Joel Mowbray, writing in The National Review, looks back on Yasser Arafat’s sham “election,” and at the air of legitimacy lent the whole miserable 1996 charade by dissembling western apologists — many of whom still refuse to acknowledge the widespread corruption surrounding those proceedings:

Given that potential opponents were intimidated or bribed to drop out of races, Arafat dominated television airtime, and there was only token opposition in the campaign for chairman, the natural assumption would be that the international observers would expose the election for the sham that it was. That assumption would be sadly mistaken.

While monitoring the 1996 election, former President Carter ignored all evidence of Arafat’s wrongdoing, and instead zeroed in on the role of the Israeli Defense Forces patrolling Jerusalem. ‘There’s no doubt [Israelis] are doing everything they can to intimidate Palestinians,’ said the former peanut farmer on the day of the election. There was credible evidence to suggest some voter intimidation by Israelis in Jerusalem, but for Carter to focus solely on that not only paints an inaccurate picture by omission, but also harms the Palestinian people in the long run, denying them the democracy they thought were getting.

The steadfast refusal of the international observers to highlight the significant PLO corruption in the months prior to the election colored the news coverage of the vote here in America.

The Sunday New York Times blared in its lead sentence, ‘Voting in their first general election today, Palestinians gave a broad endorsement to Yasir Arafat’s leadership in building their homeland.’ To this day, the urban legend of Arafat being democratically elected has real consequences.

‘The tragedy of this is that it allows people to create a moral equivalency between Sharon and Arafat, when in fact none exists,’ comments Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum.

Maybe Arafat would have won in a free and fair election, but he didn’t. Propagating the myth that he was ‘elected’ only serves to illegitimately legitimize his status as a democratic leader. Perhaps Arafat is the most popular Palestinian leader, but for all the wrong reasons. He achieved his pole position through thuggish tactics, not a democratic election.

Memorize the details, folks. Repeat as needed to those who insist that “the U.S. and Israel have no right to talk of isolating a duly elected world leader.”

Duly elected world leaders, after all, don’t extend their own terms by authoritarian decree…