Exalting Sharon: A Dire Case of Collective Amnesia - by Ramzy Baroud: "January 21, 2006 | by Ramzy Baroud
The mainstream media’s lionizing and exalting of the fatally ill Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could only be compared to that of great men and women of past years.
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Sharon’s disregard for civilian lives, since his early years as a fighter for the Jewish underground terrorist organization, the Haganah (1948-49) and his role as commander of an infamous army unit responsible for several massacres (most remembered is the brutal murder of 69 defenseless villagers in Qibya in 1953) seemed an extraneous nuisance.
Also to be dropped from the narrative was the list of relentless war crimes which took place throughout the 1950’s-60’s (during Israel’s wars with Egypt), late 70’s (during his bloody reign in Gaza), the 80’s (his contemptible war and massacres in Lebanon) and most recently with the advent of the Second Palestinian Uprising in September 2000, one that he provoked and antagonized through his misguided policy of assassination. Since his election to serve as Israel’s Prime Minister in 2001, Sharon supplemented his notorious resume with the abolition of several thousand Palestinian lives.
Some US newspapers admitted, although reluctantly, that Palestinians indeed "perceive" Sharon as a war criminal who has wrought untold hurt and misery. But as always, war crimes committed against Palestinians are never the same as those committed against others, especially when the perpetrator is Israel. Palestinian suffering lacks that needed universality – unlike Israeli victims of Palestinian suicide bombings – thus it can easily be brushed aside, without a shred of guilt and without much remorse.
Despite a memory dotted with numerous massacres, never once has an Israeli leader or official seen his day in an international court. To the contrary, the vilest of Israel’s war criminals have been darlings of Western governments and have been influential players in US foreign policy. Only by comparing this to how Palestinian terrorism, even legitimate resistance is perceived, can one begin to appreciate the treachery of it all. ...
Irish Anti-War Movement - Ariel Sharon: Butcher of Beirut, not a man of peace: "
The media is presenting critically ill Israeli leader Ariel Sharon as a ‘peacemaker’, but Palestinian Fatima Helou looks at his brutal record
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Then a neighbour screamed, "Sharon is here, Sharon is here. We have seen him at the sports stadium."
I did not know who Sharon was at the time, but his name filled all Palestinians with fear. In August 1953 his elite forces raided the al-Bureig refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and killed up to 50 refugees. In October of that year he organised another massacre, this time of 69 civilians in the West Bank village of Qibya.
His soldiers would often slaughter people they captured.
During the 1967 war he executed over 100 Palestinian prisoners. Now he was leading the charge by the Israeli army into Lebanon. In September 1982 he reached our camp. ... All night we could hear the sound of death around us as family after family were killed in their homes.
My brothers fled to the Gaza hospital on the edge of the camp hoping to find refuge. My mother and I found refuge in the mosque. My father decided to hide in the house.
Militiamen discovered us and marched us out of the camp. It was then that we saw the Israeli soldiers. They taunted us....
Irish Anti-War Movement - Ariel Sharon: Butcher of Beirut, not a man of peace: "
The media is presenting critically ill Israeli leader Ariel Sharon as a ‘peacemaker’, but Palestinian Fatima Helou looks at his brutal record
...
Then a neighbour screamed, "Sharon is here, Sharon is here. We have seen him at the sports stadium."
I did not know who Sharon was at the time, but his name filled all Palestinians with fear. In August 1953 his elite forces raided the al-Bureig refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and killed up to 50 refugees. In October of that year he organised another massacre, this time of 69 civilians in the West Bank village of Qibya.
His soldiers would often slaughter people they captured.
During the 1967 war he executed over 100 Palestinian prisoners. Now he was leading the charge by the Israeli army into Lebanon. In September 1982 he reached our camp. ... All night we could hear the sound of death around us as family after family were killed in their homes.
My brothers fled to the Gaza hospital on the edge of the camp hoping to find refuge. My mother and I found refuge in the mosque. My father decided to hide in the house. Militiamen discovered us and marched us out of the camp. It was then that we saw the Israeli soldiers. They taunted us....
The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon: "The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon | The 'man of courage and peace' story ignores his bloody and ruthless past | By Saree Makdis
01/07/06 'Los Angeles Times' -- -- As Ariel Sharon's career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as 'a man of courage and peace' who had generated 'hopes for a far-reaching accord' with an electoral campaign promising 'to end conflict with the Palestinians.'
From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants — men, women and children — still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air.
As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people — almost all innocent civilians — were killed during his Lebanon adventure.
