Of course Yasser Arafat was killed. I don't think anyone sane ever thought otherwise considering the circumstances... Same goes for Slobodan Milosevic... There likely are others, but they don't come to mind at the moment.
Love the anonymous downvote for saying something unpopular politically, but more than likely factually correct.
Dangerous political prisoners/personalities dying in mysterious circumstances at opportune times is not coincidence. The US reign death from above via remote controlled drones and this isn't contested, yet thinking that very suspicious deaths at expedient times are likely assassinations is some crazy conspiracy theory...
You're being downvoted because you don't back your facts up with any source. You're not contributing anything to the discussion. It's like saying "of course the moon landing is/isn't a hoax, I don't think anyone sane ever thought otherwise considering the circumstances...".
It says nothing. Stating something as a fact doesn't make it a fact.
For the record I have absolutely no agenda here and I must say I have absolutely no opinion on the subject at hand (nor do I think it belongs on the frontpage of HN, but that's an other subject).
The phrase "conspiracy theory" has been used to great effect to silence criticism and shut down real investigative journalism. It's a simple guilt by association technique: if you think anything other than the official line, then you are engaging in "conspiracy theory" which means you are like those people who think the queen of England is a reptile.
We are actually in worse shape than Soviet Russia. In the USSR, educated people knew that quite a bit of what was in Pravda was a lie. In the West, an attitude of malfeasance-denialism has been encouraged in the educated and upper crust elements of society to the point that erudite people tend to almost deny the existence of elite deviance or official criminality. Given the higher-educated demographic of HN, you can see it around here. Just try arguing that, say, widespread financial shenanigans have anything other than prosaic and innocent explanations.
Garbage. Conspiracy theorists are frequently ridiculed because they have dreadfully low standards of evidence, exhibit poor logical reasoning, or engage in obvious bias (the number of judgmental adjectives employed by the theorist is often a good proxy for bias). I will give any theory the time of day if it put together properly, but most 'conspiracy theories' are not.
Yeah, problem is I remember clearly how a bunch of British plane spotters were ridiculed when they worked out that the US were flying strange flights in and out of the UK with ragged looking Arabs on board. Only when non UK and US people got implicated and involved. Today we know this as extraordinary rendition.
The other problem is that official types use ridicule instead of reason to slam people with ideas that contradict theirs. It seems that some people like evidence and some dont.
"low standards of evidence, exhibit poor logical reasoning, or engage in obvious bias"
I don't disagree with any of this. Unfortunately these are the only muckrakers we've got. Everyone else just smiles and nods until the muck is shoved in their face.
A conspiracy theorist seems to be an investigative journalist or a social critic with poor epistemology.
I have noticed over the years that the concretes reported upon and the trends pointed out by conspiracy theorists -- even some of the wackier ones -- have a pretty good hit rate. The paranoid are often very perceptive. It's in the theory department that they fall down, imagining wild and unlikely scenarios to account for things that boil down to simple elite deviance, oligarchy, political opportunism, and corruption.
Most of them also have a political, religious, or ethnic bone to pick and try to ascribe all the wrongs of the world to some hated group.
But as I said... they're often right about the concretes.
It's sad times we live in when unstable nutjobs are the only ones pointing out our obvious descent toward naked plutocratic oligarchy and gangster-statism.
Well nutjobs and comedians... what was that quote about the state of a society when only comedians can tell the truth?
Comedians have, throughout history been the acceptable dissidents of society. This can be seen from ancient Greece, through Shakespeare and through to people like Bill Hicks and George Carlin.
They have the unique position of being able to say what they think, and then let the audience decide if it was satirical or serious.
I think "the state of a society when only comedians can tell the truth" is known as "normal". I've never seen any evidence of some fabulous bygone age where the people in charge were cool with political dissidents who didn't frame things in terms of comedy.
People always think that "conspiracy theory" is about conclusions, when it's actually about methodology.
It doesn't matter that certain conspiracy nutjobs happened to be correct about something. That's inevitable. The breadth and scope of conspiracy theories is such that some of them are bound to be correct purely by random chance.
What makes something a "conspiracy theory" isn't claim being made, but how that claim is backed up. "9/11 was an inside job" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but 9/11 truthers fit the mold because they use decidedly irrational techniques to support their claims. "The moon landing was faked" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but the people who believe it universally use bad reasoning to do so. Likewise, "the government is spying on everyone" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but if people use conspiracy-style reasoning to support the claim, it's a conspiracy theory even if it ends up being correct.
