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Charles Kauthammer on the Jenin "massacre":

Jenin: The Truth (washingtonpost.com)



... And yet for weeks the world has been seized with the question of the "Jenin massacre." The U.N. Security Council called emergency meetings. The secretary general appointed a special investigating committee (now disbanded). The European press published the most lurid allegations. To say nothing, of course, of al-Jazeera TV.



All this for a phantom massacre. Yet this same Middle East conflict yields no shortage of real massacres:



• April 27: Adora, Palestinian gunmen enter residential quarters shooting everyone, including a 5-year-old girl shot through the head in her bed.



• April 12: Jerusalem, suicide bombing at a bus stop, 6 murdered.



• April 10: Yagor, suicide bombing on a bus, 8 murdered.



• March 31: Haifa, suicide bombing in a restaurant, 15 murdered.



• March 28: Eilon Moreh, shooting attack, 4 murdered.



• March 27: Netanya, suicide bombing at a Passover seder, 28 murdered.



These are massacres -- actual, recent massacres. Massacres for which the evidence is hard. Massacres for which the perpetrators claimed credit. Where was the Security Council? Where was the Kofi Annan commission? Where was the world?



The United Nations' excuse will be that these murders were perpetrated not by states but by groups. But this is nonsense. The Palestinian Authority is a recognized government. The links of its top leadership to these murders is precisely the kind of question that warrants investigation. Yet the very idea that the United Nations would investigate Palestinian massacres is absurd.



The fact that such an undertaking is unimaginable is what has made the past several months so deeply, despairingly troubling. The despair comes from the bewilderment of living in a world of monstrous moral inversion.


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