I guest post David Gerstman on
The phantom menace
One of the big stories
coming out of the Middle East today is that Yasser Arafat's body may be
exhumed for testing of traces of Polonium 210, a toxic radioactive
element. For years Palestinian leadership have claimed that Arafat was
murdered by Israel.
Ma'an News from August, 2007:
Former
political adviser to the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat,
Bassam Abu Sharif, said on Saturday that former French President Jacques
Chirac and three French doctors, who treated the late leader, are
adamant that he was killed and know which poison killed him.
Ynet from January, 2009:
Nearly
five years after Yasser Arafat died from what French doctors called a
massive brain hemorrhage, Arab doctors will meet in Jordan to look into
lingering suspicious the Palestinian leader was poisoned.
Saeb Erekat on Al Jazeera from March, 2009 (translated by MEMRI)
Let
me recount two historical events, even if I am revealing a secret. On
July 23, 200, in his meeting with President Arafat in Camp David,
President Clinton said: “You will be the first president of a
Palestinian state, within the 1967 borders – give or take, considering
the land swap – and East Jerusalem will be the capital of the
Palestinian state, but we want you, as a religious man, to acknowledge
that the Temple of Solomon is located underneath the Haram Al-Sharif.”
Yasser Arafat said to Clinton defiantly: “I will not be a traitor.
Someone will come to liberate it after 10, 50, or 100 years. Jerusalem
will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is
nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif except for Allah.” That
is why Yasser Arafat was besieged, and that is why he was killed
unjustly.
Elder of Ziyon in April, 2009
As I reported on Monday, two days before the AP noticed it, Arafat's nephew is trying to put together a commission of doctors to prove that Arafat was poisoned. In Al-Quds today
he even says that they are ready to take the "evidence" of poisoning to
the International Criminal Court. But first, they have the pesky
problem of, you know, proof.
Unfortunately, the initial meeting of Arafat's doctor cronies has been delayed.
Arafat's
nephew, Nasser al Kidwa, who by sheer coincidence was also once the
former "Palestinian Foreign Minister," said that the delay was simply
because they couldn't get all the proper doctors together, and they will
meet, although they don't know when.
He followed up in November, 2009.
Press TV from January, 2011
Former
special advisor to Arafat, Bassam Abu Shareef, said the investigation
conducted by British forensic experts had revealed that the late
Palestinian leader was poisoned by thallium, IRNA reported on Tuesday.
Palestinian Media Watch has a few more instances and shows how the charge that Israel murdered Arafat is an
element of Palestinian political culture.
At
a PLO cultural celebration in the presence of the PA Minister of
Culture, a child on stage performed a skit comparing Arafat's death to
the death of Jesus by the Jews.
Boy 1: "Father,
father the Elder (Arafat). Why did it happen this way? Why did it happen
this way? Death chose you, and you did not complete the path."
Boy 2:
"Do not ask why it happened this way. Yesterday they (i.e., the Jews)
crucified Jesus; today they poisoned the father, the Elder (Arafat)."
[PA TV, June 4, 2010, Dec. 31, 2010]
The Washington Post reported in
Yasser Arafat’s body may be exhumed to investigate claims that he was poisoned:
The debate gained fresh momentum on Tuesday night, when the al-Jazeera news channel broadcast a new investigation
into Arafat’s death. It revealed the findings of a Swiss forensic
institute that examined some of his belongings preserved by his widow.
According to al-Jazeera, the scientists found unexplained traces of
polonium-210 in his clothes and other effects used by the former leader
after he fell ill. The institute also concluded that the levels of
polonium found in his belongings were unusually high – up to 10 times
higher than in control tests.
The Lausanne-based institute issued its own statement on Wednesday,
confirming it had found an “unexplained amount of polonium-210” on
Arafat’s personal effects. However, it cautioned that the results were
“not sufficient to determine the cause of death.” The institute also
pointed out that any interpretation of its results was difficult, not
least because of the long time that had passed between Arafat’s death
and the laboratory tests.
"Debate" is an odd term
here. Is there anything to the charge that Arafat was poisoned? It's
facts on one side and rumor and innuendo on the other.
I
guess that the Washington Post felt that it had fallen behind the
reporting curve, because this report was credited to the Financial
Times. But is this really a news story?
The New York Times reported
Palestinians May Exhume Arafat After Report of Poisoning:
Mr.
Arafat became ill in October 2004 and was flown by helicopter out of
the Muqata, his headquarters in Ramallah, in the West Bank, where he had
been confined under an Israeli Army siege and virtual house arrest for
more than two years. He was transferred to a French military hospital,
where he died about two weeks later of unannounced causes.
