Arafat: Poisonous Rumours

Suspicions that the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned will be strengthened by the discovery by Swiss scientists of 18 times the normal level of radioactive polonium in his remains.
Mr Arafat, who had long symbolised the Palestinians fight for their own state, died on 11 November 2004 from an illness that was never fully diagnosed by his doctors.
Swiss scientists have been carrying out tests on tissue taken from Mr Arafat’s body and personal items with which he was brought into close contact.
They say they are confident up to an 83 per cent level that the Palestinian leader was poisoned and suspect that the cause may be polonium...
The report only examined what killed Mr Arafat not whether or not he was deliberately poisoned.
The death of Mr Arafat seriously weakened the Palestinian cause, of which he had been the enduring symbol for almost 40 years, and removed the one figure who could unite the diverse and quarrelsome Palestinian groups...

The new-look Independent have splashed this big across their front-page.

Though heading it The Smoking Gun?, under a story about the assassination of JFK, might suggest they think it's a conspiracy theory.
The Independent's usually reliable Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, has looked into its plausibility before here.

The news causes the Electronic Intifada to recall what happened last year when rumours of Arafat being poisoned first gained credence - Zionists began concocting their own conspiracy theory.

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While Israel markets itself as the most gay-friendly country in the world, its PR hacks are busy reviving homophobic rumors that Arafat was a gay “sexual deviant” who died of AIDS due to his promiscuity.

On Tuesday, Aljazeera broke a bombshell story that the clothes Arafat wore as he died of a sudden and mysterious illness in 2004, contained strong traces of the lethal radioactive element polonium, raising the possibility that he may have been poisoned...

Following the Aljazeera report, Lenny Ben-David, former Deputy Chief of Mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and current public relations consultant to the Israeli government, posted a lurid article at The Times of Israel reviving rumors that Arafat died of AIDS and blaming his “sexual proclivities”:

Yasser Arafat was a murderous, genocidal, diabolical, duplicitous sexual deviant who died at the age of 75. He was despised by Arab and Israeli alike.

Ben-David dismisses the possibility that Arafat was poisoned and asserts:

Less romantic and mythical, however, is the more likely cause of Arafat’s death – AIDS.
Arafat’s sexual proclivities have been an open secret for years. The former head of Rumanian intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, disclosed in his book “Red Horizons,” that one of his officers reported, “the ‘Fedayee’ [Arafat’s code name] is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He’s playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena.”

In addition to this “evidence,” Ben-David cites another piece of “proof” that has circulated widely on Zionist websites:

After Arafat’s death, his personal physician admitted in a TV interview that his patient died of AIDS.

Both of these pieces of “evidence” are junk...

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Out magazine article by James Kirchick - filed appropriately under 'Entertainment'
Note comedy limp wrist.

The author, Ali Abunimah, proceeds to routinely and roundly demolish both of them.

Which didn't stop the right-wing Homocon, James Kirchick, pushing both these fictions in the American gay media.
James is the jerk who hijacked a TV debate about Chelsea Manning to tell lies about Russia, not uncoincidentally.
Rumours that Arafat was a pederast have long been popular with the Western right; it feeds into a domestic Orientalist myth of the Arab as sexually deviant, and is thought to discredit him amongst his own constituency in the Middle East.
One may have noticed something of a paradox in this propaganda; "Arabs are queer - Arabs hate queers!"
But anyway, the Electronic Intifada conclude...

Why should Arafat’s sexuality be of interest to propagandists loyal to an Israeli “state” that is going to great pains to present itself as a haven of gay rights amid an ocean of intolerance and to attract gay tourists and their money to Tel Aviv?

According to former Israeli diplomat and current Israeli PR hack Lenny Ben-David, all these gay tourists are nothing more than “sexual deviants.”

The lurid stories and lies about Arafat’s sexual relationships aim to provoke homphobic reactions and marshal this homophobia to produce hostility and revulsion at Arafat, and to delegitimize him in the eyes of an Arab audience that is presumed to always be disgusted by such behavior.

These Israeli reactions belie Israel’s “pink” marketing and expose the homphobia that exists at the heart of so much of its propaganda.