Through a glass, darkly

Arafat dies

Yasser Arafat is dead, finally.

Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo in 1929, although he lied about it and said he was born in Jerusalem. The fact that he lied about it shouldn't surprise anyone, Arafat clothed himself in lies his whole life. His whole public persona was built on a lie.

He helped found Fatah, an organization dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel in the late 1950's. By 1965 Fatah had launched terrorist attacks against Israel that have continued to this day, despite the fact that they have been counter-productive.

An Israeli official once said that "Arafat never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Arafat rejected the 2000 peace offer by Ehud Barak that would have given the Palestinians more than 95 percent of the disputed territories and Israel was even willing to compromise on the question of the so-called "Right of return," which would have allowed Palestinians to move into Israel itself.

Arafat was not just a danger to Israel and Israelis. In 1973 Black September terrorists, a PLO group, took over the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan.

On Arafat's telephoned orders, which were intercepted and recorded, the terrorists killed U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Charge d'Affairs George Moore along with a Belgian official. In 1974 members of the PLO group Palistine Liberation Front hijacked the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro and executed a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer.

Arafat backed the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 as well as Saddam Hussein, even after Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Arafat has been a danger to other Muslims and Arabs. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war the PLO set up bases in Jordan. The actions of the PLO, and the increased Israeli attention it drew to that country, caused problems with other groups in Jordan. The PLO actively subverted the government causing King Hussein to decide to attack it. After being forced to leave Jordan the PLO set up camp in Lebanon which promply sank into civil war and was taken over by Syria, the only country in the world currently occupying another. (We have turned over sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government and Afghanistan has already elected its own governement so America doesn't count.)

Arafat has never lived up to any of the many commitments he has made over the years. Under the Oslo Accords Arafat was supposed to stop engaging in terrorism and stop inciting others to terrorism but there is a large body of proof showing that never happened. Papers in Arafat's own handwriting show that he has continued to make payments directly to terrorists for their actions, sometimes posthumusly, as in the case of suicide bombers, to their families.

Depite the fact that Yasser Arafat is a murderer, a thief, and a corrupter of youth the United Nations in its infinite stupidity is flying the U.N. flag at half mast. Cheese eating surrender monkey Jacques Chirac attended Arafat at his bedside. Leaders, if you can call a bunch of spineless panderers that, of many nations will no doubt attend the funeral.

The funeral is no doubt going to be a spectacle of AK-47 toting, masked Palestinians weeping and throwing themselves on the coffin as it is carried to its final resting place.