Yasser Arafat’s Disastrous Legacy
Posted on November 14, 2004
Filed Under World Affairs Leave a Comment
“Yasser Arafat’s rule has been a disaster for Palestinians, for Israel, and for U.S. policy in the Middle East,” writes Heritage’s James Phillips.
“Arafat stubbornly held fast to his slogan ‘revolution until victory,’” writes Phillips, and never transformed himself into a statesman ready to make peace.
Arafat’s leadership since his return from exile in 1994 has left the Palestinians impoverished, and his refusal to groom a successor may have cleared the path for Islamic radicals to assume power.
“Until a new Palestinian leadership has emerged that rejects Arafat’s legacy of terrorism,” concludes Phillips, “there is little hope of achieving a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Read Yasser Arafat’s Disastrous Legacy, by James A. Phillips.
One of the most telling points of Arafat’s duplicity and true intentions came in the article when Phillips wrote,
Although many once hoped that revolutionary Palestinian leader would abandon terrorism and make the transition into a statesman capable of building a lasting peace, Arafat stubbornly held fast to his slogan “revolution until victory.†He played a double game right until the end, often extending the olive branch to Israel when speaking in English to Western audiences while calling for jihad and martyrdom when speaking in Arabic to his own people.
Another incredibly revealing article on Arafat is Andrew McCarthy’s article, The Father of Modern Terrorism, written for National Review Online.
McCarthy writes,
As is often the case in the modern information age, just about everything in his life is known and almost nothing in his proffered legend is true. The man airbrushed in Thursday-morning encomiums from Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac (among others) as the courageous symbol of Palestinian nationalism was not really named Yasser Arafat, was not a native Palestinian, and tended to sit out warfare with Israel whenever conventional fighting was involved. Although he occasionally claimed to have hailed from what are now the Palestinian territories, Muhammad Abdel Rahman Abdel Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini was actually born in Egypt in 1929, the fifth child of a well-to-do merchant.
…
While Arafat’s mantel as the “Father of Palestine” is dubious given that he is singularly responsible for the failure of a Palestinian nation to emerge, his credentials as the “Father of Modern Terrorism” are solid. In the late 1950′s, he co-founded Fatah, the “Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine.” His métier, and thus Fatah’s, was the sneak attack on soft Israeli targets, the better to maximize carnage and fear. The first efforts were ham-handed: failed attempts in 1965 to bomb the national water carrier and the railroad. But the organization soon hit its stride, successfully attacking villages and civilian infrastructure. By 1969, Arafat was the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group he never ceased to dominate after merging Fatah into it a year earlier. The PLO had a single purpose: the destruction of Israel.
Actually, make that two purposes. The PLO was also a fabulously profitable criminal enterprise. Though Arafat purported to have made it big in the engineering business in Kuwait, British investigators, as Stephens reported, concluded after a searching probe that his wealth stemmed from sidelines his organization maintained in “extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud” that yielded billions.
To boil the man down to mere bullet points would be too easy…Yasser Arafat had duplicity “nailed down”. Yet the extent of his legacy will, no doubt, live beyond the grave. And that worries me. Generations will have come and gone before his ideologies and his name is dimmed in the mind of history.
Oh, one final thing to note. With all of the charading as statesman that Arafat did from the failed Oslo Peace Accords to the irrelevant Nobel prize ceremonies, the Palestinian Authority’s Charter still seeks to destroy Israel. This is found in the Charter to this day in Articles 20 thru 22.
- Article 20: The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
- Article 21: The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem, or its internationalization.
- Article 22: Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-a-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberation of their homeland.
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