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COMMENTARY
November 13, 2004
A rant
Yasser Arafat is still too freshly dead for anyone to be rendering the judgement of history. Ignore all obituaries. Look instead at that procession of the self-appointed great and wise to Cairo and Ramallah! (Excluding minor officials sent as part of their diplomatic duties.) A self-selected rogues' gallery of the planet's most deceitful and self-serving politicians gone to see and be seen at a carnival of hypocrisy. But the late PLO chief was more than "a bit of a rogue". He was a monster: a man with the blood of thousands on his hands who never cared to wash them. A man who led a whole people the Palestinian Arabs whom he ruled as feudal lord into a pit of hopeless squalor. Arafat's popularity in the Arab world which our media take so much for granted was actually rather slight and selective. The Syrian defence minister for instance once memorably called him "the son of sixty thousand whores". (And something was probably lost in the translation from Arabic.) There were much different views about Arafat on and off the record almost everywhere in the Middle East. Of all his interviewers I think only Oriana Fallaci that wild Italian anarchist captured the essence of the man right down to the spittle streaming from his mouth which no one else ever mentioned. Arafat intimidated; the journalists flattered. But as my colleague Lorne Gunter said in an excellent column you have to read the flattering obituary of Josef Stalin in the New York Times for March 6th 1953 to fully appreciate the hushed tones of respect for the late Arafat today -- in the Times of New York or London on the CBC and almost everywhere else. Barbara Plett of the BBC actually cried when the helicopter took the old guy away from Ramallah on the first leg of his last journey. Some 150 million listeners to the World Service got to hear about that. (The BBC is about to fire half its staff to make ends meet; and she is not even among my candidates for the first row.) I know today's column is turning into a rant. Well so it goes. There was no excuse for anyone to flatter or appease this monster in life or in death. His narcissism and corruption were his most attractive qualities. He left bloodlakes behind him when he was taken in and sheltered in Amman and Beirut. His Black September pioneered the modern arts of aircraft hijacking and hostage butchery. The Intifadas he launched ended or destroyed the lives of countless innocents Jewish Christian and Muslim alike. The hushed tones of respect -- whether from the CBC and affiliates or from Kofi Annan Nelson Mandela Jimmy Carter Jacques Chirac -- is indicative of a posturing moral attitude that stinks to heaven. And yet what is new about it? The whole 20th century was a story of the charnel house yet throughout the self-appointed moral elect worshiped the icons of mass-destruction - Lenin Hitler Stalin Mao Fidel Che Guevara. "Islamism" appears ready to provide the 21st century with what Communism gave the one before; and the seedy old Marxist fellow-travellers of our media and academy have long since begun making their adjustments and genuflecting to the cool new revolutionary gods. Their rhetorical hitlist consists of the same old suspects -- the decent bourgeois politicians trying to defend their peoples from harm: the Bushes Blairs Berlusconis Howards Aznars. It should be said that the person who spits at the mention of George W. Bush but weeps for Arafat is beyond twitting. Such a person is sick in the head. He represents a form of judgement so totally inverted as to be indistinguishable from madness. And yet among our intellectuals this inversion is commonplace. "By their works ye shall know them." Look at the actual achievements of such a "hero" as Yasser Arafat. Go to the website of the Israeli foreign ministry and read a few dozen obituaries of the women and children and old men blown to pieces in the buses and pizzerias of Jerusalem. At the moment U.S. Marines and Army with freshly-trained Iraqi units are picking their way house by house through Fallujah trying to save Iraq from the ministrations of another generation of Arafat's terrorist progeny now matured into full religious crazies. Good and brave men and women have put their lives on the line to prevent another triumph of evil. It is not as if the world lacks heroes. There is no need to elevate a skunk. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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