Almost as absurd is the theory introduced by British security officials, with some recent support from the White House, that the bombs weren’t going to go off in America at all. Instead, they were going to blow up the planes carrying them in mid-air. This narrative is, it seems, mostly substantiated by the fact that a UPS cargo plane crashed in Dubai two months ago—even as there is no evidence that this crash was an act of terror.

More to the point, the mid-air explosion thesis needs to explain why the two bombs had already been transported by two air-carriers and yet failed to explode. “This was a potential attack on U.S. business,” explained one British official, “and the impact could have been huge. Damaging the West’s economy is a key objective of al-Qaida.” But it is not clear how these attacks would have damaged the economy of the West. The practical effect would have been to close down express mail services, like FedEx and UPS, out of Yemen. A 20-minute delay on the New York subway any given Monday morning is apt to affect our trillion-dollar economy more than two cargo planes from Yemen with no passengers blowing up in mid-air. Either al-Qaida has entered the spectacularly pointless and silly phase of its war against the West, or the latest narrative doesn’t wash.

What we do know is that the bombs were addressed to American synagogues—not churches or mosques (or financial institutions)—and that our national security apparatus is visibly uncomfortable dealing with this established fact. Neither the president, nor his spokesman, nor the White House’s counterterrorism czar made much of the notion that this act of terror had specifically targeted the Jewish community. No one denounced the attempted murder of American citizens based on their faith. No one said that foreign maniacs who target Jews are part of a global sickness.

It is unpleasant to have to make the comparison, but instructive nonetheless: Had a mosque been targeted, or had American Muslims been marked for death, we can be sure that the president, rightly, would have denounced not only the act but the idea that it had singled out a particular section of the American people.

As I argued right after the prospective attack was first announced, we have accustomed ourselves to acts of terror against Jews by rationalizing them. After all, since Israel “occupies” Muslim lands in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Shebaa Farms—and since many people see all of pre-1967 Israel itself as occupied land—it’s not surprising if Jews around the world are going to have their blood spilled because of boundary disputes in the Holy Land.

But that’s not why President Barack Obama and his Cabinet are loath to point out that this thwarted operation constitutes a hate crime. Americans believe that the worst thing you can be accused of is racism, our “original sin,” as the former senator from Illinois once phrased it before he was elected the 44th president of the United States. We assume that other people must feel exactly the same way, even if it is clear they do not, as the Arabs do not. The common word in Arabic for a dark-skinned black person is abed, slave. In Egypt, the butt of almost every joke are the Saidis, those reputedly shiftless, not-too-bright, and dark-skinned inhabitants of Upper Egypt.

The Arabs are not particularly embarrassed by their racist feelings about Jews. Rather than detail the anti-Semitic offerings available all day and night on Arab TV, where wild fantasies about Jews drinking blood and stealing the organs of gentiles occupy the same place that hardcore pornography does on your average hotel pay-per-view menu, suffice it to say that the father of the UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayid, who was thanked on Sunday by White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan for his help in foiling the Yemen package bomb attack, gave his name and financial support to a think tank in Abu Dhabi notorious for its hatred of Jews. The Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow Up hosted Holocaust deniers, promoters of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other assorted Arab and Western anti-Semitic intellectuals before it closed in 2003.

The Arabs recognize that we’re very sensitive about racism and anti-Semitism, which is why they know their calling Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman a racist resonates with us—even as the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Washington openly calls for the transfer of all Jews from any future Palestinian state. We are the ones who quiver at the accusation of racism—not them. We would not dream of calling the Arabs anti-Semitic or racist because we fear that we have subjected them to our Western colonial racism, and we feel guilty about it. Indeed, many in the West have even gone so far as to ignore the evidence of 1,300 years of Muslim anti-Jewish polemics to claim that anti-Semitism is a Western import. To call the Arabs anti-Semitic would be shaming a people we have already hurt too much.

All of our noble sentiments toward the Muslim world would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that our political correctness has created a context where it’s OK to dehumanize, terrorize, and murder Jews.

However, I have to say that when reading the comments to my pieces, I am routinely surprised that some readers appear to believe anti-Semitism is simply about the Jews. That is, that there are some in the Jewish community who would seem to prefer it if someone with a name like Lee Smith would stop stirring the pot and just let it alone. But as I said, anti-Semitism is not just about Jews; after all, it’s not a Jewish idea, any more than the Holocaust was. I like Jews as much as I like the next man on the bus. But I’m not particularly interested in the internal politics of the Jewish community. I am interested in anti-Semitism not just because it sickens me, but because it poisons American society as a whole, affecting both Jews and non-Jews.

If racism is our original sin, then anti-Semitism is the essential test of our character. Our current failure to recognize it and denounce it proves that our enemies have taken our measure. They know who we are. After killing 270 people, many of them Americans, over the skies of Lockerbie in 1988, Abdul Basset Ali al-Megrahi walked out of a Scottish prison last year to pave the way for British oil deals. It is not clear why Megrahi’s release caused shock, disappointment, and anger among American officials who demand the Israelis release Arab prisoners with Jewish blood on their hands as a show of “good faith.”

In Washington, the world’s superpower looks on in detached wonderment as we hazard educated guesses as to whether or not the Israelis are really going to attack the nuclear facilities of a regime that has called for another Holocaust. In our universities, professors explain away the Islamic Republic’s threats to destroy the Jewish state by claiming the translations from Farsi are flawed.

