Yasser Arafat endorses Kerry

[-Cp]

COUNTDOWN TO ELECTION DAY
Yasser Arafat endorses Kerry
Thinks Democratic senator 'better for Palestinian cause'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: October 18, 2004
8:35 p.m. Eastern


By Aaron Klein
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is hoping John Kerry wins the presidential election in November, several Palestinian leaders told WorldNetDaily.

Arafat deputy and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told WND in an exclusive interview that while "we do not involve ourselves in internal American politics," at the same time "our region has been sliding deeper and deeper into chaos because of certain policies over the past few years, and this needs to change."

While he would not directly endorse Kerry, it was clear Erekat was implying the PA wants a change in White House leadership: "If things continue the way they are, if certain policies toward our region are maintained in the years to come, there is going to be a lot of violence on both sides."

A prominent Arafat aide who asked that his name be withheld spoke to WorldNetDaily from Arafat's battered Ramallah compound.

"The president [Arafat] is frustrated with Bush's policies," he said. "The president [Arafat] thinks Kerry will be much better for the Palestinian cause and for the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Also today, PA Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said the future of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is unsure if George W. Bush is re-elected to office, and he complained the U.S. presidential election was stalling the Middle East peace process.

"During an American election and the three months after, allies of the United States should do more work than they would do otherwise." Shaath told a news conference.

While the comments mark the first time the PA has endorsed Kerry on the record, it has not been a secret that Arafat is frustrated with Bush's leadership.

Israel Military Intelligence Chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Ze'evi has warned Arafat is biding his time until November, when the Palestinian leader hopes President Bush will be voted out of office and Ariel Sharon's coalition government will fall.

"Arafat is waiting for November in the hope George Bush will lose the election to John Kerry," Ze'evi told Army Radio in July. "He also hopes that the Israeli government will fall, so he can take center stage diplomatically."

Since 2002, Washington has fully backed Jerusalem's decision to isolate the Palestinian Authority president, who Sharon says is directly involved in planning terrorism and is an obstacle to peacemaking.

Many Israeli and American Jewish leaders have been expressing concern that a Kerry administration will cause more violence in the Middle East and could bring Arafat back to power. They say they are worried about Kerry's statements of coordinating American foreign policy with the Europeans, some of whom favor talks with Arafat, and are disturbed by Kerry's appointment of several former Clinton Mideast policy directors as advisers, particularly former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk.

Many blame Clinton's failed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict –which sought Israeli territorial concessions for promises of peace by Arafat and ignored indications of growing Palestinian militancy and violations of security-reform agreements – for partially causing the current intifada.

Indyk, who helped devise the 1993 Oslo Accords, was a driving force behind Clinton's assessment of Arafat as a statesman and urged Clinton to accept Arafat as the legitimate ruler of the Palestinians. Under Indyk's advisory, Arafat visited the White House during the Clinton administration 24 times, more than any other world leader during those eight years.


http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40988

 

[Avatar4321]

Anyone who says terrorists dont want Bush out of office have just been squashed.

 

[-Cp]

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=\ForeignBureaus\archive\200410\FOR20041019a.html


Arafat Backs Kerry, Israelis Favor Bush
By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com Pacific Rim Bureau Chief
October 19, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - Relying on the traditional support of Jewish voters, the Kerry-Edwards campaign may not welcome news from the Middle East on how the parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict view the election.

Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority on Monday gave its first public indication of which candidate it would like to see in the White House next year.

"If [President] Bush wins, he said he would renew efforts to resume the peace process," PA foreign minister Nabil Shaath told the BBC in London. "However, with the staff that surrounds him and with his current opinions, it doesn't look promising."

Under a Kerry administration, however, "it would be likely that several staff members during Clinton's administration would return," Shaath said. "That would be a good thing, but it could take at least a year before a policy is formulated."

Elaborating on the PA's unhappiness with the incumbent, the Palestine Media Center -- an official PA institution -- said Palestinians held the Bush administration responsible for Israel's isolation of Arafat since the end of 2001.

