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Arafat's world is a revolving plot

ARAFAT, THE MAN AND THE MYTH, by Thomas Kiernan; Norton, 269 pp., $9.95.

By Theodore J. Mellow

When Yasir Arafat was nine, Thomas Kiernan reports in this unflattering biography, his father had the boy's spiritual adviser, an uncle, garroted and hanged because he was teaching Yasir to despise his father.

When Yasir was 15, Kiernan says, his father arranged for the boy's new hero, a leader of young guerrillas, to be murdered by the then chief of anti-British resistance forces.

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Arafat soon followed his father's bloody example. In 1949, when he was 20 years old, he calmly shot to death a young member of his own guerilla band whom he suspected, wrongly it turned out, of treachery. Two years later, in Egypt, Arafat apparently arranged for the murder of a Jew whose only offense had been that he intended to go to Palestine.

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The world of young Arafat, as described by Kiernan, was a primitive, barbaric place where most of the men and boys were involved in plotting against the British, or the Jews, or other Arabs.

In this world of intrigue, Yasir was a strange, moody boy.

His sister thought him dim witted, but in fact he was highly intelligent, possessed of what his family later concluded was a photographic memory.

It was his memory that impressed the illfated uncle and his knowledge of history that endeared him as a teen-ager to the guerrilla leader. They had a homosexual relationship, Kiernan reports, a common diversion among the all-male guerilla fighters.

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Intelligent and unscrupulous, Arafat at one time was on his way to becoming rich as a construction entrepreneur in booming Kuwait. But the Palestinian cause was more important to him, and he was soon among the founders, later the leader of, Fatah, Arabic for “conquest.'

Arafat was adept at taking advantage of wars and inter-Arab rivalries to strengthen his position and he now is the unchallenged chief of the Palestinian resistance.

Kiernan got no cooperation from Arafat but has done a credible reporting job in tracking down his past through relatives and acquaintances. His book does not make Arafat likable, but it makes him a little more understandable.

Theodore J. Mellow heads The Plain Dealer's foreign/national desk.