President Bush has given his blessing to the attempt of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon's effort to destroy the Palestine Authority although the U.S. supported a UN resolution calling upon the Israelis to withdraw from the areas supposedly under the control of the Palestinians. .

Does President Bush know what he is doing? The U.S. is engaged in a war against fanatical Muslim terrorists while at the same time trying to engage the mainstream Muslim world as an ally in this war. Making the U.S. an ally of Israel in its effort to crush the Palestinian resistance can only make the Muslim world more skeptical and unfriendly than it already is.

Moreover, recent congressional initiatives by Republican Mitch McConnel and Senator Joe Biden condemning the Palestine Authority a "terrorist organization" and proclaiming "solidarity with Israel" can only be seen as stupid and ignorant blunders that can only serve to under- mine the need to keep America safe from its bona fide enemies.

These actions by Congress remind one of the observation made by former ambassador to the Sudan, Donald Begus in 1985:

"At the State Department we used to predict that if Israel's prime minister should announce that the world is flat, within 24 hours Congress would pass a resolution congratulating him on the discovery." (A CHANGING IMAGE, Richard H. Curtiss, p. 340).

Could it be that in congressional elections from 1978-2000 1,732 candidates for Congress received a grand total of $34,607,182 from pro-Israel political action committees?

In other words, Israel has the best Congress that money can buy and perhaps the presidency to boot.