A terrorist "success" story
Max Boot:
Max Boot:
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There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. If Arafat had displayed the wisdom of a Gandhi or Mandela, he would long ago have presided over the establishment of a fully independent Palestine comprising all of the Gaza Strip, part of Jerusalem and at least 95% of the West Bank....
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His refusal to compromise, his unwillingness to give up the way of the gun consigned his people to economic and moral suicide. The current intifada, launched in September 2000 after Arafat turned down a generous peace offer from the Israelis at Camp David, has claimed three times as many Palestinian as Israeli victims. It has also led to a precipitous plunge in living standards in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — not something Arafat's wife and daughter would notice from their cozy Paris residence.
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Though Arafat, of course, bore ultimate responsibility for his many sins, he could not have been so destructive without so many outside enablers, ranging from the Soviet Union, which supported him from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the European Union and the United States, which stepped into the sugar daddy role in the 1990s. And let us not forget his fan club among the Western intelligentsia, many of whom even now weep for his passing as if he were a great man instead of a criminal with a cause.
George W. Bush, alone among Western leaders, had the courage to stop dealing with the Palestinian thug-in-chief. On June 24, 2002, the president gave an important speech in which he called on the Palestinian people "to elect new leaders … not compromised by terror" and to "build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." Now that Arafat has gone to the great compound in the sky, there will be pressure on Bush to resume the pointless "peace process," but it will be premature to do so as long as the terrorist kleptocracy spawned by Arafat continues to exist.
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