13-Jun-07: What hath that nation wrought?!

Any political dispute, and especially one that's been conducted between nations and religious blocs for generations, is capable of being interpreted this way or that way. There's room, in other words, to see some justice and perhaps some wrong on both sides. You can't be treated as a lunatic if you choose one or the other viewpoints because there's plenty of ground to support whatever side you take.

But that's not true when it comes to the terrorists. Absolutely not true. What the terrorists have done to their own communities is appalling, sickening, satanic. It has to stop, and it must be stopped. This is true everywhere, at all times, and without pre-conditions. Civilized society depends on understanding this.

Now let's turn to what we are learning, day after day, after Palestinian Arab terror and the remarkable things their people have done to themselves, to their society and especially to their children.

Official Israeli government channels released a report this afternoon about a terrorist massacre that didn't happen because it was discovered in time. The details are beyond belief - so bestial, so barbaric, so primitive - they're sufficient grounds for treating Palestinian Arab society as being in a class of its own, outside the community of normal human society.

On 20th May 2007, three weeks ago, two Palestinian Arab women presented themselves at the Erez Crossing in the Gaza Strip, intending to enter Israel for medical treatment. Israel admits hundreds of such Arabs every day on those grounds. Has done so for decades.

Acting on detailed and accurate intelligence, Israeli security personnel arrested them. The screams and shouts of protest at the crossing can be imagined without too much effort. The scene, had it been filmed by foreign news crews, would undoubtedly have prompted sneering news reports and angry demonstrations (and might still) in many of the world's fashionable boulevards and town squares.

So here's what followed. Both women now admit to being members of Islamic Jihad, and say they were on their way to do a double-bombing in some crowded place or other - a restaurant, a wedding hall, any place where large numbers of Israelis gather - in Tel Aviv and Netanya. No specific location, just as long as plenty of Jews are there. The bombs were to be their own bodies.

Here's what we know about the two intended murderers.

Fatma Yunes Hassan Zak is 39, lives in Gaza, a mother of eight children, pregnant with her ninth. She's an experienced handler of Islamic Jihad terrorists and coordinator of Islamic Jihad women who volunteer to be suicide bombers. She also works as a manager in Islamic Jihad's "employment" office.

Her 19-year-old son, also an Islamic Jihad terrorist, was in on the conspiracy.

So was her niece, Ruda Ibrahim Yunes Haviv, 30, a resident of Gaza. She's the mother of four children. The two women were a team, and were planning to die a violent and messy death. Not going to happen now, thank heavens.

Keep these little details in mind the next time your local lunatic fringe takes to the streets demanding that the Israeli "occupying" power releases "innocent" Pal-Arab women and children. And try to contemplate what it must be like to live in the neighbourhood, or be the children, of this sort of mother from hell.