Kristof's Own Legacy

Nicholas Kristof has fetched up with a classic of a column for students of what is called the New York Times double standard. In a column offering President Bush "10 suggestions for what you can do in 2007 to try to rescue your legacy," number three on Mr. Kristof's list was "confront the genocide in Darfur."

"President Bill Clinton has said that the biggest regret of his administration is not responding to the Rwandan genocide, and someday you — and your biographers — will rue your lame response to Darfur," writes Mr. Kristof, who goes on to suggest "inviting the leaders of Britain, France, China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to travel with you to Darfur and Chad to see first-hand the women who have been mutilated and raped, the men whose eyes have been gouged out." He also suggests "a no-fly zone" and "an international force."

We're all for it, incidentally. We don't care whether it's an international force, an American force, a French force, a United Nations force, or a freelance band of mercenaries. The first unit that gets on the ground in the region around Darfur and starts protecting the people there from a murderous Muslim onslaught will be doing humanity a great favor. A rescue can't come too soon, in our view.

But what a contrast is Mr. Kristof's suggestion with number seven on his list, in which he urges Mr. Bush to "put aside those thoughts of a military strike on Iranian nuclear sites, and make it clear to Israel that we oppose it conducting such an attack. A strike would set back Iran's nuclear programs by only five years or so, but it would consolidate hard-line rule there for at least 25 years."

So let's see if we have this straight: Genocide in Rwanda and Darfur is lamentable and should be met with a military response, but Israel and America should not act to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon that it intends to use to commit genocide against the Jews of Israel. That's the classic New York Times double standard.

It is dressed in the flimsy guise of Mr. Kristof's claim that his concern is for the well-being of the people of Iran. The fact is that an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel would almost certainly —and should certainly — be met with an Israeli second strike that would inflict immense casualties on Iran. That is a prospect that Iranian leader Hashemi Rafsanjani, as quoted by the New Republic, finds "not irrational to contemplate." Such is the suicide-bomber mentality.

How is it that journalistic antennae so attuned to genocide in Africa can be so callous to the threats of genocide against the Jews of Israel? Particularly when the current Iranian regime is running around denying the Holocaust in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in Europe. It's not as if Iran's rulers and their allies have been concealing their intentions.

On the contrary, President Ahmadinejad, as recently as August 2, told the Jews, via the Iranian news channel IRINN translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, "They should know that they are nearing the last days of their lives." The leader of Iran's proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah, has stated that if the Jews "all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide," and said, "it is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth."

We wouldn't mention all this if we had scorn for Mr. Kristof. On the contrary, he's as smart as a person can get, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes (one in foreign corresponding and another in commentary), and a wonderful person to boot. Maybe it's just something in the air on West 43rd Street. Sami al-Arian, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to aid the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was defended by Mr. Kristof in his column as an innocent professor. When al-Arian pleaded, he specifically stated that he was pleading not because he was forced to but because he was, in fact, guilty.

Somehow Mr. Kristof has yet to level with his readers about al-Arian's belated admission. Maybe if the murderers al-Arian had been aiding had killed Africans instead of Jews, the star columnist of the Times would have found a way to write about the terrorist-aiding professor's guilt. In any event, after Mr. Kristof gets done helping with Mr. Bush's legacy, he's still going to have to attend to his own.