It is hard to find words adequate to describe the malevolent 40-year career of the world’s longest-reigning terrorist (it began in January 1965), a man who fouled his nest in Jordan, Lebanon, and then in the West Bank and Gaza, a moral monster who fooled the world into thinking he had reformed (remember that Nobel Peace Prize?). Yet his farcical death scene provides perhaps the appropriate coda to an unworthy life.

The mise-en-scene is as preposterous as what came before, only much funnier. First, there is the wife, Suha, a Greek Orthodox who converted to Islam, but who nonetheless continued to observe Christian holidays and now bellows out “Allahu Akbar” as she spends a reputed $100,000 a month living the good life in Paris. Then there are the long-suffering minions, hoping to get their day in the sun, free at last of their irascible, unpredictable, domineering leader. Finally, there are the hapless French politicians, stung by their own stupidity in sending a military plane to Jordan to retrieve Mr. Arafat to Paris, then treating him like royalty (including a courtesy visit by President Chirac), only to find themselves parties to his death-bed antics. Here are some of the specifics; as they say, you couldn’t make this stuff up. On November 7, French foreign minister Michel Barnier told the LCI TV channel that Mr. Arafat was alive, but “I would say he is in a state that is very complicated, very serious, and stable at the time we are speaking.” Asked if Mr. Arafat was already dead, Mr. Barnier memorably answered: “I wouldn’t say that.” The foreign minister of a major country, supposedly a serious man, has satisfyingly been made to look like an idiot.

What Mr. Arafat might be dying of has been conspicuously not mentioned, leading to many speculations. Of course, some Palestinian Arabs have hatched a conspiracy theory about Israel poisoning Mr. Arafat. The PLO’s news service, WAFA, with a straight face demands an inquiry into the exact manner of his poisoning. “We have the right to know the type, the source of the poison as well as the antidote, and how to get it,” writes WAFA’s political editor. Meanwhile, the Israelis, when not lying low, give out that Mr. Arafat is “clinically dead.” Then there is this unique paragraph of Steven Erlanger in the New York Times:

Mr. Arafat’s condition was described as unchanged by a spokesman for the French military hospital in Paris where Mr. Arafat is variously said to be in an irreversible coma, a reversible coma, or no coma at all. The rumor of Saturday was that Mr. Arafat had sat up and waved at his doctors; the latest rumor on Sunday is that he has suffered liver failure – denied by Mr. [Nabil] Shaath – and is being kept alive on machines while his aides and his wife fight over his burial place and his bank accounts.

The allusion to a “fight over his burial place and his bank accounts”? There is widespread suspicion that Suha and her allies are pretending Mr. Arafat is still alive so that they have time to tussle with the Israeli authorities over getting him buried in Jerusalem and also plunder Mr. Arafat’s bank accounts, reputed to contain billions of dollars. A “senior Palestinian banker” is quoted noting that Mr. Arafat alone knows the numbers of his secret accounts and these could well accompany him to the grave. “If the numbers die with him, then the Swiss bankers and other bankers worldwide will be rubbing their hands in glee.”

To the prospect of Mr. Arafat forever gracing the Holy City, Israel’s justice minister Tommy Lapid said on November 5, in perhaps the best one-liner of the whole sordid affair, that Mr. Arafat “will not be buried in Jerusalem because Jerusalem is the city where Jewish kings are buried and not Arab terrorists.”

When four of Mr. Arafat’s flunkies, including Ahmed Qurei, his make-believe “prime minister,” no longer could bear Suha’s capricious ways, they announced a trip to Paris to hear directly from the doctors on the state of the great man’s health. Suha responded viciously, calling up Al Jazeera TV early on November 8 and accusing the quartet of engaging in a “conspiracy” against Mr. Arafat. “Let it be known to the honest people of Palestine that a gang of would-be inheritors are coming to Paris,” she screamed in a segment Al Jazeera aired repeatedly. Using Mr. Arafat’s nom de guerre, she warned: “You have to understand the scope of this conspiracy. I tell you, they are trying to bury alive Abu Ammar.” She also added for good measure, “He is all right and he is going home.”

To this, the flunkies replied by calling Suha “evil” and a “madwoman,” and went anyway. Suha’s stock response is “Every beautiful flower ends up surrounded by weeds.”

To make matters even more interesting, rumors have swirled around Mr. Arafat’s military hospital that he twice refused to speak to Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO’s no. 2, by telephone and instead has on the quiet made Farouq Kaddumi his successor. Who, you might ask, is Farouq Kaddumi? Mr. Erlanger explains that he is a founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization “who rejected the Oslo accords and refused to return with Mr. Arafat to the West Bank and Gaza. He still lives in Tunis, where he retains the title of P.L.O. foreign minister, despite the fact that Mr. Shaath holds the Palestinian Authority’s title of minister for external affairs.”

Got that? The farce is complete, and Mr. Arafat will die as wretchedly as he lived.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of “Miniatures” (Transaction Publishers).