Yassir Arafat, 1929-2004

EARLY LIFE

It’s ironic that the man who personified the Palestinian movement was neither born in the region it claims, nor conforms to his own organization’s definition of Palestinian identity. Yassir Arafat, whose real name is Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, was born in August 1929 in Cairo, son of an Egyptian textile merchant. He was sent to Jerusalem as a small child after his mother died, then returned to Egypt via Gaza.

Throughout his career, Arafat’s Egyptian background was a political impediment and source of personal embarrassment. One biographer notes that upon first meeting him in 1967, ‘West Bankers did not like his Egyptian accent and ways and found them alien,’ and to the very end Arafat employed an aide to translate his Egyptian dialect into Palestinian Arabic for conversing with his West Bank and Gaza subjects.

As a young man, Arafat took no part in the formative experience of the Palestinian movement ? the 1948 Arab-Israeli war ? but he would nonetheless claim refugee status throughout his life: ‘I am a refugee,’ he cried out in a 1969 interview, ‘Do you know what it means to be a refugee? I am a poor and helpless man. I have nothing, for I was expelled and dispossessed of my homeland.’ (Arafat’s congenital lying would continue for decades.)

FATAH AND THE PLO

In the mid-1950s, Arafat joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, then rose to the head of the Palestine Student Union at the University of Cairo. In the late 1950s Arafat moved to Kuwait, where he co-founded Fatah (‘Palestine National Liberation Movement’ ? an acronym meaning ‘conquest’), the faction that would later gain control over the entire Palestinian movement. Fatah’s motley ranks of Islamists, communists and pan-Arabists expanded via brute violence. ‘People aren’t attracted to speeches, but rather to bullets,’ Arafat quipped at this stage. (At right: Fatah logo of rifles and grenades over Israel)

Fatah began military-style training in Syria and Algeria in 1964, and the following year tried unsuccessfully to blow up a major Israeli water pump. Fatah’s stated goal was the obliteration of the State of Israel, and well before the 1967 war would supply a pretext, Arafat’s organization repeatedly attacked Israeli buses, homes, villages and rail lines.

This violence against Israeli civilians was a pillar of the Palestinian National Covenant (the foundational charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization – PLO), which states that ‘the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence’ and that ‘armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a strategy and not a tactic.’ (Despite repeated Palestinian commitments in the late 1990s to annul these sections of the covenant, it was never officially changed.)

Arafat’s public profile got a boost in 1968, when the IDF raided a Fatah terrorist stronghold in the Jordanian village of al-Karameh. The uniformed, keffiyah-clad Arafat took this opportunity to project himself as a fearless Arab leader who, despite the post-Six Day War gloom, dared to confront the Israelis. The image stuck, and Fatah’s numbers swelled with new recruits.

Arafat and Fatah consolidated power through bribery, extortion and murder, and at the Palestinian National Congress in Cairo in February 1969, Arafat was appointed head of the PLO ? a position he would never relinquish.

JORDAN, LEBANON AND TUNISIA

By the late 1960s, heavily-armed, Arafat-led Palestinians had formed a terrorist ‘state within a state’ in Jordan, not only attacking Israeli civilian targets, but also seizing control of Jordanian infrastructure.

The tension reached a height during late 1970, when Jordan’s King Hussein cracked down on the Palestinian factions. During this bloody conflict, known as ‘Black September’, Palestinians hijacked four Western airliners and blew one up on a Cairo runway (pictured at right), to both embarrass the Egyptians and Jordanians and, in their words, ‘teach the Americans a lesson for their long-standing support of Israel.’ With the broad publicity this generated, Arafat had hit the world stage.

When King Hussein drove Arafat’s faction out of his Jordanian kingdom (causing thousands of civilian deaths), they relocated in Lebanon. As in Jordan, Arafat soon triggered a bloody civil war in his previously stable host country. Simultaneously, the PLO launched intermittent attacks on Israeli towns from southern Lebanese positions.

Yassir Arafat then brought the high-profile terrorist act to western soil. In Sept. 1972, Fatah-backed terrorists kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games. And in 1973, Arafat ordered his operatives in the Khartoum, Sudan office of Fatah to abduct and murder US Ambassador Cleo Noel and two other diplomats. (In 2004, the FBI finally opened an official investigation against Arafat for the Khartoum murders.)

