Getting to Know You before You Die like the Dog You Are

Little Green Footballs presents one of the best Arafat articles I've ever read, by Bret Stephens. The background is fascinating, and the piece does an excellent job of revealing who Arafat really was, and what role he played in the world's problems with terrorism:

Around 1960, Arafat co-founded Fatah, or "conquest," the political movement that would later come to be the dominant faction of the PLO. Aside from its aim to obliterate Israel, the group had no particular political vision: Islamists, nationalists, Communists and pan-Arabists were equally welcome. Instead, the emphasis was on violence: "People aren't attracted to speeches but to bullets," Arafat liked to say. In 1964, Fatah began training guerrillas in Syria and Algeria; in 1965, they launched their first attack within Israel, on a pumping station. But the bomb didn't detonate, and most of the other Fatah raids were also duds. From this experience, Arafat took the lesson to focus on softer targets, like civilians.

So began the era of modern terrorism: the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 murder of American diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan, the 1974 massacre of schoolchildren at Ma'alot, and so on. Yet as the atrocities multiplied, Arafat's political star rose. Partly this had to do with European cravenness in the face of the implied threat; partly with the left's secret love affair with the authentic man of violence. Whatever the case, by 1980 Europe had recognized the PLO, with Arafat as its leader, as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people. The U.S. held out for another decade, but eventually it too caved in to international pressure under the first Bush administration.

For the Palestinians themselves, however, this was not such a good development. If Arafat's violence against Jews and Israelis was shocking, his violence against fellow Palestinians was still worse. In the manner of other would-be national liberators, he did not look kindly on dissenters within his ranks. In 1987, for instance, Palestinian cartoonist Ali Naji Adhami was murdered on a London street; his crime was to have insinuated in a drawing that the ra'is was having an affair with a married woman.

Arafat has always been the worst kind of scumbag, the ideological offspring of Adolf Hitler. Good riddance.