Talk about timing. The suicide bombing that killed nine Israelis in an attack on a Tel Aviv felafel restaurant was preceded only a day by a full-page advertisement that was rolled out in the New York Times, claiming “Hamas has held a unilateral ceasefire for a year, while Israel has ignored it and continues its attacks.” The “ceasefire” must come as news to the families of the nine killed and nearly 70 wounded, as well as to those who read on the Web site of the Jerusalem Post that this particular felafel restaurant “was hit in a similar suicide attack three months ago, injuring 20 people.” And the “ceasefire” claim could have been checked by the Times quality control people with a few keystrokes.

According to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, seven suicide bombing attacks were made in 2005. They killed 23 persons and injured 160. It reports that another 15 suicide attacks were thwarted in progress. The Israeli foreign ministry says, “Hamas was responsible for the suicide bombing at the Beersheba bus station on 28 August 2005 in which two security guards were seriously wounded. In September 2005, Hamas terrorists abducted and murdered Jerusalem businessman Sasson Nuriel.” Lest it be said that the other suicide bombings took place over the objections of Hamas, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority Interior Ministry, Khaled Abu Helal, yesterday blamed Israel for the terrorist attack, saying, “We think that this operation … is a direct result of the policy of the occupation and the brutal aggression and siege committed against our people.”

The suicide bomber was sent by Islamic Jihad, the same terrorist organization that Sami al-Arian just confessed to conspiring to help. Al-Arian’s confession was accepted by the federal judge in the case yesterday. The suicide bombing came the same day that the New York Post published Robert Novak sharply criticizing Israel for restricting movement of Arabs into Israel from the West Bank. Not a peep out of Mr. Novak in respect of Egypt’s Easter-time oppression of its Christians, known as Copts, which has been frontpage news in The New York Sun.

Hamas’s line, that Israel is to blame for the suicide bombers killing Israeli civilians, is gaining ground in elite intellectual circles. Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, went so far as to bring in an Israeli leftist, Tom Segev, to argue that Israeli settlements are to blame. Yale University is trying to hire the anti-Israel professor Juan Cole, according to Mitch Webber and Eliana Johnson, writing on the adjacent page. Princeton is poised to bring aboard the most famous of Columbia’s anti-Israel professors, Rashid Khalidi, and Harvard’s Kennedy School is harboring as its academic dean Stephen Walt, another anti-Israel academic. Mr. Walt and his coauthor are featured on the Web site of the organization that ran the ad in the Times touting the falsities of Hamas.

Anyone with doubts about Hamas’s intentions can consult its charter, which contains such gems as “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.” Or that “enemies… used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations…Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Or they can consult the words of one of Hamas’s financial backers, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has repeatedly vowed to wipe Israel off the map. Iran was just voted vice chairman of the United Nations Disarmament Commission, Fox News’s Brit Hume reported last night.

The Times ad claims “Many Americans do not understand that Hamas is a typical anti-colonial insurgency responding to an Israeli occupation and what amounts to government terror against Palestinian civilians. It is not at all related to al-Qa’ida or 9/11.” In fact Hamas represents colonialism by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza. Its ideology reeks of Al Qaeda and bin Laden. Americans don’t need the New York Times and Hamas to tell them what they don’t understand. They know that the victims slain yesterday at a felafel restaurant in Tel Aviv are no different from those slain on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. They are casualties in a war being levied by an enemy that aims to reestablish the caliphate and enforce Islamic law worldwide, an enemy that kills civilian women and children while Western sympathizers make ill-timed excuses.