Confessions of a Republican Journalist: Anti-terror, pro-Israel, 'nuf said!

If there's one unwritten rule in newsrooms, it's that breaking news happens just as you're about to shut down the computer, toss Diet Coke cans near the garbage and call it a night. On the West Coast, at least, that breaking news is usually from the Middle East -- as papers wrap up first editions, suicide bombers are just starting to climb aboard buses in Israel, terrorists fresh from the night's slumber.

Yasser Arafat’s Intifada No. 2 brought much of the same late-breaking news -- suicide bomber blows up some poor Israelis having a bite to eat or shopping; Israel retaliates with a well-aimed missile up the arse of the latest Hamas leader.

Breaking news usually means scrapping a less important story for the new piece, or shuffling stories around to find a home for the news. Editions are chased; editors get bleary-eyed as they wait for the Associated Press to write enough inches on the bombing to fill a news hole.

At home, I handle breaking news by snuggling on the couch with a down throw, in fuzzy jammies, fixating on Fox News. Add cordless and cell phones at hand to make or receive calls based on the gravity of the news event -- particularly handy for spreading the word about hour-long car chases through L.A. that wind up in a standoff outside your neighborhood 7-Eleven.

After Egypt held a state funeral for Arafat, he was flown back via helicopter to his Ramallah, West Bank, compound, also known as the Muqata. A dignified ceremony was to be held among Palestinian leaders at his gravesite, then Arafat would be parked forever in the spot that used to boast the compound’s parking lot. But Palestinians started pouring over the walls, ripping apart the barbed wire, dangling from ledges and crowded on rooftops and walls. Quickly the place was packed with thousands of people.

I never really thought Arafat was going to be buried in the first place. As headlines came out proclaiming “Arafat still alive; funeral planned Friday,” it seemed there was a little confusion about life and death as related to the PLO leader, as everyone predicted the Palestinian reaction to his death would be unpredictable. I predicted they’d pull a “Weekend at Bernie’s”: Arafat would be dead for a month or so as they worked out PLO business, but they’d tug the stocking cap over his head and make him wave and blow kisses from the hospital window. They could have even taken him on a Cannes vacation.

“We can’t see how the Palestinian security forces are going to control this crowd,” the West Bank correspondent shouted over the din of the mob on TV. “After all, they are unarmed!”

POP ... POP ... POP.

Hah. Not so unarmed now.

After camera shots confirmed that it was indeed the unarmed Palestinian police firing into the air, new guests showed up to crash the party -- first the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, in full hooded dress and fully armed, then a band of Hamas, in the same goofy regalia and waving swords and machine guns.

“Uh-oh,” the reporter groaned, “Palestinians were warned not to wear masks or bring weapons into the facility!”

This wasn’t a masquerade burial? It had the atmosphere of a party, and the militant brigades waltzed in like the A-listers at the prom. It took a long time and a lot of bullets from the unarmed Palestinian police to get the crowd to clear holes for two of the three helicopters to land, and even longer for the crowd to back off from the helicopters to even allow them to unload Arafat’s casket. The newly appointed interim leader, Mahmoud Abbas, poked his head out of a helicopter door, waving his arm and yelling out at the crowd; nobody listened to him. I stayed up waiting to see if the crowd would try to pull apart the casket and the body like the Ayatollah Khomeni’s farewell to arms, but Yasser made it to the parking lot in one piece.

“One has to ask -- if the Palestinians have no control over this situation, how will they be at keeping peace in their territories?” the reporter mused.

I’ll take a stab at that question!

Days after the Muqata mosh pit, Abbas and others had filled a mourning tent for Arafat when gunmen burst in and tried to kill their new leader. Then, as leaders tried to set up elections to determine a permanent Arafat replacement, the most popular candidate in the polls for a time was Marwan al-Barghouti, in an Israeli prison serving five life terms for five Israeli murders. So how is this guy supposed to rule, slip pieces of policy out with the laundry truck? Tunnel under a wall to make cabinet meetings?

It’s dumb ideas like this that make me think the Palestinian majority really does want to tunnel its dreams of a state into the ground. After al-Barghouti finishes his fifth life and is ready to run a state, it would probably be the twelfth of never for any sort of peace process. You can’t have a peace process when a population lifts up a man who murders five civilians or takes aim (literally) at anybody who dares broker a truce with the neighbors. (And we’re not talking about the nutter who shot Yitzhak Rabin.)

