After this week's suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus that killed at least sixteen and wounded many more, it is worth asking again: How many more Israelis have to be murdered before President Bush wakes up to the reality that only a total war against Palestinian terrorists will stop these attacks?
President Bush should stop acting as if the Israeli government and the Palestinian regime were morally equal. The Israeli government represents a free country, which protects (to a large extent) the individual rights of its citizens, and acts only in self-defense to eliminate the terrorists that threaten its people. The Palestinian regime, in sharp contrast, is a collection of terrorists and supporters of terrorism put together by the father of international terrorism, Yasir Arafat; it's a regime that has no respect for the individual rights of its own people, and whose main goal is the destruction of Israel.
Thus the road map President Bush is trying--and succeeding--to shove down Israel's throat was doomed to failure from the start. It is past time for President Bush to abandon such misguided moral relativism and choose sides: he is either with Israel or with the terrorists.
Writes David Holcberg of the Ayn Rand Institute: