No sooner had Mayor Giuliani reminded the nation of the history of the war we are now fighting against Islamic terrorism than the enemy struck again in the Jewish State, killing 16 in coordinated attacks aimed at civilians, including women and children, riding on buses. It was a reminder of the lesson Mr. Giuliani sketched before the Convention.

Today’s terrorist threat started, Mr. Giuliani said, with the attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics by a faction of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. It continued in 1985, when another PLO faction, the Palestine Liberation Front, hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer. “They marked him for murder solely because he was Jewish,” Mr. Giuliani said.

The negligence of the German and Italian governments in allowing the perpetrators to escape established an anti-terrorism policy of “accommodation, appeasement, and compromise,” the former mayor said. Involvement in attacks even won terrorists diplomatic legitimacy and recognition of their cause. “How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize while he was supporting a plague of terrorism in the Middle East and undermining any chance of peace?” Mr. Giuliani asked.

Unlike some plenipotentiaries of America’s State Department, Mr. Giuliani refuses to distinguish between Middle Eastern terrorism directed at America and Middle Eastern terrorism directed at Israel. In fact, Mr. Giuliani told the delegates, all this “hatred and anger in the Middle East” has a common source: authoritarian governments that “deflect their own failures by pointing to America and to Israel and to other external scapegoats.”

America and Israel are fighting the same enemy, which is why it’s so damag ing to America’s interests when European regimes excuse terrorist violence directed at the Jewish state. Before September 11, the response to terrorism, “particularly in Europe,” indicated “an unrealistic view of our world much like observing Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate the Soviet Union through the use of mutually assured destruction,” Mr. Giuliani said. So the mayor endorsed the Bush Doctrine as the appropriate way to deal with terrorism.

Mr. Giuliani also spoke of what he called Senator Kerry’s “record of inconsistent positions on combatting terrorism.” He pointed out that “When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, John Kerry voted against the Persian Gulf War. Later he said he actually supported the war. Then in 2002, as he was calculating his run for president, he voted for the war in Iraq. And then just nine months later, he voted against an $87 billion supplemental budget to fund the war and support our troops.”

Said Mr. Giuliani, “He even, at one point, declared himself an anti-war candidate. Now, he says he’s pro-war. At this rate, with 64 days left, he still has time to change his position at least three or four more times.”

Mr. Giuliani also said that Mr. Kerry had changed his position on Israel’s security fence. Mr. Giuliani’s political attack on the Democratic presidential candidate was, by our lights, devastating. And his willingness to address the Jewish question particularly courageous. Last month we came through a Democratic nominating convention in which the word Israel was hardly mentioned. This week we are watching an attack-by-leak on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee over allegations that it was given a look at a classified document. At last we have a leader who is prepared to mark in public the fact that Israel and America are fighting the same war.