The divine Suha (2nd from l) at the Dubai Film Festival in 2011
As you may know, Suha Arafat, the widow of the Original Terrorist, went to al-Jazeera with a few pieces of Arafat’s clothing and claimed that she had kept them in a ‘secure room’ since his death in 2004. After a ‘nine-month investigation’, al-Jazeera breathlessly reported that
…tests reveal that Arafat’s final personal belongings – his clothes, his toothbrush, even his iconic kaffiyeh – contained abnormal levels of polonium, a rare, highly radioactive element. Those personal effects, which were analyzed at the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, were variously stained with Arafat’s blood, sweat, saliva and urine. The tests carried out on those samples suggested that there was a high level of polonium inside his body when he died.
“I can confirm to you that we measured an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported polonium-210 in the belongings of Mr. Arafat that contained stains of biological fluids,†said Dr. Francois Bochud, the director of the institute.
The findings have led Suha Arafat, his widow, to ask the Palestinian Authority to exhume her late husband’s body from its grave in Ramallah. If tests show that Arafat’s bones contain high levels of polonium, it would be more conclusive proof that he was poisoned, doctors say.
Well. A sensation! The diabolical Zionists poisoned him after all!
The only problem is that Suha apparently majored in French haute couture, not physics. And the staff of al-Jazeera like a good story more than a reasonable one.
The half-life of Polonium-210 is 138 days. This means that after 8 years, only about 4.3 x 10-7 — 0.00000043 — of the original amount of Polonium would be left. So even if Arafat’s iconic underwear had been loaded with the stuff after his death, it would be undetectable, or at least at much lower levels than the Swiss laboratory found.
As Johnny Cochran would have pointed out, there is a problem with the chain of custody of the evidence.
What is more interesting is the half-life of the money that Suha extracted from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which of course is supported by the US and the European Union.
When Arafat died in November 2004, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in his secret accounts went missing. Suha refused to release Arafat’s body for a week, until the PA agreed to pay her an adequate pension (estimates range from $12,000 to $100,000 monthly).
It’s doubtful that she needed it. Earlier that year, French prosecutors investigated $11.4 million of mysterious payments into her accounts:
The inquiry, disclosed by a satirical French weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné, and confirmed by unidentified judicial officials to The Associated Press, was opened in October after the Bank of France notified the Paris prosecutor’s office that Mrs. Arafat’s accounts at two banks in France had received relatively regular transfers of nearly $1.27 million each from Switzerland between July 2002 and September 2003. The newspaper also reported that about $2.5 million of the money had been diverted to an account of an interior decorating firm, Alberto Pinto.
The PA today is undergoing what it calls its “worst financial crisis” in three years, being unable to pay its employees. Most of these employees are part of its ‘security’ forces, who from time to time murder Israelis. Many of them are in Hamas-controlled Gaza, where they are either doing nothing or working for Hamas. Some are in Israeli prisons, having been convicted of crimes including multiple murder (they get paid anyway). And then there are the pensions paid to the widows of ‘martyrs’, suicide and otherwise.
Maybe Suha will make a donation?
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