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Return of the Terrorist: The Crimes of Ariel Sharon
In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty", or the
Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".
Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".
Return of the Terrorist
The Crimes
of Ariel Sharon
Some incorrigible optimists have suggested that only a right-wing extremist of the notoriety of Likud leader Ariel Sharon will have the credentials to broker any sort of lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Maybe so. History is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon?
Sharon's history offers a monochromatic record of moral corruption, with a documented record of war crimes going back to the early 1950s. He was born in 1928 and as a young man joined the Haganah, the underground military organization of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he
was given command of Unit 101, whose mission is often described as that of retaliation against Arab attacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, one of them very well known, Unit 101's purpose was that of instilling terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence not only on able bodied fighters but on the young, the old, the helpless.
Sharon's first documented sortie in this role was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 101 unit records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs were thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".
In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty", or the
Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was
revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses."
The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshhold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).
According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the
neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.
And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel's Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza "clearances" were vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January 21 of this year.
"Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favourite to win Israel's forthcoming election, was the head of the Israel Defence Forces' southern command, charged with the task of 'pacifying' the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well. Especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international community to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation Army.
"'They came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red paint,' said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. 'In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat people, can you imagine? Soldiers with guns, beating little kids!' By the time the Israeli army's work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel."
As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City".
Israeli complacency leading to their initial defeat by the Egyptians in the 1973 war was in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability of the "Bar Lev line" constructed by Sharon on the east bank of the Suez canal. The Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.
In 1981 Sharon, then minister of defense, paid a visit to Israel's good friend, President Mobutu of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu's yacht the Israeli party was asked by their host to use their good offices to get the US Congress to be more forthcoming with aid. This the Israelis managed to accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic relations with Israel. This was not Sharon's only contact with Africa. Among friends he relays fond memories of trips to Angola to observe and advise the South African forces then fighting in support of the murderous CIA stooge Jonas Savimbi.
As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government, Sharon was the commander who led the full dress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the express design of destroying the PLO, driving as many Palestinians as possible to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state of Israel. It was a war plan that cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli soldiers. The Israelis bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also oversaw the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered and a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. However, the Middle East may have been spared worse, thanks to Menachem Begin. Just as the '82 war was getting under way, Sharon approached Begin, then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over Israel's nuclear trigger to him. Begin had just enough sense to refuse.
The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatilla took place from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israel Defense Forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.
An official Israeli commission of inquiry - chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court - investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret until now).
Amid desperate attempts to cover up the evidence of direct knowledge of what was going on by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan Commission found itself compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated: "It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of" would have been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed [i.e."eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the
non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged". (For those who want to refresh their memories of Operation Peace for Galilee, of the massacres and the Kahan coverup we recommend Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle.)
Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.
Sharon's career was in eclipse, but he continued to burnish his credentials as a Likud ultra. Sharon has always been against any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely impossible for Palestinians to accept. As Nehemia Strasler outlined in Ha'aretz on January 18 of this year, in 1979, as a member of Begin's cabinet, he voted against a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops to the
so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993 he voted No in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the way in which the withdrawal from southern Lebanon was conducted.
As Begin's minister of agriculture in the late 1970s he established many of the West Bank settlements that are now a major obstruction to any peace deal. His present position? Not another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state on the existing areas presently under either total or partial Palestinian control, amounting to merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will retain control of the highways across the West Bank and the water sources. All settlements will stay in place with access by the IDF to them. Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty and he plans to continue building around the city. The Golan heights would remain under Israel's control.
It can be strongly argued that Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. For example: Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned settlements and
building around Jerusalem. It was Labor's Ehud Barak who okayed the military escort for Sharon on his provocative sortie that sparked the second Intifada and Barak who has overseen the lethal military repression of recent months. But that doesn't diminish Sharon's sinister shadow across the past half century. That shadow is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving for the dead, the maimed, the displaced, or by
a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Sharon recently when he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheva. "I think you sent my father into Lebanon", Ilil said. "Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime minister".
