Were you thinking of spending your Saturday night curled up in front of the fire with an Eric Ambler novel? First read Debka’s latest account of the Arafat hijinks. If even half of this is true, the full story is going to be a tale for the ages.
Haaretz’ coverage is equally fascinating and does not seem to contradict Debka:
The entourage [of Palestinians in Paris] is divided into two camps. Suha and Kadoumi [original Fatah terror master] head one camp against Rashid and Abu Rudeina. The tension and rivalry between Suha and the leadership around Arafat have been going on for awhile. One of the reasons Abbas and other senior officials refused to accompany Arafat to Paris was their reluctance to meet Suha, who is taking advantage of the French law giving the wife the authority to decide who will stay beside the husband’s bed.
The fights between Suha and the Palestinian senior officials focus, among other things, on financial matters. Suha got some of her cronies to get tenders and franchises in PLO and PA deals, against the will of Arafat’s people. She accused them of corruption, while they accused her of using her status to advance her cronies’ interests.
Some of these accusations led to legal suits abroad and were among the reasons for Suha’s leaving the territories. Rashid mediated between Suha and PA officials and managed to reach financial compromise arrangements with her. In recent years, Suha claimed that she and her daughter Zauwa were not receiving enough money to live on. Arafat’s confidants, however, leaked reports of huge sums of money that were transferred to her hands.
I wonder how much of this the Palestinian people themselves know about this – and if they do, what they think.
MORE: The Torygraph has an excellent story on the money trail. The numbers are staggering. Suha Arafat makes Marie Antoinette seem like a piker. I wonder where this woman fits in the chain of corruption. We have spent the last decades listening to her lie to the world on CNN. Do these Palestinian leaders hate their own people? They certainly act like it. [Perhaps we should ask Peter Jennings.-ed. He's not talking.]
UPDATE: Bret Stephens has a good overview of the “Nobelist” in Sunday’s WSJ. I think the root of the “magic” Stephens describes is simple. Most normal human beings are desperate for peace. Arafat knew that and exploited it.
I loved it! It’s the old mystery set piece: what to do with the body. The thought of Arafat’s remains shipping from country to country with no takers is entertaining in a gruesome sort of way.
Debka is often right, even if they screw up some of the details. All this needs now is for the body to disappear at some stage, and it’s a good mystery plot.
One complication Debka missed is that Arafat wanted to be buried at the Al Aqsa Mosque, which is on top of the Jewish temple. Israel has already said he couldn’t be buried there.
Arafat is/was Egyption… perhaps they can just fly over and drop his coffin into the City of the Dead or whatever they call it. About 10,000 feet AGL would be appropriate.
On Debka, they said way back last year, perhaps before the invasion, that Saddam was moving his WMD’s to Syria. We now know that he moved a lot of stuff to Syria, which the head of NIMA said he was sure was WMDs.
Meanwhile, we can watch a macabre game of musical coffins.
So according to Debka, Arafat has been dead for days now. No state is willing to hold a ceremony for Arafat. No one seems to have the ability to conduct a funeral and burial.
In short, Arafat is despised as he should be. He was a terrorist. He manipulated the Palestinian people for his own selfish purposes without truly seeking a resolution to a conflict that would have made him irrelevant. He encouraged the “death cult” thereby condemning future generations to lives without hope, peace or prosperity. He was a not-so-common criminal (how else could he wind up with a Swiss bank account with $2 billion). He is a failed chief executive who has left behind an organization with no structure or process to deal with succession, which will likley result in violence (the conflict is underway). He is a failed statesman, which is reflected in that no country wants to accommodate his funeral.
History will judge Arafat harshly. It will be a spectacle. Who will be dragged into it as the full story unfolds.
The caudillo’s grave in an undisclosed location, talk of looted untold millions going unclaimed, a young widow taking bids from book publishers, an unsettled line of succession. Did Arafat check in at General Hospital?
I say we just send a C130 to do a LAPES delivery of the casket outside Jenin and let the Palestinians sort it out themselves…
“Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala) on Saturday asked Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip to refrain from launching terrorist attacks in Israel in the absence of Yasser Arafat.”
Haaratz’ lead paragraph is a sentence that should not exist.
richard, better make it a spooky.
