Friday, November 19, 2004
By Nir Boms and Erick Stakelbeck
With Yasser Arafat’s death, Europe has lost its oldest and dearest Arab despot. But the race to replace him as the European Union’s favored Middle East tyrant has already begun – and we seem to have a winner. Late last month, just days before Arafat was flown to Paris to receive medical treatment, the European Commission and Syria signed an “Association Agreement” that strengthened Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad’s iron grip on power. Amazingly, this significant development was all but ignored by the Western media.