YASSER, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

The AP's story on Yasser Arafat's death, carried in the Sun-Times, contained this paragraph:

After the Arabs' humbling defeat by Israel in the six-day war of 1967, the PLO thrust itself on the world's front pages by sending its gunmen out to hijack airplanes, machine gun airports and seize Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics.

At the risk of appearing pedantic: The PLO's gunmen didn't just "hijack airplanes," they also killed passengers.

The PLO's gunmen didn't just "machine gun airports," they also machine gunned the people in the airports.

And the PLO's gunmen didn't just "seize Israeli atheletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics," they also butchered Israeli atheletes at the Munich Olympics.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe commemorates some of Arafat's many achievements:

Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.

Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?

So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command.

And, yes, I will post something very similar if the life's work of Ariel Sharon is similarly sanitized after his death.