Ariel Sharon
Before anyone starts glorifying the leader as a man of peace, let's look into his past and review his actions and beliefs.
"I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've
killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I encourage my soldiers to rape Arabic women and girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do."
- Ariel Sharon, In an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956
He directed a massacre at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants men, women and children still inside. He invaded Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air. He facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people almost all innocent civilians were killed during his Lebanon adventure.
"Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations these were his stock in trade as 'a man of courage and peace'."
Sharon's "painful sacrifices" for peace may have involved Israel keeping less, rather than more, of the territory that it captured violently and has clung to illegally for four decades, but few seem to have noticed that it's not really a sacrifice to return something that wasn't yours to begin with."
Source: Saree Makdis, Los Angeles Times
