By P. David Hornik
November 14, 2004
The media's love-fest for Arafat, however shameful, has highlighted some distortions about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" and also some aspects of the media itself. After singing Arafat's praises for "putting his people on the map," "symbolizing the aspirations of his people," and the like, the media gushes that because he's now out of the way, peace is ready to flower. No one seems to notice the illogic of glorifying him as a sort of savior, then treating him as the sole obstacle to a happy ending. But, though logic and truth have a low currency in Middle East-babble, it's worth making a few clarifications.
1. Justifying terrorism. The liberal media's line about Arafat is that although he used terrorism, he achieved great things for "his people." Their justification, their embrace, of terrorism is crystal-clear. If I have a cause that I consider urgent, even desperate, can I blow an airplane out of the sky, or slaughter children in a school, to promote it? The answer has to be yes or no. Morally coherent people understand that unless terrorism is nullified, terrorism flourishes--as it does in the world today, an arena of bombings, beheadings, warfare, and fear that result from terrorism. The media, however, excuses terrorism and praises a terrorist for his "achievements." The liberal media is not part of the civilized world and is the handmaiden of terror.
2. The myth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis accepted the UN Partition Plan in 1947, which would have given the Palestinians a state on half of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan?with the Israeli part consisting mostly of the Negev Desert. The Israelis won the "occupied territories" in a defensive war for survival in 1967. In 2000, an Israeli Labor prime minister offered the Palestinians a state in these territories, and at this moment, a Republican president and a Likud prime minister are offering the Palestinians a state in these territories. There is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict; there is a Palestinian terror assault on Israel backed by much of the Arab, Islamic, and European worlds, aimed at destroying Israel, against which Israel defends itself.
3. "Arafat offered his people a hope of overcoming their statelessness." The Palestinians are not stateless. The population of Jordan is 5.6 million, and a conservative estimate is that 60% of them are Palestinians. People who claim to be concerned about the Middle East have to ask themselves: are the over three million Palestinians of Jordan stateless, or are they not stateless? If Palestinians lived only in countries like the United States or Australia where they constitute tiny minorities, it might be fair to call them a stateless people. But the Palestinians in Jordan are not a minority; moreover, Jordan is a Muslim Arab country existing on land that was often described in history as Palestine or Eastern Palestine and was included in the Palestine Mandate. It is fair to say that the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have an unclear political status that needs to be resolved in negotiations--a fact that did not require decades of terrorism to clarify it. It is not fair or true to say that the Palestinians are a stateless (i.e., suffering, deprived, desperate, etc.) people when they already have a state.
4. Now that Arafat is gone, peace is on the way . I've been reading speculations about what's wrong with the Muslim Arab world, offering explanations like polygamy, the oppression of women, cousin marriage, Islamic authoritarianism, Islamic intolerance, poor education, and so on. These are thoughtful analyses that sound like they're getting at aspects of the truth. None of them say that the existence of a single corrupt or brutal ruler in an Arab country constitutes, in itself, the problem. The United States has removed Saddam Hussein in Iraq and is pouring great resources into trying to make Iraq democratic and peaceful. It has not proved an easy task, and its success is hardly assured. Arafat is gone, but the Palestinian Authority remains a poverty-stricken entity with a cult of violence and anti-Semitism, roamed by armed gangs, a base for most of the world's worst terror organizations, deeply penetrated by Hizbullah and Iran. Unlike the liberal media, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair at least say the Palestinians need to democratize before becoming peaceful. What they don't explain is why, if Iraq has such great trouble democratizing despite their countries' and armies' efforts to help, the PA should be expected to self-democratize. No matter; the post-Arafat peacespeak is burgeoning and pressure is already mounting on Israel to make further suicidal concessions.
Finally, a note about neo-Nazis. They're considered odious people because they venerate a mass murderer. Why is veneration of Arafat different from neo-Nazism? True, neo-Nazis are usually creepy loser-types, whereas the Arafat-lovers are seemingly nice, civilized people with college degrees. But if the left-liberal part of the Western democracies shows an ongoing tendency to admire the likes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Arafat, why should they get a moral pass for it that the neo-Nazis don't get? The liberal media's endless capacity to praise and glorify Arafat, even after the particularly vicious terror war he waged in the last four years of his miserable life, means the psyche of the liberal media and the left-liberal world it represents is afflicted with neo-Nazism.
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