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Is Marwan Barghouti right to run?
Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian resistance leader imprisoned by Israel, has caused an uproar by reversing his earlier decision not to run for president of the Palestinian Authority.
Barghouti may not be able to run on the Fatah ticket after the movement picked Mahmoud Abbas as its sole candidate in an opaque process. However, Barghouti has the right to run as an individual and as one of a handful of Palestinians widely-known enough in the occupied territories to make the election a serious contest, his candidacy can only benefit democracy. He must obviously be aware that he may be breaking Fatah rules, and he must be equally prepared to face the consequences. If there is any validity to the claim that the Palestinian Authority intends to run democratic elections then everyone ought to welcome Barghouti's candidacy.
Barghouti may not be able to run on the Fatah ticket after the movement picked Mahmoud Abbas as its sole candidate in an opaque process. However, Barghouti has the right to run as an individual and as one of a handful of Palestinians widely-known enough in the occupied territories to make the election a serious contest, his candidacy can only benefit democracy. He must obviously be aware that he may be breaking Fatah rules, and he must be equally prepared to face the consequences. If there is any validity to the claim that the Palestinian Authority intends to run democratic elections then everyone ought to welcome Barghouti's candidacy.
Unfortunately, though, Barghouti's candidacy has provoked some very negative reactions that cast serious doubt on the sincerity of those who have long been calling on the Palestinians to speed up democratization and reform as a way to advance the peace process. These attitudes indicate that many of those calls were simply a cover for inaction and fear of confronting the true obstacle to regional peace: Israel.
Hatem Abdul Qader, a Palestinian official, was quoted saying that "we would do our utmost to persuade Barghouthi to withdraw his candidacy to avoid a split in Fatah." Another, Al Tayyeb Abdul Rahim, described Barghouthi's candidacy as "an irresponsible step, odd, difficult to understand and stands contrary to Fatah traditions of exercising unity." Even President Mubarak of Egypt chimed in, claiming that "Barghouti's decision to run has damaged Palestinian unity." He added that the candidacy will split Palestinians at a time when there "should be one voice and no differences at a time when we need to stay clear of differences."
The American people were "split" into almost two equal halves in the latest presidential elections, and we did not hear anyone blaming the candidates for splitting the American people at a time when America badly needs "one voice." Most democratic elections split people sometimes to the extent that winners secure their victory by a fraction of one percent of the vote, but they win and their countries stay in one piece. Sometimes elections produce unsatisfying results, offering no clear mandate to any of the competing parties. This is the basic nature of democracy and such problems are not reasons for abandoning it. The whole point is to provide a way to manage differences not eliminate them.
The Palestinians have two options. The first is a free and fair election that provides a geniune choice and in which the people, and no one else, decide the outcome. Palestinians are fortunate that with Marwan Barghouti, Mustafa Barghouti (a highly-respected leader and Marwan's distant cousin, who represents the opposition Palestinian National Initiative), as well as several others, all candidates, there could be a real contest. A fair election requires the PA not to misuse its apparatus to unfairly skew the election, and that Israel not interfere.
The second option is to put empty slogans about "Palestinian unity," or even "Fatah unity" before the interests of the Palestinian people at a time when those interests are under unprecedented threat.
It is obvious that all the calls for "unity," as well as Palestinian officials' anger at Barghouthi's decision are no more than a veil to disguise a pre-planned deal to have Mahmoud Abbas succeed Yasser Arafat. That seems to be the most convenient arrangement to protect the interests of the Oslo party, as well as the peace process operators who naively or opportunistically believe that the selection of Abbas will open the way for a settlement, albeit on Israeli terms. It also suits Israel, which expects Abbas to end the Intifada unconditionally and further lower the ceiling of Palestinian demands. While the Israelis would take that as an enormous additional gain they would also never allow any movement beyond that point towards actual peace based on a just resolution to the conflict.
So why bother with all this talk about democracy and elections? Fatah has already chosen Mahmoud Abbas. The international peace process industry has already declared that Abbas is the right "moderate" to lead the Palestinians. Fatah, as the "ruling party" in the Palestinian non-state acts as if it has the final word and should not be challenged. We have already heard sarcastic remarks about a 99.9 percent vote result for Abbas addressed to one PA official. But long-time PA official Yasser Abed Rabbo denied that this figure was the target. "Something around eighty percent would be sufficient," he told the BBC Arabic Service.
Actually, only in the worst dictatorships does the "unity" candidate who is the "one voice" of the nation win with 99 percent of the vote. Saddam Hussein claimed to have won his last presidential election by such a majority, as have a number of other Arab leaders, including those who offer Palestinians their advice.
