BRAVO TO THE SACTO UNION

The Sacramento Union published a strong anti-Arafat piece, then was bowled over by pro-Palestinian complaints. The paper responded:

A Word About Arafat
The Sacramento Union has been targeted by an orchestrated letters-to-the-editor campaign, unmistakable because of the extreme repetitiousness of content and tone. The campaign takes us to task—understandably—for publishing a column by Sacramento talk show host Mark Williams, to whom Yassir Arafat’s death occasioned some potent invective.

When much of the mainstream media was euphemistically describing the Palestinian leader’s life in terms reserved for a great statesman, Williams cleared his throat and reminded readers that the man was, ahem, a terrorist. Indeed, some call him the father of modern terrorism, though the roots of terror as an instrument of political change go back at least a century. But Arafat was quintessentially a terrorist, one who inspired so many others over the past three decades that he needn’t have been directly linked to them to have been in real ways responsible for them.

Western diplomats painted over Arafat’s sordid nature, largely because they claimed the search for more legitimate Palestinian leaders was futile—a debatable proposition—and because late 20th-century culture, ever sinking into moral relativism, increasingly countenanced terrorism as a laudable form of political expression.

Arafat’s growing stature was appalling for several reasons, not least because his swagger prohibited the emergence of moderate Palestinian leaders—many of whom were assassinated by agents connected to Arafat himself. Moreover, his detestable anti-Semitism was barely concealed. When President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered him more than even he could imagine, he could not bring himself to accept a deal. The reason: He did not want a deal; he wanted an end to the state of Israel.

We can sympathize with Arab-Americans who, owing to the lack of other Palestinian leaders and to the build-up of Arafat in Western culture, are outraged by Mark Williams’s remarks. Some of the remarks, not untypical of talk radio, were jarring when seen in print. Tombstones, for example, are not urinals. If we could retroactively excise that comment, for one example, we would.

And yet, there is a through-the-looking-glass aspect to the perspective of many of those who joined the letter-writing campaign (a few samples of which, not all of them, we’ll publish). George Orwell once said the intellectual’s duty is to state the plain truth, especially when so many other intellectuals instinctively spread confusion.

By printing Mark Williams’s comments, we have been accused of spewing “hate speech,” that politically correct phrase that insinuates itself, not as a thought-stimulator, but as a thought-stopper. The plain truth: The font of so much hatred in the Middle East was none other than Yassir Arafat, who made a peaceful settlement impossible, who justified the slaughter of innocents.

An inelegant truth, that, sometimes inelegantly stated. We may only pray, with President Bush, that Arafat’s death brings new opportunities for peace and, yes, Palestinian self-determination.