Arafat's thriller: A stroke against Israel
Il Giornale, July 5, 2012
Yesterday Suha Arafat in a single voice with Hamas (here you see again the new horrible face of occupation ...”) called for Yasser Arafat's body exhumation following Al Jazeera investigation into her husband's death.
Oddly, she did not at the same time announce that she is willing to release her husband medical record, to which she has always held on tightly, and that also the French hospital where he died never disclosed to anyone. It is indeed that medical record, not Al Jazeera, that could, if shown, illustrate the truth about the much rumored life conclusion of the PLO leader. Al Jazeera nonetheless brought off a political coup – in line with its peculiar line of conduct - to cause a huge international scandal, in order to pinpoint the reason of the rais’s death to an unlikely polonium poisoning. The network allegedly inferred this from chemical tests an Institute in Lausanne ran on his clothes and his tooth brush.
Of course, it is not known in which hands and what path the rais’s belongings went through, provided they are authentic. On the contrary, many other known facts should discard this latest conspiracy theory fabricated to criminalize Israel. First of all, Israel has always firmly denied any involvement in Arafat’s death: it is not irrelevant, if you think that the Mossad did neither confirm nor deny any important targeted elimination like Imad Mughniya’s and Mahmoud al Mabhouh’s, pandering actually to some satisfied smirks. The Palestinian Authority, which is now setting up a new official inquiry committee, had already established three from 2004, which never presented whatsoever conclusion and did not seem to have received any insight from the French hospital where the rais died. Ashrafa al Kurdi, his personal physician, had stated that the AIDS virus had been detected in his blood, as all people, Palestinians and Israelis, had long been asserting. He then added that the virus supposedly would have not caused his death but it would have been injected successively in order to cover his death by 210 Polonium, the same radioactive isotope found in the body of Russian colonel Alexander Litvinenko. What a convoluted observation.
Palestinian ethos has long had the dire need to restore an aura of shahid for Arafat’s figure, rather damaged by events, hospitalized in a French facility far away from his homeland, surrounded by squabbling and gossiping of his close ones. Next to him was his wife indulging in Parisian luxury, a permanent resident of grand hotels, who had long been taking care od a big part of her husband’s money, as claimed by the Palestinian Authority that wanted it back (after his death she fought as a tigress over the inherited money, that many consider resulting from the rais’ fraudulent piling). As a matter of fact Arafat had long not posed a problem for Israelis: weakened, confined at the Mukata after having led and lost Intifada, the worst terror attack ever against thousands of civilians together with September 11, by that time he was tired, confused, charged with corruption, far away from politics …. Who would have really get an advantage from his death? Certainly not the Israelis.
Al Jazeera, a brilliant inventor of political slogans and eager for the bloodiest battles in the Middle East, is risking a total fiasco this time.