The wanton violence fueled Arafat’s political goals, as his presence on the world stage grew: In 1974, he became the first representative of a nongovernmental organization to address a plenary session of the UN General Assembly (pictured at left) In the speech, with a gun holster strapped to his hip, Arafat compared himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Arab heads of states declared the PLO the sole legitimate representative of all Palestinians, the PLO was granted full membership in the Arab League in 1976, and by 1980 was fully recognized by European nations.

In 1978-82, the IDF invaded Lebanon to root out PLO groups that had continually terrorized the northern Israeli populace. The U.S. brokered a cease-fire deal in which Arafat and the PLO were allowed to leave Lebanon; Arafat and the PLO leadership eventually settled in Tunisia, which remained his center of operations until 1993.

During the 1980s, Arafat received financial assistance from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which allowed him to rebuild the battered PLO. This was particularly useful during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 ? Arafat took control of the violence from afar, and it was mainly due to Fatah forces in the West Bank that the anti-Israel terror and civil unrest could be maintained. Arafat would then become nearly the only world leader to support Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. (Saddam would later repay this loyalty by sending $25,000 checks to families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)

THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

In the early 1990s, the U.S. led Israel and the PLO to negotiations that spawned the 1993 Oslo Accords, an agreement that called for the implementation of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year period. The following year Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1994, Arafat moved his headquarters to the West Bank and Gaza to run the Palestinian Authority, an entity created by the Oslo Accords. Arafat brought with him from Tunisia an aging PLO leadership that would bolster his ongoing monopoly over all Palestinian funds, power and authority. Elections in 1996 extended Arafat’s control over the PA, but under the Oslo agreement, the term of that candidacy ended in 1999. Arafat never allowed new elections to take place.

While Israel went about implementing its side of the Oslo agreements ? removing troops from nearly all Palestinian areas, recognizing the PA, and educating for peace ? the PA utterly failed to live up to its commitment to renounce and uproot anti-Israel terrorism. Instead, unprecedented incitement from Arafat’s official PA media and school textbooks, and active and passive PA support for terrorist groups led to a string of suicide bombings in the mid-1990s that killed scores of Israeli civilians. In October, 1996, at the height of the Oslo years, Arafat cried out to a Bethlehem crowd, ‘We know only one word – jihad! Jihad, jihad, jihad! Whoever does not like it can drink from the Dead Sea or from the Sea of Gaza.’ [For more on the failure of Oslo, see HonestReporting's documentary film, Relentless.]

In July 2000, U.S. president Bill Clinton attempted to keep the Oslo Accords viable by convening a summit at Camp David between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. There, Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in Gaza and 92% of the West Bank, and a capital in East Jerusalem ? the most generous offer ever from an Israeli government. Yassir Arafat rejected the offer and ended negotiations without a counteroffer. As American envoy Dennis Ross concluded, ‘Arafat could not accept Camp David… because when the conflict ends, the cause that defines Arafat also ends.’ [See also this interview with Ross on Oslo.]

Immediately following this breakdown, the PA media machine under Arafat’s control ramped up the war rhetoric, and preparations were made for riots that were unleashed following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. The Arafat-supported ‘al Aqsa intifada’ would continue for four years. This unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terrorism, which would result in over 1,000 Israeli deaths, was marked by over 120 Palestinian suicide bombers and the growth of an Islamic martyrdom cult.

This stage of violence revealed that Arafat and the PA had never abandoned their longstanding plans to liquidate the Jewish state. Arafat had told an Arab audience in Stockholm in 1996, ‘We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion… We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.’ Likewise, Arafat explained to a South African crowd in 1994 that the Oslo agreement was merely a tactical ruse in the larger battle to destroy the Jewish state ? a modern version of the Muslim prophet Mohammed’s trickery against the ancient tribe of Quraysh. Arafat’s colleague Faisal al-Husseini was even more explicit, describing the Oslo process as a ‘Trojan Horse’ designed to promote the strategic goal of ‘Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea’ ? that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.

