Sympathy for a terro…

Sympathy for a terrorist, part deux:

In a tribute to the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the New York Times yesterday featured a glowing obituary that blames Israel for Palestinian terrorism, ignores major violent incidents, contradicts historical accounts of certain events, whitewashes viscious propaganda on Palestinian TV, and hails Arafat as a “statesman” and the only Palestinian leader who could make “painful compromises for peace.”

In the 5,265 word obituary by writer Judith Miller, readers are introduced to Arafat only as “the wily and enigmatic father of Palestinian nationalism who for almost 40 years symbolized his people’s longing for a distinct political identity and independent state … No other individual so embodied the Palestinians’ plight: their dispersal, their statelessness, their hunger for a return to a homeland lost to Israel.”

You’d think these folks are jockeying for a position in the Palestinian Authority or something.

It has generally been the left in this country that has aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause and consequently with Arafat. To them, Israel’s mere existence is at fault when Palestinians engage in terrorism to destroy it, as this eulogy plainly shows. The methods by which this group has tried to get their own state have been horrific, yet the Times barely mentions this.

In the most direct reference to Arafat’s terrorism, which has involved the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the 1973 murders of two US diplomats in Khartoum, the 1986 murder of an American on the Achille Lauro cruise ship, killings of hundreds of Israelis in homicide bombings, and murders and assassinations of Palestinians seen as threats to his leadership or collaborators with Israel, Miller, citing no specific examples, calls Arafat’s “violence” the “air piracy and innovative forms of mayhem staged for maximum propaganda value.”

He may have been responsible for the death of thousands, but at least he was innovative. Oh, and it is “thousands”, not just hundreds. The latest intifadah has claimed 900+ Israelis.

“Mr. Arafat,” Miller gushes, “assumed many poses. But the image that endures – and the one he clearly relished – was that of the Arab fighter, the grizzled, scruffy-bearded guerrilla in olive-green military fatigues and his trademark checkered head scarf, carefully folded in the elongated diamond shape of what was once Palestine.”

Fact-checking, please? Would someone show me a map, drawn by an independent party (i.e. these don’t count), with a sovereign country called “Palestine” with Jerusalem as its capital? And then let’s not forget that the Palestinians are surround by (allegedly) friendly Arab countries that simply refuse to give them asylum, using them as pawns against Israel.

And now the hand behind the moving pawns is finally dead after all these years. As I’ve said before, we can only hope that this will bring about a more peaceful situation than could ever occur while Arafat was alive.

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