I haven�t been visiting Salon much lately since most of their articles became �premium content,� and they loaded their site down with so many ads and popunders and web bugs that it�s just basically a pain in the neck. But Norah Vincent�s piece today is too good to miss, and it�s one of the rare free articles: It’s not just Hamas.

The lie is this: Palestinians (and, post-Sept. 11, much of the Arab world) hold the rest of the world to a moral standard they themselves neither uphold nor share. They cry for justice, and yet theirs is a culture in which justice is utterly partial (in favor of Muslims, and against the infidel) and administered by the sword alone. They pretend to want peace, though by the rules of jihad, conquest, not compromise, ends conflicts. They want freedom, and yet freedom (especially religious freedom) is precisely what the Arab world so manifestly lacks, and rejects. They want life, and yet they devalue human life at every turn, both the enemy’s (making no distinction between civilians and combatants) and their own (proudly raising their youngest children to be suicide bombers).

If it weren’t for our (and Israel’s) cultural commitment to tolerance and the rule of civic law, to the use of violence only in self-defense and to reaching diplomatic solutions, the Palestinian people would have no cause at all. They would not exist. If treated according to their own barbaric rules, with the same visceral bigotry, the Palestinians would have been exterminated long ago, and all their Jewish executioners enshrined as martyrs. But instead, we have heard them, honored their complaints and done everything — short of absconding — to deal justly with them. But they answer only with more bombs, all the while declaiming our brutality. They want from us what they refuse to give. They act according to one code and hold us to another, never seeing the incompatibility of the two.