The one thing I detest more than liberal “rabbis” is racist Jews who speak of vile, underhuman Arabs. On the contrary, Arabs are normal, and in many political and moral respects remind us of how the Jews should behave.

Take Arab rocket attacks on Israel. Few Jews are so contemptuous of Arabs to imagine them stupid to the extent of not recognizing economic benefits of stopping the attacks. Israel would open some crossings, allow some migrant laborers from Gaza, and international aid will increase. The Arabs can get still more aid by ousting Hamas, whose forces constitute, at most, 2% of Gaza’s population. In the place where firearms are abundant, Arabs would have no trouble dethroning Hamas. Gazans are not afraid of Hamas: the people who live for generations in squalid refugee camps under Egyptian, then Israeli oppression, who are used to artillery fire at night, are not afraid of anything. Individual Arabs, yes, they crack easily under interrogation, but Arab masses are fearless.

The only reason that Gazans support the militant factions and withstand Israeli retaliation is the noble feeling of immense hatred to the enemy. They can live peacefully in refugee camps on the UN handouts, but they are willing to suffer in order to return what they consider their homeland, and what is now called, Israel. Gazans did not come from the West Bank; they came from the “core” Jewish cities from Haifa to Jaffa. This is the land which they fight to get back. They don’t fight for Schem or Hebron: those cities are already in Arab hands. They want what the Israelis think is core Israel. And if they cannot get the land now, at least they will continue pounding the Zionist enemy until he gives up.

It might be that the Arabs’ calculations are right. By any measure, Haifa and Jaffa are not Jewish cities; Jews controlled those territories in antiquity only for a very short time. By any measure, Schem and Hebron are Jewish towns: we bought them, conquered them, settled them, had them as our major cities, and have the full-fledged religious right to them. If, therefore, Jews abandoned Schem and Hebron, the Arabs find it completely plausible that Zionists will eventually abandon Haifa and Jaffa. And they are right, Jews keep abandoning those places: Akko is now an Arab town, and Jaffa becomes the one.

So when Gazans shell Israel, they act neither cowardly, nor stupidly, but bravely, shrewdly, and – from their point of view – righteously.

Likewise, Israeli Arabs refuse to integrate, assimilate into the Israeli identity which is so much economically beneficial for them. First, Jews must be eternally grateful to them for doing so. Imagine if Israeli Muslims started acting as good Israelis: learned Hebrew, served in the army, and became nice to Jews. The next thing we would see will be a wave of Jewish assimilation, Jewish women converting to Islam to marry those nice, unobjectionable Arabs. The Arab hostility reminds Jews that something has to be done about the swelling numbers of Israeli Arabs; nice Arabs would be accepted as legitimate voters, breed up to majority, and vote the Jewish state out of existence.

Israeli Arabs refuse assimilating in return for economic benefits. Wait, that’s what the Jews praise themselves with. The good Jews abandon the safety and economic advantages of America and move to Israel. Arabs are smart and rational, or call them cynical: they accept economic benefits from Jews, but refuse to integrate into the Jewish society. Some youngsters are even willing to fight the Jews instead of accepting economic benefits from them, such as higher education; others accept the almost-free education, and then work to subvert the Jewish state by building a parallel Arab society, donating to Islamic charities, and showing solidarity with their Palestinian brethren in the “occupied” territories. In the meantime, Israeli Arabs work to take over Israel by rationally exploiting her democracy, by the mere act of breeding. Sex for them is a political affair. Arabs accept temporary dhimmitude, but lose no chance to further their comeback as the sovereign nation in Palestine.

Arabs don’t want the coexistence with Jews, and wait patiently for the moment when they can drown some Jews and drive away the rest. That is how normal people behave when someone takes over the land they consider theirs. That is why the Torah commands the Jews to fight the natives of Canaan and drive them away, for they would always remember that the land was theirs, and their hostility to Jews will be implacable. Arabs want to drive the Jews away: Arabs resisted the Jews fleeing to Palestine from burning Europe; America and Britain resisted Jewish flight, too. That’s exactly what Jews are commanded to do with respect to Arabs: “For I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you will expel them” (Exodus 23:31).

Jews love to assert that Arabs claim more land that they actually need or have ever settled, that Jews worked the plains which were no-man’s land. But Jews were commanded to conquer the land from the Red Sea to Mediterranean, and from Nile to Euphrates; that’s also a land that Jews have never settled, and cannot settle with meaningful density. National sovereignty over the land has nothing to do with actually settling it: look at Chinese Himalayas or Russian sub-Arctic.

Arabs are religiously intolerant, they protest when Jews worship at the Temple Mount. If only the Arab example rang a bell in Jews’ minds: “You shall destroy, destroy their deities and break, break their monuments” (Exodus 23:24). Every rabbi with the least trace of honesty would concur that cleansing the Temple Mount from Islamic structures is an immensely important commandment, and every minute of procrastinating in doing so is a grave sin. God granted us a miraculous victory in 1967 for a reason, and what reason can we imagine behind giving Jews sovereignty over the Temple Mount? That’s, of course, if you believe that there is God; for those who evolved from monkeys the implications might be different.