Though the hospital records were never made public, fueling speculation
and rumors about the cause of death, they were obtained by The New York
Times in 2005. The records showed that he had died of a stroke that
resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an underlying infection. The
infection was never identified. The hospital found no traces of
poisons.
Two Palestinian investigative committees have so far failed to produce
any conclusive findings. At a fractious convention of Mr. Abbas’s Fatah
Party in 2009, the first such gathering in 20 years, one point of
consensus was the notion that Israel was responsible for the death of
Mr. Arafat, the founder of Fatah. Delegates blamed Israel for having
kept the leader under siege, and Fatah officials said they would
continue to investigate the circumstances of his death, and the
suspicions that Israel had poisoned him.
There
is some good solid information in these paragraphs. First of all, that
the Times obtained Arafat's records, showing a cause of death. The
second is that two Fatah committees, so far, have failed to prove that
Arafat was killed.
Given this, the Al Jazeera report seems more like a fishing expedition
than anything.
(One aside on the New York Times article. The report reads:
The
legacy left by Mr. Arafat is as confounding as he was in life. Revered
by many as the revolutionary founding father of Palestinian nationalism,
he was also reviled, particularly by many Israelis, who considered him a
terrorist. He was among three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in
1994 for his role in accepting the Oslo accords, a blueprint for peace
with Israel, but nearly 20 years later his promises of a Palestinian
state remain unfulfilled. Corruption was also rampant under his
leadership.
That he was a terrorist is proven.
The only question is whether or not he gave up the terror. Lately it's
been proven conclusively
that he never changed.
What's confounding is not his legacy, but the degree to which people -
many who should know better - obfuscate what an evil and corrupt man he
was.)
Still neither the Washington Post nor New York
Times was clear about the level of doubt expressed by the Swiss
institute. Challah Hu Akbar found the document and tells us what it says
in
Al Jazeera’s Arafat Polonium Story Around Since At Least 2006:
We
therefore chose to conduct 210Po measurements on samples that had been
manifestly worn by Mr. Louvet and where stains of residual biological
liquids could be suspected by direct eye observation.
Some of these samples show 210Po activities that are clearly above
the values measured on other samples that had either not been worn or
that were not containing visible suspect stains.
This observation alone is however not sufficient to draw a final
conclusion because out of the 10 measurements performed on local samples
totally unrelated with Mr Louvet's belonging, two show 210Po activities
above the value of 2 mBq/g, which can be set as a limit for background
value.
(Emphasis added by Challah Hu Akbar. "Louvet" is a pseudonym for Arafat.)
But the next paragraph in
the report is fascinating too.
To clarify the origin of the measured
210Po, we should take into account that this nuclide is naturally
present in the environment as a decay product coming from lead-210
(210Pb): 210Po is said to be supported by 210Pb. Therefore, we propose
to wait until the beginning of June 2012 and measure the samples again.
If we observe a significant amount of 210Po in the samples with high
activities in the first measurements, this would show that 210Po is
supported by 210Pb. This would therefore be a very strong argument in
favor of a natural origin of the observed 210Po,although such a quantity
would be very uncommon. Alternatively, if we do not measure a
significant amount of 210Po, we should conclude that the high activity
measured the first time does not come from the 210Pb decay and therefore
is not explainable by a known natural phenomenon.
So a month ago a second test should have taken place to determine the
source of the Polonium. Did it take place? If so what was the result?
If it hasn't why is there talk of exhuming Arafat's body? Shouldn't the
second test be performed first?
I could infer from this
that the second test showed that there the Polonium in Arafat's personal
effects was naturally occurring and that the reason the Palestinians
are talking of exhuming his body is to keep the doubts alive.
This episode suggests three questions.
What
does this say about the Palestinian political culture? Erekat was (and
might still be) a major Palestinian political figure. Nasser al-Kidwa is
too. Both have peddled this paranoid fantasy. They aren't crackpot
columnist for some fringe newspaper.
What does this say about Al Jazeera? Numerous American media
stories tell us that Al Jazeera is a professional news organization but
it just comes from a different perspective. This shows that it doesn't
even pretend to have any sort of journalistic standards.
What does this say about the mainstream media? Two major American
papers ran stories based on the Al Jazeera report without doing the
minimum level of checking. Only some right wing pro-Israel American
blogger did that checking.
_____________________
More from Challah:
AJ's timing and the show itself was meant as attack against Abbas and PA.
Also,
let's not forget that it was AJ in 09 that aired Qaddoumi's claims that
Dahlan and Abbas were part of plot to murder Arafat.
However, not surprising some circles are spinning as "look, Israel did it."
^
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