Mayor Bloomberg was asked at his press availability yesterday about the Saudi-funded, Saudi-led propaganda mission that met on Friday with officials of the New York Police Department. “I think it is important that the police department meet with everyone,” Mr. Bloomberg said, going so far as to say that if the department’s officials did not meet with all groups, they would be “derelict in their duty.” Are terrorists members of the group that the police met with, a reporter asked? “I don’t know whether there were or not,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “You make the editorial judgment.”

And here we’d thought that one of the reasons we were paying taxes to support a police department with in-house experts like a former deputy director of the CIA was for the department to keep the mayor up to speed about the nature of the threat the city faces. What purpose did Friday’s meeting serve? The most we could dredge out of the police department was that the meeting was somehow supposed to reduce hate crimes. The hate crimes the police apparently had in mind are the isolated ones against Muslim Americans, not the ones that Saudi-funded terrorists are committing daily and systematically against Israeli Jews.

The ridiculousness of this pose becomes clear when you consider what might happen if a delegation from Al Qaeda showed up at One Police Plaza asking for a meeting on how to reduce hate crimes against Muslim Americans. Would the police really be “derelict in their duty” for refusing to meet with members of a group whose hands are drenched with the blood of New York police officers? Would the mayor really defer judgment? Of course not — if the Al Qaeda emissaries emerged from such a “meeting” alive, they’d be hauled off in leg irons. Mr. Bloomberg was clear enough the other day about Yasser Arafat, calling him “plain and simple, a terrorist.” Why the tip-toeing around the Saudi crew?

While the Saudis were strutting down Centre Street, the following events were transpiring back in the Arabian peninsula:

• The Saudi defense and aviation minister, Prince Sultan bin Abd Al-Aziz, who is the father of the Saudi Ambassador to America, when asked about American criticism of Saudi Arabia, replied, according to the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, “It is enough to see a number of congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes to explain the allegations against us.” According to another London-based Saudibacked daily, Al-Hayat, which also reported the incident, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, the minister cut off a journalist who asked him about the congressmen who attacked Saudi Arabia, stating: “Say ‘Jewish congressmen.’ It is enough that in the pictures you see some congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes. That is sufficient.”

• Dozens of American citizens, including Alia and Aisha Gheshayan, were being held against their will in Saudi Arabia.

• The Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Nawaf, gave an interview touting the kingdom’s “very good relations” with Axis of Evil nation Iran.

The meeting at the NYPD might have been defensible if its purpose had been to bring the visitors up on charges or seize them as material witnesses. But the visitors walked out of New York freely. They are headed for a press conference in Washington on Monday, a press conference for which one of the contacts is operating out of the same front whose former political director, Moussa Abu Marzook, was identified by Attorney General Ashcroft at a December press conference as “a top Hamas official who, the U.S. courts have determined, was directly involved in terrorism.”

It is hard to imagine Mayor Giuliani doing anything as stupid as Mr. Bloomberg has just done. When Yasser Arafat tried to seat himself at a concert in New York, Mr. Giuliani had him marched out by the police. When a Saudi stuntman tried to give a $10 million check to a fund for the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center and nattered on about the Israelis, Mr. Giuliani sent the check back. He was streetwise enough about the war on terror to have seen that the purpose Friday’s meeting served for the Saudis meantime was a propaganda victory. It had nothing whatsoever to do with hate crimes. It had everything to do with allowing the Saudi government-controlled press to put out the news of the NYPD stamp of approval on the regime in Riyadh.