{"id":106448,"date":"2014-01-18T16:14:21","date_gmt":"2014-01-18T16:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=106448"},"modified":"2014-01-18T16:14:21","modified_gmt":"2014-01-18T16:14:21","slug":"big-papers-remember-ariel-sharon-praise-criticism-sharons-brutally-effective-tactics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/big-papers-remember-ariel-sharon-praise-criticism-sharons-brutally-effective-tactics\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Big Papers Remember Ariel Sharon. Praise and Criticism of Sharon\u2019s \u201cBrutally Effective Tactics\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Hart\u00a0<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading the pieces in the Sunday editions of the\u00a0New York Times<\/strong>\u00a0and the\u00a0Washington Post<\/strong>(3\/12\/14) about the death of \u00a0former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, one gets the sense that reporters were aware of some of Sharon\u2019s bloodiest history\u2014but mostly kept that out of their accounts of his life.<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0Washington Post<\/strong>\u00a0(1\/12\/14<\/a>), readers were told in the very first sentence that Sharon \u201cepitomized the country\u2019s warrior past even as he sought to become the architect of a peaceful future.\u201d Alluding to Sharon\u2019s concept of peace is curious, given his history. But that history was elided, as when the\u00a0Post<\/strong>\u2018s Glenn Frankel explained this:<\/p>\n

Mr. Sharon was recalled to create and command Unit 101, which was tasked with conducting commando operations against Palestinian guerrillas. It was there that he first won recognition for his brutally effective tactics and retaliatory raids.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What \u201cbrutally effective tactics\u201d the\u00a0Post<\/strong>\u00a0has in mind isn\u2019t clear, but that unit is perhaps best known for a 1953 massacre in the Jordanian village of\u00a0Qibya<\/a>, when Sharon\u2019s unit killed dozens of women and children. The\u00a0Post<\/strong>\u2018s limited view was on display again when it explained that Sharon<\/p>\n

earned the title \u201cthe Bulldozer\u201d in the early 1970s for rooting out Palestinian resistance in the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip in part by plowing open lanes to allow Israeli armored vehicles to move through densely populated civilian zones.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Destroying homes in a refugee camp to make for tanks is not \u201crooting out Palestinian resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which was launched when Sharon was minister of Defense, was dubbed \u201cambitious\u201d by thePost<\/strong>, which added that it \u201ceventually succeeded in expelling Arafat and his fighters to Tunis.\u201d One of the most harrowing incidents of the war, the massacre in Lebanon\u2019s Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, was essentially explained away:<\/p>\n

\n

Mr. Sharon was forced to resign after an independent Israeli judicial commission ruled that he bore indirect responsibility for failing to prevent a massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps south of Beirut by Israel\u2019s Lebanese Christian militia allies. He later sued for libel and won a retraction and settlement fromTime<\/strong>\u00a0magazine for an article that claimed he had sanctioned the massacre in advance.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That is a remarkably charitable description of a brutal massacre of as many as 3,500 civilians. An official Israeli investigation known as the Kahan Commission found that Sharon had personally decided to send right-wing Christian paramilitary forces, known as the Phalangist militias, into Palestinian refugee camps immediately after Palestinians had been (falsely) accused of assassinating the Lebanese President-elect Bachir Gemayel, a Phalangist leader. The fact \u201cthat the Phalangists were liable to commit atrocities\u2026did not concern [Sharon] in the least,\u201d the Commission found (Human Rights Watch,\u00a01\/11\/14<\/a>).<\/p>\n

After the massacre began, Israel assisted the killing by firing flares over the camp to provide illumination for the Phalangists (New York Times<\/strong>,\u00a09\/26\/82<\/a>). Recently declassified Israeli documents (New York Times<\/strong>,\u00a09\/17\/12<\/a>) show that when US officials pressed Sharon to order the militias out of the camps, he retorted, \u201cIf you don\u2019t want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The libel suit against\u00a0Time<\/strong>\u00a0involved the magazine\u2019s report that an annex to the Kahan report said that Sharon had privately urged the Phalangists to seek revenge\u2014a claim that was not, in fact, part of the report. A US court found that\u00a0Time<\/strong>\u00a0had not libeled Sharon, but when he filed another suit against the magazine in Israel, where libel laws favor plaintiffs, it settled the case (Philadelphia Inquirer<\/strong>,\u00a01\/23\/86<\/a>). To present this outcome as though it absolves Sharon is a distortion of history.<\/p>\n

