Junto Boys

ARAFAT IS DEAD

<>I always thought it a mistake to legitimize Arafat as a player in the peace negotiations. A man who gained fame killing the innocent should have been executed not bargained with. It makes you wonder whether creeps like Osama Bin Laden would have existed without the example of our lenient treatment of Arafat. The world learned the wrong lesson from us. The whole point of terrorism is to get people to listen to your argument. If you kill the terrorists and ignore their argument they lose. If you embrace the terrorists and their argument, the terrorism served its purpose.

The most important lesson from Arafat is that our legitimizing him didn’t end the conflict in Israel, but it no doubt gave rise to other terrorists who might get their grievances heard via the bomb. Instead of giving men like this peace prizes and patting ourselves on the back for another faux peace, let’s use Arafat as an example of what doesn’t work in the Middle East. Let’s search for the moderate Palestinian voice and come up with an agreement to end the killings, but let’s not ever again exalt a terrorist to the role of peace negotiator. It’s not worth the creation of more terrorists for a phony peace of paper and a photo op.