Jonathan on Arafat

Hi there!

Okay-- here comes an excellent response from my cousin Jonathan on the question of "Arafat-- friend or shmoe?"

(By the by, you'll be reading a lot of Jonathan in these pages, since I'll be posting his thoughts just about every time I can coax them out of him (which, thankfully, doesn't usually take much effort.) In fact, I will even go so far as to admit that this blog of mine was started in small part because I couldn't convince Jonathan to start his own, so I thought I'd do it for him-- so much do I value his sagacious yaking.) Here's what he has to say:

I hope all's well and swell, cuz! Sorry I haven't replied on your blog yet - my home computer's net access was set up by an extremely paranoid cypher friend, so lots of web things (java, popups, cookies) are disabled, like, say, the pop-up login screen for blogspot.com. I'll see if my setup at work is any friendlier.

Now as for Arafat... the places I'd go to find the dirt aren't particularly leftish or pro-Arab (here's a timeline and links to timeline's of Arafat's career as a terrorist via lgf http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=795
more stuff here:
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP81004
http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-boot11nov11,0,3261290.column?coll=la-home-utilities via lgf, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP75104 via memri, http://www.haaretz.com/), but there are basically two consensus stories on the guy, both with elements of the truth.

As a bias alert, my personal assessment of the man runs towards Evil, Incompetent Vermin - I almost got on a ship to visit a colleague in Cyprus in the early 80's that was, I was later told, attacked by the PLO (thank the Fates I overslept! I ended up being questioned by a very serious Mossad agent, who was interviewing everyone who had a ticket, but missed the trip). The people on deck were sprayed with machine guns once the boat left the harbor of Piraeus. Turkish and Israeli and Egyptian and Syrian guest workers from Europe returning home, Eurotrash (and good ol' US white trash like m'self) looking to party on the Greek Islands, a tactically senseless act of violence, valuable only for the fear and abhorrence it would engender through media coverage, planned under Arafat's leadership. What a jerk.

(from an article in the the Boston Globe):
"It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it.
Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children."
One narrative has him as a thug who made it to medium scale warlordism, but who sucked at both low intensity conflict and running a nascent, um, territory. After Arafat walked out on Oslo (over right of return, as I recall, though this is disputed), the Second Intifada resulted in economic catastrophe, as (after multiple terrorist bombings/stabbings) Palestinians were no longer permitted to commute into Israeli territory to work, depriving the Palestinian people of their only real external source of income (aside from non-industrial farming). Massive corruption of EU/UNaid was reported (one estimate of Arafat's personal wealth is in the low [1-2] billions, and his wife and child live in Paris). Foreign trained/funded (Saudi, Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, EU, UN, etc.) anti-Israeli militant groups (Hamas, Hezbolla, etc.) gained in power relative to Arafat's Fatah/Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, and jockeyed for money/media attention/kill counts. After consolidating political power (but unable or unwilling to consolidate military power), Arafat became merely a relatively visible figurehead for Palestinian ambitions, a terrorist with an address (a bad place to be in 4th generation warfare). Towards the end, his administrative offices in ruins from various Israeli/terrorist stand off situations, the Israeli and US govt.'s concluded that Arafat wasn't worth negotiating with, since he either couldn't or wouldn't deliver peace for territorial concessions, and Israel began to unilaterally establish national boundaries (via the wall) and to disengage from the occupied territories.
A slightly more sympathetic assessment could draw Arafat as a fighter willing to do the unthinkable for his cause (however one might define that), who was great at playing the media darling (Nobel Peace Prize?! WTF?!?!?!?! Though I suppose if they gave one to Kissinger, maybe sometimes it's a prize for Not Killing So Much Anymore, rather than Peace), but who sucked at administration, and who had to negotiate from a severe position of (military/economic/moral) disadvantage, making any gains he got at all really damn near miraculous.

J