November 10, 2004

Palestinians Prepare for Arafat Burial on Friday I certainly hope not, because: Arafat 'still alive' - Islamic cleric UPDATE: OK, looks like he died just in time. Who was Yasser Arafat? For starters, he was not a native Palestinian ... he was born and schooled in Cairo ... Around 1960, Arafat co-founded Fatah, or "conquest," the political movement that would later come to be the dominant faction of the PLO. Aside from its aim to obliterate Israel, the group had no particular political vision: Islamists, nationalists, Communists and pan-Arabists were equally welcome. Instead, the emphasis was on violence: "People aren't attracted to speeches but to bullets," Arafat liked to say ... [T]he intifada ... was a premeditated act. As Arafat had already told an Arab audience in Stockholm in 1996, "We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion ... We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem." It goes without saying that Arafat failed in that endeavor. The Israelis belatedly realized that the maximum they could concede was less than the minimum Arafat would accept, and refused to deal with him. For its part, the second Bush administration cut off the international life support. In this sense, Arafat's illness -- so far undisclosed by his doctors -- can easily be diagnosed: He died of political starvation.  5:21:55 PM