Arafat the monster

[igloo]

Arafat the monster
Jeff Jacoby (archive)

November 12, 2004 | printer friendly version Print | email to a friend Send

Yasser Arafat died at the age of 75, lying in bed and surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves.

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, well-wishers would not be flocking to the hospital grounds to create a makeshift shrine of flowers, candles, and admiring messages. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."

God bless his soul? What a grotesque thing to say! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

Arafat always inspired flights of nonsense from Western journalists, and his last two weeks were no exception.

Arafat's "undisputed courage as a guerrilla leader," Derek Brown wrote in The Guardian, was exceeded only "by his extraordinary courage" as a peace negotiator. But it is an odd kind of courage that expresses itself in shooting unarmed victims and exhorting other people to become suicide bombers -- or in signing peace accords and then flagrantly violating their terms.

Another commentator, columnist Gwynne Dyer, asked, "So what did Arafat do right?" The answer: He drew worldwide attention to the Palestinian cause, "for the most part by successful acts of terror." In other words, butchering innocent human beings was "right" since it served an ulterior political motive. No doubt that thought brings daily comfort to all those who were forced to bury a child, parent, or spouse because of Arafat's "successful" terrorism.

Some journalists couldn't wait for Arafat's actual death to begin weeping for him. Take the BBC's Barbara Plett, who burst into tears on the day he was airlifted out of the West Bank. "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound," Plett reported from Ramallah, "I started to cry." Normal people don't weep for brutal murderers, but Plett made it clear that her empathy for Arafat -- whom she praised as "a symbol of Palestinian unity, steadfastness, and resistance" -- was heartfelt:

"I remember well when the Israelis re-conquered the West Bank more than two years ago," she said, "how they drove their tanks and bulldozers into Mr. Arafat's headquarters, trapping him in a few rooms, and throwing a military curtain around Ramallah. I remember how Palestinians admired his refusal to flee under fire. They told me: 'Our leader is sharing our pain, we are all under the same siege.' And so was I." Such is the state of journalism at the BBC, whose reporters do not seem to have any trouble reporting, dry-eyed, on the pain of Arafat's victims. (That is, when they mention them -- which Plett's teary bon voyage to Arafat did not.)

And what about those victims? Why were they scarcely remembered in the drawn-out Arafat deathwatch?

How is it possible to reflect on Arafat's most enduring legacy -- the rise of modern terrorism -- without recalling the legions of men, women, and children whose lives he and his followers destroyed? If Osama bin Laden were on his deathbed, would we neglect to mention all those he murdered on 9/11?

It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it.

Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and their child at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.

Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?

So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of innocents who died at Arafat's command.

[igloo]

Truth too much for some?

[girlwnoregrets]

the palistinians are the on the defense. Isreal took over their land after ww2. They just want a small portion back to call their own, but the jews refuze.

So many problems in the world would be solved if isreal gave up a SMALL (SUPER) SMALL piece of land for the palistians to claim as their country. THEY HAVE NOTHING and on the defensive side, they are only doing what was done to them.

[jtk4]

well its a little more complicated then that,and they offered a small piece of land but arafat refused.

[girlwnoregrets]

Isreal is the terrorist nation.

[jtk4]

i don't even want to see your tits now.



How do you figure that?Last time i checked there was an isreal and not a palestine.

[igloo]

Originally Posted by jtk4

i don't even want to see your tits now.

[igloo]

I posted this, and the one below, because I do think some people need to put some things in perspective about Arafat, and who he truly is.....not how he is perceived or defended, but for who he truly was..

The sad part is this terrorist and fraud completely duped a good deal of his own people into thinking he was a leader who represented their hopes and dreams.....maybe one day (and that hope is alive now that he is dead), when the Palestinians have their own state with real media, real textbooks, real schools, etc, they will come to realize what this fraud was truly about...

As the PM of Australia said: History will not look kindly upon this man (paraphrasing).


