Captain Allen@CptAllenHistory
This Day (May 10) in 1994, Yasser Arafat admitted the “peace process” was a farce.
Just months after shaking Yitzhak Rabin’s hand on the White House lawn, Arafat stood in a mosque in Johannesburg & told the truth — in Arabic, to a Muslim audience, when he thought the West wasn’t listening.
He openly declared the Oslo “peace” agreement was nothing more than a “tactical step” — a temporary truce, exactly like the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah that Muhammad used before conquering Mecca.
He then called for “jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”
This was not a slip of the tongue. This was the real Arafat when speaking in Arabic to a non-Western audience.
From the moment he founded Fatah in the late 1950s, Arafat was a terrorist and a liar. His career was built on murder: plane hijackings, embassy sieges, the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Coastal Road massacre, the Achille Lauro hijacking, school bus bombings, and endless suicide attacks.
The world desperately wanted to believe that giving him legitimacy, billions in aid, weapons, and territory would turn him into a statesman. Instead, it simply gave one of the 20th century’s most prolific terrorists a sovereign base, international respectability, and vast sums of money to enrich himself and his cronies.
While Arafat played the peacemaker in English, he continued inciting, funding, and glorifying terror in Arabic. He rejected Ehud Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital at Camp David in 2000 — then launched the Second Intifada, the bloodiest terror war Israel had ever seen.
He was never interested in building a state. He was only interested in destroying the Jewish one — by terror, diplomacy, lying to/ideologically capturing the West, demographics, whatever worked.
Arafat died a billionaire while his people remained in poverty, their suffering weaponized as propaganda. He was a cold-blooded murderer, a pathological liar, and a world-class kleptocrat to the very end.
The Johannesburg speech was the real Yasser Arafat, and the West just kept looking the other way.