AIPAC Doesn’t Win or Lose. Its Purpose Is to “Be There” for Pro-Israel Americans

A version of this article appeared in Tablet Magazine, March 4, 2013.

It was a called a crushing defeat for AIPAC on Capitol Hill.

A full year AIPAC toiled to block the sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia. AIPAC had a “4-D” strategy to “debate, delay, delink (from the sale of weapons to Israel) and, if all else failed, defeat.” The sale was vetoed 301-111 on October 14, 1981 in the House of Representatives, but it still had to go to the Senate.

While the AWACS aircraft with its massive radar dome was a very high-profile defensive weapon, it wasn’t the real target of that 1981-82 legislative campaign. The F-15 aircraft and air-to-air missiles were certainly more lethal. But more important than all, after the fall of the pro-American (and locally unpopular) Shah of Iran in 1979, the Reagan Administration sought to pivot and establish Saudi Arabia as the “pillar” of American policy in the Middle East. The AWACS, really meant originally for Iran, was the bow on top of a pile of American goodies like F-15s, refueling planes, a new navy, airbases, and more. Selling to the oil rich kingdom meant that the Defense Department could amortize its own purchases of the high-cost gizmos and weapons systems. And Saudi oil revenue would be sent back and spent in the United States.

The sale represented a new American policy. Saudi Arabia – not Khomeini’s Iran, and certainly not Israel – was to be the darling of American policy-makers. The case for Saudi Arabia and the AWACS sale was actually made in the previous administration. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served in the previous term as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, had argued that Israel was not a strategic ally of the United States, and AIPAC had to make the case that the autocratic, corrupt and corrupting Saudi Arabia wasn’t either. Saudi Prince Bandar, a racquetball partner of Colin Powell, was provided an office on Capitol Hill by one of the Republican Senate leaders so that he could make the rounds of offices with ease. One Saudi lobbyist, a long-time Washington veteran who once served in the Kennedy White House, coined the slogan “Reagan or [Menachem] Begin,” attempting to challenge the patriotism of anyone who opposed the sale.

Saudi AWACs craft

The slogan was ironic; the Israeli opposition to the weapons sale was lackluster. One senior Israeli air force officer belittled the AWACS as a “flying bus.” Yitzhak Rabin, who had been cozy with Henry Kissinger and learned much from the statesman when he was ambassador in Washington, was never happy with American citizens, including American Jews, being involved in foreign policy. He preferred to work out arrangements with U.S. Administrations when it came to arms sales – sometimes based on “one for them and two for me.”

AIPAC testified in Congress that the sale – and the pro-Saudi shift in policy – was bad for America and bad for the Middle East. On occasion, AIPAC didn’t even raise the argument that the sale would also endanger Israel.


Prince Bandar and President
Reagan in Oval Office

 But the sale finally passed in the Senate 52-48 on October 28, 1981 when President Reagan applied the full weight of the White House’s power, supported by the “Arab Lobby,” which included arms manufacturers, oil companies, and Arab registered foreign agents/lobbyists. Another irony of the battle: some of those who accused AIPAC, a domestic lobby, of being Israeli agents – Sen. William Fulbright comes to mind – later had to register as Saudi foreign agents.

Yes, the AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia was perceived as a major AIPAC loss. The senior staff at AIPAC certainly felt like it was that day when we dragged ourselves back to the office after the Senate vote and shared a cry in a side office.

Today, looking back at that sale in 1981, at events since and at the recent Senate confirmation of Chuck Hagel, neither the AWACS sale nor the Hagel appointment should be placed in AIPAC’s loss column.

Just days after the AWACS vote, the State Department’s legislative office called AIPAC’s lobbyists to request their assistance in gathering support for passage of the Foreign Aid Bill in which many countries and foreign programs were included. It has been an axiom on Capitol Hill for decades that “Israel is the engine that pulls the Foreign Aid bill through Congress” and that AIPAC is an important ally for Administrations.

