Student and mentorA close friend of Yasser Arafat has admitted that the jihadist leader publicly condemned acts of Islamic terrorism while privately approving of such acts. PA (Fatah) Member of Parliament Muhammad Dahlan made the confession on Palestinian TV recently. Speaking of the right to "violent resistance" against Israel, Dahlan said: "I lived with Chairman Yasser Arafat for years. Arafat would condemn [terror] operations by day while at night he would do honorable things. I don't want to say any more about this."
This "revelation" should not come as a surprise to anyone who has bothered to learn the facts of the case. Arafat was notorious for his duplicity. He sanctioned brutal jihads against Israel starting in the 1960s, and a led a brutal campaign against the Christians of Lebanon in the mid-70s and early 80s. Shortly after Khomeini's ascension to power, Arafat wrote the following to the Iranian leader:
I pray to Allah to guide your step along the path of faith and Holy War (Jihad) in Iran, continuing the combat until we arrive at the walls of Jerusalem, where we shall raise the flags of our two revolutions.
Notoriously, Arafat also compared the Oslo Peace Accords with Israel to the Treaty of Hudaybiyya, a truce the Prophet Muhammad concluded with his enemies the Quraysh in 628. Muhammad had conceived of the truce as a method of obtaining a strategic advantage over his enemies, and broke it as soon as he was able. Arafat's comparison of Oslo with this Treaty was his way of articulating the same goal: a temporary truce in order to give the PA more time to prepare further jihad attacks against the Jewish state.
We can see his same pattern reccuring in the current Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas. As the article linked at the beginning of this post notes: "Neither Arafat nor PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas ever condemned terror because it is wrong, but only because it is ineffective or because it damages Palestinian interests."
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