TruthNews Commentary, November 11, 2004

Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat dropped dead early Thursday morning after his brain exploded in a Paris hospital.

The Nobel Prize winning serial killer's death was announced by Palestinian officials and the Percy Medical Hospital outside Paris, where Arafat arrived for treatment of a mysterious illness, reputed to be AIDS, nearly two weeks ago. The hospital said the 75-year-old mass murderer died in the early morning hours.

Arafat had been in a coma for several days. His brain exploded on Tuesday, prompting several news reports that the crazed killer was already dead. The brain explosion is technically known as a cerebral hemorrhage.

Arafat, who killed more Jews than any man since Adolf Hitler, was flown to Paris by the French government for medical treatment on October 29. Under French care, his condition rapidly deteriorated, and he went into a coma over a week ago.

Arafat's condition launched a flurry of contradictory news reports that he was dead, or brain dead, long before his demise was announced. It also unleashed a public feud between his estranged wife Suha and Palestinian officials.

Arafat's carcass will be flown to Cairo for a memorial ceremony and, after that, to the West Bank city of Ramallah, for burial. The arrangements were finalized after Israeli authorities gave the green light for his Ramallah burial.

Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1929, under the name Mohammed al-Hussein. He and several cronies formed the terrorist group Fatah during the 1950s. Fatah began launching guerrilla raids and terrorist attacks into Israel, and joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in East Jerusalem under Egyptian patronage in 1964 for the express purpose of eradicating the Jewish state.

After Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, Arafat led a coup against PLO founding chairman Ahmed Shukiry in 1968. Arafat adopted an authoritarian style of one-man rule and relocated his base to Jordan, from where the PLO and its various factions carried out a series of terrorist attacks, including hijackings in Europe and the Middle East. Arafat and the PLO received generous funding from the KGB, the Soviet secret police, which was attempting to destabilize the Middle East and destroy Israel.

Jordan's King Hussein ordered his troops to drive the PLO out in the bloody 1971 confrontation known as Black September. Arafat and the PLO then made their home in Lebanon, again defiantly setting up a state-within-a-state and continuing terror attacks against Israel, including the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

In 1974, Arafat was invited to address the United Nations, which granted observer status to the PLO. Arafat also won pan-Arab recognition of the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people.

In 1975, the PLO presence in Lebanon plunged the nation into a protracted civil war. In June 1982 Israel sent troops to drive the PLO out of Lebanon. Trapped like a rat in the Lebanese capitol of Beirut, Arafat was escorted out and allowed to continue his terrorist attacks from the Arab North African country Tunisia.

Palestinians inside the disputed territories launched an uprising, or "intifada," against Israeli rule in late 1987. Arafat tried to take control of the intifada, but in 1990, he publicly supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

After the US-led coalition forced Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait, Arafat was left out of the historic Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, with Palestinian representatives from the territories attending as part of the Jordanian delegation.

Arafat directed the Palestinian delegates to stall progress in the talks, while sending envoys to Norway for secret, direct negotiations with Israel’s Labor party. This resulted the Oslo agreement of 1993, a seven-year peace treaty in which Israel accepted the PLO as a negotiating partner in exchange for Arafat once again renouncing terror. The seven-year peace treaty was confirmed by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony in September 1993.

In 1994, Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. As part of the Oslo peace accords, he was allowed entry into Gaza. Against only token opposition he was elected chairman of the new Palestinian Authority in 1996. Elections have not been held since.

Rabin was assassinated in 1995, to be replaced as Prime Minister by Peres, then Benjamin Netanyahu. But on the whole, the seven years following the Oslo agreement were deceptively quiet in Israel, with Arafat setting up an autonomous government, arming his security forces, jailing his opponents, establishing a gambling casino in Jericho, indoctrinating Palestinian children to hate the Jews, and collecting large cash payments from the EU and U.S. Arafat's own statements to the Palestinians indicate that he veiwed the seven year peace treaty as a "hudna," a temporary peace for the purpose of rearming. But Clinton remained Arafat's biggest supporter, inviting Arafat to the White House more than any other foreign leader. Clinton even dispatched his own campaign advisor, James Carville, to assist ex-Israeli general Ehud Barak in unseating the recalcitrant Netanyahu as Israeli prime minister in 1999.

As the seven-year peace process drew to a close in the year 2000, Clinton invited Arafat, Barak, and Peres to Camp David to begin final status negotiations. But Arafat rejected a deal that would have given the Palestinians an independent state with its capitol in East Jerusalem. The agreement, proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, would have given the Palestinians 98 percent of the disputed territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Arafat subsequently initiated a wave of terrorism that has resulted in the murders of 1,032 people in the ensuing 4 years.

During most of the Palestinian uprising, Israeli forces confined Arafat to his Ramallah headquarters, while U.S. president George Bush refused to meet or speak with the terrorist leader. Israeli voters kicked Barak out in 2001, electing former general Ariel Sharon instead. In 2002, Bush called on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders "not compromised by terror."

Arafat was reportedly a homosexual and pedophile. In 1987, former Romanian intelligence chief Ion Pacepa described Arafat's romps with his bodyguards in the book "Red Horizons." Pacepa says that fellow Romanian general Constantin Munteaunu said about Arafat, "I've never before seen so much cleverness, blood and filth all together in one man." Former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus told John Batchelor on ABC radio on October 26 that Arafat is dying from AIDS. Loftus said the CIA has known this about Arafat for quite awhile and that as a result the US has encouraged Sharon not to take Arafat out. Although homosexuality is not uncommon in the Arab world, it is officially considered a sin and a crime, and regarded in Muslim fundamentalist circles as a mark of shame and depravity.

While Arafat was brain dead and on life support, his aids and wife clashed publicly over Arafat's condition and who would succeed him. Much of the power struggle centered on the $1 billion slush fund that Arafat personally maintained in secret bank accounts. For decades, Arafat was known to have funneled substantial portions of PLO assets and income into private Swiss accounts. His estranged wife, who lived in Paris the past four years, reportedly received an allowance from the PLO of $100,000 per month.

Arafat, who dispatched scores of suicide bombers to blow up women and children, had indicated a desire to die as a shaheed, or "martyr." In the end, however, he was so afraid of death that he abandoned his headquarters in Ramallah to seek medical treatment in a foreign country.

Arafat wanted to be buried on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But Israel refused to allow the terrorist's rotting carcass to defile the site of the first and second temples. Israeli Justice Minister Yosef Lapid said that Jerusalem is "where Jewish kings are buried and not Arab terrorists." Israeli and PLO authorities compromised by agreeing to allow the murderer of women and children to be buried at his headquarters in Ramallah. A public funeral will be conducted in Cairo, the city of Arafat's birth. Arafat applauded the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1975, but Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, has supported Arafat in recent years.

Palestinians have expressed their grief at the death of the man who sent their sons and daughters to blow themselves up with the promise that in the afterlife they would cavort in sexual debauchery with 72 virgins. Maybe the Palestinian people will react like the Iranians at the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini and rip Arafat's body to shreds.

As to where Arafat will spend eternity, the Bible leaves little doubt. In Revelation 21:8, God says, "The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death." Arafat seems to qualify on all counts except sorcery, and we may yet hear of his activities in this area.

Yasser Arafat could have been the George Washington of his people, but he loved bloodshed more than peace. Rather than becoming a statesman, he remained a terrorist to the end.