HONOURING A MURDERER - George Jonas

When I heard last week that Foreign Affairs
Minister Pierre Pettigrew
laid a wreath on the grave of Yasser Arafat on
behalf of Canadians, I
decided to embark on an unscientific experiment.
Two weekend
gatherings of academics, journalists, lawyers,
doctors, business
people, engineers and pilots -- about 60 in all --
gave me an
opportunity to conduct an impromptu survey of my
own.

The sample of my acquaintances, as it turned out,
had two things in
common. One, they were all Canadians, living in
the Toronto area.
Two, not one of them would have joined Mr.
Pettigrew in honouring
the late Palestinian chairman.

Most would have simply declined. Some would have
declined
emphatically. One, a Canadian of Jewish-Moroccan
background,
would have offered to spit on Mr. Arafat's grave.

I make no claims for my sample to have been
anything but small and
unrepresentative. It illustrated, though, that Mr.
Pettigrew laid his
wreath on behalf of like-minded Canadians rather
than Canadians in
general. He certainly didn't lay it on behalf of
any Canadian I
interviewed.

In fairness to the Foreign Affairs Minister, the
urge to speak for
entire populations is strong across the political
spectrum. Alastair
Gordon, president of the Canadian Coalition for
Democracies, a
lobby group that protested Mr. Pettigrew's
gesture, wrote in a press
release that "surely Canadians would choose to
honour the victims of
terrorism" rather than honouring dead terrorists.
But much as I wish
Mr. Gordon were right, I've no idea who
"Canadians" or even "most
Canadians" would choose to honour.

When Mao Tse-tung died, a Canadian headline writer
selected the
words "Mao, The Great Humanitarian" to herald the
editorial eulogy
that followed. I should have thought that whatever
word one picked
to describe the progenitor of mass starvation and
re-education
camps, "humanitarian" wouldn't be a contender --
but I would have
been wrong, at least in terms of one major
Canadian newspaper.

I wish that Mr. Pettigrew laid his wreath for no
Canadians, but I've
little doubt he laid it for some -- probably
including the erstwhile
headline writer, if he's still with us. There are
Canadians who mistake
tyrants and terrorists for humanitarians. It's a
pity that one of them
is Foreign Affairs Minister, but there it is.

Anyway, Mr. Pettigrew wasn't breaking new ground.
When alive, Mr.
Arafat was received by the Pope. He was awarded
the Nobel Peace
Prize. He addressed the United Nations. During the
1990s, he all but
had the run of the Clinton White House. No
disrespect, but Mr.
Pettigrew's wreath is small potatoes compared with
the honours Mr.
Arafat received.

Unlike politicians or lobbyists, I don't speak for
"most Canadians." I
speak only for myself. But in November, when Mr.
Arafat, 75, was
transported to a Paris hospital, it seemed to me
that though he would
soon be dead, he wouldn't be dead soon enough. As
he lay dying,
men in the best of health would be buried before
the Palestinian
leader: younger men; men who took no risks, sought
no martyrdom,
Israeli men and Palestinian men (and women, too,
of course), for no
other reason than that Mr. Arafat, arch-terrorist,
was still alive.

Some would also die, as they had before, not
because of Mr. Arafat,
but for him. They would die voluntarily,
deliberately laying down
their lives for an agenda they shared with the
late chairman: a
Palestine "from the river to the sea," meaning a
state built for
Palestinians not next door to the Jewish state,
but on its ashes.

Mr. Arafat would die because he had lived for 75
years, because he
was sick, because his time had come. But why would
others die -- in
good health, before their time, even as children?
It seemed to me
false to suggest that these people would die for
Palestinian statehood.
Palestinian statehood was available without anyone
dying for it.
Palestinians could have achieved it long ago, not
only at Oslo in the
1990s, or at Madrid in the 1980s, or at Camp David
in the 1970s, but
much earlier, in the 1930s even, before Israel
came into being, when
the Peel Commission recommended partitioning
Palestine. It wasn't
Mr. Arafat's fault that the Arab side rejected
partition then -- he was
little more than a toddler -- but when he became
old enough to
choose, he chose rejection himself. He chose hate,
negation,
corruption and terror.

Far from being Israel's "partner in peace," Mr.
Arafat represented
rejection. He wanted peace not with Israel but
without it. "The end of
Israel is the goal of our struggle," he told the
Italian journalist Oriana
Fallaci in 1972. "Peace for us means the
destruction of Israel and
nothing else."

Mr. Arafat could have evolved from a terrorist to
a statesman, but he
only evolved from a penniless terrorist to a
millionaire terrorist. He
evolved from a bandit to a bandit with a Nobel
Peace Prize, a bandit
with a wreath from Mr. Pettigrew on his grave. Had
he come a long
way? Yes, as measured by newspaper headlines. No,
as measured by
history.

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HONOURING A MURDERER by George Jonas National Post February 14, 2005

HONOURING A MURDERER
by George Jonas
National Post
February 14, 2005