You deserve a factual look at ...: an assessment of Arafat: will his death open the way for peace?

In 1979, under the stewardship of President Jimmy Carter, Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David peace treaty, by which Israel committed itself to yield the Sinai to Egypt, together with all its material and strategic assets. The whole world hoped that this historic handshake would indeed finally bring peace and tranquility to the troubled Middle East.

What are the facts?

Review of an Evil Life: In order to analyze the situation, it is necessary to assess Yasser Arafat and what he has wrought. A Latin proverb admonishes us to say nothing but good about the dead. The Bible, on the other hand, in Proverbs (11:10) states that "when the wicked perish, there is shouting." Following that admonition, one can say without hesitation that Yasser Arafat was certainly one of the most wicked men of this and the last century. While he was not able to work on as vast a plane as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, he was certainly in the same evil league.

Here are just a few "highlights" of this monster's career. He was personally responsible for the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; he directed the execution of two American diplomats in Sudan; he masterminded the cold-blooded murder of 25 people--21 of them children--in Ma'alot, a city in northern Israel; he authorized the takeover of the Italian cruise ship ACHILLE LAURO, and the murder of a wheelchair-bound American citizen. He was the originator of the infamous crime of suicide bombings and brought it to a horrified world. He was the inventor of the hijacking and bombing of airplanes that killed thousands. And that is just the tip of the evil iceberg. As a result of the disastrous Oslo Accord, Arafat was allowed to return to Israel from his exile in Tunis. In the last year of his presidency, President Clinton convened a Camp David summit with Arafat and Ehud Barak, then the prime minister of Israel. Arafat got virtually everything he ever demanded, except the "right of return" of the descendants of the Palestinian "refugees," which would have been the end of the Jewish state.

Little Hope in the New Man: Arafat rejected this more than generous offer and decided instead to start his bloody "intifada," which by now has cost over 1,000 Jewish lives--and three times as many Arab lives and untold thousands wounded on both sides. The Palestinian economy is in ruins. More than one-half of its population is without work; famine would be rampant were it not for the constant infusion of cash by the U.S. and other western countries (most of it pilfered by Arafat and his cohorts and stashed in secret accounts all over the world).

But the greatest harm, the greatest crime that Arafat committed was to poison the minds of two generations of Palestinian Arabs against Israel and against the Jews. Evil propaganda permeates all Palestinian media. Palestinian children, beginning with pre-school, learn to hate Jews ...