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DENNIS PRAGER

10/12/90

Los Angeles Times

(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1990 All Rights Reserved)

This past week thousands of Palestinian Arabs who fervently want Israel extinguished rained stones on Jews worshiping at the Western Wall. Israeli police responded with tear gas, with rubber bullets, and finally with live ammunition, and 19 Palestinians died.

Then the U.N. Security Council condemned Israel for the "excessive" response. The only effect on Israel will be to further embitter its peace movement, for the condemnation gives new meaning to the word hypocrisy.

In that council sit nations every one of which condemned Israel for destroying the Iraqi nuclear weapons plant in 1982. In that council sit, among others, the Chinese butchers of Tian An Men Square, the totalitarian state of Cuba, and the two greatest suppliers of weapons to Iraq-France and the Soviet Union. And the condemnation was led by an American Administration that killed 50 to 100 times more civilians solely in order to remove a leader in Panama whom we loathed-not in order to repel a mob of thousands stoning people at prayer.

But it is not these nations' hypocrisy alone that is most dangerous; it is their lack of perspective.