Observers have been at a loss to explain the outpouring of affection, devotion, admiration and warmth for arguably the worst Middle East terrorist, plane hijacker and mass murderer of the past century. The only good thing one could really say about Yasser Arafat is that he was really not as bad as Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin.



The Vatican issued eulogies for the dead Islamofascist that seemed to exceed the Vatican's words issued in eulogy for canonized saints. French towns are knocking one another aside in the race to name streets after Arafat. The UN flags were at half-mast. The international media were beside themselves in admiration, giving Arafat's funeral far greater coverage than that of Ronald Reagan. Media commentators on the BBC and elsewhere literally broke into tears. States sent official representatives to the funeral, as if Arafat had been a head of state. Only time will tell if they will be as generous with their representations when the funeral for Osama Bin-Laden is at last conducted.



All this maudlin mourning for a mass murderer of children and other civilians, for a plane hijacker who paved the way for 9/11, for an Islamofascist who organized terrorist movements whose raison d'etre was a Second Holocaust of Jews.



Or perhaps that was precisely the point?



The media circus and the proclamations of Arafat's greatness did serve one useful function. And that is that they illustrated as well as anything what the true nature is of worldwide solidarity with Palestinians and support for Palestinian national goals.



The simple fact of the matter is that there is no such thing on the planet as sympathy for and identification with Palestinians. There is no such thing as pro-Palestinianism. Period. When Palestinians, or when Arabs in general, are mistreated, repressed and tormented by any Arab regime, no one cares. When Palestinians were mass murdered by Syria and Jordan, no one cared. When more than 100,000 Arab civilians are massacred in Algeria, it does not even make the evening news. When Asad or Saddam Hussein carried out mass murders of Arabs, the Human Rights lobby never looked up from its cinnamon latte.



The pro-Palestinian movement is nothing more than the 21st century's reincarnation of medieval anti-Semitism, complete with medieval anti-Jewish blood libels. People who claim to feel empathy for Palestinians are typically motivated by hatred of Jews. The reason the pro-Palestinian movement wants the Palestinians to have a state is because it understands that such a state will operate as an instrument to attack Israel, murder Jews and seek the annihilation of the Jewish state.



Once one understands this fundamental fact of life about the Middle East and about world political motivations, everything else makes sense. The mind-numbing stupidity of the world media mourning Arafat in great cries of anguish, the fawning toadying of political leaders, the maudlin outpouring of love for the cause of the fallen terrorist Nazi - all are understandable. There is nothing at all confusing about it. These people are not broadcasting their undying love of Palestinians, but rather their undying hatred of Jews.



The world actually understands that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. Palestinians are just Arabs who happen to live in the western section of Palestine, differing little from Syrians or Lebanese. Most of them are from families who migrated into Palestine from the time of the beginning of modern Zionism, when Jewish capital and human skills were making western Palestine a much more comfortable place to live for Arabs from the neighboring lands. To describe them as a nation is as persuasive as describing Michigan's Arab community as a new Detroitian nation in need of self-determination.



In 1948, the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip were seized by Arab states, (illegally) occupied by Jordan and Egypt, in their war to extinguish the newly created state of Israel. The Arab countries could have unilaterally erected a Palestinian state any time between 1948 and 1967 had they wished to do so, and Israel could have had nothing to say about it. There was no Palestinian national movement at all demanding statehood in these areas. In the entire world, there was no demand for a right of the Palestinian people to erect a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.



Neither was there any demand for Palestinian self-determination east of the Jordan river. Transjordan was always as much Palestine as was the land west of the river, and the Palestinians have always been a demographic majority in Jordan (since its independence after World War I). So why have these East Bank Palestinians never felt the need for self-determination? Why have none of the caring supporters of Palestinians ever come out for a Palestinian state at least partly east of the Jordan River? Surely, establishing a state there, at least initially, must be much easier than doing so west of the Jordan; there are no pesky Israelis around.



The problem cannot be ignored and demands a clear and unambiguous answer. Why were there no demands for Palestinian self-determination before 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza? Why were there never any such demands for the Palestinians of the East Bank? Why hardly a word from the world's Palestinian advocates when their beloved Palestinians are brutalized and repressed by the corrupt, kleptomaniacal Palestinian Authority? The answers are the same for all of these mysteries. In all these cases, promoting Palestinian self-determination and national interests would have done nothing to advance the destruction of Israel.