TERRORIST TO THE END

The final phase in Arafat’s life-long commitment to organized terror was channeled through the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a Fatah group that was responsible for many of the most deadly attacks against Israeli civilians between 2000-2004. Though many media outlets described a mere ‘loose affiliation’ between Arafat and this terrorist group, the evidence clearly indicated a direct financial and organizational bond between the two:

? In November, 2003 a BBC investigation found that up to $50,000 a month was funneled by

An ammunition bill for the terrorist Al Aqsa Brigade, signed by Yassir Arafat – see larger version

Fatah, with Arafat’s approval, directly to the Al Aqsa Brigades, for the purpose of organizing bombings, snipings and ambushes against Israeli civilians.

? Documents ca
ptured by the IDF in 2002 indicated Fatah’s ‘systematic, institutionalized and ongoing financing’ of the Al Aqsa Brigades. (See Arafat’s signature on the weapons budget, and this full report from Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)

? The leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades in Tulkarm told USA Today on March 14, 2002: ‘The truth is, we are Fatah, but we didn’t operate under the name of Fatah…We are the armed wing of the organization. We receive our instructions from Fatah. Our commander is Yasser Arafat himself.’

[For more on the Arafat-Al Aqsa connection, click here.]

In addition, Arafat granted free rein to the radical Islamic terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad to perpetrate dozens of horrific acts of civilian murder between 2000-2004. (At left: Arafat with Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, 2003)

DELEGITIMIZATION

In January 2002, the Israeli Navy seized a Gaza-bound, PA-owned freighter ? the Karine A ? that was loaded with more than fifty tons of Iranian ammunition and weapons, including dozens of surface-to-surface Katyusha rockets. (See more on the Karine A.)

In June 2002, upon recognizing Arafat’s ongoing financing and abetting of terrorism, U.S. President Bush called for Arafat’s removal from power. Progress toward peace required, according to Bush, ‘a new and different Palestinian leadership…not compromised by terror.’ Release of a U.S.-backed ‘road map’ for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was therefore delayed until such a new Palestinian leader emerged. On its part, the Israeli government chose to isolate Arafat in his Ramallah compound, the ‘Muqata’, where he would remain from early 2002 until his final days, and where he was buried.

In April 2003, hours after Mahmoud Abbas assumed the role of Palestinian prime minister, the official road map was released and diplomatic progress began. But Arafat consistently undercut the authority of Abbas, leading to Abbas’ resignation and the halting of the road map peace process.

CORRUPTION, AUTOCRACY, JIHAD

Over the course of his ‘revolutionary’ career, Arafat siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars of international aid money intended to reach the Palestinian people.

Estimates of the degree of Arafat’s wealth differ, but are all staggering: In 2003, Forbes magazine listed Arafat in its annual list of the wealthiest ‘Kings, Queens and Despots,’ with a fortune of ‘at least $300 million.’ Israeli and US officials estimate Arafat’s personal holdings between $1-3 billion.

And while the average Palestinian barely subsisted, Arafat’s wife Suha (at left) in Paris received $100,000 each month from PA sources as reported on CBS’ 60 Minutes. That CBS report also noted that Arafat maintained secret investments in a Ramallah-based Coca Cola plant, a Tunisian cellphone company, and venture capital funds in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands.

Arafat also used foreign aid funds to pay off cronies who bolstered his autocracy: An International Monetary Fund report indicated that upwards of 8% ($135 million) of the PA’s annual budget was handed out by Arafat ‘at his sole discretion.’ And Arafat’s select PA policemen, far from keeping the peace, were repeatedly among the suicide bombers and snipers.

Money was just one method of strengthening Arafat’s power apparatus. Critics of his PA government were routinely imprisoned, tortured or beaten. One example: In 1999, Muawiya Al-Masri, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, described Arafat’s corruption to a Jordanian newspaper. For this, he was attacked by a gang of masked men and shot three times. Al-Masri survived the ordeal and described Arafat’s grip on PA power: ‘There is no institutional process. There is only one institution ? the Presidency, which has no law and order and is based on bribing top officials.’

From 2000-2004, Arafat permitted Muslim imams to incite unprecedented anti-Israel and anti-American violence from their mosques and through official PA media. Arafat’s Religious Affairs Ministry employed preachers who regularly called for children to ‘martyr themselves’, and PA television glamorized the act of suicide bombing.

Under Arafat, the Palestinian Authority school textbooks denied Israel’s very existence, and jihad was presented to Palestinian children as an admirable course of action. The Jewish people, meanwhile, was represented to schoolchildren as a tricky, greedy and barbarous nation.