November 12, 2004, 8:27 a.m.
The Father of Modern Terrorism
The true legacy of Yasser Arafat.

For the last week of his life, the scuttlebutt about the Palestinian movement's centrifugal force concerned whether his impending demise was driven by AIDS, likely contracted, according to leaked foreign-intelligence reports, by his omnivorous, orgiastic sexual appetite. This as if, after three quarters of a century's worth of megalo-sadism, additional indicia of Yasser Arafat's throbbing depravity were somehow necessary. And so, evidently, they were. Thus is reflection on his life, a signal emblem of the late 20th century's triumph of terror and fraud over security and reason, as instructive about our times as it is about him.

A Thug's Life
About him, while there is much to say, there is little to glean. He was a thug. One of the most cunning of all time for sure, but quite simply a ruthless, thoroughly corrupt, will-to-power thug.

As is often the case in the modern information age, just about everything in his life is known and almost nothing in his proffered legend is true. The man airbrushed in Thursday-morning encomiums from Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac (among others) as the courageous symbol of Palestinian nationalism was not really named Yasser Arafat, was not a native Palestinian, and tended to sit out warfare with Israel whenever conventional fighting was involved.

Although he occasionally claimed to have hailed from what are now the Palestinian territories, Muhammad Abdel Rahman Abdel Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini was actually born in Egypt in 1929, the fifth child of a well-to-do merchant. He was educated in Cairo, although, after his mother's death when he was four, he lived at least part of the time with an uncle in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was then the heart of the territory known as Mandatory Palestine, which chafed under British rule as a result of a 1918 League of Nations mandate. The era, to put it kindly, was not the Crown's finest hour. Sowing seeds for recriminations that persist to this day, the Brits appeared during WWI to promise some or all of the territory alternatively to Arabs and to Jews, only to exacerbate matters by keeping Palestine themselves for three decades.

Arafat's formative years were thus spent in a milieu of sectarian violence, annealed in a hatred for Jews that, far from ever subsiding, propelled him. As an engineering student in Cairo during World War II, he was powerfully influenced by Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Islamic mufti of Jerusalem who was closely aligned with Hitler and schemed from Berlin to import the Fuhrer's genocidal program to Palestine. Indeed, as the New York Sun observed in an editorial last week, one of el-Husseini's biographers relates that Arafat was a blood relative of the mufti, who preferred him to another up-and-comer, George Habash (al-Hakim), among the fiercest of Israel's Nasserite enemies who eventually founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a frequent Arafat ally.

Nevertheless, though he may have been a local gun-runner, the 19-year-old Arafat refrained from combat in 1948, when, upon Israel's declaration of independence, it was attacked by the Arab League (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq), which was defeated in the war still regarded by Palestinians and other Arabs as "al-Nabka" (the Catastrophe). Nor did he partake in the 1956 Suez War, although, as recounted last week by the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens, he later claimed to have done so.

Raising Terror
While Arafat's mantel as the "Father of Palestine" is dubious given that he is singularly responsible for the failure of a Palestinian nation to emerge, his credentials as the "Father of Modern Terrorism" are solid. In the late 1950's, he co-founded Fatah, the "Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine." His métier, and thus Fatah's, was the sneak attack on soft Israeli targets, the better to maximize carnage and fear. The first efforts were ham-handed: failed attempts in 1965 to bomb the national water carrier and the railroad. But the organization soon hit its stride, successfully attacking villages and civilian infrastructure. By 1969, Arafat was the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group he never ceased to dominate after merging Fatah into it a year earlier. The PLO had a single purpose: the destruction of Israel.

Actually, make that two purposes. The PLO was also a fabulously profitable criminal enterprise. Though Arafat purported to have made it big in the engineering business in Kuwait, British investigators, as Stephens reported, concluded after a searching probe that his wealth stemmed from sidelines his organization maintained in "extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud" that yielded billions. Throughout his career, moreover, Arafat proved a master at culling funds — whether from levies on strapped Palestinian workers or gushing subsidies from starry-eyed European and American governments. From these, he skimmed millions and stashed them throughout the world — including in Israeli banks — keeping his wife on a lavish $100,000-per-month allowance in Paris while his people starved, and, of course, blamed Israel for their troubles.

