rantisi, who appears in public more often than any of the others, said that, to generate attacks, he makes public statements that are heard by his followers, as he did recently when he said in a television interview: "The gates of resistance are open totally." Those statements are heard by Hamas's military wing, he says, "and they listen because we are the political leaders."
 
    Some analysts here suggest that the leaders' roles are actually more direct. During the 45-minute interview in Sheik Yassin's compound, for example, aides twice brought him urgent news about developments in Ramallah, and he issued clear, direct orders.
 
    The goals of Hamas are straightforward. As Sheik Yassin put it, "our equation does not focus on a cease-fire; our equation focuses on an end to the occupation.'' By that he means an end to the Jewish occupation of historical Palestine.
 
    Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the four million Palestinians who live in other states. After that, the Jews could remain, living "in an Islamic state with Islamic law," Dr. Zahar said. "From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine."
 
    Mr. Shenab insisted that he was not joking when he said, "There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."
 
    The Hamas leaders are clearly enamored of the suicide attacks carried out by their followers. "It is the most effective strategy for us," said Dr. Rantisi. "For us it is the same as their F-16," the attack fighters used by the Israeli military.
 
    For them, the crowning achievement so far was the attack on Passover eve.
 
    "That was a great success," said Mr. Shenab. "We don't have an army, but we showed that one person can do more than an army -- and in the middle of a big alert by the Israelis." That night, the Israeli police and the military were on full alert to stop suicide bombers. "That showed that if we suffer, our enemy suffers more," he added.
 
    Sheik Yassin said: "The Palestinian people are not the same as they were in 1967," when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, "or during the first intifada," from 1987 to 1991. "At that time nobody knew how to make explosives.
 
    "But now," he added, "everybody knows, and Israel will never be stable again."
 

    On the night of the Passover attack, Dr. Zahar released a statement saying it was intended in part to shut down the cease-fire negotiations then under way, directed by Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the American special envoy.
 
    In the interview today, Dr. Zahar explained, "the Zinni mission was bad for us" because, under the proposed terms of the cease-fire, groups like Hamas would be disarmed and their leaders arrested.
 
    "Besides," Dr. Rantisi said, "we in Hamas believe peace talks will do no good. We do not believe we can live with the enemy."
 
    The budding alliance with Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction does not mean that Hamas and Fatah will carry out attacks together, just that they will not interfere with each other. In the past, Fatah security officials have occasionally arrested Hamas members at the behest of the Israeli government; Dr. Zahar points to bullet holes in his living room ceiling that were left following one assault by Fatah forces.
 
    "But now," said Mr. Abu Samhadanah, the Fatah commander, "we are not going to arrest them."
 
    Mr. Shanab said: "We disagree with Fatah on the legitimate right of return of our refugees and many other things.
 
    "But for now, we are going to postpone those problems."
 

    JERUSALEM -- On Monday, France, Belgium and four other European Union members endorsed a U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution condoning "all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. Hence, six European Union members and the rights commission now join the 57 nations of the Islamic Conference in legitimizing suicide bombers. By their logic of moral equivalence, terror is justifiable because its root cause is Israel's occupation. That Palestinian terror predates occupation, or that suicide bombings became a tactic of choice only after the initiation of the Oslo process, is too inconvenient to mention.
 
    Unfortunately the U.N. goes beyond giving rhetorical support for terrorism. In a variety of ways, its agencies have been complicit in Middle Eastern terror. Start with the refugee camps.
 
    The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees began operation in 1950. The establishment of Israel, and its simultaneous invasion by five Arab states, resulted in the creation of approximately 600,000 Palestinian refugees. An equivalent number of Jews fled their homes in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and other Arab countries, and settled in Israel.
 
    As disruptive as it was, the number of Jewish and Arab refugees pales in comparison to that created by the partition of India. There are today more than 100 million descendants of the original 15 million Indian and Pakistani refugees. The U.N. remained outside the conflict, and provided no political or economic incentive for refugees not to settle. Too bad the same restraint has not characterized the behavior of the U.N. and Arab states in the Middle East.
 
    As it is, UNRWA and the Arab League hold Palestinian refugees in limbo. UNRWA operates 27 refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and another 32 camps in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It counts nearly four million Palestinians as refugees, including those whose grandparents never saw Palestine. (If U.N. High Commission for Refugees' criteria are applied, the figure is significantly lower). In 2001 alone, UNRWA spent $310 million on the camps.
 
    It is these camps that have been at the center of violence between Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen. On Feb. 28, following a series of Palestinian terror attacks in Israel (including an attack on a young girl's Bat Mitzvah celebration), Israeli forces rolled into the Jenin and Balata refugee camps. They remained for three days. Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer explained the Israeli strategy: "We are interested in one thing only, to stop and disrupt this wave of suicide attacks. We intend to go in and get out."
 
