WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S, PLO STYLE

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My grandmother said she read the morning paper obituaries to see if she was alive. These days, it seems, the world is reading headlines to see if Arafat, reportedly in a coma being kept alive on a support system, is really dead. Yet. Or not. Or to figure out who is keeping him brain dead, as recently pronounced. And why.

Former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, tore up Brookings Institute corridor rushing to a television interview. It was the day after President Bush was confirmed winner of the presidency. Indyk, a much in media demand senior fellow at the Saban Center for Peace was unaware of the turn in Arafat’s condition. Hours had passed since news confirmed Arafat had loss of all functions of the brain. That is the definition of brain dead. No electrical activity. No blood flow. No movement. No response to stimulation. No breathing.

Patrick J McCrude, Director of Pastoral Care at Sioux City’s Marian Health Center says “brain-dead” is a diagnosis misleading people into denial so they don’t have to face thinking “this brain-dead patient is not a cold, stiff corpse but rather a warm body with a chest that rises and falls.”

During the time Arafat was pronounced in a coma, reports issued addressing funeral arrangements, possible successors to running the Palestinian Authority after the Chairman and President of the PA is declared dead. And buried. Noticeably, doctors are not speaking to press. Statements are being released by PLO chief negotiators.

The PLO leader had been ill two weeks before he was rushed from his Ramallah compound accompanied by AK-47 assault weapon bearing bodyguards. Arafat reportedly began vomiting while drinking soup at the meal concluding his daily Ramadan fast. He collapsed, breathing heavily before losing consciousness. A team of doctors conducting medical tests on him for days prior, stabilized him in a makeshift clinic. Ramallah’s hospital was not a consideration. It is medically deficient despite Europe granting and funding $6 billion dollars to the PLO for modernizing Gaza.

Three days before Palestinians were surprised when Arafat was flown to France instead of seeking emergency medical care in nearby East Jerusalem or flying to Jordan, Saudia Arabia or his native Egypt. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and PLO Secretary-General Mahmoud Abbas rushed to the Mukata compound. Arafat, a visibly aged man surrounded by doctors, looked at them blankly. After four decades he was unable to recognize them. Days later, after Arafat descended into coma, PLO aides announced their leader had issued two presidential decrees; first, entrusting Qureia, Abbas and speaker of the Palestine National Council, Salin Zanoun with running the PA during his absence; and the second, paying thousands of PA employees salaries. Something the billionaire Chairman did from time to time. Belatedly. Forbes magazine says Arafat is worth $1.3 billion or more in personal and Swiss bank accounts with details known only to former advisor on economic affairs Muhammad Rashid and Arafat's wife, Suha.

Suha, Arafat’s wife of ten years, known as “the First Lady of France,” for her lavish spending style, is accusing her husband’s colleagues of conspiracy to murder him, "You have to realize the size of the conspiracy. I tell you they are trying to bury Abu Ammar (his pseudo name) alive." Suha has been living their marriage in France while Arafat has been living their marriage in Ramallah. She lived with him in a modest Gaza house, at the beginning almost ten years ago, for a short time. Soon after Arafat’s condition was announced, Suha reportedly swept in to the Gaza compound, demanding a will from her ailing spouse before returning to her Paris residence in the Bristol Hotel. Whispers have surrounded Arafat’s sexuality going back ttwo decades. Rumors of affairs have nagged the couple’s ten year marriage. There are questions over paternity of their two year old daughter. Suha Arafat, 41, who lives in Paris, has not seen her husband since the latest round of Palestinian violence since it began in 2000. Arafat had not been to France during their marriage before being flown there, disoriented, for hospitalization. Rashid returned to Paris after fleeing abroad several months ago, once again raising question about the Palestinian leader's secret Swiss bank accounts and the leader himself.

The Palestinian leader was born on August 24, 1929. His parents named him Mohammed Yasser Abdul-Ra'ouf Qudwa Al-Husseini. In 1968, the Russian KGB remade Mohammed into Yasser Arafat. Today Mohammed nee Yasser is laying in France attached to artificial life support until negations for his death are concluded. Suha insists her husband is fine, alive, going home. “God is great."