Freedom of the press was virtually non-existent during Arafat’s reign in Gaza, Jericho and Ramallah ? if it didn’t speak favorably of Arafat, it didn’t get printed in the PA-con
trolled media. Moreover, the PA enacted a systematic policy of intimidation of foreign journalists. One case among many: When an AP cameraman captured footage of Palestinian street celebrations following the 9/11 attacks, he was kidnapped, brought to a PA security office, and Arafat’s cabinet secretary threatened that the PA ‘cannot guarantee [his] life’ if the footage was broadcast.

Yet beyond the terrorism, extortion, embezzlement and intimidation lies Arafat’s most unfortunate ongoing impact: The inculcation of murderous values in an entire generation of Palestinians, who have been educated ? under Arafat’s direction ? to continue the fight of jihad against Israel, rather than compromise to end the decades-long conflict.

How many generations will it take to undo Arafat’s dark legacy?

Arafat and the 'peace' process (Oslo accords)

[Al-Hudaybiya and] Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad's Diplomacy

On 10 May 1994, Yasir Arafat gave what he thought was an off-the-record talk at a mosque while visiting Johannesburg, South Africa. But a South African journalist, Bruce Whitfield of 702 Talk Radio, found a way secretly to record his (English-language) remarks. The moment was an optimistic one for the Arab-Israeli peace process, Arafat having just six days earlier returned triumphantly to Gaza; it was widely thought that the conflict was winding down. In this context, Arafat's bellicose talk in Johannesburg about a "jihad to liberate Jerusalem," had a major impact on Israelis, beginning a process of disillusionment that has hardly abated in the intervening years.

No less damaging than his comments about Jerusalem was Arafat's cryptic allusion about his agreement with Israel. Criticized by Arabs and Muslims for having made concessions to Israel, he defended his actions by comparing them to those of the Prophet Muhammad in a similar circumstance:

I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca.

Arafat further drew out the comparison, noting that although Muhammad had been criticized for this diplomacy by one of his leading companions (and a future caliph), 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, the prophet had been right to insist on the agreement, for it helped him defeat the Quraysh and take over their city of Mecca. In a similar spirit,

we now accept the peace agreement, but [only in order] to continue on the road to Jerusalem.

In the five years since he first alluded to Muhammad and the Quraysh, Arafat has frequently mentioned this as a model for his own diplomacy.

Though this allusion to events in early Islamic history is completely obscure to non-believers, many Muslims are familiar with the prophet's agreement with the Quraysh. Mentioning it in Johannesburg and often times since permits Arafat to send an almost clandestine message about his intentions toward Israel, one intelligible to Muslims but not to the rest of the world. What intentions did Arafat convey with his reference to the prophet's biography? An answer requires a historical excursus to the original incident nearly fourteen centuries ago.

There is a second reason carefully to review Arafat's reference, for it set off an unsettling debate in the United States, one which provoked some threatening comments. These in turn raise freedom-of-speech issues when the topic concerns Islamic sensitivities.

Historiography

The Prophet Muhammad's life is by no means a conventional topic of research, and so requires a few words of introduction.

A century ago, the French critic Ernest Renan famously observed that Muhammad was the only religious leader who lived "in the full light of history." By this, he meant that the Arabic literary sources - religious texts, biographical accounts, chronicles, and much more - are replete with information about Muhammad's life. Beyond the impressive level of detail, they also provide plenty of evidence that can be interpreted as detrimental to the prophet's reputation - which of course only adds to their credibility.

But the sources that seemed so solid in Renan's time soon came under a sustained critique from scholars who cast severe doubts on their accuracy. Starting with the publication in 1889-90 of Muhammadan Studies by the great Hungarian orientalist Ignaz Goldziher, orientalists such as the legal scholar Joseph Schacht and the religious historian John Wansborough have developed a complex theory about the origins of Islam. In very brief, they note that the conventional biography of Muhammad was only recorded in literary sources decades or even centuries after the events they described. The scholars theorize that the information about Muhammad was not (as Muslims hold) passed down from one generation to another via an oral tradition; instead, it was conjured up only much later as ammunition for heated arguments about the Islamic religion. To score points, Goldziher and others argue, the latter-day polemicists associated their own views to the life of Muhammad.