"Bush's refusal to deal with Arafat was interpreted by Palestinians as another "green light'' for Israel to impose and to maintain the siege on Arafat," it said.

The comments add substance to an assessment last July by Israel's military intelligence chief, Major-General Aharon Ze'evi, who was quoted as telling the cabinet: "Arafat is now waiting for the month of November in the hope that President Bush will be defeated in the presidential election and turned out of his office."

The PA view on the election contrasts sharply with that of Israeli leaders, who have echoed the words spoken by former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Washington in 2002: "There has never been a greater friend of Israel in the White House than President George W. Bush."

Last week, in a coordinated survey of opinions in 10 key countries in Europe, Asia and North America, Israel was one of only two countries -- the other was Russia -- where poll respondents favored Bush over Kerry (by 50 percentage points to 24).

Other polls in Israel have indicated that a majority of Israelis are grateful to Bush for going to war against Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of the Jewish state.

'Force of habit'

Jewish organizations in the U.S. say Jewish voters base their choice largely on domestic issues -- and most are liberals.

Writing in the Boston Globe last month, columnist Jeff Jacoby attributed Jewish loyalty to the Democratic ticket to historical factors.

"In the 19th and early 20th centuries, waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe, where the most anti-Semitic elements of society were often the most conservative, brought with them an intense aversion to right-wing politics -- and an appreciation for the left, which they associated with emancipation and equality."

Jacoby argued that the U.S. in 2004 was a very different country, and said, "American Jews owe it to themselves to base their political loyalty on something stronger than force of habit."

Israel is a very important factor for American Jews.

In its annual opinion survey, published last month, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) found that 75 percent of Jewish respondents felt "very close" or "fairly close" to Israel.

Seventy-four percent agreed that "caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew."

Respondents in the AJC survey backed Kerry over Bush by 69 points to 24.

That support for the Democrats constitutes a drop-off from the last three elections. President Clinton won 80 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992 and 78 percent in 1996. In 2000, Al Gore won 79 percent of the Jewish vote while Bush only garnered 19 percent.

The Republican Jewish Coalition has been drawing attention to some other recent endorsements of Kerry, which it says Jewish voters should be worried about - those of the Arab-American PAC and the Muslim-American PAC.

"Clearly these groups do not support President Bush because of his unwavering support for Israel and his relentless war against Islamic terrorists," RJC executive director Matthew Brooks said in a statement Monday.

"The endorsements of John Kerry by these two anti-Israel groups speaks volumes and should serve as a warning to Jewish Americans who think John Kerry is on their side."

Brooks noted that Kerry called Arafat a "statesman" in his 1997 book, The New War. ("Terrorist organizations with specific political agendas may be encourage by Yasser Arafat's transformation from outlaw to statesman," Kerry wrote.)

Bush has pointedly refused to invite Arafat to the White House during the past four years, a far cry from the days of the last Democratic administration, at the end of which Time magazine reported that "President Clinton has held more tete-a-tetes with the Palestinian leader than any other world leader during his eight years in office."

On its website, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) presents what is says are the candidates' records on Israel.

On Arafat, it notes that Kerry said last March that the PA chairman had "proved himself to be irrelevant," but it makes no reference to the 1997 assessment of Arafat as a statesman.

As for Bush, the NJDC noted that Bush in 2002 was quoted as saying he would not label Arafat a terrorist because he "has agreed to a peace process." The council made no reference to the fact Bush made Arafat persona non grata at the White House.

On Israel's security fence, the NJDC highlighted the Bush administration's concerns about the route of the barrier rather than its support for Israel's right to build it.

It also ignored that fact that the administration opposed the right of the International Court of Justice to rule on the matter.

On the other hand, it cited comments by Kerry in February and April 2004 showing that he "strongly supported Israel's right to build" the barrier.

The NJDC made no mention of another Kerry quote on the fence, last October, when he told an Arab American audience the fence was "provocative," "counterproductive" and a "barrier to peace."