After the bruising AWACS fight, it was years before an Administration attempted such an unjustifiable sale again. Saudi Arabia never became the pillar of U.S. policy, and by 2001 the U.S. Administration had to work overtime to shield the kingdom from embarrassing facts about the 9/11 attacks.

I doubt AIPAC’s leadership ever sat down and wrote out rules that it learned from the AWACS battle. But 30 years later these lessons were internalized, at least by me:

• Washington campaigns should be about policies, not personalities.

• Congress represents the American public’s sentiment, and that sentiment is strongly pro-Israel.

• Administrations, and their “realist” advisors, often worry more about “interests.” I cannot think of one president who has not clashed with Israel or its American supporters over his perception of American “interests.” Those interests include oil, American arms sales, Israeli arms sales, territories, etc. 

Si Kenen (left) and the author (1970s)

 • AIPAC’s founder, Si Kenen, once told me decades ago, “Administrations come and go; Congress is constant.” He also reflected on the election cycle and cautioned, “In Washington, even-numbered years (run-ups to U.S. elections) are pro-Israel; odd-numbered years (after an election, such as 2013) are pro-Arab.

• Pyrrhic victories for one side – which the Hagel’s nomination will turn out to be – does not always translate to a loss for the other side.

One writer who I admire recently wrote AIPAC lost the battle “to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.” Well, despite the calumnies of the Washington Elders of Anti-Zion that he mentions (Baker, Brzezinski, Gates, et al), AIPAC possesses no ICBMs, squadrons of F-15s or submarines which can destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. But it can, does and has pushed in Congress for stronger sanctions and for larger Israeli military aid packages, often against Administration preferences.

As AIPAC convenes in Washington with tens of thousands of pro-Israel Americans of all ages, religions, colors, and political affiliations it is wrong to view it as a winner or a loser. Citizen activists at the AIPAC meeting will meet with virtually every member of Congress. AIPAC plays predominately in the congressional arena, the arena that belongs to the American public, the political activists and the voters. It’s the arena where all who play and compete are winners.

The author worked for AIPAC in Washington and Jerusalem from 1972-1997. He was in charge of the public relations campaign during the AWACS debate.

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Israel's Elections 2013 and a Lesson from 2001: For Every Political Remedy There Is Probably an Ill

The 2012 Israeli elections revealed several flaws in the political system including the dictatorial power of some party leaders to single-handedly choose his/her slate of party candidates and the ability of special interests to stack party primary votes.

Reprinted below is a Jerusalem Post article from 2001 on the weaknesses and potential dangers of political primaries.  The article is as relevant today as it was in 2001.

I Plead Guilty

By Lenny Ben-David

Tuesday, January 16, 2001 -- Justice Minister Yossi Beilin's accusation was only half in jest: "Lenny's responsible for the election system we have today."

In my diplomatic capacity in Washington last year (2000), I was escorting the minister and his aides to a meeting with US Attorney General Janet Reno. As we stopped along the way for a coffee, Beilin made the charge. I knew what Beilin was talking about, but his aides were puzzled. Next came the explanation.

About 10 years ago, Labor MK Avraham Burg called and asked if I could brief him and several colleagues on the workings of the American primary system. I had served with an American Jewish organization since 1972 in Washington and Jerusalem, and US election-watching was an important part of my work.

Burg received me at the Knesset and escorted me to a table in the members' dining room. I was as surprised as others in the room when I saw the other MKs gathered for the private briefing: Yossi Beilin and Binyamin Netanyahu. Strange bedfellows.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick - she knew
35 years ago

As I recall today, I briefed the ambitious politicians on the growth of primaries in the US as the preferred method of parties choosing their presidential candidates. Gone were the days of the "smoke-filled rooms" of party hacks and veteran politicians who chose their party's favorite. But I issued a stern warning as I gave them a monograph written in 1978 by a then-relatively unknown political scientist, Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick.

"Primaries can kill political parties," I cautioned as they took Dismantling the Parties, Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition.

Kirkpatrick was clearly disappointed by the Democratic Party's choice of senator George McGovern in 1972 and governor Jimmy Carter in 1976. A less photogenic candidate such as senator Henry Jackson would probably have been her preference as the Democratic candidate.

There were several underlined passages in the monograph I distributed:

"Carter's campaign was a striking manifestation of the new politics, one demonstrating that a candidate without standing as a national party leader could move through the nominating process to victory without either the support of the leadership or a powerful ideological appeal or an issue constituency.

"The functions of the parties were being progressively assumed by government, public-relations firms, professional campaign consultants, and candidate organizations.

"Primaries tend to personalize politics by focusing attention... on individuals who compete not as their parties' nominees but as persons with distinctive characteristics. Because the competing candidates often share most ideological orientations, personal attributes such as appearance, style, and wit attain new importance."

INDEED, sitting before me were three young, hungry politicians with their cool, telegenic, and articulate "appearance, style, and wit." Standing in their way in their parties' power structure were politicians 25 and 30 years older.

One of Kirkpatrick's warnings rings true even after 22 years and from a distance of 10,000 kilometers. "Because candidates can go directly to the voters in search of the nomination," she wrote, "primaries permit candidates as well as delegates to be selected without having ever served an apprenticeship in the party, without ever being... socialized by the party.

"In addition," Kirkpatrick continued, "the absence of any role for party organizations encourages a focus on personality and at the same time communicates to voters and activists alike a sense of the party's irrelevance to this most important decision process."

Israel's adoption of a primary system could similarly lead to the decline of the major political parties, I warned Burg, Netanyahu, and Beilin. Burg's response was a gleeful talmudic term accompanied by the required twist of a talmudist's thumb upward, "ipcha mistabra" [The opposite reasoning makes more sense].

The three embarked on their political paths. They were soon joined by a handful of IDF generals, political neophytes who parachuted into the political fray. Together they instituted primaries, replaced party functionaries with outside political consultants, and effectively crippled their own political parties.

Today, just weeks away from new elections under the old-new rules, Israel's political body will be considering another change in the way we elect our prime minister and Knesset. Caution is required. Kirkpatrick's closing words of her study on political reform are worth repeating: "It is a basic article of faith... that for every ill there is a remedy; by now experience should have taught that, at least where political institutions are concerned, for every remedy there is probably an ill."

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President Lincoln's Secretary of State Describes Jerusalem in 1871, Attends Friday Night Services at the Hurva Synagogue

William H. Seward (1801-1872)
(Photograph by Mathew Brady)

William H. Seward served as President Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State.  On the night of Lincoln's assassination Seward was attacked in his home by one of Booth's co-conspirators and was seriously wounded. 

But he survived, and in 1871 traveled the world and visited Jerusalem where he described the population, visited the "Wailing Wall," and even participating in Friday night services, apparently at the Hurva synagogue.

His earlier visit to Jerusalem 1859 may have sparked an interest in President Lincoln to visit the Holy Land, evidenced in Mary Todd Lincoln's statement to the pastor presiding at Lincoln's funeral that her husband said "he wanted to visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footprints of the Saviour. He was saying there was no city he so much desired to see as Jerusalem." 

Below are excerpts from Seward's 788-page book Travels around the World. The text below is interspersed with my comments:

June 13, 1871--"Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may tell it to the generation following."  [Psalms]

We have done so, and we have found it neither a short nor an easy promenade. The city occupies two ridges of a mountain promontory, with the depression or valley between them. The walls of the modern Turkish city have been so contracted with the decrease of the population, as to exclude large portions of the, ancient city. Jerusalem is now divided according to its different classes of population. The Mohammedans are four thousand, and occupy the northeast quarter, including the whole area of the Mosque of Omar. The Jews are eight thousand, and have the southeast quarter. These two quarters overhang the Valley of Jehoshaphat and the brook Kedron. The Armenians number eighteen hundred, and have the southwest quarter; and the other Christians, amounting to twenty-two hundred, have the northwest quarter, which overlooks the Valley of Hinnom.... [Emphasis added. Note the Jewish population was double any other group in the Old City.]