    U.N. officials were instantaneous in their condemnation. Kofi Annan called on Israel "to withdraw immediately." High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson labeled the incursions "in total disregard of international human rights." On March 21, a UNRWA spokesman called on Israel to compensate the agency for damage to its refugee camps.
 

    Israel's raids did damage the camps. But as a result of the operation, Israel uncovered illegal arms caches, bomb factories, and a plant manufacturing the new Kassam-2 rocket, designed to reach Israeli population centers from the West Bank and Gaza. Confronted with evidence of illegal Palestinian mines, mortars, and missiles, no U.N. official questioned how it was that bomb factories could exist in U.N.-managed refugee camps. Either the U.N. officials were unaware of the bomb factories -- a fact which would suggest utter incompetence -- or, more likely, the U.N. employees simply turned a blind eye.
 
    Unfortunately, UNRWA is not alone in reinforcing the U.N.'s reputation as an organization incapable of fighting terror. On May 24, 2000, Israel unilaterally pulled back from southern Lebanon, a withdrawal the U.N. certified to be complete. Terror did not end, though. On October 7, 2000, Hezbollah guerillas crossed the border and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers (including one Israeli Arab), all of whom they subsequently killed. Observers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon videotaped the scene of the kidnapping, including the getaway cars, and some guerillas.
 
    Inexplicably, they then hid the videotape. Questioned by Israeli officials, Terje Roed-Larsen, the U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, chided Israel for "questioning the good faith of senior United Nations officials." When after eight months the U.N. finally admitted to possessing the tape, officials balked at showing it to the Israeli government since that might "undermine U.N. neutrality." The fact that U.N. observers protected and defended guerillas who crossed a U.N.-certified border, using cars with U.N. license plates while under the cover of U.N. flags, was apparently of no consequence to UNIFIL. Pronouncements aside, U.N. moral equivalency in practice dictates that terrorists are equal to states. Fighting terror compromises U.N. neutrality.
 
    The U.N. has turned a blind eye to terror in Iraq as well. Throughout the spring and summer of 2001, a series of bomb explosions wracked the safe haven of northern Iraq. Kurdish authorities long suspected the complicity of certain U.N. drivers who crossed freely between the safe haven and Iraq proper. On July 19, 2001, Kurdish security arrested a Tunisian U.N. driver found in possession of explosives. A Yemeni national serving as deputy director of the U.N. mission in northern Iraq demanded that the driver be released before any investigation could be completed; he was. The U.N.'s reputation, in other words, trumps protecting innocents from Saddam Hussein's bombs.
 
    The U.N. has a terrorism problem. Syria, a nation that hosts more terror groups than any other, sits on the Security Council. Along with Iran, Syria is a prime sponsor of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Just two months after Nasrallah declared that "Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities" and that Israel was a "cancerous body in the region . . . (which) must be uprooted," Mr. Annan bestowed international legitimacy upon Nasrallah by agreeing to an unprecedented meeting.
 
    U.N. officials can make all the high-sounding pronouncements they desire, but if the U.N. wishes to defuse regional tensions and signal that terrorism is not acceptable, then there must be no equivocation. Perhaps Mr. Annan can be forgiven for not being aware that U.N.-funded refugee camps housed arms factories, or for allowing U.N. complicity in terror cover-ups in Lebanon and Iraq. But in a Middle East where perception is more important than reality, Mr. Annan's silence is deafening and his moral equivalency is interpreted as a green light for terror. The main casualty is U.N. credibility.

    Such is the richness of European culture, even its decadence is creative. Since 1945 it has produced the truly remarkable phenomenon of anti-Semitism without Jews. How does Europe do that?
 
    Now it offers Christian anti-Semitism without the Christianity. An example of this is the recent cartoon in La Stampa--a liberal Italian newspaper--depicting the infant Jesus in a manger, menaced by an Israeli tank and saying ''Don't tell me they want to kill me again.'' This reprise of that hardy perennial, Jews as Christ-killers, clearly still strikes a chord in contemporary Italy.
 
    In Britain the climate created by much of the intelligentsia, including the elite press, is so toxic that the Sun, a tabloid with more readers than any other British newspaper, recently was moved to offer a contrapuntal editorial headlined ''The Jewish faith is not an evil religion.'' Contrary to what Europeans are encouraged to think. And Ron Rosenbaum, author of the brilliant book Explaining Hitler, acidly notes the scandal of European leaders supporting the Palestinians' ''right of return''--the right to inundate and eliminate the state created in response to European genocide--''when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder.''
 
    It is time to face a sickening fact that is much more obvious today than it was 11 years ago when Ruth R. Wisse asserted it. In a dark and brilliant essay in Commentary magazine, she argued that anti-Semitism has proved to be ''the most durable and successful'' ideology of the ideology-besotted 20th century.
 
