Hitler's Child

For a while Wednesday afternoon, I couldn’t help recalling one of my favorite flicks, “The Princess Bride.” In that movie, Miracle Max was a wizard who had been hired to revive the hero Westley from what his friends believed was death.
‘Well, it just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead,” Max corrected. “There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.” That line still brings a smile to my face.
For about a week, we were similarly teased about Yasser Arafat’s condition. "His kidneys and liver have shut down, but his heart and lungs are still functioning," said a Palestinian spokesman shortly before Yasser Arafat crossed into the category of “all dead.”
All in all, Miracle Max said it better. But thankfully, there was no magic pill to revive Arafat. And that brings an even bigger smile to my face.
The cultural divide between “red” and “blue” Americans could hardly have been clearer than in the reaction to the death of Yasser Arafat. Blue Americans were mourning the fat little terrorist’s passing, exalting him as a champion of the Palestinian people’s cause and a voice for the downtrodden everywhere.
I do not share wine and cheese with the elites of this country and could not be disinvited from their parties. I do not join their salons. And they don’t sit with me at Cougar Country for a burger either. There is no social risk for me when I say that I find it delightful that Yasser Arafat is no longer drawing breath alongside the good and decent in this world.
Perhaps there was no more disgusting tribute than that paid to the little terrorist by our nation’s worst ever president. “Yasser Arafat’s death marks the end of an era and will no doubt be painfully felt by Palestinians throughout the Middle East and elsewhere in the world,” Jimmy Carter said. “He was the father of the modern Palestinian nationalist movement. A powerful human symbol and forceful advocate, Palestinians united behind him in their pursuit of a homeland.”
Yeah, and Hitler was a powerful human symbol and the father of the German nationalist movement. Germans united behind him in their pursuit of national dignity. Did that forgive his crimes?
Carter overlooked Arafat’s greatest achievement, the murder of countless Jewish children and his deployment of Palestinian children as guided bombs. The world is a palpably better place without him.
Yasser Arafat wasn’t just a racist mass murderer. He was the world’s biggest crime boss as well. Estimates of his fortune range from as little as a billion dollars to as much as $10 billon, or more. This money was accumulated through a series of organized crime activities, including drug smuggling, and the embezzlement of foreign aid meant to assist those Palestinians whose future he supposedly championed.
If anyone wishes to know why liberals are losing ground with every election in this country, it is because Americans know who it is that pays this kind of homage to the world’s most notorious Jew-hater.
Elite opinion had no difficulty condemning the comparatively mild anti-Semitism of Richard Butler when he headed his Aryan Nations gang. But many of those same people never could bring themselves to hold the real inheritor of Hitler’s legacy responsible for his words and deeds.
It’s really quite remarkable how anti-Semitism has become socially acceptable again, in this country and abroad.
How can it be that this monster is a hero? What is heroic about engineering the slaughter of uncounted Jews? What is valorous about stealing from the very people whose cause he supposedly championed?
The sad truth remains that the same deep current of anti-Semitism that permitted Nazism to flourish in Europe still floods polite society. Pogroms and the Inquisition were only the most visible of a culture of hate that has for centuries blackened the souls of those who consider themselves enlightened. It is this deep social pathology that permitted an unapologetic neo-fascist to force a runoff with French president Jacques Chirac in France’s last presidential election. Hitler was not really a historical aberration, just a slight exaggeration. And it seems highly likely that modern Europeans were willing to outsource to Arafat accomplishing the goal that animated many generations of their ancestors. And they find allies in the liberal elites of this county.