Five Numbers That Suggest Ariel Sharon Was a War Criminal
Source: huffingtonpost.co.uk
The whitewashing of the late Ariel Sharon’s blood-stained legacy was both predictable - and predicted. But that doesn’t make it any less forgivable or tolerable.
Listen to Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister: "Ariel Sharon was a great leader of Israel. A brilliant military commander, but also a wise statesman seeing the necessity of peace."Or US senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain: "Few statesmen have made sacrifices that were as difficult, and were prepared to make more painful sacrifices still, for the sake of peace and the security for their nation."
Then there’s our own prime minister David Cameron, who said that Sharon "took brave and controversial decisions in pursuit of peace".
It was left to the Independent’s veteran Middle East watcher, Robert Fisk, to point out the hypocrisy and cant:
"Cursed in life as a killer by quite a few Israeli soldiers as well as by the Arab world - which has proved pretty efficient at slaughtering its own people these past few years - Sharon was respected in his eight years of near-death.. and he will, be assured, receive the funeral of a hero and a peacemaker. Thus do we remake history. How speedily did toady journalists in Washington and New York patch up this brutal man’s image."
As the Jerusalem Fund’s Yousef Munayyer tweeted yesterday: "That Sharon was responsible for wanton destruction and mass civilian casualties [isn’t] a ’Palestinian perspective’ but objective fact."
Here are just five numbers, five "objective facts", that suggest Ariel Sharon was responsible for war crimes.
69
On the evening of 14 October 1953, a commando unit of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) called Unit 101, under the command of a 25-year-old Ariel Sharon, raided the village of Qibya, in the then Jordanian-controlled West Bank. Their attack involved mortars, grenades and shooting; the majority of the victims were civilians.
Sixty-nine Palestinians were killed that night, two-thirds of whom were women and children. Fifty homes were demolished by the Israeli commandos. Sharon later wrote in his diary that he had received orders to inflict heavy damage on the Arab forces in the village: "The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to be an example for everyone."
As the UN observers on the ground documented: "Witnesses [in Qibya] were uniform in describing their experience as a night of horror, during which Israel soldiers moved about in their village blowing up buildings, firing into doorways and windows with automatic weapons and throwing hand grenades."
The late premier’s defenders have tried to argue that Sharon was unaware of the civilians inside these homes. This is nonsense. Again, according to the UN observers, "bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them".
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Read the full article at: huffingtonpost.co.uk
