Posted on 11/12/2004 6:49:57 AM PST by GMMAC
Shed no tears for Yasser Arafat
The Edmonton Journal
Fri 12 Nov 2004
Page: A18
Section: Opinion
Byline: Lorne Gunter
On March 6, 1953, the day Joseph Stalin died, the New York Times proclaimed him a man who had risen "from Czarist oppression to transform Russia into a mighty socialist state."
The paper allowed that Stalin could at times be "ruthless" in pursuit of his goals and that he was "hard, mysterious, aloof, and rude" -- a sort of mid-century Donald Trump, I suppose. And it insisted he "took and kept the power in his country through a mixture of character, guile and good luck."
I guess so, if by "character" you mean widespread torture, by "guile" you mean gulags, and by "good luck" you mean the systematic execution of more than 20 million people.
Otherwise, you'd just have to admit that Stalin was one of history's evil butchers -- a rival of Hitler and Mao.
Yet as the Times obit shows, history has been far more severe with Stalin than the chattering toffs of his day were.
The same will surely be true of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, who died early Thursday.
The talking heads of our day are falling all over themselves to find ways to praise Arafat. Most are being careful not to be too openly laudatory of a man many people see as a mass murderer.
Still, Arafat, like Stalin before him, has been a darling of the Western liberal-left. So on his death, the little dictator has won much undeserved praise.
French President Jacques Chirac fawned that Arafat was "a man of courage and conviction." BBC Radio 4's Middle East correspondent, Barbara Plett, admitted on air, that when she watched Arafat fly off from his Ramallah compound in a helicopter for the last time last week, "I started to cry."
The Washington Post enthused that "for virtually his entire adult life, Yasser Arafat had one dream -- self-determination and statehood for the Palestinian people."
There is little evidence Arafat ever changed his belief that Palestinians could only achieve that dream through the annihilation of Israel. But that detail escaped the Post's notice.
Oh sure, Arafat changed his rhetoric. In the early 1990s, he began claiming he wanted peaceful co-existence with Israel -- the so-called "two-state solution." After he signed the Oslo peace accords in 1993, this rhetoric earned him a share of a Nobel prize.
But from the day the Nobel committee awarded Arafat his medal to now, 1,288 Israelis have been killed in terrorist attacks, many carried out by forces under Arafat's command. That's many times more than were killed in the three decades before Oslo, when Arafat made no secret that he craved "the destruction of Israel, and nothing else."
Murderous actions speak far louder than insincere words.
But a tragedy equal to that of Arafat's killings of Israeli innocents has been his failure of his own people.
When Arafat and his cronies returned to the Gaza Strip in 1994, in luxury SUVs and Mercedes, amid joyous firing of Kalashnikovs into the air, Palestinian lands had an emerging middle class. Trade with Israel and the outside world was beginning to flourish. Palestinians had higher levels of education, stronger women's rights and more PhDs per capita than anyone else in the Arab world.
But Arafat destroyed all that with his obsession for destroying Israel, and with his corruption.
Prosperity breeds peace. So Arafat decimated the Palestinian economy. He siphoned off billions in aid sent by the rest of the world, gave much of it to his underlings to keep them loyal and kept about $1 billion for himself.
Forbes magazine rated him the richest despot in the world at the time of his death.
What money did make its way to the Palestinian Authority treasury, Arafat used to make war on Israel and on his rivals for power within the PA.
When the Americans and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered him all he had ever asked for, in return for peace, at Camp David in the summer of 2000, Arafat refused. Perpetual war was what he lived for.
So he started the current intifada that has led to the death of 4,000 of his own people and the collapse of the livelihoods of the rest. He held free elections once, and cancelled them twice.
But perhaps the best example of Arafat's betrayal of his own people came in August with the revelation that his ministers had taken 380,000 tonnes of cement, intended for reconstruction of houses bulldozed by the Israelis, and sold it to foreign buyers at a profit.
Egypt had sold the cement to the PA at below market price. Arafat's cronies turned around and sold it at a $15-per-tonne premium, personally dividing $5.5 million US in return.
And who were the foreign buyers? None other than the Israeli firms constructing Israel's new defensive wall.
Arafat's ministers intercepted cement intended to make Palestinians' lives better, sold it to a project that makes their lives more difficult (and which they revile -- and Arafat claimed to revile, too), then put the proceeds in their own secret bank accounts.
When informed, Arafat refused to have them prosecuted.
Not only are Israelis and the world better off without Arafat, the Palestinian people are, too.
Let people like Kofi, Carter, Katie, Hilderbeast, and others do that.
From a Canadian paper?
Anybody happen to know what Arafat had to say about Ronald Reagan's death?
Surprised? You shouldn't be. You just need to stop listenning to the majority of the media and hate-Canada crowd.
I'll shed a few drops. Not tears.
Edmonton Alberta.....heavy emphasis on Alberta
Ditto
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