01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Comfy Western opinion leaders and officials of nations not confronting daily terrorism lecture Israel about its assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin. They rarely note that Sheikh Yassin has been instrumental in murdering almost 400 Israeli civilians and wounding thousands more in the past several years. He was the Palestinians' Osama bin Laden.

His expressed mission was to destroy Israel and replace it with a fascist Islamic state -- a paradise for those who enjoy stoning people for adultery, where women are discouraged from reading or writing, where there are few political or social liberties and where the media are largely a propaganda machine, rife with exhortations to kill the Jews. Welcome to the Dark Ages.

Sheikh Yassin's weapons often included using troubled young people as suicide bombers as he himself hid behind an obscene curtain of piety.

The gaseous rhetoric of U.N. and other officials urging restraint -- but only by the Israelis -- can be summarized thus: Israel must not try to defend itself from those who wish to destroy it.

Of course, no other country could tolerate this submission to mass murder. (The United States, we note, has been trying to kill Osama bin Laden for years.) But it's nice and easy to demand that Israel do so.

The warning will be that Israel's action will spur more mayhem. Well, that's what Israelis get whatever they do. When one side's aim is the destruction of an entire state, and the other side has the effrontery to try to defend itself, mayhem is inevitable, but appeasement makes matters worse.

A few years ago, Israel offered PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat 98 percent the land he sought. Not enough. No offer except the disappearance of Israel could be sincerely entertained. Indeed, such offers merely fuel more demands, and more violence in an attempt to get them satisfied.

Israel has spent years trying to achieve a peaceful compromise through negotiation of the Mideast crisis. The result: The region is more of a tinderbox than ever.

For now, we can only hope that the fact that Yassin was Hamas's unifying "spiritual" leader might mean that this bloody organization might be less effective for a while, as it splits into warring groups led by various power-hungry chieftains.

With or without the assassination, the relentless attacks on Israel will continue. But with at least the momentary disruption of a command that favors sending brainwashed teenagers to do its killing, perhaps there will be some brief relief.