Lots of email like this one:
Jonah,
With all due respect to your correspondent – there has been enough silence about Arafat for the last decade or more to suffice, I’d say. The press has treated this moron and major terrorist with a respect and dignity he does not deserve. He has STOLEN from the Palestinians, kept them mired in misery while pointing the finger at Israel and others, rewarded, aided, abetted, planned and implemented terrorist attacks, and called for the second terrorist intifada, among other things.
He is a billionare who encouraged sending Palestinian children to their deaths wearing bomb-vests.
The press is silent and incurious about the diagnosis of his terminal disease, they are incurious about his roots to terrorism and his involvement in the Palestinian quagmire, and will even say kind things about him in his obituary.
Let’s just call this man what he is/was a MAJOR friggin’ TERRORIST! A POX on the world. The model for corruption and incompetence. He defined bad faith and racism. He was a cynical manipulator and the world is better for his death.
telling the truth about this man does not, in any way, denigrate the Palestinians. If Arafat was, as your correspondent said, “the symbolic figure of Palestinian nationhood for several millions of human beings” then what does this say about those several millions of human beings? The man was a sewer. What kind of symbol is that for a nation?
I’m just asking.