A byline for Hamas?

Memo to Al Qaeda's Ayman Zawahiri: Forget the mule pack; give your video cam a rest. Our nation's leading media outlets are making an offer you can't refuse: If you can keep it to 1,250 words, the next time you want to communicate directly to the American people, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and New York Times want your byline.

Inconceivable? Consider Hamas' summer hot streak. Not only has it driven Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas out of Gaza, threatened Israeli civilians and bombarded fellow Palestinians, but it has scored the ultimate media trifecta. First, the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously ran Op-Ed articles by Ahmed Yousef, a senior leader of Hamas who defended his group's bloody putsch in Gaza. Now, the Los Angeles Times has opened its Op-Ed page to Hamas political bureau deputy Mousa Abu Marzook for his insidious take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Why should any Palestinian 'recognize' the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinder-block, tin-roof United Nations hut?" Marzook asked in his article in The Times earlier this month.

Of course, he knows very well why Palestinians are in the position they're in. It's because of the refusal of the Arabs to accept the 1947 U.N. resolution for a two-state solution in the Holy Land. The architects who laid the foundation for the U.N. refugee huts are the Arabs themselves. And why is that misery still continuing in the Palestinian territories today? Because of the delusional aspirations of their Islamic fundamentalist leaders who will not accept the rights of the Jewish people to any homeland in the Middle East. Had the Arab states then, or Hamas today, chosen peace, no Palestinian would be living in refugee camps and there would be no suicide belts.

In reaction to a firestorm of protest, the New York Times' public editor defended his newspaper's publication of Yousef's piece by stating that "the point of the Op-Ed page is advocacy" and that "if you get only one side, that's not debate," a view we're sure some editors at the Los Angeles Times share.

But how to explain the radical makeover from terrorist pariah to sought-after guest commentators in our national newspapers of record? Perhaps the editors at The Times and their colleagues back East think they are performing a service by accepting Op-Ed articles that allow people like Abu Marzook to speak unencumbered to the American people. What better way to prove to these radicals that the pen is mightier than the sword?