Ilil was wrong. He's there. And now the bloodbath will begin. CP
The Crimes
of Ariel Sharon
Some incorrigible optimists have suggested that only a right-wing extremist of the notoriety of Likud leader Ariel Sharon will have the credentials to broker any sort of lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Maybe so. History is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon?
Sharon's history offers a monochromatic record of moral corruption, with a documented record of war crimes going back to the early 1950s. He was born in 1928 and as a young man joined the Haganah, the underground military organization of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he
was given command of Unit 101, whose mission is often described as that of retaliation against Arab attacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, one of them very well known, Unit 101's purpose was that of instilling terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence not only on able bodied fighters but on the young, the old, the helpless.
Sharon's first documented sortie in this role was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 101 unit records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs were thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".
In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty", or the
Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was
revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses."
The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshhold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).
According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the
neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.
And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel's Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza "clearances" were vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January 21 of this year.
"Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favourite to win Israel's forthcoming election, was the head of the Israel Defence Forces' southern command, charged with the task of 'pacifying' the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well. Especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international community to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation Army.
"'They came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red paint,' said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. 'In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat people, can you imagine? Soldiers with guns, beating little kids!' By the time the Israeli army's work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel."
As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City".
Israeli complacency leading to their initial defeat by the Egyptians in the 1973 war was in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability of the "Bar Lev line" constructed by Sharon on the east bank of the Suez canal. The Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.
In 1981 Sharon, then minister of defense, paid a visit to Israel's good friend, President Mobutu of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu's yacht the Israeli party was asked by their host to use their good offices to get the US Congress to be more forthcoming with aid. This the Israelis managed to accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic relations with Israel. This was not Sharon's only contact with Africa. Among friends he relays fond memories of trips to Angola to observe and advise the South African forces then fighting in support of the murderous CIA stooge Jonas Savimbi.
As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government, Sharon was the commander who led the full dress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the express design of destroying the PLO, driving as many Palestinians as possible to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state of Israel. It was a war plan that cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli soldiers. The Israelis bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also oversaw the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered and a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. However, the Middle East may have been spared worse, thanks to Menachem Begin. Just as the '82 war was getting under way, Sharon approached Begin, then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over Israel's nuclear trigger to him. Begin had just enough sense to refuse.
The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatilla took place from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israel Defense Forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.
An official Israeli commission of inquiry - chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court - investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret until now).
Amid desperate attempts to cover up the evidence of direct knowledge of what was going on by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan Commission found itself compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated: "It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of" would have been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed [i.e."eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the
non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged". (For those who want to refresh their memories of Operation Peace for Galilee, of the massacres and the Kahan coverup we recommend Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle.)
Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.
Sharon's career was in eclipse, but he continued to burnish his credentials as a Likud ultra. Sharon has always been against any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely impossible for Palestinians to accept. As Nehemia Strasler outlined in Ha'aretz on January 18 of this year, in 1979, as a member of Begin's cabinet, he voted against a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops to the
so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993 he voted No in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the way in which the withdrawal from southern Lebanon was conducted.
As Begin's minister of agriculture in the late 1970s he established many of the West Bank settlements that are now a major obstruction to any peace deal. His present position? Not another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state on the existing areas presently under either total or partial Palestinian control, amounting to merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will retain control of the highways across the West Bank and the water sources. All settlements will stay in place with access by the IDF to them. Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty and he plans to continue building around the city. The Golan heights would remain under Israel's control.
It can be strongly argued that Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. For example: Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned settlements and
building around Jerusalem. It was Labor's Ehud Barak who okayed the military escort for Sharon on his provocative sortie that sparked the second Intifada and Barak who has overseen the lethal military repression of recent months. But that doesn't diminish Sharon's sinister shadow across the past half century. That shadow is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving for the dead, the maimed, the displaced, or by
a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Sharon recently when he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheva. "I think you sent my father into Lebanon", Ilil said. "Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime minister".
