Who Is Yasser Arafat?

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Who Is Yasser Arafat?

By Rowland Croucher and others ⋅ July 2, 2003 ⋅ Post a comment

[Again: please note that this website is even-handed re Israel. Odd stance, eh? This is published here FYI].

The article that the editors of Melbourne University student magazine Farrago didn’t want you to see.

by Nadav Shlezinger

TNA News with Commentary No. 338, June 2002

As a Jewish student on campus, the amount of anti-Israel propaganda floating around on campus never ceases to amaze me. Groups that supposedly preach human rights, happen to also be conducting a campaign of misinformation against the tiny state on the eastern Mediterranean. This often includes support for the murder of innocent civilians, or as certain members of these groups surmise, ‘a legitimate struggle against occupation’. How an 85 year-old Holocaust survivor sitting down to their Passover meal can be judged an oppressor, or for that matter a five-year old girl sitting in her bedroom, is an interesting question. Quite often, the immoral diatribe will also include support for Yasser Arafat.

To some, he is a freedom fighter, to others he is the murderer of their children. As the face of the Palestinian people, and a pioneer of terrorism in the Middle East, he has been in the world media spotlight for almost 40 years. So the question may be asked, who is Yasser Arafat?

Born in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, and not in Jerusalem as he has so often claimed, Arafat was part of a middle-class family. As a teenager, Arafat was already fighting against the Jewish underground movements in the British mandate of Palestine. Israel’s independence was announced in 1948 after the United Nations partition resolution (which called for both a Jewish and Arab state in Palestine) was rejected unconditionally by all the surrounding Arab nations. After the war, Jordan held a section on the West Bank of the Jordan River, which today is known simply as The West Bank.

After completing his studies in Egypt, Arafat – who also goes by the name Abu Ammar – spent time in many countries trying to raise support for the Palestinian cause. This included time spent in Kuwait, where he set up an engineering company in 1955, to raise money for the fight against Israel. By 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was formed, and in January 1965, with Arafat as its leader, the impact of the new Fatah organisation was first felt by Israel. With Syrian backing, Fatah – an acronym for the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine – carried out an unsuccessful terrorist attack on the National Water Carrier of Israel. However, the countless terrorist attacks over the many years to follow were not to have as light an effect on innocent civilians as the first did.

In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt (as well as capturing the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula) in a war forced upon it amid mass deployment of troops by Syria, Egypt and Jordan along its borders. However, Arafat’s intentions remained the same. In 1970, he said ‘our basic aim is to liberate the land from the ‘Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River’ (the whole of Israel). In his obsession to drive the Jews into the sea, unspeakable acts of terror were committed.

In September 1970, following an attempted coup by the PLO, King Hussein’s Jordanian army attacked PLO strongholds. By the end of the month, the Palestinians were defeated, a large number of their fighters, including Arafat, escaping to Lebanon. There were almost a dozen completed hijackings in the four-year period after the Six-Day War. In one case, a Swissair plane with Israelis on board was sabotaged, killing 47 people. In 1972, at the Munich Olympic Games, gunmen from Black September, an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization, of which Arafat by now had full control, broke into the athletes village and took hostage Israeli competitors. By the end of the failed rescue mission, the terrorists had killed eleven Israelis and a German policeman. In 1974, three terrorists infiltrated the Israeli-Lebanese border, and – after murdering three members of a family – entered a school in Ma’alot, where 105 schoolchildren were sleeping. The Israeli army botched the rescue attempt. The result was the cowardly murder of 21 schoolchildren and four teachers by terrorist grenades and gunfire.

The policy of Arafat’s terrorists, was not just to kill Israelis, but also to kill Jews of any nationality. In 1976, the most documented of hijackings, terrorists took control of an Air France plane and took it to Uganda, which was controlled by dictator Idi Amin. Jews and non-Jews were separated, and the Jewish passengers were held hostage. Israel staged a successful rescue mission, sending elite units to Uganda. Jonathan Netanyahu, the brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, died in the rescue mission. Also in the 1970′s, terrorists took control of a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, pushing overboard a 72 year-old wheelchair-bound American Jewish man. Arafat’s men would stop at nothing to achieve their aims of destroying Israel and the Jewish people.

In 1982, after a string of terrorist attacks, Israel commenced Operation Peace for Galilee, entering Lebanon to search for the terrorists who were making life increasingly difficult for Israel’s northern inhabitants. For Arafat, this meant expulsion from Lebanon, and a new base in Tunisia. Arafat remained in exile until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, in which then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat, as the two sides agreed to further dialogue towards peace. It was the first time that Arafat had acknowledged the right of Israel to exist.

But hindsight has proved the failure of this momentous occasion. Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995, while Arafat has failed to live up to his side of the agreement. Since then, Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon have all made concessions for peace, but to no avail. They have had to deal with a dictator, who has not held an election since 1993. Under the Palestinian Authority, schoolbooks teaching of the necessity to push the Jews into the sea are standard text. Arafat’s people live in squalor, not because of Israel, but because aid given to the Palestinian Authority is used to buy more helicopters for Arafat, or to pay for apartments in Paris for Arafat’s wife, or to pay for guns, grenades and mortars, which are then used to kill Israeli civilians. Arafat’s official television network, PATV, regularly broadcasts mosque sermons, in which clerics tell worshippers, to ‘kill Jews or the Americans who stand with them, wherever they may be.’ His religious authority, the Wakf, digs up Jewish artifacts under the Temple Mount, the holiest side in Judaism, so that they can disprove the Jewish history that exists on this site.

In June 2000, Barak offered Arafat a nation, side-by-side with Israel, in 97% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip. Arafat’s response, in September 2000, was an organized campaign of terror against Israel, which is still continuing today. According to former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, Arafat told him ‘we can wait 150 years to push the Jews into the sea’. In a recent interview with Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera, Arafat refused to denounce suicide bombings, despite Rivera’s insistence that he do so. In the past year and a half, suicide bombings have claimed hundreds of Israeli lives, including 28 at a Passover meal in Netanya, 15 at a Pizzeria in Jerusalem, and 21 at a discotheque in Tel Aviv. Many of these bombing have been carried out by members of Arafat’s own Fatah brigade, and documents have been seized proving that Arafat had ordered the bombings.

Arafat, once (and incredibly, still) touted as a peacemaker by world leaders, has proven over and over again that he is still a terrorist, with no regard for human life. In 1975, Arafat told the UN General Assembly, ‘I hold the olive branch of a peace-maker in one hand, and the gun of a freedom fighter in the other.’ The only thing that was clear then and has been obvious ever since, is that Arafat never truly intended to hold the olive branch.