Arafat

First of all... for anyone who reads both MEJ and Running Scared, I am unable to post there this morning for some mysterious reason, and have a customer service request in to figure out the problem. (If Ron could try it to test it, I'd appreciate it.) On to the topic of the morning.

Read any paper and you'll see the same news - Arafat is dying, barring some act of God. (How scary of a divine statement would that be!?) I'm not sure how I feel about this. I know that many bloggers, particularly the heavily conservative ones, are cheering in the streets and preparing to pop open bottles of champagne as soon as official word is received that he's drawn his last breath. I'm finding it difficult to get in a celebratory mood over this, though.

Let us be very clear up front - I'm no Arafat fan. And I don't personally know anyone who is. It's not so much a matter of the fact of his dying, I suppose, but rather more an issue of how he is dying. Even though I was not a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, I will confess to a moment of guilty pleasure where I silently cheered when news was released of Saddam's two sons being gunned down. No matter how you felt about the Iraq war, those were two bastards who seriously had a front row seat reserved in Hell next to that guy who shot the pope. They were bad men who were confronted by force and taken down in battle - like warriors.

Had we heard that Arafat was killed when we dropped a bomb on him, or stormed his compound or something similar, perhaps I would be joining the cheering throngs. But as it stands, at the end of all things, he's a frail, 75 year old man lying in a hospital, expiring from natural causes. The cycle of life is coming to a close for him. There is no victory over him in battle - no final chance for him to take up arms and make a stand. Just an old man in a white room drawing his last ragged breaths. It seems small cause to cheer.

Perhaps on an even deeper, more mean spirited level, some of us might feel somehow cheated? Is it that some of us actually wanted to see him taken down in violence as punishment for decades of terrorist atrocities? And that, just possibly, seeing him expire at the end of his natural lifespan is somehow a victory for him?

I'm not sure. These are philosophical questions that require looking into deeper rooms of our minds which we'd often rather leave for the maid to sweep up. Part of me cries out that he is a monster. Another part answers that he's an old man about to go to meet his final judgment. One side cries for vengeance while another has a knee-jerk reaction to allow old men to die quietly. I am left wondering what awaits him beyond the shroud of death. He fought his entire life in what he considered a holy war in which he was absolutely right and his enemies were the personification of evil. How the rest of the world viewed him seemed to matter not a bit. I'll have to reflect on this further. I invite you to join me.