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Guest
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Matthew
Rojansky
Matthew
Rojansky is a graduate student in law and international affairs
at Stanford University and has studied and worked in the
Middle
East.
Don’t
Eulogize the Tsar of Modern Terrorism
Arafat's
bloody legacy...
[Matthew
Rojansky] 11/15/04
In
death, Yasser Arafat has become a figure “larger than life” in
the Western press. The New York Times recently referred to him as “a symbol of suffering
and steadfastness” and “the guerrilla fighter and Nobel Prize
winner who has symbolized the Palestinian struggle for statehood
for the last four decades.” Such willing promulgation
by Western journalists of Arafat’s father-of-a-nation image
among Palestinians, coupled with a systematic de-emphasis of
his appalling criminal past, runs the risk of rewriting history
and whitewashing the record of one of the cruelest terrorists
of all time. Yasser Arafat not only does not deserve
the formulaic eulogy due departed heads of state, he deserves
to be accorded in death the moral condemnation warranted by
a lifetime of theft, deceit, and murder.
Arafat
was a pioneer in the field of human suffering. In 1959,
he founded the Fatah movement, which was expressly dedicated
to the destruction of the State of Israel, and which emerged
in the mid-1960’s as the dominant faction in the PLO. After
realizing that the Jewish population of Israel could not be
destroyed through conventional military attack by Arab armies,
Arafat led the PLO in a terror campaign against civilians,
including the ambush-murders of Israeli schoolchildren in 1968,
the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics,
and the torture-killing of American diplomats taken hostage
in Khartoum. For these and other atrocities, Arafat was
awarded the honor in 1974 of addressing the UN General Assembly,
which duly distinguished him as the sole legitimate representative
of the Palestinian people, and granted his terrorist syndicate
special observer status at the UN.
Rather
than live up to the “freedom fighter” image he successfully
cultivated in the Muslim world and parts of the West, Arafat
continued to rely on terror as a political tool for the next
three decades. He committed the PLO to a “phased plan” for
the destruction of the Jewish state, and utterly rejected the “just
and lasting peace” called for by Security Council Resolution
242 after the Six Day War. Throughout the 1970’s and
1980’s, Arafat masterminded the hijacking of dozens of civilian
aircraft and exercised direct operational control in hundreds
of other dramatic terror attacks. One of the cruelest
was the 1985 murder of an elderly disabled American, Leon Klinghofer,
who was shot aboard the hijacked Italian cruise ship Achille
Lauro and thrown overboard in his wheelchair.
While
the PLO head continued to authorize murders of civilians, he
saw an opportunity to advance the “phased plan” for Israel’s
destruction by entering into secret negotiations for the establishment
of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the
early 1990’s. The ensuing “peace process” opened the
flood gates of foreign aid, at least $1.3 billion of which
was siphoned offshore to Arafat’s personal accounts, while
millions more went for weapons and ammunition that would be
used by terror groups under Arafat’s direct and indirect command,
even as peace talks proceeded throughout the decade. The “peace
process” was the ideal cover for Arafat’s 1996 commitment to “jihad,
jihad, jihad,” and his promise in 1998 to “intensify the blessed
intifada,” a strategy that came to fruition with his rejection
of peace in exchange for Palestinian statehood in July 2000,
and his public call for a new wave of terror against Israel
two months later.
Despite
a top aide’s comparison of the PLO leader to Mother Teresa
and Nelson Mandela—who he said would also have become terrorists
under “Israeli occupation”—Yasser Arafat’s acceptance in 1994
of the Nobel Prize for Peace made a mockery of the very word. A
medal that has memorialized the work of true humanitarians
like Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, and Martin Luther King, belonged
nowhere near the blood-stained hands of the founding father
of international terrorism.
Though
Arafat will be eulogized by his followers as a Nobel laureate
and a patriot, he must also be remembered as a serial murderer,
a deceiver, and the chief architect of his own people’s suffering. The
only fitting end for the Palestinian arch terrorist would have
been to seize his assets and distribute them to families of
terror victims, prohibit broadcasting of his memorial ceremony
in Cairo, and inscribe in large letters above his tomb, “here
lies Yasser Arafat, billionaire, murderer, and betrayer of
peace.” CRO
The
author is a graduate student in law and international affairs
at Stanford University and has studied and worked in the Middle
East.
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