Arafat dead at 75

[kg_veteran]

Link

[FishForLunch]

Well CNN is mourning

[mercury_rev]

Good riddance to a terrorist murderer.

[capitalcity]

...the world has lost a nobel prize winning ambassador of peace.[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-disgusted.gif[/img]

[EricaLubarsky]

I can't say that I'm saddened.

[kg_veteran]

From Power Line:

Omitted from Arafat's AP obituary

Some date the beginning of the terrorist war against the United States to the seizure of 67 American hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran by the followers of Ayatollah Khomeni in November 1979 or to the bombing of the barracks in Beirut by Hezbollah that killed 241 Marines in October 1983.

Yasser Arafat, however, is the true father of this war. First Arafat created Black September as an offshoot of his Fatah organization. He presided over the operation resulting in the massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich by Black September in 1972. The following year Arafat became the first Arab terrorist to target Americans.

He personally ordered the assassination of American Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel, Jr. and charge d'affaires Curtis Moore in Khartoum on March 2, 1973. (See my "Who murdered Cleo Noel?") Arafat himself presided over the Khartoum operation and ordered the assassination of Noel and Moore by short wave radio from PLO headquarters in Beirut. Moore and Noel were only the first of many Americans murdered by Arafat's terrorist thugs.

In a bizarre footnote to his assassination of American officials, Arafat became the foreign leader most frequently hosted by President Bill Clinton during his two terms in office. The many cold-blooded murders for which Arafat was responsible in the course of his life were politely passed over in silence as they remained entirely unavenged.

As the founder of Fatah and leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Arafat waged a lifelong war on the state of Israel and its Jewish citizens. Although Arafat occasionally interrupted the war against Israel with short term periods of truce or "hudna," he never relented from his orgy of murder or ceased to pursue his lifelong goal of destroying Israel.

In November 1974, while in the middle of his murder spree, Arafat was invited to address the United Nations. He came accompanied to New York by three henchmen who had assisted or participated in the operation to assassinate Noel and Moore. He gave his speech at the General Assembly podium with a pistol and holster strapped to his hip. His many diplomatic victories were not the fruit of subtlety or grace.

Over the final four years of his life he presided over the renewed terrorist war against Israel in which he funded and personally approved the suicide bomb operations that are his true contribution to civilization -- a contribution that made him a hero in European capitals from London to Berlin. In his usual style, he had set up entities to carry out the suicide bomb operations that allowed him to deny responsibility for them. Only the willfully credulous were fooled.

In the notorious tradition of the "175ers" among the Nazi leadership, Arafat led an incredibly dissolute life. It was his dissolution that ultimately resulted in his contraction of AIDS, the disease that led to his death outside Paris yesterday. As with so many basic facts about this utterly vile human being, the truth (although baldly reported by Oriana Fallaci in the fall of 1981) remains shrouded in myth, deception and outright lies.

Late in his life Arafat took a wife for the purpose of keeping up appearances in a culture that loathes homsexuality. While his wife and political epigones fought over the billions he had stolen from his supposed beneficiaries, the scene of his death at a French military hospital outside Paris came to resemble a protracted farce befitting a second-rate Hollywood comedy. On the other hand, in an episode worthy of Kafka or Orwell, Arafat won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994.

[kg_veteran]

More of the truth about Arafat:

Yasser Arafat and the Myth of Legitimacy

[kg_veteran]

Arafat the monster
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | November 11, 2004
link

YASSER ARAFAT died at age 75, lying in bed surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves.

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."

God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

Arafat always inspired flights of nonsense from Western journalists, and his last two weeks were no exception.

Derek Brown wrote in The Guardian that Arafat's "undisputed courage as a guerrilla leader" was exceeded only "by his extraordinary courage" as a peace negotiator. But it is an odd kind of courage that expresses itself in shooting unarmed victims -- or in signing peace accords and then flagrantly violating their terms.

Another commentator, columnist Gwynne Dyer, asked, "So what did Arafat do right?" The answer: He drew worldwide attention to the Palestinian cause, "for the most part by successful acts of terror." In other words, butchering innocent human beings was "right," since it served an ulterior political motive. No doubt that thought brings daily comfort to all those who were forced to bury a child, parent, or spouse because of Arafat's "successful" terrorism.

