How Far Down is "Down"?

Steve Erlanger would have us believe that, in an report of his, that unlike Mahmoud Abbas, "Yasir Arafat kept the Islamists down".

But this is incorrect.

In fact, in December 1993, Arafat had already reached an agreement with Hamas, initialed in Egypt. Since that time, the Palestine Authority and Hamas have, with minor disputes, being colluding to pursue a terror campaign against the civilian population of Israel in actions that should be defined as war crimes. The late Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, warned Arafat in a speech in the Knesset plenum on April 18, 1994 that his compromise with Hamas, allowing them to continue the terror acts, would jeopardize the peace.

As Marwan Barghouti, now in an Israeli jail, made clear after the infamous Bet Lid attack in January 1995 in an interview with the BBC, as long as terror was conducted outside the areas of PA control, in other words, in Israel proper, then they were to be permitted.

"Down" would seem to be quite a relative term.

So, how low can the NYT go?