It's so obvious once you point it out

This morning brought the tragic news of a bomb attack on a US diplomatic convoy in Gaza in which the victims were engaged in the Great Satanic activity of...interviewing Palestinian candidates for the Fulbright scholar program. It's not easy to rank acts of terrorism along any dimension, since it's all the same to the bereaved, but this one seems especially pointless. We did however find ourselves wondering how far the blame would spread, from the perpetrators of course, perhaps to the Palestinian Authority for failing to prevent it, maybe even to the Israelis -- leaving aside the inevitable paranoid attribution of them as being behind everything bad, we assume that the Americans had to travel to Gaza to meet the Palestinians because the Palestinians can't get to Tel Aviv with the Israeli blockade.

We're not subscribing to these explanations, but they are bound to be out there. But the Wall Street Journal online editorial page, OpinionJournal, managed to extend even that chain of blame -- in their view, it's all Rachel Corrie's fault. We have referred before to this woman's case: she got in the way of an Israeli bulldozer via her role in an activist group protesting against Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes. OJ notes the theory, not yet proven, that the explosives came from Egypt via one of the Gaza tunnels that the Israelis demolished this week, and making the link to opponents of the demolitions, says:

And it appears terror advocates like Rachel Corrie now have American as well as Israeli blood on their hands.

Let's be clear that on the Israeli-Palestinian question, we sit somewhere in the increasingly awkward middle of opinions on the conflict, and definitely not with the knee-jerk Israel-bashing Hamas scarf-wearing European "intelligentsia." The unfortunate Ms. Corrie was perhaps naive to engage in a game of who'll blink first with the Israelis, and maybe also naive about the fraught nerves produced by living with terrorism every day. But note the complete lack of any logical linkage between her actions and the Gaza bomb: there's not a shred of evidence that her fatally unsuccessful protest allowed in these particular explosives.

We don't want to encourage the OJ crowd too much, but here's an angle they might want to look at: Fulbright scholarships. Senator Fulbright. A senator from Arkansas. Bill Clinton. It's his fault!