Some journalists couldn't wait for Arafat's actual death to begin weeping for him. Take the BBC's Barbara Plett, who burst into tears on the day he was airlifted out of the West Bank. "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound," Plett reported from Ramallah, "I started to cry." Normal people don't weep for brutal murderers, but Plett made it clear that her empathy for Arafat -- whom she praised as "a symbol of Palestinian unity, steadfastness, and resistance" -- was heartfelt:

"I remember well when the Israelis re-conquered the West Bank more than two years ago, how they drove their tanks and bulldozers into Mr. Arafat's headquarters, trapping him in a few rooms, and throwing a military curtain around Ramallah. I remember how Palestinians admired his refusal to flee under fire. They told me: `Our leader is sharing our pain, we are all under the same siege.' And so was I." Such is the state of journalism at the BBC, whose reporters do not seem to have any trouble reporting, dry-eyed, on the plight of Arafat's victims. (That is, when they mention them -- which Plett's teary bon voyage to Arafat did not.)

And what about those victims? Why were they scarcely remembered in this Arafat death watch?

How is it possible to reflect on Arafat's most enduring legacy -- the rise of modern terrorism -- without recalling the legions of men, women, and children whose lives he and his followers destroyed? If Osama bin Laden were on his deathbed, would we neglect to mention all those he murdered on 9/11?

It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it.

Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.

Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?

So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command.

[dude1394]

Maybe bush should have said, god bless his soul, he'll sure need it. Good riddance..

[Drbio]

Let him rot in hell.

[dalmations202]

Geopolitical Intelligence Report: The Death of Arafat

THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT

The Death of Arafat
November 11, 2004 2359 GMT

By George Friedman

That Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era is so obvious that it hardly bears saying. The nature of the era that is ending and the nature of the era that is coming, on the other hand, do bear discussing. That speaks not only to the Arab-Israeli conflict but to the evolution of the Arab world in general.

In order to understand Arafat's life, it is essential to understand the concept "Arab," and to understand its tension with the concept "Muslim," at least as Arafat lived it out. In general, ethnic Arabs populate North Africa and the area between the Mediterranean and Iran, and between Yemen and Turkey. This is the Arab world. It is a world that is generally -- but far from exclusively -- Muslim, although the Muslim world stretches far beyond the Arab world.

To understand Arafat's life, it is much more important to understand the Arab impulse than to understand the Muslim impulse. Arafat belonged to that generation of Arab who visualized the emergence of a single Arab nation, encapsulating all of the religious groups in the Arab world, and one that was essentially secular in nature. This vision did not originate with Arafat but with his primary patron, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the founder of modern Egypt and of the idea of a United Arab Republic. No sense can be made of Arafat's life without first
understanding Nasser's.

Nasser was born into an Egypt that was ruled by a weak and corrupt monarchy and effectively dominated by Britain. He became an officer in the Egyptian army and fought competently against the Israelis in the 1948 war. He emerged from that war committed to two principles: The first was recovering Egyptian independence fully; the second was making Egypt a modern, industrial state. Taking his bearing from Kamal Ataturk, who founded the modern Turkish state, Nasser saw the military as the most modern institution in Egypt, and therefore the instrument to achieve both independence and modernization. This was the foundation of the Egyptian revolution.

Nasser was personally a practicing Muslim of sorts -- he attended mosque -- but he did not see himself as leading an Islamic revolution at all. For example, he placed numerous Coptic Christians in important government positions. For Arafat, the overriding principle was not Islam, but Arabism. Nasser dreamed of uniting the Arabs in a single entity, whose capital would be Cairo. He believed that until there was a United Arab Republic, the Arabs would remain the victims of foreign imperialism.

Nasser saw his prime antagonists as the traditional monarchies of the Arab world. Throughout his rule, Nasser tried to foment revolutions, led by the military, that would topple these monarchies. Nasserite or near-Nasserite revolutions toppled Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan monarchies. Throughout his rule, he tried to bring down the Jordanian, Saudi and other Persian Gulf regimes. This was the constant conflict that overlaid the Arab world from the 1950s until the death of Nasser and the rise of Anwar Sadat.

Geopolitics aligned Nasser's ambitions with the Soviet Union. Nasser was a socialist but never a Marxist. Nevertheless, as he
confronted the United States and threatened American allies among the conservative monarchies, he grew both vulnerable to the
United States and badly in need of a geopolitical patron. The Soviets were also interested in limiting American power and saw Nasser as a natural ally, particularly because of his confrontation with the monarchies.

