At this writing, I don’t know when Arafat will die. I do know that as national monsters go, Arafat is somewhere between Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Milosevic. All these monsters are alive. Castro has kept his fellow Cubans in near starvation poverty for four decades out of ego and ideology. Saddam Hussein murdered his own people and, like Milosevic, murdered many of his neighbors. Ditto Arafat.
Like Saddam Hussein, Arafat has always lied about everything. (Lying seems to be a common thread among Arab leaders. Some of my friends argue Arab leaders have no idea what the Western concept of “lying” is, in the first place.)
The death of Arafat will be a time of great revelation. We will get to see what Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and the entire leadership of France and the EU have to say about this horrible monster. They have all supported him in his death cult.
For me, Arafat is a symbol of historic change, more significant than the Holocaust. The Holocaust showed how much all Europeans hated Jews. The hatred was pan-European regardless of the Jews' contribution to European society or their level of assimilation.
Some Holocaust guilt on the part of a few Europeans, but mostly American Holocaust guilt at the cabinet level, created the tiny unsustainable State of Israel. That half-hearted creation is the only positive reaction to the Holocaust that I see.
Arafat, four decades later, showed that killing Jews is not an unacceptable thing to do. Many, if not most, Europeans still hate Jews enough to monetarily support Arafat in his Jew killing efforts.
The people whom Arafat has been killing turn out not to be Jews, but Israelis. Therein lies a very important difference that I discuss in the blog below.