The Jews throughout the world, not merely as pilgrims, but in anticipation of death, come here to be buried, by the side of the graves of their ancestors. As we sat on the deck of our steamer, coming from Alexandria to Jaffa, we remarked a family whom we supposed to be Germans. It consisted of a plainly-dressed man, with a wife who was ill, and two children--one of them an infant in its cradle. The sufferings of the sick woman, and her effort to maintain a cheerful hope, interested us. The husband, seeing this, addressed us in English. Mr. Seward asked if he were an English man. He answered that he was an American Jew, that he had come from New Orleans, and was going to Jerusalem.

We parted with them on the steamer. The day after we reached the Holy City we learned that the poor woman had climbed the mountain with her husband and children, and arrived the day after us. She died immediately, and so achieved the design of her pilgrimage. She was buried in this cemetery [on the Mt. of Olives]. She was a Jewess, and, according to the Jewish interpretation of the prophecies, the Jew that dies in Jerusalem will certainly rise in paradise.

June 15th.--"And the name of the city from that day shall be, the LORD is there."

Our last day at Jerusalem has been spent, as it ought to have been, among and with the Jews, who were the builders and founders of the city, and who cling the closer to it for its disasters and desolation. We have mentioned that the Jewish quarter adjoins, on the southeast, the high wall of the Haram [The Haram el-Sharif, or Temple Mount]. This wall is a close one, while the upper part, like all the Turkish walls of the city, is built of small stone. The base of this portion of the wall, enclosing the Mosque of Omar, and the site of the ancient temple, consists of five tiers of massive, accurately-bevelled blocks. It is impossible to resist the impression at first view, notwithstanding the prophecy, that this is a portion of the wall of the Temple of Solomon, which was hewn in the quarries and set up in its place without the noise of the hammer and the axe. So at least the Jews believe.

 For centuries (we do not know how many) the Turkish rulers have allowed the oppressed and exiled Jews the privilege of gathering at the foot of this wall one day in every week, and pouring out their lamentations over the fall of their beloved city, and praying for its restoration to the Lord, who promised, in giving its name, that he would "be there." [Seward reports that Jews were permitted access to the Wall only one day a week, Friday.]

The Jewish sabbath being on Saturday, and beginning at sunset on Friday, the weekly wail of the Jews under the wall takes place on Friday, and is a preparation for the rest and worship of the day which they are commanded to "keep holy." The small rectangular oblong area, without roof or canopy, serves for the gathering of the whole remnant of the Jewish nation in Jerusalem. Here, whether it rains or shines, they come together at an early hour, old and young, men, women, and little children--the poor and the rich, in their best costumes, discordant as the diverse nations from which they come.

Illustration from Seward's book.

They are attended by their rabbis, each bringing the carefully-preserved and elaborately-bound text of the book of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, either in their respective languages, or in the original Hebrew. For many hours they pour forth their complaints, reading and reciting the poetic language of the prophet, beating their hands against the wall, and bathing the stones with their kisses and tears. It is no mere formal ceremony. During the several hours while we were spectators of it, there was not one act of irreverence or indifference. Only those who have seen the solemn prayer-meeting of a religious revival, held by some evangelical denomination at home, can have a true idea of the solemnity and depth of the profound grief and pious feeling exhibited by this strange assembly on so strange an occasion, although no ritual in the Catholic, Greek, or Episcopal Church is conducted with more solemnity and propriety.

Though we supposed our party unobserved, we had scarcely left the place, when a meek, gentle Jew, in a long, plain brown dress, his light, glossy hair falling in ringlets on either side of his face, came to us, and, respectfully accosting Mr. Seward, expressed a desire that he would visit the new synagogue, where the Sabbath service was about to open at sunset. Mr. Seward assented.