Scholars who accept this approach more or less ignore the standard Muslim account about early Islam and the life of the prophet. In their new version of those events, Mecca, Muhammad, and the Qur'an are all quite transformed. In perhaps the most radical of these efforts, Hagarism, a 1977 study by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, the authors completely exclude the Arabic literary sources and reconstruct the early history of Islam only from the information to be found in Arabic papyri, coins, and inscriptions as well as non-Arabic literary sources in a wide array of languages (Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac). This approach leads Crone and Cook in wild new directions. In their account, Mecca's role is replaced by a city in northwestern Arabia and Muhammad was elevated "to the role of a scriptural prophet" only about A.D. 700, or seventy years after his death. As for the Qur'an, it was compiled in Iraq at about that same late date.

While these ideas are fraught with implications for the Islamic religion, many of them potentially beneficial, believing Muslims have for the most part studiously avoided paying any attention to this line of research. And so a strange - and ultimately unsustainable - duality now exists, with the scholars in the role of termites, eating away at the magnificent traditional structure and the believers acting as though the beams and joints were as strong as ever.

Turning to the Treaty of Hudaybiya and the conquest of Mecca: every last detail about these subjects comes from the Arabic literary sources. For the purposes of this discussion, which has to do with Arafat's statement and his audience's interpretation of it, the issue is not at all what happened in the seventh century but what the Arabic written sources tell about those events and how Muslims today understand them. In other words, we need only look at the literary sources - which greatly simplifies matters, for all analysts work from precisely the same texts.

This much established, what do the Arabic literary sources say?

The Event

The sources tell of tensions between Muhammad and the grandees of the Quraysh tribe who controlled Mecca, his home city. The Quraysh leaders viewed the upstart prophet as a direct threat to their interests for his monotheistic message undermined Mecca's status as a pilgrimage destination for followers of the polytheistic Arabian religions. Tensions between Quraysh and the nascent Muslim community eventually forced Muhammad to flee the city in 622 C.E., when he found refuge in Medina, a town to the north of Mecca. By 628, Muhammad had built enough strength in Medina to challenge the Quraysh and possibly to vanquish them and take their city; instead, he reached an agreement with them. Named the Treaty of Hudaybiya after the town where it was signed, this pact disappointed many of the Muslims, who were spoiling for a fight. The treaty held that the two sides

agreed to remove war from the people for ten years. During this time the people are to be security and no one is to lay hands on another. . . . Between us evil is to be abstained from, and there is to be no raiding or spoilation.

In the twenty-two months after signing the treaty, Muhammad significantly built up his power base. He made new conquests and formed alliances with powerful tribes, in particular with the Bani Khuza'a. As a result, by 630, he was considerably stronger vis-à-vis Quraysh than at the time of the signing. Quraysh did less well in terms of making new alliances, but it did ally with another strong tribe, the Bani Bakr.

Now, the Bani Khuza'a and the Bani Bakr lived near each other and had a long history of feuding - and feuding in Arabia, as in Appalachia, was passed on from generation to generation. In December 629, some of the Bani Bakr, possibly with Quraysh help, took vengeance on a party of the Bani Khuza'a, killing several of the latter. On hearing this news, Muhammad instantly opted for the most drastic response - to attack Mecca. It appears that he had decided the time had come to challenge the ultimate power base of Quraysh in their home city.

In response, Quraysh sent a delegation to Muhammad, petitioning him to maintain the treaty, and offering (as was the Arabian fashion) material compensation for the lives of the dead men. Muhammad, however, had no interest in a compromise and rejected all Quraysh entreaties. In an act of desperation, Abu Sufyan, leader of the Quraysh delegation, went to the mosque in Medina and proclaimed, "O people, I guarantee protection for all!" To this, Muhammad dryly replied, "You say this, O Abu Sufyan, not any one of us."

Muhammad had already made quiet preparations for an assault on Quraysh. This meant once the desultory negotiations ended, he was ready in short order to advance with a huge force on Mecca. So impressive was his army that the Meccans made no effort to resist it. Instead, they surrendered their city without a fight in January 630. And so ended the Hudaybiya incident.

Assessments

What is one to make of this sequence of events? Two points stand out. First, Muhammad was technically within his rights to abrogate the treaty, for the Quraysh, or at least their allies, had broken its terms. Second, it is equally clear that his response was disproportionate to the infraction: a raid by an allied tribe, even possibly with Quraysh connivance, hardly warranted conquest of the enemy's entire territory.

