Endless war against terrorism

The hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his followers recently celebrated the murder of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin by a Israeli helicopter gunship. Sharon personally instructed and monitored the assassination operation, and then congratulated his troops for successfully carrying out their duty (The Jakarta Post, March 23).

Amid worldwide condemnation, these hard-line leaders of the Israeli community even hinted that Yasser Arafat, the president of Palestine and also the founder of the Al Fatah faction, could be assassinated as well.

The war against terrorism that was launched by U.S. President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks seems to be heading nowhere. The recent railway bombings in Spain that killed 200 people show that terrorism has spread even wider in scale and size.

The key to the problem lies in the Arab world undertaking a concerted effort -- which might be possible as Iraq is no longer under Saddam Hussein's rule -- to halt or freeze, for a time, their diplomatic relations with the Israeli (for countries like Egypt, Jordan and Oman) and U.S. governments.

They should turn instead to the European Union, East and Southeast Asia, who have been sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians.

The core of worldwide terrorism lies in this region, as human injustices also start in this part of the world. Had these two communities, the Arabs and Jews, learned the example set by the late president Anwar Sadat of Egypt and the late prime minister Menachem Begin of Israel, who acknowledged that they were cousins, both from Ibrahim or Abraham, and who in 1978 reached a deal in which Israel returned Sinai (occupied by Israel during the 1967 war) to Egypt, the disputes in the Middle East would have been settled by now.

M. RUSDI Jakarta