<html>
<body>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000"><b><i>Scroll down for "If Sharon's a
Man of Peace"<br><br>
<br>
</i></b></font><font size=3>Al Awda News - Jan 6, 2006<br>
<a href="http://www.al-awda.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.al-awda.org<br><br>
</a>Dear fellow activists and letter writers,<br><br>
In light of the impending death of Ariel the “Butcher of Beirut”
Sharon,<br>
we can expect a flood of news stories about this war criminal
hailing<br>
him as “courageous man of peace” and other assorted nonsense as they<br>
spin his life and accomplishment and try to turn him into “a great<br>
leader and statesman”…Please re-read the piece that I wrote about
him<br>
earlier in the year whereby you can find much useful information
about<br>
Sharon’s criminal accomplishments…We need to take the initiative and
be<br>
ready to counter the opposition as they will try to posthumously
turn<br>
this bloodstained wretch into a saint…<br><br>
Thank you,<br>
Mike<br><br>
***<br><br>
"Thanking" Sharon<br><br>
By Mike Odetalla<br>
<a href="http://www.hanini.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.Hanini.org<br><br>
</a>Since the so-called Gaza disengagement, US President George W Bush
has<br>
reiterated his call that people ought to be "thanking Ariel
Sharon" for<br>
keeping Israel's word about dismantling its occupation of
Palestinian<br>
territory.<br><br>
What does Sharon's history tell us?<br><br>
Sharon's first documented sortie in the role George W Bush describes as
as<br>
"man of peace" was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of
El-Bureig, south<br>
of Gaza. An Israeli history of "Unit 101" records 50 refugees
as having been<br>
killed; other sources allege 15 or 20.<br><br>
Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs
were<br>
thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of huts in which
the refugees<br>
were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms
and<br>
automatic weapons".<br><br>
In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's Unit 101 on the
Jordanian<br>
village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at
the time, Moshe<br>
Sharett (aka Shertok), confided to his diary "would stick to us and
not be<br>
washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly
pro-Israel<br>
commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon’s role
are<br>
scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such
as<br>
Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who wrote a whitewash of
Sharon,<br>
describing him as "feisty", or the Washington Post's man in
Jerusalem who<br>
fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in<br>
Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".<br><br>
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: "Sharon's
order<br>
was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on
its<br>
inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all<br>
expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya
was<br>
revealed only during the morning after the attack.<br><br>
The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown
up,<br>
and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had
been<br>
killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the<br>
inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was
hiding<br>
inside the houses."<br><br>
The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: "One
story was<br>
repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body
sprawled<br>
across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced
by<br>
heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over
them." The<br>
slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to
the<br>
president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16
October1953<br>
(S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of
Jordan<br>
to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote,
Israeli<br>
troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in
the<br>
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed
to<br>
Jordan).<br><br>
According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the
village<br>
and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic<br>
weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42
Arab<br>
civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under
the<br>
wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been<br>
destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings
in<br>
Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover
their<br>
withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the
neighboring<br>
villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.<br><br>
And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head of the Southern Command
of<br>
Israel's Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza
"clearances" were<br>
vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent
on<br>
January 21, 2001.<br><br>
"More than thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon was the head
of the<br>
Israel Defense Forces' southern command, charged with the task of<br>
'pacifying' the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old
men<br>
still remember it well, especially the old men on Wreckage Street.
Until<br>
late 1970, Wreckage, or Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores
of<br>
narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a
shantytown<br>
cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees
from<br>
the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international
community<br>
to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an
unusually<br>
prolonged visit from Mr Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to
bulldoze<br>
hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow
Israeli<br>
troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp,
to<br>
exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation
Army.<br><br>
"'They came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to
demolish<br>
with red paint,' said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. 'In
the<br>
morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all
the<br>
soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw<br>
everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers
and<br>
started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day.
And<br>
the soldiers would beat people. Can you imagine soldiers with guns,
beating<br>
little kids? By the time the Israeli army's work was done, hundreds of
homes<br>
were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout the camp,
as<br>
Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads.<br><br>
Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the
already<br>
badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with
a<br>
Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to
exile<br>
in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by
Israel."<br><br>
As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was far from the<br>
exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's command
destroyed<br>
some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the
second<br>
time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested
and<br>
deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected<br>
guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104
guerrillas<br>
were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects,
but<br>
to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian
Centre<br>
for Human Rights in Gaza City".<br><br>
Israeli complacency leading to their initial defeat by the Egyptians in
the<br>
1973 war was in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability of the
"Bar Lev<br>
line" constructed by Sharon on the east bank of the Suez Canal.
The<br>
Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.<br><br>
In 1981 Sharon, then minister of defense, paid a visit to Israel's
good<br>
friend, President Mobutu of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu's yacht the
Israeli<br>
party was asked by their host to use their good offices to get the
US<br>
Congress to be more forthcoming with aid. This, the Israelis managed
to<br>
accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic relations
with<br>
Israel. This was not Sharon's only contact with Africa. Among friends
he<br>
relays fond memories of trips to Angola to observe and advise the
South<br>
African forces then fighting in support of the CIA stooge Jonas
Savimbi.<br><br>
As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government, Sharon was
the<br>
commander who led the full dress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the
express<br>
design of destroying the PLO, driving as many Palestinians as possible
to<br>
Jordan and making Lebanon a client state of Israel.<br><br>
It was a war plan that cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian
and<br>
Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli
soldiers.<br>
The Israelis bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also oversaw
the<br>
infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.<br><br>
The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered and a further
1,200<br>
buried privately by relatives. (Was Lebanon spared a nuclear assault?