By the late 1960s, the PLO had set up shop in Jordan, wreaking havoc in the kingdom. Arafat and his affiliates soon became innovators in a tactic later refined by al Qaeda: the civilian airliner as terror weapon. On February 21, 1970, the PFLP — by then also under the PLO arch — bombed SwissAir Flight 330 enroute to Tel Aviv, murdering 47 passengers and crew. Eight months later, on September 6, they attempted a spectacular atrocity: a quadruple hijack, which now appears an eerie harbinger of the tectonic bin Laden operation on another September day 31 years later.

As recalled in the riveting account of "Black September" by hostage David Raab, all the hijacked flights were bound from Europe to the United States. One, a Pan-Am 747, was taken to Cairo, where it was blown up on the tarmac just after the passengers were allowed to exit. A second, targeting an El-Al aircraft, was foiled in flight by Israeli sky marshals. But a TWA 707 and a SwissAir DC-8, with a combined 310 passengers and crew, were hijacked to a Jordanian dessert. The terrorists segregated Israeli, American, Swiss, and West German passengers for captivity — releasing the others — and threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the planes unless jailed militants were released. Under international pressure, King Hussein resolved to reassert control. War broke out on September 13. By the time it ended two weeks later, the hostages had been released, but over 2,000 people had been killed as Arafat and his terrorist band were driven out of the country.

In the first of his many rises from the ashes, Arafat relocated to Lebanon. Staging from there, the PLO embarked, almost exactly a year to the day later, on another of the late 20th century's most infamous murder sprees. On September 5, in the midst of the Munich Summer Olympic Games of 1972, eight PLO operatives (a wing of Arafat's Fatah group known as the "Black September" brigade) carried out a plan that enabled five of them to steal into the Olympic village, quickly murder two members of the Israeli team (the wrestling coach and a weightlifter), and take nine other Israeli athletes hostage. The terrorists demanded the release of 200 Arab prisoners and safe passage back to the Middle East. German authorities lured them, with their captives, to the airport, but a rescue attempt was badly botched. In the resulting battle, the Palestinians killed all nine Israeli athletes by grenade and gunfire, as well as murdering a German policeman. Five of the terrorists were killed in the struggle, but German authorities managed to capture the remaining three. True to form, Arafat's organization responded the following month by hijacking a Lufthansa jet and taking the passengers hostage. The Germans capitulated, releasing the killers.

Arafat, meanwhile, also kept Israel's support network, the U.S., in his sights. On March 1, 1973, another eight-member Black September cell raided the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, taking as captives two American government officials, Ambassador Cleo Noel and the Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore, as well as a Belgian diplomat named Guy Eid. The terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan in California (jailed for the 1968 slaying of Robert F. Kennedy), of Palestinians imprisoned in Jordan (including Black September's own Abu Daoud, who later claimed to be the master-planner of the Munich Olympics massacre), and of Palestinian women jailed in Israel. When they were rebuffed, the terrorists murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid, and then anxiously surrendered to the Sudanese authorities.

These murders, theoretically an act of war against the U.S., were never "solved" in the sense of convicting the man ultimately responsible. The FBI was reported to have reopened an investigation of them earlier this year, and at least one State Department spokesman has strangely claimed the link between Arafat and Black September was never conclusively established — even as he acknowledged Black September's membership in Arafat's own Fatah faction.

