Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: No more Arafat games

Thursday, April 4, 2002 | 8:41 a.m.

FINALLY SOMEBODY USED THE MAGIC WORDS when giving Yasser Arafat some advice. It was President George W. Bush who told the Palestinian leader to speak in Arabic when talking about restraint of terrorism.

Easter weekend Bush said, "I believe Mr. Arafat could have done more three weeks ago and can do more today. I know that I have been disappointed in his unwillingness to go 100 percent toward fighting terror. That includes using security forces to help prevent suicide bombers, crossing certain lands, and that also means speaking out clearly in his native tongue."

For too long Arafat has been talking about peace in English and smiling but then giving his followers an entirely different message. The people of Israel have a good and clear understanding of Hebrew, Arabic and English. Most Western diplomats heard what they wanted to hear before going back to sleep.

It was in 1989, almost 13 years ago, that U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz finally got Arafat to condemn terrorism. Within hours of Arafat's statement, his senior adviser, Abu Iyad, told Arabs that their leader didn't mean Judea and Samaria.

A frustrated George Shultz and U.S. Department of State heard what they wanted to hear. The people of Israel also heard Arafat's message but found it necessary to balance it with what Iyad said in Arabic. They also heard another statement made for Arab consumption by PLO Executive Committee member Abdallah Hourani, "The declaration of a Palestinian state is the beginning of the road to the elimination of the new fascist Zionist state (Israel)," Hourani told his Arab listeners.

After more than 30 years of PLO terrorism and broken agreements, the Israelis have learned to listen to the messages sent out to the Arab world by that organization. It's really too bad our own foreign relations people haven't learned the same lesson.

It was only 10 years ago that Arafat was recorded calling the Jews "dogs," "trash" and "dirt." This didn't surprise anybody with knowledge of Arafat and his followers. Nevertheless, editorial writers and diplomats expressed shock at these remarks.

Arafat the terrorist and his Palestinian Liberation Organization have become respectable Chairman Arafat of the Palestinian Authority. So everybody has been fooled? Not really. The Israelis hungry for peace have gone along with the charade hoping he would change. They learned better less than two years ago when Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat everything that the so-called Saudi plan now advocates. Arafat rejected even discussing the proposal made in the U.S. and returned home to start this latest bloody intifada.

He is the same old terrorist who has been sending his young people to summer school to learn how to shoot and blow themselves up to kill and maim Jews. These are the same lessons taught during the first intifada in the late 1980s. I'll never forget the elderly Arab shopkeeper who told me in 1988 that he couldn't have his store open the next day. The PLO leaders had told him if he wanted to live and not have his shop burned down he would close it. It was also back then that Arafat's trained killers murdered other Arabs they believed might not be sympathetic to the PLO cause. The same practice is now in effect today according to recent news reports. Two days ago at least 11 Palestinians died at the hands of their brothers who suspected them of helping Israelis.

The Palestinian use of young human bombs to kill Jews reminds me of the late Prime Minister Golda Meir's words. "We will have peace with the Arabs when they will love their children more than they hate us," Meir said.

It was only five years ago that Fawaz Turki, a Palestinian now living in the U.S., wrote in the Washington Post, "The United States, notorious over the years for underwriting the survival of two-bit dictators around the world, has latched on to yet another one of these in the person of Yasser Arafat, whose woeful disregard for the human rights of his own people Washington continues not only to wink at but to urge him on, presumably in the name of stability in the territories."

It sounds like Bush has seen through the games Arafat has been, and is, playing. Let's hope this is the case.