...It is understandable that Americans have never found it easy to think about Arafat -- and not just because his goal of Palestinian independence challenged the myth that Israel's creation was innocent. (It remains perhaps the most painful moral irony of our time that history's ultimate victims, the Jews, victimized another people in the process of creating their state.) His career defies comfortable moral assumptions. He was a statesman and a terrorist, a guerrilla leader and a politician. The idea that terrorism, seen from a historical perspective, could serve a legitimate political purpose is not easy to swallow -- and to argue that position has become taboo after 9/11. Yet our position has no moral consistency. We claim to subscribe to Kant's categorical imperative, to treat humans as ends, not as means, but we live in a world of ends where the bloody traces of the means are quickly forgotten. We celebrate French Resistance fighters, or Mandela's African National Congress, or the Jewish terrorists who would later become Israeli statesmen, like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, or any other "terrorist" group whose cause we support and who ends up victorious. But this is not easy to acknowledge. How much easier simply to denounce Arafat as a terrorist and murderer.

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