Nonetheless, a number of Israeli and American intelligence officials have long maintained that Arafat personally ordered the killings by issuing a radio message, to wit: "Why are you waiting? The people's blood in the Cold River cries for vengeance" — Cold River reportedly being a predetermined code directing the executions. Furthermore, in the kangaroo court that passed for a Sudanese prosecution, one of the terrorists, Salim Rizak, testified: "We carried out this operation on the orders of the Palestine Liberation Organization"; while another witness, the Sudanese official who conducted interrogations, reported that the killers had taken their cues from radio messages emanating from Fatah headquarters in Beirut. Thus abound dark suspicions, not to mention an explicit allegation by former NSA official James J. Welsh, that Arafat's complicity was shunted aside for what was perversely perceived as the greater good of diplomatically cultivating him. Meanwhile, of the eight surrendering Black September terrorists, two were released immediately by the Sudanese due to purportedly insufficient evidence, while the remaining six were convicted, sentenced to life-imprisonment, and...released the very next day to the open arms of the PLO.

From his Lebanese perch, Arafat's rampage of Israel continued apace. On April 11, 1974, the PLO slaughtered eighteen residents of Kiryat Shmona in their apartment building. A month later, on May 15, Palestinian terrorists attacked a school in Ma'alot, murdering 26 Israelis, including several children. Then, in June, the PLO — through the "Palestinian National Council" — endorsed what it called a "phased plan" to obliterate Israel.

Weak-Kneed Appeasement
Seven years earlier, of course, Egypt, joined by Syria and Jordan, had foolishly launched yet another war of aggression against Israel. They were routed in the Six Day War of June 1967, at the end of which Israel's territorial holdings had drastically swelled to include the West Bank and East Jerusalem (taken from Jordan), the Suez and Gaza (from Egypt), and the Golan Heights (from Syria). It was understood that this expansion would not be permanent — in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, Israel agreed eventually to withdraw from some undetermined portion of these territories in exchange for peace treaties that settled borders and acknowledged Israel's right to exist. In Arafat's 1974 phased plan, however, the PLO reaffirmed its rejection of Resolution 242 and committed itself to establish, in any ceded territory, a Palestinian state that would work toward Israel's destruction.

Adumbrating the global strategy for dealing with terror that would reign supreme through the quarter century leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the world reacted to Arafat's contemptuous belligerence with weak-kneed appeasement. The PLO was rewarded with observer status in the U.N., and on November 13, 1974, a triumphant and utterly unrepentant Arafat, holster strapped to his hip, addressed the General Assembly in New York City. By 1980, the European Economic Community recognized him as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people.

Not that there weren't setbacks. In 1979, Israel had struck a historic peace deal with Egypt in which it agreed to a phased pull-out from the Sinai (completed in 1982) and acknowledged that there should eventually be some form of autonomy for the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank and Gaza. With its southern flank calmed, Israel wearied of continuing missile attacks and other sorties launched against its northern communities from the PLO's Lebanese stronghold. Israel invaded in 1982, inducing Arafat to flee to Tunis.

From Killing Klinghoffer to "Nobel" Star
The PLO's bloodlust did not abate. In 1985, a cell identifying itself as the Palestine Liberation Front, led by Mohammed Abu al-Abbas, hijacked the Italian cruise ship, Achille Lauro. As his horrified wife looked on, the terrorists viciously shot a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound Jew named Leon Klinghoffer, then tossed him overboard to die in the sea. Despite indications that the PLF was acting on instructions from PLO headquarters in Tunis, a State Department spokesman incredibly contended as late as 2002 that the PLF had been a renegade group broken off from the PFLP, and that Arafat was probably blameless in the Achille Lauro operation. But, aside from the fact that the PLO's website (for its U.N. mission) listed the PLF as one of its constituents, Abbas had actually been a member of Arafat's own PLO Executive Committee. More to the point, when Abbas died last year in Iraq (where he had been harbored by Arafat's staunch ally, Saddam Hussein), Arafat issued an official statement lavishly praising him as a "martyr leader" and "a distinguished fighter and a national leader who devoted his life to serve his own people and his homeland."