Conspiracy theories involve massive application of various logical fallacies, such as ignoring the fact that unlikely events still occur due to chance, focusing on successes and ignoring failures (i.e. Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy), ignoring any explanation of facts that does not fit the desired conclusion, and just plain non sequiturs.
A lot of people who were talking about government surveillance back in the day fit this pattern. The fact that they were right does not change the fact that their reasoning was bad.
Many people were talking about it without fitting this pattern, by using sanity and reason. Those are the ones to pay attention to.
When you see somebody labeling something as a "conspiracy theory", look at the mechanics of the argument being made, rather than the conclusion. For example, in this case we have a comment that states, "Dangerous political prisoners/personalities dying in mysterious circumstances at opportune times is not coincidence." Well, that's classic conspiracy thinking. Coincidences can and do happen, all the time. Do people get assassinated sometimes? Yes. Do important people die at extremely convenient times purely due to natural causes? Also yes. Thus, while the fact that somebody died at a convenient time can be suggestive, it is not conclusive.
Even if Arafat was assassinated, it can still be a conspiracy theory to say it if the argument is done in a certain way. Saying that Arafat must have been assassinated because he died at a certain time is nonsense. Saying that Arafat must have been assassinated because his bones were filled with Polonium is reasonable.
To shut down complaints about the first kind of argument because the second kind of argument also exists in parallel is awful.
Trouble is, without evidence it's hard to distinguish between plausible-but-true and plausible-but-false theories, and Occam's razor usually finds the prosaic explanations simpler.
Absolutely. That's why we need real investigative journalism. The problem is that this is very, very hard and expensive to do well and nobody seems willing to pay for it.
This is crazy thinking. Famous people do typically have access to better medical care, through personal wealth or the goodwill of their supporters, but you seem to think that power/celebrity confers immunity from disease and misadventure. It lowers the risk, is all.
This does not mean I disagree with the findings of this report, not least because I haven't read it yet. It's entirely plausible that Arafat could have been murdered...but considering that he was a thorn in Israel's side for around 40 years, you're in no position to talk about him dying at an opportune time. I'm sure there were people who wanted to assassinate him over the last several decades. For the last 2 years of his life he was effectively under house arrest by the Israeli army, so why wait 2? Is there something terribly unusual about 75-year old men dying? Hardly. It's certainly possible that he was assassinated, but by your logic we should also be investigating the death of counterculture icon Lou Reed, who was a mere 71.
I think a lot of people may agree that "of course he was killed," but it is particularly interesting because of the poison used (polonium-210) which has only been confirmed in one other poisoning case, that of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian dissident.
Secondly, it is of interest because Arafat's movements and those he had contact with were very limited around the time that he fell ill, so it raises interesting questions about who could have done it.
Hopefully this won't have a negative impact on ongoing peace negotiations.
If I'm reading correctly, the half-life is 138 days, or 4-1/2 months. If you start with 5 times the lethal dose (still a very small quantity), you've got a year to administer it.
You might want to check out Adam Curtis, if you don't know him yet. Start with "all watched over by machines of loving grace". It's a series available for download on archive.org.
Peace negotiations? Those are a joke. A new settlement is announced and a Palistinian community in Jerusalem is scheduled for demolition. I'm unaware of such extreme provocation from the Palistinian side, but I'm sure it is there. Peace isn't wanted anywhere near enough by anything like enough people.
It certainly seems more likely today than yesterday. But who killed him? It almost certainly wasn't the Israelis or the US - they liked the fact that they could mostly deal with Arafat, and he'd keep more radical Palestinian elements under control.
Milosevic.. why would anyone bother killing him? He was going to be locked away for life, and there wasn't anyone he could really blame, so I can't see what the motive would be?
Love the anonymous downvote for saying something unpopular politically, but more than likely factually correct.
That's the HN way of saying "eeee it's not fair I'm being downvoted. Someone vote me up". I don't see you complaining about the anonymous up votes.
> That's the HN way of saying "eeee it's not fair I'm being downvoted. Someone vote me up". I don't see you complaining about the anonymous up votes.
I could care less about downvotes, but it's nice if people give an explanation, counter-point, etc... Discussion is what brings understanding.
> It certainly seems more likely today than yesterday. But who killed him? It almost certainly wasn't the Israelis or the US - they liked the fact that they could mostly deal with Arafat, and he'd keep more radical Palestinian elements under control.
There's a good post a few lines up that explains it well. Needless to say, the Israeli cause has advanced without Arafat in the picture. It was most definitely in their interest to kill him, and they had the ability (his compound was under siege at the time he fell ill).