Ilil was wrong. He's there. And now the bloodbath will begin. CP
For more information:
http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon.html
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And we wonder silently and aloud why there is a "conflict". Wonder no more, folks. That this evil madman is still around, still killing and destroying as he has been from day one is very hard to accept.
So, Scottie, how do you like the headnote of this post? I'm not the only one calling this war criminal by his real title - terrorist.
So, Scottie, how do you like the headnote of this post? I'm not the only one calling this war criminal by his real title - terrorist.
Furthermore, angie, I am NOT a fan of ariel sharon. He's an asshole. ANd if you would analyze this israel-palestine stuff in REALISTIC fashion, I'd agree with you a lot. But you EXAGGEARATE in such STUPID and biased fashion that you cause me to wind up defending sharon. Sharon is an asshole, but he's not hitler, he's not "why there's conflict," he's not 50 other things. The fact is, about what, 2000 palestinians have died in their 3 year intifada? If you do the math, that's 1.8 palestinians dead per day. YOUR LOCAL POLICE DEPARTMENT probably kills that many people, provided you live in LA or NYC or chicago or something. Hardly Hitler, who ROUNDED UP millions and proceeded to exterminate them.
If ariel sharon is a "killing machine" then I guess he's really LOUSY at what he does, because not a lot of people are being killed.
Again, I will be totally honest here when I say that I'm NOT a fan of ariel sharon. BUt your idiotic exaggerations force me to at least try to drag you back into the realm of REALITY, something you don't seem to be a fan of.
Signed "hi" and "ugh"
If ariel sharon is a "killing machine" then I guess he's really LOUSY at what he does, because not a lot of people are being killed.
Again, I will be totally honest here when I say that I'm NOT a fan of ariel sharon. BUt your idiotic exaggerations force me to at least try to drag you back into the realm of REALITY, something you don't seem to be a fan of.
Signed "hi" and "ugh"
To my knowledge Sharon was never "out of office". Even when he was "reprimanded" after the Kahan inquiry, he refused to go quietly into the night.
But, lads - I always think of you as multiple personalities - really! Why don't you drop a line to Counterpunch. These good folk wrote the article.
Actually they haven't said anything that we've not been hearing about, reading about for years.
Yes, I can well imagine if Sharon decided to kill 50 or 60,000 Palestinians a day too! He'd get away with it in 2003? l think not. No, it's much easier to do it a couple here, a handful there, isolate their villages into enclaves, bring in the "settlers"..
Would you mind telling all of us why we should forget about the massacre at Sabra and Shatila?
Israel was hunting down war criminals for over fifty yeas and no doubt still are. Or in your warped mind are you the only people who matter?
I think not.
As for casting aspirations on my intellect, well, guys (I think of you as multiple personalties, remember) all you're doing is coming over here on the board as being very intellectually challenged yourself.
Although I suppose I'd miss your rants, Hi et al, having now become accustomed to them. Whenever I send off a note re "the conflict", there you are, pouncing.
Ye'ah, I'd kind of miss you if you weren' t here, my lad!
But, lads - I always think of you as multiple personalities - really! Why don't you drop a line to Counterpunch. These good folk wrote the article.
Actually they haven't said anything that we've not been hearing about, reading about for years.
Yes, I can well imagine if Sharon decided to kill 50 or 60,000 Palestinians a day too! He'd get away with it in 2003? l think not. No, it's much easier to do it a couple here, a handful there, isolate their villages into enclaves, bring in the "settlers"..
Would you mind telling all of us why we should forget about the massacre at Sabra and Shatila?
Israel was hunting down war criminals for over fifty yeas and no doubt still are. Or in your warped mind are you the only people who matter?
I think not.
As for casting aspirations on my intellect, well, guys (I think of you as multiple personalties, remember) all you're doing is coming over here on the board as being very intellectually challenged yourself.
Although I suppose I'd miss your rants, Hi et al, having now become accustomed to them. Whenever I send off a note re "the conflict", there you are, pouncing.
