Yasser Arafat decided to spend time with a few British journalists. You get the sense that the reporters are becoming downright bored of these get-togethers:
The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill gives more ink to the Rais’ environment, and rarely grants him quotation marks. A favorite snippet:
His ministers and advisers flanking him occasionally whispered into his ear to advise moderating an opinion, to complete a sentence, or to suggest that a fact was wrong.
Anton La Guardia of the Daily Telegraph writes a similar account:
The conversation is unfocused, but has constant themes – Mr Arafat’s importance in history, his relevance to the present, the suffering of Palestinians, the wickedness of the Israelis and their blindness to his reasonable offers to make a “peace of the brave.”
At no point would he accept that Palestinians, or he personally, shared any blame for the catastrophe of the intifada.
He claims to control every member of the Palestinian security forces, yet is unable to restrain the gunmen and suicide bombers without political concessions.
Speaking of the Noble laureate, check out the headline from the NY Post today:
ARAB BOMB TARGETS YASSER’S HATED CUZ
