After Arafat

A terrorist monster meets his Maker.

"Our enemies never miss an opportunity
to miss an opportunity for peace."
-- Abba Eban

by Rod D. Martin
December 16, 2004

Substitute the words, "Yasir Arafat," for "our enemies," and engrave that sentence on Arafat's tombstone.

That will be history's verdict on the old terrorist from Egypt. It might also be the verdict on those who foolishly followed him to the brink of destruction.

Four decades ago, Arafat formed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whose stated goal was -- and remains -- the destruction of Israel.

What followed was a cowardly war on civilians, not just in Israel but in places like Beirut, Lebanon, which Arafat transformed from a cosmopolitan city widely known as "the Paris of the Middle East" to a war-torn slow-motion hell.

For a time, he was the darling of leftist intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.

But by the early 1990s, with his old Soviet patrons consigned to history's ash heap, Arafat was about to become as irrelevant as they.

That is, until Bill Clinton…