 

[-Cp]

http://web.israelinsider.com/bin/en...Who=Article^l4262&enZone=Politics&enVersion=0


Analysis: Arafat and most nations want Kerry, Israelis alone prefer Bush
By Jerusalem Newswire October 19, 2004

Three weeks before the people of the United States choose their president for the next four years, reports from Israel and elsewhere tellingly reveal how the parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict view the candidates.

While Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority is rooting for Democrat John Kerry, Israel's Jews overwhelmingly hope President George W. Bush will stay in the Oval Office through 2008.

And Israel is believed to be the only nation in the world wanting Bush to win.

The Israeli daily Maariv reported Monday that senior PA official Nabil Shaath informed the BBC in an interview that he believes the "peace process" would benefit from Bush's removal from power.

Shaath was quoted as saying that, were Bush to be returned to office, despite his commitment to renew efforts to resume the diplomatic process, "with the staff that surrounds him and with his current opinions, it doesn't look promising."

Kerry's election would likely result in the return to the new administration of a number of President Bill Clinton's staff.

"That would be a good thing," Shaath said.

His opinion substantiates the assessment delivered to the Israeli cabinet last July by Israeli military intelligence chief Major-General Aharon Ze'evi, who said that Arafat was hoping for a Bush defeat.

At that time, Ze'evi explained that a growing sense of turmoil in the PA was attributable to Arafat's decision to sit tight and do nothing until after the US elections.

"Arafat is now waiting for the month of November in the hope that President Bush will be defeated in the presidential election and turned out of his office," Ze'evi was quoted as saying.

Arafat also hoped that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would collapse.

Since Bush's election, the US leader has adamantly refused to meet with Arafat, and has called on the Palestinian Arabs to replace him with new leadership. Those calls have gone unheeded.

Earlier this year, Kerry told New York Jewish leaders that he agrees with Bush's decision to isolate and ignore Arafat because the PLO chief was "not a partner for peace, much less a statesman."

Meanwhile, under a shouting headline declaring that the "World wants Kerry to beat Bush," the Sydney Morning Herald reported last week that "an ambitious polling exercise" carried out internationally in September singled Israel out as the only country on earth that supported the president over his opponent. (Newspapers in ten countries, including Haaretz in Israel, conducted polls of their countrymen concerning the US election. -- Israel Insider)

Israelis have by and large been fully supportive of the US war in Iraq, and, according to polls, are thankful to President Bush for removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Traditionally, most American Jews vote Democrat, and are expected to do so again in November.

Based on the surveyed feelings of Israeli Jews on the matter, analysts have questioned whether a rub-off affect on American Jewry could help swing a number of Jews to come out for Bush.

Around 250,000 US citizens live in Israel, of whom about 120,000 are eligible to vote. Only 14,000 voted in 2000, but nearly three times that number are expected to do so this year.

About 30,000 Palestinian Arabs also hold US citizenship.

 

[-Cp]

http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=14626&intcategoryid=3


OP-ED
Kerry’s road map to peace
would lead back to nowhere
By Martin Peretz



BOSTON, Oct. 18 (JTA) — Like many American Jews, I was brought up to believe that if I pulled the Republican lever on the election machine my right hand would wither and, as the Psalmist says, my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth.
According to the Bible, of course, these are actually the feared consequences of forgetting Jerusalem. Now, while there are many reasons one might want to vote for John Kerry, remembering Jerusalem — remembering to stand up for the State of Israel — is not among them.

It is true that candidate Kerry’s campaign pronouncements have been unexceptionable from the pro-Zionist point of view. Yes, he flip-flopped on the miles of trenches and fences Israel is building to defend itself from the plague of terrorism, first attacking it as “another barrier to peace,” then accepting it as “a legitimate act of self-defense.”

He has also foundered concerning what can be expected of Yasser Arafat. Just as Arafat was launching the second intifada in 2000, Kerry asserted optimistically that we must “look to Chairman Arafat to exert much greater leadership.” Three days later, he portentously declared the obvious on “Face the Nation,” calling the Israel-Palestinian conflict “an extraordinarily complicated, incredibly deep-rooted problem.”

