What Killed Arafat?

By Nicholas Stix

A Different Drummer
December 2, 2004

After Arab terrorist Yasser Arafat died on November 11, at the age of 75, USA Today, among other outlets, talked about how “enraged” the Arabs in the territories in Israel were. You may ask, “How could they be enraged?” USA Today supplied no answer at the time, but I can. Many of Arafat’s supporters have spread a blood libel, according to which the Mossad, in league with some of Arafat’s own goons, poisoned him. All over again, the refrain rings: “The Jews did it!”
Hamas leader Khaled Mesha’al said, "I do not hesitate accusing Israel of killing Yasser Arafat and I call on my brothers in Fatah and in the PNA not to keep silent in this regard.”

For over thirty years, Israel was in a position to snuff Yasser Arafat like a cockroach, anytime it pleased. Not only was the Israeli government not responsible for his death, if anything, it was responsible for him living as long as he did. If only the Sabras had killed him!

Meanwhile, Arafat’s widow, Suha, has run off with his French medical records, and her lawyer has made the fantastic claim that Arafat’s French hospital and doctors have no other copies.
Mrs. Arafat clearly does not want the truth known, whatever it may be. Supporters of Israel’s right to exist have a rumor of their own, as to how Arafat died, which is more likely than the Arab blood libel: AIDS. Supporters of Israel have long claimed that Arafat was a homosexual, arguing that that was why his now loving, bereaved widow had long stayed as far from him as possible, consoling herself in her estrangement from her husband and the couple’s “people” with million-dollar shopping sprees in Europe’s swankiest department stores. (A less satisfying explanation of the estrangement, for Arafat’s enemies, is that the man who cold-bloodedly sacrificed young Arabs on homicide bombing attacks, had no intention of permitting the violence he had unleashed to touch his own family.) Yet another, more commonly held explanation of Arafat’s death, is that he died of cirrhosis of the liver, which if true, would strongly suggest that he was an alcoholic.

Note that homosexuality and drinking are terrible sins in Islam (though what, pray tell, outside of killing “infidels” isn’t?).
(In a particularly vitriolic, intolerant, delightful rant, “Firehat” (Norman Liebmann) quipped, “It’s still not known what Arafat died of except that his nurses had to get into moon suits to take his temperature with a thermometer affixed to a robotic arm.”)

With a little white-out, some photocopying, a typewriter and a skilled forger, I’m sure Mrs. Arafat can come up with a “useful” cause of death. But why bother? We’re talking about people whom you can’t trust to give you the correct time of day, and now they’re going to imitate CBS News?

Meanwhile, the French have done their part for the Arabs, by lying on Arafat’s death certificate, in claiming that he was born in Jerusalem, when he was, in fact, born in and largely raised in Cairo.

When I lived in Tübingen, West Germany, there was a group of some 20 wealthy Arab Muslim students from Tunisia, in North Africa. Virtually none of them studied, preferring to pass the time engaging in promiscuity (exclusively with white, Western women, with whom they were obsessed, even as they held them in contempt), heavy drinking, and gambling. It’s a wonder they didn’t cause an outbreak of venereal disease.