Just<br>
as the 1982 war was getting under way, Sharon approached Menachem
Begin,<br>
then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over
Israel's<br>
atomic weapons trigger to him. Begin refused.)<br><br>
The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatilla took
place<br>
from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning
on<br>
September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israel
Defense<br>
Forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the
Lebanese<br>
force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset
of<br>
Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage
included<br>
infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly,
some<br>
of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were
killed.<br><br>
An official Israeli commission of inquiry - chaired by Yitzhak
Kahan,<br>
president of Israel's Supreme Court - investigated the massacre, and
in<br>
February 1983 publicly released its findings. This was published
without<br>
Appendix B, which remains secret until now. Never acknowledged in
Israel,<br>
despite its exposure at the time by Radio France's Beirut correspondent,
is<br>
the role --- inside Sabra and Shatilla, alongside the Phalange gangs ---
of<br>
Sayerret Maskal, the Israeli army's version of the British SAS. This
unit<br>
was been implicated in marking for assassination the residences of
teachers,<br>
nurses, doctors, journalists and any others suspected of having or likely
to<br>
have connections beyond the camp including access to international
media.<br><br>
Amid desperate attempts to cover up the evidence of direct knowledge of
what<br>
was going on by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan Commission
found<br>
itself compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis,
had<br>
responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated: "It
is our<br>
view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense
for<br>
having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by
the<br>
Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having
failed<br>
to take this danger into account when he decided to have the
Phalangists<br>
enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the<br>
Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing
or<br>
reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists'
entry<br>
into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty
with<br>
which the Defense Minister was charged".<br><br>
Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983, he was relieved
of<br>
his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as<br>
minister without portfolio. Sharon's career was in eclipse, but he
continued<br>
to burnish his credentials as a Likud ultra. Sharon has always been
against<br>
any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely impossible for
Palestinians<br>
to accept. According to Nehemia Strasler (Ha'aretz, January 18, 2001):
Back<br>
in 1979, as a member of Begin's cabinet, he voted against a peace
treaty<br>
with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops to
the<br>
so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed
Israel's<br>
participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993 he voted No in
the<br>
Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained in
the<br>
Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against
the<br>
Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the way in which the
withdrawal<br>
from southern Lebanon was conducted.<br><br>
As Begin's minister of agriculture in the late 1970s he established many
of<br>
the West Bank settlements that are now a major obstruction to any
peace<br>
deal. His present position: Not another square inch of land for
Palestinians<br>
on the West Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state on the existing
areas<br>
presently under either total or partial Palestinian control, amounting
to<br>
merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will retain control of
the<br>
highways across the West Bank and the water sources. All settlements
will<br>
stay in place with access by the IDF to them. Jerusalem will remain
under<br>
Israeli sovereignty and he plans to continue building around the city.
The<br>
Golan Heights would remain under Israel's control.<br><br>
It can be strongly argued that Sharon represents the long-term policy of
all<br>
Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery.
For<br>
example: Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions of Unit 101. Every
Israeli<br>
government has condoned settlements and building around Jerusalem. It
was<br>
Labor's Ehud Barak who approved the military escort for Sharon on
his<br>
provocative sortie that sparked the second Intifada and Barak who
has<br>
overseen the lethal military repression of recent months. But that
doesn't<br>
diminish Sharon's sinister shadow across the past half century. That
shadow<br>
is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving for the dead,
the<br>
maimed, the displaced, or by a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16,
who<br>
confronted Sharon before the "elections" that brought Sharon to
power as<br>
Prime Minister as leader of the Likud, when he visited her agricultural
high<br>
school outside Beersheba. "I think you sent my father into
Lebanon", Ilil<br>
said. "Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16
some odd<br>
years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years.
I<br>
accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in
this<br>
country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime
minister".<br><br>
Sharon was indeed "elected" Prime Minister of Israel and true
to his<br>
ghoulish blood-soaked history, he continues to slaughter, destroy
and<br>
torment the Palestinian people. His policy of death, murder, and
oppression<br>
has earned him the titles of "Man of Peace" and
"visionary" from George W.<br>
Bush, and "Butcher of Beirut" from the rest of the world’s
people.<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3><i>Bush calls Ariel Sharon a
"man of peace."<br><br>
</i></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=4><b>If Sharon's a Man of
Peace - by Lincoln Begman<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>If Sharon's a man of
peace<br>
Tigers don't have any teeth<br>
Vultures do not feast on meat<br>
Sweet is bitter, bitter's sweet<br><br>
If Sharon's a peaceful man<br>
Bombs don't hit Afghanistan<br>
No hatred in the Ku Klux Klan<br>
And Clark Kent isn't Superman.<br><br>
If Sharon would kill no one<br>
Plants would never seek the Sun<br>
A woman's work be quickly done<br>
And Hitler was a lot of fun.<br><br>
If Sharon's a man of peace<br>
Dogs love cats and pigs are geese<br>
Birds have fur and mice have fleece<br>
And Black youth need not fear police<br><br>
If Sharon's a peaceful guy<br>
Guns don't shoot and birds don't fly<br>
FBI don't mean to pry<br>
And Palestinians don't die.<br><br>
By now, I'm sure, you know the score<br>
Sharon's a bloody man of war<br>
The only way for peace to shine<br>
Is independent Palestine<br><br>
<br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
</font><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.freedomarchives.org</a></font></body>
</html>