Muslims exert horrendous religious punishments. Saudis sentence rape victims to capital punishment and ban every other religion from their country; Iranians stone adulterers. Liberal Jews have long forgotten their own punishments – which are exactly the same for the very same crimes. But Jews prefer tourism’ income to religious purity, and porn industry tax revenues to morality.
Arabs teach their children violence; at the age of eight, they slaughter sheep. At the age of three, good religious Jewish children start learning the Torah from Leviticus, the section that details sacrifices. Liberal Jews assert that Judaism is non-violent; reading the Torah might change their opinion. The God who told us to slaughter Amalek babies and priests of Baal during their worship, who killed the Egyptian firstborn and ordered us to bring numerous gruesome animal sacrifices, God of the Deluge, pogroms, and Holocaust – he is not a merciful liberal “spirit which is in man.”

Arabs are terrorists. But when Arabs kill Jewish civilians, they act normally – as any normal person does to his hated enemy. Jewish civilians serve in the army, pay taxes which support the army, vote for the governments which keep the territories under “occupation,” and send their sons and daughters to fight the Arabs. Palestinian terrorists don’t seek annihilating the Jews; that’s a task for Arab mobs and armies. The terrorists seek rational political ends, and employ violence only to achieve those ends; such violence is very economical by the standards of warfare. Such violence is extremely efficient in political terms: polls show Israeli support for Palestinian statehood growing after major terrorist acts.

Jewish partisans in Europe during WWII also employed terrorist tactics, and so did ETZEL and LEHI. Forget the fringes; it was the Haganah that carried out Dir Yassin and Kfar Kassem. Israeli army routinely shot POWs in 1967 and more rarely in 1973, and crushed them flat with tank tracks. When given a minimally free hand, IAF bombed Lebanese and Gazan towns with no compunction. Indeed, what compunction could be there to an enemy? The British - the world’s utmost liberals - exhibited a very limited compassion to Dresdners whose women, children, and the old they burned in incendiary raids, hurrah. Jews have a divine guideline in dealing with our sworn enemies, “Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3). God severely punished Saul for merely killing women and children, but not animals. David, likewise but for a different reason, killed all the inhabitants but not animals. You may not like it, but that is Judaism. If you want to be nice, join Tibetan monks; they are not nice, either.

Arabs are suicidal, they send their children to suicide bombings. And Jews were sending their children to senseless risk in Beirut for eighteen years. Arabs, at least, sacrifice their children for political ends; not so the Jews who during the Second Intifada feared for their children day and night but did nothing to stop the Arabs from killing them. No grieving Jewish parent went to Ramallah and blew himself in an Arab bus; a shame. Arabs sacrifice their children for what to them is a noble aim of fighting the Zionist enemy; Jews sacrificed their children to Shimon Peres, the idol of Rabin and his peace process. In the Book of Maccabees, Hannah urges her seven sons to suffer horrible death at the hands of liberal Jews and their Greek masters rather than “merely” eat non-kosher meat. That’s a Jewish mother, that’s Judaism. Compare to Tel Aviv restaurants serving pork.

Of course, Islam is a perversion. Of course, Arabs are wild, primitive, and make worse neighbors than Anthrax bacteria. Of course, the country is ours and we must cleanse it from Arabs by whatever means necessary. But the Arab example offers Jews a valuable insight into what the “normalcy” really is.

The world screamed when Dr. Baruch Goldstein reportedly shot 154 Arab worshipers in the Jewish holy place in Hebron. The Kach Party he belonged to was banned in Israel, America, and elsewhere even though it had no operational link with the incident. Israel engaged in self-flagellation, including a high-level Shamgar Commission inquiry. Google shows 65,000 pages about Dr. Goldstein.
A less conspicuous event took place on Thursday: an Israeli Arab walked into the major religious Zionist school and shot 19 people, mostly teenage students. They were not exactly worshiping at the moment, but some of them died with Hebrew holy books in hands, stained with young martyrs' blood.

UN Security Council refused to condemn the massacre. The world’s leaders, as usual, expressed their admiration for dead Jews. And then nothing changed. No high-level commissions, nothing. Israeli police rushed to announce that the murderer acted alone, even though someone obviously gave him the expensive automatic rifle with large number of cartridges.

It is outrageous when Jews kill others. It is normal when others kill Jews. The government never liked yeshiva students, anyway. The attack by an East Jerusalem' Arab reinforces the government's policy of divesting from that troublesome area. The mass murder also gives Israeli government a bit more of international acquiescence in the Gaza invasion.

It takes a lot of bravery and hatred to conduct a mass shooting alone. Doubt that? Look at how many Israelis stood up to shoot Shimon Peres, whom just everyone despises? The lack of hatred, the lack of courage… So how an Arab villager did manage such a horrendous but nevertheless brave act?

His hatred was twofold. Generally, he hated Jews who, he honestly thought, stole his land. His village was in Muslim country before, in Jewish country now. No amount of Israeli propaganda can change that fact. And all the liberal education that Jews bestowed on him taught the Arab one thing: that nationalism is noble and the country is worth fighting for. The Jews imagined they taught the Arab their history, but he readily applied their doctrines to his own history.

Then, it was the Arab labor. The yeshiva employed the Arab as a driver. That was a shame for Rav Kook’s disciples. Religious Jews, of course, treated their Arab driver a bit better than a swine. They were masters, he was, to put it mildly, a worker. Someone who lacks the divine soul which Jews have. No doubt, he was treated politely - but with unmistakable disdain which he couldn’t fail to miss. Not that the Jews were wrong to treat him thus; they were wrong to employ a despised human being – who could be reasonably expected to hit back one time.

