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Enough with the Arafat Accolades Monty
Rainey
November
18, 2004
The past week or so, since the death of Yasser Arafat, the world has endured endless accolades from revisionists, extolling the virtues of the terrorist leader. Now that some of the hubbub has died off, the world needs a reality check of just who we are talking about here. I’m reminded of some 30 years ago when I heard my father in law talking to a co-worker about the recent passing of another co-worker. My father in law’s friend was telling about what a great guy old Joe had been, when my father in law interjected a statement of honesty rarely heard when he exclaimed, “Well, I didn’t like the son of a bitch when he was alive. No reason for me to fall in love with him now.”
It seems easy for those who would blame Israel for all the ills of the Arab world, to view the passing of Arafat with rose colored glasses, but let’s take the glasses off for a few minutes and just look at exactly what kind of monster the world has been relieved of with his death.
When it comes to understanding the whole “Palestinian” problem, the waters are quite muddy. The supporters of an independent Palestinian state should first look at what other Arab neighbors have to say about it. For example, what Syrian president Hafez Assad once told Arafat, “You do not represent Palestine as much as we [Syria] do. Never forget this one point. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria… the Syrian authorities are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.”
Indeed, Syria ravaged Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon in 1976, and in 1983, it backed a successful military effort by pro-Syrian Palestinians to expel the PLO from Tripoli in northern Lebanon.
Revisionists would have us believe that Arafat sought only for an independent Palestinian state, but this was clearly not the objective. Arafat was quite fond of saying, “The PLO offers not the peace of the weak, but the peace of Saladin.” What is not stated, but what Arabs understand, as well as others who know their history of the Crusades, is that Saladin’s peace treaty with the Crusaders was merely a tactical ruse that was followed by Moslem attacks, which wiped out the Christian presence in the Holy Land.
In 1980, Arafat said, “The question of borders does not interest us. Palestine is only a small drop in the great Arab ocean. Our nation is the great Arab nation extending from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and beyond.”
So how exactly has Arafat managed to attain almost rock star like world status? In his book, A Durable Peace, Benyamin Netanyahu coins the phrase, “false reductionism”, whereby all the Middle East conflicts are reduced to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is then reduced to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and you are then ready for the final and logical step; reduce all the various Palestinian communal groupings and points of view to a single, anti-Israel “liberation movement,” the Palestinian Liberation Organization. This completes the role reversal whereby Israel is transformed into an evil and heartless villain challenged by a Zapata like force of freedom fighters.
The icing on this particular piece of cake came in 1994 when Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. To have even been considered for such high praise, Arafat must surely have been a man committed to peace. Well, let’s look at just a few of the highlights of Arafat’s peace promoting life.
In 1970, Arafat introduced the world to modern day terrorism. Yes, in the world where political correctness did not exist, you would be able to look up “terrorist” in any dictionary and see Arafat’s ugly mug. In what history has come to know as “Black September” the Arafat led PLO assassinated Jordanian Prime Minister Wafsi Tal, along with Cleo Noel, the American Ambassador to Khartoum and his aid, Curtis Moore. This led to the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, but they found sanctuary in Lebanon and regrouped in time to instill murderous carnage upon the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. It was this public viewing of the murder of Israeli athletes that made Yasser Arafat and the PLO household names on a worldwide scale.
Arafat and the PLO’s next big move was in 1976 when they held 103 hostages at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. For many years following, the PLO occupied itself by bombing farms in northern Israel at random. This culminated into the assassination of an Israeli Ambassador by the PLO in London. This brought about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to dismantle the PLO terror bases and the PLO was again expelled, this time from Lebanon and forced to relocate to Tunis.
The list of Arafat led PLO atrocities is long and includes other notable events in the life of this peace loving leader such as the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Signing the Oslo Accords in 1993, then failing to live up to his agreements. Ditto the Wye River Plantation Agreement. Addressing the United Nations with an AK-47. Ordering countless assassinations and homicide bombings. The list goes on and on.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate what a peace loving man Arafat truly was, is to mention the murder of Hebrew University Professor Menachem Stern by two teenage Arabs. Most of the world probably never heard of Professor Stern, and I only mention him here because the two youths would later tell police they had murdered Mr. Stern as an initiation rite in order to qualify for Yasser Arafat’s ‘Fatah’ movement. This is a typical example what a wonderful peace loving man, Yasser Arafat truly was.
Arafat, with his own children safely exiled in France, had no problem recruiting the children of other Palestinians to strap on a bomb and commit mass homicide on anonymous Jews. The evening news with its revisionists and the world press and internet blogs with their Palestinian sympathizers may paint a rosy picture of Yasser Arafat, but the truth is, he was a viscious murderer, and the world is better off without him.
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