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Palestinian Arabs

?So may all your enemies fall, O God!?


By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
November 11, 2004

Yasser Arafat, the most prolific killer of Jews since Adolf Hitler, lost his battle with what many say was AIDS overnight, and went to face final judgment for the death and destruction he visited on so many.

His official death announcement came during the predawn hours Thursday, and was followed by an outpouring of admiration from world leaders.

Arafat is expected to be flown to Cairo in the coming hours, where his body will lie in state before proceeding to Ramallah for burial on Friday.

As his end neared Wednesday, rabbis in Israel engaged in a biblical debate over what one’s response to the news should be. They were widely united in their opinion that Arafat’s death marked a “day of happiness” for the Jewish people and the Nation of Israel.

The Egyptian

Arafat was trained as an engineer at university in Cairo, where in 1929 he had been born to an Egyptian textile merchant.

Ironically, the father of the “Palestinian” myth neither hailed from the region known as Palestine, nor did he conform to the PLO’s definition of “Palestinian” identity.

Despite his lack of “pedigree,” Arafat, in a 1969 interview, claimed, “I am a refugee… I have nothing, for I was expelled and dispossessed of my homeland.”

HonestReporting’s biography of the mass murderer notes that his Egyptian background was long a point of contention between Arafat and those he meant to rule.

‘Liberator of Palestine’

In 1964, Arafat founded the Fatah organization, and shortly after took over as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an umbrella group that encompassed most non-Islamic “Palestinian” terror groups.

Years before the availability of Israel’s Six Day War victory as a pretext, Arafat’s armed thugs were murdering Israeli Jews on public buses, in private homes and during the infiltration of farming villages.

As part of his Palestinian National Covenant, Arafat outlined “armed struggle [as] the only way to liberate Palestine,” stating that terrorism against Israel’s Jews was a “strategy and not a tactic.”

Despite repeated “Palestinian” commitments during the Oslo peace process to annul the covenant’s inflammatory articles, it was never officially changed.

Father of modern terrorism

But Arafat’s brand of terrorism quickly extended beyond the borders of the Jewish state.

In 1973, PLO terrorists abducted and executed 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. Months later they did the same to two US diplomats in the Sudan.

Arafat’s campaign to eradicate the Jewish presence in the Middle East and inflict suffering on Israel’s allies in the West also introduced to the world the horrors of airline hijacking and “suicide” bombings.

His PLO is credited with training terrorist groups as far flung as the Irish Republican Army and Japanese communists during its years in Lebanon.

This legacy earned Arafat the title “father of modern terrorism.”

Extortionist

Having sufficiently intimidated both his enemies in the Middle East and the West at large, Arafat ascending the world stage in 1974 with an address before the UN General Assembly.

Gun holstered to his hip, Arafat proceeded to compare himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, stating that he came “bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun.”

“Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand,” he ominously warned the gathered international delegates.

By 1980, the PLO was declared the sole representative of the Palestinian Arabs, granted full membership in the Arab League, and officially recognized by the nations of Europe.

Man of peace?

In 1988, Arafat ostensibly renounced the use of terrorism, shortly after which he joined bilateral negotiations with Israel. In 1993, Arafat signed the so-called Oslo Accords “peace” agreement with the Jewish state.

But the decade-long “peace” process notwithstanding, Arafat’s statements in Arabic, as well as numerous seized PLO documents provide a mountain of evidence that he never relinquished his goal of annihilating Israel.

‘Jubilation when the wicked perish’

It is with that bloody legacy in mind that top rabbis in Israel Wednesday gave their blessing for Jews to respond to Arafat’s death with “happiness and rejoicing,” Arutz 7 reported.

“So may all Your enemies fall, O G-d!” declared the Pikuach Nefesh Rabbis Association.

The religious Tekumah Knesset faction issued a statement admonishing Israeli Jews to view Arafat’s demise through the spectrum of Proverbs 11:10:

When the wicked perish, there is jubilation.

Others quoted Proverbs 24:17:

When your enemy falls, do not rejoice.

They explained, however, that this referred to a personal enemy, and not wicked people in general. Likewise, the latter verse prohibited widespread public rejoicing, but not feeling satisfaction with the downfall of God’s enemies.

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