Palestinian nationalism has long been led in large part by non-Palestinians. Many of the leaders of the anti-Jewish and anti-British Palestinian Revolt in the 1930s were not Palestinian at all, but Syrians, Lebanese or Iraqi Arabs. The Palestine Liberation Organization was launched in 1964 in Egypt, with close ties to the Egyptian Islamofascist fundamentalist movement, the Moslem Brotherhood. It was initially headed by one Ahmed Shukhairy, best known for his speech before the Six Day War, in which he announced that there would be no Jewish survivors in the coming battle to liberate Palestine. Meanwhile, a young Egyptian student named Yasser Arafat set up a rival Palestinian organization in 1965 named Al-Fatah, a term connoting Islamic conquest. Yes, Arafat, like Edward Said, was not a Palestinian but an Egyptian. Other Palestinian terrorist organizations were also led by Syrians and Iraqis.



What exactly were the Fatah and the PLO (taken over by the Fatah faction in 1967) supposed to be liberating? After all, this was back before Israel's victories in the 1967 Six Day War, during which Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in its counterattack. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were there for the Palestinian plucking, had they wished to have their own state. There were no Palestinian occupied territories at all to liberate. The West Bank and Gaza were not occupied, at least not by Israel.



The answer is that these Palestinian liberation movements were launched in the mid-1960s to liberate the Middle East from Israel's existence. From Arafat's viewpoint and that of his apologists, Tel Aviv and Haifa were and are just as much illegal settlements on Palestinian soil as anything later constructed by Israel in the Gaza Strip.



On the day before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War, no one on earth, and certainly no Palestinians, were expressing the belief that Palestinians needed self-determination in the West Bank, on the East Bank, or in Gaza. Yet, six days later, according to decades of historic revisionism ever since, the Palestinians are supposed to have morphed into a nation, desperately in need of their own state, unlike say, the Kurds or Berbers, whose statelessness has never raised an eyebrow among the world's compassionate classes.



Indeed, Palestinian statelessness was pronounced the nucleus of the entire Middle East conflict. But was it? Just what was the nucleus during the 20 years of conflict before 1967? The fact that any creation of such a newly needed state just happened to represent an existential and genocidal threat to Israel was, of course, pure coincidence.



The Palestinian lobby is an anti-Jewish lobby and little else. The pro-Palestinians like to denounce their critics as fawning yes-men for Israel, while posturing their own compassion for Palestinian suffering. The same people who never heard of the massacres in Sudan or Algeria, scream in outrage at the genocide and war crimes Israel supposedly conducted in Jenin, in which perhaps 20 Palestinians died in a battle against entrenched terrorist squads. The pro-Palestinians dismiss their critics by insisting that "criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitism."



Yet such a defense is entirely disingenuous. Anti-Zionists cheering Palestinians who blow up buses full of Jewish children and who mechanically denounce each and every effort by Israel to protect those children from bombers are simply anti-Semites. The Solidarity Movement hoodlums vandalizing Israel's security fence are designer-jeans pogromchiks. The issue is not whether Israel and its policies are legitimate targets for fair criticism. Israel is an imperfect democracy, with all the shortcomings of other democracies, augmented by decades of nonstop warfare and siege. The real issue is the pro-Palestinian agenda of anti-Semitism and genocide.



"But, but, but...." scream the Israel-bashers, "what about Jewish anti-Zionists?" If anti-Zionism is today, in fact, virtually always anti-Semitism, what about Jewish anti-Zionists? The answer is that Jewish anti-Zionists are also, by and large, anti-Semites. Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism have been around for many centuries, despite the delight and the serendipity expressed by Israel-bashers every time they find one more to put up on their websites. Some of these Jewish anti-Semites have tenure at Israeli universities.



Creation of a Palestinian state will not result in any relaxation of tensions, regardless of its borders. Its creation will result in the greatest terrorist bloodbath in the history of the conflict, with countless rockets and missiles raining down upon Israeli civilians from the State of Palestine with thousands of Jews murdered by infiltrating terrorists, who are cheered on by the European intelligentsia; where Palestinian use of Weapons of Mass Destruction is a real possibility; where Palestine will serve as the launching base for Arab armies from neighboring countries entering Palestine much like German troops entered the Rheinland in 1936.



And when the final showdown comes, then all those compassionate supporters of Palestinians, those whose hearts always cried so passionately for Palestinian suffering, all those protesters of Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, all the ISM demonstrators vandalizing Israel's security wall, all those who could not control their tears at the funeral of the arch-terrorist mass murderer, all those media bimbos who saluted the noble cause Arafat promoted - will have nary a word to say about the final Armageddon unleashed against the Jews.