Yasser.

I have not yet commented on the passing of Yasser Arafat.

Years ago when I lived in the Middle East I stuck up for the man. For one reason, because he was the most reasonable of those in position of power amongst the Palestinians. It was Yasser or Hamas, I choose Yasser. I never viewed him as a good man or anything like that.

He wa a crime boss. The people of Palestine now have an oppurtunity. I fear though they will not miss this oppurtunity to miss an oppurtunity. I can not recall who said it but (Dennis Ross comes to mind but I do not know) the Palestinians are a group of people who never miss an oppurtunity to miss an oppurtunity. Indeed.

Before you get to rosy about Yasser remember he was responsible for the killing of many many people. The 72 Munich game terror attack, the killing of American diplomats, a civil war in Jordan and Lebanon.

One last note. In my sophomore year at Reedsville HS I took the general shop class and overview of drafting, woodworking and machine shop. One of our first assignments was to by hand magnify an image. We overlayed a grid on an image and then drew the image onto another piece of paper with an expanded grid on it. Then one would draw grid by grid. This non-artist (I can not draw a convincing stick-figure) did remarkably well.

Anyway, the image I chose to expand was a political cartoon, I found in the local newspaper. It was an image of Yasser Arafat walking out of a nation (he had just been ejected from a country, can not remember which one) on the case containing his machine gun, he had bumper stickers of all the nations ("I Love LIbya", "Lebanon is for Lovers" and the like) he had been ejected from. It was funny in the way such cartoons are.