“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” - Walter Duranty, New York Times reporter and apologist for Josef Stalin.
It is very disturbing to know that the spirit of Walter Duranty (1, 2, 3) is alive and well today, as seen in the way reporters have responded to the death of Yasser Arafat:
“It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it.
Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.
Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma’alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat’s name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?”
- From Arafat the Monster, by Jeff Jacoby
And yet Arafat is the subject of unwarranted praise, from our own President to the entire French nation. Jeff Jacoby notes that a BBC reporter wept over Arafat’s death, and that Gwynne Dyer, a columnist, said that Arafat succeeded at getting international attention through terror, implying that it was a good thing. We always hear about the shitty things Israel, and now the United States, are supposedly doing to native populations in the Middle East, but the fact that Arafat was a murderer is a point willfully ignored by the ideological left-wing. They have learned nothing from their own shameful history of defending the actions of murderers in order to serve their own ideological goals. After all, Stuart Chase, author of “A New Deal,” published in 1932, finished his book by saying, “Why should the Russians get to have all the fun remaking the world?” The left wants to remake the world, and Walter Duranty’s actions made it possible for them to defend Soviet Russia and still sleep at night with a clear conscience for some 20 years. The same thing has happened with Arafat, but we can only hope history will judge him correctly, since the left certainly did not.