The Week

-- Israeli voters awarded Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Likud party 38 seats, while giving Labor, Israel's historic major party of the Left, only 19. The result was not exactly a sweep for Likud: Other parties, to the right of Likud or the left of Labor or somewhere in between, hold the remaining 63 seats in the Israeli parliament. Sharon must decide whether to form a coalition that includes Shas, a party of ultra-orthodox Jews, or Shinui, a new secularist party that wants the state to cut its religious subsidies. Sharon has the choice because most Israelis think he is a tough guy, and that toughness is needed in the maelstrom of terror that Israelis have been enduring for months. Ultimately, the shape of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and of the Middle East, will depend less on Israeli voters or Arab tyrants than on what the United States does in Iraq.

-- A good chunk of the world insists that Yasser Arafat has nothing to do with the "suicide bombers," except to oppose them. They are simply out of his control. But consider this. A year ago, a suicide bomber named Abdel Baset Odeh murdered 29 people and injured dozens of others in the infamous Passover Massacre at Netanya. Now the Palestinian Authority-Yasser Arafat's own regime-has honored the terrorist by naming a soccer tournament after him. His brother will distribute trophies. The individual teams, too, have been named after suicide bombers. But let no one think that the good Chairman and Nobel Peace Laureate countenances any terroristic activity.

-- It's official: Muammar Qaddafi's Libya has been appointed to the chair of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. This was the work of the U.N.'s African bloc, which controls appointments to the commission this year under a rule that rotates this power geographically. In related news, Iraq will be chairing the U.N. disarmament conference in Geneva for several weeks this spring, as a result of a mysterious decision by Iran to step down. (This one rotates alphabetically.) You can laugh freely at that without any apprehensions-the disarmament conference, after 20 years of deliberation, has yet to agree on a program of work. The U.N. is ever the U.N. Leaving his post at that organization in 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered no less than three metaphors for the place: "a theater of the absurd, a decomposing corpse, and an insane asylum." Twenty-six years later, the play goes on, the corpse stinks worse than ever, and the lunatics are still firmly in charge of the asylum.

-- A radio station in Miami ran a vile parody song defaming Condi Rice. It began, "Condoleezza, Condoleezza, what you be doin'? That neo- fascist black-haired token schwarze dog. Is you there 'cause you a high-toned public Negro? Is you their black-haired answer-mammy who be smart?" Etc., etc. The Florida branch of the NAACP was asked to intervene and request an apology from the radio station-but it refused. Eventually, the station stopped airing the song and apologized anyway. The story made not a ripple in the national press. (Imagine a similar outrage committed against, say, Donna Brazile.) But we are reminded that there is nothing so vile that it cannot be said with relative impunity against a Republican. And to be a black Republican, of course, is to betray.