Last week saw the death of Yasser Arafat, the 75-year-old leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the undisputed father of modern terrorism.
Arafat was born in 1929 in Egypt as Muhammad Abdel Rahman Abdel Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini. His family later moved him to Jerusalem when he was young, and his time in what was then the British mandate of Palestine began his lifelong hatred of the Jewish people. After some time as a petty gunrunner, he co-founded the "Fatah" organization in the 1950s -- a terrorist "liberation movement" that executed sneak attacks on civilian Israeli targets.
Years later, Arafat merged Fatah with the PLO, the umbrella terrorist group he served as lifetime chairman of and which has always served the single purpose of destroying Israel. From this position of power, he embarked on a decades-long, epic career of ceaseless violence.
To comprehensively list Arafat's crimes against the world and the Jewish people would require more space than these humble pages allow. But for just a brief mention of the acts committed by subsidiaries of the PLO (and thus, acts committed with Arafat's own permission if not outright blessing and direction): the series of "Black September" airplane hijackings in 1970, the murder of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in the 1972 Munich Summer Games, the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and subsequent execution of passenger Leon Klinghoffer, a crippled American Jew whom Palestinian terrorists shot and dumped (still living) out of his wheelchair and left to drown in the sea, the bloody first intifada of the late '80s and early '90s and the even more gruesome second intifada from 2000 to the present.
Suicide bombers running into pizzerias and discotheques, bombs packed with nails and rat poison, agitators with AK-47s taking potshots at Israeli military and civilians alike before hiding amongst the civilian population -- all this and more is the legacy of Arafat. He was easily meaner, crazier and uglier than a dozen Osama bin Ladens.
But even for all that, perhaps his most appalling crime was his achievement of some measure of legitimacy. In the 1990s, the Palestinian Authority was created and Arafat was appointed its chief. After the tragically comic Oslo Accords of 1993, Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially promising to end the violence of the first intifada that he himself had engineered. This combined with the undue praise Presidents Carter and Clinton gave Arafat amount him to a thug who climbed his way to respectability via mass murder.
Disgusting as that may sound, Arafat had one even greater failing: he was phony, through and through. For all his talk of liberation and dedication to his people, Arafat's career never served anyone but Arafat himself: a fact he betrayed to the whole world at the Camp David peace talks of 2000.
There, Israel's then-prime minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat virtually everything he wanted: a "return" to Palestinian control of 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip. A shockingly generous (and potentially disastrous) offer on Israel's part the likes of which the world had never expected. Practically the only thing Barak didn't offer was his first-born child, but Arafat just walked away.
That day, Arafat revealed once and for all that his leadership had nothing to do with serving the would-be nation of Palestine, only his own glory and security. And greed, as well: recent reports have uncovered perhaps as much as $7 billion in Arafat's bank accounts -- money the corrupt slimeball skimmed while his people went hungry.
Since coming into office, President George W. Bush has refused to recognize the legitimacy of Arafat as a political leader, rightfully dismissing the old terrorist godfather as someone wholly uninterested in real peace.
That snub always inflamed both Palestinian nationalists and international leftists even further, but now the point is moot: Arafat is dead, apparently of natural causes (rumors about the Israeli Mossad poisoning him have surfaced, but they're as silly as ever, mostly because Israel is never secretive about killing bad guys).
The peace process is far from over, and there may well be widespread Palestinian rioting and civil war in the wake of the Arafat-shaped power void. But the chance for peace in the Israel/Palestine conflict is now brighter than ever, because the one man indisputably more responsible than anyone for the conflict's exacerbation is gone.
Cheer up and have hope now, Israel. The bastard's dead.
Eric Spratling is a public relations senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu. Read his blog online at asuwebdevil.com.
