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Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Reinventing the heel
George Jonas is the latest to contemplate the secrecy of Arafat's mystery ailment (Post subscribers).
So far, the theories are that either French doctors are baffled or they're covering up something horrible. Jonas' conclusion? Most likely, the French are colluding with the Palestinians and allowing the mystery to persist so they can blame Israel for poisoning him.
There's more to it. Arafat spent his life not just terrorizing people but terrorizing history. He expended great resources to revise the history of Jerusalem to be a Muslim history, not a Jewish one. He advanced the disputed al Aqsa claim while brazenly asserting to Bill Clinton at the failed Camp David peace talks that a Jewish temple never existed in Jerusalem.
The poison libel is more than just a way for Arab leaders to foment more hatred on the street, it is a desperate attempt by his supporters to salvage Arafat's reputation by rewriting his personal history. (Eric Margolis’ hagiographic tribute to the man, glossing over Arafat’s decades of brutal terrorism completely, is as deliberately and spitefully revisionist as anything that the Zundels and the Irvings of the world have produced. I understand many Sun papers refused to run it. Smart.) Arafat died a death of indignity: after two years of imprisonment in a squalid and ruined compound, he expired old and weak in a European hospital, not as a lion of Shaheed as he had always promised.
But the martyr myth will be the one recorded by official Palestinian historians. Already the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades, Arafat's special terror militias, have renamed themselves the Al-Shahid Yasser Arafat Brigades (and they already have the Wikipedia entry). His death certificate has been falsified by French coroners to show that he was born in Jerusalem (not the reality, Cairo) entrenching the fiction that he was a displaced person fighting for the right to return to his homeland. The revisionists are working overtime now. The only question now is, how will factual history stand up to their assault?
I'm not so confident it will.
Posted by Kevin Libin on November 16, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
Le Canard Enchaîné reports today that Arafat died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Posted by: Norman Spector | 2004-11-16 2:42:08 PM
Here's my brief rebuttal to the Margolis piece for anyone who might think it worth a click:
http://www.surlycomments.blogspot.com/
It's a new blog, and its author shamelessly craves attention.
Posted by: surly | 2004-11-16 3:36:41 PM
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