Question: Why have American leaders and world media turned against Yasser Arafat and are blaming him ...

Question: Why have American leaders and world media turned against Yasser Arafat and are blaming him for suicide bombings in Israel, even though he has tried his best to prevent them and has arrested as many of those responsible as he can locate? Isn’t that like holding our government accountable for the acts of every criminal in our country?

Response: As we have shown in past issues, Arafat is the bloodiest and most vicious terrorist in history. He and his PLO still hold all the records for the most people taken hostage at one time, the largest number of bombings, torture, rape, hundreds of thousands killed, etc. Yet he has been whitewashed not only by the liberal media but also by our State Department and political leaders. In 1986, 47 U.S. senators (including Al Gore) signed a petition to have him arrested and tried as a mass murderer. Yet when Gore was vice president, he received and honored Arafat in the White House. The world is reaping the destruction it has sown in allowing Arafat to represent “justice” and “peace.”

Benjamin Netanyahu writes, “Under Arafat’s rule...Palestinian Islamic terrorist groups...run summer camps in Gaza that teach Palestinian children how to become suicide martyrs....” (Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001], xv). On September 11, just hours before the attack on America, Arafat’s state-controlled newspaper, Al-Hayat-Al-Jadida, declared, “The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of the Lebanese suicide bombers who taught the U.S. Marines a tough lesson....These suicide bombers are the salt of the earth...the most honorable people among us.”

Arafat runs the PLO territories like the other Muslim dictators and more tightly than most. Just a word from him and anyone is picked up and summarily executed. There is no freedom of speech or conscience, yet huge rallies are held openly in which Hamas is praised and mobs chant the names of suicide bombers as their heroes.

Indeed, suicide bombers are the most honored people in PLO territory. Arafat’s newspaper has “wedding announcements” from families who are rejoicing over the “marriage” of sons to the “black-eyed” virgins in Paradise through their martyrdom by suicide in Israel, killing innocent women and children in the process. And you ask why Arafat, who is a terrorist himself and who has sheltered, encouraged and trained suicide bombers, should be held accountable? I am astonished.

It is true that our government and police are not able to stamp out completely the mafia and all criminals. However, our government does not encourage, shelter, sponsor and finance criminals as Arafat does for the Hamas, his own fatah and other terrorist groups within the PLO territories. Now he is supposedly cracking down on Hamas and other terrorists whom he has praised and supported for years. If he really does so, he will be going against the Palestinian psyche and it could well be his end.