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Date Posted: 21:02:04 03/30/04 Tue
Author: schwabra
Author Host/IP: dialup-67.29.206.201.Dial1.Cincinnati1.Level3.net / 67.29.206.201
Subject: Stop using children

Stop Using Children

By Richard Cohen

If there is such a thing as a citizen's arrest, then there ought to be such a thing as a citizen's U.N. resolution. That being the case -- columnists can make anything the case -- I propose a resolution condemning the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Islamic Jihad for using naive and addled children as suicide bombers. I am waiting for France, Spain, Russia and other European governments to sign it.


Those are some of the nations that were quick to sign the U.N. resolution condemning Israel for the targeted assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the so-called spiritual leader of Hamas. As is almost always the case with anti-Israel resolutions, it was vetoed by the United States in the Security Council. Still, there can be no doubt where most of the world stood on this matter: Israel did the wrong thing.


Maybe. But what about the Palestinians who enticed Hussam Abdo, chronologically 16 but intellectually much younger, to become a suicide bomber? This runt of a kid, the butt of jokes and everybody's favorite target for teasing, was given some petty cash, promised a hereafter of virgins and sent to a border crossing with a bomb strapped around his middle. Israeli troops quickly spotted him.


Why? Well, one reason is that kids have been used before for suicide bombings. Only recently, an 11-year-old was given a bomb to deliver from one side of the border to the other. This time, though, a cameraman happened to be at the crossing and filmed what transpired. Among other things, Israeli troops did not drill Abdo, as many U.N. members would have done. Instead, they sent a robot out to help disarm him and then took him away as if he had been caught playing hooky. He didn't get so much as a slap in the face.


The use of dopey kids as suicide bombers is clearly abhorrent. It is child abuse combined with murder. Yet the United Nations says nothing. It would not even mention terrorism in its proposed condemnation of Israel for the murder of Yassin. The one-sidedness of that resolution was the stated reason the United States vetoed it. You would think from reading the resolution that Israel had taken out some sweet Muslim cleric, a veritable Islamic Gandhi, and not a leader of a terrorist organization that has killed almost 400 Israelis and wounded countless others in the past 31/2 years.


As some of you know, I have repeatedly called for Israel to get out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and return to the approximate 1967 borders. I have endorsed every peace plan that has come along and long ago supported a Palestinian state. When a Palestinian talks about his ancestral home in what is now Israel, I get the message. One of the world's most intractable and bloody conflicts is not all that difficult to understand: two peoples, one land.


But in the past several years, this conflict has begun to be seen in the most simplistic terms. The reasons for Israel's founding -- the Holocaust, among other things -- have been brushed aside in a frenzied, mindless dash to demonize one side in this conflict. It seems easier just to deal with cartoon figures, bad Israelis (First World colonialists) and good Palestinians (Third World victims). There is some truth to this, but history cannot be repealed and even victims -- and both sides are victims -- can act in inexcusable ways. If Europeans are so intent on restoring everyone to their ancestral land, they can start with Germans who were forced out of Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere following World War II. After you, sir.


Bit by bit, the United Nations is making itself look both silly and bigoted in the place that matters most to it -- the United States. The U.N.'s persistently one-sided resolutions, its proclivity to blame Israel for everything and the Palestinians for nothing -- not even for repeatedly rejecting every peace plan offered them -- reduces it to irrelevance. What would these nations do with a society that exalts martyrdom and sends children to die in an effort to kill other children? These are criminal acts -- and for what? An improved peace plan? Another block of Jerusalem?


So, I offer my own U.N. resolution. I want the United Nations to condemn Palestinian terrorism, specifically suicide bombers and, most specifically, the use of confused and sad kids for that purpose. It's pretty simple: If you cannot condemn the murder of innocents, especially by children, then you have no business condemning anything else. In the undiplomatic language of my old neighborhood, put up or shut up.

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