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October 17, 2003/Tishri 21 5764, Vol. 56, No. 4
The price of terror
JONATHAN FRIENDLY
Jewish Renaissance Media
When Israel bombed a terrorist training camp in Syria in response to the Maxim restaurant massacre on Oct. 4, it served notice that it was fully prepared to take hostilities in the Mideast to the next level if Arab nations do not stop harboring and financing terrorists. The message is exactly the same one the United States sent when it destroyed the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan after Sept. 11 and removed Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
While we can fear that the Israeli strike might prove the catalyst for another large-scale Arab attack on the Jewish state, like the Yom Kippur war 30 years earlier, we cannot fault the necessity for the action. The training camps are the spiritual homes of terror. Despite Syrian protestations of innocence, it has been clear for more than a decade that the leadership of Islamic Jihad uses its center in Damascus to organize terror attacks against Israel, often training its recruits at bases like the Ein Saheb facility that Israel struck Oct. 5.
Like his father, Hafez, before him, President Bashar al-Assad has actively encouraged the terrorists and permitted Iranian government funds to flow through Syrian banks to the paymasters recruiting for Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and Gaza.
It is worth noting that Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the attack in Haifa as it had for many similar bombings, has none of the political or social service trappings of groups like Yasser Arafat's Fatah - or the Lebanese-based Hezbollah, which uses the same training camps for its military wing. Islamic Jihad does not run schools or hospitals; it exists only to conduct attacks that it hopes will rouse all Palestinians to a final war to exterminate Israel.
The strike on Ein Saheb should never have been necessary, of course. It was easily within Arafat's power to end the intifada, which began just over three years ago. It was his decision to free the jailed Islamic Jihad and Hamas leaders then and his failure to curb the suicide bombers when first they struck. He lacked the will to disarm the terror groups when that was the first condition of all the peace plans laid out by at least three major initiatives, including the now-defunct road map.
Instead, his Palestinian Authority gave and continues to give free rein to the most violent elements that reject any peace with Israel. The P.A. actively glamorizes the suicide killers, naming its schools and summer camps and streets in their honor. The price for that is the security barricade that Israel is now building, the closing of crossings, the wasted hours at checkpoints, the stagnant economy.
In principle, the Oct. 5 strike was simply an extension of Israel's policy of destroying the homes of the intifada-inspired suicide bombers. The message should now be as clear to Syria's al-Assad and to Iran's supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as it is to the families of the suicide bombers: If you help terror, be prepared to pay what could be an ever-rising price.
Jonathan Friendly is contributing editor of Jewish Renaissance Media.
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