Collin Levey / Times editorial columnist
Unwarranted hand-wringing over the death of a killer

By Collin Levey
Special to The Times

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BRITISH novelist Graham Greene once wrote that we should "leave death to the professionals." The phrase sprang to mind this week on the news that Hamas mastermind Sheik Ahmed Yassin had been hit with an Israeli missile in the early hours of Monday morning.

In the caterwauling that followed, foreign leaders across the Middle East and Europe grabbed microphones to express their outrage. British foreign minister Jack Straw condemned the attack as an "unlawful killing," while editorials called it politically "baffling." Some even ventured that Israel's action should rightly infuriate the U.S. because such actions weren't in American interests and made the U.S.'s own diplomatic chess game in the Middle East more tenuous and complicated.

And all the stories emphasized Yassin's physical frailty, showing pictures of him in a wheelchair wrapped in blankets. The message seemed to be that killing such a vulnerable creature was barbarity.

But Yassin was, and the Palestinian crowds that flooded the streets would agree, a professional. His was the business of orchestrating murderous attacks on Israeli civilians, a vocation he had excelled at for decades, and no less since Israel was blackmailed into letting him out of prison a few years ago.

The sheik's death is a good lesson in many ways, strategic and moral. But perhaps most importantly, it was a chance to understand what most of the rest of the world, especially Europe, feels deep down about terrorism and the appropriate way to deal with it. Or, more accurately, not to deal with it at all.

When it comes to U.S. campaigns against terrorism, Europe has been peevish, but somewhat reserved in its criticisms. No country, including France and Germany, can afford to alienate itself too drastically from the world's only superpower. Besides, all have the added incentive of knowing they are potential targets — however much the temptation to believe they can pose as neutral and divert the blows onto the U.S.

When it comes to hunting Osama bin Laden, or the death of Saddam Hussein's two sons in Iraq, there have been no words of indignation comparable to what we've heard this week. Such words would cause many to question Europe's core principles, not to mention its relationship with the U.S. Censuring Israel's war against the terrorists its citizens confront in the checkout aisle every day, on the other hand, doesn't require political courage at all.

True, George Bush and America have seen rising unfavorables in world polls since the Iraq war, which was opposed by some 90 percent of Spaniards and similar numbers of French and Germans. Yet, far more astonishing is the recent survey that found some 59 percent of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace.

The dynamic in Europe dangerously tilts the balance against Israel in a way that works against the values Europe pretends to support. It encourages Palestinians in their intransigence, a stance that can only lead to more stalemates and bloodshed. Israel may be a small and isolated state in world opinion, but it's the most powerful, dynamic society in its neighborhood — and it's not going anywhere.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia now smugly promises to take a complaint over the killing of Yassin to the United Nations, where no doubt he'll receive a warm welcome — but to what end? For a PR victory that will have the leftwing press in Europe cooing in his honor, yet will achieve nothing toward peace and settlement?

Still, there's little doubt he will get exactly what he wants. As professor Anne Bayefsky detailed in a recent issue of Commentary, in a world of brutal dictators and human-rights violators, "The U.N. General Assembly in 2003 passed 18 resolutions singling out Israel for criticism; human rights situations in the rest of the world drew only four country specific resolutions."

Calling the action against Yassin "extrajudicial," the phrase on every sage's lips this week, was a clever move by Israel's critics. To suggest that Israel ought to have brought Yassin into a court of law imposes on the country a one-sided obligation to operate within the constraints of a civilized society while declared enemies get a pass on blowing up buses because they are supposedly too irrational to be held accountable for their actions.

Israel and the Palestinians have been at war, continuously, for decades, though anyone honestly interested in peace knows the only solution is separate states. Nor, for all the pointing at settlers who want to expand the borders of the Israeli state, is there any excuse for not realizing that the bulk of democratic opinion in Israel is ready to make sacrifices and take risks for a real solution. To date, however, no good deed has gone unpunished.

The problem is on the other side, where Palestinians are encouraged by the U.N., trendy Europeans and other political fashionistas to persist in intransigence. And let's not mince words about the reason — because of the emotional satisfaction it supplies to casual anti-Semites in the West who revel in imagining Israel to be the "greatest threat" to world peace.

Collin Levey writes Thursdays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com

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