Yasser, That's My Baby! I was profoundly saddened to read, on the opening screen of AOL when I checked my email after work Wednesday nite, that Yasser Arafat has died — in France, not even in Palestine, nor in the veritable 'homeland' of freedom, the United States, which should always have been on his side but has yet to wake to that fact.
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I had, of course, heard that he seemed to be dying, but I didn't want to believe it. I was afraid that with his death, the Palestinian leadership would lose its guts and give in to Israeli terms — that is, accept slavery with a gentle face. Arafat didn't care what face slavery wore: he wanted freedom for his people, and justice for all people.
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The Israelis managed to present their attitude as reasonable, and that of Arafat as insane. But what if we were talking literal slavery here, and the South, as a condition to voluntarily abstaining from the Great Rebellion of 1861-65, had offered a "compromise" on slavery:

"We will remain in the Union voluntarily, without warfare for independence, if the Union will accept our right to own slaves, as long as we treat them well." And then they turn to blacks and say, "We pledge that we will no longer flog you if you refuse to work. No longer hunt you down and chop off a foot if you flee. No longer lynch you if you get uppity. OK? You won't be free, because you're not meant to be free. God in his infinite wisdom made the black man inferior to the white man and put the black man in chains so he might do the white man's bidding. But we will be NICE to you."

Would we accept that? Some white people in the North surely would have, as most Christian Americans seem to accept Israel's modern-day version of the same offer.
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As it happens, the South DID arise in rebellion, and we did have to fite a terrible war, which, thank goodness, we won. So blacks are NOT slaves today, and don't have to periodically bargain for better treatment AS slaves. Palestinians aren't so lucky. They are to this day slaves of Zionism, and Israelis offer them not freedom but less-onerous slavery.
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Oppression Oppresses the Oppressor Too. The people who do injustice are almost as much victim of their folly as are the people to whom they do injustice. It just doesn't hurt as much.
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I don't mean that "In the grand scheme of things, God will punish." Because I don't believe in God. I'd like to, but can't. I especially can't believe in a benign God on a planet where most creatures must kill to live. And I assuredly don't accept any theological excuse for why bad things happen to good people.
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What I do mean is that in order to keep a man down, you have to stay down with him. Even if you are standing, with your foot on his throat, you can't move your foot away from his throat, so are stuck wherever he happens to have fallen that you managed to stomp your foot. The world moves on, but you're stuck with your foot on a man's throat in the same place you stepped on him 20, 30, 40 years ago.
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You know you're in the wrong. You know you shouldn't be doing anything even remotely like what you're doing. Judaism forbids it. Christianity forbids it. The Golden Rule, in its Buddhist, Hindu and multitudinous other versions, forbids it. So you know you're wrong, you feel you're wrong, but you feel trapped. If there is a God, and you go to meet your maker, what will you answer when he asks why you continued in error for so long, even after He gave you the wisdom to see the error of your ways?
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Even if there is no God, no Last Judgment, no Divine Retribution, what toll will your conscience inflict on you for being an inhuman monster? Israelis apparently never ask such questions. Everyone else in the world does. Israelis can't afford to.
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Israelis keep talking about "survival", as tho (a) the Arabs will slit their throats if they do justice and (b) the God who so loves them that he made them his "Chosen People" will somehow abandon them and not even let them into Heaven! Islamist "terrorists" are certain that God will reward them after this life if they act heroically. Supposedly pious Jews have no such certitude.
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Since when do people kill those who do them justice? Or do Israelis feel that true justice requires them to die for their crimes?
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Jesus said, in Palestine: "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them." Simple. Elegant. Wise. Do Israelis heed Jesus's infinitely good — and practical — advice?
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Zionists are very quick to suggest to Christian Americans that "Jesus was a Jew". Do they heed the advice of that Jew? (We will, for the moment, pass over the fallacy of calling Jesus a Jew.)
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Jesus understood what all intelligent people understand. There is, indeed, a popular group chant among racial-justice and other activists in the United States: "No justice. No peace." The converse of that is plain: if justice, then peace. And only thru justice can we achieve peace.
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Do Israelis offer JUSTICE for peace? No. They offer LAND for peace — land they STOLE to begin with! They say,

"If you let us keep SOME of the land we stole, we'll give some of it BACK to you."

Yasser Arafat said, as all decent and just people say,

"No way! You have STOLEN from us. Give us back EVERYTHING you stole, and THEN we'll forgive you. ONLY then can there be peace between us. And you know, you'll feel better for having given back what you stole!"

