For years, the Islamic fanatics and their allies have blocked any attempt by the United Nations General Assembly to even define the word “terrorism”.  In the words of Lebanese Islamist sheikh Omar Bakri, “there are two types of terrorism: Blessed and deplorable, the violence the mujahideen use for defense and retaliation is meant to protect lives and defend honor. Their terrorism is blessed.” (MEMRI, September 12, 2008)

In the pathological parallel universe that Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers occupy, any murders of innocent civilians which Islamic terrorists commit - 9/11 included - are part of a just war of liberation to defend Allah against Zionist and American imperialism.  Any actions by Israel and the West to repel, go after and kill these murderers are condemned by the Islamic fanatics as state terrorism.   And they simply do not say whether the many instances of Muslim-on-Muslim killings - the genocide of black Muslims by Arab Muslims in Sudan or the Shiite-Sunni massacres, for example - constitute ‘blessed’ or ‘deplorable’ terrorism.   

Thus, it should be no surprise that when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon decided recently to convene a modest one day symposium at the UN headquarters in New York to recognize the victims of terrorism, he came under a barrage of criticism from Arab diplomats and reporters for a ’biased’ selection of participants discussing a subject that the UN had not defined.   Ingrid Betancourt, who was recently released from six years in captivity in Colombia, and Ashraf Al-Khaled, whose wedding in Amman, Jordan was marred by terrorist bombings in November 2005, were among the participants.   So was the father of an Israeli girl who was killed in a 2001 suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

In responding to Arab complaints that no Palestinian victims of Israeli ‘state terrorism’ were included, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Carmon, correctly responded that “the United Nations could not find even one Palestinian terror victim because there is no such thing. While there are Palestinian victims of the dispute, the only victims of terrorism on that side are those hurt by Arab-on-Arab terrorism."

Periodically, the Palestinian terrorists who blow themselves up to kill as many innocent victims as possible or who are killed while waging their campaign of terror against Israel are glorified in UN documents, distributed to the Secretary General and the president of the Security Council by the UN's Palestinian representative.  Their names are included in a list of ‘martyrs’.  The Islamists believe that the families of these ‘martyrs’ deserved a place in the UN’s terrorist victim symposium more than the father of the Israeli girl whom such ‘martyrs’ killed in cold blood.  They believe that Muslims suffered the most from terrorism and are the real victims – turning a blind eye to their own complicity in the intercine struggle within the Muslim world and in the bombings that destroyed Muslim and non-Muslim lives alike.  

Let’s look at one example of a Palestinian ‘martyr’ whose murder of innocent Israeli civilians made him an Islamic hero.  His name was Nidal Ali Latif Abu Sa'ade, who was killed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in January, 2006 after an exchange of fire erupted as the IDF was trying to arrest him and a fellow terrorist.  Abu Sa'ade was in charge of dispatching suicide bombers to carry out attacks inside Israel.  Note that much like Osama bin Laden this terrorist was too cowardly to blow himself up in the cause of Allah.  He just directed others to do the dirty work until he was finally dispatched to the jihadist ‘paradise’, courtesy of the IDF.

Abu Sa'ade was directly involved in all of the suicide bombing attacks within Israel during the prior year carried out by the Islamic Jihad infrastructure that existed in the northern West Bank at the time, including:

• The suicide bombing at the "Stage" club in Tel Aviv in February

2005, in which five Israeli civilians were murdered.

• The suicide bombing at the "Sharon" mall in Netanyah in July 2005,

in which five Israeli civilians were murdered.

• The suicide bombing at the Hadera market in October 2005, in which

six Israeli civilians were murdered.

• The suicide bombing at the "Sharon" mall in Netanyah in December

2005, in which five Israeli civilians were murdered.

Martyrs of the Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu faiths are willing to suffer alone, go to prison alone and sacrifice their own lives alone rather than submit to tyrannical rule that would force them to renounce the core tenets of their religious beliefs.  They have not made a habit of deliberately murdering non-Jews, non-Christians, non-Buddhists or non-Hindus and calling such murders the acts of martyrdom.

Islamic ‘martyrs’, on the other hand, turn themselves into human bombs to kill as many non-believers as possible.  They serve the cause of imposing the tyranny of Islamic law on everyone else.

In praising martyrdom operations and stating that Islam will conquer the world, Iranian President  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, "Is There Art that Is More Beautiful, More Divine, and More Eternal than the Art of Martyrdom?"  He was only echoing the religious rationalizations of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei for the deliberate taking of Israeli civilian lives by Palestinian suicide bombers.

Saudi Arabia's Minister for Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Saleh Al al-Sheikh, has also condoned suicide bombing.  He said that “suicide bombings are permitted” in Islamic law and that the suicide bombers “are considered to have died a martyr's death."

Fifteen of the nineteen terrorists responsible for the attacks of September 11^th were from Saudi Arabia and were brainwashed by the Saudi Arabian fundamentalist creed of Wahhabism. These murderers who killed 3000 innocent civilians along with themselves were honored as ‘martyrs’ all across the Islamic world.   Apparently, Allah commanded them to wage jihad against Islam’s enemies even though the United States was not at war with any Muslim nation at the time and had saved Balkan Muslims from Serbian nationalists during the prior decade.  Perhaps they were inspired by this pathological verse in the Koran:

“Prepare against the infidels all the weapons you can of power to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies, and other enemies whom you do not know. Whatever you spend in Allah’s cause will be repaid to you, and no wrong will be done to you.” 8:60

There can never be reconciliation with a fanatical ideology that considers the deliberate killing of innocent men, women and children a ‘blessed’ divine act.  This ideology holds that Allah’s Islamic law must stand above human law and that Islamic law commands violent jihad against all unbelievers until they submit to Islam.  As long as proponents of this insanity manage to control the majority of votes in the UN General Assembly, no agreement on a meaningful definition of terrorism, or global consensus on how to combat this scourge, will be possible.  We will hear many platitudes about protecting the innocent against violence but no ‘infidels’ will ever be considered among the innocent and no Islamic suicide bombers will ever be considered among the ‘deplorable’ terrorists.

More UN resources and time are devoted to the advocacy of the Palestinian cause than to any other issue.  The UN Division for Palestinian Rights, for example, legitimizes Palestinian terrorists as resistance fighters and supports Hamas, whose charter calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.  It also uses UN funds to organize an annual "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People," mourning UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, which called for the division of the Palestinian Mandate into a Jewish and an Arab state. And more UN funded vitriol is aimed at Israel than at any other member state.

Between the UN Human Rights Council, the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and the upcoming anti-Semitic Durban II conference, one would think that the Palestinians’ thirst for victim status in the eyes of the world would be fully satiated.

However, it is never enough for the hate mongers who demand special privileges to use the UN for their own selfish purposes and who deny the humanity of anyone whom they consider the enemy of Islam.  They even begrudge an Israeli father his invitation to a UN forum to express the human pain of losing his daughter as a result of a suicide bombing.