Arafat's Dirt Nap

There has been a lot written in the last few days about the passing of Yasser Arafat (D-Mass). Something written a few years ago here is interesting, well, no..., more like incredible, to read. I hope that particular "donation" was well marked. As if that ever happened.

Today on Fox News I heard that there was an outbreak of gunfire in the "mourning tent" of Yasser Arafat. My first hope was that it was just somebody making sure the fat bastard was really dead, but no. It was some radical Fattah nut shooting (and killing) some other nut from some other radical faction. At Yasser's "funeral", as if you could ever call that mob scene an actual funeral. Mahmoud Abbas was there, Arafat's replacement, but he wasn't hurt. One assumes that proper "mourning" was resumed shortly thereafter.

Also on Fox News (I try to be "Fair and Balanced") was a story just coming out about Arafat killing (murdering actually) two U.S. diplomats in 1973 in Saudi Arabia, and the possible cover-up of that story. The commentator asked (moon-eyed) if this proved to be in fact true, would it have an effect on Arafat's "legacy". I had to think seriously about this for about a millisecond and answer "No". No effect at all. His legacy is that of a murdering, embezzaling, lying thug. So this incident fits right in with his previously known modus operandi. Just a couple more murders. It is very annoying that somebody in the U.S. didn't whack him for this though. It would have created a twenty minute scene and then been all over with. The Palestinians would have had a new nut for a leader in days. After suitable shootings of course.

So just what finally did in Yasser? Good question. Nobody seems to know, or if they do know, they're not talking. This from the New York Times:

PARIS, Nov. 11 - Even after Yasir [sic] Arafat's death this morning, French health officials continued their stony silence about exactly what disease killed the Palestinian leader. And so the man who lived so much of his life simply and in the public eye, died mysteriously, surrounded by secrecy.

Why the "stony silence"? Something killed him, and fairly quickly after he got to France. It doesn't seem like it was a heart attack, lung cancer, or an old festering bullet wound. Could it have been something shameful? Nobody's actually saying, so that leaves room for conjecture. One has to wonder. How about trichinosis? That would be very shameful for a devout Muslim. Could it have been something even more shameful?

Which brings us to the lovely Mrs. Suha Arafat. She's been in France for quite some time, living on the meager stipend of $100,000 a month. Unless she's recently purchased a Formula 1 team, spending that kind of money can be real work. That's $1.2 million a year. Where this money comes from is another story entirely. But it's a lot. The last we heard from Mrs. Arafat was when she was bemoaning the fact that the people in the Palestinian power struggle were trying to "bury him alive". Interesting, since he was already brain dead at that point. Similar to what he had been for years actually. However, from CNN,

Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi told CNN that Mrs. Arafat's remarks were "very, very unfortunate" and "very provocative, almost slanderous."
"[Yasser Arafat] is not just a husband or a father," Ashrawi said. "He is father of a nation. ... He is not just Suha's husband, and he should not be reduced to just Suha's husband.

And yet, even brain dead, he did hold the key to all that "Palestinian" money, maybe over a billion, so let's be very careful here. Suha might have known something that shouldn't be general knowledge. She may have had to give up the $1.2 million a year, but the Palestinian Authority has since decided to give her a "pension" of $22 million per year for the rest of her life. Suha is now 41 years old. Once she had her "pension", she allowed the disconnecting of her beloved's life support systems. That's $22 million a year for sombody that didn't ever do anything for the Palestinian Authority, and who wasn't even liked by the Palestinian people. She was, after all, a converted Christian. Seems odd. I'd be watching my back.