As the Arab’s family told journalists, he was depressed by news of the Israeli invasion of Gaza and massive killings there. And his attitude, though factually wrong, is understandable: Israel daily sends signals of having no right to this land. The government abandons Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, the Temple Mount. Step by step, Palestinians reclaim "their" land: Schem, Hebron. Even the Jews, the leftists, agree that Arabs are right and join their demonstrations. Israel ran from Gaza and jailed the Jews who protested that move. How could Israel be possibly right in invading Gaza now, in killing the Arab's brethren? That they bombarded Sderot and Ashkelon with rockets is irrelevant. They only demanded forcibly what is rightfully theirs and what the Zionist state refused them: the Palestinian statehood. Even Zionists have long agreed to Palestinian statehood, but now wickedly drag the negotiations. And so in the Arab's eyes, Hamas was right to shell Israel, to get what is rightfully theirs, what even Zionists have conceded is the Palestinian land.

You don’t play games with your enemies.

People embellish their enemies in order to improve their own reputation. Fighting a prominent enemy is a marvelous task. Thus Israelis attribute pan-Islamic qualities and freedom fighters’ aspirations to Palestinian peasants, and the Arabs, in turn, mythologize the IDF. Being defeated by the armed-to-the-teeth monster is not that insulting. Israelis, for their part, inflate the effects of terrorism out of proportion even though they are statistically insignificant, compared to road accidents.

Modern terrorism is a return to historically standard situation of no universal security. Every man stood – and stands – for himself. Medieval travelers were much more likely to fall prey to bandits than Israelis – to Arab terrorists. Terrorism is a normal mode of war where the enemies don’t match forces in the open, but undertake to crush each other’s will to fight. In moral terms, terrorism against non-combatants is no different from sieges which also affect non-combatants. In both cases, the status of non-combatant is dubious, since the entire population supports war effort by paying taxes and encouraging able-bodied males to fight. Indeed, the textbook example of non-combatants – pregnant women - give birth to soldiers, and babies will soon become soldiers.

Israel patently demands that Palestinian Arabs stop terrorism before the final-status negotiations commence. The British occupiers of the same land failed extracting the same concessions from Jewish guerrillas. Irgun and Lehi continued attacking the British until they withdrew, much like the Afghan mujahedeen attacked the withdrawing Russians, and like Hezbollah and Hamas pursued the Israelis. Israel negotiates with Palestinians only because of the terrorists. Should they stop, Israel would abandon the negotiations at once. Israelis want to hold on to Judea, but don’t want to pay even a minor price of suffering terrorism. Public support for abandoning Judea to Arabs grows with the increase in terrorist acts in Israel.

As a lawyer, I recognize that people have conflicting values which often cannot be reconciled. I encountered many situations where I could equally well argue both sides of the conflict. In the present Jewish-Muslim situation, both sides are right. Jews needed a land for our state and sensibly chose a religiously significant land. Palestinian Arabs settled the nearby hills for millennia and sensibly regarded the country as their own. No amount of debate can solve that contradiction. Jews used terror successfully against the British occupiers, and need not scream when Arabs use a similar tactics against the Jews.

Just fight the Arabs.

Osama doesn't deal in the irrational. There is no cognitive gap between soldiers and suicide bombers. Both are equally ready for the mission. Shahedeen would prefer to live on but undertake suicide missions out of utter tactical necessity, like kamikaze and soldiers in clearly lethal operations. Few soldiers are eager for high risk, and the number of suicide attackers is minuscule compared to Muslim population.

Osama's goals are rational. All major Islamic terrorist organizations have domestic agenda. They want to overturn the corrupt regimes in favor of a more pure revolutionary rule. Osama convinced some of them to attack America first, in order to remove the dictators' major support. That strategy is wrong: so far, the American client dictatorships invariably failed, anyway, while some dictatorial regimes persisted without the American or Russian support. Though wrong, Osama’s America-first strategy is rational and suggests collaboration between him and Mubarak and Faisal. Osama does them a great favor by channeling their own terrorists into fighting America rather than the domestic governments. No doubt, the Arab rulers pay him for the favor.

Incidentally, some of Osama's immediate demands are good for America and Israel. America, indeed, has no business fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq; demolishing their government infrastructure and terrorist training camps in retaliation raids would serve the immediate American interests as well at a lower cost in lives and money. Osama condemns Hamas and PIJ for concentrating on Palestinian statehood rather than building a worldwide Islamic caliphate; Israel, too, would like Hamas to attack elsewhere. Israel would love to see the Middle East the United States withdrew from, plunged in myriad local conflicts pitching progressive dictators against Islamic terrorists. Such the Middle East won't threaten Israel with a major war, and will even promote Israel to the role of regional power arbiter now held by America.