Questions Beyond the Grave. Did Arafat die a natural death? Or did the Israelis find a way to kill him even as he stayed within his compound? We will probably never know, and conspiracy theories will likely abound for decades.
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Yasser Arafat was, to be sure, no "spring chicken", but a 75-year-old man who had lived an extremely stressful life. I'd like to think he died a natural death, having been spared by Fate from murder by the enemies of Earth, the Israelis. But it might well be that the Israelis found a way to poison his food, or air, or to bombard him with microwaves, as the Soviets were reputed to have done to Americans in our embassy in Moscow.
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The uncritically Zionist Government and media of the United States have tried to portray Arafat as a "terrorist" victimizing innocent Israelis — never mind that Menachem Begin was without doubt a member of the terrorist organization Irgun, which in 1946 bombed the King David Hotel, killing over 100 people: British soldiers, civilians, and even Jews in the crowd without distinction.
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After a decade or two of such unending, uncritical, and unwavering Zionist propaganda, coupled with unending murder of Palestinians by Israel, all but the most credulous and uncritical people on this planet had realized that Arafat was never the bad guy attacking innocents for no reason, but only a man fighting back, against insuperable odds, to stop the crimes constantly being committed against his people by the Israelis and their colonial underling, the Government of the United States.
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Americans have been taxed to the tune of over $91 BILLION — and growing — to empower Israelis to kill without mercy and steal another people's country right out from under them, all the while posing as "victims" of "anti-Semitism". Never mind that "Semite" means a speaker of a Semitic language, and the overwhelming preponderance of all true "Semites" are Arabs. Never mind that Yasser Arafat attended midnite mass in Bethlehem on Christmas and Easter services with Christian Palestinians until the Israelis forbade him to do so! No, we are supposed to think of Yasser Arafat as a simple-minded, crude, violent, "anti-Semitic" bigot (which would have to mean anti-self) who killed people for no reason. What a load of crap!
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I honor Yasser Arafat, as almost the entire world outside the United States has long honored Yasser Arafat, as a HERO who stood against infinite odds to TRY to win justice for his people and who managed somehow to evade death at the hands of the Israeli military, despite their best efforts — and remember that the Israelis have always represented themselves as the world's supreme military, head and shoulders above the American military and every other fighting force on Earth.
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Arafat died not on the battlefield but in a hospital, from organ failure. Whether the Israelis induced that organ failure we may never know. Let us, for this purpose, assume it was just his time to go.
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Yasser Arafat was, for most of the world, beyond contention a great man. He was courageous when almost everyone around him was scared sh*tless. He stood by his principles when unprincipled scumbags like Bill Clinton tried to get him to renounce them. He never gave in, never gave up, but was a permanent, resolute inspiration to his people, and to all Arabs everywhere, in never accepting the "inevitability" or "permanence" of Zionism.
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Like the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians who never gave up on independence from Soviet Communism, Yasser Arafat stood fast in believing that Palestine could someday be free. When all the rest of the world said, "Give up!" — in the case of the Baltic States, "accept the facts: you are part of the Soviet Union and always will be" or, in the case of Palestine, "Israel has won. It's all over. Give up." — he said 'Go F*CK yourself! It's NOT over. We will NEVER give up.'
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That's something for Democrats suffering post-election melancholia to remember.
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Bruce Springsteen sang of "No Surrender". Yasser Arafat lived it.
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I see a lot of surrender around me. Yasser Arafat saw a lot of surrender around him, but refused, himself, to surrender. In doing so he gave millions the courage to stand against defeat, insist on justice, and believe that eventually even the stupidest redneck could be made to understand that Christians have NO STAKE in doing injustice to Arabs for the sake of Jews.
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Once the United States turns its back on Zionism — and that will in part be because decent, progressive, American JEWS turn their back on Zionism as a dream become NIGHTMARE — the evil lunacy of Zionism will end, Palestine will be reunited peacefully, and the endless war the neo-cons have embroiled us in will equally end.
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When will that be? How long will we have to wait? Yasser Arafat is done waiting. We are not.
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I am so terribly, terribly sad that Yasser Arafat never got the chance to preside over a unified and secular Palestine: Moslem, Christian, and Jewish without distinction. He would gladly and proudly have attended Rosh Hashana services with Jewish Palestinians as openly, honestly, and lovingly as he attended Easter and Christmas services with Christian Palestinians. And everyone in attendance would have been thrilled to see him.
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It hurts so BAD to think of a man who worked his entire adult life to win freedom and justice for his people to die before those ends were achieved. It hurts so bad. I feel so sad for Arafat and for Palestine. Arafat is dead. Palestine is not. Dare I transfer my hopes from Arafat, the hero of Palestinian struggle, to the Palestinian people? Or are Palestinians, absent Arafat, as gutless and useless as Americans without John F. Kennedy?
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Yasser Arafat was a decent and astoundingly courageous man — which may be why he was so despised by the envious, and disgraced, gutless wonders who run this country. He cared deeply about his people and about justice: simple human fairness. He wanted to welcome — no, craved — the contribution of all Palestinians, of whatever religion, to the progress and pride of his nation, and knew that a reunified Palestine would NEED the inputs and aspirations of all Palestinians, Moslem, Christian, and Jewish without distinction. But he didn't live long enuf to see all the peoples of Palestine join as fellow countrymen in a loving and joyful project of national reconstruction, building a society fit to call itself "The Holy Land". Will anyone?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:54 AM