Daniel Pipes writes:
“Arafat’s lived a lie and died a lie. Agence France Press reports today that the death certificate issued for him by municipal officials at Clamart, the suburb of Paris where he died on Nov. 11, records his place of birth as Jerusalem and not where it really was, Cairo. They did so on the basis of his livret de famille (family record book) produced by the French foreign ministry in 1996.
In 1999, I summarized the uncovering of his true origins as reported by Christophe Boltanski and Jihan El-Tahri in their 1997 book, Les sept vies de Yasser Arafat.
The French researchers tell an amusing story of discovery. They went to the
University of Cairo and innocently asked for the registration of one Muhammad
‘Abd ar-Ra’uf ‘Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husayni at the School of Civil Engineering in
1956. This, Arafat’s birth name means nothing to the Egyptian clerk, who “sits
down behind a rickety wooden table, almost completely hidden by the pile of
dusty files bound in black leather” and “blows off a layer of grime in a most
professional way,” then hands over the records. In a blue ink faded by time, the
researchers find that their man, living at 24A Baron Empain Street, Heliopolis,
“was born on August 4, 1929, in Cairo.” With this information in hand, they dash
over to the State Registry and find Arafat’s actual birth certificate, which
confirms the date and place.
And Daniel Pipes adds:
“Adriana Stuijt, a South African journalist who edits “Uncensored South African News,” notes that another terrorist acquired great wealth and a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as a secular sainthood, namely Nelson Mandela. “As a journalist,” she writes, “I will never forget the many ‘necklacings’ I witnessed, seeing black fellow-South Africans burned to death with petrol-filled tyres about their necks at the express orders of Nelson Mandela and his henchmen, just because these unfortunates had disobeyed the African National Congress.”
