Arafat: death even worse than his life

Father of Terror's death even worse than his life
By P. David Hornik November 7, 2004


He's alive. He's dead. He's conscious. He's in a coma. He's brain-dead. He's recovering. He's on life support.

You'd think they were talking about a great statesman and noble leader, watching every tremble of the needle with clenched hearts. As far as many people are concerned, of course, that is what they're talking about.

Last April 5, asked about Arafat in an interview to Israel's Y-net news website, Ariel Sharon said, "I am not vouching for his physical safety. Whoever kills Jews or orders Jews and Israeli citizens to be killed ... is a marked man." Soon after I wrote: "Did Sharon mean what he said this time. . . ? Many of us feel that this man's continuing to go scot-free is a moral stain on our history that may never go away unless something is done about it soon. . . . This founder of modern terrorism . . . murdering Jews and others for decades in a sententious world of Holocaust ceremonies and proclamations about human rights -- is he going to get away with it? . . ."

The answer is now clear, and it's melancholy. Yes, he got away with it all -- scot-free. He's dying in state in a great capital of European culture, the finest physicians hovering over him round the clock, preparations already under way for a grand funeral in Gaza to be attended by some of the world's leading dignitaries. It's still not clear how his billions will be disbursed after his death.

His victims died much less honorary deaths, most of them now entirely forgotten except by family and friends. They didn't die in old age in top-flight hospitals with doctors hanging over them, most of these victims, but suddenly, in scenes of bloody carnage. One morning early in the "second intifada," the janitor of my younger son's school was shot dead in his car while on the way to work. My son, then ten years old, had his introduction to murder on a personal level: he had to learn that this man would not be coming to the school anymore, and why.

A few years earlier a girl, then fourteen, who had gone to school with my older son was killed by a suicide bomber in downtown Jerusalem. Then in the "second intifada" another classmate of his, this one a friend, a boy who had now reached the age of twenty, died in another suicide bombing on the same Ben Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem.

On September 9 last year, seven people were killed and over fifty wounded in a suicide bombing at the Cafי Hillel in Jerusalem's German Colony neighborhood. One of the dead was the brother of an old friend of mine.

You didn't know about these people; when such people got as far as the hospital, you didn't follow the details of their life-and-death struggles; an Israeli dignitary may have gone to their funerals, but world leaders didn't bother. No, the only one to whom great honor accrues is the killer -- and I, who don't want to be just part of a "people that dwells alone" but also part of the world, will somehow have to come to terms with these facts.

At a time when nonagenarian Nazis and aides to Nazis who killed a dozen people sixty years ago are still hunted down, aged, confused witnesses shuffling up to the stand in desperate attempts to testify against them, Arafat will be buried in state in Gaza, and something in me will get buried, too -- a hope I nurtured, admittedly weak, that there was enough justice in the world that it would still catch up with him, as the terror raged and more and more victims died and were mangled.

Who to blame? -- Sharon, for knuckling under to Bush's behest that Arafat not be touched? Bush, for knuckling under to "the world" at a time when he made ringing statements about good and evil and the duty to defeat all terror? Rabin and Peres for bringing Arafat out of his eclipse in Tunis to wage war on our children for eleven years? "The world" that has always supported him and embraced him so eagerly in the seventies when he came with his headdress, stubble, and gun, the noble savage, the "oppressed," the "victim," to make Jew-killing virtuous again?

Arafat is almost gone, but terror, his legacy, is with us, flourishing as never before, having "graduated" to videotaped beheadings on the Internet, mega-attacks that kill thousands and could kill millions instead of the ten people in the cafי or the fifteen people on the bus. No, justice was not done; instead there's a gaping hole, a void, to be filled with the screams and mourning of generations of victims as the Father of Terror sleeps peacefully in his grave.

Courtesy of israelinsider.