Israel says Arafat must go and the world rises up in defense of the most prolific killer since Adolf Hitler. Another country, America, is heard from as well.

Maybe it's not the oil. Maybe it's something more sinister that prompts the world, and our State Department, to side with terror as long as it is "only" Israelis who are dying.

Some dare call it anti-Semitism.

A bride of Israel, Nava, along with her father, David Applebaum, a doctor, a healer, are murdered, and don't touch, you say, don't touch a hair on Arafat's head. Perhaps, Mr. Powell, you were out playing golf with Prince Bandar when this happened. So you are unaware that your State Department spokesman went on TV to warn Israel to keep Arafat safe and snug.

As for you masters of Europe and your treachery: one day your sly anti-Semitism will come back to haunt you. Over the centuries, you have uprooted a thousand synagogues and replaced them with ten thousand mosques. Wait, now, and see what grows from the soil of Ishmael. Your churches are next.

For Sunday is coming, Sunday bloody Sunday.  

Jack Engelhard is the author of the novel Indecent Proposal and the award-winning memoir Escape From Mount Moriah.

How Arafat Survives

David Hornik

In its official statement about its vague decision to "remove" Yasser Arafat, the Israeli government referred to him as a political problem, an "obstacle" to peace, and did not emphasize the thousand dead Israelis, the thousands of bereaved, maimed, and traumatized ones. Jerusalem apparently did not think mentioning the latter aspect would impress anyone much, whereas the notion of Arafat as a diplomatic glitch might at least have some exculpatory value for the dark deed Israel was hinting at.

But "the world" jumped to Arafat's defense anyway. Everyone -- the Arabs, the Europeans, the U.S., the Israeli Labor Party -- concurred that there is something necessary and desirable about having Arafat sitting and functioning in his compound a few miles north of Jerusalem, and that anything done to disrupt that state of affairs would be both unwise and reprehensible.

One could now fete and honor a Jew-murderer and at the same time feel virtuous, a friend of the oppressed.

It's nothing new. Someday historians will look back at our era and wonder how this baleful figure was able to pursue a career for four decades as an arch-terrorist, dictator, liar, and thief without ever being stopped or punished. The reason, they may discover, is that he meant too many things to too many people, that he fulfilled certain needs in the "civilized" world that made his presence too precious to dispense with.

For Europe, the place where he is most genuinely popular (as opposed to the Arab world), Arafat's rise to prominence in the early 1970s relieved the discomfort of a quarter-century in which Europeans felt they had to behave well toward Jews and recognize their right to life. This was, after all, a period in which Britain and France joined Israel in a military campaign against Egypt, and France for a time was Israel's main ally and military supplier -- things that would be unthinkable today. But then, in the early 1970s, came Arafat with his headdress, stubble, and gun, proclaiming that if one was a victim of Jews it was right to kill them. He quickly became the toast of Europe. Jew-murder was no longer a base act perpetrated by brownshirts, fascists; it was now a noble, revolutionary deed performed by the downtrodden and desperate. One could now fete and honor a Jew-murderer and at the same time feel virtuous, a friend of the oppressed. No wonder most of Western Europe hasn't gotten over its fondness or, at best, ambivalence toward Arafat to this day, as dignitaries continue to go on pilgrimage to his Ramallah compound and still proclaim him a requirement of peace. No amount of documentary evidence of Arafat's responsibility for the terror seems to impress such people, and why should it? The whole point in the first place was that Arafat redeemed Jew-killing and made it admirable again.

For the Left in general, Arafat provided a vivid avatar of the revolutionary hero in a time when the species was getting scarce. Joe was gone and the Soviet Union had lost most of its chic; Ho, too, was gone, and it was hard to work up much enthusiasm for his successors in liberated South Vietnam; Mao died and his luster quickly dimmed. But Castro was still there -- and Arafat. Here was a self-declared leader of a dark-skinned, Third World people that laid claim to being expelled, oppressed, and poverty-stricken all at once -- and the victims of a Jewish colonial outpost backed up by the Great Satan itself! Marx must have held wild parties in his grave. And the more Arafat sent his righteous minions to shoot, stab, bomb, and generally butcher the colonialist-capitalist usurpers of his land, the more he became the darling of the international Left, which to this day idolizes him and sends human shields to defend his forces against the evil depredations of the Israeli army.

For U.S. administrations, Arafat gradually became

Outpost               - 10 -               October 2003