MARINA DEL REY, CA--In their terrorist war against Israel, the Palestinian's most powerful weapon is one supplied by the rest of the world: moral sanction, said Robert Tracinski, a columnist for Creators Syndicate and a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. 

"When a brutish, primitive dictatorship engages in an all-out terrorist war motivated by racial hatred and religious intolerance--and receives the sympathy of the world and the de facto protection of our State Department, morality has been turned upside down and becomes a terrorist weapon," said Tracinski.

"Ten months ago Israel made the most generous peace concessions it has ever made," said Tracinski, "offering the Palestinians full statehood, half of Jerusalem, and international control of the Temple Mount. The Palestinians responded with a campaign of hatred and terrorism--but were not condemned. As a result, Israel is now weighing whether to invade the West Bank to stop the bloodshed."

"If Israel does invade, the only extraordinary thing about their action," noted Tracinski, "will be the vitriolic condemnation from the rest of the world--and the Bush administration--whose 'morality' condemns the victims of terrorism if they try to fight back. The only hope for peace is that the Israelis poised on the border of the West Bank have begun to realize that they must reject the perverse moral perspective of America and the rest of the world if they want to survive."

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Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004.

The Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization established in 1985, seeks to advance novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and its principal tenets: reason, rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism.