Miko Peled, who was serving in the Israeli military at the time, examines the events leading up to the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre and questions why the world turned a blind eye to the signs of impending tragedy.
The post Israel’s License to Kill: Unraveling the Sabra and Shatila Massacre appeared first on MintPress News.
The list of settler ambushes upon Palestinian women and children and unarmed men in the West Bank is endless. It grows day by day with more and more ferocity. In fact, there have been more than a thousand such documented attacks by rabid settlers on Palestinian civilians, although many more go unreported as futile. Of late the victims of settler violence have begun to include other Jews.
Gaza Siege Intensifies, More Ethnic Cleansing Looms, but Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions Campaign Gathers Momentum
Dr A.Clare Brandabur
Fatih University, Istanbul
Readers will recall the famous perceptual illusion in which the brain switches between seeing a young girl and an image intended to represent an ‘old crone’. The picture of course remains the same, but our minds flick between the two interpretations, unable to perceive both images at the same time.
Ariel Sharon was a serial mass murderer, engaged in massacres of unarmed victims in four countries, of all ages and conditions. He was a “hero” for hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews who settled on land and in houses seized from Palestinians in the West Bank. He was praised by Western leaders at his funeral for his violent, lifelong opposition to Arab nationalist movements throughout the Middle East. That he was a fanatical upholder of Jewish supremacist policies and practices did not go unnoticed by wealthy Zionist donors in the US.
The death of former Israeli leader Ariel Sharon enlivened US media’s interest in the legacy of a man considered by many a war criminal, and by some a hero. In fact, the supposed heroism of Sharon was at the heart of CNN coverage of his death on January 11.
As Israel buried Ariel Sharon amid eulogies from world figures, Tony Blair, a Butcher of Baghdad, paid a tribute to the Butcher of Beirut which included the line that Sharon “didn’t think of peace as a dreamer, but did dream of peace.” Also that “…he sought peace with the same iron determination” as he had fought (read slaughtered) across the Middle East. Re-writing history does not come more blatant, but Blair was ever good at fantasy, think “weapons of mass destruction” and “forty five minutes.”
It is easy to forget, with eulogies casting him as the unexpected “peace-maker”, that for most of his long military and political career Ariel Sharon was known simply as The Bulldozer. That is certainly how he will be remembered by Palestinians.
His death was announced on Israeli army radio on Saturday. He was 85 years old and had been comatose since 2006.