Thousands of Lebanese civilians died in the invasion of Lebanon, though you\u2019d have a hard time knowing that if you read the\u00a0Washington Post<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The lengthy obituary in the\u00a0New York Times<\/strong>\u00a0(1\/12\/14<\/a>) by Ethan Bronner filled in some of what was missing from the\u00a0Post<\/strong>. The\u00a0Times<\/strong>\u00a0mentions the Unit 101 raid that the\u00a0Post<\/strong>\u00a0omitted. But like thePost<\/strong>, the\u00a0Times<\/strong>\u00a0tried to place emphasis on Sharon\u2019s supposed interest in peace; the headline refers to Sharon as an \u201cIsraeli Hawk Who Sought Peace on His Terms.\u201d When discussing the Sabra and Shatila massacres, Bronner wrote:<\/p>\n

He was dismissed as washed up in 1983 when he was forced to resign as defense minister after an official committee charged him with \u201cindirect responsibility\u201d for a Lebanese massacre of hundreds of Palestinians the previous year.<\/p>\n

Mr. Sharon survived that humiliation and remained politically active enough to take command of his rudderless Likud Party after a 1999 rout by Labor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given the scale of killing he bore responsibility for, it is obscene to refer to the \u201chumiliation\u201d of Sharon.<\/p>\n

Apart from this bloody record that the\u00a0Times<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Post<\/strong>\u00a0mostly whitewashed, another key part of Sharon\u2019s legacy are the illegal settlements that even US politicians recognize as an obstacle to any meaningful solution to the Israel\/Palestine conflict. Given that, the attempts to portray Sharon as a peacemaker ring all the more hollow.<\/p>\n

So would critics of Sharon\u2019s legacy ever get a voice? Articles the next day provided an answer. In thePost<\/strong>\u00a0(1\/13\/14<\/a>), a piece headlined (in the print edition) \u201cTo Evicted Settlers, Sharon Was No Hero\u201d mostly conveyed the bitter feelings of settlers who felt betrayed by Sharon over his decision to remove illegal colonial settlements in the Gaza Strip. The article started by noting that while \u201cthousands paid tribute\u201d to Sharon, \u201cthere were other voices to be heard.\u201d That led to a brief discussion of young Palestinians burning his photograph, leaders of the Palestinian political movements Fatah and Hamas, a \u201cleftist historian\u201d and also a \u201chuman rights activist.\u201d \u00a0Those voices, heard in passing, were merely a set-up for the words of angry settlers, which occupied the rest of the article.<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0New York Times<\/strong> (1\/13\/14<\/a>), readers saw the headline \u201cPraise and Criticism as Sharon\u2019s Body Lies in State.\u201d But the criticism comes from right-wing settlers\u2014e.g., \u201cA\u00a0Belgian businessman with a velvet skullcap who despised Mr. Sharon\u2019s late-in-life moves regarding the Palestinians said he had come \u2018to make sure he\u2019s dead.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Were there other criticisms to be heard? The\u00a0Times<\/strong>\u00a0says that \u201cPalestinian news media reported\u201d that some burned pictures of Sharon, and that human rights groups \u201cdenounced Mr. Sharon as a war criminal.\u201d They were the exception:<\/p>\n

But most Israelis mourned Mr. Sharon as a man whose imprint on their nation had been indelible, and one of the last of its founding generation of fighters and farmers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As is often the case, there are more thorough examinations available in the independent media. Max Blumenthal\u2019s obituary in the\u00a0Nation<\/strong>\u00a0(1\/11\/14<\/a>) is one such piece, as is the discussion on\u00a0Democracy Now!<\/strong>\u00a0(1\/13\/14<\/a>) with Noam Chomsky and Rashid Khalidi.<\/p>\n

In that interview, Chomsky says:<\/p>\n

There is a convention that you\u2019re not supposed to speak ill of the recently dead, which unfortunately imposes a kind of vow of silence because there\u2019s nothing else to say\u2014there\u2019s nothing good to say\u2026. He was a brutal killer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Peter writes for\u00a0FAIR<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Hart\u00a0 RINF Alternative News Reading the pieces in the Sunday editions of the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0and the\u00a0Washington Post(3\/12\/14) about the death of \u00a0former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, one gets the sense that reporters were aware of some of Sharon\u2019s bloodiest history\u2014but mostly kept that out of their accounts of his life. In the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0(1\/12\/14), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":106449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-106448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}