This Week in History: ‘The Engineer’ is assassinated

From the Jerusalem Post, an analysis of the effect of killling of a terrorist responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent civilians in Israel and Gaza. (Why an analysis is necessary, I don't know.)

For instance,

"the assassination of Yehiyeh Ayash was a consequential event for the peace process, terrorism and Palestinian politics."

"When the traditional 40-day Muslim mourning period ended following the terrorist’s assassination, Hamas undertook a wave of vicious and especially deadly terror bombings in Israel. In the period between February 25 and March 4 of that year, four bombings rocked Israel, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. Perhaps as a result, Ayash’s family home in the West Bank town of Rafat was demolished by the IDF using explosives, the first demolition since the beginning of the peace process several years earlier."

Direct linkage? I don't think so. A convenient "excuse" to the mind of Hamas murderers? Most likely.


Yehiyeh Ayash was a murderer. In the same way that civilized society through history has resorted to the removal of murderers from society, so Israel acted towards him.

Hamas would have killed Jews regardless of Ayash's death. And what if, just perhaps, his death discouraged some young Palestinian from following in Ayash's footsteps.

Read the full column, This Week in History: ‘The Engineer’ is assassinated.


What do you think?

Jeff Jacoby - "There is no ‘good’ communist "

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby comments on the acceptability of Communism to a liberal world.

IF JOSÉ Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist. And not just a nominal communist, as his obituaries pointed out, but an “unabashed’’ (Washington Post), “unflinching’’ (AP), “unfaltering’’ (New York Times) true believer.

Without a hint of irony, AP’s obituary quoted a comment Saramago made in 1998: “People used to say about me, ‘He’s good but he’s a communist.’ Now they say, ‘He’s a communist but he’s good.’ ’’

But the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past.

Communist regimes have murdered, according to Jacoby, 100 million men, women and children. And Communism is still a horror to those who live under it.

Anyone who imagines that the horrors of communist rule is a thing of the past ought to spend a few minutes with, say, the State Department’s latest human rights report on North Korea.

Jacoby's position, and it should be ours, is that there is no such thing as a good Communist. Read the full column - There is no ‘good’ communist