Killing Arafat
Alexander Marriott September 16, 2003

After years of duplicitous dealing and overt support of terrorism the Israelis finally started talking about removing Arafat from the Middle East peace process, killing him if necessary. They have removed the killing option in the last week or so, but the fact that the Israelis are now talking about removing one of the many obstacles to peace is a hopeful sign that the drawn out mess over ther may eventually be solved.

Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, has been a fomenter of terrorism virtually his entire “professional” career. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s Arafat served as the nexus between the Soviet money and arms and the terrorist training camps in Syria and Lebanon which trained and supplied many notorious terrorists. One such person to come out of Arafat’s Terrorist “College” was Abu Nidal, notorious terrorist madman who was only recently killed in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, and Hamas terrorists trained under Arafat as well.

With the fall of the Soviet Union Arafat’s money supply dried up. His terrorist connections were still in place though and there was a regional enemy to use them against, Israel. It was in this way that Yasser Arafat was able to drum up pressure on Israel to allow him and all of his terrorist cronies in exile in Tunisia to come back to the West bank.
The western world, particularly the United States under Bill Clinton were all too willing to forget Arafat’s transgressions and puppet him up as the leader of the Palestinian people. This is how the much heralded Oslo Accords came about.
What everyone involved with the Oslo Accords failed to realize, accept Arafat of course, was that Arafat had always been a consort of terrorists and still was. Israel’s release of authority over the Palestinian areas precipitated an Arafat sponsored and run terrorist regime. This on and off use of terrorism has continued unabated since 1993 when Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Rabin sold the Israeli people out to a known terrorist who gave no signal of being “reformed.”
So it is no surprise that we remain in the same mess now, because Arafat and the terrorist apparatus he built are still in place. Israelis know all of this by now; there have been more than enough deaths since 1993 to illustrate the truth of this over and over again.

Western liberals say that it’s all Israel’s fault for defending themselves, which they cloak in the term “cycle of violence.” There is no such thing. The Palestinian terrorists bomb civilians indiscriminately and Israel kills terrorist leaders in the most targeted way that they can. There is no equivalence in these two actions. One is an aggressive act of murder against innocent civilians while the other is an act of self-defense to kill the people responsible for murdering Israelis.
The Israelis should be lauded for being so restrained for so long. The spiritual leader of Hamas, a skinny and creepy looking Sheikh has been allowed to offer succor to terrorists for years and continues to do so unabated. This is an illustration of Israel’s restraint in killing only those terrorists who have directly participated in ordering or planning attacks.

The United States would never be so restrained in fighting terrorism, nor should it be. The nature of terrorism and religious fanaticism requires the wholesale destruction of all who are involved in it. Fanatics won’t relent or change their minds. Those they abandoned and discarded long ago.

This is why killing Arafat as opposed to exiling him, where he can still communicate with terrorists on the ground, is preferable. His death and the prompt subsequent deaths of everyone else in the terrorist hierarchy will effectively clamp down the terrorism problem which has only been emboldened by Israel’s limited and timid responses. If they don’t do this then they can only expect more of same and the blood of Israelis will continue to run in the streets as it has been.