Is this the model the PA wants to follow and is it on such grounds that it deserved so much support and Marwan Barghouthi so much condemnation?
As the West Bank head of the Fatah organization, Barghouti's association with strong arm tactics during the Oslo period undermined his popular support from middle class Palestinians, but recent polls show him running ahead of Abbas, an indication that his active leadership in the resistance gained him widespread grassroots credibility that few other Palestinian figures can match. Some Palestinians, who might not support Barghouti if he were free, see great symbolism in a potential victory for him when he is behind Israeli bars. For Israel, Barghouti is the head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a resistance organization that switched to suicide attacks inside Israel following Israel's assassination of regional leader Raed Karmi in January 2001, though Israel has never been able to prove Barghouti's personal involvement in such attacks which escalated in the months after his capture.
It is viciously hypocritical to call for Palestinian democracy and then seek to deny the people the right to choose the person they see fit to lead them. Let the Palestinians in the occupied territories decide whether they see Barghouthi as one of their national heroes who struggled bravely against the occupation and never feared the personal consequences or whether they consider him no more than an "irresponsible" spoiler of Fatah's sacred unity.
What indeed is irresponsible, odd and difficult to understand is for any Palestinian to be treated in this cruel manner not by his Israeli persecutors but by his own comrades. Marwan Barghouti is castigated not when he lives among his comrades but when he is serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for "crimes" he ostensibly committed defending his people and land while others were basking in the privileges, false prestige and wealth they traded for the rights and dignity of their people.
Ambassador Hasan Abu Nimah is former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. Ali Abunimah is co-founder of the The Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3408.shtml
Hatem Abdul Qader, a Palestinian official, was quoted saying that "we would do our utmost to persuade Barghouthi to withdraw his candidacy to avoid a split in Fatah." Another, Al Tayyeb Abdul Rahim, described Barghouthi's candidacy as "an irresponsible step, odd, difficult to understand and stands contrary to Fatah traditions of exercising unity." Even President Mubarak of Egypt chimed in, claiming that "Barghouti's decision to run has damaged Palestinian unity." He added that the candidacy will split Palestinians at a time when there "should be one voice and no differences at a time when we need to stay clear of differences."
The American people were "split" into almost two equal halves in the latest presidential elections, and we did not hear anyone blaming the candidates for splitting the American people at a time when America badly needs "one voice." Most democratic elections split people sometimes to the extent that winners secure their victory by a fraction of one percent of the vote, but they win and their countries stay in one piece. Sometimes elections produce unsatisfying results, offering no clear mandate to any of the competing parties. This is the basic nature of democracy and such problems are not reasons for abandoning it. The whole point is to provide a way to manage differences not eliminate them.
The Palestinians have two options. The first is a free and fair election that provides a geniune choice and in which the people, and no one else, decide the outcome. Palestinians are fortunate that with Marwan Barghouti, Mustafa Barghouti (a highly-respected leader and Marwan's distant cousin, who represents the opposition Palestinian National Initiative), as well as several others, all candidates, there could be a real contest. A fair election requires the PA not to misuse its apparatus to unfairly skew the election, and that Israel not interfere.
The second option is to put empty slogans about "Palestinian unity," or even "Fatah unity" before the interests of the Palestinian people at a time when those interests are under unprecedented threat.
It is obvious that all the calls for "unity," as well as Palestinian officials' anger at Barghouthi's decision are no more than a veil to disguise a pre-planned deal to have Mahmoud Abbas succeed Yasser Arafat. That seems to be the most convenient arrangement to protect the interests of the Oslo party, as well as the peace process operators who naively or opportunistically believe that the selection of Abbas will open the way for a settlement, albeit on Israeli terms. It also suits Israel, which expects Abbas to end the Intifada unconditionally and further lower the ceiling of Palestinian demands. While the Israelis would take that as an enormous additional gain they would also never allow any movement beyond that point towards actual peace based on a just resolution to the conflict.
So why bother with all this talk about democracy and elections? Fatah has already chosen Mahmoud Abbas. The international peace process industry has already declared that Abbas is the right "moderate" to lead the Palestinians. Fatah, as the "ruling party" in the Palestinian non-state acts as if it has the final word and should not be challenged. We have already heard sarcastic remarks about a 99.9 percent vote result for Abbas addressed to one PA official. But long-time PA official Yasser Abed Rabbo denied that this figure was the target. "Something around eighty percent would be sufficient," he told the BBC Arabic Service.
Actually, only in the worst dictatorships does the "unity" candidate who is the "one voice" of the nation win with 99 percent of the vote. Saddam Hussein claimed to have won his last presidential election by such a majority, as have a number of other Arab leaders, including those who offer Palestinians their advice.
Is this the model the PA wants to follow and is it on such grounds that it deserved so much support and Marwan Barghouthi so much condemnation?
As the West Bank head of the Fatah organization, Barghouti's association with strong arm tactics during the Oslo period undermined his popular support from middle class Palestinians, but recent polls show him running ahead of Abbas, an indication that his active leadership in the resistance gained him widespread grassroots credibility that few other Palestinian figures can match. Some Palestinians, who might not support Barghouti if he were free, see great symbolism in a potential victory for him when he is behind Israeli bars. For Israel, Barghouti is the head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a resistance organization that switched to suicide attacks inside Israel following Israel's assassination of regional leader Raed Karmi in January 2001, though Israel has never been able to prove Barghouti's personal involvement in such attacks which escalated in the months after his capture.
It is viciously hypocritical to call for Palestinian democracy and then seek to deny the people the right to choose the person they see fit to lead them. Let the Palestinians in the occupied territories decide whether they see Barghouthi as one of their national heroes who struggled bravely against the occupation and never feared the personal consequences or whether they consider him no more than an "irresponsible" spoiler of Fatah's sacred unity.
What indeed is irresponsible, odd and difficult to understand is for any Palestinian to be treated in this cruel manner not by his Israeli persecutors but by his own comrades. Marwan Barghouti is castigated not when he lives among his comrades but when he is serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for "crimes" he ostensibly committed defending his people and land while others were basking in the privileges, false prestige and wealth they traded for the rights and dignity of their people.
Ambassador Hasan Abu Nimah is former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. Ali Abunimah is co-founder of the The Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3408.shtml
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Who cares if he runs? He's in jail for the rest of his life. If he wins, he's still in jail.
angie, leo, nessie, christ. what do they have in common?
they are all so right, so all knowing. so superior.
maybe they're all the same person.
they are all so right, so all knowing. so superior.
maybe they're all the same person.
He is in jail for fighting for the Freedom of the Palestinian People.
Nelson Mandela was also in jail for fighting for the Freedom of his People in South Africa.
Sometimes very brave People have to spend time in jail.
Nelson Mandela was also in jail for fighting for the Freedom of his People in South Africa.
Sometimes very brave People have to spend time in jail.
Pal, I suspect you know pretty well why he's in prison. If you really happen not to know, do a little research.
Let me ask you though, do you feel planning and ordering the murder of innocent people constitutes a "fight for Freedom"? Please give a direct, simple answer. (Note: Mandela didn't enagage in such acts.)
Let me ask you though, do you feel planning and ordering the murder of innocent people constitutes a "fight for Freedom"? Please give a direct, simple answer. (Note: Mandela didn't enagage in such acts.)
[Pal, I suspect you know pretty well why he's in prison. If you really happen not to know, do a little research.
Let me ask you though, do you feel planning and ordering the murder of innocent people constitutes a "fight for Freedom"? Please give a direct, simple answer. (Note: Mandela didn't enagage in such acts.)]
yes, but Ariel Sharon has, and that hasn't prevented him from being Prime Minister of Israel
--Richard Estes
Let me ask you though, do you feel planning and ordering the murder of innocent people constitutes a "fight for Freedom"? Please give a direct, simple answer. (Note: Mandela didn't enagage in such acts.)]
yes, but Ariel Sharon has, and that hasn't prevented him from being Prime Minister of Israel
--Richard Estes
"Sometimes very brave People have to spend time in jail."
And sometimes terrorist leaders also have to spend time in jail. Hitler did his term in the slammer too.
@%<
And sometimes terrorist leaders also have to spend time in jail. Hitler did his term in the slammer too.
@%<
Claims that Sharon planned and/or ordered the murder of innocents are anti-Israel propaganda and can be easily understood as such when examined in context. Arab lives were lost in the incidents, and Sharon was involved, but the context was a viscious war in which Israel was defending itself from terrorism. The two most commonly cited incidents are the 1953 raid on Qibya and the 1982 Phalange-executed Sabra & Shatila massacre.
An IDF anti-terrorism unit (Unit 101) commanded by Ariel Sharon destroyed much of Qibya during the night of Oct 14-15, '53 killing 69 civilian inhabitants in the process *because they were hiding inside the homes _unbeknownst_ to the Israeli soldiers*.
As for Sabra & Shatila, any honest informed individual should know by know that Sharon hadn't planned and/or ordered this massacre.