Buddy ó LAPES and a lotta-gun salute… not a bad idea…
I think this is hilarious that even if the Israelis said “sure have his funeral in Jerusalem”, none of the Arabs would show because they could not bear landing their planes at Ben Gurion airport. Also, I am sure no Arab leader would attend an event where the IDF provides security and they could not tolerate the PA providing security. Could you imagine the security risk Mubarak would take if he headed to Gaza or Ramallah for Arafat’s funeral? I think he should have his funeral in Paris and be buried under the Arc de Triumph (sp?) or somewhere in Europe where he is worisphed as a great leader, maybe Oslo.
Reminds me of that garbage barge that no one would take. Man, what a comical ending to a gruesome, blood-soaked life…
Richard: LAPES?
Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System. Cargo or vehicles are loaded on a heavy skid, with a drogue parachute attached. You drop the ramp, pop the chute at zero feet elevation and the the skid is yanked out the back of the bird to land flat and skid along the ground…
Re: chuck
The Soviet Army moved and re-burried Hitler’s remain half a dozen times from 1945 to the mid ’50s. This is all in an effort to prevent die-hard Nazi from worshipping at his grave. Finally, even Soviet Army lost track of where it is.
I snorted it back in the ’80′s.
Here is the solution to the stopping Hamas terrorist from attacking Israel!!
‘Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala) on Saturday asked Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip to refrain from launching terrorist attacks in Israel in the absence of Yasser Arafat.’
If Arab-Rat is NEVER taken back he will always be absence so Hamas will ALWAYS jave to refrain from launching terrorist attacks.
I don’t know if this is OT or not, but here goes.
Don’t the purported videos of Arafat’s “romps” with his bodyguards exist? If they do, the perhaps after Arafat is buried somewhere inconspicuously, these tapes could be released publicly and aired via electronic hijacking of Arab TV networks. Ending with the phrase “Arafat had AIDS” in Arabic.
Then again, all this will be blamed on the Joooooos!
It would be best if the body and the money disappeared into thin air,allowing the whole thing to pass into myth and legend, somewhat like King Solomans mines.Keep the buggers occupied for centuries,searching and assassinating each other.Every now and then a mysterious camel train loaded with strong boxes could be reported in some God forsaken arid armpit of the universe and off the Jihadis would go again.
This Sunday morning has brought out the blackest humor but I am howling.
Maybe Letterman/Leno should fire their joke writers and hire some of you !!!
Is this the right thread for making fun of Kerry after the fact?
I don’t care, I’m gonna do it anyway.
Read this.
According to one former Kerry supporter, the only real problem with John Kerry now is that he’s a lying scoundrel.
“The man’s campaign platform had one plank. One plank. He promised to remove George Bush from office. He broke his promise; his plank is gone; he’s got nothing.”
“The truth is, if John Kerry had been riding his good-for-nothing plankless platform through a vast and dangerous ocean, he’d be swimming with sharks right now. Instead, he’s sitting around, defeated, and almost certain to be not eaten alive by large bloodthirsty aquatic carnivores. It’s just not fair.”
Do these Palestinian leaders hate their own people?
A real brain teaser, that one, Roger.
More black humor of a sort– the issue of Arafat’s burial reminds me of an old political joke (which I heard from a Conservative Jewish friend, FWIW).
The story is that Nikita Khrushchev decided in the late 1950s to see if he could complete his program of destalinization by having Uncle Joe’s remains reinterred elsewhere. So he contacted President Eisenhower to ask about reburial in the United States. Ike reacted with utter horror. So Khrushchev then worked his way down through Macmillan, de Gaulle, and other Western heads of state, none of whom were willing to have Stalin reburied in their countries. Finally Khrushchev phones David Ben-Gurion, who says, “Fine by me, you can rebury Stalin in Israel.” Khruschchev is astounded but pleased– and then Ben-Gurion says, “I just have to warn you about one thing.”
Khrushchev says, “What’s that?” Ben-Gurion replies, “Israel has the highest resurrection rate in the world.”
Solomon, so that ‘baby laxative’ they used to cut the good stuff, was actually BABY laxative?