The battle mounts over where to bury the PLO chairman. Israel has refused Palestinian request to bury Arafat in his “beloved” birthplace, Jerusalem near the Temple Mount, fearing political instability along with physical instability of the crumbling prayer site. For years, Palestinians listened to Arafat’s inspirational tales of his Uncle Sa’ud, his childhood in a Jerusalem home near the Western Wall, Temple Mount and oppressed life in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp. The leader’s tales of “victimization by Zionism” describing how Israel’s coming into existence displaced him struck a sympathetic chord amongst his “peers” in the West Bank. Coached by his Russian mentors, Arafat’s political star, rocketed skyward.

The glitch in the biography the Kremlin wrote for Arafat, according to French biographers, Christophe Boltanski and Jihan El-Tahri, authors of “Les sept vies de Yasser Arafat”, “The Seven Lives of Yasser Arafat,” is documentable. “Mr. Palestine was born on the shores of the Nile," not Jerusalem.

Muhammad Abd ar-Ra'uf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husayni aka Yasser Arafat, was born in Cairo, the fifth of seven children of a Palestinian merchant. Arafat’s biographers said his father, Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husayni, was killed 20 years later fighting Israelis. Al-Husayni received a Bachelor Degree in Architecture from King Fuad University. He attended the School of Civil Engineering in 1956, living in Cairo until age 28. He left Egypt in 1958 to work in Kuwait as an engineer. His early political affiliation was with an Egyptian student organization that excluded Palestinians.

Al-Husayni became an officer in the Egyptian military. In 1968, the then unknown Arab construction engineer and collector of race cars travelled on an Egyptian passport to Moscow. Two years later Al-Husayni caught the eye of the Kremlin. The KGB remade his image with his becoming Palestinian, their initial career move recommendation to him.

Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, former head of Romanian Intelligence wrote almost two decades earlier in his book “Red Horizons,” Arafat was “an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence.” Pacepa relates how “the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that “Abu Amman,” Arafat’s nomme de guerre, had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”

Russian strategy was the genius of the Palestinian leader's ability to charm Arabs and Western leftists alike. Arafat received military training from Russia’s Balashikha special-ops. Romanian general Constatin Munteaunu was assigned to teach Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization operations in deception and influence designed to fool the West into granting the organization recognition. The Ceaucescu regime prepared themselves in the event Arafat no longer wanted to co-operate, taping amongst other things, Arafat’s orgies with his body guards. Munteaunu had spent months pulling together secret reports from Egyptian, Jordanian, Romanian and Syrian intelligence agency files. Pacepa wrote "The report was indeed an incredible account of fanaticism, of devotion to his cause, of tangled oriental political maneuvers, of lies, of embezzled PLO funds deposited in Swiss banks, and of homosexual relationships, beginning with his teacher when he was a teen-ager and ending with his current bodyguards."

The PLO was formed by Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad. They met in Kuwait where Arafat worked as an architect, initially of buildings, later of roadmaps to genocide. Together, the men hatched the idea of establishing the Fatah, Palestinian National Liberation Movement. Arafat returned to “Palestine” to found the Movement with support from a group of Palestinian activists. January 1, 1965, the PLO began. Arafat made three secret trips to Palestine before relocating to Jordan from Israel in 1967. Then, in 1969, Arafat was elected the third Chairman for the Executive Committee of the PLO. In the aftermath of the 1969 Jordan war, he moved to Lebanon where he remained until 1982.

