No doubt the usual quarters are going to erupt in high dudgeon over the assassination at Damascus over the weekend of the Palestinian Arab terrorist leader leader, Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil, who perished when his car exploded outside his house in Damascus. But many others will recognize that the people of America owe Israel thanks. For not only is Hamas targeting Israel but, as Erick Stakelbeck of the Investigative Project pointed out in an eerily well-timed piece in the weekend edition of The New York Sun, the terrorist group is also targeting America.

Mr. Stakelbeck noted that one accused Hamas operative and his wife were recently caught casing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at Maryland. He noted that last month, a Hamas chief signed a statement urging Muslims around the world to join the army of Moqtada Al-Sadr in fighting American forces in Iraq. This same Hamas leader, Khaled Mash’al, said in April that Hamas’s “battle is with two sides. One of them is the strongest power in the world, the United States.” Another Hamas leader, Mr. Stakelbeck reported, wrote last year that attacking America is “a moral and national duty – but above all, a religious one.”

Indeed, no sooner had the smoke cleared in Damascus than some leaders of Hamas were already vowing to use the death of Khalil as an excuse to mount a wider war of terror against Israel and its interests around the world. Later in the day, a spokesman for Hamas withdrew that threat, though it would be folly for anyone to believe it. As Mr. Stakelbeck reported Friday, Israeli authorities last December charged Jamal Aqal, a Canadian citizen born in Gaza, with receiving weapons and explosives training from Hamas for use in terrorist operations in Canada and New York City. Concluded Mr. Stakelbeck: “The question may no longer be if Hamas will attack America, but when.”

On September 11, 2001, President Bush vowed, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” The Israeli action yesterday was an emphatic demonstration that the government of Syria still harbors Hamas terrorists. The regime in Damascus is probably grateful that yesterday’s strike targeted the terrorist leader and not the tyrant who was hosting him. Next time around, as Mr. Bush suggested, that distinction might not be so neat.