Arafat Dead
 

It's finally official - Yassar Arafat is dead.

So, where does that leave us? Has any one person stepped up as the "heir apparent" or can we expect yet another war in the Middle East?

The Palestinian constitution states that the Speaker of the Palestinian House of Representatives assumes temporary power until elections are held 60 days from now.

Methinks there's gonna be a nasty power struggle over in the Palestinian Authority over who's gonna take over the HMFIC post Arafat just vacated. HAMAS and Hezbollah want a piece of the action big time, the Israelis are just waiting in the wings to see who's left after the bullets stop flying in Ramallah.

The speaker is a figurehead without any power.

Ahmed Q. has the power now with Abbas.

http://www.honestreporting.com/m/legacy.asp

-Rudey

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/op...20L%20Friedman

November 7, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Footprints in the Sand
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It is a sad but fitting coda to Yasir Arafat's career that the prospect of his death seemed to unlock more hope and possibilities than the reality of his life.

His corrupt, self-interested rule had created a situation whereby Palestinian aspirations seemed to have gotten locked away with him, under house arrest in Ramallah, well beyond the reach of creative diplomacy. Only human biology could liberate them again - and so it has.

In the early 1990's, I sided with those Israelis who, though no fans of Arafat, were ready to deal with him at Oslo in the name of normalcy for both Israelis and Palestinians. But once it became clear, after the collapse of the Camp David talks, that no deal was possible with Arafat, I wished for his speedy disappearance. He was a bad man, not simply for the way he introduced a whole new level of terrorism to world politics, but because of the crimes he committed against his own people. There, history will judge him very harshly.

Google is a wonderful tool. I spent time the other day Googling every variation I could of the words: "Yasir Arafat and Palestine and education." I couldn't come up with a single speech, or even full paragraph, in which Arafat laid out his vision for how Palestinians would educate their youth and nurture their talents. Maybe all his speeches on that subject were never translated from Arabic. Or maybe they just don't exist - because this was never his priority. His obsession was with Palestinian "land," not Palestinian "life." Google the words "Yasir Arafat and martyrdom and jihad," and the matches go on for pages.

After every defeat, Arafat stood on the ruins and flashed a victory sign. While his wife lived in Paris and his cronies lined their pockets, two generations of Palestinians remained in their poverty and displacement, because he never had the courage to tell them the truth: "Palestine will have to be divided with the Jews forever. We must make the best final deal we can over the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem - without double talk about getting the rest later - and then build the finest society that we can." Had he ever given that speech - in Arabic - had he ever adopted the nonviolence of Gandhi, Arafat would have had three Palestinian states by now - Israel's reckless settlements notwithstanding.

The fact that he didn't was not a mistake in judgment but an expression of character. For him, it was better to die in Paris, and have two generations of Palestinians die in exile, than be the Arab leader who officially and unambiguously agreed to share Jerusalem with the Jews. I can understand why stateless Palestinians would revere Arafat for the way he put their cause on the world map - but that became an end for him rather than a means, which is why his historical impact will be as lasting as a footprint in the desert.

Arafat's exit from the stage, combined with the downfall of Saddam Hussein, is a real moment of opportunity for the Arab world: Under Saddam and Arafat, Iraqi and Palestinian nationalisms were devoid of any positive agenda for developing all the men and women in those two societies. They were focused on the negative agendas of resisting outsiders and buying more weapons than computers - because that is what served their one-man rulers. This negative nationalism kept their people mobilized, externally focused and never able to ask about education budgets, let alone democracy. As the Arabic saying went, "No voice should be louder than the battle." And no voices were louder in insisting on that than Arafat's and Saddam's.

But if you have societies held together by a voluntary social contract among its constituent populations, and by institutions, you don't need one-man rule. You don't need to mobilize the whole society around resistance to outsiders. And you don't need the suppression of every group in the society, other than the tribe of the one-man ruler - with all the violence and extremism that such suppression brings.

