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November 12, 2004
Yassir Arafat
When I first heard that Yassir Arafat was seriously ill and that his days may be numbered, my first response was "good." My second response was to ask forgiveness for that thought from the good Lord. I'm pretty confident, though, that Arafat will have a much tougher time getting through the pearly gates than me.
The plight of the Palestinian people is at once sad and maddening. Sad because so many of the live in such abject poverty, and are controlled by "leaders" who are nothing more than terrorists. It is maddening because they have brought so much of it on themselves. Their history is one of lost opportunities.
Arafat was as much trouble to the Arab nations among which he and his PLO lived as the Israelis against whom he fought. King Hussein had to use his army to chase him out of Jordan. He brought nothing but misery to the Lebanese when he used Beruit as a base. And his tenure as leader of the Palestinian Authority has only brought a much worse form of terrorism, suicide bombings, to the West Bank and Israel.
He stole upwards of a billion dollars from his own people. The money now resides in Swiss bank accounts. If the secret codes died with him, then that is just all the more money that he squandered for the "cause".
President Clinton gave Arafat his Palestinian nation on a silver platter and he turned it down. The excuse was that he would only be granted 95 or 98% of the West Bank, and the few Israeli enclaves left constituted an intollerable insult. The real reason, perhaps, is that he was so locked into his role as rebel that he could not handle the idea of actually leading a nation.
Perhaps the best insight into his character took place some years ago when it was reported that he threatened his own security chief with a pistol at a cabinet-type meeting. This showed Arafat as he truely was; the Arab equivalent to the teenager who robbed convenience stores grown up to be mafia don. He was nothing more than a street thug who managed to ingratiate himself with world leaders.
Now we have the sickening spectacle of these so-called leaders paying tribute to the fallen terrorist. It's bad enough that the man was actually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Scenes such as the huge funeral with thousands of weeping worshipers are unfortunately the norm for such types. So many showed up for Stalin's funeral that crowd control became impossible and, in a macabre tribute to the dictator, hundreds suffocated.
Perhaps now the new Palestinian leadership will be able to break free of the bonds of the past that held Arafat so tightly. A look at their personal histories does not give one optimism, unfortunately. But it took a protoge of Stalin, one Nikita Khrushchev, to lead that country out of the darkness of terror. While Khrushchev remained a dictator (and indeed something of a warmonger), at least the mass murders stopped. It is not wishing for much to hope that the new Palestinian leaders can do as much.
Update I
So why did so many Westerners fall for his act? Max Boot, writing in the Sunday Washington Times, says that they are
Motivated by a combination of guilt for their countries' past conduct, a taste for vicarious revolutionary adventure, and condescension toward Africans and Asians thought incapable of Western standards, European and American intellectuals were willing to excuse any crime committed in the name of "national liberation."
Makes sense to me.
Update II
Charles Krauthammer thinks that with the death of Arafat the prospects for peace are more distant than most people think.
Posted by Tom at November 12, 2004 8:20 AM
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