Success Quote by Oriana Fallaci

Fallaci aims straight for delegitimization, not debate. Calling war “something Arafat sends others to do for him” frames him as a commander of disposable bodies, a politician whose power depends on outsourcing risk. The line is built to sting because it swaps the usual vocabulary of liberation and resistance for the language of manipulation: “others,” “poor souls,” “believe.” Faith becomes gullibility, commitment becomes exploitation. It’s classic Fallaci: moral theater staged as reportage, with contempt doing the heavy lifting.

The subtext is as much about Western audiences as it is about Arafat. By spotlighting “the poor” who fight and die, she implies an asymmetry between elites and masses that readers instantly recognize across contexts. She’s also telling you how to read the entire conflict: not as a tragic collision of national projects, but as the cynical career maintenance of one man. “Pompous incompetent” is an insult, but it’s also a narrative device: pomp explains the ego; incompetence explains the political outcome. No structural forces, no competing constraints, just character failure.

The Camp David reference pins the rhetoric to a specific moment: the post-2000 collapse of negotiations, when blame became a geopolitical commodity. By naming Clinton’s mediation, Fallaci recruits American credibility as an evidentiary prop, suggesting that even a superpower’s full-court press couldn’t overcome Arafat’s vanity and ineptitude. The intent isn’t to parse why talks failed; it’s to foreclose sympathy, converting a complicated process into a moral verdict.