Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rrufff who wrote (7954)	11/14/2004 4:26:34 PM
From: steve kammerer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32591

NEVER, NEVER said he was my hero. I'm just responding to all these posts that have Arafat being the cause just about everything. Heck, Haim, who has extremely intelligent and inciteful posts on other financial boards started his posts about Arafat being sick by complaining that Arafat was just trying to get sympathy and, by extension, take some of the sympathy away from Israel. I don't defend him. arafat = Terrorist = ariel One down, one to go.

To: rrufff who wrote (7954)	11/15/2004 2:26:51 AM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Respond to of 32591

These people deserve a state? By YOSEF GOELL I am about a year older than Yasser Arafat was at his death and, I suspect, somewhat more ill than he was before his final collapse. Which is a way of begging indulgence to engage in what many would consider some very politically incorrect contemplations of the true meaning of what transpired around Arafat's death. What we saw at the Ramallah compound where his body was flown in by two Egyptian military helicopters for burial on Friday afternoon was the true face of the Palestinian people. There is no doubt that the frenzied mobs of tens of thousands of uncontrollable young men who prevented the unloading of the casket from the helicopter truly mourned their leader. They chose to express that mourning in an ethos of savagery, many frenziedly firing AK-47 assault rifles – whose possession was forbidden them by the post-Oslo agreements signed, and immediately flouted, by Arafat. A dwindling number of Israelis, but more people in the West, chose to see Arafat as a romantic freedom fighter – an Arab Che Guevara who was the cultural icon of their youthful days. There have been many movements of national liberation during the past half-century. None of them, perhaps with the exception of the Chechens, have been as murderous as the movement for Palestinian independence that Arafat created and led. As far as we know Arafat was not part of the al-Qaida network of anti-Western terrorism created in recent years by Osama bin Laden. But he was undoubtedly bin Laden's mentor in the techniques of harnessing large-scale murder and terrorism in the service of such causes. Arafat and the Palestinian movement he headed first came to the world's notice with the hijacking of Israeli civilian jets and the demolition of European and American ones, and the barbarous murder of 11 Israeli sportsmen at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The disappointing reaction of many European commentators who witnessed Arafat's murderous rampage over 30 years was basically a racist one. What else can one expect from Palestinians, and Arabs, whose rage is so deep over memories of European colonialism, new American economic and cultural imperialism and the presence of a Jewish Israel in their midst? But what transpired on Friday belies that argument. That culture-wide sense of inchoate murderous rage does indeed pervade much of the Arab world. But it is primarily directed inwardly, against universally corrupt Arab regimes. What keeps it in check, however, are exactly those tyrannical Arab regimes. The pre-funeral rites for Arafat at Cairo's airport were conducted with exemplary order and formal respect. That is because Hosni Mubarak's moderate but effective military dictatorship ordered that it be so, and kept the Egyptian populace away from the airport. Nor are such armed mobs permitted in the Jordanian, Syrian and other Arab dictatorships. Arafat's would-be successors, who were aboard the Egyptian helicopters, obviously could not control their followers; as Arafat himself did not, and mostly would not, during the 10 years since Oslo and the past four years of the "intifada." The most telling pictures from Ramallah on Friday were of the Palestine Authority's Saeb Erekat vainly trying to force open the door of the helicopter in the face of the mob, then escaping with his other returning colleagues and losing themselves in the crowd. In that context it is worth recalling that until Friday many were pressuring Israel to permit Arafat's burial on the Temple Mount. The problem all along was not merely the murderer Arafat but the Palestinian people whom he truly represented and led. It is a population with an unprecedentedly high proportion of violence-prone young men, and parents who have surrendered any hope of controlling them. Such a population does not deserve an independent state, even if it does hold superficially democratic elections. Such an armed independent state would constitute a great danger to Israel, to the surrounding Arab world and to the stability of the Middle East and the world as a whole. Other nationalities who are much more deserving of independence, such as the Kurds in our region, are being denied such independence for much crasser reasons of Big Power political interests. Arafat's greatest achievement was to put the claims of the Palestinians at the head of that list. That totally undeserving claim should and can now begin to be rolled back. On Friday, someone at the Foreign Ministry leaked a decision to begin a worldwide campaign to blacken Arafat's name after his burial. Such a campaign would be at least 30 years overdue. Today it would be flogging a dead horse. What is needed instead is to speak the bitter truth about the Palestinian people to the world. The writer is a retired lecturer in political science and a veteran journalist.