Not long after Achille Lauro, Arafat began in 1987 to blaze the path that, by the mid-1990's, sickeningly transformed him into a regular White House guest and a Nobel Laureate. As was his Orwellian wont, he started on the road to faux respectability with a terrorist barrage that became known as the First Intifada. (With Arafat, it had to be the First Intifada because there would, of course, be a Second.)

The siege was ignited by two unconnected events in the powder keg of Gaza: the December 6 murder of an Israeli, followed quickly by the tragic December 10 death of four Palestinians in a car accident which was falsely, but unrelentingly, hyped as a revenge killing. Skirmishes quickly broke out in Gaza, and careened through the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The violence, a roller-coaster of lulls and explosions, lasted over six years. In the first four years — that is, the period before the ebb that marked the onset of the 1991 Gulf War — Israeli defense forces responded to more than 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks, 100 hand grenade attacks, and 600 assaults with guns or explosives, all of which killed 27 and wounded over 3000. Although the PLO was rivaled in the operation by militant Islamic groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Arafat's group dominated the so-called "Unified Leadership of the Intifada," using leaflets to direct the days and targets of attacks.

Israelis were not alone among the terror casualties. Arafat unleashed PLO death squads to kill numerous Arabs who were deemed to be collaborating with the enemy. In 1990, the Arabic publication Al-Mussawar reported Arafat's defense of the tactic: "We have studied the files of those who were executed, and found that only two of the 118 who were executed were innocent." As for those putative innocents, Arafat sloughed them off as "martyrs of the Palestinian revolution."

Even as the violence hummed, Arafat assumed his statesman's face for the West, to great effect. As the body count mounted in 1988, the U.N. granted the PLO's observer mission the right to participate, though not vote, in General Assembly sessions. In addition, the administration of George H. W. Bush held open the possibility of direct dialogue if Arafat would renounce terrorism and agree to be bound by Resolution 242. This he purported to do on December 16, 1988, claiming to acknowledge "the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security...including the state of Palestine and Israel and other neighbors according to the Resolutions 242 and 338"; and asserting: "As for terrorism...I repeat for the record that we totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism." Like the Europeans, the U.S. officially recognized Arafat as the legitimate leader of the Palestinians.

The bankruptcy of these claims was revealed as the Intifada ensued and Arafat blundered by publicly aligning with Saddam both after the invasion of Kuwait and throughout Iraq's scud missile attacks on Israel. But just as it seemed he might finally fade away, the strongman caught a lifeline when Gulf War victory failed to carry the first President Bush to re-election. Bush's successor, President Bill Clinton, saw in the intractable Israeli/Palestinian conflict the chance for an enduring legacy, and saw in Arafat a viable "peace partner."

With Clinton as determined midwife, Arafat and the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the ballyhooed Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian Authority was created, Arafat was appointed its chief executive, and a plan for eventual self-government by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza was set in motion. But euphoria over this seeming breakthrough blurred appreciation of both Arafat's innate mendacity and Oslo's patent failure to resolve key contentious issues, including final borders, the status of East Jerusalem, and the rights of Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees — under the delusion that Arafat would work in good faith toward a peaceful, comprehensive settlement with Israel over a five-year period.

The mega-murderer was suddenly statesman, star, and, in 1994, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — a once-coveted honor now, by his attainment of it, reduced to a joke best listed among his countless victims. Thanks to this peace partner, it soon became clear that Oslo was a charade, a case of a credulous American president choosing his honey over his lying eyes.

The Palestinian Authority reneged on its promises of democratic reform and establishment of the rule of law — holding elections exactly once and never again after Arafat was overwhelmingly elected. Arafat also failed to honor, despite incessant pleading by Clinton administration figures, a commitment that the Palestinian National Charter would be amended to remove clauses calling for the destruction of Israel. The PA made a show of appearing to comply, disingenuously noting the provisions purportedly slated for nullification and calling for a new draft of the Charter to be produced. No revised Charter, however, was ever forthcoming. Meanwhile, what education system existed in the territories, much like Arafat's public statements in Arabic (always far more menacing than the English he spoke to the Western world), continued to instill hatred for Jews and calls for the demise of their state. Naturally, the terrorist activity also proceeded, with the PA ineffectual in halting it — when not encouraging it outright.

