By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jul 5, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
Recent reports have some speculating — most prominently his widow — that the late PLO President Yasir Arafat may have died from illicit poisoning.
Larry Ben-David (NOT the Israeli version of Larry David) argues in The Times of Israel that the claim is a distraction from the clear probability that Arafat died of AIDS:
Less romantic and mythical, however, is the more likely cause of Arafat’s death – AIDS.
Arafat’s sexual proclivities have been an open secret for years. The former head of Rumanian intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa , disclosed in his book “Red Horizons,” that one of his officers reported, “the ‘Fedayee’ [Arafat’s code name] is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He’s playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena.”
In an in-depth 1976 biography of Arafat, writer Thomas Kiernan chronicled the life of a young Arafat in Cairo. When Arafat discovered his girlfriend, Jinan al-Oraby, was friendly with the daughters of the Harkabis, an Egyptian Jewish family, he arranged for the murder of their father. When Jinan expressed sorrow for her friends, “Yasser went into a rage… he proceeded to beat me, tearing my clothes off…he threw himself on me… He tried to penetrate me, but he could not do so. This made him even more irrational.”
Kiernan also relates Arafat’s relationship with a boy, Ahmed, whose parents ended up on the Israeli side of the border after the 1948 war. An associate of Arafat’s related, “Yasser tried to get the boy to publicly denounce his parents…Yasser really loved the boy. He was delicate, sensitive, like a flower. He was very much a part of Yasser’s inner circle – four of five boys who lived in the same place, and well, you can imagine what I mean.”
Kiernan continued: Arafat held a “kind of formal hearing for the boy” because of his refusal to denounce his parents. “Arafat sobbed and sobbed as [a young associate] proceeded to castrate the boy. The next day the boy was dead.”
On Tuesday, I will be visiting Pittsburgh to perform my Pink Floyd hit “The Wall” at Consol Energy Center. By coincidence, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has gathered this week in Pittsburgh.
One issue the Presbyterians will be debating is whether to take action in support of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, under siege in Gaza and as second-class citizens in Israel under the rule of the apartheid government there.
I write in support of those Presbyterians who would like their church to divest its holdings in three U.S. companies — Motorola Solutions, Hewlett-Packard and Caterpillar. These companies profit directly from Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and suppression of the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Israel itself.
While there are very legitimate issues with the Israeli government’s handling of the West Bank’s disputed territories (I support the transfer of most of these lands to a new Palestinian state), the notion that Gaza is under siege by Israel (when Hamas just fired 150 rockets last week into civilian Israeli territory), or that Palestinians who live in Israel proper are second-class citizens under an apartheid regime (when they share every single right and responsibility of citizenship as their Jewish neighbors), cannot be classified as anything but malicious lies.
The decision to divest is an independent issue, and while I am strongly opposed for the reasons I outline here, reasonable minds certainly can differ. But if people base the decision on Waters’ lies, they are doing a great disservice to the dialogue.
The answer? We do need education. Indeed someone just wrote a good book on the subject…
Big news on the film front: “Hitting the Cycle,” the baseball-themed film, co-produced by The RP’s sister, Jennifer Miller was named Best Dramatic Feature Film last night at the Manhattan Film Festival. The film was written and directed by Jennifer’s high school classmate Richey Nash, and co-stars the legendary Bruce Dern.
Anderson Cooper has, at long last, publicly said he is gay.
Cooper made the announcement in an email to writer Andrew Sullivan.
“The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud,” he wrote.
Cooper’s sexuality has long been the subject of ample media speculation, but he has never publicly confirmed it — a fact which he also seemed to address in the email to Sullivan:
In other BREAKING NEWS: The RP is Jewish, RP Jeff Smith is short, RP Michael Steele is African-American. RP Krystal Ball is a brunette, and RP John Y. Brown, III has curly hair.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Jun 29, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
Now we know why we are losing the global war on drugs — it’s the fault of the Zionists! Read the article below from JTA:
An Iranian vice president blamed “Zionists” for the global drug trade and said the Talmud encourages promoting addiction in non-Jewish communities. Iranian First Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi made the comments Tuesday as part of ceremonies marking International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking in Tehran.
He said evidence of the “Zionists'” direct involvement in illicit drugs is that fact that “you cannot find a single addict among the Zionists,” the semi-official Iranian FARS news service reported. Referring to the Talmud, he said, “The book teaches them how to destroy non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother.”
I guess I need to reade my Talmud a little more carefully. And heed Abe Foxman’s words quoted later in the article:
“To all those who thought that anti-Semitism is a thing of the past, certainly this makes it very clear that it is alive and well again. What makes it more sinister and dangerous is the fact that it comes from a leader of a country that has vowed to destroy the Jewish state, and is making efforts to obtain the means to do it,” ADL National Director Abe Foxman said in a statement.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Jun 29, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
If you are enjoying all of the anti-Aaron Sorkin backlash upon the premiere of his new HBO series “Newsroom” (I find the show to be pretty good), you’ll love this video compilation of Sorkin’s tendency to use the same lines in different productions, over and over and over again (h/t JTA’s Six Degrees, No Bacon):
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 28, 2012 at 1:00 PM ET
I really enjoyed my virgin “Ask Me Anything” chat at Reddit. I responded to over 110 questions in 2 hours — from No Labels, to our national political mess, to the NBA Draft, to the baseball season, to good television, we covered the whole gamut.
If you are interested in reading a transcript, click here.
