Who Killed Arafat And Why? (Ramzy Baroud)

[Tace]

Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

July 27, 2009 -- Who killed Yasser Arafat?

When the Palestinian leader was declared dead in a French hospital on Nov. 11, 2004, there was no way of knowing how questions related to his death should be phrased. Was he killed or did he die from old age? If he was killed, then who killed him and why?

The “mysterious” nature of his symptoms gave birth to a theory that he was poisoned over a period of time, provided enough evidence that foul play was involved, even accusing some of those closest to him. Although the man’s story has been recorded in the ever-growing chronicle of the Palestinian struggle and Palestinians have somehow moved on, recent breaking news has blown his story wide open once again, breeding new controversy and stories of conspiracy.

Nearly five years have passed since Arafat died. During those years, a number of high-ranking Palestinian leaders, especially from the Hamas movement, have been assassinated by Israel in various and consistently gory methods. Among Palestinians, Arafat is referred to like all those killed by Israel, as a “martyr,” an indication of the widespread belief that his death was hardly the result of natural causes. If Arafat was indeed killed and since his death was not caused by an Israeli airstrike or an assassin’s bullet, a key question has been lingering, giving rise to all sorts of answers — who killed Arafat and how?

Israelis made little secret of their desire to see Arafat dead. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed regret in a newspaper interview on Feb. 1, 2002 that he hadn’t killed Arafat decades earlier when he had had the chance. Sharon told Israeli newspaper Maariv that he should have “eliminated” Arafat during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

“Do you regret it (not killing Arafat)?” he was asked. “Certainly, yes,” he replied.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/commentary/3521-who-killed-arafat-and-why

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. The Arab street thrives on rumors and *spies* This is no different.

However perception is reality in this case, and many things without merit are used to inflame.

[timeforpeace]

2. Isn't the accepted view that he died of AIDS?

[valerief]

3. That's what I recall reading, too. nt

[MADem]

5. Doesn't that sound squirrely to you? In the slightest?

Yassir was a wealthy man who could afford the best care, and who got the best care. HIV has been a manageable, chronic disease for some time now.

That sounds like one of those rumors that are tossed out there to raise suggestions with vicious intent. Or maybe not--perhaps he simply eschewed treatment until it was too late, though that seems unlikely, too. I'm not his doctor, though, so I can't say for certain, but I look askance at that assertion.

There was no autopsy, so we'll never know for certain.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58516-2004Nov17.html

. . . Adding to the confusion is the lack of information that was released during his treatment. Arafat's wife, Suha, refused to allow Arafat's aides to see him and withheld virtually all information about his condition, which she was allowed to do under French privacy laws.

When Palestinian officials flew to Paris to see Arafat for themselves, his wife complained to al-Jazeera television that there was a huge conspiracy against her husband and that officials were coming to bury him alive.

When the officials arrived, they mended fences with Suha Arafat, and during a news conference afterward, Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath gave the most complete account to date of Arafat's health. Doctors, he said, "don't have a full understanding of why his status has deteriorated, which means that we don't really have a full diagnosis. . . . We know what it is not. It is not malignancy or cancer anywhere in his body, and the doctors today ruled out completely poisoning."

But Palestinian officials continue to complain that Arafat's wife is blocking the full release of information about his cause of death, which they say is preventing their people from reaching closure.

"Maybe I don't have the full information about how died and the reason, but I am totally convinced it was an abnormal and unusual cause of death," said Hussein Sheikh, the general secretary of Arafat's Fatah political movement in the West Bank. Arafat "is not the property of Suha. He's the property of the Palestinian people, and it is the right of the Palestinian people to know how their president died."

[LeftishBrit]

7. I don't think anyone knows...

Both 'AIDS' and 'assassination' are widely promoted theories. Rumours abound

I'd be inclined to think it was natural causes, and probably not AIDS. He was fairly old, and not particularly healthy. He did have enemies - but, while neither Israelis nor Hamas are always above assassinating their enemies, they tend to use obvious methods: the gun or the bomb. Secret poisonings and the like seem to be more associated with e.g. the former Soviet Union than the Middle East.

[MADem]

4. If anyone killed Yassir, it was someone closer to home than Israelis.

It's not like Palestine doesn't have their own vicious infighting going on. And Yassir was "The Devil You Know." He was "coming around."

People who didn't want any compromise at all would have a motive for murdering Yassir. People who wanted to wrest power from al-Fatah had motive for murdering Yassir.

Also, the Yassir of the seventies and eighties was an entirely different Yassir of his later years. The old revolutionary turned into a pragmatist. That may not have sat well with many.

You can't be blaming the officialdom of the Jewish State for this one. Yassir at the helm was paradise compared to the situation at present.

[Ozymanithrax]

6. Wasn't he killed by someone on a Grassy Knoll?

He was a 75 year old aids patient who had been sick for some time.

[Behind the Aegis]

8. Time. Because time will claim its victim if no one else does.