It’s not just about the Jews. As the most recent Wikileaks documents show, the George W. Bush Administration deliberately covered up the extent of the Iranian war against the United States in Iraq so as to save itself the trouble of responding to the killing of American soldiers by a foreign government. There was no way the American military was going to open up a third front in the war on terror, reasoning that that only made American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan more vulnerable—as well as American civilians at home whose government will not name and pursue their enemies. This is an old habit now of U.S. policymakers, and it knows no party. Democrats and Republicans alike play the same sick game. The Islamic Republic released the American hostages it had taken under the Jimmy Carter Administration to the newly elected Ronald Reagan—who blinked when Iran and Syria, via Hezbollah, killed diplomats and Marines in Beirut.

Rather than making our enemies pay, we’ve let them off time and again over the last 40 years, thus ushering in the golden age of international terrorism, which is helping to capsize the short-lived Pax Americana. Our leaders will not speak frankly to the people who elected them because they fear the American electorate has no stomach for it. War in the Persian Gulf that sends gas to $10 a gallon combined with terror attacks at home would ravage the American economy and our national psyche. So we are silent. And in our silence, monsters breed.

It is a moment when Obama might want to read a short opinion handed down in 1992 by the Supreme Court in a case called United States v. Alvarez-Machain. It involves a citizen of Mexico, Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was indicted for participating in the kidnapping and murder of a special agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Enrique Camarena Salazar, and a pilot working with him. Alvarez, a medical doctor, allegedly aided in that crime by, as former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist put it, “prolonging agent Camarena’s life so that others could further torture and interrogate him.”

On April 2, 1990, Alvarez was, Rehnquist wrote, “forcibly kidnapped from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, to be flown by private plane to El Paso, Texas, where he was arrested by DEA officials.” A United States district court, Rehnquist noted, “concluded that DEA agents were responsible for respondent’s abduction, although they were not personally involved in it.” Alvarez then tried to dismiss the indictment, claiming, as Rehnquist characterized it, “that his abduction constituted outrageous governmental conduct.”

That argument was rejected by the district court, which nevertheless reckoned that his abduction violated America’s extradition treaty with Mexico. It ordered that Alvarez be sent back to Mexico. The riders of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit turned out to be of a similarly delicate mind. They may have been moved by letters of protest from the Mexican government to the American government. But when the matter got to the Supreme Court, it turned out that the justices were made of sterner stuff.

One of the cases Rehnquist cited was United States v. Rauscher, in which the court prohibited the prosecution of a defendant brought to America from England for a crime not covered in the extradition treaty between the two countries. It decided that Rauscher could be tried only for one of the offenses described in the treaty. It seems that once an extradition treaty is followed, the government’s hands are bound by the terms of the treaty.

But Rehnquist then cited another case, Ker v. Illinois, involving a thief named Frederick Ker, who had been convicted in an Illinois court for larceny but was hiding out in Peru. Ker’s “presence before the court,” as Rehnquist so delicately put it, “was procured by means of forcible abduction from Peru.” Precisely because Ker wasn’t brought back via an extradition process, the court decided, Ker’s claims to rights under extradition law could be, and were, rejected.

The court later cited “Ker” in upholding the right of Michigan to try a man named Shirley Collins, whom it had allegedly seized, “blackjacked,” and brought back to the Wolverine state. “This Court,” wrote Justice Hugo Black, “has never departed from the rule announced in [“Ker”] that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court’s jurisdiction by reason of a ‘forcible abduction.’”

Rehnquist and most of his colleagues took such a view in the Mexican case. They rejected claims that the mere existence of an extradition treaty ruled out the use of other means than extradition to bring a fugitive to justice here. Rehnquist went through a scholarly explication. He noted that Alvarez and others who filed briefs in his case “may be correct that respondent’s abduction was ‘shocking,’” as it was put in oral arguments. But he concluded that the fact of Alvarez’s “forcible abduction does not therefore prohibit his trial in a court in the United States for violations of the criminal laws of the United States.”

Charges against Alvarez here were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence, and he was sent home. But his case suggests that if Obama can, without breaking other Americans laws, find a way to use covert means to bring al-Megrahi to America and to put him on trial here, the Supreme Court itself is unlikely to be over-punctilious about the fact that a formal extradition process wasn’t used. So it becomes a test of how serious the president, his secretary of state, and the director of the FBI were when they expressed their outrage over Scotland’s decision to let the killer go home, ostensibly on “humanitarian” grounds.

If Obama were to act, no doubt the Libyans would be fit to be tied, as would, for that matter, the British and the Scots. But the British and the Scots have been thoroughly discredited in this case, as has the United Nations. So much so that bringing al-Megrahi to a prison here to serve out the remainder of his term would support the cause of justice—and serve notice on the world that America will not be trifled with by foreign courts in cases in which acts of war and murder have been committed against our citizens and our carriers.

And imagine what wonders such an action would do for Obama’s standing in the polls. One of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, discovered this when he held the air traffic controllers to account. They are not comparable to al-Megrahi by any means, but Reagan signaled his view that the law is the law, and it needs to be enforced and to be seen as being enforced. Obama is apparently prepared to take action even against our own intelligence agents whom he deems to have broken the law during interrogations. What would stop him from using all the precedent the Supreme Court has provided him in pursuing a terrorist who killed 270 persons in one of the most infamous crimes in history?

But here’s the interesting part: Some suspect that Scotland has had the wrong man all along. One theory, described in 1989 by David Tal of Israel’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, holds that Iran, not Libya, was actually behind the attack, that it was revenge for the accidental downing of an Iranian passenger plane by the USS Vincennes over the Straits of Hormuz in 1988. According to Tal, the attack itself was carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a terrorist cell based in Damascus. Tal wrote that evidence was found on Popular Front agents caught in West Germany just months before the bombing, including bombs designed like the one that took out the Pan Am plane, and flight timetables. In 1997, Abolghassem Mesbahi, an Iranian dissident, told German officials that Iran was indeed behind Lockerbie—a claim Iran denied.

Scotland Releases Lockerbie Bomber [AP/JPost]