What made this problem so extraordinary and incredible? “Arafat, has forces around him, underneath him, close by him, that are working against what he is doing,” Kerry said by way of exoneration. (And, to sustain the moral equivalence of the parties in his head, Kerry added, “The same is true of Prime Minister Barak” — which was nonsense, as there wasn’t a single such person in Barak’s circle.)

By now, to be sure, Kerry thinks that the chairman’s support for terrorism has already rendered him unfit as a partner for peace. And his votes in the U.S. Senate (like all but a handful of senators’) have been routinely friendly to Israel.

So why am I still exercised about John Kerry?

It’s the ramifications of his foreign policy in general, especially his fixation on the United Nations as the arbiter of international legitimacy, proctor of that “global test.”

Save for the American veto in the Security Council, Israel loses every struggle at the United Nations against lopsided majorities. In the General Assembly and Human Rights Commission, Muslim states trade their votes to protect aggressors and tyrannies from censure in exchange for libels against the Jewish state. The body’s bloated and dishonest bureaucracies are no better, as evidenced most recently by the head of the U.N. organization for Palestine refugees, who has just defended having Hamas militants on his staff.

I’ve searched to find one time when Kerry — even candidate Kerry — criticized a U.N. action or statement against Israel. I’ve come up empty-handed. Nor has he defended Israel against the European Union’s continuous hectoring.

Another thing that bothers me about Kerry is the deus ex machina he has up his sleeve: the appointment of a presidential envoy. It’s hard to count how many special emissaries have been dispatched from Washington to the Middle East to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. What’s easy to see is that none of them has gotten to “yes.”

In recent years, both George Tenet and Gen. Anthony Zinni have served in this meaningless position. And who would Kerry designate? He first suggested the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter and James Baker, Bush 41´s secretary of state.

Then he found out — why he didn’t know this is another matter — that both Carter and Baker were deeply distrusted by the Israelis and by American Jews. There was no mystery as to why. Carter (well, how does one say this?) is not exactly a friend to the Jewish nation and, besides, his favorite politician in the Middle East was the mass murderer Hafez Assad. A huge beneficiary of Saudi business, Baker was adept at pooh-poohing concerns about Israeli security.

So we are left with Kerry’s other putative designee, Bill Clinton, whose national security staff was so mesmerized by the mirage of a quickie Israel-Palestinian peace at the end of his term, that, according to the 9/11 report, it couldn’t be bothered take out Osama bin Laden after the attack on the USS Cole. Clinton succeeded in squeezing Israel into the extravagant Camp David and Taba formulae, but failed to get Arafat to go along. At least for Israel, these proposals are now toast.

For his part, Kerry grabs at any showy idea to demonstrate his sense of urgency. As a response to militant Islam and to encourage moderate Muslims, the presidential aspirant proposed that “the great religious figures of the planet” — he mentioned the pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama — hold a summit.

To do exactly what?

“To begin to help the world to see the ways in which Islam is not, in fact, a threat,” Kerry said, “And to isolate those who are, and to give people the strength to be able to come together in a global effort to take away their financing, their freedom to move, their sanctuary, and so forth.”

This muddled foolishness reflects Kerry’s sense of politics as desperate theater. Another simply showy idea he proposed (to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press”) was to insert U.S. troops between Israel and the territories, as part “of some kind of very neutral international effort that began to allow Israel itself to disengage and withdraw.” Now, if anything would put American soldiers in harm’s way it is such a move, exposing our men and women to fiercely competing gangs of suicide bombers and other killers.

Kerry asserts that it is “Israel’s presence [in the territories that] puts Israel in difficult circumstances and obviously creates an enormous handle for Osama bin Laden for all the radicals and extremists to hang on to.” But this stands history on its head. It is not the occupation that caused the conflict. It is the very existence of Israel — even within the unbearably narrow 1949 cease- fire lines.