Roger,
Thank you so much for your dogged passion for the story that is The Middle East. One inescapable conclusion to me is that Arafat’s passing provides the global community who gets it (ie, not the UN or Axis of Weasels) to chip away at the PLO veneer and let the healing sunshine in, just like what is happening with UNSCAM.
Telegraph’s money quote (pun realized, but not intended):
“Over the past 40 years, Mr Arafat’s PLO has built up a global empire of investments, worth an estimated $4.2 billion to $6.5 billion. (?2.3-?3.5 billion). Meanwhile the Palestinian Authority, which administers the territories, is virtually bankrupt.”
Will every vested (and sandaled) interest do everything in their power to close the drapes? Of course. But with the power of the Internet to route around the censors, (at least portions of) the true legacy of the Arafat and the PLO will cast a distinct shadow. Sort of like Punxatawny Phil.
Kenneth Greenlee
As the post says, Hanan Ashwari’s long run on CNN begs the question, “why do Palestinian leaders hate their own people?”. It also begs the question, why does CNN hate ITs own people?
Buddy,
CNN openly acknowledged that it acted as a propaganda tool for Saddam. Why would it be any surprise that they retain a PLO thugette to effectively disseminate propaganda for Arafat? Watching CNN lose market share brings almost as much pleasure as looking at the circulation drops of the major DNC organs.
All the kings horses and all the kings men etc.
I think that schadenfreude is underrated.
oh, brother, do I ever agree, on that schadenfreude thing. It’s like watching a herd of galloping Mastodons do the Lemming Leap.
So now, they’re saying he’s got ‘liver failure’. Nothing else is passing, either.
I don’t know about where, but I have a couple of ideas on how:
1) Face down; and
2) wrapped in pigskin.
My, this is a tale for the ages. Have you considered telling it?
Who do you suppose will represent the US at the funeral (providing there even is one of course) which seems to me a delicate matter? I suggest Bill Clinton.
If Clinton doesn’t want to go, Jimmy Carter probably would.
From the Haaretz article:
Another official in Paris, however, said that “the organs in the lower part of Arafat’s body have not been functioning well. …”
Clearly the euphemism was taken from a Cialis ad. Given Arafat’s condition, is this news?
Scott Ott figured out the Araft burial arangements:
“Chairman Arafat will be placed in a Tel Aviv city bus and driven to a crowded market,” said an unnamed spokesman for the Hamas social services agency. “There we will conduct the traditional scattering of his fragments. According to protocol, no friends or family will attend this ceremony.”
I doubt very seriously if Arafat or his sogenanten wife, whom he had not seen in years, spent a large fraction of the billions that passed through their hands on personal consumption items.
What happened to the money? I think the answer is fairly simple. War is an expensive business. Armies don’t hold bake sales and car washes to finance their expenses. Arafat was funding several armies such as Fatah, the Martyr’s Brigade und so weiter, I have heard the number 12, but I assume that is mythic like the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles of Jesus.
Not only that, but palestinian society, like all Arab societies, is tribal, and the cooperation of tribal chieftans must be secured with generous gifts. Further, the chaos and disintegration of Palestinian life and the “refugee camps” has created many criminal gangs of rootless young toughs whose cooperation must also be purchased.
Finally, there was lots of old fashioned stealing and coruption by the higher ups.
My bottom line is that Arafat will go the Devil with a fairly light bank account. The wife is likely a different story. I doubt that she was his wife in the sense that Harriet was Ozie’s wife. She is a Chistian and he is a Moslem. My hypothesis is that she was appointed and given the cover of wife by outside funding agencies (probably the KGB, but maybe the French* who have long historic ties with christian communities in Syria-Palestine, to start) to keep an eye on the money.
She was paid a commission on the money she handled and took out life insurance on Arafat in the form of cash deposits in her personal Swiss accounts. I am sure those accounts are fairly fat, but not nearly enough to get her into next years Forbes Magazine list. The money was all spent and the bottom line was rendered by Edwin Starr: “War, What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”
*This may explain why he was brought to Paris to die. Instead of dying in Amman or Cairo.
I guess Martha Stewart is a piker compared to Suha. Though I’d like to see either squat cough and bend over.