There comes a time when we must, however reluctantly, face the plain truth: Yasser Arafat is engaged in open warfare against Israel, and he has no intention of stopping until the latter ceases to exist. In contrast to the speeches he makes in English, which, for the benefit of Western ears, pay lip service to the "peace process," his Arabic speeches to his own people are nothing short of calls to war. The sheer number of jihad speeches he has delivered since the signing of the Oslo accord in September 1993 is staggering. Following are a few highlights:
"It is revolution until victory, until victory, until victory," Arafat said in a radio address just two months after Oslo. "The jihad will continue," he told worshippers at a South Africa mosque in 1994. "You have to understand our main battle is Jerusalem...You have to come and fight a jihad to liberate Jerusalem, your precious shrine...It is not their capital. It is our capital."
On June 19, 1995, he told an audience of fellow Muslims at Al-Azhar University in Gaza: "We are all seekers of martyrdom in the path of truth and right toward Jerusalem, the capital of the state of Palestine. The commitment stands and the oath is firm to continue this long and arduous jihad in the path of martyrdom...a path of victory and glory."
At a rally of Hamas supporters in Gaza, Arafat was videotaped exhorting Palestinians to follow in the footsteps of Yechya Ayyash, the infamous mastermind of many bus bombings. He lavished praise upon all "Palestinian martyrs," including those who had slain Israeli women and children in schools. During a September 1995 speech at a school for Palestinian girls, he cited two female terrorists – Abir Wahidi and Dalal Magrabi – as ideal models of Palestinian womanhood. Magrabi had participated in a 1978 bus attack, distinguishing herself by snatching an Israeli baby from its mother and throwing it into the burning bus to die with the passengers.
In September 1996 Arafat said, "We will be willing to die as martyrs until our flag flies over Jerusalem. No one should believe they can frighten us with weapons. We have much stronger weapons, the weapon of belief, the weapon of sacrifice, the weapon of jihad...a jihad of attrition, of holy death. Warfare is our only way to victory." The following month he told the residents of a West Bank refugee camp, "We have a long struggle ahead of us. I call upon each and every one of you to bring into this world at least twelve children and give me ten of them in order to continue the [jihad]."
Nowadays Arafat begins most of his speeches by reciting the intifada rallying cry, "With blood and spirit we shall redeem thee, O Palestine." During a Dec. 18, 2001 address in Ramallah, he pointed to a young Palestinian girl in the audience and said, "This little cutie is the first of our soldiers...One of our [children] will wave the flag of Palestine, Allah willing, over the walls of Jerusalem, its churches and its mosques...And whoever does not like it can drink the water of the Dead Sea." As is always the case, this reference to child warriors drove his Palestinian listeners into a frenzied screaming fit of intifada slogans. "We are willing to give seventy of our martyrs," Arafat continued, "for every one of their martyrs in this campaign...When [a suicide bomber’s mother] is informed of the martyrdom of her son, she goes out to the street with cheers of joy saying, ‘Allah be praised.’ " These, of course, are the same mothers to whom Arafat pays reams of cash for having provided him with home-grown martyrs.
Arafat’s audacity literally knows no bounds. He circulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that Israel’s own Mossad security service was responsible for the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister last year. Similarly, he has stated that Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel are actually carried out by a secret Israeli group, headed by Ehud Barak, in order to turn public opinion against the Palestinians. Over the years, he has also accused Israel of infecting Arabs with AIDS, mad cow disease, and cancer. He has charged that Israelis poison Palestinian food in order to "harm male virility" and thereby diminish Palestinian birth rates. He has asserted that Israeli planes drop bags of poisoned candy into Palestinian neighborhoods as part of its "genocide" plan. And for good measure, he has accused Israeli soldiers of using radioactive bullets against "Palestinian demonstrators."
While publicly lamenting the suffering of his people, Arafat has quietly stashed away enormous sums of money for his organization in foreign bank accounts and investments. Is he, then, any better than Sadaam Hussein, who blames America for Iraqi poverty while privately feeding his own insatiable lust for luxury and renewed military might? Is he any better than the infamous Congolese tyrant Mobutu, who amassed over $5 billion in foreign bank accounts while his countrymen struggled to survive on about $100 per year? Is he any better than former Central African Republic dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who gave himself a $22 million coronation ceremony at a time when his subjects lived in squalor?
There is not a sentence Arafat utters that can be believed. Last fall, in a public display of compliance with America’s anti-terrorist objectives, he declared Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to be illegal organizations; he went so far as to invite television crews to film the closing of those organizations’ offices. But on December 22, the PFLP held a grand ceremony in honor of its 34th birthday. Not only did Arafat countenance this "outlawed" group’s shindig, but he also sent his Cabinet Secretary there to deliver a speech – on Arafat’s behalf – praising the PFLP and lauding the unity of "all [Palestinian] factions."
Earlier this year, Arafat illegally tried to import from Iran a $100 million arms shipment that included highly potent C-4 explosives that would have dramatically increased the lethality of future suicide-bomber attacks against Israeli civilians. When his attempted transaction was uncovered, Arafat claimed to know nothing about it and promised to "investigate" the matter. But the evidence of his involvement is irrefutable: The very ship used to smuggle the weapons had been purchased in October 2000 by Adel Moghrabi, who heads the Palestinian Authority’s weapons-acquisition office; the ship’s captain was Omar Akawi, an officer of the PA Naval Police.
Arafat has made it abundantly clear that his long-term strategy is "Liberation in Phases," a plan whose ultimate objective is the total elimination of Israel. On Sept 1, 1993 he told an Arab audience that the then-imminent Oslo accord was but a well-calculated part of that incremental plan. This scarcely represented a softening of his 1980 assertion that "peace for us [Palestinians] means the destruction of Israel." Today the PA’s official electronic media regularly praise terrorist tactics and call openly for Israel’s annihilation. Maps sold at Palestinian headquarters do not even show Israel, but only a Palestinian state.
There comes a time when we must, however reluctantly, face the plain truth.