There should have been surprise in none of this. As Stephens reports, in 1996, Arafat brayed to an Arab audience in Stockholm, "We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.... We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem." Asked about his plans on Egyptian television in 1998, Arafat explained that strategic pause was a venerable Islamic strategy, referring specifically to the "Khudaibiya agreement" in which the Prophet Mohammed made a ten-year treaty with the Arabian tribe of Koreish, but broke it after two years — during which his forces used the security of the pact to marshal their strength — and then conquered the Koreish tribe.

Such machinations were certainly no secret to the governments and media in the U.S., Europe and Israel itself. They knew precisely who Yasser Arafat was. But politically and culturally, hopeful hearts and good intentions were for them more essential than results on the ground — the "process" always took precedence over the "peace." Thus, in the Wye River Accords of 1998, the Clinton administration and Israel, now led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took the terrorist at his word when he promised, yet again, to crack down on terror, this time in exchange for a pull back of Israeli forces (which had entered the territories in response to terror attacks), the ceding of additional territory to PA control, and even the release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners — many of whom had been incarcerated for terrorism offenses.

14 9/11s
The violence never stopped. Yet, with his presidency winding down in 2000 and desperate for an accomplishment that might balance a record besmirched by scandal, President Clinton boldly sought a final time to forge a comprehensive settlement. He brought Arafat and yet another new Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, to Camp David. Under intense U.S. pressure, Israel offered the creation of a Palestinian state over 90 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with its capital to be in East Jerusalem. In a move comprehensible only if one accepts that Arafat was incorrigibly devoted to Israel's extermination — in which case, it was entirely comprehensible — Arafat rejected this stunning offer, with poison-pill insistence that millions of Palestinians be accorded a right of return to Israel.

The breakdown of negotiations resulted, like night followed day with Arafat, in a new round of terror: the Second Intifada, which continues to this day. This program has been pursued mostly by suicide bombings — often including explosives strapped to children encouraged by the culture of shahada, or martyrdom, which thrived under Arafat's corrupt and dysfunctional leadership. In the main, attacks have willfully targeted civilians in busses, restaurants, shopping centers, synagogues, hotels and other public centers. Since 2000, approximately 900 Israelis, three quarters of whom were civilians, have been murdered. To extrapolate to American proportions, for a country the size of Israel this is the rough equivalent of over 40,000 dead — or, as the Hudson Institute's Anne Bayefsky has calculated, about 14 9/11s.

Arafat's world, like everyone else's, radically changed on September 11, 2001. The Bush Doctrine, announcing a commitment to eradicate terrorists and terror supporting governments, did not immediately spell the end for the Palestinian strongman. He was, however, gradually marginalized and reduced to pariah status — but for the markedly less frequent, and ineffectual, paeans from Europe, the Islamic world and the U.N.

The magic began to fail even his most trusted old tricks. For example, on December 16, 2001, with American forces suppressing terrorists in Afghanistan, an ostensibly chastened Arafat appeared on PA-controlled Palestinian television to warn Hamas and Islamic Jihad against "all military activities" against Israel, and to purportedly "renew" his "call to completely halt any activities, especially suicide attacks, which we have condemned and always condemned." This time, the ploy fell flat — undercut, no doubt, after the Nobel laureate characteristically followed it up only two days later with a speech at a Ramallah rally — the kind of red meat always conveniently ignored in the halcyon pre-9/11 days. "With God's help," he boasted:

next time we will meet in Jerusalem, because we are fighting to bring victory to our prophets, every baby, every kid, every man, every woman and every old person and all the young people, we will all sacrifice ourselves for our holy places and we will strengthen our hold of them and we are willing to give 70 of our martyrs for every one of theirs in this campaign, because this is our holy land. We will continue to fight for this blessed land and I call on you to stand strong.