Nasser's view of Israel was that it represented the intrusion of British imperialism into the Arab world, and that the conservative monarchies, particularly Jordan, were complicit in its creation. For Nasser, the destruction of Israel had several uses. First, it was a unifying point for Arab nationalism. Second, it provided a tool with which to prod and confront the monarchies that tended to shy away from confrontation. Third, it allowed for the further modernization of the Egyptian military -- and therefore of Egypt -- by enticing a flow of technology from the Soviet Union to Egypt. Nasser both opposed the existence of Israel and saw its existence as a useful tool in his general project.

It is important to understand that for Nasser, Israel was not a Palestinian problem but an Arab problem. In his view, the particular Arab nationalisms were the problem, not the solution. Adding another Arab nationalism -- Palestinian -- to the mix was not in his interest. The Zionist injustice was against the Arab nation and not against the Palestinians as a particular nation. Nasser was not alone in this view. The Syrians saw Palestine as a district of Syria, stolen by the British and French. They saw the Zionists as oppressors, but against the Syrian nation. The Jordanians, who held the West Bank, saw the West Bank as part of the Jordanian nation and, by extension, the rest of Palestine as a district of Jordan. Until the 1967 war, the Arab world was publicly and formally united in opposing the existence of Israel,
but much less united on what would replace Israel after it was destroyed. The least likely candidate was an independent Palestinian state.

Prior to 1967, Nasser sponsored the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization under the leadership of Ahmed al Shukairi. It was an entirely ineffective organization that created a unit that fought under Egyptian command. Since 1967 was a disaster for Nasser, "fought" is a very loose term. The PLO was kept under tight control, careful avoiding the question of nationhood and focusing on the destruction of Israel.

After the 1967 war, the young leader of the PLO's Fatah faction took control of the organization. Yasser Arafat was a creature of
Nasser, politically and intellectually. He was an Arabist. He was a modernizer. He was a secularist. He was aligned with the Soviets. He was anti-American. Arafat faced two disparate questions in 1967. First, it was clear that the Arabs would not defeat Israel in a war, probably in his lifetime; what, therefore, was to be done to destroy Israel? Second, if the only goal was to destroy the Israelis, and if that was not to happen anytime soon, then what was to become of the Palestinians? Arafat posed the question more radically: Granted that Palestinians were part of the Arab revolution, did they have a separate identity of their own, as did Egyptians or Libyans? Were they simply Syrians or Jordanians? Who were they?

Asserting Palestinian nationalism was not easy in 1967, because of the Arabs themselves. The Syrians did not easily recognize their independence and sponsored their own Palestinian group, loyal to Syria. The Jordanians could not recognize the Palestinians as separate, as their own claim to power even east of the Jordan would be questionable, let alone their claims to the West Bank. The Egyptians were uneasy with the rise of another Arab nationalism.

Simultaneously, the growth of a radical and homeless Palestinian movement terrified the monarchies. Arafat knew that no war would
defeat the Israelis. His view was that a two-tiered approach was best. On one level, the PLO would make the claim on behalf of the
Palestinian people, for the right to statehood on the world stage. On the other hand, the Palestinians would use small-scale paramilitary operations against soft targets -- terrorism -- to increase the cost throughout the world of ignoring the Palestinians.

The Soviets were delighted with this strategy, and their national intelligence services moved to facilitate it by providing training and logistics. A terror campaign against Israel's supporters would be a terror campaign against Europe and the United States. The Soviets were delighted by anything that caused pain and destabilized the West. The cost to the Soviets of underwriting Palestinian operations, either directly or through various Eastern European or Arab intelligence services, was negligible. Arafat became a revolutionary aligned with the Soviets.

There were two operational principles. The first was that Arafat himself should appear as the political wing of the movement, able
to serve as an untainted spokesman for Palestinian rights. The second was that the groups that carried out the covert operations
should remain complex and murky. Plausible deniability combined with unpredictability was the key.

Arafat created an independent covert capability that allowed him to make a radical assertion: that there was an independent Palestinian people as distinct as any other Arab nation. Terrorist operations gave Arafat the leverage to assert that Palestine should take its place in the Arab world in its own right.