Ye'ah, I'd kind of miss you if you weren' t here, my lad!
Yes, I can well imagine if Sharon decided to kill 50 or 60,000 Palestinians a day too! He'd get away with it in 2003? l think not.
Hmm lots of other countries get away with it ...
Interesting no?
Hmm lots of other countries get away with it ...
Interesting no?
Name ONE COUNTRY wherein 50 to 60,000 people have been killed in one day? I doubt that even in Rwanda were 700,000 or so killed in a day. Over a period of time, yes, but God, above, and this is an example of your self professed intellect??
Hi
Thanks Hi.. good luck with whatever you will be busy doing.
Angie
i wasnt reading your post all that closely and I just assumed ou meant the literal "from 50 people to 60,000 people" both of which are much more than 2 people... (feel free to add the extra zeros if you want to be clearer).
It would be easy to find somwhere where 50 people died in a day. However what is your point?
Thanks Hi.. good luck with whatever you will be busy doing.
Angie
i wasnt reading your post all that closely and I just assumed ou meant the literal "from 50 people to 60,000 people" both of which are much more than 2 people... (feel free to add the extra zeros if you want to be clearer).
It would be easy to find somwhere where 50 people died in a day. However what is your point?
Since the Bush administration has articulated a Mideast policy predicated on fighting terrorism, examining the pedigree of Ariel Sharon, Bush's "man of peace," is a task that requires some attention.
And what you find is a man drenched in blood.
Qibya is a small West Bank village not far from the Israeli border. In October, 1953, the Jewish state decided to attack Qibya in revenge for killings by infiltrators whom the Israelis thought might have come from that hamlet. Sharon was chosen to lead the mission.
Noted Israeli historian Benny Morris has unearthed the order Sharon gave his troops: "maximal killing and damage to property."[1]
And maximal killing is what Sharon and his commando unit brought to Qibya on the night of October 14, 1953. Their attack left 70 dead.
The Arab Legion investigated and determined that the Israelis had moved from house to house "systematically killing" the residents before blowing up their homes.[2] This account, Morris says, is corroborated by Israel Defense Forces post-operational reports, which describe breaking into most of the houses and "clearing them" with fire and grenades.[3]
A United Nations report suggests an even more grisly sequence: "Bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses," the document says, "indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them."[4]
Commander E.H. Hutchison, a U.S. naval officer serving on the U.N. armistice monitoring commission, investigated the slaughter. "Here and there from between the rocks," he wrote, "you could see a tiny hand or foot protruding."[5]
Every fall in Qibya during the olive harvesting season, the memory of the attack is kept alive in a mourning ceremony. A memorial plaque behind the village mosque honors Sharon's victims.[6]
Sharon later claimed he thought the villagers had fled, leaving the houses empty.
This isn't possible, historian Morris concludes. Rather, the Israeli troops "in moving through the village, had indiscriminately thrown grenades through windows, knocked down doors, and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire."[7]
Maximal killing indeed.
Sharon later described his order for "maximal killing" as referring only to the Jordanian military then controlling the West Bank. "Of course, this is misleading nonsense," is Morris' retort. "The order was to kill as many Arabs as possible, without any discrimination between civilians, National Guardsmen, and soldiers."[8]
Morris observes that prior Israeli retaliatory strikes, like this one, were explicitly designed to kill civilians.[9]
Now, Benny Morris is no fan of the Palestinians. He's a committed Zionist who lately has taken to co-authoring commentaries with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.[10]
And Qibya was no aberration for Ariel Sharon. A 1985 Israeli biography, Sharon: An Israeli Caesar by Uzi Benziman,[11] describes two earlier incidents in which Sharon honed his murderous instincts.
He killed two women from the Arab village of Katama in order to induce a Jordanian military response.[12] Later, in a raid on the el-Burj refugee camp, his plan called for trapping the Palestinians in a lethal crossfire between two groups of soldiers.
