I don’t think so, but Yasser “Jihad” Arafat apparently does.

Responding to harsh criticism by US officials, Arafat also made an appeal yesterday to the American people in a program on the Qatari satellite channel Al- Jazeera, asking them to compare the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation to their own against British forces in the American War of Independence.

“Did you ever accept the British occupation of the United States,” Arafat asked. “Didn’t George Washington fight, along with his people, until they freed the United States?”

Obviously, my education of colonial history is deficient. I can’t recall reading about that part where England had millions of people living in cities on the east coast, and George Washington had the colonials strap black-powder balls to themselves and walk into New York shops to set them off.

I also must have been asleep in class on the day when they described how George Washington made speeches in English feigning conciliation and victimhood, and different speeches in colonialspeak urging his followers to drive all English men, women and children into the Atlantic.

And I must have cut class the day they explained how Washington, listening to the wise council of the French, and Spanish and Italians, urged him and his followers to withdraw from their own land to Mexico, and wait for the ultimate war that would defeat those evil Englishpeople living in America, after which they would be able to have all of the territory, even that part of it which had been legally granted by treaty. And that when that war was launched, and ignominiously lost, that George Washington started up bands of terrorists to kill innocent English civilians.

I was apparently taught by some historical revisionist that George Washington was fighting an empire across the sea, and that he waged war on the armed forces of that country, many of them mercenaries–not on innocent civilians in Philadelphia.

But I’m sure that now that Yasser has straightened us out, he will receive appropriate respect from world leaders. Maybe he’ll even get another well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize…

[Update at 3:30 PM]

UPI Columnist Jim Bennett provides an alternate point of view:

Actually, there were millions of English people living on the Eastern seaboard. Washington was one of them. The equivalent of the Arabs were the Indians, who did try terrorist tactics for a long time. In fairness, that was the way they always fought. And the surrounding powers did try to aid the Indians, while mostly exploiting them for their own strategic purposes.

But I don’t suppose Arafat would find the analogy of use in appealing to
Americans. It’s also not hopeful to the Palestinians.

Apparently, the International Space Station is going to serve as a poster child for government waste.

And they said it wouldn’t be useful for anything…

Apparently there are still a few unrepentent socialists left in the former Soviet Union. Cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev isn’t very happy about this new-fangled free-enterprise Russian space program, in which people can travel into space by simply (horrors!) paying money.

It is a frightening trend; why, if this keeps up, it might eventually lead to free enterprise in that last proud bastion of socialist manned space programs–the USA.

[Thanks to Jim Bennett for the link]

Apparently there are still a few unrepentent socialists left in the former Soviet Union. Cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev isn’t very happy about this new-fangled free-enterprise Russian space program, in which people can travel into space by simply (horrors!) paying money.

It is a frightening trend; why, if this keeps up, it might eventually lead to free enterprise in that last proud bastion of socialist manned space programs–the USA.

[Thanks to Jim Bennett for the link]

Apparently there are still a few unrepentent socialists left in the former Soviet Union. Cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev isn’t very happy about this new-fangled free-enterprise Russian space program, in which people can travel into space by simply (horrors!) paying money.

It is a frightening trend; why, if this keeps up, it might eventually lead to free enterprise in that last proud bastion of socialist manned space programs–the USA.

[Thanks to Jim Bennett for the link]

According to this article, Johnny Jihad wanted to have four wives, per the custom of the particular sect of Islam that he’d adopted.

Sheesh, why didn’t he just move to northern Arizona?

An official of the Palestinian Authority (i.e., in Arafat’s pay) made a fiery speech at a mosque denouncing the US, and declaring us infidels.

Hmmmm… wasn’t one of the lessons that we were supposed to learn from 911 was that, if someone says they want to kill you, believe them?

As someone who originally hails from the Land of Big Sea Waters, I particularly enjoyed Will Warren’s latest masterpiece.

Financial Times informs us that some of the mullahs aren’t happy with a US presence in Afghanistan, and view Karzai as “an American stooge.”

Well, I’m wondering why we should care if a bunch of Islamofascists are unhappy.

So, they don’t find our presence acceptable? Well, we don’t find flying airplanes into our inhabited skyscrapers acceptable either, and they’d better realize that we’ll stay there as long as we think we need to in order to prevent future recurrences. And if there’s a split developing within the Iranian power structure, as this article implies, we need to encourage it.

Watching bits and pieces of Hannity and Colmes again tonight (it was up against a Simpsons rerun that I’ve seen many times…), and they had Lanny Davis on. He was, of all things, defending the Bush Administration (at least insofar as he thought there was no evidence that they’d done anything wrong) and was urging them to come clean on the “energy task force.”

My take is that he knows he was running interference for a criminal scoundrel in the past, he has at least the vestiges of a conscience, and that he hopes, by appearing to be “consistent” that he will somehow redeem himself.

Of course, he’s not being consistent, because in the case of the Clinton Administration, almost without failure, there was almost always a “quo” to match every “quid.” The only excuse that the Clintonistas could put forth was that yes, there was a quid, and yes, there was a quo, but we must understand that Bill Clinton was such a noble and ethical creature, that it was madness to connect the dots and think that there was therefore a “quid pro quo.”

(Quick translation for those who are Latin challenged: “quid” means “this,” “quo” means “that,” and “pro” means “for”…)

The uphill struggle that the Democrats face in making this into a Republican scandal is that while there are “quids” to both parties, there are no recent “quo”s, and to the degree that they exist at all, they only came from Democrats…

Lanny also said something toward the end that simply reinforced Glenn Reynold’s recent Fox News editorial. Lanny said, “We must pass campaign reform to end the corruption caused by all this money.”

No, Lanny, it’s not the money that causes all the corruption. Lord Acton had it right when he said it, and it remains right today.

Power corrupts.