ARAFATA NON GRATA, PART 2

What goes around comes around. The State Department lashed out at Rudolph Giuliani a day after the New York City mayor asked Yasser Arafat to leave a special New York Philharmonic performance of Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" Monday night. Giuliani had said that the PLO leader and Fidel Castro were not to join other dignitaries in town for the U.N. celebration, but Arafat turned up in his highly-visible, checked headress anyway. (An unidentified country slipped him the ticket.) A State spokesman called Giuliani's action "unfortunate in light of the constructive role that Chairman Arafat has played in the Mideast peace process." The unrepentant mayor dismissed Arafat as a murderer. "Rudy Giuliani is a very strong-willed person who operates according to his own internal compass," says TIME's Janice Simpson. "He wasn't pandering at all to Jewish voters. He just believes strongly that Arafat and the PLO are terrorists. Tact and diplomacy aren't his strong suits at all. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he turned around and said something tomorrow to anger Jews."