The Middle East: Where words speak louder than actions
The Middle East: Where words speak louder than actions

The record shows that he was born in 1929 outside of Cairo, Egypt. Yet others claim Gaza, to make him seem somewhat more Palestinian, and to better lay claim to a nationality that was manufactured in 1964 with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Its sole purpose was “liberating Palestine” through armed struggle – despite the fact that the disputed territories were not “occupied” by Israel until June 1967. Confusing? Not at all. It’s part of a lie that we have been living for, well, as long as they have been lying.

Yasir Arafat, still burning in a Hell where his Arabic serves him well (where its many jihadist residents discovered that all the virgins look like Ruth Bader Ginsburg), proved that if you cannot defeat them with war, then you can always resort to words. Because in an oil-thirsty world there is always an assemblage that wants to blame the Jews. The same world that blamed them long before there was a need for oil.

In what Professor Rael Isaac referred to years ago as a remarkable case of “semantic larceny,” the Arabs became the “Palestinians” to better allow the Palestinian Arabs to become the David to Israel’s Goliath.

Yes, it is a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
Sometimes people believe the damnedest things.

Arafat died on November 11, 2004. Well, maybe. He was first officially reported to have died a few days earlier. And then, a day after that. And then not. And, yes, it was finally confirmed on the eleventh, poisoned by the Israelis his cohorts contended – a fabrication they quickly promoted. Another lie. It was done to cover the fact that he had finally succumbed to AIDS, an embarrassment to a people who routinely torture the gay. Leading the war of terror against the Jews as a lifelong bachelor, he used to boast that he was really married to the revolution.

That is, until the public relations team that tried to reinvent the Israelis as Goliath told him he needed to soften his image, developed over the years as a mass murderer killing Jews everywhere, including in countries not “occupied.” Many fell victim. Schools, tourist resorts, cruise ships, the Olympic Games, and quiet bedroom communities far from the war that he helped launch were all fair game. But his preferred targets were in Israel, and the victims, almost unanimously civilians.

Nonetheless, the progressive world was quick to embrace him – enough that he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it is a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Arafat was no innovator, unless of course one counts murderous hijackings. But he was adaptive, and after a generation of murder and mayhem, he came to understand that words were more important than actions. Bomb buses in Israel, all in the name of peace. It is the ageless war against the Jews, fought on a different battlefield.

It is a lesson not lost on the Palestinian Authority today.

The PA is led by Mahmoud Abbas, its Chairman since 2004. His PhD thesis and subsequent book were the very denial of the Holocaust. He was the chief financier of the Munich Olympic massacre, part of a five-decade-long curricula vitae colored with the blood of innocents. Notorious for naming city squares, schools, and soccer stadiums after Palestinian suicide bombers, one would think that would preclude him as a potential peace partner with Israel. In a normal world. Until we remember that we live in a mad, mad, mad, mad world, where all one needs to do is utter the word “peace” while unapologetically murdering the innocent. Perhaps a peace prize awaits him as well.

Pushing a false and deceptive narrative, words count. Actions do not matter.

The prevailing Islamic/Arab/Palestinian narrative has us believing that a weakened Israel, denied its history, shrunken in territory, and removed of its international prestige, is the prelude to peace. The world is quick to accommodate.

Where one might cite scores of examples, only one is necessary. Two weeks ago, the U.N.’s heritage body UNESCO agreed to adopt a resolution, a joint Palestinian-Jordanian initiative, proclaiming the Temple Mount sacred to “Muslims only.” That declaration, we are told to expect, will be supported by the European Union, denying the very Jewish claim to its holiest site.

Let us remember that there are two competing factions – organized movements – that lead the Palestinian charge seeking to “liberate Palestine.” Hamas, that declares exactly what it intends to do, and the PA/Fatah, which while routinely putting out the same vitriolic message for Arab domestic consumption, advances another tamer euphemistic memo to the willfully gullible foreign audience. Both are cloaked with genocidal determination.

It should be noted that during the years that followed his receiving his prestigious peace prize, Nobel Laureate Yasir Arafat engineered a four-fold increase in terror attacks against the civilized world that foolishly continued to petition his peace. The sixteen hundred killed in Israel after the Oslo Peace Accords were not spared by his words.

Words.

The Arabs believe their own lies, something best illustrated by this Middle East parable: An Arab father, trying to catch an afternoon nap in a home full of boisterous children, barks out the lie that they are giving away free figs at the local market. Moments later, as he places his head on his pillow in a now empty house, he too suddenly jumps up and runs to the shuk to get some of those fictitious figs.

The line between fact and fantasy disappears. As it has with greater occurrence throughout the whole western world.

That the Arabs believe their own myths and lies is nothing new. It seems endemic. That the western world has joined that run for figs is troubling indeed.

Meir Jolovitz is a former national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.