You may not have heard that on Monday afternoon the Israel Defense Forces killed terrorist commander Mahmud Abu Khalifa and two of his deputies with a precision hit on their car in Jenin. As they were driving in the center of the West Bank city, an air force helicopter fired a missile at them that was on target. There was no collateral damage or civilian casualties.
Just half a year ago, when the IDF similarly knocked out Hamas chief Ahmed Yassin with a missile strike in Gaza (followed, a few weeks later, by the same treatment for his briefly-serving successor Abdul Rantisi), the world was up in arms. The EU was hopping mad, Turkish prime minister Erdogan called it a "terrorist act" and put Turkish-Israeli relations on ice for a while. The State Department was "deeply troubled."
One wonders, then, why the elimination of a smaller fry like Khalifa didn't evoke a reaction. Is it that being a larger-scale murderer like Yassin gives you a "political" status that makes you sacrosanct? By that logic Claus von Stauffenberg, the German general who tried to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, was committing a huge crime. Or that, Khalifa being only the latest in a string of Israeli assassinations of terror masters, it's become old hat, just not newsworthy anymore? Or -- the most optimistic interpretation -- that in the wake of events like Beslan, "the world" is less and less in the mood to stick up for terrorists? |