A horrible life.(The Middle East)

YASSER ARAFAT was responsible for years of murder and bloodshed, for civil war, for the hijacking of aircraft and other acts of terror, for gun-running, for embezzlement and blackmail and bribery. His racist fantasies have polluted far and wide.

Lying was his one great skill. He was able to persuade the watching world that his long career of crime was actually a national liberation movement. Aman of his time, he had understood that the manufacture of the Palestinians into a Third World and anti-imperialist cause was certain to win him general applause. And it proved so. The Soviet Union took him up, and then the United Nations, the Saudi royals, other Arab dictators (including Saddam Hussein), and the European Union too. The more he urged on jihad and killing, and the more money he stole to finance corruption and death, the louder the acclaim he received. In an episode from the theater of the absurd, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for signing a treaty that he had no intention of keeping.

The historian Lord Acton once observed that behind every despot comes an apologist with a sponge. A BBC reporter wept to see Arafat leave his West Bank headquarters on his final flight to a military hospital in Paris. The Guardian compared him to Moses, and the thriller writer John Le Carre described him as "cuddly," recalling how once he had put his hand on Arafat's chest to feel the Palestinian heart. CNN called him a "revolutionary romantic figure comparable to Ho Chi Minh and Nelson Mandela," a comparison that ought to earn the latter substantial damages for libel. Jacques Chirac praised Arafat as a man of "courage and conviction," and some French municipalities are ...