I hardly ever agree with JPhurst, yet he is 100% right. I don't think Arafat helped any real movement towards peace, yet the dead are dead. If people want to mourn him, we should let them do so without this horrible attitude. I would be saying the same thing whether it be Arafat, Blair, Bush, Sharon, Mugabe - whoever. We all see and hate the images of people celebrating when a US or UK soldier dies. We shouldn't sink ourselves to that level.
My only problem with this thread is that some people are being nicer to Yassar Arafat in death than they were to Ronald Reagan.
True! I always belive in redemption! This man had a chance to redeem himself and he did, but in his end years, he didn't and he lost our respect for it.... For a half a century the only thing he did was reject peace and act in violence. When he did that, we opened up to him...but then he went back to his old ways, eventhough his age had slowed him down. Today, American, Israeli, Lebanese, Jordanian, Cypricot, Turkish, Greek Victims of Arafat's terror have a scar, but a little joy that this man wouldn't obstruct there justice ever again!
I don't think anyone is being particularly nice to Arafat here, though I do understand your contrast you're making with Reagan. I offer this, not as a defense, but as an explanation - far too many people try to oversimplify figures, and narrow them to single descripitions. Arafat = terrorist, Reagan = the man who defeated communists, etc. But nobody is that simple, and I can see how someone might react against the oversimplification of these two complicated figures. While I was never a fan of Arafat, I understand why he commanded such love and respect from the Arab world. Likewise, I understand why Reagan was so popular and I share that admiration to an extent, but he also alienated people and played loose with ethics for political gains. A poster earlier mentioned cult of personality, and the reference went ignored, but that's what's happening in both cases. People attach their ideas to these leaders and refuse to see past them. In any case though, taking joy in a person's death seems, at the very least, juvenile. Then again, it's hard for me to feel all that strongly about the deaths of Arafat and Reagan, because they were more or less irrelevant long before. I'm not going to pretend Arafat was a saint. But to dismiss him simply as nothing more than a terrorist shows a willfull ignorance of what motivates people.
Partisan Democrat that I am, I have no problem ranking Reagan ahead of Arafat in any moral category you want to name. My cult of personality reference earlier was in response to VFish's hard-on about Arafat having AIDS -- he's obviously not thinking things through, or he'd realize that Palestinians would dismiss anything bad about Arafat as being Zionist propaganda. Kind of how Dubya supporters dismiss anything bad about Dubya as being liberal propaganda. At any rate, I'm not sorry Arafat's gone. Shovel him in a hole and be done with his miserable carcass. But let's not forget the Kaiser Wilhelm rule here: We can wind up with somebody worse.
Ah. But I think CoP goes both ways - there are those who have the idea of Arafat as the devil in army fatigues, believe that the world has become a better place now that he's gone from comatose to dead, and refuse to believe that he has made any positive contributions to the world.
I realize that not all Muslims are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but Arafat was a hero to Palestinians, and those who saw the Palestinian cause as their own. He had more fans than detractors in the region.
You misinterpreted my post. I was commenting on how the secrecy surrounding Arafat's death could perpetuate certain rumors. I could care less how he died.
Well, they just planted fat in a whole in the ground. Any one care to guess how many in the crowd were hurt by falling ak 47 rounds shoot in the air when the bullets fell back down? I say couple of hundred at least.
You word this like there's perfect symmetry in either believing Arafat is a terrorist or a great and noble leader. There's no question that he brought the plight of the Palestinians to the world's attention, and had a brief window of opportunity for peace. I don't refuse to believe that. But I also believe that on balance he was not an admirable person. Even if one were to countenance his armed struggle against Israel, only an immoral person could justify his sanctioning of suicide bombers and the like against innocent civilians. Besides, from a strategic and tactical perspective he did not positively advance the ultimate goal of Palestinian statehood. And his pilfery of the Palestinian Authority's treasury is another crime he committed against his own people. The list of his misdeeds is much longer than I can detail here. I like to think that we ultimately judge people on balance. Martin Luther King, Jr. was reportedly a womanizer and may have had some other character flaws. But those defects are relatively minor when compared to the overwhelming good he contributed to the world. Sorry, moral people do not mourn Arafat's death.
Are you nuts? Those bullets were being fired by Israeli snipers placed in strategic spots by the Mossad to shoot helpless Palastinians.
Many are. But there is a lot of disputes in the Islamic world between muslims themselves. If you give them something to agree on, they would agree on the Israeli propblem. But not all of the region is muslim. There is Victims of Arafat's parade in Lebanon who suffered the most. Victims of the Da'mour massacre cannot be forgotten!
The plus is that their are young palestinian boys (ages 15-17) that are probably sleeping alot better tonight.
You see the guys dressed in black with their heads covered going into the compund? I would not be surprised if one of them was that guy they are looking for in iraq. He would be crazy enough to attend.
Tell that to Coretta and the kids. But as I said, it's minor when compared to his lifelong work and deeds.
Arafat is dead Yassar Arafat's long drawn out battle with a mysterious blood disease has ended and the mysterious blood disease won in a route. In fact the mysterious blood disease pulled it's starters at halftime and still defeated Arafat going away. Arafat's last words were reportedly "I am sorry I didn't take any filthy jews with me" but that statement can not be confirmed. His burial is in Egypt and people mourned all over the West Bank but their sobs were drown out by laughter from Israeli's.
That was a beautiful, dignified ceremony befitting of such a noble and distinguished statesman. Touching... it brought a tear to my eye. :’^)
That place looked like a garbage dump just a few days before. He should do like I am going to do be buried at my soccer field.