When Yasser Arafat died yesterday at a Paris hospital, some critics of the terrorist leader found it fitting that he should end his life in France. The Fifth Republic has been one of Arafat’s main sources of international support, choosing to launch its moral recriminations against Israel and America rather than Palestinian violence. The Quay d’Orsay only escalates its obstructionism in the war on Islamic terrorism and flaunts its indifference to rising European anti-Semitism. President Chirac praised the terrorist responsible for the killing of Jewish schoolchildren and American diplomats as a “man of courage and conviction.” Yesterday, the French prime minister stood beside Suha Arafat as Arafat’s coffin was loaded into a French military aircraft with a full-dress French military honor guard.

Arafat could have, on the other hand, spent his last days at Norway. It was the 1993 Oslo Accords that rescued Arafat from political oblivion and exile in Tunis – installing him as president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat’s second trip to Oslo – when the Norwegians awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 – cemented his new status as a statesman, at least in the eyes of much of Europe.

The Norwegian diplomat Terje Roed-Larsen, who serves as the United Nation’s Middle East envoy, heaped praise on Arafat yesterday with an enthusiasm that would make a Gaullist blush. “He was like a surrealistic painting, full of contradictions, full of mystery, full of inconsistencies,” Mr. Roed-Larsen told Norwegian state radio NRK. “He was complex, deep, superficial, rational, irrational, cold, warm. He may be the most fascinating person I have ever met, and without comparison the most fascinating leader I have ever met.”

This came at the end of a week in which Norway managed to forbid Jews from marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a step the French haven’t yet taken. The local TV2 News reported that no Norwegian Jews participated in Oslo’s commemoration of Kristallnacht.”TV2 also reported that the authorities, saying they didn’t want trouble, forbade any Jewish symbols, including Stars of David and Israeli flags,” according to Israel’s Arutz-7 radio station. “On the TV2 evening news, a group of Jews and their friends who wanted to take part in the commemoration were shown being firmly told by a policeman to ‘please leave the area,'” according to a dispatch from an American journalist living in Norway, Bruce Bawer, on AndrewSullivan.com. “This in a city where Muslim demonstrations take place on a regular basis, and include signs and banners bearing hateful, barbaric slogans.” The ban prompted a protest from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the government of Norway.

So it’s not surprising that a Middle East “peace process” launched in Norway placed its hopes in Yasser Arafat. Now that Arafat is dead, and his terrorist organizations continue to thrive, perhaps the Norwegians – and the rest of the world – will reconsider that process. In doing so, Norway would do well to look next door, to Finland, where the Helsinki Agreements helped end another conflict of long standing, the Cold War. “Despite their proximity, the accords reached at Helsinki and Oslo represent decidedly different approaches to international relations,” writes Natan Sharansky in his newly released book, “The Case for Democracy.” “The process started at Helsinki helped end the Cold War and liberate hundreds of millions of people. The process started at Oslo unleashed an unprecedented campaign of terror and left millions of Palestinians living under a tyrant.”

Mr. Sharansky was a dissident in the Soviet Union when the Helsinki agreements were reached, and a politician in Israel at the time of Oslo. He’s uniquely vantaged to draw parallels between the two peace negotiations. “Whereas the Helsinki agreements forged a direct link between human rights and East-West relations, the Oslo accords failed to establish any connection between human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,” writes Mr. Sharansky. Oslo was based on the premise that to establish peace and stability in the Palestinian territories, Arafat’s dictatorship had to be strengthened, Mr. Sharansky says. Cynical Western and Israeli leaders thought that without democratic constraints on his power, Arafat would be more forceful in suppressing Palestinian terrorist groups.

Yet, Mr. Sharansky explains, totalitarian regimes depend on the hatred of an external enemy to promote internal stability. The result, he told an audience at Washington’s American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, is that the Palestinian Arabs brought up under Palestinian sovereignty are even more violently anti-Israel than the Palestinians who lived under Israeli rule. So the Israelis strengthened Arafat’s powers as a dictator only to have those powers turned against them.

“The concept of the friendly dictator is a figment of our imagination because the internal dynamics of non-democratic rule will always require external enemies,” Mr. Sharansky writes. “Freedom’s skeptics must understand that the democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator who loves you. Indeed, it is the absence of democracy that represents the real threat to peace.” Oslo represents the belief that strengthening authoritarian rulers at the expense of their people will lead to peace. Which is why, as Palestinian officials look for an appropriate resting place for Arafat, we modestly propose Norway.