On Arafat...

The Wall Street Journal's online counterpart- opinionjournal.com - sends out a daily e-mail called "Best of the Web." In this wonderfully pleasing collection of snippets from around the Internet, the editors comment on world events and often the inconsistencies of the left-wing media outlets. So I don't bore you with too much, I'll refrain from posting everything worth reading from BOTW. But I will provide my (very few) readers with pieces that can't be ignored. Friday's included one such article, on the late Mr. Arafat:

"Now that George W. Bush has won an undisputed election, what if he were to cancel the elections in 2008 and thereafter and simply declare himself president for life? It sounds like a left-wing paranoid fantasy, but Jimmy Carter endorses the idea on the op-ed page of today's New York Times. Reminiscing about his favorite terrorist, Yasser Arafat, Carter writes:

In effect, peace efforts of a long line of previous administrations have been abandoned by President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. For the last three years of his life, Mr. Arafat was incapacitated and held as a prisoner, humiliated by his physical incarceration and excluded by the other two leaders from any recognition as the legitimate head of the Palestinian community. Recognizing Mr. Arafat's failure to control violence among his people or to initiate helpful peace proposals, I use the word "legitimate" based on his victory in January 1996 by a strong majority of votes in an election monitored by the Carter Center and approved by the occupying Israelis.

"It's true that Arafat in 1996, like Bush this year, won a strong majority of the votes in an election that featured no serious opposition. But as we noted in May 2002, new elections were due in 1999, and Arafat never held them. We hope and expect that Bush will leave office on schedule, on Jan. 20, 2009--but if he doesn't, it would be 'legitimate' by Carter's lights.

"Come to think of it, we'll bet Carter is kicking himself for not thinking of this 25 years earlier."

I don't remember reading about this in either the Post or the Times....

DcD