But, of course, this wasn't just any ailing and frail 75-year-old man. It was Yasir Arafat...

Hussein Ibish:  "As is so often the case, human life ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.

But, of course, this wasn't just any ailing and frail 75-year-old man. It was Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, president of the Palestinian Authority, and national symbol of the Palestinian cause. This was the man who had overseen the revival of the Palestinian political and national identity, and who held a certain iconic status even for his most bitter Palestinian critics.

From the outset, there was a refusal to believe that such a "great man" could have died a squalid, mundane death. For many, his ending had to be heroic and romantic. He must have been assassinated. Anything less wouldn't do justice to his mythological, larger-than-life status. As early as November 2004, Palestinian journalist Maher Ibrahim wrote in the Dubai-based newspaper Al-Bayan, "Israeli Radiation Poisoning Killed President Yasser Arafat." A Palestinian grocer, Terry Atta, reflected public sentiment that has been widespread since Arafat's death when he recently told Abu Dhabi's The National newspaper, "We all knew it was poisoning."

As with the endless theories about "who killed JFK," the Arafat murder conspiracy theories reflect a natural human tendency to protect the mythic and the iconic from the prosaic: How could a giant like John F. Kennedy have simply been shot by a pathetic loser like Lee Harvey Oswald? Counterintuitively, narratives about grand conspiracies are reassuring, while random twists of fate can be deeply unsettling: Is reality really so terrifyingly arbitrary?"

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine] 

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/05/arafatuous?page=full

Al Jazeera's new investigation into the not-so-mysterious death of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat is little more than baseless speculation.

A Palestinian youth walks next to a mural depicting late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in the northern West Bank village of Kabatyeh, Wednesday, July 4, 2012. Arabic text quotes a famous idiom meaning "We are holding to our promise." (AP Photo/Mohammed Ballas)