    Successful? Did not Hitler, the foremost avatar of anti-Semitism, fail? No, he did not. Yes, his 1,000-year Reich fell 988 years short. But its primary work was mostly done. Hitler's primary objective, as he made clear in words and deeds, was the destruction of European Jewry.
 
    Wisse, who in 1991 was a professor of Yiddish literature at McGill University and who now is at Harvard, noted that many fighting faiths, including socialism and communism, arose in the 19th century to ''explain and to rectify the problems'' of modern society. Fascism soon followed. But communism is a cold intellectual corpse. Socialism, born and raised in France, is unpersuasive even to the French: The socialist presidential candidate has suffered the humiliation of failing to qualify for this Sunday's runoff, having been defeated by an anti-Semitic ''populist'' preaching watery fascism.
 
    Meanwhile, anti-Semitism is a stronger force in world affairs than it has been since it went into a remarkably brief eclipse after the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps in 1945. The United Nations, supposedly an embodiment of lessons learned from the war that ended in 1945, is now the instrument for lending spurious legitimacy to the anti-Semites' war against the Jewish state founded by survivors of that war.
 
    Anti-Semitism's malignant strength derives from its simplicity--its stupidity, actually. It is a primitivism which, Wisse wrote, makes up in vigor what it lacks in philosophic heft, and does so precisely because it ''has no prescription for the improvement of society beyond the elimination of part of society.''
 

    Today many people say that the Arabs and their European echoes would be mollified if Israel would change its behavior. People who say that do not understand the centrality of anti-Semitism in the current crisis. This crisis has become the second--and final?--phase of the struggle for a ''final solution to the Jewish question.'' As Wisse said 11 years ago, and as cannot be said too often, anti-Semitism is not directed against the behavior of the Jews but against the existence of the Jews.
 
    If the percentage of the world's population that was Jewish in the era of the Roman Empire were Jewish today, there would be 200 million Jews. There are 13 million, 5 million clustered on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, facing hundreds of millions of enemies. Ron Rosenbaum writes, ''The concentration of so many Jews in one place--and I use the word 'concentration' advisedly--gives the world a chance to kill the Jews en masse again.''
 
    Israel holds just one one-thousandth of the world's population, but holds all the hopes for the continuation of the Jewish experience as a portion of the human narrative. Will Israel be more durable than anti-Semitism? Few things have been.
 
 

    Harvard University President Lawrence Summers did something last week almost unheard of in the world of university heads. He said what was on his mind on an issue bound to inflame passions and he said it with clarity, precision and force.
 
    In a speech at Harvard's Memorial Church, Mr. Summers addressed the growth of anti-Semitism on American campuses, taking special note of the current effort of some faculty and students to get universities to end their investments in Israel. The push for divestment has been organized at some 40 campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton and other illustrious institutions of higher education.
 
    Mr. Summers paid particular attention to the selective targeting of Israel. At the same rallies where protesters, many of them university students, condemn the IMF and global capitalism, he noted, "it is becoming increasingly common to also lash out at Israel." "Some here at Harvard," he says, "have called for the university to single out Israel among all the nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested. I hasten to say the university has categorically rejected this suggestion."
 
    His comments made a splash in the Boston press and elsewhere over the weekend, for good reason. It is big news these days when the president of a major university speaks for himself as opposed to issuing obfuscations via the vice president in charge of public relations. It's even bigger news when the president says what he thinks without kid gloves and obeisance to the PC crowd, as Mr. Summers has been doing with some regularity.
 
    He has told his Harvard audiences that the U.S. military deserves more support and respect than it is getting on campus. He has issued warnings on grade inflation and the lowering of educational standards. And he ran afoul of black studies' star Cornel West, when he suggested that the scholar curtail some of his outside activities -- which included work on a political campaign and recording a rap album -- in the interest of more serious scholarly work. (An offended Mr. West is decamping to Princeton.) In short, Mr. Summers has the idea, no doubt dizzying to some, that it is the job of a university president to lead -- to stand up for the values, intellectual and social, that a university is supposed to embrace.
 
    Mr. Summers found his target when he said that anti-Semitism -- once the preserve of the ill-educated and right-wing fringe groups -- is now finding expression in progressive intellectual communities. He left open the possibility that the actions of some of those intellectuals, while anti-Semitic "in their effect," might not always be so intentionally. This is certainly a more nuanced view than those of the activists who regularly describe the Israelis as Nazis and perpetrators of genocide.
 
    Mr. Summers said he spoke as a secular Jew long impatient with those who saw anti-Semitism everywhere. It is to the Harvard president's credit that he has seen the signs of rising anti-Semitism, cloaked in the same anti-Israel fervor now animating European Leftists, on the campuses here at home, and that he chose to speak out. That is what bully pulpits are for.