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How Arafat Got Away With It

(Los Angeles Times)Max Boot - Arafat and his cronies pocketed billions of dollars and kept their grip on power through the cruel application of violence against various enemies and "collaborators." In return, Arafat reaped worldwide adulation and a Nobel Peace Prize. There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. His unwillingness to give up the way of the gun consigned his people to economic and moral suicide. The current intifada, launched in September 2000 after Arafat turned down a generous peace offer from the Israelis at Camp David, has claimed three times as many Palestinian as Israeli victims and has also led to a precipitous plunge in living standards in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arafat could not have been so destructive without so many outside enablers, ranging from the Soviet Union to the European Union and the United States, which stepped into the sugar daddy role in the 1990s. Many among the Western intelligentsia even now weep for his passing as if he were a great man instead of a criminal with a cause.
2004-11-12 00:00:00
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