The Chicago Sun-Times
October 10, 2002

Double standards for Mideast cops
Editorial

http://www.suntimes.com/output/commentary/cst-edt-edits10.html

The Palestinian Authority's police finally found a murder by the terrorist
Hamas gang that they couldn't stomach. Of course, it wasn't the terror
killing of an Israeli. It was the death of the commander of the Palestinian
riot police in the Gaza Strip, kidnapped and riddled with bullets the other
day by a Hamas chieftain in revenge for the police slaying of his brother
and two other Hamas thugs a year ago. (In case you're wondering, those three
were killed not for a terrorist crime but for taking part in an
anti-American riot last October that embarrassed Yasser Arafat, coming as it
did only weeks after the Sept. 11 attack.)

The Palestinian Authority security forces responded to the killing of one of
their own by doing what police in most of the the rest of the world normally
do--search for suspects in a murder. It culminated in gun battles between
Arafat's cops and Hamas gangsters, leaving, Palestinian sources say, four
Hamas gunmen dead and 15 others wounded. A cease-fire was reportedly
reached, maybe with an understanding that the killers of the officers will
be handed over to Palestinian police sometime soon.

We bring this up not out of any belief that justice is about to break out in
Arafat's domain. Rather, this episode serves as a rebuttal to his
apologists, who moan that Arafat can't be expected to run a police operation
with all those Israeli tanks in the West Bank. We now know that his police
can move against terrorists when they want to. But if Hamas, and not
Arafat's police, does rule in Gaza, who's to blame? There's been no West
Bank-type Israeli military incursion there. What's more, while Hamas
cutthroats have the run of Gaza, and Fatah terrorists share quarters with
Arafat in Ramallah, his police continue to round up anyone suspected of
collaborating with Israel. Even as Israelis encircled Arafat's compound in a
much criticized recent operation, Palestinian police, working in the West
Bank as well as Gaza, arrested nearly a score of accused collaborators.
Arafat's apologists also conveniently forget that long before the West Bank
incursion, his jails were infamous for their revolving doors for arrested
terrorists, and one of his police stations was the site of the lynching of
two Israelis.

The Israelis are coming in for criticism again, this time for an operation
in Gaza. While in pursuit of two terrorists there, Israeli troops came under
fire, and an Israeli helicopter responded with a rocket. Sixteen people, 13
of them gunmen, were killed, and a large number of people, unfortunately
civilians among them, were hurt. The point to remember here is that the
civilians were not targeted, as Israeli civilians are by Hamas in Jerusalem
malls and Tel Aviv buses.

The usual suspects, read Javier Solana of the European Union and Richard
Boucher of our own State Department, were quick to accuse the Israelis of a
careless undertaking endangering civilians. Where, we can't help but ask, is
the outrage over Hamas murderers going about the business of plotting terror
among Palestinian civilian populations, in effect using as shields the
women, children and old people they claim to be champions of? Boucher, or
whoever gives him his orders, should be mindful that we may be at war in
Iraq soon, and Saddam Hussein will have no compunction about hiding soldiers
among women and children or in mosques and neighborhoods. If Saddam doesn't
disarm, U.S. forces will have to go after him, just as the Israelis are
taking on the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who try to make the crowded
Gaza Strip a protected sanctuary for themselves.