A superb New York Sun Editorial:
Hardliners in the war on Islamic extremist terrorism have long called for it to be treated as a war rather than a law-enforcement issue. Yet by allowing, in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of an Axis regime to come to New York and stay on Park Avenue at the Intercontinental Hotel The Barclay, President Bush is signaling that he’s less than serious in his approach to a regime he marked, at the outset of his presidency, as evil. Those who recognize the Iranian threat are left with the law-enforcement option. Police Commissioner Kelly, District Attorney Morgenthau, or any enterprising federal prosecutor or G-Man has a perfect opportunity at hand to seize Mr. Ahmadinejad and to hold him as a material witness or even as a suspect. Years ago the Jewish Forward newspaper made a similar argument in respect of the Hafez al-Assad of Syria. It didn’t happen, of course, and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon grew worse until the murder of Rafik Harari and the new outbreak of war.
An ample American legal record already holds the Iranian government responsible for terrorist attacks by Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As our Josh Gerstein reported on April 3, dozens of rulings, many of them by a federal judge in Washington, Royce Lamberth, have found Iran civilly liable for murders; courts have made verdicts against Iran totaling about $6 billion. A December 2003 fact sheet from the Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives lists at least 52 Americans murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists since 1993. Many of the victims are New Yorkers, and Iranian funding and training figured in many of the attacks, according to American and Israeli government and non-government reports on terrorist organizations.
Mr. Bush himself said earlier this month, “The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies have demonstrated their willingness to kill Americans.” The president said that Hezbollah, which Iran funds with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is “directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans abroad. It was Hezbollah that was behind the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans. And Saudi Hezbollah was behind the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans, an attack conducted by terrorists who we believe were working with Iranian officials.”
Read it all.