News Abroad

The Reason Those Obits on Arafat Rang False

by Gil Troy

Mr. Troy is the author of Mr. and Mrs. President: From the Trumans to the Clintons. His next book is Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, which will be published early next year by Princeton University Press. He is Professor of History at McGill University and a member of HNN's advisory board.

The worldwide eulogies lionizing former Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat were predictable, as was the United Nation’s flag flying at half-mast.

Still, it was surprising how many simply glossed over Arafat’s methods. Ignoring terrorism when assessing Arafat is like evaluating Robin Hood without mentioning stealing or Adolf Hitler without mentioning anti-Semitism.

Here, then, is an underappreciated but corrosive aspect of Arafat’s legacy. It is bad enough that the world excused Arafat’s addiction to terror, making the reprehensible debatable, then justifiable. In blithely ignoring terror, too many politicians, journalists and intellectuals demonstrated that Arafat’s assault on Western civilization was not simply physical – Arafat debased truth itself.

Arafat was lucky to bully his way onto the world stage at a critical passage in intellectual history. The 1960s rebellion against authority rejected traditional, linear notions of truth and storytelling. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who also died this fall, was among the many intellectuals who questioned excessive literalism. Derrida’s idea of deconstruction – especially as distorted and popularized – made everything relative: searching for hidden meaning in texts highlighted authors’ ever-shifting perspectives rather than a text’s clarity and authority. At the same time,"Third Worldism" became epidemic in governmental and intellectual circles. Noble movements such as the civil rights movement and the fight against apartheid combined with the gap in wealth and power between modern liberal democracies and struggling former colonies produced a distorted doctrine that only finger-pointed one way. Somehow, only whites could be racist, historic"victims" could use violence freely – and modern democracies were always wrong. Unidirectional Third Worldism gave the world’s"oppressed" tremendous tactical latitude with minimal moral culpability, while putting the onus on the perceived oppressors, usually western powers.

Arafatism applied these abstractions to reality. Terrorism came to be"in the eye of the beholder," and one person’s terrorist became another’s freedom fighter. A modern theory of relativity drained words of their meaning and politicized everything, consistently rationalizing inconsistency and sanitizing the ends to justify nefarious means. Pragmatists who tried distinguishing between"good" terrorism and"bad" terrorism at least had some intellectual integrity because they acknowledged reality. But Arafat’s terrorism – hijacking planes from Europe in 1970, killing Israeli Olympic Athletes in Munich in 1972, shooting American diplomats in the Sudan in 1973, slaughtering Israeli schoolchildren in Ma’alot in 1974 – was too evil, too unpalatable. Similarly, Arafat’s role in turning toward terror after Camp David 2000 was too problematic for those who cast him as the Palestinian Nelson Mandela. The documents Israeli soldiers found linking Arafat to the Al Aqsa terrorists via receipts for reimbursements and rewards, let alone his harsh jihadist rhetoric, again proved too dissonant for the preferred narrative. Better to render Arafat’s crimes invisible, blaming Israeli defenders against the terror for the troubles.

When it became too difficult to deconstruct and relativize, many eulogists retreated to the ubiquitous" cycle of violence" posture. Treating the violence Arafat spawned as a meteorological phenomenon absolved the Palestinians’ top terrorist of responsibility. Softpedalling Arafat’s role in the collapse of Oslo, a Montreal Gazette obituary reported, vaguely, that in 2000"terrorist attacks stepped up and frightened many average Israelis." Such reporting made the attacks seem natural, uncontrollable events like winter storms.

In April 2002, at an anti-globalization and supposed"pro-peace" rally in Washington, pro-Palestinian protestors held up signs supporting suicide bombers saying,"Martyrs not murderers." These mostly 20-something, Nike-clad, latte-sipping, self-righteous armchair warriors, blithely justifying the murder of commuters, café-goers and Passover seder participants, are the bastard children of Arafat’s murders and Derrida’s musings. Arafat was not just the Typhoid Mary of international diplomacy, spreading the bug of terrorism worldwide by demonstrating how his violent tactics could work; Arafatism was a moral virus to which modern intellectuals proved particularly susceptible. When otherwise peaceful people support violence, judge western countries harshly and disproportionately, ignore the sexism or sadism or even racism of"people of colour," mortgage their critical faculties to support"a cause," they further Arafat’s epistemological epidemic, his assault on truth, linearity and consistency.

Arafat is now dead and buried. But his signature tactic – terrorism – survives, as does the modernist tendency to distort reality to perpetuate political postures. Tragically, typically, Arafat’s funeral – and its coverage – epitomized this phenomenon, which is as intellectually bankrupt as it is morally disreputable.