Some of Osama's most outrageous demands prove realistic. Back in 1997, he told a Pakistani newspaper that the price of oil should increase by $115 per barrel. Now the Muslim countries are more than half way through his admonition. Unlike Western analysts, Osama proved right about the Soviet collapse in Afghanistan and Islamic victory in Sudan. The US toppled Saddam, whom Osama hated, and pursues Osama's agenda of democratizing Egypt. It remains to be seen whether Osama's most far-fetched idea, that of Islamic caliphate, would be borne out. Cultures, like animal species, come and go. Ancient Greece with its religion and culture is irreversibly lost. Osama imagines resurgence of truly fundamentalist – protestant – Islam. Protestant Christianity gained power only because it was supported by economic boom, but Muslims lack the relevant culture of education and work ethics. More likely, Osama's war on the West will remain a glorious episode of Islam's Endspiel.

The West is blinded by political correctness and wrong ideas of minimizing the enemy's civilian casualties. Osama said, "…if the majority of American people support their dissolute president [Clinton], this means the Americans are fighting us and we have a right to target them." Osama repeatedly defended huge collateral losses among Muslim civilians during the terrorist attacks on the US embassies in Africa as unavoidable – a position the US and Israel shrunk from in Iraq and Palestine. Osama is far from an idealist, but cynically applies double standards: he claims killing enemy civilians with inherently indiscriminate weapons is permissible but lambastes the very same collateral killing by Israel. Osama disregarded the plight of Muslims on still larger scale when denounced the first US-Iraq war. He felt no gratitude to America for stopping Iraq's atrocities in Kuwait. Osama thinks in terms of "our scoundrels against them." Though at odds with secular Saddam and receiving huge assistance from sources in Kuwait, Osama decried the American invasion of Iraq.

Westerners fall into the trap of rationalism. They try to understand Muslim world and devise intellectual responses. That's an absurdity on par with centrally planned economy. Societies are too complex to be described with simple formulas. Understanding Egyptian society from Nubian waterless villages to Cairo coffeehouse intellectuals is a daunting task, probably impossible and certainly not allowing for straightforward conclusions. Add dozens of other Muslims countries with diverse societies, and academic and diplomatic generalizations about the Muslim world become demonstrable falsehoods. Some of the Muslim hatreds are similar: heinous America refuses them visas, an odd but powerful crowd called Jews whom they have never met oppresses the Palestinians whom they have never see either, and evil Russians spread communism which promises to make all people equal and satiated. History, experiences, and mentality drastically differ between Riyadh and Jakarta. The objects, too, are different. America and France are not "the West", but an anti-Muslim and pro-Arab country, respectively. Western analysts try to understand Muslims, get everything wrong, and act accordingly wrongly, exacerbating the situation. Osama, on the contrary, is not a theorist. He showed no interest in understanding his enemy, but prefers targeting it without a second thought. That policy is far more effective.

Al Qaeda is not a terrorist organization in the sense of regularly committing terrorist acts with its own cadres. Rather, Al Qaeda is a venture firm engaged in seed financing, superfluous training, PR, and logistics. In return for those services, Al Qaeda shares in the terrorist acts committed by its client groups. Sometimes, Al Qaeda claims participation; that’s mostly happens when grassroots terrorists without an organization of their own perpetrate the attack. More often, Al Qaeda merely lauds the terrorist act, as happened with 9/11, without hijacking the laurels. Osama might be fearless, but he is a not a soldier - merely a rich Arab who brought the concepts of Western capitalism into the field of anti-Western terrorism. Let’s look at details.

Hollywood horror movies endow aggressors with bizarre features; media treat terrorists similarly. But they are not bizarre exceptions from human mentality. They are normal religious nationalists willing to die for their cause but not seeking death as members of some death cult; Osama evades American assassination attempts. In regular armies, soldiers undertake practically suicide missions defending their comrades and country; terrorists operate similarly. People who strongly identify with ideas might die physically but continue living in their ideas; shahedeen die, but live on as part of the ummah. Neither are terrorists monsters; thinking of 9/11 civilian death toll, recall fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo. The absence of mass following among Muslims doesn’t prove Osama wrong: John Brown failed to rally a significant number of slaves but nevertheless greatly advanced abolitionist cause.

Westerners despise Osama for barbaric intolerance. Civilized, affluent people are afraid to show intolerance because it endangers their lifestyle: the victims of their intolerance can strike back. The people preoccupied with pursuit of material wealth abandon the fight for moral values and rationalize their cowardice by abandoning moral absolutes. But the entire human system of values is calibrated with moral values. People who don’t pursue moral imperatives, pursue the other things even less. They want welfare rather than work, submission to government rather than responsibility.

Osama is highly responsible. Westerners seek to enjoy every moment of their lives, and grow impatient. They want all policies to bring immediate results. Osama, in the service of eternal God, is very patient – not because he is superhuman, but because he cannot change the political situation immediately. Neither are his means outdated. Westerners launched massive wars in Algiers, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq but believe the age of war is over. The inhabitants of pax Romana and Peace of Westphalia worlds thought similarly; Jews in 1939 thought that ethnic or religious wars are unthinkable anymore. Osama is way more realistic.

Taking the fight into America is not apocalyptic lunacy, but the only viable way to win the war. The Soviets lost the war in Afghanistan despite their cruelty because mujahedeen had safe havens in Pakistan; they could regroup, rearm, and relax. Israel similarly loses against the West Bank terrorists by allowing them safe havens in Jenin and elsewhere. Osama has to attack America if he is to deny his enemy a place to relax; continuous strain breaks the will to fight.

