Arafat was born in Cairo[3] to Palestinian parents on August 24, 1929. Arafat's father was a textile merchant and a Palestinian with some Egyptian ancestry. Arafat's mother was from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem. She died when Yasir, as he was called, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of the British Mandate of Palestine. He has revealed little about his childhood, but one of his earliest memories is of British soldiers breaking into his uncle's house after midnight, beating members of the family and smashing furniture.[4]
What kind of origin is this for a super-villain? Broken furniture and and beaten extended family member? Furthermore, is this the worst that the British Empire could come up with?
For you young people, before the greatest villain of all time showed up the ugly bastard up to was the best we could do for a global all-purpose baddie. He had the ugly, he had the gloat and we couldn't kill him easily. Also, he could kind of speak English a little bit which made him all the more menacing (bad guys are so much more effective with accents). You see, the Shah of Iran at the time (Khomeini) couldn't speak English, nor could Noriega or subsequent pretender to the Fu Manchu throne, this put them at a disadvantage. If they can't speak English who gives a fuck what they are cackling about to their cronies in their dark dungeon lairs?
Back to Arafat. The world needs its bad guys, it needs them with faces that we have pictures and video images of, with ugly-ass ethnic faces, preferably. It needs them with non-Christian religions, and in uniforms that don't look a lot like ours. It needs them to speak in languages that are difficult for native English-speakers to learn, and to do stupid shit like burn effigies or have their followers do them. They also have to relatively far away from anybody civilized, that way they can be scary without actually causing panic among god-fearing white people. Yup, that Hitler guy kind of screwed things up for the supervillain club. Everything changed because of him.
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