Yasser Arafat. Photo: World Economic Forum.

JNS.org – Senior Palestinian Authority and Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub has claimed that the U.S. was involved in the death of former PA President Yasser Arafat.

“It’s obvious that Israel wasn’t alone [in poisoning Arafat]; the U.S. was there. That fool known as [George W.] Bush took away Yasser Arafat’s protection and gave [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon the green light to liquidate Yasser Arafat,” Rajoub recently said on a Palestinian Authority TV (PA TV) broadcast, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported Wednesday.

Arafat died in Paris in 2004 at age 75 from a massive stroke, according to French doctors. Yet many in the Arab world have claimed that Jews or Israelis poisoned Arafat, which according to PMW is a “libel”  frequently featured on PA TV.

“It’s not surprising that the PA would like to present the U.S. as co-conspirator in the so-called poisoning of Arafat, because inciting hatred against the U.S. is a consistent PA policy over many years,” Itamar Marcus, director of PMW, told JNS.org.

Marcus pointed to several expressions of anti-American sentiment in the PA media that will be included in an upcoming PMW report, including an Oct. 31 op-ed in the official PA newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, that stated, “The truth is that we hate America, but [we] treat it with friendship; we hate anyone who gets close to it, but we rush in to secretly knock on its doors; we burn its flag every time we are enraged, but apologize to it [America] for the actions of youth who are unaware of its stature; we call it ‘Satan’, but make pilgrimages to it; our blood boils when we hear it speak about human rights, but we ask it to treat us with patience.” Additionally, a PA TV broadcast this fall claimed the U.S. based its “fable of a ‘War on Terror'” on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which became “the excuse for Washington’s increasing interference in many of the world’s nations’ affairs.”