> Milosevic.. why would anyone bother killing him? He was going to be locked away for life, and there wasn't anyone he could really blame, so I can't see what the motive would be?
You must not have followed his trial. He said alot of things that were embarrassing to the west, and cast alot of doubt. You're right in that he would have been found guilty, since it's just a show court, but the trial wasn't going the way the prosecutors wanted.
It's simply incorrect to say that Arafat kept the radicals under control - there was clear evidence that he was involved with the militant / terrorist wing of his political party, Fateh (the Al-Aqusa Martyrs Brigades), which carried out a great many suicide bombings. I won't repeat myself (my theory is above), but if you understand the political circumstances at the time, Arafat was in fact the last remaining major road block to a grand bargain that Sharon was moving heaven and earth to get done. There were very compelling reasons to knock him off.
Arafat's relationship with al-Aqsa was complicated. It is true that Fatah was paying al-Aqsa, but it's also true that Fatah was trying to get al-Aqsa to stop attacks[1]
Around the time of his death al-Aqsa was seeking to cut links with Arafat[2].
To claim that Sharon was trying to cut any kind of deal with the Palestinians is... unusual. (For those not aware, it was former Israeli PM Aiel Sharon's visit to the Moslem area of Temple Mount in Jerusalem that sparked the second intifāḍah[3] (prior to him becoming PM). The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is named after this incident).
Additionally, Arafat's Fatah group was seen as the one group strong enough to keep Hamas controlled.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was a problem for Israel, but it was seen as much less of a problem than Hamas. Subsequent events would show this view was probably correct: When Abbas took control of Fatah it quickly lost control of Gaza to Hamas, and the Israelis have consistently struggled to find a successful approach to dealing with Hamas in Gaza (eg, they later fought a fairly unsuccessful war to try to control Hamas in Gaza).
Edit: Although I disagree with you, I think you do make some good points. You were downvoted when I wrote this, so I have upvoted you.
All reasonable points, here's why you're wrong, though.
First, I appreciate the acknowledgment that Arafat was indeed involved with Al-Aqusa (a terrorist group bombing Israeli civilians). Not sure why you think that that would make the US and Israel consider him a suitable interlocutor - I still think that stands in favour of my argument that Sharon was done with him and killed him to create the circumstances for a deal.
Arafat may have reduced funding to Al-Aqusa, but that's because they were on the ropes militarily by 2004. He certainly didn't stop funding because he thought terrorism was an unacceptable option. The simple fact was, that he was funding terrorists after the failure of Camp David, which again, makes him a very bad candidate for the next round of grand bargain negotiation.
To claim that Sharon wasn't looking for a deal is just silly (even if he was often inflammatory and arguably quite evil). The fact that Sharon was looking for a deal was widely acknowledged and published in newspapers - here's a quote from wikipedia: "In May 2003, Sharon endorsed the Road Map for Peace put forth by the United States, European Union, and Russia, which opened a dialogue with Mahmud Abbas, and announced his commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state in the future." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Sharon#Founding_of_Kadim... I'd provide more quotes, but this is pretty self evident.
You also seem to suggest that because Sharon was an aggressive guy, he wasn't looking for a deal. That just doesn't follow (especially in the Middle East, where the perception of strength is everything).
You also say "Additionally, Arafat's Fatah group was seen as the one group strong enough to keep Hamas controlled." My response: killing Arafat would / did not prevent Fateh from acting as a counterweight to Hamas. In fact, it's likely that Fateh was ultimately a far better counter-weight to Hamas with Abbas at the helm. Israel was able to work with Fateh to squash Hamas in the West Bank in a way that may well have been impossible with Arafat running the show (supplies of weapons to the Palestinian authority etc).
On an anecdotal note, it was clear on the streets (I was living there at the time), that in many cases, Palestinian policemen went from carrying shitty old AKs to gleaming new M16s within a year after Arafat was out of the picture.
Arafat may have reduced funding to Al-Aqusa, but that's because they were on the ropes militarily by 2004. He certainly didn't stop funding because he thought terrorism was an unacceptable option. The simple fact was, that he was funding terrorists after the failure of Camp David, which again, makes him a very bad candidate for negotiating a grand bargain.
I suspect (given your other comments) that you are familiar with the realpolitik of the middle east - there are no lily white good guys. Of course Arafat funded terrorists!
My view is that the Israelis viewed him as "the devil they knew", and that he was infinitely preferable (and more controllable) than Hamas.