The plan worked: 15 refugees were killed.[13]
Benziman, the biographer, describes Sharon's consistently sadistic behavior toward Arabs: His men "witnessed him laughing as a junior officer tormented an old Arab and then shot him at close range; they noted his composure as he planned operations designed to kill as many civilians as possible; they carried out his intricate plan to trap a peaceful Bedouin boy shepherding his flock."[14]
On another occasion, Sharon censured a junior officer for failing to kill two elderly Arabs encountered during a raid.[15]
Such censure wasn't often necessary, though, because Sharon's soldiers--like their leader--had come to view the Arabs, as a whole, as the enemy.[16]
The culmination of Sharon's vision was Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when he was Minister of Defense. Over 20,000 people--overwhelmingly civilians--died.[17]
In the most gruesome episode of that ghastly affair, Israeli troops, having encircled the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, stood by as Lebanese Phalangists spent 40 hours massacring the inhabitants.[18]
Israel says 700-800 died,[19] but an investigation by Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk suggests the toll was 3000-3500.[20]
According to Benziman, Israeli army intelligence knew of the slaughter shortly after it started. They didn't bother to stop the killing.[21]
Ariel Sharon is a man defined by his contempt for the value of Arab life, his absolute trust in military force, and his vision of peace through annihilation.
Maximal killing.
Indeed.
1. Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 259. The Qibya affair is extensively discussed on pp. 257-276.
2. Morris, p. 261.
3. Morris, p. 262.
4. Morris, p. 261, note 91.
5. Morris, p. 261, note 91.
6. Flore de Préneuf, "An Eye for an Eye," Salon.com, February 6, 2001.
7. Morris, p. 262.
8. Morris, p. 259, note 87.
9. Morris, p. 259, note 86.
10. See Benny Morris, Camp David and After: An Exchange (An Interview with Ehud Barak), The New York Review of Books, June 13, 2002; and Benny Morris and Ehud Barak, Camp David and After--Continued, The New York Review of Books, June 27, 2002.
11. London: Robson Books, 1987. First published in 1985 by Adam Publishers in Tel Aviv. Benziman, who was then an editor at the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, writes, as does Morris, as a firm supporter of Israel.
12. Benziman, p. 39.
13. Benziman, p. 49.
14. Benziman, pp. 56-57.
15. Benziman, p. 73.
16. Benziman, p. 56.
17. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, Boston: South End Press, 1999 updated ed., p. 221 (as of late December, 19,085 had been killed, 84% of them civilians, according to Lebanese police). Since this figure included only bodies that passed through hospitals and other centers, the true total must be much higher. Chomsky, p. 223.
18. For extensive information, see the International Campaign for Justice for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila.
19. See the report of Israel's Kahan Commission.
20. See Amnon Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatila: Inquiry into a Massacre, Belmont, MA: AAUG Inc., 1984.
21. Benziman, p. 264.
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The above is from Robin C. Miller who is a tireless researcher for a semblence of truth on behalf of the oppressed.
Here is her site:
http://www.robincmiller.com/index2.htm
Here is her site:
http://www.robincmiller.com/index2.htm
Numbers Numbers….
For Numbers to mean something they have to be compared with something else…
A Ratio of the Number of People killed since the intifada Began in Sept. of 2000
Number Killed from sites:
http://www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ia50
Israeli Victims 824 up to June 1, 2003
http://www.palestinercs.org/Database/Date/
Palestinian Victims 2422 up to August 3, 2003
Approx…………..Approx…………….Approx
Israeli……………Palestinian…………U.S. Pop. 2000 Census
5,000,000………..4,000.000…………..281,422,000
824 as of 6-1-03…2422 as of 8-3-03
as compared to U.S. Population it would be as if
for Israelis 46,300 deaths
for Palestinians 170,400 deaths
The U.S. went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of around 3000 deaths in the WTC 9-11 attack can you imagine if the numbers were 170,400 and we wonder why the Palestinians are fighting for their land and Freedom…..
To end all these atrocities we need a Palestinian State Now...
