Re: Thread Title: I think the change was good, but should've been followed by (formerly..Arft is dy.) I think that would've made it clear to all. But I think that most of us 'figgered' it out.

There've been a lot of poorly thought-out comments on this thread. I think saying that Hitler was a moderate next to Genghis or Idi shows a poor knowledge of all of the above.

I think making Bush and Arafat equivalent shows a misunderstanding of the principles involved.

You can make all of 'em equivalent by saying: Bush / Sharon / Hitler / Stalin / Arafat / Amin all did "what they thought was best".

In other words, going down the road of moral equivalency in this manner makes anything else you say meaningless, because it's equally applicable to anyone else. Making the Palestinians equivalent to Indians on Reservations overlooks the fact that one can equally state that the Jewish people are the 'Indians' who took BACK what had been stolen from THEM.

Arafat spent a lot of time making demonstrably false statements of fact, of history, of his policies, and of his actions. His was a cult of personality, which puts him more into the techniques of Nasser, which he was familiar with, and Saddam Hussein, who apparently modeled himself with some success after Josef Stalin.

It is yet simplistic to say, "Good, he's dead" without knowing what's going to happen, but we can all hope that with the end of his stultifying and non-productive rule, something better can happen.

As I've quoted before, from an Israeli military history book, "The tragedy of the Middle East is not that it's a battle of right against wrong, but of right against right."

God would weep if He wasn't still celebrating the Red Sox winnning the World Series.