David Parsons, June 30, 2003

The scourge of jihad terrorism has left a widening trail of carnage of late. In one particular week in May, Islamic suicide bombers murdered and maimed from Saudi Arabia to Morocco to Israel.

In Riyadh, 15 local Muslims launched three simultaneous suicide raids on housing compounds for foreigners, killing 34 people, including seven fellow Saudis. In Casablanca, 13 suicide bombers killed 29 people in coordinated strikes at five sites frequented by Westerners. And in Israel, a wave of Palestinian terror attacks - four suicide bombings and a shooting ambush - killed 12 people in a span of 48 hours.

But the world's reaction to this recent spate of Islamic terror is perplexing, as a series of troubling distinctions are still being drawn between the violence plaguing Israel and the "global terror" spearheaded by al-Qaida.

Arab rulers and media voiced unprecedented disgust for the attacks on innocent civilians on Saudi and Moroccan soil, insisting that no cause justified such horrific deeds. Saudi royals expressed revulsion at the blind cruelty against helpless women and children, while even the hardened Syrian regime labelled it "a sinful terrorist act".

And yet the Arab world showed little sympathy for the innocent Jewish women and children snuffed out by Palestinian attacks, insisting these were "legitimate acts of resistance against occupation" and thus outside their definition of "terrorism".

As Israel sought to protect its citizens from more attacks, the US then demanded that Israel not target senior leaders of Palestinian terror militias in the same way Washington has struck at top al-Qaida figures or Saddam Hussein. Such tactics, the Bush Administration said, hinder progress towards ending a conflict that is resolvable through negotiations, whereas America is waging an all-out war against ruthless terrorists with whom there can be no compromise.

And finally, the Europeans weighed in by distinguishing between "political" leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian factions, who should be engaged in dialogue, and their "military wings", which are finally being blacklisted.

It all amounts to a universally shameful approach towards the value of Jewish lives, and the Palestinians who kill them.

LET US START with the Arabs. There is simply no right under international law to bomb buses, cafes and discos, even Jewish ones. To be considered genuine "freedom fighters", the laws governing conflicts require that both the ends and means be justified. The Palestinian "resistance" fails on both accounts. The unswerving goal of Hamas is to eradicate the Jewish presence from all "Palestine", a form of ethnic cleansing. Fatah still seeks a similar end in stages. Meanwhile, both terror factions deliberately target civilians, a means that is totally barred under international law no matter the cause. Even Amnesty International endorses this view, saying that Palestinian terror attacks directed against Israeli civilians constitute "crimes against humanity".

The Bush Administration, meantime, engages in a cruel double standard when carving out an exception for the Palestinians in the war on global terror. The Palestinians preach and practise the same anti-Western Islamic agenda as al-Qaida. Listen to the imams of Gaza and you will hear it. They rage against the same enemies of Allah, urging the faithful to "kill locally, but think globally". Their terror funding comes from sources far and wide, as increasingly do the bombs and suicide bombers. That adds up to global terror that must be crushed, not compromised.

The Europeans are no less in error. There is no daylight between the political and military "wings" of the Palestinian militias - merely a division of labour. Both take credit for terror attacks and work for the same detestable goals. Hamas' extensive charity and social services are offered to build popular support for their primary raison d'etre - to eliminate Israel. As returning PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan said last year: "These days the only way to get the legitimisation [of the people] is by revenge operations." That is, Palestinian political careers are built on killing Jews. Just ask Yasser Arafat.

THE WORLD IS desperate to find and eradicate the roots of global terror. Yet it refuses to see that the selective treatment accorded the Palestinian cause over recent decades fuelled the proliferation of terrorism worldwide, as the wide berth given to the PLO's vast terror network encouraged others to adopt their deadly means. The perception that they could kill and mangle on an international scale and still get away with it, nurtured the present-day epidemic of terrorism.

Today, that Palestinian cause is now driven by the same Muslim concepts of jihad and martyrdom that inspire al-Qaida. And yet it still enjoys a perverse preferential treatment.

It is time to cut off that root, and to declare the very concept of jihad a war crime.

David Parsons is the editor of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) News Service.