| -Caveat Lector-
http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq24.html#1 IV. Who is Ariel Sharon? The current Prime Minister of the Zionist State of Israel, Ariel Sharon, is no one to complain about terrorism. His unconscionable attempt to subvert the truth by characterising Israel as a nation “under terror”, the principal victim of terrorism in the ongoing Middle East conflict, is probably best exposed by reference to Sharon’s own systematic involvement in grotesque acts of terrorism in Palestine. In 1953, Ariel Sharon founded and led Unit 101, a special commando unit which conducted attacks on Palestinian villages, killing women and children.[69] Perhaps the most notorious massacre occurred in the West Bank village of Qibya. On 14th October 1953 Sharon’s forces blew up 45 houses, murdering en masse 69 Palestinian civilians, around half of whom were women and children. Even the U.S. State Department issued a statement on the massacre four days later, articulating its “deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives” in the attack. The statement further asserted that the perpetrators “should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future.”[70] In 1956, Sharon became a commander of a paratroop brigade and fought as such in the Sinai campaign. It was not long before his impact was felt. Following is a report on the subsequent massacre that occurred under Sharon’s command, worth quoting from extensively here, by Ohad Gozani in Tel Aviv: “Reports of how Israeli paratroopers killed about 270 Egyptian prisoners of war 40 years ago are straining relations between the two countries. Egypt has demanded an investigation into the alleged atrocities, which date back to Israel's involvement in the 1956 Anglo-French campaign to take the Suez Canal. The killings were revealed in a paper on the Sinai campaign commissioned by the army’s military history division. They were described in graphic detail in newspaper and television interviews.In all, 273 Egyptians, some of them Sudanese civilian road workers, were killed in three separate incidents, according to the accounts. “Arye Biro, a retired army general, admitted shooting the Sudanese at a quarry two days into the campaign at strategic Mitla Pass in central Sinai. Mr. Biro, then a company leader in the 890 Paratroop battalion, said the 49 terrified prisoners were taken into a quarry and shot dead. He said: ‘We couldn’t take care of anything else before we got done with them. One escaped with bullets in the chest and in the leg, but came back on all fours because he was thirsty. He soon joined his [dead] comrades.’ Mr. Biro said he and his troops later killed 56 Egyptian soldiers and irregulars as they were advancing in a truck to the oil port of Ras-al-Sudr on the Gulf of Suez. ‘Six survived the initial bursts of gunfire,’ he said. ‘They later went to sleep with the rest. Blood was coming out of every hole in the flatbed truck and in huge quantities.’ “A witness told the newspaper: ‘When the rear flap was lowered, all the bodies poured out in one mass. I couldn’t bear the thought that we shot people without a fight.’ Another 168 Egyptian soldiers were cut down as the paratroopers headed South. Mr. Biro’s commanding officers were Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eytan.”[71] By 1969, Sharon had been appointed Head of the Israeli Defence Force’s (IDF) Southern Command. Once again, it was not long before he made his presence known. British journalist Phil Reeves reported that: “In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon’s command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 12,000 people [Palestinian refugees] 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.”[72] By 1981, Sharon was appointed to the post of Israeli Minister of Defence, serving during the Lebanon War. Sharon orchestrated Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that resulted in the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilians. The Third World Quarterly (Volume 6, Issue 4, October 1984, pp. 934-949) published figures estimating that over 29,500 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians were either killed or wounded between 4th July 1982 and 15th August 1982. Nearly half of these victims - 40 percent - were children.[73] Additionally, Ariel Sharon was most notoriously responsible for the genocidal massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, on the evening of 16th September 1982 to the morning of the 18th, in an area under the control of the Israeli army. The massacres were carried out by members of the Christian Lebanese Phalange militia, which was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon’s 1975 civil war. Ariel Sharon had meetings with the Phalange forces before the massacres occurred. Dr. Ben Alofs, a Dutch doctor working as a nurse in West Beirut in the summer of 1982, provides a detailed eye-witness account with some crucial background information indicating Israeli - and specifically Sharon’s - complicity: “The Israeli journalists Zeev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari describe how Sharon insisted on sending Phalangist militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila... To accomplish this, Sharon had held meetings on September 15th with Elie Hobeika, Fadie Frem and Zahi Bustani (leaders of the militiamen) as well as with Amin and Pierre Gemayel, the political leaders of the Phalangist party. The leaders of the Israeli army, Sharon included, were very well aware of the mood of the Phalangists, shortly after the murder of their leader. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the feelings of the Phalangists towards the Palestinians knew what would happen if they were let into the refugee camps. “‘Tell al-Zaater’ is a well-known name in Lebanon as well as in Israel. This camp in East-Beirut, where I met Palestinian refugees for the first time in 1975, had been besieged for 53 days by the Phalangists and Maronite Tiger-militiamen during the summer of 1976. After the Palestinians surrendered, the International Red Cross, which was to give a ‘safe passage’ to the camp’s population, was unable to prevent the murder of over 1000 civilians. Israeli army commanders Eitan, Drori and Yaron made comments on how obsessed the Phalangists were with revenge, talking about a ‘sea of blood’ and ‘kasach’ (Arabic for ‘slashing’ or ‘cutting’). As they made these observations Ariel Sharon gave the green light for the Phalangists to enter Sabra and Shatila. They did so as dusk fell on the 16th of September. “While the massacre was being committed, I was working in the Gaza hospital in Sabra. The situation was chaotic and confusing. Many wounded were carried into the hospital and our morgue was full within a short time. Most of the victims suffered bullet wounds, but a few were injured by shrapnel. On September 17th it became clear that the ‘Kataeb’ (Phalangists) and/or the militiamen of Saad Haddad (funded and armed by Israel) were slaughtering the civilian population. A 10-year old boy was carried into the hospital. He had been shot, but was alive. He had spent the whole night wounded, lying under the dead bodies of his parents, brothers and sisters. At night the murderers were assisted by Israeli flares. “I was working with a team of Scandinavian, British, American, Dutch and German doctors and nurses. We had insisted that the Palestinian hospital staff flee to the northern part of West-Beirut. On Saturday morning September 18th, we were arrested by the Phalangists/Haddad militiamen. They forced us to leave our patients behind and took us outside Sabra and Shatila via the main road. We passed by hundreds of women, children and men who had been rounded up. We saw bodies in the road and the small alleyways. The militiamen shouted at us and called us ‘Baader Meinhof’. A Palestinian nurse who thought he would be safe with us, was identified and taken away behind a wall. A moment later came the gunshots. “Just before we reached the exit of the camp I saw an image that will forever be in my mind: a large mound of red earth with arms and legs sticking out. Alongside the mound stood an army bulldozer with Hebrew markings. Just outside the camp we were ordered to take off our hospital clothing and we were lined up against a wall… After interrogation in their military headquarters the Phalangists took us to the Israeli forward command post just 75 meters (250 feet) away. It was a 4 or 5 story building at the edge of Shatila. (Some weeks later I was on the top floor. It offered excellent views of the destruction in Shatila). The Israeli soldiers were clearly uncomfortable, being confronted with more than 20 Europeans and Americans.”[74] Phalangist forces had gone through the camps, slaughtering unarmed civilian refugees indiscriminately, lining them up and mowing them down by machine-gun fire. Women and girls were raped repeatedly and brutally. Children were shot dead and mutilated. Men were disembowelled just before execution. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) counted 1,500 victims in total at the time of the massacre. By 23rd September, the body count had risen to 2,750. There should not be any doubt that Israeli troops surrounding the refugee camps were fully aware of the atrocities being committed inside. Dr. Witsoe who was at Gaza Hospital at the time, testified to the New York Times that from 5-5.30AM there were low level flights of Israeli planes over Sabra and Shatila, “after which shelling promptly commenced.”[75] Furthermore, according to Newsweek: “The Israelis established observation posts on top of multi-storey buildings in the north-west quadrant of the Kuwaiti Embassy. From these posts, the naked eye has a clear view of several sections of the camps, including those parts of Shatila where piles of bodies were found.”[76] The U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East at the time, Morris Draper, testified to the BBC that U.S. officials were horrified when told Sharon had allowed Phalange militias into West Beirut and the camps “because it would be a massacre.” Shortly after the killings began he cabled Defense Minister Sharon, urging to him: “You must stop the slaughter…. The situation is absolutely appalling. They are killing children. You have the field completely under your control and are therefore responsible for that area.”[77] His plea was to no avail. An official Israeli Commission of Inquiry chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, President of Israel’s Supreme Court, investigated the massacre and found Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, responsible. In February 1983 the Kahan Commission released its findings that: “It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence 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 Defence 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 Defence Minister was charged… [I]n his meeting with the Phalangist commanders, the Defence Minister made no attempt to point out to them the gravity of the danger that their men would commit acts of slaughter.... Had it become clear to the Defence Minister that no real supervision could be exercised over the Phalangist force that entered the camps with the IDF’s assent, his duty would have been to prevent their entry. The usefulness of the Phalangists’ entry into the camps was wholly disproportionate to the damange their entry could cause if it were uncontrolled… We shall remark here that it is obstensibly puzzling that the Defence Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister [Menachem Begin] privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps.”