It's true that Arafat didn't want a complete peace deal (he turned down the alleged Barak offer to split Jerusalem or whatever it was), but it's not at all clear to me that there was any Palestinian leader with anything like real power who did want a deal. I mean.. Abbas? Seriously?
Sharon endorsed the Road Map for Peace put forth by the United States, European Union, and Russia, which opened a dialogue with Mahmud Abbas, and announced his commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state in the future.
Has any Israeli PM not endorsed whatever the latest peace plan is? Even Netanyahu sometimes says things that could be read as an endorsement if you didn't know better. The endorsement is meant for US consumption.
OTOH Sharon's plan (essentially isolation from the Palestinian territories) wasn't the worse plan ever, and even sort of worked.
Oh hell.. I'm persuading myself that you might be right. Persuade me of this: killing Arafat would / did not prevent Fateh from acting as a counterweight to Hamas. In fact, it's likely that Fateh was ultimately a far better counter-weight to Hamas with Abbas at the helm.
That clearly failed, and to me it was obvious even at the time that Fatah would lose Gaza. Why do you think otherwise?
Will attempt fast responses. Don't want to piss everyone off by getting too far into the weeds on a topic that probably shouldn't even be on HN. Also, I prefer coding to dwelling on a previous life. :)
You say: "My view is that the Israelis viewed him as "the devil they knew", and that he was infinitely preferable (and more controllable) than Hamas."
I say: That's where you're getting it wrong. It wasn't a choice between Arafat and Hamas, it was a choice between Arafat and Abbas. Abbas was clearly preferable (for all the reasons stated above).
You say: "...it's not at all clear to me that there was any Palestinian leader with anything like real power who did want a deal. I mean.. Abbas? Seriously?"
I say: Yes, Abbas, seriously. Sharon was pursuing a strategy that was largely unilateral - in other words, a weaker leader on the other side was fine, as long as they didn't get in the way and kept the PA running. Arafat was in Sharon's way (not a good place to be historically).
You say: "The endorsement is meant for US consumption."
I say: No, I am absolutely sure that the Israelis are deadly serious about a Palestinian state (or something that can be called that). Israelis are terrified of the "demographic bomb", which is what they call the far higher fertility rate of Palestinians. The Palestinian birth rate threatens the Jewish majority even in what is currently agreed to be Israel over the next few decades. Giving away areas of current Israel with high Arab populations to the Palestinian state is often mooted as an option in a final status deal, in exchange for bits of land covered with Israeli settlements (which would be a double win for Israel).
Don't want to write more on this here. If you'd really like to continue the discussion, you can email me on slooge[at]hotmail.com.
I follow the Mid East because it is informative about my Swedish media. (The journalist profession was more or less taken over by the extreme left of the 1968 generation, it gives a hair raising insight to compare what doesn't get into Swedish news from the top news of NY Times/BBC.)
I must say thanks to you and to nl for having a reasoned discussion, you seldom see that on this subject. Made my day.
Sharon looked for a deal with Abbas. That says it all. That lame duck was propped up just to split the opposition. That fact that the US and Israelis supported a deal with him is evidence enough. Negotiating with Abbas was never an attempt to negotiate with the Palestinian people, it was a an attempt to appear reasonable whilst running a prison camp that is widely likened to apartheid South Africa.
'Danny Rubinstein, a journalist and author of a book about Arafat, had a different memory of events. In the weeks and months before Arafat's death, he said, people in Sharon's inner circle talked constantly about how to get rid of him. "For me, it was very clear from the beginning. Every day this was the topic – should we expel him, or kill him, or bomb the Muqata [Arafat's HQ]. It was obvious to me that they would find a way."'
While he might have kept more radical Palestinians under control, he was also himself seen as a tougher counterpart than Abbas, which might have been a motive.
At the risk of getting down voted on what is an emotional issue for a lot of people, here's my (quite realist) view.
I was living in the West Bank when Arafat died, and I knew a bunch of people who worked in his compound. He got very sick, very quickly. The doctors around him were baffled by the steep decline, which is why he was flown to France just before he died.
I acknowledge that my theory on the issue is purely circumstantial, but a good place to start with these things is "qui bono?". Ariel Sharon (and Israel, and in my view, everyone) had a lot to gain by Arafat's death.
Whatever you think of the nastiness that he'd been involved in, Sharon was a remarkable human - Israelis aren't given to overstatement and they called him the "Lion of God".
Sharon was clearly making a dash for a grand bargain, and it's obvious that the "bulldozer" (another of his nicknames) wasn't letting anything get in his way.
