The peace process, Arafat’s red herring

Is red herring kosher? I only ask because so many Jews, especially Jewish leaders, gorge themselves on it. Yasser Arafat began dishing out his red herring years ago. And even though he is dead, his political diversion tactics continue to be served on a silver platter and people from prime ministers, to professors, to peace activist keep swallowing Arafat’s red herring, a.k.a. the peace process.

A red herring, as most of you know, is a diversion or distraction from a real problem or matter at hand. Arafat’s real problem at hand was that Israel existed. Thus, his biggest goal in life was to destroy Israel. Yet he learned a thing or two as he watched his fellow Arabs try to destroy Israel – Israel couldn’t easily be destroyed militarily. He needed another method of destruction. Hence, the Father of Modern Terrorism amped up his infamous activities. But terrorism costs money. Many Arab leaders had a lot of money. But many Arab leaders hated Arafat. So Arafat needed money from another source – the West. Enter the red herring.

Most Westerners, at least publically, didn’t support funding the destruction of Israel. So Arafat needed to find a different way to pull the heartstrings and more importantly the purse strings of the West. The KGB would help him do just that.

Arafat’s success in organizing and motivating terrorists caught the KGB’s attention, which during the ’60s was developing “liberation fronts” throughout third-world countries. The KGB knew that Arafat would never get the additional support he needed to destroy Israel if he kept saying that he wanted to destroy Israel. So they sent him to the “reform school” of the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceauşescu, a master of propaganda.

In David Meir-Levi’s History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression, it’s recorded that Arafat initially resisted being molded into a statesman that the West would support. According to Meir-Levi, “Arafat railed against Ceausescu’s injunctions that the PLO should present itself as a people’s revolutionary army striving to right wrongs and free the oppressed: he wanted only to obliterate Israel. Gradually, though, Ceausescu’s lessons in Machiavellian statecraft sank in. Arafat developed propaganda tactics that would allow him to create the image of a homeless people oppressed by a colonial power.”

While Arafat was being molded into a statesman that the West would openly support, he sent one of his top men in the PLO, Abu Jihad, to North Vietnam to study the strategy and tactics of Ho Chi Minh.  Again, according to Meir-Levi, “Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation.”

While in North Vietnam, it was made clear to Abu Jihad by Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap, that if Arafat wanted to gain support, he had to redefine the terms of his struggle. Meir-Levi gives a quote that is a bombshell in a nutshell, “General Giap said, ‘Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.’”

Thus, the “Palestinian Cause” was born. Arafat manufactured a humanitarian crisis to divert attention from his goal to destroy Israel.

So, if you believe that Israel is responsible for Palestinian refugees, if you believe that the Palestinians should have their own state within the borders of Israel, if you believe that Jews are occupiers of Arab land in Israel, if you believe that it is unfair for Israel to set up roadblocks and fences to keep Arab terrorists at bay, if you believe that Jewish leaders in Israel should sit at a negotiating table with Arabs who continue to keep Arafat’s goal to destroy Israel alive, then you are a mouthpiece for Arafat’s propaganda. You are continuing to peddle his manufactured humanitarian crisis. You are continuing to be fooled by the scheme of communists and a terrorist. You are continuing to serve his red herring.

How sad that the communist General Giap was right. Arafat did indeed have Americans, even presidents, eating red herring out of his hands.  Unfortunately, Giap probably never dreamed that so many Jews would be so easily fooled and eat out of Arafat’s bloodstained hands too.