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Nov. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com: Actually, it really is all about you with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff
Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Nov. 18, 2004 / 5 Kislev, 5764

Arafat and the ‘peace process’

By Larry Elder


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There must be a 'peace process' before it can be 'restarted'. What the world regularly ignores




http://www.jewishworldreview.com | "...There have been suicide bombings, targeted assassinations, mortar attacks," said PBS's Gwen Ifill about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when she hosted the vice-presidential debate, "all of this continuing at a time when the United States seems absent in the peace-making process..." Absent?


President Bush became the first American president to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He offered a "roadmap," which depended upon so-called confidence measures — a euphemism for telling Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat to put a stop to terrorism against the Israelis. But the terrorism continued, and the White House quite properly allowed Ariel Sharon to take the necessary steps to defend his country.


Now, with Arafat's death, the chorus demands that the White House "seize the initiative" and "restart the peace process." Peace process? The resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict depends upon the following premise — that the Palestinians accept Israel's right to exist.


Arafat — despite public pronouncements to the contrary — sought Israel's destruction. Yet former President Jimmy Carter called Arafat "a powerful human symbol and forceful advocate." President Jacques Chirac called him "a man of courage and conviction." A man of courage and conviction?

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Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst James Welsh and I recently spoke about the legacy of Yasser Arafat. Welsh found Arafat's fingerprints all over the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The NSA belatedly decoded a message from PLO terrorist group Abu Jihad to Arafat that the terrorists had left for Munich.


Arafat's liaison officer for Romania led the PLO team that seized and killed the Israeli athletes.


"Arafat was not only a terrorist against the Israelis and others," says Welsh, "but against the United States." On March 2, 1973, Black September operatives, under the direct command of Yasser Arafat, assassinated U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and his deputy, George Curtis Moore, in Khartoum, Sudan. Ion Mihai Pacapa, one of Arafat's Kremlin controllers and head of communist Romania's secret police before his 1978 defection, wrote in a Wall Street Journal article:


James Welsh . . . has told a number of U.S. journalists that the NSA had secretly intercepted the radio communications between Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad during the PLO operation against the . . . embassy in Khartoum, including Arafat's order to kill Ambassador Noel. . . . In May 1973, during a private dinner with [Romanian dictator] Ceausescu, Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation.


In 1974, Arafat's PLO seized a school in the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot, killing 21 children and 4 adults. The early '70s murders were just the beginning. Arafat's life consists of a long list of terrorist attacks. Arafat praised "martyrs" and provided assistance to their families. According to Human Rights Watch:


The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Social Affairs says that it provides a small monthly sum to the family of any person killed or injured in confrontations with Israeli forces or settlers. . . . The PA makes no apparent effort to limit special payments by others to the families of suicide bombers who attack civilians.


Arafat stole money from the Palestinians. Some Israelis estimate his "net worth" at $11 billion. Forbes calculates it at a mere $300 million, but last year, Israel's chief of military intelligence listed Arafat's personal assets at more than $1.3 billion. Whatever the actual amount, not bad pay for terrorism.


In 1996, Arafat said, "We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. . . . We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem." And following Arafat's refusal to accept a deal in the waning days of the Clinton administration, Arafat launched the second Intifada, a terror war that, from Sept. 29, 2000, through Nov. 7, 2004, claimed 3,250 Palestinian and 942 Israeli lives. To put this in terms of the U.S. population, that is equivalent to 285,212 Palestinian and 44,715 Israeli deaths. Arafat refused to share power. Under international pressure, Yasser Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister. Abbas resigned after four months in office when Arafat refused to grant him any real power. Arafat's culture of hatred means Palestinians learn to hate Jews from the womb to the tomb. According to polls by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, 60 percent of Palestinians support "suicide attacks." From an early age, Palestinian children learn from Israel-absent maps to hate Israelis and to seek the destruction of the State of Israel. Three years ago, columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote:

Arafat is embarked on a strategy of war — and has been ever since he signed the September 1993 Oslo 'peace' accords on the White House lawn. Don't take it from me. Take it from the mouth of one of the leading Palestinian moderates, Faisal Husseini. Shortly before his fatal heart attack last year, he openly admitted that Oslo was 'a Trojan Horse . . . just a temporary procedure . . . just a step toward something bigger.' That something bigger is 'Palestine from the river to the sea,' Husseini said, i.e., from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. That means eradicating Israel. Oslo? Just a way of 'ambushing the Israelis and cheating them.'


So much for the "peace process."

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JWR contributor Larry Elder is the author of, most recently, "Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies and the Special Interests That Divide America." (Proceeds from sales help fund JWR) Let him know what you think of his column by clicking here.






© 2004, Creators Syndicate