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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (24114)	4/9/2002 12:56:54 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

'Good Will' at the Times Is the New York Times in favor of terrorism? After reading yesterday's paper, we had to wonder. First there's this passage in a report from Tel Aviv by Douglas Frantz (links require registration): The Palestinians are badly overmatched in weapons. The relative paucity of high-powered weapons discovered in the Israeli incursions underscores the contention by Palestinian militants that suicide bombers are their only means of countering one of the world's best-equipped armies, which uses heavily armored tanks and American-supplied warplanes and helicopter gunships to dominate the conflict. It is of course true that Israel has a vast military advantage. If the Jewish state valued human life as little as the Palestinian terrorists do, it would be well capable of crushing all resistance. But how exactly does Frantz think the Arabs are "countering" the Israeli army by committing mass murder on buses, in shopping centers and at religious services? Then there's this eye-popping comment in a "Week in Review" piece by Serge Schmemann: "Even people of good will argue for the morality of suicide bombings, saying that suicide bombers are a natural product of a history of humiliation and despair." Schmemann himself rejects this view, but his comment that "people of good will" support it is shocking enough. Would Schmemann say that "people of good will" endorse the idea that blacks deserved to be enslaved or that the Holocaust is a myth? Of course not. Certain ideas are so monstrous that no one can hold them and still be credited with "good will." It's not clear who these "people of good will" are; Schmemann gives no specific examples. What he seems to mean is that the pro-suicide bombing position is a respectable one in the context of elite Western (particularly European) opinion. What would lead civilized people to endorse such barbarity? opinionjournal.com