The false-passport row denies Israel's right to act against those trying to destroy it.

FOR average Israelis, members of the silent majority (as distinct from the country's chattering cliquey elite), the false-passports brouhaha abroad is just another sideshow in the international community's theatre of the absurd.

In this global burlesque, everything can be turned upside down. The lie is granted equal standing with truth, and flagrant canards frequently gain the ascendancy and are paraded as fact. Values are devalued. Good and evil are interchangeable. Anything goes.

In this environment of intellectual anarchy, Israel's existential struggle stands no chance of being granted anything vaguely resembling a fair hearing.

The case of terror kingpin Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is instructive. After his body was discovered in a Dubai hotel, his own son, Abdel-Rauf, bragged on TV that the late lamented ''fought the Jews, hit the Jews, kidnapped and killed Israelis. He outfitted and dispatched suicide-bombers.'' That evidently made him an object for admiration. Killing Jews is a noble objective, one to take pride in, to revere.

Mabhouh co-founded the Hamas military wing and Hamas declared war on Israel. He was a self-confessed murderer.

Last year he boasted on al-Jazeera about his personal culpability in the separate 1989 kidnap-murders of Israeli soldiers Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa'adon.

He crowed about smuggling into Gaza thousands of Iranian-made missiles for the sole purpose of making the lives of Israeli civilians hellish in the country's heartland, including Tel Aviv.

So when Israelis point to Mabhouh's gory record, it isn't just their biased say-so. It's hardly an unsubstantiated assertion, an excuse to justify assassination.

Accustomed and resigned as Israelis are to the world's double standards, they nevertheless watch with renewed amazement as Mabhouh's suspected killers are placed on Interpol's wanted list, where Mabhouh himself never appeared - soaked with blood as his hands were. Has anyone, incidentally, bothered inquiring which passport Mabhouh was travelling under and why he was allowed to enter Dubai on a gun-running mission?...