And that's why so much is riding on how Palestinians and Iraqis replace the one-man rulers who so distorted their societies. Will they each use this moment to hold elections and build a bridge to a society of institutions and laws, or will they simply build a bridge to another one-man ruler? If it is the latter, then the U.N. is going to continue putting out reports about the lack of human development in the Arab world. If it is the former, I am certain that within a decade when you Google the words "Iraq, Palestine, educational innovation and scientific breakthroughs," you will actually come up with some matches.

-Rudey

Now that Arafat is dead, will his fat wife keep the money he stole from the Palestinian people?

Nov. 9, 2004 14:10
Arafat- Where's the money?
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

In his four decades as Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat has run a murky financial empire that includes far-flung PLO investments in airlines, banana plantations and high-tech companies, and money hidden in bank accounts across the globe.

Jaweed al-Ghussein, a former PLO finance minister, told The Associated Press it was worth $3 billion to $5 billion when he quit in 1996. No one will say how much it's worth now - some estimates say as little as a few million. But as 75-year-old Arafat fights for life in a hospital near Paris, Palestinians fear that what's left will disappear or be pocketed by Arafat cronies.

"It's the money of the Palestinian people," said Palestinian legislator Hassan Khreishe, adding that he would urge a parliamentary investigation.

That could prove difficult.

Arafat has long resisted proper accounting for the funds, which include Arab payments to the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, and Western aid to his self-rule government, the Palestinian Authority, after interim peace deals with Israel in the 1990s.

Arafat lived frugally, but needed large sums to maintain loyalties. He would register investments and bank accounts in the names of loyalists, both to buy their support and protect the holdings from scrutiny and seizure, said al-Ghussein.

Only Arafat had the full picture, he said, and it's not clear whether he left a will or financial records.

Arafat never divulged his finances. Pressed at a February meeting with leaders of his Fatah movement, he cut them short, saying "there are no assets," according to one participant.

Mohammed Rashid, Arafat's financial adviser, denied his boss was rich.

"Arafat has no personal property in any part in the world," he told Al-Arabiya television on Sunday. "He doesn't even have a tent, a house, an orchard or any account that we can call personal in the name of Yasser Arafat."

However, Forbes magazine ranked him No. 6 on its 2003 list of the richest "kings, queens and despots," estimating he was worth at least $300 million. Shalom Harari, a former top Israeli intelligence official, said Arafat may have stashed away up to $700 million, part of it for an emergency such as a new exile, especially with Israel threatening to expel him.

Two names frequently come up in connection with Arafat's money - Rashid and Arafat's wife, Suha.

In the past 10 years, Rashid has handled hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian Authority revenue Arafat diverted from the treasury - though a reformist finance minister, Salam Fayyad, said the money was invested on behalf of the Palestinian Authority and has since been restored to public control.

Suha Arafat, Arafat's wife of 13 years and mother of his daughter, lives in Paris and has received monthly payments of $100,000 from the Palestinian coffers, according to a senior official in Arafat's office. This year, French prosecutors launched a money-laundering probe into transfers of $11.4 million into her accounts. She has refused to talk to reporters about Palestinian finances.

Al-Ghussein, speaking by telephone from London, said the big money from the Arab world started flowing in 1979. For a decade, the PLO received about $200 million a year, $85 million of it from Saudi Arabia, he said.

Al-Ghussein, who headed the Palestinian National Fund, the PLO treasury, said during that period, he would hand Arafat a check for $10.25 million every month from the PLO budget, ostensibly for payments to PLO fighters and families of those killed in battle. He said Arafat refused to account for his spending, citing national security.

Much of the Arab money dried up after Arafat infuriated his patrons in 1990 by siding with Saddam Hussein during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But Saddam gave Arafat $150 million in three payments, Al-Ghussein said.

"It was handed to Arafat personally," said al-Ghussein, who left his job in 1996 after falling out with Arafat. In 2000, a court in the United Arab Emirates cleared him in a civil suit of stealing $6.5 million in Palestinian Authority funds.

The PLO investments are said to have ranged from an airline in the Maldives to a Greek shipping company, banana plantations, a diamond mine in Africa and real estate throughout the Arab world.