I wasn’t always interested in what was going on in the Middle East. At the time the Oslo Accords were signed, I was entering my freshman year of college and paid attention to little. But I had one high school friend, Jackie, who did her best to remind everyone of the Holy Land situation: she often wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of a fighter jet, and the words “Don’t worry, America -- Israel’s behind you!”

Now, after all these nights of breaking news, paying attention, and getting to know groups such as the Republican Jewish Coalition and JINSA, this Irish-Catholic is so supportive of Israel that I’m nearly an honorary Jew.

The Mideast crisis is worthy of a book, not just a blog post, and it could take many years off my life going into the history of the conflict, who’s done what to piss who off and who was justified and who should rot in hell and why. But I will never accept the rationalization some Americans -- including some colleagues -- give for Palestinian suicide bombings, swearing that desperation drove these jacked-up 19-year-olds to strap a nail-filled (to increase casualties) bomb on their chest and take out men, women and children eating pizza or dancing at a disco. This cop-out is far from rational. It’s the same kind of rationale that would account for suicide hijackers flying into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Desperation. Evil America and Israel. Anything goes.

And what rational person would believe that, if you blow up a Greek Orthodox monk or a little old lady at the bus stop in the name of jihad, there will actually be 72 virgins waiting on high to do your bidding? Can an irrational population even run a state?

The Palestinians didn’t exactly have help from Arafat in reaching any degree of rationality. When he was handed the West Bank, Gaza and a chunk of Jerusalem on a plate at Camp David, he rejected the deal and left the meeting without putting forth a counteroffer.

Why? He didn’t want to settle with Israel. Then he wouldn’t be the fearless warrior fighting the evil oppressors anymore, and what kind of martyr would that make?

Even as Arafat was ill for weeks before he died, he never put any plans into place for a smooth succession of power. Why would a megalomaniac lower himself to see that anyone was fit to fill his shoes?

When Arafat “renounced” terrorism in 1988, he also publicly recognized Israel’s right to exist alongside a Palestinian state. But his election as president the next year was for a Palestine that would wipe its shoes on top of Israel -- in other words, no Israel -- and if suicide bombings conducted by his Fatah movement’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade aren’t terrorism, what is? Oh, right, it’s Intifada.

Arafat was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

WHY?

The recent documentary “Relentless” showed Arafat’s double-speak: talking about a peace process in English for American cameras, then speaking in Arabic on Palestinian television about getting rid of the Jews. Nice.

And that wasn’t the only perk of Palestinian TV displayed in the film. Seven-year-olds were on programs describing how they wanted to be a “martyr” -- murderer -- when they grew up. Kids were getting excited about killing Israeli kids; these Palestinian kids were being given textbooks that don‘t even show the existence of the Israeli state. And this martyrdom was encouraged on a children’s show, sort of a homicidal Romper Room.

After the film was shown at a festival last year, one of the makers of the documentary fielded questions from the audience, first adding a footnote to the footage.

“Remember the host of that children’s program?” he said. “She blew herself up in Jerusalem last week.” Fortunately, she was my favorite kind of suicide bomber, the kind who doesn’t manage to take any victims with them. Do the flunkies still get martyr status? And do female suicide bombers get promised 72 male virgins?

So it’s a pretty hopeless situation when Islamic Jihad and Hamas are seen as the cool guys, but the Israelis have the cooler military. It ends up looking like some peon vs. corporate giant match-up, a David vs. Goliath oppression to the rest of the world, with militants openly condemned but also glorified.

“I have no problems with telling the world what Yasser Arafat really is, a supporter of terrorism, somebody that's done nothing,” Rabbi Marvin Heir of the Simon Wiesenthal Center once said on Alan Keyes’ show. “He's, if anything, encouraged terrorism. He knows the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad. He could have arrested them. He could have closed their offices. He never wanted to do that.”

So Arafat didn’t get to be buried in Jerusalem as he so desired, wound up in a parking lot with masked goons dancing around his grave, firing bullets into the air without taking into account that what goes up must come down. This leader revered by so many and reviled by even more -- hopefully -- left his Palestinians in as much chaos as before. And as the Palestinians torch synagogues in Gaza and Hamas vows to continue its jihad in the West Bank and Jerusalem, chaos reigns.