An Old City synagogue, similar to the one described by
Seward (circa 1900)

A crowd of "the peculiar people" attended and showed us the way to the new house of prayer, which we are informed was recently built by a rich countryman of our own whose name we did not learn. It is called the American Synagogue. [The description is of the Hurva Synagogue; the nearby domed Tiferet Synagogue was not inaugurated until 1873. The writer is apparently mistaken about the American donor.  The most likely foreign philanthropist to have been credited with building the Hurva is Moses Montefiore of England or Alphonse or Edmund de Rothschild of France.]  It is a very lofty edifice, surmounted by a circular dome. Just underneath it a circular gallery is devoted exclusively to the women.

Aisles run between the rows of columns which support the gallery and dome. On the plain stone pavement, rows of movable, wooden benches with backs are free to all who come. At the side of the synagogue, opposite the door, is an elevated desk on a platform accessible only by movable steps, and resembling more a pulpit than a chancel. It was adorned with red-damask curtains, and behind them a Hebrew inscription. Directly in the centre of the room, between the door and this platform, is a dais six feet high and ten feet square, surrounded by a brass railing, carpeted; and containing cushioned seats. We assume that this dais, high above the heads of the worshippers, and on the same elevation with the platform appropriated to prayer, is assigned to the rabbis.

We took seats on one of the benches against the wall; presently an elderly person, speaking English imperfectly, invited Mr. Seward to change his seat; he hesitated, but, on being informed by Mr. Finkelstein that the person who gave the invitation was the president of the synagogue, Mr. Seward rose, and the whole party, accompanying him, were conducted up the steps and were comfortably seated on the dais, in the "chief seat in the synagogue." On this dais was a tall, branching, silver candlestick with seven arms. [Pinchas Rosenberg, the Imperial Court tailor of St Petersburg donated a silver candlestick in 1866.]

The congregation now gathered in, the women filling the gallery, and the men, in varied costumes, and wearing hats of all shapes and colors, sitting or standing as they pleased. The lighting of many silver lamps, judiciously arranged, gave notice that the sixth day's sun had set, and that the holy day had begun. Instantly, the worshippers, all standing, and as many as could turning to the wall, began the utterance of prayer, bending backward and forward, repeating the words in a chanting tone, which each read from a book, in a low voice like the reciting of prayers after the clergyman in the Episcopal service. It seemed to us a service without prescribed form or order.

When it had continued some time, thinking that Mr. Seward might be impatient to leave, the chief men requested that he would remain a few moments, until a prayer should be offered for the President of the United States, and another for himself. Now a remarkable rabbi, clad in a long, rich, flowing sacerdotal dress, walked up the aisle; a table was lifted from the floor to the platform, and, by a steep ladder which was held by two assistant priests, the rabbi ascended the platform. A large folio Hebrew manuscript was laid on the table before him, and he recited with marked intonation, in clear falsetto, a prayer, in which he was joined by the assistants reading from the same manuscript. We were at first uncertain whether this was a psalm or a prayer, but we remembered that all the Hebrew prayers are expressed in a tone which rises above the recitative and approaches melody, so that a candidate for the priesthood is always required to have a musical voice.

At the close of the reading, the rabbi came to Mr. Seward and informed him that it was a prayer for the President of the United States, and a thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Union from its rebellious assailants. Then came a second; it was in Hebrew and intoned, but the rabbi informed us that it was a prayer of gratitude for Mr. Seward's visit to the Jews at Jerusalem, for his health, for his safe return to his native land, and a long, happy life. The rabbi now descended, and it was evident that the service was at an end.