Combining these points leads to this conclusion: If there is no basis to accuse the Muslims of breaching their promise, there is reason to wonder what validity the treaty had if the Muslim forces were at the ready, seemingly prepared to exploit any minor incident to destroy a rival. The issue here is not a legal one but a moral and political one.

Nearly all Western historians agree with this judgment. Here, in rough chronological order, is how a few authorities have assessed Muhammad's actions. Note that while the earlier writers used harsher language (pretext, casus belli), the later authors do not disagree with them on the essentials:

William Muir, writing in 1861: "the alleged infraction . . . by the Coreish afforded Mahomet a fair pretext for the grand object of his ambition, the conquest of Mecca."

Carl Brockelmann, 1939: Muhammad "was simply waiting for a pretext to settle accounts with [Quraysh] once and for all. A brawl between a Bedouin tribe converted to Islam and some partisans of Quraysh, in which some townsmen from Mecca itself are supposed to have taken part, presented a pretext for declaring the peace broken."

Bernard Lewis, 1950: "the murder of a Muslim by a Meccan for what appears to have been a purely private difference of opinion served as casus belli for the final attack and the conquest of Mecca."

Montgomery Watt, 1956: "In the year 628 at al-Hudaybiyah it had suited Muhammad to make peace and end the blockade, for he was then able to devote greater energy to the work among the nomadic tribes. In the twenty-two months following the treaty, however, his strength grew rapidly; and when his allies of Khuza'ah appealed for help he apparently felt that the moment had come for action."

John Glubb, 1970: "It is possible that the Prophet himself was ill content at the prospect of having to wait ten years before he could march on Mecca, which now seemed as ready as a ripe plum to fall into his lap. He may consequently have welcomed the opportunity Beni Kinana had supplied, enabling him to break the truce."

Marshall Hogdson, 1974: "Muhammad interpreted a skirmish between some Bedouin allies of the Quraysh and of the Muslims as a breach of the treaty by the Quraysh."

Frank Peters, 1994: "The violation might have been settled in other ways-the Quraysh appeared willing to negotiate - but in January 630 A.D. Muhammad judged the occasion fit and the time appropriate for settling accounts with the polytheists in Mecca for once and for all."

And Arafat - what does the reference to Hudaybiya suggest about his future actions? It appears that he made the comparison with the Prophet Muhammad to make several points to a Muslim audience about his own actions:

• He made unpopular concessions that will turn out well in the end.
• He will achieve his goal - though what that goal is remains ambiguous: it might be just the city of Jerusalem (in parallel to the city of Mecca) or the whole of Israel (in parallel to the whole Quraysh dominion).
• He intends, at the right moment, to exploit a minor transgression to attack his enemy.

The third point is the operational one, permitting Arafat to imply not that he will break his agreements with Israel but will, when his circumstances change for the better, take advantage of some technicality to tear up existing accords and launch a military assault on Israel.

It bears noting how easily Arafat or a future Palestinian leader will find this to do-legally. Arafat has already signed five complex agreements with Israel that include hundreds of pages of mind-numbing detail. The Oslo II agreement of 28 September 1995, for example, runs 314 pages without attachments and includes a myriad of specifics. To take just one clause: Israeli authorities have obligated themselves to help the Palestinian Authority maintain a statistical system by transferring the "estimation procedures, forms of questionnaires, manuals, coding manuals, procedures for and results of quality control measures and analysis of surveys." The Hudaybiya precedent implies that Arafat can choose any lapse or transgression (say, not receiving the results of quality control measures) and turn this into a casus belli for an all-out attack on the Jewish state.

Muhammad as a Perfect Human

Arafat's Hudaybiya reference has reverberated for over five years, spurring debate about both the Hudaybiya episode itself and his intentions. Newspapers and magazines not usually in the business of opining on seventh-century events, much less with the sacred history of Islam, find themselves thrust into a wholly unfamiliar (and thoroughly discomforting) subject area. Often they make mistakes. Whether they deal with this topic accurately or not, the response of American Muslim institutions bear close watching. In general, they respond to any criticism of Muhammad's actions with unvarnished rage and sometimes even with intimidation.

