Truth from the mouths of terrorists

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On June 10, Israeli army helicopters fired seven rockets into the car of Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader in Gaza. Unfortunately, the Israelis missed him. After the first rocket Rantissi leaped out of the car, leaving his son to crash into a wall, killing two bystanders.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters shortly after the failed Israeli assassination attempt was announced that President Bush was "deeply troubled" by the attack. He shouldn't have been. The 57-year-old Dr. Rantissi was trained in the West as a pediatrician, but along the way he made a midlife career change. Today his speciality is murdering women and babies -- as long as they are Jews.

The president and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, freshly appointed as the administration's chief operations officer for implementing the Middle East "road map," would do well to listen to what Dr. Rantissi has to say about Israel, Palestinians and Jews. He and his Hamas brethren make no bones about their real beliefs.

From his hospital bed in Gaza, Dr. Rantissi told reporters Hamas would strike back yet again. "I am telling Sharon and all the Israeli murderers: You don't have any security unless you leave the country," he said. "There will be no single Jew in Palestine. We will fight them with all the power that we have."

Think that's just the ranting of a wounded man, understandably angry after someone has just tried to kill him? Think again. Dr. Rantissi told me the exact same thing when I interviewed him at length some six years ago in his Gaza office.

I was curious when I met him about the rising tide of suicide bombers, who suddenly burst onto the scene in 1994, shortly after Yasser Arafat set up his Palestinian Authority in Gaza under the Oslo Accords. I asked him what could possibly motivate young men to take their own lives, just to kill Jews. "They know that these bombings are the same as fasting and observing Ramadan," Dr. Rantissi told me. "They increase their blessings with God."

Dr. Rantissi's words might seem odd to Americans or Europeans, but they make perfect sense to Palestinians and other Muslim Arabs who have been fed the steady diet of anti-Semitic filth that state-sponsored preachers throughout the Middle East have been doling out to the faithful for the past two decades.

Fasting and observing Ramadan are two of the Five Pillars of Islam, which the Prophet Mohammed exhorted his followers to observe. In the hierarchy of traditional Islam, prayers performed during Ramadan are believed to have a greater intercessionary value, as do prayers uttered in one of the Two Holy Mosques in the Arabia Peninsula.

It is a testament to just how perverse the terrorists and their supporters have become to learn that murdering innocents has been elevated to this same level by Dr. Rantissi and by other senior Muslim clerics I interviewed over the past year for an upcoming book, "Preachers of Hate." And yet, that is precisely what Dr. Rantissi meant when he said that by carrying out a suicide attack, young Palestinians could hope to "increase their blessings with God."