Osama is not a genius who rallied Muslim nations. The Muslim community is too huge, diverse, and dispersed to feel communal bonds. Other Muslims didn't help their Indonesian coreligionists hit by tsunami, and few Muslims came to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders. The seventh-century jihad was waged for spoils rather than religion, and since then Arabs showed no religious zeal to fight. Arabs want the US visas rather than Palestinian statehood. Osama attracted into his ranks one thousandth of one percent of the world Muslims. Many more admire him as a symbol with no intention of joining him. Osama draws adventurers rather than Muslims. That's not Osama's fault, but human. Rabbi Kahane similarly failed to gather a significant number of American Jews to confront Russia over the emigration restrictions on Soviet Jews. Osama was even less successful in garnering worldwide Muslim support for Palestinian insurgency. He repeatedly condemned Muslim governments and clergy for their failure to channel military support to Palestinians, and his early darling Hamas proved a disappointment unconcerned with global Islamic struggle.

The operation that would qualify Al Qaeda into the top tier of terrorists is 9/11. The official version contains many incongruent details, including puddles of molten steel which doesn’t yet melt at 1500F – the maximum temperature of kerosene burning, collapsing of the tower structures much after the kerosene burned away and in the absence of major afterfires, and the absurd story of Boeing plane’s wings liquefied before crushing into the Pentagon. It matters most that no terrorist group claimed the attack. That never happened before for any large general-purpose attack. On the contrary, often several groups claim one attack. Terrorism is about publicity, and refraining from publicizing one’s involvement in the major terrorist act is senseless. Terrorist leaders do not fear retaliation, but long for propaganda effect. It is unbelievable that no group claimed 9/11. Even in the doubtful videotapes, Osama never claimed organizing the event. He only praised it, as he praised many other terrorist acts both before and after 9/11. Osama's praise is unrelated to his participation or even to Muslim involvement: he congratulated the Chechen fighters for terrorist attack on Moscow Nord-Ost theatre, which is widely viewed as KGB/FSB ploy to implicate the Chechens. Osama’s praise for 9/11 came out only on October 7, almost a month after the attack – an inexplicable delay – and unusually for Osama stressed liberation of Palestine before Mecca’s. The US government attributes to Osama only a few days’ advance knowledge of the attack; that’s not planning. Curiously, Osama's family in Saudi Arabia denounced him four days after the attack – three weeks before his first comment on 9/11; under the American pressure, they somehow knew the culprit before he stepped forward. Osama was quick to claim responsibility for attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and even claimed credit for the USS Cole attack which he didn't organize. Islamic terrorist groups often claim credit for others' attacks – a practice facilitated by cross-membership; a whole bunch of terrorist organizations claimed three bombings in Taba in 2004. It is unbelievable that Osama refrained from claiming 9/11 attack fearing American retaliation. The very choice of date, the 9/11 for 911 emergency phone number, smacks of American black humor.

The Spain train bombings are also odd. Anyone living in Spain knows that local trains never arrive on time. The four trains just couldn't converge at the train station to blow the roof. The attack was planned by someone living in a country where timely arrival of trains is a norm; that disqualifies Israel. All the suspects killed themselves rather than be arrested by Spanish police. That's odd, since the terrorists could use the court hearings as media tribune and hoped to be exchanged in prisoner swap. Police found a lot of unused explosives; why didn't the terrorists use them for train bombings but left that overwhelming evidence? Why did they stay in Spain after the bombings? No working relationship is proved between the dead terrorists and Al Qaeda.

Another Al Qaeda-related attack, that of the shoe bomber, is odd beyond measure. Jose Padilla might be an imbecile but someone sane had to assist him. Anyone who helped him to prepare the bomb understood that such bomb cannot cause a plane crash. The shoe bomber's case smacks of a trailer show for 9/11.
A string of assaults is atypical for terrorists who have to go deep underground after strikes, but is extremely typical of sabotage planned by secret services. For example, Israeli secret service apparently organized a string of double murders in the settlements to greatly terrorize the local Jews, too active politically. In a typical case, two family members would be murdered ostensibly by Arabs in unrelated incidents within a short time – the very improbability of such event causing terror.
Then of course there's Padilla's acquaintance McVeigh who surprisingly demolished a huge building with low-yield ammonium explosive, but that's another story.

Germans set Reichstag on fire to implicate fellow communists. Jews killed Rabin to implicate the right-wingers. Russians blew the apartment houses in Moscow to launch a retaliatory war in Chechnya. Staging an attack is a historically standard way of forging a casus belli.

Why terrorism is not ubiquitous? It takes no brains or training to rent an apartment, turn gas on in the kitchen stove, and blow the building. It takes no brains and almost no training to rent a truck, buy three tons of nitrate ammonium fertilizer, mix it with you-know-what, park the truck at any building and blow it up. It takes only minor brains and moderate training to derail a train transporting chlorine cisterns. Terrorists can legally purchase weapons and equally simply procure C-4 explosive by registering a demolition company. Propane gas cylinders can be purchased in hundreds from multiple vendors without drawing anyone’s attention.
FBI works very well and intercepts many terrorist attempts. But the described grassroots terrorism is suitable for two- or three-men cells and usually cannot be detected beforehand.