By pure force of will, he withdrew Israel from Gaza (an absolutely wrenching move for Israel to make), and then left Likud to establish Kadimah so that he could move forward without blockage from the right wing radicals in his old party. In a very short time frame, Sharon bent a famously fractious Israeli parliament into a position to make a grand bargain that would stick - the last major road block to a bargain was Arafat.
Israel had had a real go at negotiating with Arafat with Bill Clinton at Camp David. It didn't work out. Of course, there are a bunch of conflicting opinions on who's to blame for the breakdown in talks, but the basic, unarguable outcome was that Arafat wasn't willing to take Israel's best offer.
Sharon obviously knew that, and also knew that Arafat's successor was going to be the comparatively mild mannered Abbas, who Sharon was already dealing with constructively. I think Sharon basically decided that, given Arafat's previous form, he was a very high risk as a grand bargain spoiler - Arafat's moral authority with the Palestinian population remained high. So, in the absence of any other option (since Arafat was essentially a dictator), good night Arafat.
Sharon had a stroke shortly thereafter, and with that, arguably the only person capable of cutting the gordian knot in the medium term was out of the picture. Gotta love ash-sharq al-awsat.
Thanks, I didn't know that. According to Wikipedia, another of his nicknames amongst Israelis was "The King of Israel". That moniker at least, indicates that he was regarded as a formidable character.
An interesting point of view, but I think you're way off. You make it sound like Sharon's strategy was to find a willing partner to negotiate with to find a "grand bargain". He wasn't. His strategy was to destroy any peace process. Pulling out of Gaza demonstrates that. It was done to completely destroy any need to negotiate with the Palestinians, as described by Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon's senior advisor in an interview with Ha'aretz. The following is quoted from here: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/top-pm-aide-gaza-p...:
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Asked why the disengagement plan had been hatched, Weisglass replied: "Because in the fall of 2003 we understood that everything was stuck. And although by the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik [Sharon] grasped that this state of affairs could not last, that they wouldn't leave us alone, wouldn't get off our case. Time was not on our side. There was international erosion, internal erosion. Domestically, in the meantime, everything was collapsing. The economy was stagnant, and the Geneva Initiative had gained broad support. And then we were hit with the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [refusing to serve in the territories]. These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose with a strong odor of grass. These were people like Spector's group [Yiftah Spector, a renowned Air Force pilot who signed the pilot's letter]. Really our finest young people."
Weisglass does not deny that the main achievement of the Gaza plan is the freezing of the peace process in a "legitimate manner."
"That is exactly what happened," he said. "You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Interesting and well thought out. (I don't even know if it is a conspiracy theory or not. :-) )
Regarding Sabra and Shatila, afaik two separate courts said he couldn't be proven to be responsible? He should have considered the risk of a revenge. The wikipedia link supports this, too.
(I read up on this because I've seen SaS arguments so often. I've never seen an answer to the counter question of how to judge those who themselves did attacks on civilians in that civil war. Like PLO, unlike Sharon.)
You may be getting downvotes because of your tone. I'm sure there are people who previously (and perhaps still) believe that Arafat was not killed. It's not very nice to suggest they are not sane.
I don't assume the US (merely using it as an example when we question the possibility of conspiracy theories being true).
Arafat could have been killed by other (more radical) Muslims, by the Israelis, by any number of people (though the method suggests a government was probably involved). Milosevic was likely killed by some western government, based on circumstance (being in custody at the Hague), and the fact that he revealed that people were trying to kill him before it happened...
<ignore reason=probably not true>There aren't many with the capability.</ignore> Polonium has no stable isotopes and is naturally so rare that the nuclear industry synthesises it from bisimuth using neutron beams in specialist nuclear reactors. <ignore reason=probably not true>Also, apart from triggers for nukes and poisoning dissidents, it has very few uses.</ignore>
I don't understand who/what your markup is meant for? Are you claiming that things you're writing are probably not true and should be ignored? Then why are you writing them? This seems a little too clever.
I put the markup in after it was pointed out I was probably talking bollocks there. I didn't want to delete the wrong info as that would make the comment after make no sense, so I did that instead.
Well, it's worth noting that the one known time Israel did assassinate a PLO leader, they used the rather less subtle method of sending in a Mossad hit squad to shoot him:
Love the anonymous downvote for saying something unpopular politically, but more than likely factually correct.
Dangerous political prisoners/personalities dying in mysterious circumstances at opportune times is not coincidence. The US reign death from above via remote controlled drones and this isn't contested, yet thinking that very suspicious deaths at expedient times are likely assassinations is some crazy conspiracy theory...