Friday, July 30, 2004
Left starts to wake up to Arafat
After 10 years of contortions and turning a blind eye, the New York Times has finally woken up to the erstwhile Nobel Prize winner, or so a recent editorial might indicate:
"It's been the misfortune of the Palestinian people to be stuck with Yasser Arafat as their founding father, a leader who failed to make the transition from romantic revolutionary to statesman. All he seems capable of offering Palestinians now is a communal form of the martyrdom he seems to covet ... That the Palestinian lands are in total ruin, that the fruits of the Oslo accords are in tatters, seems of no importance to him. His reflexive insistence that this is all the fault of `Zionists,' the West, other Arabs, is unsustainable. Arafat himself bears a large share of the responsibility for these misfortunes."
(See Good Morning, New York Times (Yoel Marcus))
Marcus says of Arafat:
"He built around himself a corrupt Mafia-style regime with the gang he brought over from Tunisia. He kept a handle on things by greasing palms, torturing his rivals and brutally bumping them off.
"I am not belittling Israel's role, with its overuse of force against the Palestinian Authority and the widespread destruction it has caused. But somewhere along the line we began to realize that we are sick and tired of living year after year in the grip of bloody terror.
"There was a time when both Clinton and Barak offered Arafat 97 percent of the territories. Arafat's response was the Al-Aqsa Intifada that claimed thousands of lives. Israel is now preparing to leave the Gaza Strip. But Arafat, over in the Muqata, is busy sabotaging the start of Israel's withdrawal from the territories and dragging his people down into the depths of despair."
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Now (August 4) it is reported that the EU fraud investigation agency(OLAF) has unanimously endorsed investigating evidence that money sent by the EU to the Palestinian Authority was used by Arafat's group to fund terrorist attacks.
