This week’s theme is hypocrisy. I’ll try to make it fun.

Right after September 11, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon compared Israel to the U.S. under attack. He ordered assassinations of Palestinians and invaded their towns. President George Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell were both critical. When the Israeli leader said they reminded him of Munich, they slapped him down.

Yet, after last weekend’s suicide bombings in Israel, the U.S. accepted Israel’s harsh response, as if Ariel Sharon had been right all along. It’s always amazing to see them reverse their position on a dime and feel no need to explain. Think of Saddam Hussein, think of Manuel Noriega, think of Osama bin Laden.

So what really changed? U.S. policy, I’d say. In the immediate aftershock, the Bush administration seemed determined to resolve festering sores that create recruits and support for terror, like the Palestine impasse. But it’s proven tough in the face of Israeli recalcitrance and a barrage of U.S. punditry that claims, for instance, that there’s no relation between Palestinian grievances and September 11.

So the U.S. government seems to have backed off, choosing to settle for the overthrow of the Taliban and, it hopes, the death of Osama bin Laden. Then it’ll look around for who to bomb and overthrow next. It’s so much more doable than peace in the Mideast. And the tradeoff is merely the certainty of future World Trade Center attacks.

Why? Because religious fanaticism thrives under savage repression. Look at early Christianity. You crucify their leader and they declare a victory. Or the Jewish martyrs of Masada; 2,000 years later, it’s a tourist site. If the U.S. doesn’t defuse the sources of terror, we’ll all pay a price, or our children will.

Ariel Sharon tells Yasser Arafat his police must arrest those responsible for the latest bombings in Israel. Then Israel shuts down travel in Palestinian areas and bombs its police stations, making the demand impossible to meet.

I’d say that gives us a right to ask what the real purpose of Israel’s attacks is.

It could be to eliminate and replace Yasser Arafat with a more submissive leader, which is hard to picture. It could be to reoccupy Palestinian land, or lead to the expulsion of its inhabitants, a nightmare scenario that gets serious ice time in Israeli politics.

Ariel Sharon says “a war has been imposed on us.” What war? The other side has no army, no air force, not even tanks. It isn’t a country, it’s a patchwork of administrative areas. It’s like talking about a war between Canada and Telus Mobility.

As for “America’s New War,” Afghanistan has sent up no planes, there have been no battles between the two “sides,” and most U.S. casualties resulted from its own fire. Can we please have some new terminology?

Speaking of terminology, take state terror and moral equivalence. I’ve avoided talking about the former lest I be accused of the latter. But there is such a thing as state terror. Just read Peter Cheney’s grim reports in The Globe and Mail about the effects on civilians of bombing Afghanistan, whether it’s “inevitable,” as the briefers say with scant regret, or because pilots don’t want to return to base without the thrill, as they sometimes say, of dropping their load.

The state of Israel assassinates people, then rages when one of its own is assassinated. Five kids die because Israeli forces mined the road to their school. It’s not surprising that states employ terror, given their power. Nor is the point that one kind of terror justifies the other. The point is that terror is reprehensible, wherever it’s used, because innocents are innocents.

I think people on the left have sometimes justified terror when it was used in the name of causes such as national liberation; and those on the right have done the same for the uses of state terror in response to September 11 or the suicide attacks on Israel.

Is Iraq next? Well, I agree Iraq should not be left to build weapons of mass destruction. But no nation should, including the U.S., which has actually dropped two of its atomic bombs. And Israel has had those same weapons for decades, yet the U.S. doesn’t threaten to bomb it. I also agree that Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was unacceptable. But so was Israel’s of Jordan and Syria in 1967, and Lebanon in 1982.

Ariel Sharon says Yasser Arafat supports terror, which may be true; but Ariel Sharon was officially cited in his own nation for abetting massacres in Sabra and Shatila. The problem lies in the hypocrisy, the sight of which drives human beings to fury. It will be damn hard to find global solutions while you still have global Tartufferie.

Leaving us with the kid from California who joined the Taliban and survived the jet strafing of prisoners of war. Will U.S. leaders stick to their position: accept no Taliban prisoners, and prefer that foreign ones be killed, so they don’t make more trouble?

And what will Heather Reisman do? The kid got hooked on Islam by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a staple of high-school courses. Is she at this moment, clearing it off the shelves at Indigo? If not, why not?

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.