Posted on 04/11/2002 1:58:22 PM PDT by quimby
The war that Arafat called forth (FOUAD AJAMI)
BY FOUAD AJAMI
We have come to the inevitable conclusion that the peace of Oslo that plucked Yasser Arafat from his exile in Tunisia nearly a decade ago and brought him to the Palestinian territories is now a thing of the past.
From the moment he arrived up till last week's Passover massacre in Netanya, the Palestinian leader aided, abetted, and led the forces of radicalism and terror. He operated on the blissful assumption that the other Arabs and powers beyond would come to the rescue, spare him the logic of his own deeds, deem him the best of a bad lot of alternatives. The "siege of Ramallah" that Arafat courted and rendered inevitable is not, save in his mind, a replay of 1982's Lebanon war.
Nor is it a mere recasting of that war's two antagonists, Arafat and his nemesis, Ariel Sharon.
No sovereign government could tolerate the current season of killing that Arafat unleashed on Israel. He has waged his cynical and brutal war with a cunning sense of Israel's scruples and restraint and its sensitivity to international norms and pressures. If this new cycle of warfare pits Sharon against Arafat, this is exactly the kind of war and the adversary that Arafat called forth. With brutal efficiency, it was his launching of the war in September 2000–upon his return from Camp David and his spurning of the peace offered him by Ehud Barak, Israel's soldier-statesman, and a solicitous Bill Clinton–that resurrected Sharon's political career.
Arafat broke Barak. The waves of suicide "martyrs" sent a bewildered Israeli nation in search of a leader who would deliver it from merciless terror. Over 18 months, Arafat came to present Israel with a sadistic challenge: With indiscriminate terror his instrument of war, he set out to wreck the nation's peace of mind, taunt its liberal culture, and destroy its modern economy.
Targeting the soul. The logic behind Arafat's ruthless method is easily seen. In the cold calculus, the balance of casualties now runs 3 to 1–in 18 months, 1,200 Palestinians have been killed for 370 Israelis. In the first intifada, which erupted in 1987 when Arafat was still away from the land, the ratio had been 25 to 1. The lieutenant who sat in for him at the Beirut summit, Farouk Qaddumi, cut to the heart of the matter. This second intifada is working, he said, because Israel "lost stability and security; psychological problems spread, and unemployment and emigration rose." Arafat aims at Israel's soul–to wear it down, to rob it of the sense of normalcy that has been its impossible dream since the beginning of its statehood.
As a gambler and adventurer averse to the normal work of nations, Arafat made peace with Israel only to break it. He had broken with the Arab world only to return to the Arab councils of power and to take up an old, failed history. He was unloved and distrusted by other Arabs. There was loathing of him in Beirut, a city he had set on fire for more than a decade, and contempt for him in Kuwait for his betrayal of the Kuwaitis in 1990's hour of need. But Arafat hoped that there would be uses for him and a new lease on life. This second intifada is his "gift" to the other Arabs: a macabre celebration of the "martyrs," a diversion from the verdict on the Arab condition rendered by the "boys of September 11" who gave the world a cruel illustration of the furies on the loose in Arab lands.
It was true to Arafat's way and to his history that he would try to hold America's campaign against terror hostage to his war against Israel. America is unloved in Arab lands, this argument runs, and its campaign can proceed only if Palestinian claims are satisfied. But this argument is supreme illusion. America indeed is unloved. In truth, the hatred for it is bottomless. Even if we cast Israel adrift, Arab opinion will cut us no slack.
In modern times, the Palestinians have been singularly unlucky in their choice of leaders. When statehood was first offered the Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s, their leader was a terrible man, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti (religious judge) of Jerusalem. He abandoned reason, moved to Hitler's Berlin, and hoped the Nazis would grant him a political world. In the 1960s, another Palestinian leader, a braggart by the name of Ahmad Shuqairi, was sure that Israel would be sacked and its people would flee or be put to the sword.
Arafat is of a piece with that history. The young Palestinian men and women, cruel and betrayed at the same time, who embrace death and destruction and spread it in their wake, would have had a different history had the man in the Ramallah compound been made of different stuff.
This is no argument. It is Administration policy.
The the best of my knowledge, he was not Arafat's blood uncle. Arafat has referred to Al-Husseini as "his spiritual uncle", which is worse. You can disavow an uncle who embraced Hitler and espoused the "Final Solution". But Arafat embraced such a man as if he was his uncle. Very revealing of the evil of this man who Colin Powell apparently considers to be a Palestinian George Washington.
Imagine if the Europeans had gotten together before the action in Kosovo to say that they would tolerate no attack on a "white nation." Yet the Arab nations have no shame in basing their entire foreign policy on naked racial solidarity. It is disgusting.
We should collect him and the other 99 sane Arabs scattered around the world, bring them to a safe house, and kill the 299,999,900 others.
No, I don't really mean this.
But what is our strategy in this war? No enemy before - not the Nazis, not the Soviets, not the Japanese - has been so dangerous. Even the coming conflict with the Chinese, 50 or 100 years down the road, will not be as vicious.
We are prisoners of our conscience, weakened from within by self-hating proponents of cultural relativism. Maybe I will start feeling more optimistic in six months after Saddam Hussein is overthrown. But if our own people don't "get it", we have no hope of winning this war.
Great read! I would like to see a photo of Arafat’s head about 200 feet from his body due to about 5 bomb belts being detonated on his body. Of course he would have been surrounded by his personal security guards before the blast.
I was not aware of a link either. But see this :
Muslim cleric calls for death of Arafat Says Israel should continue offensive until he's executed
See the Bold area of the article for detail : Such a false transformation of Islam was in fact made by the late Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. .....
Husseini ended his woeful life by putting his perverted religious teachings at the service of the evil and pagan Nazis.
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Muslim cleric calls for death of Arafat Says Israel should continue offensive until he's executed
and this:
Fouad Ajami: Don't Let Arafat Distract Us ^
And on the oil Embargo:
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