Via Jamie Kirchick, who as a columnist for the New York Blade must find it especially amusing that he's being called a "gay-basher" in the TNR comments section:

A leading Palestinian “resistance” figure has confirmed what many suspected all along: Yasser Arafat died of AIDS.

In an interview with Hizballah's Al-Manar TV earlier this month, Ahmad Jibril, founder and leader of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, revealed a shocking conversation he recently had with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his staff.

Hardly shocking. Edward Said always said -- out of print, anyway -- that Arafat was gay, and we have Orianna Fallaci's famed interview with the PLO leader, whose entourage she described as something out of a Nordic Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. Of course, this matters not at all unless (or until) Hamas seizes on it to try and further discredit Fatah as a corrupt, kufir outfit founded by a queer. And the Stalinoid left, trying to forge an alliance with "revolutionary" Islamism, takes up the mantle it wields so well, of painting its enemies and heretics sexual perverts.