Who Can Really Say?

Unreconstructed Jimmy

Diplomacy is all well and good, but sometimes a rat bastard should be called a rat bastard. Yasser Arafat was a rat bastard and the best thing I can say about that sentence is that I'm able to say write it in the past tense.

Jimmy Carter disagrees.

"Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era and will no doubt be painfully felt by Palestinians throughout the Middle East and elsewhere in the world," Carter said.

He was the father of the modern Palestinian nationalist movement. A powerful human symbol and forceful advocate, Palestinians united behind him in their pursuit of a homeland," he said in a statement distributed by his Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center.

Yasser Arafat's PLO was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games. Yasser Arafat pioneered terrorism as a political tool -- the bombs, the plane hijackings, and the Achille Lauro hijacking which included the murder of a wheelchair bound American. Yasser Arafat's eventual acceptance on the world stage as a legitimate leader was disgusting and his performance as one was appalling. He was not the leader of the Palestinians, he was their demagogue. Arafat's legacy is The Wall that Israel's been forced to build to protect itself from what he has created. The modern Palestinian nationalism that Arafat fathered is a disaster.

The problem with Carter is that he believes the notion that you can make peace with an unreconstructed murderer.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam].

UPDATE: More here.

Posted by Peter at November 11, 2004 08:01 PM