Absolute and entire ugliness is rare, observed the Victorian
author John Ruskin. He did not have the pleasure of meeting Yasser
Arafat.
In his last photo opportunity, Arafat, whose soul reflected his
countenance, wore pajamas and a fur hat. As he clasped the hands of
members of his entourage, sporting a syphilitic grin, he made an
obscene attempt to raise an aide’s hand to his grotesque, giant
lips. The Arab on whose hand Arafat had orally fixated pulled away
persistently, embarrassed, as though a hound had mounted his
leg.
But Arafat’s mug and manners were the least of his obscenities.
The Egyptian-born representative of the Palestinian People began
his campaign of violence against Israel well before the 1967 war —
his official pretext.
One of his first acts of terror within Israel was in 1965 — a
failed attempt by the Fatah to bomb the National Water Carrier, the
country’s irrigation and reservoir system. One of the last
atrocities to have been carried out by Arafat’s Fatah and Al Aqsa
Martyrs occurred in March. Fatah and Hamas collaborated in a
double-suicide bombing in the port of Ashdod. Ten Israelis were
killed and 16 wounded.
OFFICIALLY, ARAFAT STOPPED claiming responsibility for acts of
terror in 1988. The West ignored the body count and took him at his
word—his English word.
In Arabic, however, Arafat persistently promised to
maintain the struggle to “eliminate the state of Israel and
establish a purely Palestinian state,” in the words of a 1996
speech delivered in Stockholm. It was a vow he repeated often, most
notably in the same year at a rally near Bethlehem: “We know only
one word — jihad. jihad, jihad, jihad. Whoever does not like it
can drink from the Dead Sea or from the Sea of Gaza.”
Or, as he prated to Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda, newspaper of
the Palestinian Authority (PA): “O my dear ones on the occupied
lands, relatives and friends throughout Palestine and the diaspora,
my colleagues in struggle and in arms, my colleagues in struggle
and in jihad … Intensify the revolution and the blessed intifada
… We must burn the ground under the feet of the invaders.”
My fear and loathing of Yasser Arafat was born of personal
experience as an Israeli. In 1974 Arafat sent the Democratic Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), an offshoot of the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), into northern Israel.
They infiltrated a high school in Maalot, killing 26 people; 21
were children only a little older than I was.
In April of that year, PLO terrorists attacked Kiryat Shmona,
murdering 18, including eight children. The pathologist who
performed the autopsies on the Maalot and Kiryat Shmona children
was a close family friend. He arrived at my father’s home
distraught and later suffered a nervous breakdown.
In March 1978, Fatah terrorists took over a bus on the Coastal
Haifa-Tel-Aviv highway (on which I traveled daily — in a bus — to
school and back), killing 21 Israelis.
THE COMMITTEE FOR ACCURACY in Middle East Reporting in America has
provided a potted historyof Arafat’s mass murders from 1965
until 2004. Some of the most ghastly acts on his rap sheet are the
slayings of 47 people on a Swissair flight in 1970; nine pupils and
three teachers in an attack on a school bus from Moshav Avivim,
also in 1970; 27 religious pilgrims at Lod Airport; 11 Israeli
athletes in the 1972 Munich Massacre.
Also bearing Arafat’s signature were the hijacking of an Air
France plane that ended with the Entebbe rescue and the pirating of
the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, during which a
wheelchair-bound elderly man, Leon Klinghoffer, was shot and thrown
overboard. This cold-blooded killing Arafat coordinated from his
headquarters in Tunis, to which he had been expelled from Lebanon.
And before that from Jordan.
That the Left grieves over Yasser Arafat is not surprising. This
is another manifestation of the coffeehouse humanitarianism of the
folks at CNN, the New York Times, and the U.N. and its
terrorist arm, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
A correspondent (and a writer in his own right) puts it better
than I ever could: “Theirs is a seeming Rousseauian sympathy for
the Symbolic Savage, any savage, wherever he may be, whom they
fantasize as fighting nobly against the stifling strictures of
Civil (and civilizing) Authority.”
Indeed, what does one say about a commentariat, and for that
matter, about kings and heads of state, whose “notion of
‘freedom,’” as my correspondent points out, “is better symbolized
by alienated rebel figures, such as Arafat and other terrorists —
stateless malcontents answerable to no one, whose chief enemies are
soap and razors”?
ESPECIALLY MISGUIDED WERE the debates over Arafat’s wealth — an
estimated $1.3 billion in personal holdings. The proverbial man
from Mars would be forgiven for thinking Arafat was an
entrepreneur, rather than a grubby thief.
Fortunately, Forbes’s Nathan Vardi audited Arafat,
discovering that he used this vast fortune, including “the $5.5
billion in international aid that has flowed into the PA since
1994,” to maintain an “elaborate patronage system” — corruption
was the byword of Arafat’s administration. The Palestinian
Legislator Hannan Ashrawi, however, preferred to characterize such
nepotism as “being fatherly” — a characterization MSNBC’s Joe
Scarborough failed to challenge.
Joe Scarborough, who usually likes to dish it straight up, also
claimed that Father Arafat walked away from Ehud Barak’s two-state
solution, brokered by President Bill Clinton, because he feared
assassination by the extremists who had — and still have — the
run of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Wrong. Arafat believed that by resorting to violence, he could
achieve a one-state solution. How else, asks writer
Maurice Ostroff, does one explain the dramatic rise in terror
attacks during 1993 and 1994 while peace talks were still in
progress?
As a master of triangulation, Arafat was able to string the
Israeli and American camps along while working diligently to reach
agreements with the most extreme Arab leaders and factions in the
PA and beyond. If anything, it was Arafat and his Fatah and Al-Aqsa
Martyrs’ close contacts with Damascus and Tehran, Hamas, and
Islamic Jihad that secured his safety for so long.
CONSIDERING THEIR NEWLY FOUND, elections-spurred affinity for
faith, Arafat’s liberal fans ought to acquaint themselves with some
facts. Particularly pertinent is the Palestinian fabrication about
Islam’s — and Arafat’s — attachment to Jerusalem.
“Yerushalaim” is the Hebrew biblical name for the city that was
sacred to Jews for nearly two thousand years before Muhammad. Not
once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Koran. Muhammad was said to have
departed to the heavens from the Al Aksa Mosque, but there was no
mosque in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque
were built on the Jewish Temple Mount. This usurpation was
subsequently justified by Muslim theologians by superimposing their
relatively recent fondness for Jerusalem upon the existing, ancient
sanctity of the place to Jews.
Samuel Katz, in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy In
Palestine, poses this question: What would the Christian
reaction be if the same Muslim theologians had chosen to
appropriate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, re-name it, declare
it Muslim property (which means killing for it), and demand Arafat
be buried in it?
Israel’s justice minister Yosef Lapid provided a wonderfully
apposite response: “Jerusalem is the city where Jewish kings are
buried and not Arab terrorists.”
Amen.