An IDF anti-terrorism unit (Unit 101) commanded by Ariel Sharon destroyed much of Qibya during the night of Oct 14-15, '53 killing 69 civilian inhabitants in the process *because they were hiding inside the homes _unbeknownst_ to the Israeli soldiers*.
As for Sabra & Shatila, any honest informed individual should know by know that Sharon hadn't planned and/or ordered this massacre.
[An IDF anti-terrorism unit (Unit 101) commanded by Ariel Sharon destroyed much of Qibya during the night of Oct 14-15, '53 killing 69 civilian inhabitants in the process *because they were hiding inside the homes _unbeknownst_ to the Israeli soldiers*.]
Does anyone really believe this? Even accepting it at face value, one would normally expect the soldiers to check the homes before blowing them up with grenades. But, of course, they didn't want to, because the purpose was to kill the people there.
Here's another account, from an article Alexander Cockburn published in 2001:
{Sharon's first documented sortie as a terrorist was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 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." Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, cited in a petition demanding retribution against Sharon for war crimes, 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 who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: 'One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, 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 October 16, 1953...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 had been 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 neighboring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel. The U.S. Department of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953, expressing its 'deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives' in the Qibya attack as well as the conviction that those responsible 'should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future.'"}
Of course, the idea of brutalities happening "unbeknowst" has a much darker context, one that you would think would cause Sharon and his Zionist supporters to blanch, but apparently not, because it has been invoked in this instance to conceal his conduct.
[As for Sabra & Shatila, any honest informed individual should know by know that Sharon hadn't planned and/or ordered this massacre.]
More from Cockburn:
{As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government, Sharon was the commander who stunned his colleagues by instigating the fulldress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the express design of dispatching all Palestinians to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state. From the vantage point of nearly 20 years we can see it was a war plan that cost untold suffering, many thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over 1000 Israeli soldiers.
Sharon also engendered the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The slaughter in the two contiguous camps took place from 6 at night on Sept. 16, 1982 until 8 in the morning on Sept. 18, in an area until the control of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 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 62hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women) and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.
To cite only one postmassacre eyewitness account, that of U.S. journalist Thomas Friedman of The New York Times: "Mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire."
An official Israeli commission of inquirychaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Courtinvestigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret). The Kahan Commission found 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 the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed 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 nonfulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged."
Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on Feb. 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.}
Finally, Sharon in Gaza during the 1970s:
{Let us move now to 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 Jan. 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 armoured 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 in Wreckage Street but through 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 overcrowded 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."}
No doubt Barghouti and Sharon would have much to discuss if he were elected. When it comes to killing people, Sharon has accomplished a seemingly impossible task: he has killed more people than Barghouti, and gets his Western supporters to either conceal it or excuse it.
--Richard Estes
Does anyone really believe this? Even accepting it at face value, one would normally expect the soldiers to check the homes before blowing them up with grenades. But, of course, they didn't want to, because the purpose was to kill the people there.
Here's another account, from an article Alexander Cockburn published in 2001:
{Sharon's first documented sortie as a terrorist was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 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." Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, cited in a petition demanding retribution against Sharon for war crimes, 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 who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: 'One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, 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 October 16, 1953...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 had been 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 neighboring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel. The U.S. Department of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953, expressing its 'deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives' in the Qibya attack as well as the conviction that those responsible 'should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future.'"}
Of course, the idea of brutalities happening "unbeknowst" has a much darker context, one that you would think would cause Sharon and his Zionist supporters to blanch, but apparently not, because it has been invoked in this instance to conceal his conduct.
[As for Sabra & Shatila, any honest informed individual should know by know that Sharon hadn't planned and/or ordered this massacre.]
More from Cockburn:
{As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government, Sharon was the commander who stunned his colleagues by instigating the fulldress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the express design of dispatching all Palestinians to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state. From the vantage point of nearly 20 years we can see it was a war plan that cost untold suffering, many thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over 1000 Israeli soldiers.
Sharon also engendered the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The slaughter in the two contiguous camps took place from 6 at night on Sept. 16, 1982 until 8 in the morning on Sept. 18, in an area until the control of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 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 62hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women) and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.
To cite only one postmassacre eyewitness account, that of U.S. journalist Thomas Friedman of The New York Times: "Mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire."
An official Israeli commission of inquirychaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Courtinvestigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret). The Kahan Commission found 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 the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed 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 nonfulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged."
Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on Feb. 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.}
Finally, Sharon in Gaza during the 1970s:
{Let us move now to 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 Jan. 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 armoured 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 in Wreckage Street but through 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 overcrowded 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."}
No doubt Barghouti and Sharon would have much to discuss if he were elected. When it comes to killing people, Sharon has accomplished a seemingly impossible task: he has killed more people than Barghouti, and gets his Western supporters to either conceal it or excuse it.
--Richard Estes
"Following its investigation, on 8 February 1983, the Kahan Commission submitted its report. It concluded that direct responsibility rested with the Jemayel Phalangists led by Fadi Frem. Israeli forces were deemed indirectly responsible. Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, was found to be personally responsible. Sharon's negligence (that is, complacency not complicity, the Commission maintained) amounted to a non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged, and it was recommended that Sharon be dismissed as Defence Minister, which he was."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_Commission
@%<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_Commission
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The source you quote regarding the early 1970s discloses that the 104 people assasinated during the second half of 1971 were "guerrillas". Which honest person believes Guerillas are innocent individuals, i.e. non-combatants?
As to Qibya, when the IDF force approached the village, hundreds of Qibya residents were seen fleeing. When the mission was complete, Sharon and his men reported that they had destroyed 42 buildings and killed 10 to 12 people, all soldiers or guards. Had it been Sharon's intention to murder civilians, the hundreds of defenseless villagers fleeing Qibya would have been prime targets -- instead the IDF allowed them to leave unharmed. Sharon believed that all residents had fled. The IDF soldiers had found a young girl in one house and an elderly man in another. Any such inhabitants discovered were chased away. But there's no question that Sharon was negligent in the extreme, and this carelessness is one of his hallmarks, no doubt.
Even the most reliable anti-Israeli source can't force merit into any of their claims that Sharon (or any Israeli official for that matter) had masterminded or ordered the Sabra & Shatila massacre.
The source you relied on for the info on the Aug '53 El-Bureig raid doesn't mention the casualties tally. And within the entire body of information you've garnered, this is the only point in Sharon's career as a military commander about which one can claim Sharon is guilty of ordering murder with any credibility.
As to Qibya, when the IDF force approached the village, hundreds of Qibya residents were seen fleeing. When the mission was complete, Sharon and his men reported that they had destroyed 42 buildings and killed 10 to 12 people, all soldiers or guards. Had it been Sharon's intention to murder civilians, the hundreds of defenseless villagers fleeing Qibya would have been prime targets -- instead the IDF allowed them to leave unharmed. Sharon believed that all residents had fled. The IDF soldiers had found a young girl in one house and an elderly man in another. Any such inhabitants discovered were chased away. But there's no question that Sharon was negligent in the extreme, and this carelessness is one of his hallmarks, no doubt.
Even the most reliable anti-Israeli source can't force merit into any of their claims that Sharon (or any Israeli official for that matter) had masterminded or ordered the Sabra & Shatila massacre.
The source you relied on for the info on the Aug '53 El-Bureig raid doesn't mention the casualties tally. And within the entire body of information you've garnered, this is the only point in Sharon's career as a military commander about which one can claim Sharon is guilty of ordering murder with any credibility.
["Following its investigation, on 8 February 1983, the Kahan Commission submitted its report. It concluded that direct responsibility rested with the Jemayel Phalangists led by Fadi Frem. Israeli forces were deemed indirectly responsible. Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, was found to be personally responsible. Sharon's negligence (that is, complacency not complicity, the Commission maintained) amounted to a non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged, and it was recommended that Sharon be dismissed as Defence Minister, which he was."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_Commission
@%<]
if you read the description of the Kahan Commission report in the Cockburn article, it closely mirrors the one presented here.
for example, Cockburn says that Sharon refused to resign after the Commission's finding, this one says that Sharon was "dismissed", thus confirming Cockburn's account
similarly, both found Sharon "personally responsible" based upon a doctrine of gross negligence
I leave it to others as to whether the distinction between "complicity" and "complacency" mentioned in your post is morally significant to them, especially in regard to an individual like Sharon who has been called many things, but rarely, if ever complacent
--Richard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_Commission
@%<]
if you read the description of the Kahan Commission report in the Cockburn article, it closely mirrors the one presented here.
for example, Cockburn says that Sharon refused to resign after the Commission's finding, this one says that Sharon was "dismissed", thus confirming Cockburn's account
similarly, both found Sharon "personally responsible" based upon a doctrine of gross negligence
I leave it to others as to whether the distinction between "complicity" and "complacency" mentioned in your post is morally significant to them, especially in regard to an individual like Sharon who has been called many things, but rarely, if ever complacent
--Richard
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