If Palestine was a separate nation, then what was Jordan? The Hashemite kingdom were Bedouins driven out of Arabia. The majority
of the population were not Bedouin, but had their roots in the west - hence, they were Palestinians. If there was a Palestinian nation, then why were they being ruled by Bedouins from Arabia? In September 1970, Arafat made his move. Combining a series of hijackings of Western airliners with a Palestinian rising in Jordan, Arafat attempted to seize control of Jordan. He failed, and thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hashemite and Pakistani mercenaries. (Coincidentally, the military unit dispatched to Jordan was led by then-Brigadier Zia-ul-Haq, who later ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988 as a military dictator.)

Arafat's logic was impeccable. His military capability was less than perfect.

Arafat created a new group -- Black September -- that was assigned the task of waging a covert war against the Israelis and the West. The greatest action, the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, defined the next generation. Israel launched a counter-operation to destroy Black September, and the pattern of terrorism and counter-terrorism swirling around the globe was set. The PLO was embedded in a network of terrorist groups sponsored by the Soviets that ranged from Japan to Italy. The Israelis became part of a multinational counter-attack. Neither side could score a definitive victory.

But Arafat won the major victory. Nations are frequently born of battle, and the battles that began in 1970 and raged until the mid-1990s established an indelible principle -- there is now, if there was not before, a nation called Palestine. This was critical, because as Nasser died and his heritage was discarded by Anwar Sadat, the principle of the Arab nation was lost. It was only through the autonomous concept of Palestinian nationalism that Arafat and the PLO could survive.

And this was Arafat's fatal crisis. He had established the principle of Palestine, but what he had failed to define was what that Palestinian nation meant and what it wanted. The latter was the critical point. Arafat's strategy was to appear the statesman restraining uncontrollable radicals. He understood that he needed Western support to get a state, and he used this role superbly. He appeared moderate and malleable in English, radical and intractable in Arabic. This was his insoluble dilemma.

Arafat led a nation that had no common understanding of their goal. There were those who wanted to recover a part of Palestine and be content. There were those who wanted to recover part of Palestine and use it as a base of operations to retake the rest. There were those who would accept no intermediate deal but wanted to destroy Israel. Arafat's fatal problem was that in the course of creating the Palestinian nation, he had convinced all three factions that he stood with them.

Like many politicians, Arafat had made too many deals. He had successfully persuaded the West that (a) he genuinely wanted a compromise and (b) that he could restrain terrorism. But he had also persuaded Palestinians that any deal was merely temporary,
and others that he wouldn't accept any deal. By the time of the Oslo accords, Arafat was so tied up in knots that he could not
longer speak for the nation he created. More precisely, the Palestinians were so divided that no one could negotiate on their
behalf, confident in his authority. Arafat kept his position by sacrificing his power.

By the 1990s, the space left by the demise of pan-Arabism had been taken by the rise of Islamist religiosity. Hamas, representing the view that there is a Palestinian nation but that it should be understood as part of the Islamic world under Islamic law, had become the most vibrant part of the Palestinian polity. Nothing was more alien from Arafat's thinking than Hamas. It ran counter to everything he had learned from Nasser.

However -- and this is Arafat's tragedy -- by the time Hamas emerged as a power, he had lost the ability to believe in anything but the concept of the Palestinians and his place as its leader. As Hamas rose, Arafat became entirely tactical. His goal was to retain position if not power, and toward that end, he would do what was needed. A lifetime of tactics had destroyed all strategy.

His death in Paris was a farce of family and courtiers. It fitted the end he had created, because his last years were lived in a round of clever maneuvers leading nowhere. The Palestinians are left now without strategy, only tactics. There is no one who can speak for the Palestinians and be listened to as authoritative. He created the Palestinian nation and utterly disrupted the Palestinian state. He left a clear concept on the one hand, a chaos on the other.

It is interesting to wonder what would have happened if Arafat had won in Jordan in 1970, while Nasser was still alive. But that wasn't going to happen, because Arafat's fatal weakness was visible even then. The concept was clear -- but instead of meticulously planning a rising, Arafat improvised, playing politics within the PLO when he should have been managing combat operations. The chaos and failure that marked Black September became emblematic of his life.

Arafat succeeded in one thing, and perhaps that is enough -- he created the Palestinian nation against all enemies, Arab and non-
Arab. The rest was the endless failure of pure improvisation.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

<edit> save space.

[dude1394]

Just shows another failure off the accolytes of socialism.