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Ehud Ya'ari: ï¿½Shabbat Shalom, Dirty Jewsï¿½

Only now, after the suicide bombing scare has spread with a vengeance to Muslim countries, has a relevant, focused and urgent debate about the phenomenon gotten under way in the region. Religious scholars, columnists and politicians are rushing to build a wall of words, a kind of theological separation barrier between bombers operating against Israel or the United States who are praised and encouraged, and the perpetrators of such acts at home, who are denounced.

In Saudi Arabia, the arrested religious instructors of the Al-Qaeda bombers who carried out the last wave of suicide attacks in the capital Riyadh have been interviewed on TV, so that they could publicly confess and express their regret. Sheikh Ali Khudeir and Sheikh Nasser al-Fahd, both important spiritual mentors of the young generation of Bin-Ladenists in the kingdom, were seated one after the other in the studio in order to declare that they had erred in teaching their disciples to consider other Muslims as "heretics," thereby sanctioning the spilling of their blood by suicide bombers.

Of course they both assured the viewers that they had not come under any pressure from their interrogators or jailers, but simply that with their imprisonment, they had suddenly come to realize a different truth. They vehemently condemned the suicide terror in Saudi Arabia, and warned against "chaos, bloodshed and civil war."

These interviews, conducted between interrogations, were the most obvious action the al-Saud family has taken to confront the outbreak of domestic terrorism. The Saudis are trying to follow in Egyptï¿½s footsteps, after Cairoï¿½s security services managed to mobilize hundreds of al-Gamaï¿½a al-Islamiyya prisoners to repent en masse, announce that they were turning their backs on violence and declare a total, unconditional cease-fire.

But even now, with the suicide bombers striking not far from princesï¿½ palaces in the capital, the Saudis are still not willing to go the whole way in issuing an unequivocal religious-legal prohibition of suicide bombings any place, against any target. For fear of provoking the more radical of their subjects, they are not prepared to take the risk of banning the phenomenon on moral grounds.

That makes it possible for Syria, for example, to express regret and even condemnation of the attacks in Istanbul, except for those directed against the synagogues. Damascus grieves over the Turkish blood that was spilled -- but only the Turkish blood. Turkeyï¿½s Jews, in this context, are considered "Zionist agents."

The attempt to avoid invalidating the war of the suicide bombers so long as it is limited to "appropriate" targets has not escaped the notice of the heads of Al-Qaeda. That explains the unprecedented announcement made by the organization following the attacks on British targets in Istanbul: It included an explicit apology for the wrongly chosen point of explosion outside the HSBC Bank, on grounds that it caused too many Turkish casualties. The declaration claiming responsibility in the name of the Abu-Hafs Al-Masri Brigades, named for one of Al-Qaedaï¿½s senior commanders who was killed in Afghanistan, also contained an apparent between-the-lines promise to be more cautious in future -- but to continue with this kind of operation.

The same is true of the veteran Turkish Islamicist terrorist organization, the IBDA/C, which stands in Turkish for "Warriors of the Islamic Front of the Great Orient." The group, which actually provided the Istanbul suicide-bombers, went to the trouble of emphasizing in its announcement that the synagogues had been attacked on a Saturday precisely to minimize the number of injuries among Muslim passers-by. The claim is patently baseless, but it is interesting nevertheless for the message it seeks to convey.

Meanwhile nothing equals the explanation that the IBDA/C gave for the attacks on the synagogues. "Shabbat Shalom, Dirty Jews" was the headline of the text that boasted, "Weï¿½ll savor halvah yet at the funeral of Rabbi Isak Haleva," the chief rabbi of Turkey, who was injured in the hand in the attack on the Beth Israel synagogue and who was described by the IBDA/C as someone who was invited to watch the torture of the groupï¿½s imprisoned leader Saleh Mirzabeyoglu. The announcement listed the Jewsï¿½ "crimes" against Muslim Turkey, starting with the Donme, the disciples of Shabtai Tzvi, who converted to Islam in the 17th century and "poisoned" the soul of the nation for generations, and ending with Herzl, who tried to bribe Sultan Abd al-Hamid to plant a Zionist state in the heart of the Caliphate.

The danger from our point of view is that the official religious establishments in most Muslim states will find it convenient to rule out the killing of Muslims in suicide bombings while simply refraining from saying anything about the killing of Jews and foreigners. This will pave the way for further attacks, notwithstanding certain limitations, even in their own countries, and will represent an attempt to regulate the phenomenon rather than stamp it out.

The Turkish government understands clearly what the Saudis keep trying to evade: Suicide attacks cannot differentiate between one type of blood and another. That's true of Iraq, of Saudi Arabia, of Turkey and even of Israel, where more than a few Arabs have been killed. There is no middle ground between license and prohibition. And those who sanction suicide bombers next door will soon enough find them exploding in their own backyard.