Polls to Be Proud Of
On the Mideast, America is right and the rest of the world is wrong.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, April 26, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
The people of the United States should take solace, even pride, in the fact that their views on the violence in the Middle East are completely at odds with the opinions of the United Nations, the continent of Europe and most of their own media. Since early April, various opinion polls have been asking Americans essentially the same questions about the blood-stained standoff between Israel and the Palestinians. Their responses, excerpted here, have held remarkably steady throughout, with answers that make clear they understand the meaning of terror and do so in numbers that make the "margin of error" irrelevant.
The polling question that most strikes me asks whether people believe Israel's actions against Arafat and his army is the same as the U.S.'s against bin Laden and al Qaeda. Some 59% say it is. Since last year when Yasser Arafat allowed the girding of young Palestinians with explosives who were sent to exterminate Jews in packed discotheques, markets and other public places, Americans have overwhelmingly concluded: This is terror. This is the conscious, mass murder of innocent civilians for political ends. It is the anti-civilization that we Americans perceive as a mortal threat and have committed ourselves to defeat.
To be sure, if you excavate the entire poll you also find support for the U.S. recognizing a Palestinian state (68%). Even this may be seen as American common sense, for the fact is that the intifada, for years, has been driven by the most radical, rejectionist Palestinian factions who even now summarily execute Palestinian "collaborators" just as 20 years ago they murdered, maimed and silenced any voice of Palestinian moderation.
Sitting home at night, watching the news on U.S. television or C-SPAN's airing of the BBC, Americans who hold these views of the events in Israel must wonder if they're living in some alternative reality. This past week, amid the constant images of Jenin's rubble and elderly men and wailing women in scarves, came word that Amnesty International, the Red Cross and an arm of the U.N. were accusing the Israelis of "human rights abuses." The U.N. Security Council put through an Arab-sponsored resolution to investigate the fighting in Jenin, a place that in fact has been the West Bank's version of the Star Wars bar, the primary haunt and collection point for the most extreme Palestinian gunmen and suicide planners.
In the otherwordly moral calculus of post World War II Europe and much media--which these polls suggest is beyond the ken of most Americans--self-evident atrocities such as the Passover suicide bombing are mere stories in the wreckage of the news. But a military counter-strike is a human rights abuse. We have arrived at a point in international affairs at which the degraded concept of moral equivalence would be a step toward the sunshine.
It may well be true that Americans born after World War II lost their innocence about the world on September 11, but how fortunate that when this nation is attacked and finds itself in a long, grim war with an enemy dedicated to killing civilians, its people are not so easily diverted by the kind of casuistry, salami-slicing, needle-dancing, opportunism and moral myopia that has gripped the world's opinion-shaping institutions.
The White House, meanwhile, presumably worried about its Middle Eastern allies, has over this period taken its policy through a series of flip-flops, sent Colin Powell on a mission to Arafat that about half the people polled called a failure, and yesterday took instruction in Texas on the tender sensibilities of our nominal allies from Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. One would hope that Mr. Bush knows that his most steadfast allies in the war on terror are the same people he asked for support on September 20.
The war against global terror is surely far from over, and these are still dangerous times. But what the American people are discovering about themselves bodes well.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. |