The holdings were registered in the names of dozens of Arafat loyalists, according to a retired PLO financier in Gaza and to a Palestinian economist in the West Bank who began following the money trail at the request of some Fatah officials this year. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.

A senior Palestinian Authority official with detailed knowledge of financial transactions said much of the money has been lost. Some of the companies went bankrupt. In other cases, Arafat cronies absconded with the cash. Some frontmen for PLO investments died, and the holdings passed to their families.

Others insisted the PLO still has substantial assets.

Al-Ghussein said that when he left office the money was in "numerous accounts" worldwide, but he declined to elaborate.

The West Bank economist estimated the organization had $2.5 billion to $4 billion in assets and cash.

A new source of income opened for Arafat after he established limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

The international community, protective of the fledgling peace effort with Israel, donated more than $6.5 billion to the Palestinian Authority from 1994 to 2003, in the beginning with few questions asked.

Last year the International Monetary Fund reported $900 million in Palestinian Authority income never reached the treasury during the first six years of self-rule. The money, including Israeli tax rebates and revenue from monopolies on cigarettes, fuel and cement, instead went into a Tel Aviv account controlled by Arafat.

Harari, the former intelligence official, said the prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, was offended by the arrangement but was told by his advisers that Arafat needed a slush fund to suppress opposition to peace deals with Israel.

International aid officials declined to discuss PLO finances, saying they were only concerned with the Palestinian Authority's bookkeeping. Karim Nashashibi, the IMF representative in the Palestinian areas, said the $900 million has been restored to the treasury under Fayyad, who has won international praise for his work.

In the last three years, Fayyad sharply curtailed Arafat's spending powers, cutting the budget for the "president's office" from $100 million in 2002 to $43 million this year.

-Rudey

Re: Arafat Dead
 

GOOD RIDDENCE!

From wikipedia:
His most enduring accomplishment to date has been stealing billions of dollars from the Arab residents in West Bank and squatting in a walled compound like a rotting turd expecting world leaders to come and worship at his feet. His death is most likely the result of an AIDS infection he picked up from one of the adolescent boys he cavorted with.

Thank god...the man was a terrorist. Israel should have taken him out long ago.

France finally did its part in the war on terror letting that SOB die.

Thank you France.

LOL!

It is believed he went to France to die because you don't have to list a cause of death there..though everyone is already suspecting it was AIDS. I believe Chirac called Arafat a "Great Man of Courage" :rolleyes:

It's funny because France was getting upset because Arafat was in a French hospital and his wife Suha (who has been living in Paris on a $100,000 a month stipend) was using French laws to refuse to even allow the Palestinian people the right to know anything about him or to release any details (analysts said it was a power play and also a play to get money). When Suha insulted the 4 Palestinian rulers who would take power after Arafat, they refused to come until France pushed them to come because of Suha. They finally offered her a $2 million amount to allow them to see him and to release details about him.

They still haven't released the cause of death even though it's medically impossible not to know after all this time. They say it's because it was something embarassing. I had heard the AIDS thing but I thought you became really, really skinny if that was true...no?

-Rudey

I'm not exactly sure if what I'm going to say is right since I'm not a doctor but, people don't die from AIDS itself; they die from the complications that come with it (sorta like Alzheimer's). Some people lose a lot of weight and some people remain a normal weight depending on the infections and complications they end up with.

Rudey-
I've only seen one man dying with AIDS and he was very skinny. Although with AIDS, you acutally die of opportunitstic infections. I imagine that would determine what you look like more than anything else.
-M

I have known and seen a few people with AIDS, and they became incredibly emaciated. I think that it's called wasting syndrome. They had some, if not all, of these symptoms: skin cancer, pneumonia, blindness, thrush, and digestive problems. By the end, they were hallucinating or hearing things and slipped into a coma. The last person I knew with AIDS died in 1996 so the symptoms might have changed.

That's classic Chirac... sucking up to murderers, thugs and terrorists.

He probably has a similar opinion about Pol Pot.

Arafat the monster

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | November 11, 2004

YASSER ARAFAT died at age 75, lying in bed surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves.
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In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."

God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

Arafat always inspired flights of nonsense from Western journalists, and his last two weeks were no exception.