One explanation for the lack of grassroots terrorism is the built-in moral prohibition. The US Army, for example, can feasibly take over the country, like the many coups in other countries, but it doesn’t. Criminal gangs can kidnap local politicians to exchange them for jailed members, as German insurgents kidnapped Peter Lorenz in 1975, but such cases are few. Population of populist countries is widely conformist to the extent of sending their children to Vietnam and Iraq wars, and is not prone to confronting the government. Social security destroyed the most important reason for people to care about their children: financial. People don’t rely on children for the old-age security. In the absence of financial bonds, moral issues are not strong enough to make the parents cut off their child’s finger instead of allowing him into the army for a senseless war.

People are afraid to go against the ruling system on their own but assemble in groups – that is where security services detect them. Many people support terrorists but few can go out and kill by themselves as lone wolves. Three-hundred million strong American nation produces a handful of psycho murderers, and its five millions Muslims are statistically unlikely to produce many suicide terrorists. But not even one? It’s hard to comprehend why, despite the abundant Internet indoctrination, no man stood up against the system by terrorist means. Raskolnikoffs can be rare because they infringe on the universal moral tenets, but “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” and the high enough goals justify the means; there should be no shortage of lone terrorists.

People don’t detest terrorism the way they detest murder; terrorism is a tool only, and can bear good fruits of freedom as well as sour fruits. Osama’s efforts are doomed. The freedom fighters like Thomas Jefferson used violence to break the constraints on a fully-fledged new order. Osama misuses terrorism to create a new order; such an approach cannot work in the West. Terrorism has some potential in Muslim states saturated with Islamic opposition; Osama can terrorize the despotic governments into allowing the Islamists to seize power in free elections. Even in the Muslim world, terrorism has no long-term potential: Iranians, for example, grew opposed to the ayatollahs in three decades.

Terrorists long for state sponsors not only for money and weapons, but predominantly for psychological reasons: the support reassures them. It’s not even about safety; many terrorists are ready to die. Their problem is deep human discomfort of confronting a towering entity alone.

If the above insight is true – and no other concept explains the lack of ubiquitous terrorism – then Al Qaeda emerges as an exceedingly odd organization. Al Qaeda has never had a state sponsor. No meaningful terrorist group ever existed without support of a state or state-like entity. From medieval Assassins with their own mountainous quasi-state to Red Army Faktion supported by German Stasi, all terrorists relied on Big Brothers. Al Qaeda purchased safe havens in Sudan and Afghanistan, but never had a Big Brother to rely on. Either Al Qaeda is a historically unique organization – an unlikely assumption – or it’s not a terrorist powerhouse.

The trial of bombing suspects in Spain produced the predictable results: a wholesale acquittal. One explanation is that it is almost impossible to convict terrorist suspects unless they were detected and wiretapped beforehand. They don’t leave many traces, and rarely engage in continuous operations like a gang, but rather act in hit-and-run manner. In this case, however, there is just no evidence linking the suspects to the terrorist act.

Even Spanish prosecution rebuffed the myths of Al Qaeda perpetrating the attack where four trains exploded near the train station. None of the suspects is affiliated with Al Qaeda, and they received no advice or financing from Al Qaeda.
Out of the 28 defendants, only three were convicted of murder, seven acquitted, while 18 convicted of vague crimes such as association with terrorist organization. Every Arab in Europe can be convinced on such grounds, since he donates to Islamic charity which donates to Hamas, or visits a local mosque frequented by terrorists. The 18 acquitted defendants didn’t participate in the Spain bombing attack.
Zougam, an Arab salesman, merely sold the mobile phones used to set off the explosives. The terrorists would be crazy to buy phones from one of their associates because the leftovers of the exploded phones are easy to trace. The phones were unlocked in Zougam’s shop, as if to create more evidence; why unlock the phones instead of buying cheap prepaid phones?
Gnaoui, another Arab, is sentenced of transporting the explosives to Madrid. If he knew about the attack – which required many people – why wasn’t he recruited to place the bombs on the trains, too? Gnaoui, at most, is a petty arms dealer with no connection to the terrorist attack.
Trashorras, a Spanish national and former miner, allegedly supplied explosives. It is incredible that he knowingly participated in a plot to kill his countrymen in great mass – the total amount of explosives is huge, about 300 lbs. Thashorras was an informant of Spanish police, for years providing information on sales of explosives and firearms.
No one was prosecuted for planting and setting off the explosives, but only for auxiliary roles. No mastermind was identified in the trial.

Four Arab suspects blew themselves up when apprehended by Spanish police. Such behavior is highly unusual of the Islamic terrorists, and clearly prohibited in Islam (suicide bombing are military operations rather than suicide per se). The Arabs killed one policeman in the blast, but that was probably an unintended consequence. The Arabs’ chances of being convicted for the train bombing were slight, the trial provided them with a tribune for pompous addresses, and suicide made no sense. Spanish police oddly declared tracing of dynamite used in the suicide impossible, and it remains unknown whether the dynamite is the same used in train bombings; given the police’s refusal to trace it, the dynamite was likely different.

