DING DONG, YOU-KNOW-WHO IS DEAD

and that sound you don’t hear is millions of Jews not saying Kaddish.

Unless it’s to praise God for doing the right thing and removing Yasser Arafat from the planet’s surface.

Mr. Arafat leaves behind a rich legacy - of grieving families, of murdered children, of dead Palestinian suicide bombers who continue to blow themselves and their Israeli victims to bits because of Arafat’s failure to grasp the concept of peaceful coexistence. Hijack victims. Slain Olympian athletes. A rich legacy of terrorism and violence. Of four-year-olds carrying toy AK-47’s and chanting “Death to the Yahoodi.”

But he leaves no Palestinian state. He could have had it, but instead he slapped away the deal Israel offered him and started a second intifada. The stupid, arrogant, thieving bastard.

Pete, of A Perfectly Cromulent Blog, offers this analysis of Arafat’s military genius:

That said, it wasn’t until watching CBS’ “career retrospective” of Arafat that I realized the P.L.O. got its ass kicked in every conflict they ever fought: the Six-Day War, Jordan, Lebanon. Sure, Arafat et. al. got some decent pub with that courageous attack on the Israeli Olympic team in 1972, and by subjecting legions of children to gunfire by encouraging them to throw rocks at armored vehicles (even the kids in Northern Ireland figured out that was a bad idea early on), but as a military leader, Arafat was a joke.

And there’s more in the way of a fitting eulogy from Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, who says it better than I ever could:

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, “God bless his soul.”

God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil - as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize - but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

Jacoby goes on to castigate the journalists who seem to have no problem reporting Arafat’s “steadfastness” and how he “shared our pain” under siege in Ramallah, while ignoring the heartbroken families of the victims of his “struggle for the Palestinian people.” The people who could have lived side-by-side with Israel but who instead fought war after unsuccessful war to drive the Jews into the sea.

Well, screw the journalists. At least Jacoby remembers what Arafat’s real legacy is.

Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.

Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma’alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat’s name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?

So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim’on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne’eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma’alot - 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat’s command.

Thanks to Laurence Simon for this link.

I can picture it now, Arafat arriving before Allah’s throne for his performance review:

Allah: Yasser, you got some ’splainin’ to do...