Aryan

This article claims he was born in Jerusalem:
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/1969.cfm

"Israel has ruled out a highly symbolic Jerusalem burial for Arafat whose Palestinian constituency sees the city as Islam's third holiest site and capital of a future Palestinian state. Arafat made clear that he wanted to be buried in Jerusalem, where he was born."

I've always believed he was born in Cairo. The article is wrong, right?

ZFBoxcar

You are correct. He was born in Cairo to Palestinian parents.

The Chap

What? NO!
Surely in a manger in Bethlehem attended by shepherds and three wise men. Well, that's what the BBC and the left wing papers in the UK have been intimating.

__________________
Where's the bloody gin? An army marches on its liver, not its ruddy stomach.

Aryan

Well I say either bury him in Cairo, or the town or village his family came from. Burying him in Jerusalem is purely politically motivated.

Ray

Was he born in Cairo?

Any authentic links?

How come that the news reports are not stating this?

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

Ironduke

Plenty.

Ray

Ironduke,

Thanks.

Julie

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...5E1702,00.html

Arafat 'born in Jerusalem'
From correspondents in Paris
November 16, 2004

THE death certificate issued for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by French authorities last week indicates his place of birth as Jerusalem and not Cairo, officials said today.

Municipal officials at Clamart, the suburb of Paris where Mr Arafat died last Thursday, said they issued the document on the basis of a family record book itself issued by the French foreign ministry in 1996.

The issue is symbolically important because Israel considers Jerusalem as its eternal capital, while Palestinians want to make east Jerusalem, occupied by the Jewish state since 1967, the capital of their promised state.

Mr Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Rawf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussaini, on August 4, 1929.

The official version of his life history records he was born in Jerusalem. However numerous biographers agree that he was, in fact, born in Cairo, where his father, from Gaza, owned a business.

stud.jur

Having researched the topic briefly for an editorial letter, where my thesis was that Arafat was indeed born in Jerusalem, based mostly on the death certificate issued by French authorities, I concluded:

The document was based on a family records book, "livret de famille", which inter alia is used as proof for someones legal competency to get married in France, which Arafat did.

It does not, it seems, as such give any valid confirmation of nationality.

lemontree

Arafat was Egytian. His mother was related to some mufti of Jerusalem.
Arafat was also enrolled in the Egytian army, he was part of the 1956 Suez conflict. He was cofounder of "Fatah", and since PLO was Egytian backed he would have been the ideal choice, being Egyptian himself.
Everything esle is hogwash to make him acceptable to the Palestienians, as one of their own.

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Cheers!...on the rocks!!

stud.jur

Well, in that case the hogwash worked pretty well, don't you think....

My agenda was less to repeat all that than to point out that the french authorities/doctors' death certificate after all probably doesn't alter what is common knowledgde, that he was born in Cairo.

I think there are few serious researchers that truly believed he was born in Jerusalem.

Still, the death certificate that stated otherwise was widely quoted, such as in news.com.

The official French document is not, I take it, part of the "hogwash to make Arafat acceptable."

It merely indicated that he could have been right after all, but as I tried to point out, the source is not reliable qua confirmation of nationality.