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Jewish World Review April 18, 2001 / 25 Nissan, 5761
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Arafat to be guest of honor at terrorist conference
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
There's an international conference of terrorist
organizations in Tehran next week, and guess who's among
the guests of honor? Not the elusive Osama Bin Laden. He
doesn't go out much these days. No, the big surprise
personality is no one less than Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Yasser Arafat.
It's the Palestinian leader's first visit to Iran in a
long time. The mullahs who rule that benighted nation
have considered him unkosher ever since he began talking
about making peace with Israel. But according to
Palestinian insiders, Iranian intelligence decided
recently that Arafat has "resumed the path of the
people" by launching the now five-month-old intifadeh
and apparently dropping plans to resume peace
negotiations with Israel.
So off went the invitation to Arafat. Both the host and
the invitee decided to keep the visit hush-hush, say the
sources, until Arafat's actual arrival in Tehran. Once
there, they say, he plans to meet with Iran's spiritual
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most extreme of the
extremists holding sway in Iran.
Of course, the April 24-25 predators' ball is not being
billed as a terrorist conference, but rather as the
International Conference for Support of the Intifadeh.
But the stated goal is clear: to seek "ways to establish
an independent Palestinian state from the Jordan River
to the Mediterranean Sea" which kind of cuts out
Israel.
The participants, in addition to Arafat, are major
Islamic terrorist groups. This rogues' gallery includes
the heads of all the Palestinian extremist groups, such
as Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine, as well as leaders of
Islamic militants operating worldwide.
Also attending: the senior leadership of Hezbollah, the
Iranian- and Syrian-backed Lebanese-based terrorist army
whose recent attacks on Israeli civilians and military
are sharply raising the Mideast's war risk factor. It
was Hezbollah's killing of an Israeli soldier in the
Shebaa Farms district that prompted Sunday's Israeli air
raid on a Syrian radar position in eastern Lebanon.
The Israelis say and they are right that Hezbollah
would never have upped its attacks on Israel without
Syrian approval, if not instigation. So guess where
Arafat is stopping on his way to Tehran? In Damascus, to
pay his first visit to Syrian President Bashar Assad,
the head of another government that looked askance on
Arafat's "peacemaking" with Israel.
What does all this mean? Possibly that Arafat hasn't
strayed that far from the terrorism that he claims to
have rejected. For all his talk of making the "peace of
the brave" with Israel, what we are seeing is increasing
proof that he is unwilling or incapable of accepting the
presence of a viable Jewish state.
Those who back Arafat, both Westerners and moderate
Arabs, should take note, as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon already has. Syrians, Iranians, Arafat and all
their buddies should remember: The biggest risk
terrorists face is the danger of blowing themselves
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
JWR contributor and veteran journalist
Richard Z. Chesnoff is a senior correspondent at US News
And World Report and a columnist at the NY Daily News. His latest book, recently updated, is Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe
Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History.
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