Arafat's underwear, polonium and strange life of George Galloway

I was reading the excellent article by prof. Barry Rubin that starts with a most reassuring statement: "Yasir Arafat is still dead." While I know that it is so, a bit of reassurance from time to time cannot hurt. And the latest attempts to use his remains to gain some illusory advantage over the hated Zionist and the latest signs of (after)life in his underwear are somewhat amusing, as Barry Rubin mentions.

The whole story of polonium-infested underwear is so ridiculous that it practically destroys itself:

The institute studied Arafat’s personal effects, which his widow provided to Al Jazeera, the first time they had been examined by a laboratory. The items were variously stained with Arafat's blood, sweat, saliva and urine; doctors used those biological samples to look for heavy metals and other poisons.

Let's see: 8 years after her hubby croaked, the grieving widow suddenly decides to produce several items of underwear and other belongings for analysis. Said belongings display unusual amount of Polonium 210, the isotope that kills - slowly but surely when introduced into someone's body. There is one big question no one seems to ask: how come the widow waited all these years with her suspicions?



Then there is another question, almost (but not quite) as big: where is the report on Arafat's death produced by the French clinic where the Great Statesman croaked?

And a smaller one: why hasn't the grieving widow, who is the only holder of that report, produced it immediately after the demise of her hubby? Or now, for that matter?

Well, and there is one small fact that seems to escape the media notice:

Po-210 per unit can be bought in any amount under a "general license", which means that a buyer need not be registered by any authorities.

Or, in other words:

Polonium-210, the radioactive isotope fingered as the substance used to off exiled Russian KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, is available to buy online for just $69 plus shipping and handling.

New Mexico firm United Nuclear Scientific Equipment Supplies offers a sample of radioactive element on its website, as part of its aim of putting the "fun back into science".

Do I hint that the widow or some of her friends could have been into some murky business with a vial of Polonium? You bet I do. Knowing some (but far from a lot) about the wily widow, I wouldn't put any dirty trick past her. She will do anything underwear-wise to make her own people forget that insidious question about the missing fortune her hubby was supposed to leave to his people.

Barry Rubin also mentions another, more disturbing phenomenon:

What’s dismaying is how much play Western media are giving this charge as if it should be taken seriously. When the West behaves in this way it signals at the least a dangerously naive credulousness and at worst a profound anti-Jewish and anti-Israel complex. The New York Times and Washington Post take this nonsense seriously.

Of course, the story gives some useful fodder to scoop seekers, but it also feeds another type of life forms.

Speaking about peculiar life forms, in search of related material I've stumbled on a fiery piece by no other but Georgie (the Spiv) Galloway, recently resurrected to political life but still active in his favorite media outfits - like Al Jazeera, that published his incendiary article The strange death of Yasser Arafat. One of the first sentences in that piece is "I loved him as if he were my father, and have remained his loyal supporter all my life." Well, it takes one to love one, I guess, and there is no accounting for tastes. After all, Georgie loves a lot of different men - like the late Yasser, the late Saddam, the late not late yet Nasrallah etc.

Oh well, read the whole piece if you care. The only other thing of notice is, possibly, the sloppy way The Spiv has with his writing. One example is here:

And will they [meaning Israel] now agree - as leading Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat, and, crucially, Arafat's widow Suha have now demanded - to exhume the president's body from his Ramallah tomb, so that it can be examined for the nuclear murder weapon?

With all his professed love for Palestinians, Georgie still doesn't know that Ramallah tomb, as the whole of Ramallah and its surroundings, are under full control of Palestinian Authority.

I only hope "they" will let The Spiv keep the exhumed underwear after the lab tests. 

To safeguard together with the Saddam's set. To sniff from time to time, to savor and to compare...


P.S. To be fair to NYT, its writer adds at the end of his piece:

One thing is for certain. Even if the exhumation goes ahead and the autopsy comes up clean, many Palestinians, including no doubt Bassam Abu Sharif, will refuse to accept that the leader of the Palestinian revolution passed away without someone’s helping hand.

And you know what kind of hand he means.