Me and Yasser

Mahmoud Abbas, the newly elected president of the Palestinian Authority, was sworn in yesterday... and the vicious mess that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a media euphemism that handily disguises the fact that people are dying) continues on its merry way. Now lost to the mists of time (in journalism, that's five days or more) is the question of how predecessor Yasser Arafat died in November in a French hospital. Information about the underlying illness that caused his death was never released, yet two theories from overseas persist. The first blames poisoning (an Israeli government minister suggested assassination as an option in 2003). The second whispers "AIDS." The Canadians who picked up on the AIDS talk fastest included yucky-heads like Conservative Party MP (and former Canadian Alliance Party leader) Stockwell Day. Their fascination with the scuttlebutt revealed the likely source of those rumours -- enemies of Arafat only too happy to add in their and their society's homophobia to the mix.

Gay Palestinians are treated worse than dirt by their brothers and sisters. (And the AIDS gossip sure isn't suggesting that a blood transfusion was the culprit.) Still, we need to set aside suspicion over the agenda and look at the facts themselves. Er, there are no facts. "Even now, a month after he was pronounced dead in a military hospital on the southern outskirts of Paris on November 11, the cause of Arafat's death remains unknown," noted The Guardian on Dec. 16. "Why was it that a parade of doctors - from Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt and France - could produce no definitive diagnosis?" Certainly fear of a homophobic backlash might have, ahem, encouraged Arafat's colleagues and his medical team to avoid a final diagnosis. Some of Arafat's symptoms could be attributed to AIDS-related complications (though of course, they could also be attributed to other illnesses).

Some of us have questions. For others, Arafat's AIDS and homosexuality are the absolute truth -- as gleefully propagated by the hate-spewing pigs of the far right both here and abroad (a Google search will bring up a few sites filled with vitriol the likes of which will leave you breathless). But what strange bedfellows indeed: some gay people, suffering from a desperate need to find "famous" homosexuals to validate their own lives, also have decided that Arafat's AIDS and homosexuality are fact.