Death of a Jackal

Commentary by Greg Lewis / OpinionEditorials.com
November 13, 2004

Yasser Arafat is dead. Long may he stay dead, and long may the murderous ideology for which he became an international spokesperson suffer in the wake of his passing. For Yasser Arafat, by creating a cult of personality around the so-called "Palestinian" cause, has managed over the past 40 years, since he founded the PLO, to set back, perhaps irrevocably, the cause of human rights around the world.

Arafat has been brain-dead for the past decade. It has been the lot of French physicians (fitting circumstances to surround the demise of a degenerate international ingrate, don't you think?) to inform the world of this fact, although the Frog docs will testify only to the Palestinian leader's condition during the time he has been confined to one of their hospitals.

Indeed, it is Arafat, and Arafat alone, who has stood in the way of his professed people's achieving statehood. It is Arafat's intransigence that has been for years the final impediment to the realization of what is pronounced, in high diplomatic circles, to be "a Middle East Peace Agreement." As long as Arafat remained "sentient" (this descriptor is certainly open to debate, as witness recent video of the Palestinian leader, goat-fur helmet intact, uncomprehending drool-grin pasted on his face, entering a French MedEvac helicopter), peace in the Middle East would remain an impossible dream. Even former Israeli Prim Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview on Thursday with Fox News's Linda Vester, said that as long as Arafat was alive, there was no hope that a moderate would come to power in Palestine.

It simply never occurred to Arafat that Israelis and Palestinians might live harmoniously or in close geographical proximity. Arafat's stated goal has never been other than to "push Israel into the sea." Indeed, Arafat managed to parlay transparent duplicity into a position of international celebrityhood, not to mention a Nobel Peace Prize. He became the poster boy for the idea — recently given bolstered credence by the revelation that Kofi Annan and others of his ilk, including French, German, British, and Russian diplomats, were on the take from Saddam Hussein — that no matter how fatuous and insupportable your idea of what the minimum standards for nationhood might be, you ought to go ahead and state your case to the UN, knowing that that organization, at least on the level of international diplomacy, tilts so far to the guilt-ridden, self-deprecating left that your message has a way-better-than-average chance of being heard and appreciated, as long as it is sprinkled liberally with references to your and your people's victimization at the hands of such imperialist capitalist nations as the United States of America and Israel.

I do hope that they observe Islamic convention and manage to get Arafat's body buried within 24 hours of his officially reported death and that in doing so they gloss over the fact that Arafat, in the spirit of the culture of death and hopelessness which he has spawned among the Palestinian Arabs who have fallen under his deleterious influence and which culture his charges have adopted, will be recognized by the history yet to be set down as the selfish, lying perpetuator of his people's demise that he has been. Arafat, through his abjectly unscrupulous leadership, has leveraged the suffering and hopelessness of the Palestinian people into an enormous personal fortune and a position as — to anyone who has eyes to see — a figure emblematic of the corruption and disingenuousness that the "cause" of the left, which includes Palestinian nationhood, has become.

Yasser Arafat: Long may his legacy die!