But lest you conclude that the three-time Pulitzer-prize winner has lost all sense of morality and the ability to condemn murder, he does confess that Fadlallah “was not a social worker. He had some dark side.”

Well now, Tom, you don’t say. Really?

Dark side, Tom, is Mel Gibson, who is a racist and misogynist. But even Mel hasn’t killed anyone or advocated that civilians be blown up (at least not yet). But here is Fadlallah in a 2002 interview with the Daily Telegraph: “I was not the one who launched the idea of so-called suicide bombings, but I have certainly argued in favor of them…[the Palestinians] are in a state of war with Israel. They are not aiming to kill civilians but, in war, civilians do get killed.”

Fadlallah is, of course, lying through his teeth, as the first target of a suicide attacker is civilians which is why, after the Mercaz Harav massacre in Jerusalem of March 6, 2008, when a Palestinian gunman walked into a yeshiva and shot eight rabbinical students dead, Fadlallah called the attack “heroic.”

While some imams courageously ruled that suicide bombings were against Islamic law, Fadlallah defended the religious basis for these terrorist attacks to the Daily Star.