Here’s a rare appearance of good sense and clear thinking at the Los Angeles Times, as Max Boot points out one of the main reasons I voted for George W. Bush in this election—his unprecedented, unyielding refusal to deal with Yasser Arafat: How Arafat Got Away With It. (Hat tip: Free Speech Is Only For �ber-Libs.)

Though Arafat, of course, bore ultimate responsibility for his many sins, he could not have been so destructive without so many outside enablers, ranging from the Soviet Union, which supported him from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the European Union and the United States, which stepped into the sugar daddy role in the 1990s. And let us not forget his fan club among the Western intelligentsia, many of whom even now weep for his passing as if he were a great man instead of a criminal with a cause.

George W. Bush, alone among Western leaders, had the courage to stop dealing with the Palestinian thug-in-chief. On June 24, 2002, the president gave an important speech in which he called on the Palestinian people “to elect new leaders … not compromised by terror” and to “build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty.” Now that Arafat has gone to the great compound in the sky, there will be pressure on Bush to resume the pointless “peace process,” but it will be premature to do so as long as the terrorist kleptocracy spawned by Arafat continues to exist.

Only if his successors show a genuine commitment to peace and pluralism should they be rewarded by the West. In the meantime, the U.S. and its allies need to work behind the scenes to identify and support genuine Palestinian democrats — not a new generation of gunmen in the Arafat mold.