Someone framed the Islamists: a car was left at one of the train stations with audio tapes with Koranic verses, literature in Arabic, and detonators. Are we to believe that the terrorists didn’t know how many detonators they would need, and left a few spare ones? That they didn’t take the detonators away? That they are so stupid as to leave detonators and Koranic audio tapes in abandoned car? Passengers saw men in ski masks repeatedly entering and leaving the train. Why would the terrorists act so irresponsibly, sure to make the passengers suspicious? Just how many terrorists should act concurrently to place rucksack bombs in at least ten train cars? We’re talking of three dozen people at least – and are we to believe that none of them was identified in the subsequent three-year investigation? It is quite unbelievable that dynamite caused the amount of damage seen on the trains; powerful C-4 is a much more likely explosive for the Madrid bombing. Conveniently, one unexploded rucksack contained dynamite, as to offer the evidence; its detonator’s wires were not connected. The unexploded rucksack with dynamite was miraculously found after the police have initially searched the very same pile of baggage. The other two initially unexploded rucksacks contained something so unusual that it went off when the bomb squad tried to deactivate them; it is impossible that bomb experts failed to deactivate a crude terrorist device.

No terrorist organization claimed credit for the attack; al-Masri Brigades claim of responsibility is clearly fake. There is no conceivable reason why a terrorist organization would abstain from claiming such high-profile attack. Just like with 9/11, the Madrid bombing was qualitatively different from terrorist attacks. There are dozens of major terrorist organizations in Europe, but none of them ever perpetrated an attack on such scale, either before or after the Madrid bombing. The train bombing was highly successful in political terms for the Islamists: it led to Spain’s withdrawal from Iraq. Why didn’t they continue such bombings in other countries to pursue the Islamist agenda? It is no problem to buy C-4 or dynamite in Europe; rucksacks and mobile phones are not hard to get, either. The masterminds of the Madrid bombings meant them to produce the same effect as 9/11: Spaniards were expected to rush against Islamists, like the Americans. The plan did not work with sybarite Europeans: they opted for withdrawal from Iraq. Four trains were bombed, just like the four airplanes in 9/11.

The train bombing could not be a local plot for a single reason: everyone who lives in Spain knows that trains there never arrive on time. No Spanish resident would have planned an attack based on the official timetable of the trains’ arrival. The trains could not arrive approximately simultaneously and cause the railway station roof to crush, as was apparently the bombers’ plan. The bombing’s masterminds live in a country where the trains arrive on schedule.
The Madrid bombing was apparently linked symbolically to 9/11: it was meant to happen 911 days after the attack in America. But the trains in Spain exploded 912 days after the WTC attack. Not really.

It was still the 911th day in the United States of America.

A self-serving moralizing serves badly. A soldier crosses the enemy’s lines at night on a glider, enters the enemy army’s camp, and shoots several enemies before being gunned down himself. A hero? No, a cowardly Palestinian terrorist, according to the Israeli media.
Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers during the truce was treacherous, immoral? A young Sharon had similarly kidnapped Jordanian officers to exchange them for Israeli POWs.

Surely a decent human being doesn’t hijack civilian airliners? Israelis did hijack a Syrian passenger jet to get hostages for exchange.

Warriors don’t target civilians, only terrorists do? Then why had Israel bombed civilian enclaves from Port Said to Beirut?

Arab bombers must be mad to commit suicide? Many Israeli soldiers undertook clearly suicidal missions.

Arabs are bad because they kill Jews? Jews have likewise killed Arabs in many wars. Arabs fight to get their land back; Jews fight for that same reason.

All nations at war denigrate their enemies, and accuse them of immorality. It is easier to kill or persecute immoral people than honest and rational ones. If they are honest, perhaps they are also right? That reasoning led to Christian persecution of the Jews. The Church, evolved from Judaism, could not proclaim Judaism wrong. At the same time, Judaism – in the Christian outlook - could not be right. The Church, accordingly, substantially avoided theological dispute with Jews and proclaimed them evil and immoral people. Israel follows a similar approach with the Palestinians.

They are not bad. Palestinian Arabs are somewhat smarter and harder working than any other Arabs except the Egyptians. Of all Arabs, only Palestinians and Egyptians lived in arable lands and developed at least rudimentary work ethics. Palestinians are braver and more warlike than any other Arabs; the Lebanese voted for Hezbollah to obtain security and welfare, but Palestinians voted for Hamas specifically because of its hard-line policy toward Israel. Hamas is refreshingly honest compared to Israeli politicians; it refuses to nominally renounce violence and accept Israel in order to get huge international aid.

Israeli leftists vociferously stamp Palestinians as wicked supporters of the evil Hamas. That’s an easy way out for the intellectual cowards. Otherwise, if the Hamas soldiers are decent and brave on par with Israeli soldiers, then either the Israelis are wrong or the two sides face irreconcilable differences. The Israeli ultra-left accepts that the Jews are wrong; the peaceniks laud Arab guerillas and go after Jewish soldiers. Most leftists refuse to go that far, and assert that it is the wickedness of some Arabs that fans the Arab-Israeli conflict. Wicked people need to be reproved or punished; they are an exception. The few wicked Arabs of Hamas origin are treated as criminals: jailed or refused aid. No, they won’t reform themselves or betray their voters.

How does one condemn people of demonstrable moral integrity, like the Hamas? By declaring their methods immoral. As if there are moral methods of warfare! As if the Palestinians could have received anything from Israel without violence! The Intifada started the concessions. Foreign powers started pushing Israel to settle with the Palestinians only after the TV screens became soaked with blood. The peace process started only when Arafat made the status quo untenable for the Western guardians of international tranquility.

