If We Do Play by the Rules, Let’s Welcome Arafat--Then Put Him Under Arrest

Touchy, touchy. Yasser Arafat’s request for an American visa in order to address the United Nations has been turned down by the State Department. Sounds like George Shultz is carrying a grudge.

Just because the Palestine Liquidation Organization (Yasser Arafat, chairman) accepted responsibility for an attempt on the secretary of state’s life when he visited Jerusalem last March, is that any reason to exclude its head honcho from these hospitable shores? Has Shultz started taking things personally?

A couple of other irritants may explain why Arafat’s visa didn’t come through. There was the prominence of Abul Abbas at the PLO’s latest confab in Algiers. He’s the convicted mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking that cost one American, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, his life.

His body was tossed overboard still in his wheelchair, another example of the PLO’s peculiar code of chivalry. While the PLO has moved indirectly toward recognizing Israel and very indirectly toward renouncing terrorism, it has kept Abul Abbas on its executive committee. Another heroic figure given free reign by Arafat is known by the nom de guerre of Col. Hawari. He’s the gent who supplies Arafat’s bodyguards when he isn’t directing terrorist attacks.

In short, these are not exactly the kind of guests you would want setting down their Kalashnikovs in your living room.

In rejecting Arafat’s application for a visa, the State Department cited some of the PLO’s latest outrages and concluded: “Mr. Arafat, as chairman of the PLO, knows of, condones and lends support to such acts; he therefore is an accessory to such terrorism.” What’s more, Arafat himself was implicated in the killings of American diplomats Cleo Noel and G. Curtis Moore at Khartoum, Sudan, in 1973. A grand jury should have been convened years ago to pursue an indictment in that case. At this point it would be more appropriate for Arafat to apply not for a visa but a pardon.

Some things about the PLO and its bloody chieftain just don’t seem to have changed since it began specializing in the slaughter of innocents around the world, from Israeli kindergartens to the Olympic Games. It is one thing to engage Arab Palestinians in a dialogue that might leadto a workable peace in the Middle East, and quite another to give terrorism the American seal of approval. And that would be the effect of handing Yasser Arafat a visa. The United States may need to move toward the recognition of an Arab Palestine, but not of Arab terrorism. The two are not the same, and it is an insult to the descendants of Saladin to assume that they are.

As the State Department explained in its usual style, a mixture of understatement and generality: “The U.S. government has convincing evidence that PLO elements have engaged in terrorism against Americans and others. As chairman of the PLO, Mr. Arafat is responsible for the actions of these organizations.” All of which, in the State Department’s eyes, makes him a persona less than grata. Which is why the chairman may not be able to deliver another one of his holster-on-hip addresses to the United Nations, which has proved a most supportive audience. (Its Zionism-is-racism resolution could have come right out of the PLO’s collection of nuttisms.)

Yes, after its vague resolutions at Algiers, the PLO is supposed to have changed its ways. But it might be noted that the terrorist acts cited by the State Department have occurred since the PLO’s Cairo Declaration of 1985, which also forswore terrorism.

The PLO’s chieftain is, however, most welcome in Europe, where moral standards haven’t changed all that much since 1938. The PLO and its supporters now talk of convening the United Nations in Geneva to let Arafat explain the PLO’s new, peaceful stance. The Swiss tend to be picky about letting in people without money, but they have never insisted on good character in their visitors, or in their bank depositors.

The State Department’s decision does raise a tricky legal question, however. While the United States reserves the right to exclude security risks from these shores, this country is also bound by treaty not to “impose any impediments to transit” of visitors to the United Nations on official business. Those who recognize that treaties are the law of the land insist on admitting Arafat, and they’re right.

The Solomonic decision in this instance would have been to admit our would-be guest and then nab him before he stepped off the tarmac. Protocol of course would have demanded some kind of official greeting. I suggest: “Welcome to the United States of America--and you’re under arrest.” In that way this country’s obligations as both host and law-abiding member of the international community would have been honored. But the United Nations probably wouldn’t understand. Despite the presence of all those translators, the meaning of honor is largely unknown in those precincts.

Oh, yes, the greeters/arresting officers should be sure to read Arafat his rights. That’s a bigger break than he ever gave his victims.