No Tears for Arafat

It is a measure of the corrupting power of moral relativism and doctrinaire appeasement that politicians, the press, and the world are shedding tears for Yassir Arafat, who died in foggy circumstances in a French military hospital early on the morning of November 11^th after being airlifted there from his three-year incarceration in Ramallah. At least, that is official date of his death. He may have died much sooner than that, but the otherwise pliant French aren't telling. Nor is his high-living, spendthrift widow, Suha, heiress now to mind-boggling amounts of money Arafat embezzled from his precious Palestinian people for deposit into his own bank accounts. Nor are his successors in the Palestinian Authority talking much about it. After all, he was their "hero."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a lapse of his usual articulated moral clarity, called him "an icon of the Palestinian people…Whatever differences we had…it is important to recognize this." Perhaps. Al Capone is an icon to murderous gangsters, and Charles Manson is an icon to murderous psychopaths. When they died, were they feted with elaborate funerals attended by criminal prosecutors? Arafat was murderous and likely a psychopath, as well. In short, he was a killer, for the sake of killing, for the sake of becoming dictator over millions of stateless refugees in a mythical country called Palestine, one of whose neighbors would not be Israel, not if he had anything to do with it. The erasure of Israel from the Mideast map was his malign obsession.

President Bush said, "We express our condolences to the Palestinian people….We hope that the future will bring peace and the fulfillment of their aspirations for an independent, democratic Palestine that is at peace with its neighbors." As "democratic" as the IRA? The Basque Separatists? More likely an Arafat-ruled Palestine, if it ever came into existence, would have been as "democratic" as Robert Mugabe's Stalinist reign of terror, racism, and destruction in Zimbabwe. But Bush has sent an American diplomat to represent this country at Arafat's Cairo funeral. That is disgraceful, especially when one remembers that American diplomats died on Arafat's orders.

All the major world leaders sent "condolences," except Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel -- who must have taken some satisfaction for neglecting to mention Arafat's name in his statement to the Knesset -- and also with the possible exception of John Howard, newly reelected prime minister of Australia, who apparently refrained from communicating an iota of regret that the killer had expired. Not all politicians are epistemologically challenged or given to transparent crocodile tears.

French president Jacques Chirac announced "It is with emotion that I have learnt of the death of President Yassir Arafat." Which emotion was that? Grief, or relief? Secretary of State Colin Powell, who recently betrayed Taiwan, chimed, "We know that, in the eyes of the Palestinian people, Arafat embodied their hopes and dreams for the achievement of an independent Palestinian state." Somehow, Taiwan as an independent state not under the thumb of totalitarian China is far less desirable a value than an independent Palestinian state that will declare war on Israel. Go figure. And, Colin: Never mind what he was "in the eyes of the Palestinian people." He was a killer, and you know it.

Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, according to the London Daily Telegraph, called Arafat "one of the few world leaders who was instantly recognizable everywhere." Perhaps he was trying for some subtle, post-Halloween humor.

ABC reporter Lama Hasan claimed that Arafat was "seen as a terrorist" by many people. One must wonder what gave them that impression! His body count? Tom Brokow of NBC called Arafat a "dedicated militant." Dedicated to what? President Murabek of Egypt called him a "man of courage." Can anyone remember the last time Arafat faced down an Israeli tank? National Public Radio called him a "statesman." Of what state? Other news media and admirers had the unmitigated, Michael Moore-ish gall to call him the "George Washington" of his cause.

But Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, born in Cairo, Egypt, was a career killer. He was chief of the PLO, through which he planned and carried out massacres, bombings, plane hijackings, drive-by shootings, and most recently the "intifada" of suicide bombers in Israel. His victims number in the thousands, including not only Israelis and other Arabs, but Westerners, including Americans. The PLO allied itself with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two other terrorist gangs.

That bloody, forty-year career was made possible by a Western refusal to acknowledge that he was a killer and that his "cause" was, and still is, a tissue of fabrications about the plight of refugees spurned by other Arab governments but, through diplomatic legerdemain, made Israel's responsibility.

To repeat: Yassir Arafat was a career killer. A mass murderer. A creature that aspired to political power on a growing pyramid of bodies, the method of any other ambitious tyrant. There is no justification whatsoever for calling him as a "hero," "statesman," "freedom fighter," "president," or even a "militant." All the evasive euphemisms in the world will not conceal the fact that he was a killer. In all the somber, deferential media commentary and recaps of his career, the term "terrorist" keeps popping up. It won't go away, not even from the minds of the advocates of appeasement.

So why is his death being treated as though the Queen of England had died overnight? Since when do respectable presidents, premiers, and prime ministers mourn the death of certified sleaze, and weep at the decease of a caricature of evil? And why is anyone who identified Arafat for what he was -- a killer -- being labeled a "detractor," a "villifier," a "harsh critic"? Why are those who are moral enough to call him for what he was, in turn being vilified?

Observe the double standard: It is unfair to judge a killer like Arafat, to wish him a death as terrible as any he has caused, and good riddance, but somehow proper to heap moral opprobrium on those who have so justly judged him.

We enter through the Looking Glass of diplomacy and moral relativism a world where nothing seems what it is, where things are what moral relativists wish them to be. It is a realm more perilously fantastic than anything Lewis Carroll could have imagined. When Alice entered Wonderland, she was brave enough to call things what they were. But our mature, "worldly," university-educated political leaders, when they enter it, become squeamish, pragmatic cowards, ready to cut cards with the devil in a game of moral equivalence. Now that their "icon" is gone, they are hoping that "peace" will really have a chance in the Mideast, that the Hegelian notion of thesis and antithesis can be made to work.

But a Palestinian state would mean the end of Israel, which would be enclosed on all sides by states that wish to erase it from the map and launch a second Holocaust. Make no mistake about it: Everyone concerned in the "peace process" knows this, but not everyone wishes to believe it. Israel, in this world of make-believe, cannot claim a moral right to exist without accommodating its determined destroyers. It is the only terminus of Bush's "road map." "Peace," to Arafat, to the Palestinians, means a Mideast without Israel. That is all it has ever meant these last forty years. Check the PLO manifesto and any Palestinian schoolbook atlas.

It is a world where evil men can be forgiven and honored, and their evil actions discounted or swept under the rug of compromise in the name of peace at any price. It is a world where the innocent are punished, and the guilty are awarded Nobel Peace Prizes.

Our political leaders, our intellectuals, our newspaper columnists, have not learned an important lesson from World War II, or even from recent history, which is that "peace at any price," a peace that discards all moral judgment, that rests on a damning evasion of the nature and ends of evil, can only mean the peace of death. Death, destruction and misery are the only rewards for sanctioning evil, for paying respects for the passing of one of its most notorious vehicles.

President Bush will not say it, but every American should reclaim their country's honor and toast: Yassir Arafat, you were a mangy, rabid, vicious dog, and may you burn in the hottest corner of hell.

And then they should demand that President Bush forget the United Nations and Europe and guarantee this country's safety and sovereignty by going after the growling, teeth-baring curs that rule Iran.

Edward Cline is a novelist who has written on the revolutionary war period. He is author of the Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the Revolutionary period, the detective novel First Prize, the suspense novel Whisper the Guns, and of numerous published articles, book reviews and essays.