Terrorism is more moral than war because terrorism is more cost-efficient. Israel was more inclined to make peace with powerful Egypt than with the Palestinian trifle. Logically then, the Palestinians needed to fight harder than the Egyptians to reach an acceptable peace with Israel. The Palestinians, however, killed half the number of Jews that Egypt has killed. The Palestinians killed “only” about 1,500 Jews to get a state of their own; the Jews have killed many more Arabs to establish Israel. The Jews have rejected a Palestinian state with no less vigor than the Arabs have rejected Israel. Palestinian terrorism is a relatively low-casualty means to a political end. The Israeli government condemns Palestinian terrorism for the same reason the Palestinians condemn Israeli air strikes: both condemn the weapons they cannot counter.

The moralizing has backfired. The Arabs remain immune to Israeli philippics. The West, used to the daily violence in Iraq, treats terrorism as a given, not as a something unusually evil. The virus of moralizing infected its inventor, Israel. Now the leftists accuse the Israeli army of terrorist tactics in Gaza and Lebanon, sue the Israeli police for indiscriminate killing of likely insurgents, and demand better conditions for jailed terrorists.

The Palestinians are good people who will fight Israel until she utterly destroys them and expels the remnants.

Countries release prisoners under two scenarios: insignificant criminals through amnesty and POW’s after wars. Amnesty is much criticized because if a sentence term could be reduced, then the original long sentence was unjustified. Civilized countries have mostly switched to a parole system, and pardon criminals individually after elaborate investigations.

POW’s are generally exchanged after a war’s end, whether formally with a peace treaty or de facto with a conclusive armistice. Releasing them earlier brings hardened and hating fighters into the enemy’s ranks. Tactical POW exchanges sometimes take place after inconclusive battles for expediency’s sake, so that each side doesn’t have to maintain an approximately equivalent number of the enemy’s prisoners. Unable to maintain POW camps, armies shoot or starve prisoners. Unilateral POW releases never happen in wartime.

Is Israel at war with the Palestinians? Those in Israeli jails answer in the affirmative. Heroes at home, they won’t lead a pastoral life after release, but will involve themselves in the anti-Israeli struggle. By far most of the guerrillas Israel has released in earlier exchanges have joined the ranks of fighting organizations.

Some POW’s are never released, but held as trophies or hostages. Barghouti might not have been involved in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade attacks on Jews, and Israel could have sentenced him as a nod to Arafat, but now Barghouti is both a trophy prisoner and a valuable hostage, and must remain in jail. Israel needs the resolve to use its Arab hostages.

Some POW’s are sentenced for war crimes rather than repatriated after the war ends. Though most Palestinian insurgents in Israeli jails committed terrorist acts of war, several are guilty of war crimes, such as the deliberate murder of children.

Whether a prisoner release, euphemistically called an “exchange,” shows Israel goodwill or not is irrelevant. The Palestinian reaction to the ostensible goodwill is what matters. And they will recognize the swap as a hard-won concession, not goodwill. Arabs will be proud of their achievement and prompted to repeat the tactical victory. Swaps make Israelis into soft targets for hostage-taking by the Palestinians to press any of their demands. Swaps embolden guerrillas who are virtually assured of returning home after Israel catches them.

Disproportional prisoner swaps serve the government’s PR needs. Bringing back Cpl.Shalit is a PR achievement for Kadima, though worthless in military or security terms. The exchange values the media darling Shalit’s life on par with the hundreds of Jewish lives taken – and more yet to be taken - by the released terrorists. Shalit now becomes more important than scores of other Jews later. A publicized life costs many inconspicuous lives.

The exchange runs against the basic Jewish value of justice. Punishments must be meted out no matter what, on rich and poor alike, and certainly on enemies. Criminals should not be spared, even if Israel would enjoy flooding Palestine with Arab gangsters.
Judaism prescribed buying out kidnapped Jews in a different situation. Kidnappers profited in either case: sell the Jew back to his nation or sell him away as a slave. Then, a buyout did not prompt the kidnappers to more activity than they would otherwise undertake anyway. Today, kidnapping Israeli soldiers is unprofitable per se, and only a prisoners’ swaps make it profitable, thus provoking the kidnapping.

The Israeli problem of having too many prisoners reminds us of Biblical punishments. The ancient Jews had no concept of long-term incarceration. The idea of keeping criminals for years and decades on the public account was alien to their practical minds. Inflicting a bruise for a bruise might seem harsh to moralists, though many Jews would venture to carry out the punishments. Public lashing and execution remain meaningful options. The Torah unequivocally prescribes death for murderers: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed” (Gen9:6). The commandment is not qualified by the aesthetics of execution, its expediency in solving crimes, or the morality of taking human lives. Execution is only about justice: justice to the victims and justice to the murderers. Errors happen, but in the worst case scenario Israel would execute a member of an enemy military group not directly involved in the murder of Jews. I can live with that. The Israeli government can live with that, too; it killed scores of innocent civilians in Lebanon and Gaza. And don’t start that “we-have-no-Sanhedrin” rant. Israeli courts sentence Jews to years in jail for killing Arabs in self-defense, and all the more so do they have the legal and moral jurisdiction to sentence Arabs to death for murdering Jews.

Once Israel stops taking prisoners, the issue of prisoners’ exchange will become moot.