On the death of a terrorist named Arafat and a CiF Watch Tweet which went viral

After Yasser Arafat died in 2004, the Palestinian Authority refused to release medical records which would have shed light into the cause of death.

While it was reported that AIDS was a possible cause, as Challah Hu Akbar observed, “conspiracy theories relating to Arafat’s death have been around since the beginning.”  

These have included the accusation that he was poisoned by Polonium 210, the same substance which killed Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.  The Polonium theory was also advanced, for example, by antisemitic extremist Israel Shamir in 2006.

Interestingly, a report in 2005 by The New York Times (which had access to Arafat’s medical records) concluded that he died of “a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unknown infection,” but noted that the “findings argued strongly against poisoning”.

However, just yesterday, July 4, Al-Jazeera revived the story, and claimed that the results of “a 9 month investigation” of the death of Arafat “uncovered radioactive polonium on [Arafat’s] final belongings,” a story which has spread across the web.

Of course, many of us at CiF Watch have been more concerned with the absence of information, in most of the coverage of these “revelations”, regarding Arafat’s death toll – the casualties resulting from a terrorist war against innocent civilians which he helped to revolutionize.

Arafat’s long reign of terror included orchestrating the start of the 2nd Intifada, a four-year campaign of violence which claimed the lives of over 1100 Israelis. (See CAMERA’s “Yasir Arafat’s Timeline of Terror” for a summary of the terrorist violence the Palestinian leader was responsible for – attacks which date back to the 1960’s.)

So, yesterday, we Tweeted the following which, as of this post, has been ReTweeted 88 times:

Hopefully, the success of our (under 140 character) observation about the legacy of Arafat indicates that the notoriety of the man (known as “The Father of Modern Terrorism“) will not soon be forgotten.

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