Five Americans brutally murdered in their college cafeteria by Palestinian Arab terrorists who targeted the Frank Sinatra International Student Center in Jerusalem, and the senior senator from New York wants to respond by … extraditing the spiritual leader of the terrorist group Hamas and putting him on trial in an American court. It would be laughable if it weren’t so indicative of the failure of many of our political leaders to recognize Wednesday’s attack for what it was — an act of war against America.

Why Sheikh Yassin should be granted the due process of an American jury trial is beyond us. Would Senator Schumer propose that American taxpayers finance the sheikh’s legal defense, and that he be given the Miranda warning before being interrogated? Would Mr. Schumer propose to risk the lives of American FBI agents or U.S. Marshals in order to snatch the sheikh alive and put him on trial? Why not just kill him with a bomb or a missile? The time for trials and tribunals is after the war has been decisively won, as at Nuremberg. Until then, the American priority must be the victory necessary as self-defense.

Senator Schumer’s statement last night drew an explicit parallel between the Sinatra Center bombing and the World Trade Center attack. He said, “Israel would never expect the U.S. not to respond to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and Israel deserves the same type of full, unyielding support from President Bush and the United States.” We asked Mr. Schumer last night why Mr. Bin Laden was worth a military attack, while the Hamas leader deserved an extradition and trial, and the best the senator could muster by way of a response was, with respect to Mr. Bin Laden, “There’s a big war going on so I think it probably makes more sense to bring him to justice this way.” Well, it’s the same big war that just claimed five American lives at the Sinatra Center.

If Mr. Schumer indeed wants to play a constructive role here — and we have no doubt, by the way, that his heart is in the right place — he could begin by reversing his error of opposing, as a congressman, the Gulf War resolution that was sought by the last President Bush. It is Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, after all, that is rewarding the families of suicide bombers. The Democrats in the Senate have been holding a set of hearings calculated to stir opposition to ousting Saddam Hussein, and the party’s 2000 standardbearer, Al Gore, has been counseling delay. Or if Mr. Schumer insists on focusing on law enforcement rather than waging war, he could follow through on his campaign promise of forcing the move of the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem — a move required by American law.