To: Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel
From: Jordan Max, armchair prime minister in Chutz L’aretz
Re: Top 21 ways to get rid of Arafat
Arik, I know you’re a busy man, and you no doubt get lots of cockamamie ideas and unsolicited advice on how to run the country. Well this is different. I once took a psychology course in a university.
Given that you’ve gone on record as saying you don’t want to kill Yasser Arafat or destroy the Palestinian Authority, you need to think, as we say here, outside the box. Seeing as you’ve got him nicely caged there in Ramallah (a happenin’ town if ever there was), here’s some ideas on how you can hasten his resignation or at least his packing up and moving out of the neighborhood, for good. Possibly to Saudi Arabia, where he can join other former dictators in “retirement,” like Idi Amin. Or perhaps the next NASA trip to Mars. I understand the Russians are eager to have paying millionaire passengers on their trips to the International Space Station. Considering what Arafat’s stolen from his own people and stashed in Swiss bank accounts, he could afford 300 or so trips.
In an interview with Ma’ariv, the Israeli daily newspaper, you said: “Today we have no inclination to hurt Arafat personally. It would harm Israel. We have no intention now to harm Arafat or to dismantle the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority.”
What would you do if you have a lousy neighbor, who plays his music (weapon fire) at all hours of the day or night, harasses you while mouthing his commitment to peaceful coexistence, dumps his garbage all over your lawn?
Here then are my suggestions as to what could or should be done to induce Arafat to give up and resign from his “presidency,” or at least to “leave town” for good.
1. Elect him a synagogue president — within a week, he’ll have thousands of knives in his backside, and hordes of kvetching nobodies telling him how to run his “business” that he’ll wish he could just go back to his other job as chief terrorist and provocateur.
2. Match him up with Shulamit Aloni, and send them off together on a world tour for lost causes, starting in Afghanistan.
3. Make him the United Nations’ next international ambassador for peace and send him on a tour of world capitals. If the four-star restaurants in Geneva don’t do him in, one of his “escorts” will.
5. Make him the official spokesman for the Home Armaments Shopping Channel.
6. Appoint him as the New York Times’ ombudsman.
7. Appoint him as Britney Spears’ poodle’s bodyguard.
8. Send him to Las Vegas along with other holdovers from the ’70s, doing two shows nightly and matinees on the weekend.
9. Bombard his office with unsolicited e-mails, telemarketers, door-to-door salespeople.
10. Reroute all consumer complaint department lines to his personal phone number.
11. Create a real democratic parliament and free press, where he has to answer to his own people for his errors in leadership.
12. Allow Amnesty International, B’tselem and Palestinian Human Rights Groups to set up shop in the Palestinian-run areas.
13. Get him on the next “Survivor,” or “Who Wants to be an Embezzling Millionaire?” contest.
14. Place him on Mr. Blackwell’s Worst-Dressed Dictator List.
15. Make him the artistic director for all future televised beauty pageants and awards events.
16. Link him romantically with Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Connie Chung.
17. Appoint him Gary Condit’s press agent.
18. Convince him that disco and punk music are really back in style.
19. Get him a spot on “Sesame Street” — look what it did for Deborah Harry’s career (remember Blondie?).
20. Bring in some really nasty neighbors who play their loud music until 4. a.m. every night.
21. Make him the next Greenpeace poster child for its forthcoming “Save Our Endangered Terrorist” campaign.