Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Just who is Yasser Arafat?

If PLO strongman dies, funeral hymns should not obscure his record

As of Monday afternoon, Palestinian leaders were rushing to Paris to check on the condition of gravely ill 75-year-old PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

It tells us something about the nature of Arafat's organization that observers quite seriously predicted an early sign of which faction proves successful in the battle to succeed Arafat will be revealed by which can mount the first and biggest new terror attack, slaying the largest number of non-combatant Israelis.

Should Arafat die, the natural instinct of many of the media will be to honor the murderer for receiving an improbable Nobel Peace Prize for his success in pulling the wool over the eyes of many who believed he actually wanted peace with Israel.

In reality, of course, Arafat heads an organization built on the premise that any Arab who truly seeks peace with the Jews must be assassinated out of hand -- a process that has actively forestalled accommodation in the Arab world since the 1920s.

Historian Paul Johnson, in his massive 1991 history "Modern Times," reminds us the Palestine Liberation Organization in the '60s and '70s "was the largest, richest, best-armed and most active of all terrorist groups, with its own training camps of which many other, quite unrelated terrorist movements took advantage."

"Most PLO experts and instructors" of that era graduated from the Soviet terror training academy in Simteropol in the Crimea, the British historian reminds us. "The massacre of 26 pilgrims, mostly Puerto Ricans, at Israel's Lod airport in 1972, was carried out by Japanese Marxists, trained by the PLO in Lebanon."

Respect for the dead goes too far if it commands we ignore what Mr. Johnson calls "The lesson of the Seventies," which was "that terrorism actively, systematically and necessarily assisted the spread of the totalitarian state; ... that it exploited the apparatus of freedom in liberal societies and thereby endangered it. ... The political terrorism of the Seventies was a product of moral relativism. ... The unspeakable cruelties it practised were only made possible by the Marxist habit of thinking in terms of classes instead of individuals."

Nor is there any reason to believe this cat ever changed his spots. James Bovard, in his 2003 book "Terrorism and Tyranny," offers plenty of criticism for Israel. But "To recognize Israeli abuses is not to condone similar abuses of the Palestinian authority," he notes.

Arafat's "PA has routinely used torture. Arafat's intelligence operatives routinely murder Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. ... Many Palestinians believe that the PA, at least in the late 1990s, was more interested in collecting foreign aid for itself than in standing up for the rights and interests of the Palestinian people."