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RandySF

(57,661 posts)
Sun Jan 12, 2014, 12:40 AM Jan 2014

Sharon destroyed entire cities and presided over the killing of countless civilians.

Last edited Sun Jan 12, 2014, 05:02 PM - Edit history (1)

A central player in Israeli affairs since the state’s inception, Ariel Sharon molded history according to his own stark vision. He won consent for his plans through ruthlessness and guile, and resorted to force when he could not find any. An accused war criminal who presided over the killing of thousands of civilians, his foes referred to him as “The Bulldozer.” To those who revered him as a strong-armed protector and patron saint of the settlements, he was “The King of Israel.” In a life acted out in three parts, Sharon destroyed entire cities, wasted countless lives and sabotaged careers to shape the reality on the ground.

The first act of Sharon’s career began after the 1948 war that established Israel at the expense of 750,000 Palestinians who were driven away in a campaign of mass expulsion. Badly wounded in the battle of Latrun, where the Israeli army suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the Royal Jordanian Army, Sharon momentarily retired from army life. He looked back in anger at the failure to take Latrun, a strategic swath of land containing three Palestinian towns seemingly obstructing the new Jewish state’s demographic continuity. Spineless politicians and feckless commanders had tied the hands of Israel’s troops, he claimed, leaving the Jewish state exposed from within. Sharon yearned to finish 1948—to complete the expulsion project he viewed as deficient.

In 1953, Sharon was plucked out of retirement by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and appointed the head of a secret commando unit tasked with carrying out brutal acts of reprisal and sabotage. Following a lethal Palestinian assault on an Israeli kibbutz, Sharon led his men into the West Bank town of Qibya with orders from Ben Gurion’s Central Command to “carry out destruction and cause maximum damage.” By the time they were done, sixty-nine civilians—mostly Palestinian women and children—lay dead.

In the years after that scandal, Sharon carried out bloody raids on Egyptian and Syrian territory that inflamed relations with Israel’s neighbors and led them to seek urgent military assistance from the Soviet Union. In the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Sharon was accused by one of his commanders, Arye Biro, of overseeing the massacre of forty-nine Egyptian quarry workers who had been taken prisoner and had no role in the fighting (official censorship kept the details from the public for decades). In the 1967 Six Day War, Sharon ran up the body count on encircled Egyptian tank units, converting unprecedented kill ratios into national fame. With the Gaza Strip now under Israeli control, Sharon orchestrated the razing of Palestinian citrus orchards to make way for Jewish colonization.


http://www.thenation.com/article/177883/how-ariel-sharon-shaped-israels-destiny

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Sharon destroyed entire cities and presided over the killing of countless civilians. (Original Post) RandySF Jan 2014 OP
Oh boy Oh boy Kurska Jan 2014 #1
It looks pretty dead for the I/P fight club... Violet_Crumble Jan 2014 #4
I like it when journalists strip the "diplomatic immunity" from butchers. delrem Jan 2014 #5
I'd never have made a good diplomat... Violet_Crumble Jan 2014 #6
I like it when journalists strip the "diplomatic immunity" from butchers malaise Jan 2014 #8
That sure isn't a mainstream US and "Western" MSM account of history! delrem Jan 2014 #2
KR El_Johns Jan 2014 #3
that is true - Douglas Carpenter Jan 2014 #7
Someday, somehow CFLDem Jan 2014 #9
Tearing down the set and exposing the back wall of the theater is frowned upon by the parasites. Egalitarian Thug Jan 2014 #10

Violet_Crumble

(35,954 posts)
4. It looks pretty dead for the I/P fight club...
Sun Jan 12, 2014, 03:29 AM
Jan 2014

I dunno. Maybe if I kick it off with a few well placed fat jokes, things might start going off?

btw, good to see you round DU. It's been a while since we've crossed paths

delrem

(9,688 posts)
5. I like it when journalists strip the "diplomatic immunity" from butchers.
Sun Jan 12, 2014, 04:08 AM
Jan 2014

That is, from the long-term "official" accounts of a butcher's rapine.

It opens up a whole other world.

For humor I like the "official" accounts!:
"Kim Jong Un Praised by British Personage
Pyongyang, January 10 (KCNA) -- Dermot Hudson, chairman of the British Association for the Study of Songun Policy, posted an article on its website on Dec. 24 last year to mark the 2nd anniversary of Kim Jong Un's assumption of supreme commandership of the Korean People's Army (KPA).
Noting Kim Jong Un is highly respected and revered by the progressives as another great commander of Mt. Paektu and iron-willed brilliant commander, the article said:
Kim Jong Un has demonstrated his superb commanding art as a brilliant commander for the past two years.
After assuming heavy responsibility as supreme commander of the KPA, he evinced his firm will to successfully carry forward the Songun revolutionary cause of leader Kim Jong Il while inspecting the Seoul Ryu Kyong Su Guards 105 Tank Division of the KPA on Jan. 1, 2012.

hehehehehehe! It's all the fucking same.

Violet_Crumble

(35,954 posts)
6. I'd never have made a good diplomat...
Sun Jan 12, 2014, 04:22 AM
Jan 2014

btw, here's more about Qibya, the massacre that Ariel Sharon was directly responsible for and involved in. It's not as well known of as Sabra and Shatilla, which I guess is because of how long ago it was...

The Qibya massacre, also known as the Qibya incident, occurred in October 1953 when Israeli troops under Ariel Sharon attacked the village of Qibya in the West Bank. Sixty-nine Palestinian Arabs, two-thirds of them women and children, were killed. Forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque were destroyed. The attack followed cross-border raids from the Jordanian occupied West Bank in which Israeli civilians were killed.

The act was condemned by the U.S. State Department, the UN Security Council, and by Jewish communities worldwide. The State Department described the raid as "shocking", and used the occasion to confirm publicly that economic aid to Israel had been suspended previously, for other non-compliance regarding the 1949 Armistice Agreements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibya_massacre




delrem

(9,688 posts)
2. That sure isn't a mainstream US and "Western" MSM account of history!
Sun Jan 12, 2014, 02:31 AM
Jan 2014

It's more like a pro-freedom version of South African history, written during the dark days of apartheid when US and "Western" MSM was 100% pro-apartheid and universally condemned Mandela, Biko etc. as being "terrorists" and beyond the pale of civilized discourse, and that somehow slipped through the cracks.

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