In a bombed out ruin, the Palestinian people built a shrine, a mausoleum.

In a day.

Much of the work was done by hand. Ramallah, some of you may recall, has been under quite a brutal occupation for some time. Available technology and raw materials are somewhat limited.

Throughout the day, throughout the night, they worked. They did not sleep. During the day, they did not eat, or even drink water. It was, some of you may recall, still Ramadan.

It is a simple shrine, a simple mausoleum, a temporary resting place for the diminutive man in the black and white khaffiyeh, draped into his own fashion statement for almost half a century, the indestructible, indefatigable little General who shouted and fought and scrapped and almost died a thousand times, so that the world would know Palestine, would know the Palestinians, so that no one would ever again dare to say that they do not exist, that Palestine does not exist, that it is not a nation, not a State.

They did it to allow Arafat the dignity of a burial, somewhere, and in quiet acknowledgement that the gangsters in Tel Aviv have so long passed that line that divides men from brutes. To expect dignity, or even decency, from that sector is not realistic.

Rich men would have lost nothing were Abu Amar laid to rest in Jerusalem to begin with, as opposed to his inevitable move there. The gangsters and their hangers-on could still have told one another that it is not the capital of Palestine.

But the zeal to dishonor a man even in death, dishonor a people even in the raw freshness of grief, proved stronger than the frail threads of civilization with which the west, some of you may recall, claims to have been experimenting the last few centuries, though it is clear that they did not inhale.

The Palestinian people looked at one another, shared a moment of collective lack of amazement, and silently went to what is left of the Mukata and began to build a shrine, a mausoleum.

In a day.

France did the minimum that the gangsters did not have the decorum to do, allowing the coffin of the Father of Modern Palestine to be loaded onto the Cairo-bound aircraft with at least a semblance of the solemnity that civilized people accord a fallen head of state.

Only brief glimpses of this were shown to American audiences, none of them live, lest the viewers get the wrong idea.

The kept eunuchs of the Arab League put their dollar bought and perpetually dollar paid for heads together and agreed with Washington's whispered suggestion that Abu Amar's Cairo "funeral" be handled discreetly. A quiet and private affair, lest the Egyptian public get the wrong idea, and to spare the eunuchs, including Hosni himself, the humiliation of seeing what real popular support looks like, the kind of mass outpouring of chanting and grief that neither trinkets nor coins nor the threat of torture can buy.

While the Palestinians wept and built a mausoleum, the Americans took time out from gushing over their latest panoply of spectacular war crimes to vilify Arafat in death more than they had in life, surprising anyone who had not believed such to be possible.