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Middle East
Wall Street Journal: The End of ’Arafat’
2003-09-17
Even if he lives, the idea of him must die.
EFL; go read it all.
Reflecting the views of Israel’s Cabinet, Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said publicly over the weekend that "killing" Yasser Arafat was "one of the options." Secretary of State Colin Powell of course had to say that exiling or executing Arafat would incite Arab rage, that it would be most unhelpful to the peace process, etc., etc.
'Twouldn't be diplomatic to holler "off with his head!" even though Colin is probably feeling the urge...
The truth is that Yasser Arafat’s moment in history has ended. . . . "Arafat" should enter history not merely as the name of one autocratic man, but as the name we assign to an entire Western phenomenon of false thinking. "Arafat," we now see, has come to represent the act of self-delusion on a massive, international scale. "Arafat" is about refusing to believe that an adversary is simply irredeemable. Most importantly at this particular moment, "Arafat" is about allowing barbarism, or its techniques, to challenge the political tenets of civilized life.
That pretty well sums up Yasser. Us westerners have degenerated into thinking that other people think just like we do, they just wear funny hats or shoes occasionally. On the moral level, we've reached the point after years of "moral equivalence" of assuming that Iago was merely misunderstood and that a hug would have brought him around. There's little room in our thinking for the idea of pure amorality. We simply have difficulty accepting the fact that psychopaths don't have consciences to appeal to.
For years the Western nations that emerged from World War II and the Cold War have been playing with fire by pretending that their world and the alternative world of "Arafat" could somehow coexist. More than anything, this impossible notion reflected political and moral fatigue. Thus in the 1990s, the world came very close to letting "Arafat," this time in the person of Slobodan Milosevic, achieve its logical end on European soil, again. But the United States intervened and Milosevic is on trial for crimes against civilized humanity. George W. Bush’s decision to go to war against the regime of Saddam Hussein was the opposite of "Arafat" thinking; it was a decision to refute "Arafat."
Luckily Bush is not an isolated phenomenon, no matter how much the professionally Sensitive™ would like to make him so. See also Saddam Hussein, multiple incidents. See also Noriega a few years back.
If you look at the Nobel Prizes’ own biography of Yasser Arafat, you find this remarkable sentence toward the end: "Like other Arab regimes in the area, however, Arafat’s governing style tended to be more dictatorial than democratic." That is to say, Arafat by his own choice of governance—dictatorship over democracy—bears individual responsibility for the legacy he leaves. That legacy includes: the contemporary crime of hijacking and blowing up civilian-filled airliners; the attempted destabilization of Jordan and Israel and the successful destruction of Lebanon as a formerly sovereign nation; and decades of violated international agreements, culminating in the collapse of Oslo. Last year, in a perfect storm of bad faith, Arafat was caught paying for the shipment of arms from Iran to the Palestinian territories aboard the Karine A.
Also add to the bill of partculars: providing a "cause" which other Arab despots and terrorists could use to promote their own causes and distract their subjects from their own misery; e.g. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the House of Saud, etc.
Across these years, the West, mainly the European nations, accomplished the post-World War II feat of pretending that crime is not crime, so long as the motives and politics for the crimes are moralized. The U.S. and Israel participated as well in the pretense, bringing Arafat out of exile in Tunis. The world has learned since that this apologetics* (and much direct funding) has made possible any crime, culminating in the anti-moral act known as suicide bombers. Arafat most recently threw over Mahmoud Abbas, and the fatigued West barely sighed in complaint.
*Disagree with the word choice here. "Apologetics" is the systematic defense of the doctrines of a religious faith; for example, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologia or St. Augustine’s Confessions. I think the author meant "appeasement" or perhaps "co-dependent enabling."
This past September 3, in an article published in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Ayyam, the Palestinian writer Tawfiq Abu Bakr wrote: "It is difficult to find a greater and more deeply rooted culture of self-deception than that in our Arab and Palestinian arena." But we in the West fomented that culture of self-deception, by perpetuating the conceit that Yasser Arafat—"Arafat"—was the singular vessel of peace for the Palestinians. He manifestly is not. The Israelis are in the best position to know what to do at this point, though no option—seclusion, exile, trial or killing him—is particularly attractive.
Gotta disagree here, Mr. Journal. Killing him is manifestly attractive. Despots maintain power, in part, by killing or otherwise disposing of anyone else who is competent to replace them. Erase Arafat, and the Palestinian enterprise has no single effective leader. (With any luck, all of those with the potential to become the next Arafat will kill each other off in the ensuing Palestinian civil war.)
But Israel has to live (or die) with Arafat. The U.S. for its part, rather than sustain the Arafat conceit as it is doing now, should say it is no longer going to be associated with Arafat and what he stands for.
We said that last year. The Karine A was what sealed it, in fact...
As for the Palestinians and Arabs, the President of the United States has said many times that he supports a Palestinian state. Now they too have to decide whether the moment has arrived to get past "Arafat."
There are occasional voices that say he's got to go. They're usually drowned out by the rent-a-mob. We — and they — should keep in mind the percentage of the electorate that voted in favor of Saddam Hussein last time around, and the percentage that fought for him.
For those who will scream that this is more "unilateralism," we would say that for some 30 years there were crucial breakpoints, most recently the Oslo concessions and the Abbas opening, where credible pressure on Arafat from important players in the West and Middle East might have avoided arriving at where we are now. It never came. Not once. Where Yasser Arafat spends his eternal rest the rest of his life is not important. What matters is for the world to recognize that it is time to get rid of "Arafat."
Posted by:Mike

#3  Probability of Yasser getting zapped seems to be trending up in the past few days. I see a bus boom in the relatively near future followed by a an Apache raid on Ramallah...
Posted by: Fred   2003-9-17 3:35:41 PM  

#2  Secretary of State Colin Powell of course had to say that exiling or executing Arafat would incite Arab rage, that it would be most unhelpful to the peace process, etc., etc.

"Unhelpful"???? Haaahahahahahaaaa!!!!!!!!

Arafart's permanent disappearance from the stage would be the biggest boost that the peace process could ever receive.
Posted by: Bomb-a-rama   2003-9-17 1:53:43 PM  

#1  I don't have the info to research but maybe someone can correct me if I am wrong : It was Europe, James Baker and the UN who forced Arafat and his PLO on Israel at Madrid at the beginning of the 90's?
Posted by: Barry   2003-9-17 1:15:12 PM  

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