I have yet to see anything in the Arab press that mentions George Habash's death as less than tragic.
The entire Arab world - from moderate US allies and Arab members of Knesset to the PA and the far reaches of the diehard Islamist terror groups - is uniformly mourning an arch-terrorist leader.
He is being described most often in the Arab press as a force for "unity" and yet he was an unrepentant advocate of terror against civilians worldwide. All of the Arabs who claim to be against terror nowadays are uniformly mourning one of the architects of modern terrorism - without the slightest reservation. I could find no expressions of regret over his methods, over the scores of deaths of innocents worldwide that he was responsible for.
And it is not like Habash changed his positions in his later years. He remained with the same mindset that came up with airplane hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and 1970s.
His death, and the outpouring of grief and mourning it has spawned, is a damning indictment of the willingness of Arabs across the political spectrum to truly eschew terror.
This man remains a hero to people that we are supposed to be negotiating with as if they live in the same moral universe as we do. That fact should give us pause when we hear platitudes about "terror" from our erstwhile allies.
