He was responsible for blowing up babies in pizza parlors. Yet Jacques Chirac did everything possible to save his life and honor him. He had babies shot in their homes and schools, sometimes while their mothers watched. Yet Jimmy Carter welcomed him into his home in Plains, while Rosalind actually served him a nice dinner.



Much of Europe and Scandinavia called him "a great and courageous leader," yet he orphaned the babies of 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. He murdered a disabled, elderly American tourist, the wheelchair-confined grandfather of the Klinghoffer babies, "heroically" tossing grandpa off a cruise ship at sea. Yet President Bush said, "May God rest his soul," upon hearing initial false reports of his death.



To the Arab and Muslim world, his legacy was teaching their babies how to blow up and murder innocent non-Muslims. Yet he somehow attained heroic status.



And there you have the upside down world in which we live today. Under present conditions, a Palestinian state would undoubtedly send the horrible message that there are positive consequences to terrorism.



It would be virtually impossible for Ariel Sharon, upon hearing the good news of Osama bin Laden's demise, to react with, "May God rest his soul." The correct Jewish response would be, "How wonderful. Evil is dead. Now let's have a holiday or at the very least a party!"



Well, Yasser Arafat is finally dead. "Hooray; the wicked witch is dead!" That is actually an appropriate Jewish reaction from which the free world can learn a valuable lesson. There should be no compassion for evil, whether it is Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Timothy McVeigh, Pol Pot or Adolph Hitler himself. "Purposely" hurting innocent people changes the status of a human being into sub-human monster.



So where do we go from here? Do the Palestinians deserve, yes deserve, a state? The simple answer is, "No, but...." After 2000 years, the world agreed to divide ancient Israel, which belonged to the Jews, into two parts; giving half the land to Arabs and the other half to Jews. Naturally, Arabs were permitted to continue living in the Jewish part and reap their rewards. However, Jews were forbidden to live in the Arab portion, keeping Arab/Muslim land Judenrein. Somehow, the entire free world has agreed with this bizarre position.



Egyptian-born Abu Amar, a.k.a. Arafat, was able to change his birth certificate without forgery by simply repeating the big lie. This Master Manipulator understood that the best way to keep his message on CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS was to maintain refugee status for his people and change the word occupation from a noun to a verb. The wandering Jew has morphed into the wandering Palestinian, a people without a homeland.



Would it be possible to keep generations of people in refugee camps, where no one was guarding them or forcing them to live in squalor? Now that is a trick worth studying - bright people remain destitute and willing to kill themselves, while their leader steals infrastructure funds to set up his wife in a Parisian hotel on $500,000 per week. And they somehow love him for it. This is not a fairy tale. The wicked witch was a real live person with a keffiya.



Now that the ultimate terrorist is dead, where do we go from here? Is peace possible in 2004-5? The truthful answer is, "No," unless one has the bizarre belief that it is indeed possible to negotiate with and trust evil. Of course, many immoral, foolish leaders have bought into the Neville Chamberlain approach. Such moral luminaries (sic) as Chirac, Jack Straw, Kofi Annan and Gerhard Schroeder have fallen into the foolish leftist trap called "trusting humanity", into which even Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross once mistakenly stepped.



Unless we begin with the premise that people need to earn or deserve something before they are given it, society will fail. The Jewish people yearned for a return to their homeland for 2,000 years. Therefore, a valid argument can be made that the Palestinians still have 1,950 years to approach a level of quid pro quo. Why did this simple fact not even enter into the Oslo process or the Camp David talks? Because we live in a world of immediate gratification, which usually leads to disaster.



It is necessary and better for a group to wait and learn values before they are permitted to have a state. There are very wise Biblical precedents for this concept. 3,350 years ago, God made an incredible effort to "take the Jews out of Egypt," and bring them into their land of Israel. He used plagues to free them and even split a giant sea to permit escape.



After all those amazing miracles, the Master of the Universe made those same Jews wander in the desert for 40 years before bringing them into the Promised Land. Herein lies the answer to the present Israeli-Palestinian issue. God understood the important concept that the children of Israel were simply not ready for their own state, because they were filled with poisonous Egyptian values and a death culture.



That generation had to die out and a new generation had to be raised, and taught different values and behavior. Unless this same change is applied to the Arab Palestinians, a decent, democratic state is not possible. As the Jews did 3,300 years ago, Arabs must change their thinking, their ideologies, their methods of raising their children and their behavior. The Arab Palestinians must go through their own "Wilderness Program", in the same way that Jewish "Palestinians" underwent their transformation.



The simple answer to this lingering problem, which politicians have not been able to figure out, is that the West Bank and Gaza should become commonwealths of Israel for at least a generation. If the Palestinians take advantage of learning science, technology, business, nation-building, values and democracy from Jews, while teaching their children the important Biblical concept of "love your neighbor," a separate state can eventually go off on its own. Just like an IPO spinoff, only then will their shares truly be worth something.