Kiss Arafat goodbye!
By Alan Caruba
web
posted December 17, 2001
It's now, more or less, official. Yasser Arafat is "irrelevant." That's just a tad better than being dead.
At what point did this known terrorist lose his "authority and credibility"? You can pinpoint that to the day in mid-December that Secretary of State Colin Powell said the violence by Palestinian terrorist groups was destroying Arafat's "authority and credibility." The truth is that Arafat never had any credibility. Until the Bush administration, no previous one would admit this. Indeed, the failure to act against Arafat's killers, allied with all the other Islamic terrorist organizations, led inevitably to the 911 attack.Failure, through fear and the idiotic notion we could control these groups at the cost of a few lives, has brought death to the shores of America.
 Arafat: No one left to talk to |
Yasser Arafat is the man who has led the Palestine Liberation Organization from its inception. No Palestinian elected him. No Palestinian dare speaks to defy him. He has initiated, directed, and encouraged the ceaseless killing attributed to the Palestinian Authority and its allied Islamic terrorist organizations. His victims included the murder in 1973 of the American ambassador to Sudan, the American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, Bill Buckley, and thousands more.
In the past, his terror campaign against Israel was just part of the US policy to effect an "even-handed" approach to the nightmares of the Middle East. When required, he was able to rein in the suicide bombers. He no longer can. In terms of our failed US foreign policy and the restraints we imposed on Israeli domestic policy, Arafat is useless.
One important aspect of this story has been overlooked thus far. Arafat has amassed huge wealth from the millions in US taxpayer extortion paid to him with the intention of funding the "peace process." The cold reality is that those funds and the millions given by Middle Eastern nations have supported the goal of destroying Israel, the front line of the Islamic war on the West.
In an Executive Order freezing the funds of numerous Islamic terrorist organizations and individuals, you will find nothing that affects the funds of Arafat or the PA. Many Palestinian groups are identified as terrorist organizations, but not Arafat's "government" entity; the same one with which the Israelis have been unable to secure any promise or movement toward peace for more than three decades.
In effect, the US is still officially sanctioning Arafat's activities. And how grateful he is! "Dear God, who cares about the Americans. The Americans are on your side and they give you everything," he said in a recent Israeli television interview.
Somewhere in the highest circles of power that determine policy for this nation, it has been decided that it is time to end this charade, this dance with the devil, this collusion with evil. Notably, every time an American diplomat "talks" to a Palestinian, a Sudanese, or any other Muslim nation's leadership, they come to the same conclusion; the US is reluctant to take any real action to resolve the threat they represent. More death follows as night the day.
This capacity to focus solely on the existence of Israel as the only problem facing the Middle East is evident in the delusion that still exists among the foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Conference. According to Arabic News.Com, the OIC recently expressed the view that "Israel is entirely responsible for the worsening of the situation in the Middle East."
This fiction ignores little things like the crumbling hold on the people of Iran exercised by its mullahs; the eight-year former Iraq-Iran war; the Persian Gulf War to get Iraq out of Kuwait; the attacks on the government of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood; the failed effort of the Palestinians to topple the Jordanian government and subsequent takeover of Lebanon. Then, of course, there was the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
The OIC, however, can't see any other problem in the entire Middle East except little Israel. So, naturally, the 57-nation Conference pledged support for the Palestinian Authority. This is such stupefying hypocrisy that it is obvious why they are incapable of addressing the real problems of the region.
Iraq is next. There is no question that Saddam represents a clear and present danger. George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President, stated that the failure to remove Saddam from power at the end of the Gulf War was a mistake. Saddam then tried to assassinate the father of the 43rd President and Commander in Chief of the greatest military power on the face of the Earth. America has been attacked by people in league with Saddam. Connect the dots.
It is time to transform the Middle East by the might and power of our ideas and our military capacity to liberate the people who live under the oppression of the Arafat's, the Khadafi's, the Osama bin Laden's, the Saddam Huessein's, the kings and shieks of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States.
Kiss Arafat goodbye. Kiss Saddam goodbye. 
Alan Caruba is the author of "A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam" available from www.anxietycenter.com, the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.
Other related articles: (open in a new window)
- Arafat:
Dead man walking? by Alan Caruba (February 19, 2001)
Alan Caruba opines that Israel may not have to negotiate with Yasser Arafat that much longer. A Pax Hebraica imposed with the sword?
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