Posted on 09/23/2003 1:40:16 PM PDT by knighthawk
As the United Nations General Assembly voted last week on an Arab-sponsored resolution to proscribe any action Israel might take against Yasser Arafat -- 133 for, four against, 15 abstentions, including Canada -- petitions popped up in my e-mail demanding: a) that the UN condemn terrorism; b) that the UN declare suicide bombings war crimes and have those who instigate them prosecuted as war criminals before the ICC, the International Criminal Court, and; c) to protest Canada's fence-sitting abstention in the General Assembly.
Though I agree with the petitions, I've two reasons for not signing them (or clicking on the appropriate boxes, as we do in the electronic age.) The minor reason is that as a columnist, I see my job as commenting on world events rather than signing petitions about them. The major reason is that it seems pointless to me to petition the enemy.
Comforting as it might be to pretend otherwise, if the enemy is terrorism, the UN and its sub-organizations, including the ICC, have become its big tent, sheltering, if not directly terrorists, then their cowardly, guilt-ridden, pseudo-sophisticated or confused apologists -- all those who can't tell the difference between being pragmatic and unprincipled. UN-types try to appease hijackers, suicide bombers and political assassins for various reasons. They include feelings of Western guilt and the sophomoric fallacy that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," and range from realpolitik to the naive belief that by appeasing murderers they can influence and rehabilitate them. Petitions won't make a dent in such reasoning.
Certainly suicide bombings are war crimes, but the suicide bombers, with their Arab apologists and European appeasers, are also UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's constituency. The likelihood of Mr. Annan and his colleagues declaring them war criminals is about the same as a milk marketing board declaring dairy products poisonous. As for the ICC, it would probably indict George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and -- especially -- Ariel Sharon before it would indict Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Islamic Jihad leader Dr. Ramadan Shalah, and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Or Fatah and Tanzim (al-Aqsa Brigades) leader Yasser Arafat.
To give the devil his due, one can say two things for Mr. Arafat. First, he's the Houdini of Mideast politics. If he's finally caught in his box, the amazing thing is that he has somehow kept slipping out of it for 44 years. From 1959, when he and other Palestinians founded Fatah in Kuwait, until last week when Israel announced that it had reached the end of its patience with him, Mr. Arafat managed to survive both physically and politically against astounding odds. Never mind Israel or the West, which he terrorized with impunity for nearly half a century; he survived his far more venomous and unscrupulous enemies in the Arab world.
A master of snatching victory, or at least deliverance, from the jaws of defeat, the Palestinian leader escaped the enmity of his rivals, confederates or erstwhile allies, from Syria's Hafiz Assad or Libya's Muammar Gaddafi to Iraq-sponsored mass murderer Abu Nidal. He managed to flee from Jordan in 1971 and from Lebanon in 1982 -- during the latter exodus protected from the angry Lebanese, whose country he helped plunge into civil war, by the very Israelis and U.S. Marines he had reviled and terrorized. A mere 18 months after his Black September fedayeen killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and about a year after orchestrating the assassination of U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel in Khartoum, Sudan, Mr. Arafat was addressing the United Nations in New York (Nov. 13, 1974), holding a theatrical olive branch in one hand, with his other hand resting on his gun holster.
The holster was empty, by the way, just like the rest of Mr. Arafat's gestures, but it did the trick. He spoke in the UN assembly and the world listened.
The next thing one can say for Mr. Arafat is that he never really denied his fundamental aim. It was the well-meaning liberals of the world, including many in Israel, who so desperately wanted to believe that with the establishment of a Palestinian state peace would come to the Middle East, that they completely closed their eyes to the fact that such a Palestinian state was the last thing Mr. Arafat wanted.
This willful, optimistic blindness wasn't Mr. Arafat's creation. Though he often dissembled for tactical reasons, he never veered far from his view that a state created on the West Bank and Gaza, the territories formerly held by Jordan and Egypt, and occupied by Israel during the 1967 war, would, in his own words, "spell the end of the whole Palestinian cause."
That's because for Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian cause has always meant Israel's destruction. His political dream has been the elimination of a Jewish state in the Middle East, not the creation of a Palestinian one. Peace with Israel would undermine this cause by definition.
Time for the crystal ball. Mr. Arafat will be gone, if not today, then tomorrow. The Jewish state is likely to survive and a Palestinian state is likely to come into being. The irony is that, if and when it does, generations of human suffering, intifada, suicide bombings, refugee existence and the rest will have achieved exactly what the Palestinian people, and the Arab world, could have had in 1948 by simply accepting the partition of Palestine. Such futility.
Middle East list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
No more UN for US-list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
Suicide bombings are legitimate restistance, war crimes went the way of genocide.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.