Sharon's approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn't very different from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations — these were his stock in trade as "a man of courage and peace."
Some may take comfort in the myth that Sharon was transformed into a peacemaker, but in fact he never deviated from his own 1998 call to "run and grab as many hilltops" in the occupied territories as possible. His plan for peace with the Palestinians involved grabbing large portions of the West Bank, ultimately annexing them to Israel, and turning over the shattered, encircled, isolated, disconnected and barren fragments of territory left behind to what only a fool would call a Palestinian state. ...
Ariel Sharon: "Ariel Sharon By Robert Fisk | 01/06/05 ""The Independent""
Israel's Prime Minister was a ruthless military commander responsible for one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century, argues Robert Fisk. President George Bush acclaims Ariel Sharon as 'a man of peace', yet the blood that was shed at Sabra and Chatila remains a stain on the conscience of the Zionist nation. As Sharon lies stricken in his hospital bed, his political career over, how will history judge him?"
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Back on 18 September that same year, Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post and Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television and I had clambered over the piled corpses of Chatila - of raped and eviscerated women and their husbands and children and brothers - and Jenkins, knowing that the Isrealis had sat around the camps for two nights watching this filth, shrieked "Sharon!" in anger and rage. He was right. Sharon it was who sent the Phalange into the camps on the night of 16 September - to hunt for "terrorists", so he claimed at the time.
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Only years later was it proved that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original massacre were interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the murderers to be slaughtered over the coming weeks.
So it is as a war criminal that Sharon will be known forever in the Arab world, through much of the Western world, in fact - save, of course, for the craven men in the White House and the State Department and the Blair Cabinet - as well as many leftist Israelis. Sabra and Chatila was a crime against humanity. ...
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He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel's retreat from Lebanon in 2000. By 2002, he had built 34 new Jewish colonies on Palestinian land.
And he was a man of peace. [... and friend of Bush! ed.]
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n September 2000, Ariel Sharon marched to the Muslim holy places - above the site of the Jewish Temple Mount - accompanied by about a thousand Israeli policemen. Within 24 hours, Israeli snipers opened fire with rifles on Palestinian protesters battling with police in the grounds of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock. At least four were killed and the head of the Israeli police, Yehuda Wilk, later confirmed that snipers had fired into the crowd when Palestinians "were felt to be endangering the lives of officers". Sixty-six Palestinians were wounded, most of them by rubber-coated steel bullets. The killings came almost exactly 10 years after armed Israeli police killed 19 Palestinian demonstrators and wounded another 140 in an incident at exactly the same spot, a slaughter that almost lost the United States its Arab support in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War.
Sharon showed no remorse. "The state of Israel," he told CNN, "cannot afford that an Israeli citizen will not be able to visit part of his country, not to speak for the holiest for the Jewish people all around the world." He did not, however, explain why he should have chosen this moment - immediately after the collapse of the "peace process" - to undertake such a provocative act. ...
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Sharon's ability to scorn the Americans was always humiliating for Washington. Before the massacres of 1982, Philip Habib was President Reagan's special representative, his envoy to Beirut increasingly horrified by the ferocity of Sharon's assault on the city. Not long before he died, I asked Habib why he didn't stop the bloodshed. "I could see it," he said. "I told the Israelis they were destroying the city, that they were firing non-stop. They just said they weren't. They said they werent doing that. I called Sharon on the phone. He said it wasnt true. That damned man said to me on the phone that what I saw happening wasn't happening. So I held the telephone out of the window so he could hear the explosions. Then he said to me: 'What kind of conversation is this where you hold a telephone out of a window?'" ...
ISN Security Watch - New evidence in Sharon corruption case: "ISN SECURITY WATCH (Wednesday, 4 January: 15.40 CET) -
Israeli police say they may have uncovered evidence that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s family received US$3 million in illegal campaign contributions, Israeli television reported.
According to the late Tuesday report, Sharon’s family may have received a bribe from Australian billionaire Martin Schlaff in connection with a scandal involving illegal campaign contributions in 1999.
Last month, police officers confiscated mobile phones and laptop computers belonging to members of the Schlaff family in Israel. The family owns stakes in a West Bank casino, news agencies reported, citing official court documents.
“We suspect that there could be proof within Schlaff’s computer data that the sum of US$3 million was transferred to the Sharon family,” police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told reporters.
In November, the prime minister’s son, Omri Sharon, pleaded guilty to charges related to the illegal financing of his father’s 1999 campaign for the leadership of the Likud Party."
