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With Our Blood And Our Souls We Will Redeem You Yasser Arafat
In a bombed out ruin, the Palestinian people built a shrine, a mausoleum.
In a day.
Much of the work was done by hand. Ramallah, some of you may recall, has been under quite a brutal occupation for some time. Available technology and raw materials are somewhat limited.
Throughout the day, throughout the night, they worked. They did not sleep. During the day, they did not eat, or even drink water. It was, some of you may recall, still Ramadan.
It is a simple shrine, a simple mausoleum, a temporary resting place for the diminutive man in the black and white khaffiyeh, draped into his own fashion statement for almost half a century, the indestructible, indefatigable little General who shouted and fought and scrapped and almost died a thousand times, so that the world would know Palestine, would know the Palestinians, so that no one would ever again dare to say that they do not exist, that Palestine does not exist, that it is not a nation, not a State.
They did it to allow Arafat the dignity of a burial, somewhere, and in quiet acknowledgement that the gangsters in Tel Aviv have so long passed that line that divides men from brutes. To expect dignity, or even decency, from that sector is not realistic.
Rich men would have lost nothing were Abu Amar laid to rest in Jerusalem to begin with, as opposed to his inevitable move there. The gangsters and their hangers-on could still have told one another that it is not the capital of Palestine.
But the zeal to dishonor a man even in death, dishonor a people even in the raw freshness of grief, proved stronger than the frail threads of civilization with which the west, some of you may recall, claims to have been experimenting the last few centuries, though it is clear that they did not inhale.
The Palestinian people looked at one another, shared a moment of collective lack of amazement, and silently went to what is left of the Mukata and began to build a shrine, a mausoleum.
In a day.
France did the minimum that the gangsters did not have the decorum to do, allowing the coffin of the Father of Modern Palestine to be loaded onto the Cairo-bound aircraft with at least a semblance of the solemnity that civilized people accord a fallen head of state.
Only brief glimpses of this were shown to American audiences, none of them live, lest the viewers get the wrong idea.
The kept eunuchs of the Arab League put their dollar bought and perpetually dollar paid for heads together and agreed with Washington's whispered suggestion that Abu Amar's Cairo "funeral" be handled discreetly. A quiet and private affair, lest the Egyptian public get the wrong idea, and to spare the eunuchs, including Hosni himself, the humiliation of seeing what real popular support looks like, the kind of mass outpouring of chanting and grief that neither trinkets nor coins nor the threat of torture can buy.
While the Palestinians wept and built a mausoleum, the Americans took time out from gushing over their latest panoply of spectacular war crimes to vilify Arafat in death more than they had in life, surprising anyone who had not believed such to be possible.
With characteristic American black-is-white Orwellian knockoff, the one moment of his post-guerilla life that could be called noble was held aloft and crowned as his worst failure: namely that in the year 2000, he had flatly refused the cajoling of a charming western politician who wished him to renounce the Right of Return in exchange for an archipelago of prison camps with a flag over them, not unlike what they are "offered" today, by a warlord consortium that knows full well, even if its serfs do not, that the land is not the warlords' to offer. Quite the contrary. If by some miracle the planet survives long enough, and men of goodwill ever sit at the table, negotiations will begin from the truth, and not the construct of wealthy moguls with oil that needs guarding.
Although to his detriment, Arafat had at that point spent the past decade or so teasing western politicians with coy hints that he might let them have their way with him, and had thereby collected an impressive array of nosegays and filled dance cards as well as a big necklace from Norway, when the confident suitor reached out to claim his prize, Arafat leapt from the carriage and fled.
It may be wishful thinking to suppose he acted out of conscience as opposed to the more mundane and pragmatic desire to avoid being assassinated by his own people; since there were so many people already trying to assassinate him, perhaps he merely felt their efforts would be superfluous, and was motivated by sheer abhorrence of inefficiency and duplication of effort, but in the spirit of generosity and courtesy offered by civilized people to the newly dead, let us once again call it his noblest hour, and for it, honor his memory, and those who honor it with us, they who built a shrine, a mausoleum.
In a day.
If you feel you cannot weep for Arafat, weep instead for Abdel Salam Samren, for Abdul Rahman Jadallah, Raghda Alassar, for Imam Al-Hams, names few of you will recall. Go to google, and type the words "Palestinian child shot," hit search, and weep at what you see.
Yasser Arafat represented Palestine, including every one of those thousands of children. Like him, their bodies are gone from this earth.
Like him, they will live forever.
If you feel you cannot praise Arafat, praise the images that Americans were allowed to see, live, probably because of the scant likelihood that they would comprehend what they were seeing.
What looked like an uncontrollable mob grasping at a coffin was in reality the fulfillment of Arafat's promise, his triumph, his fateh: a State.
Out of the ashes, out of the ruins, out of grief, a people who can build, in a day, a shrine, a mausoleum out of love and tears and sand and suffering, can and will greet you and pray with you one day in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, in the spirit of the Prophets, the spirit of Peace, that shall not pass away.
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