Dean's World

So, the State Department has revealed that it knew for decades that Yasser Arafat ordered the murders of U.S. diplomats--and kept it secret until just recently.

One should note that killing diplomats is generally particularly heinous. It's considered a cause for declaration of war all by itself.

Arafat was always--always, always--a terrorist thug. He died a terrorist thug. The veneer of respectability he's been given was and is atrocious. The fact that he was never anything but an oppressor of the Palestinians is therefore unsurprising, but it's disgusting how many people see him as their saintly savior.

All that said, I pretty much agree with Michael van der Galien's take on it.

By the way, for the Islam-obsessed: I have frequently seen it asserted that Yasser Arafat's PLO was the "first Islamist terrorist organization."

This is quite false for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason is that neither Arafat nor his PLO were ever Islamists, and they still aren't Islamists now. "Islamist" is a term meaning "Person or group who wants Islamic religion written into all levels of government." Al Qaeda is an Islamist group. Most Muslims are not Islamists and don't have much trouble separating the idea of religion from government.

Arafat was not an Islamist. Never. Neither is the Fatah party he founded, which is still around today in Palestine.

That doesn't make them good, by the way, but it gets tiresome--to me anyway--to see people making such fundamental errors, so they can lump every bad thing that happens in the Islamic world together and tie it to the religion. Fatah is a secularist, socialist, nationalist movement, not a religious movement.

Yes, Arafat was known to utter "Islamic" sentiments now and then, in pretty much the same way as lots of politicians in America and other countries mouth "Christian" sentiments. But it would be dumb to think that he was ever a theologian or that his organization and movement were based on religion. It was always an afterthought at best.

*Update*: More right here.

What, you thought they just loved the Kalashnikov AK-47 for its superior field performance? You thought Saddam loved the SCUD and his T-72s just for their aesthetics and superior engineering?

I'm often blown away by how many people, even in late 2006, don't get just how deep KGB involvement was throughout the entire Middle East, in so many secularist "revolutionary movements."

*Update 2*: Yasser Arafat was famed for always carrying a sidearm. I'm not philosophically opposed to that, but I've been searching: what make and model of sidearm did he carry? My guess is it was a Makarov. But you tell me. 500 points if you have photographic evidence to back up your answer.

Again, please read this.