Derek Brown wrote in The Guardian that Arafat's "undisputed courage as a guerrilla leader" was exceeded only "by his extraordinary courage" as a peace negotiator. But it is an odd kind of courage that expresses itself in shooting unarmed victims -- or in signing peace accords and then flagrantly violating their terms.

Another commentator, columnist Gwynne Dyer, asked, "So what did Arafat do right?" The answer: He drew worldwide attention to the Palestinian cause, "for the most part by successful acts of terror." In other words, butchering innocent human beings was "right," since it served an ulterior political motive. No doubt that thought brings daily comfort to all those who were forced to bury a child, parent, or spouse because of Arafat's "successful" terrorism.

Some journalists couldn't wait for Arafat's actual death to begin weeping for him. Take the BBC's Barbara Plett, who burst into tears on the day he was airlifted out of the West Bank. "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound," Plett reported from Ramallah, "I started to cry." Normal people don't weep for brutal murderers, but Plett made it clear that her empathy for Arafat -- whom she praised as "a symbol of Palestinian unity, steadfastness, and resistance" -- was heartfelt:

"I remember well when the Israelis re-conquered the West Bank more than two years ago, how they drove their tanks and bulldozers into Mr. Arafat's headquarters, trapping him in a few rooms, and throwing a military curtain around Ramallah. I remember how Palestinians admired his refusal to flee under fire. They told me: `Our leader is sharing our pain, we are all under the same siege.' And so was I." Such is the state of journalism at the BBC, whose reporters do not seem to have any trouble reporting, dry-eyed, on the plight of Arafat's victims. (That is, when they mention them -- which Plett's teary bon voyage to Arafat did not.)

And what about those victims? Why were they scarcely remembered in this Arafat death watch?

How is it possible to reflect on Arafat's most enduring legacy -- the rise of modern terrorism -- without recalling the legions of men, women, and children whose lives he and his followers destroyed? If Osama bin Laden were on his deathbed, would we neglect to mention all those he murdered on 9/11?

It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it.

Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.

Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?

So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Has anyone else heard that he actually died last week but they are just now releasing this info??

It's possible. His wife was using French laws to prevent the release of any details until French authorities and the Palestinian leaders interefered.

-Rudey

Re: Arafat Dead
 

This news is the most hope for the Palestinian People in my lifetime.

Under Chirac, Vichy France is alive and well.

Considering all the secrecy behind his final days, I wouldn't doubt it one bit.

Suha the Swine Gets Rich!
 

Basically the woman that Palestinians hated because she didn't visit Arafat even for the last few years, got married privately, said she would never have a baby there but in France, lived off $100,000 a month in Paris and was investigated for ties to the billions that Arafat stole while Arab children lived in poverty will now be getting $22 million a year from a budget supported from governments around the world.

-Rudey



Report: Suha to receive $ 22m. a year from PA
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH

Yasser Arafat's widow, Suha, is expected to receive a sum of $22 million a year out of the Palestinian Authority budget, according to the Italian newspaper Corriere De La Serra.

The paper said Suha reached an agreement about the money during a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO's newly elected chairman, who visited while she was staying next to her husband's bed in the French military hospital outside Paris.

It said Abbas personally promised Suha that she would receive $22 million a year to cover her expenses in Paris. The paper noted that in July Arafat transferred to his wife $11 million to cover her living costs for the first six months of the year.

Abbas and the Palestinian leadership were forced to strike the deal with Suha after she refused to allow them to visit her husband in hospital.

The Palestinian leaders reached the conclusion that it would be better to make a deal with her in order to solve the crisis surrounding Arafat's possessions and secret bank accounts.

According to Palestinian officials, the money that Suha is expected to receive will come from secret accounts held by Arafat and his cronies in various countries. They estimated that at least $4 billion were being held in these secret accounts.

Hope she enjoys her Palestinian blood money.

Ding Dong the Witch is dead!
 

Maybe she poisoned him?

That would explain her outbursts, and it would also explain the weird nature of his last weeks.

But, maybe I've been watching too much Law and Order.