Wretchard of Belmont Club in a characteristically good post on the legacy of Yasser Arafat says:
The Intifada may have hurt Israel, but it consumed Palestine, leaving it with only the counterfeit of a functioning society. Terrorism leaves nothing but ash. And when Arafat dies, as all men must, his legacy, no less than his corpse will be contested by a swarm of pretenders — a power struggle, of possibly surpassing savagery among men nurtured — at the European taxpayer’s dime — for their skill at terror.
Wretchard correctly notes that terrorism is a poisoned pill and any society that embraces it will be destroyed by it. Robert Bolt said it well in his play, A Man for All Seasons, putting the words in the mouth of Thomas More:
Oh? And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.
In a sermon delivered on July 4, 1880 by Phillips Brooks in Westminster Abbey, Dr. Brooks said:
MY Friends,—May I ask you to linger while I say to you a few words more, which shall not be unsuited to what I have been saying, and which shall, for just a moment, recall to you the sacredness which this day—the Fourth of July, the anniversary of American Independence–has in the hearts of us Americans. If I dare—generously permitted as I am to stand this evening in the venerable Abbey, so full of our history as well as yours—to claim that our festival shall have some sacredness for you as well as us, my claim rests on the simple truth that to all true men the birthday of a nation must always be a sacred thing. For in our modern thought the nation is the making-place of men. Not by the traditions of its history, nor by the splendor of its corporate achievements, nor by the abstract excellencies of its constitution, but by its fitness to make men, to beget and educate human character, to contribute to the complete humanity, the “perfect man” that is to be,—by this alone each nation must be judged to-day. The nations are the golden candlesticks which hold aloft the candles of the Lord. No candlestick can be so rich or venerable that men shall honor it if it holds no candle. “Show us your man,” land cries to land.
As Brooks went on to say for America this man is Lincoln. For Palestine it is Arafat.