[78] The former Chief Prosecutor to the International War Crimes Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Judge Richard Goldstone, agreed that Ariel Sharon “should be tried for war crimes in connection with the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in Lebanon.” Speaking in an interview with BBC Panorama, Judge Goldstone observed that: “If the person who gave the command knows, or should know... that there’s a situation where innocent civilians are going to be injured or killed then that person is as responsible, in my book more responsible even, than the people who carry out the orders.” The London Independent further reported that: “Mr Sharon was Defence Minister when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and Israeli forces allowed their allies in the Lebanese Christian militias to enter the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps and massacre up to 2,000 people. An Israeli inquiry held Mr Sharon responsible. Judge Goldstone said it was regrettable that no criminal prosecutions had been brought.”[79] Indeed, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have echoed the call for Sharon to be tried for war crimes. This is a responsibility of the international community under international law. Article 146 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War stipulates that each High Contracting Party “shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed” grave breaches of the Convention, “and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts. It may also, if it prefers, and in accordance with the provisions of its own legislation, hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party concerned, provided such High Contracting Party has made out a prima facie case.” Article 147 of the Convention clarifies that the grave breaches noted in Article 146 include wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Conclusions Israel since its inception has been a colonial terrorist entity that has aimed to marginalise and exile the indigenous population through terror, intimidation, repression and slaughter. Genocide and its justification appears to be built into the State’s military and ideological institutions. Terrorism is an integral aspect of the State’s military policy, designed to secure its strategic and ideological objectives in unhindered territorial expansion at the indigenous population’s expense. It is noteworthy that the intensification of indigenous resistance in the form of the rising activity of groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas has occurred as a direct consequence of brutal Israeli terrorisation of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Clearly, the targeting of civilians cannot be condoned and must be condemned by any decent human being. Yet neither Hizbullah nor Hamas initiated the policy of targeting civilians, but only began doing so in response to Israel’s longstanding policy of terrorism. Such policies on the part of the resistance groups should be condemned and labelled correctly as acts of terrorism, but understood in the context of a much more brutal, repressive and extensive system of genocide and terror implemented by the Zionist regime against the indigenous population. It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that violence only breeds violence. Given the historical record, it is unsurprising that the current Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, is a war criminal of the highest order, of similar rank to war criminals such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, whose grave acts of genocide and terror have led to them being frequently compared to Hitler by many commentators. It is reasonable to therefore conclude that whereas Milosevic and Saddam were the ‘Hitlers’ of the 20th Century, Sharon is the Hitler of the New Millenium. The grim irony of the situation is accentuated in light of Israel’s claim to be the principal victim of terrorism in this conflict. The fact of the matter is that the primary aggressor is the Zionist regime, responsible throughout its history for the systematic manufacture of “wars of terrorism” against the indigenous Palestinian population. Unless Israel’s illegal occupation, coupled with its increasingly brutal system of apartheid (for extensive discussion and references see our report, Apartheid in the Holy Land: Racism in the Zionist State of Israel available at http://mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq11.html), is dismantled, the conflict will not end. What is needed in the region is willingness to return to the basic ethical values that inform not only the essence of a just and peaceful community, but of decent human relations. But this will only develop in the wake of the recognition and removal of the fundamental cause of the conflict - Israeli apartheid, illegal occupation, socio-economic repression and systematic terrorism in Palestine. And that means the dismantlement of the structures that have contributed to these, both in relation to the current Israeli regime, and the repressive Palestinian Authority, to establish a new system of justice for all. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substancenot soap-boxingplease! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright fraudsis used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om |