The Palestinian Intafada erupted, 1987, in the disputed territories, lasting until September 13, 1993, when President Arafat signed the Declaration Of Principles agreement in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The Cairo Agreement, between Arafat and Rabin was signed May 4, 1994. July 1994, after 27 years of his mythical “staying away,” Arafat entered Gaza. That same year Rabin, Peres and Arafat, the man who ordered the execution of the US Ambassador to Sudan, Cleo Noel, was warmly received in Washington DC by President William Jefferson Clinton. Despite world outcry, Arafat along with Yitzchak Rabin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani had refused to honor the terrorist who almost exactly 24 years earlier, March 2, 1973, ordered PLO gunmen to empty bullets into the bodies of the ambassador and two other diplomats held hostage during dinner at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum. Some saw Clinton’s invitation, a deliberate failure to arrest and prosecute terrorists, as a violation of International Law. The UN, in 1950, had stipulated "Offenses against the peace and security of mankind...are crimes under international law, for which responsible individuals shall be punished".

President Richard Nixon had refused to negotiate with Arafat. Arafat had demanding the release of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s Palestinian assassin, as well as other Palestinians being held in Israel and European prisons, had communicated, by high-frequency transmitter, to his PLO faction Black September commander, Abu Iyad, at PLO headquarters in Beirut, the order "Remember Nahr al-Bard. The people's blood in the Nahr al-Bard cries out for vengeance. We and the rest of the world are watching you." "Nahr al-Bard" referenced a terrorist training facility Israeli troops had attacked 11 days earlier. There was no denying his role in these Embassy murders. Israeli intelligence intercepted and recorded Arafat ordering their murders. Transcripts were later turned over to the US State Department and Nixon.

March 2, at 9:06 pm, US Ambassador Noel and his two aides were lined up against the embassy basement wall. And shot. Authors David Halevy and Neil Livingstone wrote in their book, “Inside The PLO,” "The terrorists fired from the floor upward, to prolong their agony of their victims by striking them first in the feet and legs, before administering the coup de grace."

Thirty one years later, the formerly ruthless gun toting dictator who dressed in military fatigues, emerged from his Ramallah compound a feeble 75 year old geriatric wearing blue pajamas and a woolly knitted toque. Arafat’s political career suffered. Although surrounded by armed bodyguards bearing Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles, he was no longer charismatic. No longer the lion of the desert. He appeared helpless.

As I watched Indyk race past me at Brookings, I looked at a colleague and said, “It’s beginning to feel a little like “Weekend At Bernies.” She said, “What?”

“Weekend At Bernies” was billed as the drop dead comedy of 1989. The taglines read “Two morons. One corpse. And the plot thickens” and “Bernie Lomax would be the perfect host, except for one small problem: He's dead,” and “Bernie may be dead, but he's still the life of the party!”

The lead character, Bernie Lomax, was embezzling his own company’s money. The fraud was discovered by two employees angling for a promotion. Their less than enthusiastic boss who had hoped to get away with his scheme, invited the two for a luxury weekend at his beach house where he planned to have them killed. They arrive to find Bernie dead and that he hired a hitman to kill them who won’t kill them if Bernie is alive. So the two employees keep Bernie “alive” by dragging his body out, like a puppet, all over the island. Because they need him, just like interested parties in the world, need Arafat “alive.” Some want Arafat kept alive for political motivation, others for spiritual comfort. After his negotiated death, predictably his artificial breathing support will be removed. Mohammed Yasser Abdul-Ra'ouf Qudwa Al-Husseini was buried 36 year years ago. Yasser Arafat will be buried along with the rumors of his homosexuality, forbidden in the Muslim culture he mastered. With Suha as his widow, and Rashid as Arafat’s Swiss banker, the world is yet to see how human the despot was.

The Immam at the Taqwa mosque in Gaza City, spoke, asking “men of honor” to come forward as the world awaits the Wizard of Oz Munchkin Coroner’s determination of the Wicked Witch of the East “Not only is she really dead, she's really most sincerely dead.” It has been established, there is life in Palestine after Arafat.

The question on the table is will there still be deaths after Arafat.

BIO: Carrie Devorah is an award winning investigative photojournalist cross credentialed as a Crime Information Analyst, profiler, security and mediator. She covered international horseracing and boxing before moving to America writing on issues related to Faith, Homeland Security and International Terrorism. January 29^th 2004, Devorah’s youngest brother was one of 11 commuters murdered in a Jerusalem bus bombing Yasser Arafat ordered to be hit as it neared the office of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon.