Attempts to portray Yasser Arafat as a freedom fighter would be laughable if the media didn’t take these claims so seriously. So we have to wonder what moved Chicago Tribune reporter Ron Grossman to compare Yasser Arafat to Thomas Paine, who was one of the intellectual leaders of the American Revolution and author of “Common Sense.” Trying to understand Arafat’s rejection of significant Israeli concessions at Camp David, Grossman writes:
Let me, then, offer this alternative scenario as possibly a key piece of the Arafat puzzle: If he had signed on the dotted line in 2000, he would have transformed himself from the leader of a popular uprising to a pillar of the establishment. Other revolutionary leaders have balked at just such a decision point or lived to regret having come out of the underground and into halls of power.
A rebel’s life is the stuff of legend and literature….
Tom Paine was similarly a revolutionary wordsmith who couldn’t stop the flow of his rhetoric. His pamphlet “Common Sense” inspired the British Colonies in North America to declare their independence.
Afterward, he moved to England, where he wrote in support of the French Revolution, provoking the authorities to consider him an enemy of the British throne. He escaped arrest by fleeing to France and was there imprisoned and nearly guillotined for opposing the execution of Louis XVI.
Freedom fighters only target military and government institutions, never attacking civilians. When Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan compared Arafat to George Washington, Slate columnist Timothy Noah replied that there is no evidence George Washington or his Revolutionary Army targeted civilians during the American revolution, while evidence linking Arafat and his people to the killing of civilians abounds. As Noah so aptly states:
In the Americans’ struggle for freedom, a radical was someone who dumped tea in Boston Harbor. In the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom, a radical is someone who straps on a bomb and blows up Israeli children.
Arafat compared himself to Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson in his 1974 speech at the UN. But Washington, Lincoln, Wilson and Paine never advocated deliberate attacks on civilians or wars of terror to extract concessions from opponents. On this point, Grossman and the Trib lack a little common sense.
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