The jig was up. Arafat's celebrity might be a product of the "international community" but his relevance was strictly made-in-the-USA, and America was no longer buying. The administration of President George W. Bush let it be known that Arafat would no longer be dealt with. When the president eventually proposed his "roadmap" to resume negotiations toward an eventual Palestinian state, he snubbed Arafat and made unconditional cessation of all Palestinian terrorism a nonnegotiable prerequisite. Critically, the administration also eased the restraints that had for decades compelled Israel to accord its sworn enemy so wide a berth.

Now under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel responded forcefully to the terror onslaught, including through high-profile "targeted assassinations" of Hamas leaders. Its forces tightened the noose around Arafat. Unable to leave his squalid Ramallah compound with any assurance that he'd either survive or be permitted to return, the "president" of what was more a racket than a government — and decidedly not a nation — remained holed up there for over two years until his evacuation to Paris, in extremis, in late October. There he died on Wednesday, one of history's most repulsive conmen and killers.

"The power of bad men," Burke famously observed, "is no indifferent thing." The power of this evil man informed an age — the age of terrorism. The Israelis and Palestinians may never coexist peacefully, but as long as Yasser Arafat lived they didn't even have a chance.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

[jtk4]

Firstly, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians lost Gaza, the West Bank and Golan Heights (respectively) by participating in a failed attempt at genocide against the Children of Israel. Had Israel lost this 1967 defensive war, the Arab-Palestinians and their Arab allies would have raped, butchered or driven out every Israeli they could get their hands on and gobbled up all of Israel.


but isreal won.


the reason why the us backs isreal is because commie russia backed the palistines back in the day.

[chris817]

Originally Posted by girlwnoregrets

the palistinians are the on the defense. Isreal took over their land after ww2. They just want a small portion back to call their own, but the jews refuze.

So many problems in the world would be solved if isreal gave up a SMALL (SUPER) SMALL piece of land for the palistians to claim as their country. THEY HAVE NOTHING and on the defensive side, they are only doing what was done to them.

Isreal did not take over any land it was given to them. Also it was just desert and the hard working jewish people made isreal what it is today. I feel sorry for the palenstian people they were lied to and swindled of billions of dollars from their leader. They also were given about 97% of what they wanted but Arafat declined
Maybe they will have a chance for truth now

[tasrit]

Originally Posted by chris817

Isreal did not take over any land it was given to them.

Israel take over the land by terrorism.

[raver_mania]

Originally Posted by chris817

Isreal did not take over any land it was given to them. Also it was just desert and the hard working jewish people made isreal what it is today. I feel sorry for the palenstian people they were lied to and swindled of billions of dollars from their leader. They also were given about 97% of what they wanted but Arafat declined
Maybe they will have a chance for truth now

It definitely was not given to them by the Arabs. Also, it was not just desert, there are Arab people living on it before the Brits (the fuck-ups they are) decided to give a land surrounded by Arab nations, to the Jews.

[jtk4]

Originally Posted by tasrit

Israel take over the land by terrorism.

whowhatwherewhen

[jtk4]

Originally Posted by raver_mania

It definitely was not given to them by the Arabs. Also, it was not just desert, there are Arab people living on it before the Brits (the fuck-ups they are) decided to give a land surrounded by Arab nations, to the Jews.

You guys act likethis is somethin weird, the ottomons teamed with germany in ww1, they lost their land got split up. That is what happens in war going back to the beginning of time. There were russian jews living in that land,which was swampland at that time, before england gave that land to them. They really did that because they were afraid the french would get it.

[chris817]

Originally Posted by raver_mania

It definitely was not given to them by the Arabs. Also, it was not just desert, there are Arab people living on it before the Brits (the fuck-ups they are) decided to give a land surrounded by Arab nations, to the Jews.

I never said it was given to them by arabs. I know there were people living their but the jewish people built it to what it is today