Believe It or Not

All kinds of claims are levied against candidates during the course of a campaign for president of America, but it'll be a frosty Friday before New Yorkers see one as ridiculous at that raised against Mayor Giuliani by Time magazine. A story by Amanda Ripley reports that "an analysis of 80 of Giuliani's major speeches from 1993 to 2001 shows that he mentioned the danger of terrorism only once." Well, backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Anyone who watched Mr. Giuliani through the period of his mayoralty remembers his vocal opposition of terrorism — so vocal, it was, that it was sometimes expressed at his own expense.

The most famous example is his decision, in 1995, to expel the Palestinian Arab terrorist Yasser Arafat from a concert being played at Lincoln Center in connection with the jubilee of the United Nations. Mr. Giuliani's explanation of his thinking was clear and unambiguous. Mr. Giuliani referenced the PLO's role in the slaying of American Leon Klinghoffer, a passenger on the Achille Lauro cruiseship taken over by terrorists. Mr. Giuliani caught all kinds of flak from the democrats, including, incredibly, Mayors Dinkins and Koch. Mr. Giuliani never gave an inch, solidifying his reputation for having one of the qualities needed in a president — the ability to maintain a politically incorrect position.

After Israel was struck by a horrific spate of suicide bombings in March 1996, Mr. Giuliani traveled to the Jewish state. There he boarded the No. 18 bus, a route that had been struck twice by terrorists in the preceding weeks. He explained his reasoning for the trip to reporters as follows: "I want to show that terrorism can't succeed and that decent people stand up against terrorists." Soon after the arrest of two Brooklyn men implicated a plot to blow up subways in New York, in August 1997, Mr. Giuliani addressed Jewish leaders in the city. He spoke of his visit to Jerusalem the prior year and of the obligation democracies faced in confronting terrorists.

It was on Mr. Giuliani's watch that New York began hardening its high profile governmental locations downtown. No doubt this stemmed from Mr. Giuliani's experience as United States Attorney for the Southern district, where, Stuart Taylor reported in 1984, he opposed a judge's ruling against extraditing a member of the Irish Republican Army convicted in Great Britain of committing murder on the grounds that it was political. Mr. Giuliani said the ruling "may come back to haunt us" in pursuing terrorists. In 1988, he attempted to close the PLO's mission to the United Nations under the 1987 Anti-Terrorism Act. He was way ahead of the other politicians — and the leading weekly newsmagazine.