Recent events have rekindled simmering feelings in Israel that its chief ally and supporter — America — actively applies a glaring double standard when it comes to how to deal with the terrorist threat facing the citizens of both nations.
This issue was thrust back into the limelight last week after tens of people were slaughtered in Riyadh in a well-executed Al Qaeda homicide bomb attack. Following that atrocity, US Secretary of State Colin Powell intimated that while the Riyadh bloodbath was clearly terrorism, no such component existed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I don’t attribute [the attack] to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I attribute it to terrorism,” Powell said during a press conference in Amman, Jordan.
A short time later, President George W. Bush vowed that the killers involved in the attack would “come to know the meaning of American justice.” His meaning was clear.
Statements such as these have left people in Israel wondering if Washington views American lives as more valuable and more worthy of justice than the lives of Israeli Jews.
It has also called into question with the average Israeli the veracity of Washington’s proclaimed friendship, as similar attacks against the region’s Jews are met, not with calls for justice, but with demands on Jerusalem to show restraint and practice appeasement.
The most recent example of Washington’s position following a major Palestinian terror attack took place on March 6 of this year. A day earlier a Palestinian man strapped with explosives murdered 17 people on a public bus in the port city of Haifa.
In the aftermath of that attack, media reports indicated major pressure from the Bush administration for Israel to not “overreact” to the massacre of its citizens, even as US forces massed to launch their invasion of Iraq in order to ensure American security.
The begging question is whether American security has been compromised by terror to the level Israeli security has?
Per capita, far more Israelis have been killed in terror-related attacks over the past two years than have Americans. The current Palestinian terrorist campaign has forced the average Israeli to live with the threat of a ghastly and untimely death every day and in every corner of the country.
By comparison, the average American does not yet face this level of threat. The conclusion is that the terrorist threat to the average Israeli is exponentially greater than that to his/her American counterpart. Reason would suggest that the greater the terrorist threat, the greater the demand and support for Bush’s brand of justice should be.
Washington, however, has hinted over the past decade that it does not exactly view Palestinian terror as “terror.”
Speaking on the issue of Palestinian terrorists last year, Powell noted, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” and said that the terror groups plaguing Israel constitute “gray areas
