No doubt the left-wing opinion elites are going to go into high dudgeon over Jerusalem’s decision to refuse to cooperate with the “fact-finding” mission the United Nations wants to send to Jenin. Let them peer at the photograph on today’s front page of the corpse of one of three Palestinian Arabs lynched in cold blood yesterday morning by their own fellow Palestinian Arabs.

Elsewhere around the world yesterday, Iran was building a nuclear bomb, Communist China was brutally suppressing labor union organizers, and Saudi Arabia was denying women the right to drive cars. Yet the “emergency session” the Security Council was in last night was to figure out how to launch an effort to smear the Jewish state for defending its citizens against a wave of suicide bombings aimed at women and children.

For what it’s worth, a lot of ordinary New Yorkers will see through the U.N.’s game. There doesn’t seem to be any move afoot on the Security Council, alas, for an emergency investigation of the Iranians, the Chinese Communists, or the Saudis. Or for an inquiry into the lack of due process or a fair trial for the man whose corpse is pictured on page one. But so long as the U.N. is set on investigating the Battle of Jenin, it might begin with the accounts of the clash that appeared in the Arab press and broadcasts. A batch of these dispatches, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, landed in our inbox last night.

One dispatch on the Hamas Web site quotes Sheikh Jamal Abu Al-Hija, the commander of the Hamas Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades in the Jenin refugee camp, as reporting, “Some of the youths stood fast, and filled their school bags with explosive devices.”

The Islamic Jihad commander in the Jenin refugee camp, Abu Jandal, was interviewed several times by the Al-Jazeera television network during the fighting. In one conversation, Abu Jandal said: “Believe me, there are children stationed in the houses with explosive belts at their sides … Today, one of the children came to me with his school bag. I asked him what he wanted, and he replied, ‘Instead of books, I want an explosive device, in order to attack.'”

The Islamic Jihad Web site, meanwhile, announced that its commander in Jenin, Muhammad Tawalbeh, had prevented civilians from leaving the camp. The Islamic Jihad Web site said that Tawalbeh “had thwarted all attempts by the occupation to evacuate the camp residents to make it easier for the Israelis to destroy [the camp] on the heads of the fighters.”

So in its investigation into the alleged civilian casualties at Jenin, the U.N. might do well to be less concerned with the level of cooperation it gets from Israel, and more concerned with the level of cooperation it gets from the Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders who were equipping schoolchildren with explosive devices in their book-bags. Or from the Islamic Jihad commander who was preventing civilians from fleeing the battlefield. Or from Iran, which is funding these terrorist organizations. Or from the Arab thugs who murdered the man whose corpse appears in our page one photograph.