Before delving into the American scene, some background is again needed, this time on Muslim attitudes toward the Prophet Muhammad:

Early Muslims saw Muhammad as an exemplary human but by no means a perfect one. Indeed, they dared not. The Qur'an itself refers to Muhammad as "erring" (93:7) and includes much information that reveals his foibles. Perhaps the most damning concerns the Satanic verses episode when, for evidently political reasons, Muhammad recognized the validity of pagan Meccan gods (53:19-21), thereby temporarily making Islam into a polytheistic religion (and appeasing his Quraysh critics). Internal evidence suggests to Muhammad's leading modern Western biographer, Montgomery Watt, that the Satanic verses incident must be true: "It seems impossible that any Muslim could have invented this story."

Then, over the centuries, Muhammad's blemishes faded. That is because, as Annemarie Schimmel explains in her study of the prophet's place in the Islamic faith, "the personality of Muhammad is indeed, besides the Koran, the center of the Muslims' life." The jurists, the mystics, and the pious turned Muhammad into a paragon of virtue, explaining away his apparent faults. Fundamentalists took this process a step further; in their eyes, Muhammad has acquired a Jesus-like perfection. As concerns the Satanic verses episode, for example, an influential Egyptian intellectual simply dismissed information about it as "fabricated (even though it is in the Qur'an itself)," indeed, he calls it nothing less than "a fable and a detestable lie."

This Muslim attitude of protectiveness toward Muhammad also breeds deep resentment of Western Christians, who have never been shy about expressing their own, rather less elevated, views of Islam's prophet. To get the flavor of these it may suffice to note that one of Muhammad's medieval names, Mahound, is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary, as meaning the false prophet Muhammad, any false god, a monster, or the devil. In modern times too, disagreement on matter of Muhammad remains widespread and intense. On occasion, it even has direct political consequences. Encountering the Christian hatred of Muhammad made the European imperialist venture that much more unacceptable to Muslims; for example, Schimmel argues that this "is one of the reasons for the aversion of at least the Indian Muslims to the British."

The sanctity of the prophet among the believers is such that Muslims resist any but a completely pious discussion of his character and actions-and all the more so coming from unbelievers. As Shabbir Akhtar puts it in his aptly titled book, Be Careful with Muhammad!, "endorsement of Muhammad's prophethood was the distinguishing feature of the Muslim outlook. It was the responsibility of the Muslims, therefore, to guard the honor of their Prophet." Even the allegation of Muhammad's faults is deemed an insult against Islam and in some places is legally punishable. Pakistani law mandates imprisonment or death for "wilful defiling, damaging or desecration of the Holy Quran, and directly or indirectly, by words either spoken or written or by visible representation, or by an imputation, innuendo or insinuation defiling, the name of the Holy Prophet." This law has been often implemented, with several Christians sentenced to death under the law (one specifically for telling a Muslim that Salman Rushdie depicted the Prophet Muhammad accurately), though no capital sentences have yet been carried out. In addition, dozens of people are awaiting trial in Pakistan on blasphemy charges.

The sort of open-ended discussion that the West holds on virtually every topic is precisely what Muslims most do not wish to permit about their prophet. Accordingly, Westerners doing what comes naturally to them, saying just what they think about Muhammad, find themselves under a barrage of bitter criticism from fundamentalist Muslims. The most celebrated case, Salman Rushdie's, happens to involve a Muslim living in Great Britain, but the same sort of threat could befall a person of any religion living in any country (which explains, for example, why the author of Why I Am Not a Muslim felt constrained to write under a pseudonym).

Controversy

This long legacy and vehement set of attitudes meant that when American journalists, scholars, and politicians opined about the Treaty of Hudaybiya, the Muslim institutional reaction was predictably hostile. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization credibly said to have a "close connection" to Hamas, the Middle Eastern terrorist group, took the lead in trying to suppress critical discussion of Arafat's Hudaybiya reference. When a commentator or politician had the temerity to raise this subject, CAIR orchestrated an abusive Muslim response. The first instance occurred in an editorial in U.S. News & World Report on 10 June 1996, when the magazine's editor-in-chief, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, touched briefly on Hudaybiya:

The Israelis have a historic question: Is Arafat a true peacemaker, or does he believe his own rhetoric when he echoes the doctrine of the prophet Muhammad of making treaties with enemies while he is weak, violating them when he is strong?

