Robert Fisk‘s latest piece focuses on Yasser Arafat and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. Included are such snippets as how Arafat “no longer wore socks, how he had a habit of picking loose skin from his feet during interviews, how the lavatories smelled.”
Just as nauseating is how Fisk effectively whitewashes Arafat’s bloody history of terror.
But what catches my eye is the following (emphasis added):
Then this month, when the scientists reported on the high level of polonium found in Arafat’s body, it [talk of “poison”] started again. Perhaps it came, one interviewer suggested to me, in the depleted uranium shells the Israelis had fired at Arafat’s headquarters when he was trapped inside. Problem. According to my enquiries at the time, the Israelis had no depleted uranium shells in their ordnance inventory. That doesn’t mean they haven’t used them in other locations. But not at Ramallah.
Back in October 2006, Fisk was given the front page of the UK’s Independent to spread the libel that Israel had used uranium-based weapons in southern Lebanon. The charge was swiftly debunked yet Fisk and the Independent have never, to this day, retracted this libel.
Fisk still seems to be stringing along the story, despite the evidence, that Israel has used depleted uranium weaponry. Even after it is confirmed to him that no such weaponry is in IDF usage, Fisk still implies that these figments of his imagination have been deployed somewhere.
When will Robert Fisk give up his Israeli uranium charge?