Coming down from the dais, we were met by a band of musicians playing on drums, fifes, and violins. We questioned whether this music was a part of the service of the synagogue, but our doubt was removed when we found it accompanying us to the gate of our hotel. The Jews, in their dispersion, are understood to be forbidden the use of musical instruments in worship. Their chants of praise are the traditional songs of Israel, just as the Christians, who have succeeded them, prefer, to all other devotional hymns, the Psalms of David.

A pleasant dinner ensued with the United States consul and his accomplished wife… [end of excerpt.]

After his dinner with the American Consul General, Seward and his party left Jerusalem the next day for Damascus, Beirut and European capitals. He returned to the U.S. in October and died the following year. His travelogue was published posthumously by his son in 1873.


Seward’s account of his encounter with the Jewish community in Jerusalem 140 years ago is an important addition to the history of American involvement with the Jews of Palestine. American ties to a Jewish homeland predates Israel’s founding in 1948 and even the formal establishment of the political Zionist movement in the 1880s. The relatively large population of Jews in Jerusalem Seward discovered in 1871 is testimony to the age-old Jewish dedication to Jerusalem.

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For the Palestinians’ sake, it’s time to kill off Arafat

Arafat and Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini

A version appeared in The Times of Israel

There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.  – Miracle Max, “The Princess Bride”

Yasser Arafat was poisoned in 2004 with polonium, a dangerous radioactive substance, a Swiss laboratory concluded and Al Jazeera reported this week. Arafat’s wife, Suha, literally went through his clothes and underwear to find loose change to prove her husband was poisoned. Now she has called on the Palestinian Authority to exhume her husband’s body from the mausoleum in Ramallah.

What is her motive? She told Al Jazeera she seeks to enhance Arafat’s “great legacy. [This will] glorify more his legacy, will get people to go more into his footsteps, not giving up the land….But his legacy…will be more and more as a great leader from our century, one of the great leaders of all the world. This will intensify this down-to-earth, lovable, humble person.”

Such a eulogy is surely expected from a wife who, according to some reports, absconded with hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money deposited in the Palestinian accounts to which she had signing powers.

But make no mistake. Yasser Arafat was a murderous, genocidal, diabolical, duplicitous sexual deviant who died at the age of 75. He was despised by Arab and Israeli alike. Syria’s Hafez Assad tried to jail him. King Hussein of Jordan once said of Arafat, “He never came to a bridge he didn’t double-cross.” And Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak considered him a cur.

Arafat and his forces fleeing Beirut in August 1982 under the
watchful eye of the Israel Defense Forces and U.S. Marines
(Photo credit: Lenny Ben-David)

On August 30, 1982, I stood on the roof of a warehouse in Beirut port in a forward IDF position and watched the evacuation of Arafat and his fighters. Firing volleys of victory “fantasia” rounds into the air, the terrorists drove past U.S. Marine sentries protecting their departure. From our perch, meter-long camera lenses recorded every face, so it’s easy to believe the reports that Israeli snipers had Arafat in their cross-hairs. But Prime Minister Begin reportedly gave the order for the snipers to stand down. Over the years of intifadas and suicide bombings I often regretted his decision.

In the rogues gallery of the 21st Century, he certainly ranks with Osama Bin Laden for pure malevolence and blood thirst.

Lest we forget, the body lying in the elaborate Ramallah crypt belonged to an evil man who commanded brigades of terrorists that mowed down or blew up thousands of innocent civilians in Israel and across Europe. He ordered the murder of Israel’s Olympic athletes in 1972. In 1973, he gave the orders to execute three diplomats (two American, one Belgian) in Khartoum, Sudan. He ordered the massacres of Christians in Lebanon. He mocked the United Nations when he showed up with a pistol on his hip in 1974. He embraced Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution in 1979. And he was behind the massive arms smuggling attempt on board the Karin A in 2002.

When it came to the peace process, he spoke with a venomous forked tongue, beguiling gullible Westerners with promises of peace while inciting jihad against the Jews in his Arabic declarations. His promises to cancel the genocidal “Palestinian Charter” were never carried out.

