By Professor Louis Beres, Purdue University Jewish Press April 28, 2004

Earlier this month, a previously unknown Arab/Islamic terror group
claimed the murder and mutilation of four American civilian contractors in
western Iraq as “retaliation” for Israel`s assassination of Hamas leader
Sheikh
Ahmed Yassin.

“This is a gift from the people of Fallujah to the people of Palestine and
the family of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by the criminal
Zionists,” read the statement from the Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin.

Now that Israel has also succeeded in eliminating Yassin`s successor, a
pediatrician who devoted his professional life to blowing up Jewish children
in
buses and nursery schools, it is vital to understand what should already be
obvious: terrorists have absolutely no rights of retaliation under
international
law.

There can never be any legal or moral equivalence between permissible
acts of anticipatory self- defense against a leading terrorist, whether it be
Sheikh Yassin or Dr. Rantisi, and the jubilant dismemberment, burning and
hanging of American noncombatants carrying food supplies to hungry Iraqis.
The fact that various Arab/Islamic terror groups see no difference between
such expressions of force only reveals just how dangerous these groups have
become. Indeed, they openly subordinate the most evident civilizational
limits
of humanitarian international law to the ritualistically primal pleasures of
random slaughter.

By definition, terrorists are criminals under international law. They do
not have any rights of reprisal. When a police officer shoots a fleeing
murderer
to protect human life, that action is certainly not comparable to the felon`s
own criminality. The latter is an obvious instance of law-violation, one that
must be circumscribed and punished. The former is an obvious example of
law-enforcement, one that is indispensable to providing public order and
security. The fact that both instances involve the use of force does not make
them the same. They are not merely different actions from the standpoint of
legality; they are diametric opposites.

The leaders of Hamas and its sister terrorist groups always urge
“retaliation” for Israel`s self- defense policy of targeted killings — a
policy now
similarly followed and codified by the United States. With such misuse of
language, the terrorists and their sympathizers acknowledge no legal
difference
between the essential use of force by states to protect against terrorism and
the
steadily escalating terror-violence that inevitably elicits such force.
Recently, the frenzied Hamas cries for Jewish and “Crusader” blood were
formalized in a widely-circulated deck of cards containing the pictures of
Israel`s democratically-elected leaders. In a grotesque parody of the current
American program to identify most-wanted Iraqi war criminals (criminals who
are enormously popular heroes to Hamas and to other Palestinian terror
organizations), these cards seek nothing less than to equate law-breaking
with
law-enforcement.

Normally, assassination is a crime under international law. There are
residual occasions, however, where assassination may be not only permissible,
but altogether law-enforcing. One such case is state-authorized
counter-terrorism, so long, among other things, as the assassination is
directed at the target terrorist as meticulously as is operationally
possible.

By definition, on the other hand, assassination BY terrorists of a state
official or of an ordinary citizen is always murder. It is true that in
certain ex-

tremely rare circumstances, the assassination of a public official by
insurgent
forces could be construed as law-enforcing — circumstances called “tyrannicide” in political philosophy and jurisprudence — but these are surely not
such
circumstances. Here, in the matter of Hamas vs.Israel and the United States,
Palestinian forces have repeatedly declined diplomatic methods of conflict
resolution while simultaneously murdering the most fragile noncombatants with
intentionality and cruelty.

To better understand this point, let us consider an eye-opening and
altogether plausible scenario. In addition to Operation Iraqi Freedom and its
associated plan to kill or capture leading Iraqi war criminals, the United
States
is now also conducting various other military operations in reprisal for the
acts
of terror of September 11th. An explicit major objective in these operations
is
the assassination of Bin Laden himself.

If these operations should eventually succeed, and Bin Laden is
“removed,” al Qaeda`s successor leadership might then decide to murder an
American high official. If, following such a murder, the United States were
to
respond with purposeful targeted assassinations, would any civilized person
see
“equivalence” in these reciprocal killings? Rather, wouldn`t it be perfectly
clear
that the violence by al Qaeda was entirely criminal, while violence by the
United States was entirely law-enforcing?

Israel has been conducting necessary operations for many long and
painful years against Palestinian terrorists. A major objective in these
opera-

tions has been the targeted killing of criminals who plan barbarous attacks
on
Israeli women and children. Whenever Israel, in the most controlled and
precise manner possible, targets the perpetrators of these heinous crimes,
Hamas and its fellow “freedom fighters” initiate yet another spasm of utterly
indiscriminate murders. There is a “cycle of violence,” to be sure, yet there
is
anything but equivalence.

Impatient with all civilized limits, Hamas and its terrorist group partners
now seek not only to reinvent language, but also to transform violation into
punishment. This transformation, which unhesitatingly replaces law with
vengeance, threatens to sacrifice ever-larger numbers of defenseless Israelis
and
Americans in the relentlessly desperate “martyrs`” search for immortality.
Only a vast collective Jewish and American agony defines the Hamas idea of
justice, an idea that handily masks genocide as “retaliation.” But no amount
of
linguistic manipulations can turn crime into law.

No cause on this green earth can ever justify the jubilant maiming,
disembowelment, charring and murder of children on an Israeli school bus or
adult American civilian contractors delivering food in Iraq, and no terrorist
public relations campaign — no matter how slick and well-funded from Saudi
Arabia or even parts of Europe — can ever succeed in portraying monstrous
defilement as sacred goodness.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2004 and is filed under opinion.