The Road Map has many flaws and unless the flaws are addressed it will probably fail
For a Possible Solution:
CLICK HERE > http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=311985&group=webcast
For Numbers to mean something they have to be compared with something else…
A Ratio of the Number of People killed since the intifada Began in Sept. of 2000
Number Killed from sites:
http://www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ia50
Israeli Victims 824 up to June 1, 2003
http://www.palestinercs.org/Database/Date/
Palestinian Victims 2422 up to August 3, 2003
Approx…………..Approx…………….Approx
Israeli……………Palestinian…………U.S. Pop. 2000 Census
5,000,000………..4,000.000…………..281,422,000
824 as of 6-1-03…2422 as of 8-3-03
as compared to U.S. Population it would be as if
for Israelis 46,300 deaths
for Palestinians 170,400 deaths
The U.S. went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of around 3000 deaths in the WTC 9-11 attack can you imagine if the numbers were 170,400 and we wonder why the Palestinians are fighting for their land and Freedom…..
To end all these atrocities we need a Palestinian State Now...
The Road Map has many flaws and unless the flaws are addressed it will probably fail
For a Possible Solution:
CLICK HERE > http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=311985&group=webcast
Ariel Sharon is no war criminal! Cruelty is something that is unknown to the Israeli Defence Forces!
Shooting missiles into refugee camps, torturing prisoners, shooting children and destroying homes with their inhabitants still inside are not atrocities, they are standard Zionist policy! You have no right to criticize our murderous actions or our fuhrer Ariel Sharon who's hands are stained with the blood of tens of thousands of women, men, and children! He's not Arab, he is a proud Zionist! Therefore, whatever atrocities he commits are OK, and completely justified!
Israel is always attacked! Israel is always persecuted! Our occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is a brave measure of heroic self-sacrifice! We sacrifice our Jewish religion and customs to satisfy our Zionist ambitions. Not content to have our own homeland, we deprive the Palestian people of everything they have, and chase them into refugee camps and neighboring Arab countries which despise them as much as we do. We murder their children when they challenge our tanks which occupy their homes in spite of every UN resolution ever passed. We shoot missiles into refugee camps because of the possibility that from these places of squalor and poverty there may have emerged someone who took a potshot at one of our soldiers or settlers. We beat our prisoners and deprive them of food, punishing many of them for crimes that settlers and the IDF are allowed to commit everyday.
Our current leader Ariel Sharon is a war criminal, who continues his apartheid policies against all Palestinian people.
But you must remember, we are Zionists! Unlike everyone else, we are justified in our atrocities.
If you don't agree with us, then we will label you a terrorist or an antisemite( although many Jews shudder when looking at the things we do).
And if you get any more directly in our way, we will run you down with a bulldozer.
Heil Sharon!
- A concerned Zionist
Shooting missiles into refugee camps, torturing prisoners, shooting children and destroying homes with their inhabitants still inside are not atrocities, they are standard Zionist policy! You have no right to criticize our murderous actions or our fuhrer Ariel Sharon who's hands are stained with the blood of tens of thousands of women, men, and children! He's not Arab, he is a proud Zionist! Therefore, whatever atrocities he commits are OK, and completely justified!
Israel is always attacked! Israel is always persecuted! Our occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is a brave measure of heroic self-sacrifice! We sacrifice our Jewish religion and customs to satisfy our Zionist ambitions. Not content to have our own homeland, we deprive the Palestian people of everything they have, and chase them into refugee camps and neighboring Arab countries which despise them as much as we do. We murder their children when they challenge our tanks which occupy their homes in spite of every UN resolution ever passed. We shoot missiles into refugee camps because of the possibility that from these places of squalor and poverty there may have emerged someone who took a potshot at one of our soldiers or settlers. We beat our prisoners and deprive them of food, punishing many of them for crimes that settlers and the IDF are allowed to commit everyday.
Our current leader Ariel Sharon is a war criminal, who continues his apartheid policies against all Palestinian people.
