Editorial

Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily
financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also
by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes.
These states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe
havens of the murder vendors. The outer circle is largely financed by
Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities in
the United States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations of
Europeans to various NGO's and by certain United Nations
organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and
exploited by agents of outer circle. The Saudi regime, of course, will
be the next victim of terror, when the inner circle will explode into
the outer circle. The Saudis are beginning to understand it, but they
fight the inner circles, still financing the infrastructure at the
outer circle.?

Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on
their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in
Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad
"soldiers" join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hotspots, while
some of their leaders ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in
Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands Dollars per month
from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority while a typical
local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives
only a cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing
murders at the retail level.

The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking
of all laws. The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of
law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free
press, among other liberties. There are naive old-fashioned habits
such as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances
and hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies
and not using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in
history, not even in the Nazi period, was there such total disregard
of all of the above as we observe now. Every student of political
science debates how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning
a democratic election and abolishing democracy. Other aspects of a
civilized society must also have limitations. Can a policeman open
fire on someone trying to kill him? Can a government listen to phone
conversations of terrorists and drug dealers? Does free speech
protects you when you shout "fire" in a crowded theater? Should there
be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders? These are the
old-fashioned dilemmas. But now we have an entire new set.


Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage?
Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm
a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do
you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use
ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because
one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly?
Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately
behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden
in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately
moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All
of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do
you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be
avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in
a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and
financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in
France (ARGENTINA!), killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting
responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do
more of the same, while the Government of Iran issues public
condemnations of his acts but continues to host him, invite him to
official functions and treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to
you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in
such a situation.