originally posted at American Thinker
By Camie Davis
Arafat’s
life is a tale of a remarkable image makeover and an example of how history can
be twisted to fit a terrorist’s narrative. With the help of communists,
Arafat became known as a legitimate statesman. The “Father of Modern Terrorism,” whose goal was to destroy
Israel, morphed into a Nobel Peace Prize winner who signed peace accords in the
Rose Garden.
Before
Arafat began to revise history, Israel was mostly regarded in the public eye as
an underdog struggling for survival. When the United Nations presented
partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the Jews said yes
and the Arabs said no. The Arabs turned down statehood because statehood
was also offered to the Jews. In 1948, five Arab countries attacked
Israel literally the minute modern-day Israel was born. Israel was
attacked again by Arab nations in 1967 and 1973.
Arafat
hated that the Arab promise to “throw Israel into the sea” failed, so he
intensified his own efforts to destroy Israel. He realized though, after
Arab losses in conventional wars against Israel, that another tactic had to be
employed more -- terrorism. He had a problem though. Many Arabs
leaders hated him. Since he couldn’t garnish their support for his Fatah
terrorist organization, he needed support from the West. Yet, when one’s
goal is to destroy Israel, the West, at least publically, isn’t prone to rally
around that cause.
Perhaps
Arafat would have fallen into the dustbin of history if he hadn’t gained the
support of the Soviet KGB. Arafat’s success
in organizing and motivating terrorists caught the KGB’s attention, which during
the 60’s was developing “liberation fronts” throughout third-world countries.
With the KGB’s help, Arafat became the leader of the PLO. He intensified
his terrorist activity and became a pioneer in hijackings, kidnappings, and
other modes of terrorizing civilians.
So
why would a leader like Mandela, along with many other world leaders, become a
mouthpiece for someone like Arafat?
Because Arafat rebranded himself and his cause to destroy Israel into a
humanitarian crisis. And the world
fell for his trick.
The
KGB knew that Arafat would never get the additional support he needed to
destroy Israel if he kept saying that he wanted to destroy Israel. So they sent
him to the “reform school” of the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, a master
of propaganda. According to David Meir-Levi in History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of
Israeli Aggression, Arafat initially resisted being molded into a
statesman that the West would receive: Arafat railed against Ceausescu’s injunctions that the PLO
should present itself as a people’s revolutionary army striving to right wrongs
and free the oppressed: he wanted only to obliterate Israel. Gradually, though,
Ceausescu’s lessons in Machiavellian statecraft sank in. Arafat developed
propaganda tactics that would allow him to create the image of a homeless
people oppressed by a colonial power.
While Arafat was being molded into a statesman that the West
would openly embrace, he sent one of his top men in the PLO, Abu Jihad, to
North Vietnam to study the strategy and tactics of Ho Chi Minh. Again,
according to Meir-Levi: Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in
mobilizing left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where
activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the line of North
Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a
Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation.
While in North Vietnam, it was made clear to Abu Jihad by Ho’s
chief strategist, General Giap, that if Arafat wanted to gain support, he had
to redefine the terms of his struggle. Meir-Levi gives a quote that is a
bombshell in a nutshell: General Giap said, “Stop talking about annihilating Israel and
instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will
have the American people eating out of your hand.”
Hence, the “Palestinian Cause” was born. Arafat
manufactured a humanitarian crisis to detract attention from his goal to
destroy Israel. And Arafat’s bloodstained hands did indeed become a
trough that the masses -- including American presidents, activists like
Mandela, teachers, professors, Christians, and even some Jews -- ate from. World-leaders pushed the terrorist
turned humanitarian as a viable peace partner upon Israel, brushing aside the
fact that Arafat admitted that his overtures for peace were mere Trojan
Horses.
Arafat’s propaganda turned the underdog Israel fighting for
survival against Arabs since the day of its modern-day inception, into what the
public would perceive as a brutal oppressor and occupier who employed Nazi
regime tactics against Palestinian Arabs.
Mandela furthered Arafat’s narrative in 1990 when he said, “We do not regard the PLO as a
terrorist organization. If one has to refer to any parties as a terrorist
state, one might refer to the Israeli government because they are the people
who are slaughtering defenseless and innocent Arabs in the occupied
territories.”
The
public became enablers of Arafat’s propaganda too. School teachers and college professors push Arafat’s
narrative by telling students that Israel is a “bully” and an “apartheid
state.” Churches push Arafat’s narrative by boycotting companies who
invest in Israeli companies and boycotting Israeli products in protest of
Israel’s “brutal occupation, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians.” And even liberal
Jews push Arafat’s narrative by believing that Jews living in Judea and Samaria
are mere “settlers occupying Arab land.”
Each
time world-leaders and the public support the manufactured “Palestinian
crisis,” it lends legitimacy and justification to Arabs to continue their
violence against Jews. For instance, it fed the justification of an Arab
teenager who recently stabbed to death a Jewish teenage soldier while he slept
on a bus. The New York Times furthered the justification by
posting a picture, not of the mother of the boy who was murdered, but of the
mother of the killer, hoping to elicit empathy for the supposed victims of the
Israeli occupation. It fed the justification of two teenage
Arab boys who cut through a fence surrounding a Jewish town and then cut the
throats of a Jewish family. The
media’s minimal coverage portrayed the murdered family as settlers basically
getting what they deserved.
Mandela
called Arafat “one of the outstanding freedom fighters of this
generation.” Since Arafat was labeled a freedom fighter by a public
figure like Mandela, Arab terrorists equivocate their actions as nothing more
than freedom fighting too.
Israel
erects fences and roadblocks to prevent terrorists’ infiltration and the
slaughter of Jews. Yet Arafat duped the world into perceiving these
security measures as instruments of oppression instead. Israel’s self-defense is portrayed as
aggression. When in reality, Israel tries to prevent civilian casualties
during military operation against terrorists. Before the most recent IDF operation in Gaza, over 100,000
phone calls were made to Arab homes and 2 million pamphlets were dropped into
Gaza to warn of the impending military operation. Yet often, terrorists
will not allow their families to leave and instead use them as human shields. These facts are disregarded though, and
Jews are portrayed as wanton killers.
Unfortunately,
the prediction of a North Vietnam communist general of how easy it would be to
dupe the masses came true. Arafat’s
propaganda is still believed and pushed by a gullible public who continue to
aid and abet Arafat’s real agenda -- to destroy Israel.