In the next issue of U.S. News & World Report, dated 17 June, the editors noted publicly in a "word to our readers" that "Many Muslim readers have called or written to complain that we spoke badly of the prophet Muhammad and his legacy"; privately, they told of feeling "under seige." In a lengthy and carefully worded retraction, the magazine made the following key points:

Readers ought to be assured that no disrespect for Islam as a religion or for the prophet Muhammad was intended in any way. . . . The 10-year truce was broken two years later by the Meccans.

Still, the outraged messages kept coming in, for the magazine had not repudiated the notion that Muhammad had a "doctrine" of breaking his word. A week later, the editors addressed this point, and wrote what their Muslim critics insisted on hearing:

We deeply regret any ambiguity in the language; Mr. Zuckerman meant no insult. He was referring to Mr. Arafat's reference to the Prophet and did not intend to state that this was the doctrine of the Prophet. . . . ...it was the Meccans, not the prophet Muhammad, who broke the peace of Hudaybiah of 628.

This abject apology did the trick, and the controversy came to a close.

In a second incident, Yehoshua Porath, a well-known professor of Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote in The New Republic of 8 July 1996:

Arafat repeatedly equated the Oslo agreement with the Hudaybiya agreement, which the prophet Muhammad concluded during his wars with the Quraysh tribe. Muhammad broke the agreement eighteen months after its conclusion, when the balance of power changed in his favor, and it has become a guiding precedent in Islamic law for how to deal with non-Muslim powers.

Porath's credentials and stature perhaps explain why the reaction to this passage was particularly vehement. The New Republic editors explained in the 15 July issue:

Within days of publication, TNR was the target of hundreds of abusive phone calls, letters and e-mail accusing us of defamation of the Prophet and worse. It turned out that CAIR had, through CAIR-NET, its Internet site, exhorted the faithful to tell us off, and they did.

Then follows a selection of foul, abusive, and threatening letters. A typical one read:

You guys had better watch out, ok? Because this is not going to go on further anymore, ok? You'd better watch out that f *ing Jew ... tell him where he is coming from, ok? Because you know mother-f *er bastard, mother--his mom is a bastard. ok? He can't talk about Muslim shit and you get your act together ... all of you. We don't want to hear anymore about this problem, ok? You got that right?

The final case involved a politician, Representative Jim Saxton, a Republican of New Jersey. He wrote of Arafat in December 1998,

how can anyone trust an agreement compared to the Treaty of Hudaibiya enacted by the Prophet Muhammad, in which a treaty lasts as long as political expediency dictates[?]

CAIR had Saxton's office deluged with aggressive but not threatening hate mail, making the congressman feel, in his words, "uncomfortable." He wrote CAIR a letter on 5 January 1999 in which he quoted the U.S. News & World Report editor's note cited above (that "The 10-year truce was broken two years later by the Meccans"). CAIR wrote a triumphant press release on 11 January quoting this phrase, then gilding the lily by adding five words in parenthesis and ascribing them to Saxton:

The 10-year truce (of Hudaibiya) was broken . . . by the Meccans (not by the Prophet Muhammad).

Reviewing these three cases suggests that Islamic organizations like CAIR either do not fully understand or do not accept the First Amendment and its strictures about freedom of speech. The rough-and-tumble of American life does not allow for a taboo to descend on certain subjects, no matter how holy they may be to a portion of the population. Even the most delicate issues - Holocaust denial, Jesus portrayed as a practicing homosexual, genetic black inferiority - get a full and lively airing. Attempts by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and like-minded organizations to impose on Americans the Middle East's notions of sacredness, censorship, and privilege are doomed to fail.

Given the vigorous U.S. tradition of free speech - indeed, its near-sanctity - American Muslims might be advised that they can best protect the Prophet Muhammad's reputation (as well as forward the other views of most concern to them) not by demanding silence, much less by threatening those who disagree, but by convincing the audience of their views. The sooner they accept this approach, the better they will represent their interests and the healthier the American body politic will be.

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Sep. 1, 1999 update: For more on this subject, see my weblog entry, "Arafat and the Treaty of Hudaybiya - Updates."

أحمد جبريل: مات ياسر عرفات من الإيدز (AIDS)

أحمد جبريل: مات ياسر عرفات من الإيدز