However it is not appropriate to flame someone in a RIP thread, so I thought I would start another one in the Pit.
I have a very negative feeling about Sharon. The most horrible thing he did was allow the Sabra and Shatila massacre of about 3,000 Palestinians by the Lebanese Christians when he was the Israeli defense minister and the Israeli military were in control of that camp:
Sharon’s legacy is, I guess you’d say, enigmatic? Mixed. As a commander, he was great. Mitla Pass is controversial still, but his commands in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur war were brilliant.
When he turned to politics, he got elected as a hardliner, and then unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and created a party dedicated to a settlement. So, he’s ambiguous.
As a politician, he was Machiavellian, amoral, and often brutal. As a soldier, he was possibly the finest field commander of the latter half of the 20th Century. As prime minister… I miss him every day.
He was proof that you can be a great man without necessarily being a good one.
A human being so despicable that death is too good for him. I’m sorry to see his coma end, and sorry that more of humankind’s butcher’s couldn’t join him stuck in between. A Vlad Tepes of his time.
“George Bush called Sharon a ‘Man of Peace.’ And to a certain extent, I think that was true. Certainly, his last eight years in the coma, he was very peaceful.”
My wife, a lifelong Meretz voter who spend her teenage years protesting outside Sharon’s office, yesterday admitted to me that she thought Sharon had been a good Prime Minister.
Sharon loved his country, and he got the job done. Those are the two qualities Israelis admire the most. I think he’ll be remembered fondly.
Sharon was a pig and a Jewish version of Yasser Arafat, but the number of Palestinian civilians murdered by Lebanese Christians under the supervision of Israeli Jews at Sabra and Shatilla certainly was not 3,000, though once your reach beyond “several hundred” I’m not sure how important the actual numbers are.
Beyond that, I found his butchering of roughly seventy Arab civilians during the Quibya massacre vastly worse which doesn’t receive nearly the coverage.
Unfortunately, most of Israel’s harshest critics fall into a few categories.
A. Ignorant Europeans who are upset at Israel for the way it reminds them of their colonialist past and, in extreme situations, are secretly delighted at the way Israel allows them to say nasty things about Jews and absolves their guilt at their own treatment of Muslims and their historical treatment of Jews.
B. American Jews who outwardly care about both Israel and the Palestinians but secretly couldn’t give a shit about either group and are upset at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank because of the way it embarrasses them and ruins their self-image and who, if you were to ever get them really drunk would probably admit they be happy if A) the Palestinians disappeared so they wouldn’t have to be embarrassed by those awful Israelis, or B)if the Israelis were wiped out so they could reclaim the gold medal in the victimization Olympics.