(Slate)Christopher Hitchens - Has any national movement ever been so appallingly led? Arafat managed to be both a killer and a compromiser, both a Swiss bank-account artist and a populist ranter, both an Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had a state. In cold fact, Arafat was protected from "martyrdom" at Israel's hands, as he well knew, by an edict of President Bush to Sharon. The charming conclusion of this drama is now the widely spread rumor that the chairman was martyred after all, having been poisoned by the Jews: a rumor itself perhaps designed to pre-empt any discussion of his AIDS-like symptoms at the end. What a squalid and ignoble terminus, to a life of steadily diminishing returns.
2004-11-19 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive