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.
Mein Kampf in PA Territory
... translation of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is being distributed by Al ... in both German
and Arabic. The translator, Luis Al ... the Nazis turned into the "Gospel of ...
csf.colorado.edu/forums/peace/oct99/msg00003.html - 5k - Cached - Similar pages
The Outpost
... and based his strate gy in Mein Kampf on long term cooperation with ... slogans including
a literal translation into Arabic of "one folk, one party ...
www.afsi.org/OUTPOST/96JAN/jan6.htm - 7k - Cached - Similar pages
The extended hand... withdrawn, LIVE, and broadcast on Al Jezeera as well as EVERY venue on the planet.
We need to stop trying to resuscitate Arafat, and instead nail the coffin closed forever.
Describing Arafat personally, in his memoir Red Horizons, Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of Romanian intelligence, recalls that his own dossier on Arafat provided:
Pacepa recalls the strategic advice that Ceausescu gave Arafat during Arafat's visit to Bucharest in 1978:
But, Bin Laden did us all a favor-he has let the US & Israel know who our friends really are-While they are too weak to stop us from doing what needs to be done. Don't forget-China Olympics 2008.
At Israel's founding, the U.S. was neutral, with an arms embargo on both sides. The truth is that in its 1948 War of Independence, Israel's main source of arms, after domestic production, was Stalinist Russia via Czechoslovakia. Stalin apparently figured that, Jews being liberal socialists types, he could make Israel into a Communist puppet. Within a few months, about the time Israel won its War of Independence, Stalin saw that the Jews weren't going along his plan, and Israel became pro-Western.
One particular remark, in the runup to Desert Storm, is worth quoting, if inexactly: that Saddam Hussein was a small-time hood, out of his depth trying to pull off a big heist.
They hate US because we defend/promote Israel. That's why all of Europe has now shifted, They are chicken.
That's my position. Unfortunately much of Islam has bought into the Pan Arab Islamic agenda. A good portion of Turkey has not and remains the only possibility for leadership away from the fascistic and dangerous admixture of Pan Arabism and Islam.
I've never before seen so much cleverness, blood, and filth altogether in one man."
I guess that quote was from a few years before clinton came on the world scene.
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