HE WAS responsible for and complicit in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians over the past 40 years. His cells committed heinous crimes: suicide bombings, attacks on children, execution-style murders and more. Yet, astonishingly, there was his casket, draped in the Palestinian flag, carried to a plane by a French honor guard past thousands of well-wishers. Unfortunately, while history may remember Arafat for his Nobel Peace Prize and his "long effort for statehood," as The New York Times so myopically put it, nothing will change who the true Arafat was: a heinous brute and a notorious terrorist.
Arafat and his various terrorist fronts began their evil long before the well-documented wave of homicide bombings that encompassed Arafat's second intifada against Israel began in 2000. In 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), operating under Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), bombed a SwissAir flight bound for Tel Aviv. Many forget that a "Black September" group, responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics, was in fact comprised of eight PLO henchmen. In 1973, another Black September cell, this time in Sudan, kidnapped and executed U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and two others. Forgotten in history is the charge, though never proven, that Arafat himself directly ordered the killings in a phone conversation to his operatives in Sudan.
Another tragically forgotten episode occurred in Ma'alot, a town in northern Israel. On May 15, 1974, PLO terrorists stormed a school taking dozens of children hostage and demanded the release of jailed colleagues. When the gunfire ended and the smoke cleared, 21 children lay dead. Even the handicapped were fair game for Palestinian terror. In 1985, a cell called the Palestine Liberation Front hijacked an Italian cruise ship named the Achille Lauro. The terrorists then proceeded to shoot Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew in a wheelchair, and dump him overboard to drown in the sea.
The list of violence and atrocities could go on and on, but what is nearly as abhorrent are the various alter-images of Arafat crafted over the last decade. The image of Arafat as the peacemaker reached a pinnacle in the mid-1990s after he signed the Oslo Peace Accords with Israel and won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, trivializing the accomplishments of every winner before and every winner since. But Arafat never cared about a lasting peace in the region; he rejected a proposal at Camp David in 2000 that would have granted the Palestinians their own state in Gaza and the majority of the West Bank, and proceeded to launch the violent insurrection of the second intifada.
The other false image of Yasser Arafat, Arafat as the victim, came about in more recent years. The inauguration of President George W. Bush, and the subsequent Bush doctrine, signaled the beginning of the end for Arafat. For more than two years, he has been holed up in his compound in Ramallah surrounded by Israeli forces, his relevancy stripped away, much like the lives of his victims. But Arafat's internment did not grant him reconciliation for the atrocities he has committed. It did nothing more than elevate his status as a cause celeb among Israel's detractors.
The images of Arafat as the peacemaker and the victim are dangerous because they conceal the true Arafat: Arafat the terrorist. Most of us were not alive during Arafat and the PLO's violent heyday or know little of the aforementioned attacks and others. And while, granted, the next generation will be similarly unfamiliar with the Bali nightclub bombing or names like Abu al-Zarqawi or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, their deaths will not be mourned with flower-adorned memorials or lamenting world leaders.
History will ultimately decide in which light Yasser Arafat is cast. Will students 50 years from now read of his Nobel Peace Prize, see pictures of him smiling with distinguished world leaders and hear President Bush's almost inconceivable remark, "God bless his soul"? Hopefully, they will instead see the pictures of his victims, read of his malevolence and rightly cast him alongside Hitler, Hussein and bin Laden as one of the most notorious murderers of the 20th century.
Joe Schillings column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jschilling@cavalierdaily.com.
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