To project his Middle East bona fides, Kerry has bashed George Bush dozens of times for supposedly showing no interest in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, for breaking a continuum going back at least 30 years.

“Some cliches,” wrote the dovish Israeli journalist Aluf Benn in the even-more dovish Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “become permanent features in public until someone takes the trouble to check out their validity.”

Which is what Benn did. And what did he find? The Bush administration “has been far more involved than any previous administrations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has courageously presented the two sides with practical objectives and demands.”

Kerry seems to have nostalgia for the peacemaking ways of Bill Clinton. But what Clinton actually bequeathed to George W., says Benn, was “an Israeli-Palestinian war and a total collapse of the hopes that flourished in the 1990s. The height of the peace process during the Clinton era, the Camp David summit in July 2000, was a classic example of inept diplomacy, a rash move whose initiators failed to take into account the realpolitik, misunderstood Arafat and brought upon both Israelis and Palestinians the disaster of the intifada.”

By contrast, Bush has committed Ariel Sharon to a Palestinian state and to a withdrawal from some, though certainly not all, of the settlements. In return, the president has recognized that the most populous and strategically pivotal settlements would remain in Israeli hands and has also ruled out what would be suicide for Israel, the return of Palestinian refugees after 56 years. The Palestinians have not yet signed on to these particulars. But they are the future details of any peace.

Bush’s empathy for the government in Jerusalem is particularly remarkable, because empathy was altogether foreign to both Bush pere and his secretary of state. One can only imagine the horror of 41 and James Baker (to whom the president may actually owe his office) in seeing the inheritor become a true ally of Israel.

Yet there it is. And with his understanding of, and sympathy for, the Israeli predicament, Bush has coaxed from Sharon an agreement to withdraw unilaterally from all the Gaza settlements and from four in the West Bank — something even left-wing governments, as Benn puts it, “were afraid to do.”

Kerry, meanwhile, appears ready to formulaically follow the failed precepts of the past, complete with photo-ops and multiple interlocutors. This is a road map to nowhere.

 

[theim]

Running tally of Kerry endorsements:

Spanish Socialist Party
Communist Party USA
PLO Terrorist leader Yasser Arafat

Quite a retinue.

 

[tim_duncan2000]

Kerry seems to have nostalgia for the peacemaking ways of Bill Clinton. But what Clinton actually bequeathed to George W., says Benn, was “an Israeli-Palestinian war and a total collapse of the hopes that flourished in the 1990s. The height of the peace process during the Clinton era, the Camp David summit in July 2000, was a classic example of inept diplomacy, a rash move whose initiators failed to take into account the realpolitik, misunderstood Arafat and brought upon both Israelis and Palestinians the disaster of the intifada.”

I get tired of hearing how wonderful everything was with Clinton and how Bush screwed everything up. It is complete bullshit.

By contrast, Bush has committed Ariel Sharon to a Palestinian state and to a withdrawal from some, though certainly not all, of the settlements.

Why people are against that, I'll never understand. Maybe they think it should be all or nothing (withdraw from all settlements or none of them). I think that's a stupid argument, and they should just be glad that any steps are being taken. You have to start somewhere.

 

[no1tovote4]

There was a guy on the radio today that said the leadership in Iran endorsed Bush, I have been looking for a story online but cannot find one. I wonder if he was seeking to effect the election or has access to a news source I do not have.

 

[Sandy73]

Next week it will be Osama endorses Kerry !!

 

[Avatar4321]

Next week it will be Osama endorses Kerry !!

LoL. Well like i said in another thread. there is a high chance osama is already dead and the dead always support Democrats.

 

[NightTrain]

... but this is critical to understanding what's really going on, IMHO. -NT

The KGB's Man ["I invented the hijackings"]
Wall Street Journal Sept 22, 2003 | ION MIHAI PACEPA

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism" during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism" was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror operations, while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager," his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.

In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."

Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his -- all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.

On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.
__________________