A Journal for Western Man-- Issue VI
Alan Caruba
In March of this year, the pundits and the headlines all agreed that Yasser Arafat was finished as the spokesman for the Palestinian people. It has taken since then for the Israelis to conclude that the only hope of peace they have is to rid themselves of this 72-year-old terrorist and find someone, anyone, who will seriously negotiate terms by which these two peoples can end their conflict.
Israel is the template for real peace. Through force of arms, applied with care to avoid non-combatant deaths, Israel has determined to literally tear down the headquarters of their most dedicated enemy, building by building, room by room. There comes a time when peace can be won only by the arts of war. This is the lesson for Americans as well.
Yasser Arafat was 35 years old when, in 1965, in Beirut, Lebanon, he first handed out "Military Communique No 1" announcing that Fatah, an organization composed of a dozen friends, had launched an attack on Israel's water system. It was New Years day. No one printed his news release. It turned out that it was a lie. He has been lying ever since. However, he has also become the mastermind and financier of every act of terror that has afflicted Israel since.
Arafat has since strutted upon the world stage, meeting with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and other statesman, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for pretending to seek peace with the Israelis, and being hailed before the General Assembly of the United Nations.
What level of delusion did it require for the Israelis and others to accept him as someone with whom some progress toward peace could be made? What level of delusion did it require for the Israelis to hammer out the Oslo Accords with him? At the cost of how many lives has it been to hope against hope that some accommodation could be made that would permit his so-called "Palestinians" to live and work beside the Israelis as civilized neighbors?
Before the emergence of Arafat, Israel, starting in 1948, had fought and won five wars launched against them by their Arab neighbor states. Since that first war the refugees of that and subsequent wars to annihilate the Jews of Israel have remained the world's oldest and only continuous refugees. It was not until 1967 that Arafat declared that his Arabs should be considered a separate nation.
It took the events of September 11, 2001 for the blinders to fall from the eyes of Americans. It has taken some two years of unceasing suicide-murder bombings for the Israelis to conclude that the only answer, the only hope for their people, was to isolate and remove Yasser Arafat as the single greatest obstacle to peace.
Now, within hours, days or weeks, Yasser Arafat will be physically removed from Ramallah. His alleged power is at an end. He may be dead or he may be exiled. The Israelis are teaching the world a valuable lesson. You do not negotiate with terrorists and dictators. You eliminate them. You remove them and you send a message to all their colleagues that terror is no longer going to be tolerated as an instrument to destroy peace throughout the world.
Israel, America, and the civilized world no longer have any other alternative. The threat to world peace, to the rational conduct of affairs between nations, is the mass psychosis called the Islamic Jihad. It is perpetrated by Arabs and other Muslims. It has been articulated and supported by every leader throughout the Middle East. It began with Mohammed who declared that "the sword is the key to heaven." Six hundred years earlier, a Jew named Jesus had warned that all who live by the sword would die by it.
So, it is time, finally, for Yasser Arafat to go. Just as it is time for Saddam Hussein to go. It is time for Khadaffi to go. It is time for the House of Saud to be replaced and it is time for the Iranians to free themselves from their ayatollahs. The Islamists in the festering cancer called the Middle East, in Northern Africa, and in Pacific Basin nations who threaten the "infidels" must, like an evil genie, be put in a bottle and cast into a deep pit.
Israel is demonstrating what must be done. All the other craven voices who counsel patience must be silenced. Americans and the world knows we shall invade Iraq. Just as in Afghanistan, we shall do so not to conquer, but to liberate.
Those who cling to the view that the United Nations shall rid the world of the scourge of war know that it cannot and it will not. As President Bush so clearly expressed it, the UN is impotent and irrelevant. Allow it to implode.
America shall take up arms because, as the twenty-first century dawns, the greatest republic on the face of the earth must insure that peace, freedom, and liberty becomes our legacy to the future. Lincoln said it best. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. That expresses my idea of democracy."
In the last century, men arose to enslave the world and the might of America defeated them. We shall defeat this new generation of dictators. And men will say "peace" in every language of the earth.