But you must remember, we are Zionists! Unlike everyone else, we are justified in our atrocities.
If you don't agree with us, then we will label you a terrorist or an antisemite( although many Jews shudder when looking at the things we do).
And if you get any more directly in our way, we will run you down with a bulldozer.
Heil Sharon!
- A concerned Zionist
I've already seen these figures on Pal-Indy, where Angel had been posting until it was knocked off the web.
The real atrocities are terroristic attacks carried out by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades where innocents like chidren and babies are shot in their beds - also by snipers, or homicidal suicide bombers blow themselves up amid innocent crowds going unsuspectingly about their business.
These terrorists are erroneously considered freedom fighters yet are Nazi-like murderers whose primary objective is to murder as many Jews as possible IRRESPECTIVE of gaining "Palestinian" independence. The Hamas and Jihad have explicitly said as much many times.
First we need to end these atrocities, stop "Palestinian" hate incitement, get rid of all the "Palestinian" terrorists and their infrastructure, collect all the illegally possessed and unregistered weapons in the disputed territories; then we could think about establishing a Palestinian state...in Jordan.
Of course the "Palestinian" casualties are higher but that doesn't imply any atrocity.
Moreover, Israel has almost always kept the rate of "Palestinian" non-combatant casualties to the minimum possible (compare this to any other county in the world who has or is struggling against terror, including the US in Afghanistan).
I've already explained this to Angel a few weeks ago on Pal-Indy but he/she evidently coundn't care less, unfortunately.
>>>"we wonder why the Palestinians are fighting for their land and Freedom….. "<<<
Which land are they fighting exactly to gain independence in? Only the disputed terrirories, or also Israel proper? What makes Angel sure they are fighting only for "freedom" in the disputed territories alone?
>>>"The Road Map has many flaws and unless the flaws are addressed it will probably fail "<<<
I agree it's flawed but the main problem is the US is insisting only Israel actually make overtures as confidence building measures (released 334 "Palestinian" prisoners yesterday) along with adhering to the Roadmap, while it does not simultaneously insist the "Palestinians" crack down on the terror originating from their ranks. That's why the Roadmap will undoubtedly fail, just as all the preceding peace plans.
The real atrocities are terroristic attacks carried out by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades where innocents like chidren and babies are shot in their beds - also by snipers, or homicidal suicide bombers blow themselves up amid innocent crowds going unsuspectingly about their business.
These terrorists are erroneously considered freedom fighters yet are Nazi-like murderers whose primary objective is to murder as many Jews as possible IRRESPECTIVE of gaining "Palestinian" independence. The Hamas and Jihad have explicitly said as much many times.
First we need to end these atrocities, stop "Palestinian" hate incitement, get rid of all the "Palestinian" terrorists and their infrastructure, collect all the illegally possessed and unregistered weapons in the disputed territories; then we could think about establishing a Palestinian state...in Jordan.
Of course the "Palestinian" casualties are higher but that doesn't imply any atrocity.
Moreover, Israel has almost always kept the rate of "Palestinian" non-combatant casualties to the minimum possible (compare this to any other county in the world who has or is struggling against terror, including the US in Afghanistan).
I've already explained this to Angel a few weeks ago on Pal-Indy but he/she evidently coundn't care less, unfortunately.
>>>"we wonder why the Palestinians are fighting for their land and Freedom….. "<<<
Which land are they fighting exactly to gain independence in? Only the disputed terrirories, or also Israel proper? What makes Angel sure they are fighting only for "freedom" in the disputed territories alone?
>>>"The Road Map has many flaws and unless the flaws are addressed it will probably fail "<<<
I agree it's flawed but the main problem is the US is insisting only Israel actually make overtures as confidence building measures (released 334 "Palestinian" prisoners yesterday) along with adhering to the Roadmap, while it does not simultaneously insist the "Palestinians" crack down on the terror originating from their ranks. That's why the Roadmap will undoubtedly fail, just as all the preceding peace plans.
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