I was in the auditorium in Cairo in 1994 when Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin were supposed to sign the Oslo II Accords under President Hosni Mubarak’s sponsorship. Arafat pretended to put his signature on the document, but an observant Israeli team saw that he had faked it. “Ya kalb!” (“You dog”), Mubarak shouted, and he demanded that Arafat come back and sign.

Yasser Arafat during a pilgrimage to Mecca (photo credit: The Palestinian Authority via Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash 90)

Is this the legacy of a “great leader?” Or is this the next myth the Palestinian people want to perpetuate, along with the Nakba, the UNRWA-perpetuating tale of millions of refugees, and the denial of Jewish ties to Eretz Yisrael? (Arafat, after all, told President Bill Clinton that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.)
Murder by poison is as legendary as it gets (Socrates, Napoleon, and Snow White come to mind), especially since polonium can only be produced in an advanced radioactive research center. Russia used the poison to kill a dissident six years ago.
Less romantic and mythical, however, is the more likely cause of Arafat’s death – AIDS.

Arafat’s sexual proclivities have been an open secret for years. The former head of Rumanian intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa , disclosed in his book “Red Horizons,” that one of his officers reported, “the ‘Fedayee’ [Arafat’s code name] is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He’s playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena.”

In an in-depth 1976 biography of Arafat, writer Thomas Kiernan chronicled the life of a young Arafat in Cairo. When Arafat discovered his girlfriend, Jinan al-Oraby, was friendly with the daughters of the Harkabis, an Egyptian Jewish family, he arranged for the murder of their father. When Jinan expressed sorrow for her friends, “Yasser went into a rage… he proceeded to beat me, tearing my clothes off…he threw himself on me… He tried to penetrate me, but he could not do so. This made him even more irrational.”

Kiernan also relates Arafat’s relationship with a boy, Ahmed, whose parents ended up on the Israeli side of the border after the 1948 war. An associate of Arafat’s related, “Yasser tried to get the boy to publicly denounce his parents…Yasser really loved the boy. He was delicate, sensitive, like a flower. He was very much a part of Yasser’s inner circle – four of five boys who lived in the same place, and well, you can imagine what I mean.”

Kiernan continued: Arafat held a “kind of formal hearing for the boy” because of his refusal to denounce his parents. “Arafat sobbed and sobbed as [a young associate] proceeded to castrate the boy. The next day the boy was dead.”

After Arafat’s death, his personal physician admitted in a TV interview that his patient died of AIDS.

Today, Suha Arafat and the Palestinian leadership are demanding an international tribunal to investigate Arafat’s death comparable to the tribunal established after the bombing death of Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri.

Their worship of Arafat as a hero and martyr reflects just how delusional Suha and some members of the Palestinian leadership have become.

The chemical element polonium was discovered and named by Marie Curie in honor of her country of origin, Poland. But perhaps it should be named for Polonius of “Hamlet” fame who could look at Suha’s attempt to lionize Arafat and warn, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

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Today is Bobby Kennedy's Yahrzeit

Who knew the young Kennedy was a reporter in Palestine in 1948?

I discovered his amazing reports and published them here.
RFK actually drove in the convoys to Jerusalem, and whenever I see a picture of the convoys I search for him. His Boston Post reporting was very pro-Jewish State ("Israel" was not named at that point), and, like a good Kennedy, he wasn’t fond of the Brits.

In Jerusalem in 1948 and holding an imaginary (David's) slingshot.

Biographer Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Joe Kennedy was unhappy his son took the trip. Neither was his girl friend who dropped him. But later RFK married her sister Ethel, and the kids credit Israel for the shiddach.

Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen, once told me “People don’t realize my father was killed by a Palestinian terrorist because of his support for Israel.”

As for his motive, assassin Sirhan Sirhan cited Kennedy’s support for Phantom jets for Israel. He committed the murder on the first anniversary of the Six Day War.

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