Another Tack: Ceremony or no ceremony

Nothing good can come of emboldening "good terrorists" who want Mona back in action.

By SARAH HONIG
At the very last moment, PA figurehead Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) got cold feet. Fearing flak, he canceled the awards ceremony in which the PLO's highest medal of heroism was to be conferred on five women - all convicted terrorists behind Israeli bars. All honorees were handpicked by Abbas himself. Three were foiled in their homicidal attempts but not so the two stars. They in particular point to the nature of Abbas's followers - with whom we so longingly seek coexistence. Ahlan Tamimi planned the August 9, 2001 attack on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria and drove the suicide bomber to the destination where he killed 15 persons, including seven children and five members of a single family. Amana Mona - insolently unrepentant and the most aggressive despot of the women's security wing in whichever facility she's transferred to - is the fetching Fatah operative who via Internet chats lured 16-year-old Ofir Rahum to a cruel death on January 17, 2001. Just as Abbas was off globe-trotting - yet again - his minister for prisoner affairs, Ashraf el-Ajami, blabbed about the projected ceremony. That rendered Abbas's choice of heroines an especially superfluous embarrassment and the event was expediently called off. Abbas, after all, had managed to convince willingly gullible saps everywhere that he substantially differs from Hamas's supposedly more villainous terror warlords. Measured by the simplistic yardstick of moral relativism, Abbas appears a trustworthy moderate. WHEN CHRONIC peaceniks have nobody else to appoint as their interlocutor, they pretend that the hypothetical lesser-evil is humanity's great hope for the greater good. When incorrigible political con artists like Ehud Olmert need any semblance of an achievement on which to base future election campaigns, they negotiate a "shelf-agreement" and make real concessions to their imaginary peace partner. When Abbas's own minions belie their front man's pro-forma moderation by doing the immoderate thing - like indiscriminately murdering Israelis - Olmert & Co. rely on Abbas's predictable lip-service, condemning "the damage to Palestinian interests." It's never the shedding of innocent Jewish blood that offends Abbas, but the potential inconvenience to his charlatan administration. Yet even Abbas's wan sham-censure suffices to enable Israel's homegrown self-bamboozling "Peace Camp" to absolve him of culpability. And so with official Israeli connivance, and enthusiastic State Department patronage, Abbas postures as a saint on the side of the angels, indeed as a victim of terrorism rather than its devious promoter. Like all shysters, however, Abbas occasionally slips up. The hullabaloo about his chosen laureates for the Al-Kuds Mark of Honor threatened to expose his true colors. After all, the release of Abbas's heroines - along with all other female terror convicts - was, significantly, the taunting initial Hamas precondition for any morsel of information about hostage Gilad Schalit. Ceremony or no ceremony, by so much as considering accolades for child-slayers, Abbas collaborates with Hamas's manipulative psychological warfare, which - in order to tug at the heartstrings of progressive do-gooders - disguises mass-murderers as prisoners of conscience, persecuted altruists and vindictively incarcerated political philosophers. Ceremony or no ceremony, by championing barbarous murderers, Abbas endorses his heroines' atrocities. When sadists of Mona's ilk become their society's poster-children - the objects of reverence, compassion and/or models for emulation - then their underlying moral code inevitably characterizes the collective which sponsors and supports them. MONA'S COLD-BLOODED hunting expedition began long before 20 AK-47 bullets riddled Ofir's young body. This homicide was meticulously and maliciously premeditated and executed painstakingly, over months, in scrupulously plotted phases, to wrest an unsuspecting boy from his protective environment and trick him to his death. Mona acted with noxious purposefulness to tempt the randomly selected teenager from his home. All that mattered was to get her hands on a Jewish kid. Ofir's predator ruthlessly stalked her prey and prepared his execution. Like her, the Jewish state's would-be destroyers pursue their deadly deliberate task over time, resorting to the same cunning, exactingly lethal determination. Mona played Ofir like Abbas plays Israeli dupes. Ofir embodied the shared Israeli dream of peace and bliss. He fell for the charms of something virtual in cyberspace. He had stars in his eyes. He hoped. He yearned to make love, not war. Like most of us. Ofir sought puppy-love in Jerusalem. Identically infatuated, Osloites were mesmerized by no-less-mythical geopolitical romance in "the New Middle East." Ofir wanted to believe the pretty decoy who flirted with him, the sly impostor who posed as "Sally." We want to believe that the "peace" on Olmert's shelf is more genuine than Abbas's affectations. Ofir, however, didn't know he was walking into a trap. This nation should have known about the ambush down Oslo's path, the road map's dangerous detours and the transparent recklessness of disengagement. We were explicitly alerted to consequences Ofir couldn't envision. Yet dire warnings remain unwelcome killjoys, even if everything Oslo-critics prophesied came to be with uncanny accuracy. Though the writing was on the wall then and still is now, too many refuse to read. It's less of a strain to dismiss cautions that territorial surrenders fuel confrontation. Our choice is between hard times or a colossal collective calamity as awful and final as that which cut short Ofir's life. We're as well-meaning and trusting as he was and enticed by beguilements as tantalizing as the bait which fatally attracted Ofir to a rendezvous with a hail of bullets. He, however, was a typical schoolboy with the right to dream, while Israel's national aggregate has no right to stay as naïve. Delusions can terminate our existence just as they did Ofir's. Therefore, we cannot afford the luxury of ignoring what Abbas had in mind. What counts isn't that he backtracked to preserve his image and avoid excessive discomfiture to his Israeli "useful fools." What counts is that he contemplated glorifying Ofir's callously calculating assassin. The inescapable subtext is that her crime is his ideal, his prescription for all Israelis. Mona is the benchmark of popular Palestinian intentions toward us all. That's why they acclaim her malevolence instead of denouncing it, instead of beating their own breasts for sanctioning and commissioning her blood lust. Nothing good can come of emboldening "good terrorists" who identify with Mona and want her back in action.