AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME
When I heard that Ariel Sharon had had a stroke, my first thoughts were, to be quite honest, God let him go to hell now.
For Palestinians Sharon is the posterman for oppression and mass-killings of their people. He was
"the mass murderer who led the assault on the West Bank village of Qibya, on October 14, 1953, in which his troops blew up 45 houses and killed 69 Palestinian civilians -- about half of them women and children, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, Beirut, Tal Alzaatar,Ain Alroumanah, Jenin"
Read comments on Umkhalil´s blog.
Read there also an article by Karma Nabulsi first published in the British paper the Guardian.
Nabulsi writes:
Sharon has shaped everything for us: young, or old, in exile, or at
home in an Israeli prison under occupation. He is emblematic of our
condition; worse than emblematic, it is his very fist we feel. To this
day I have not been able to watch him on television, but must avert my
eyes at the immense presence of this avatar - there is no one else who
evokes this terrible reaction.
I know this is shared by Palestinians everywhere, especially the
survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which, let us not
forget, he was culpable, according even to an Israeli tribunal, the
Kahane Commission. They recommended that he never be allowed to return
to public office....
To us, to me, his mission had always been thus: to kill our
resistance, our organisations, our solidarity, our institutions, and
above all our national liberation movement....
This he did through the iron tools of military rule: assassination,
imprisonment, violent military invasion...
His great skill was breaking ceasefires whenever he felt cornered to
make a political concession towards peace, he sought to provoke an
inevitable response, which could then be used to advance his military
aims, and free his hands to expand settlements, expropriate land in
Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He never cared for Gaza, it was
a military asset. Indeed he won internationally uncontested control of
the West Bank (which was always his goal), by returning it. An empty
gesture anyway: in practice it is still owned and run by Israel...
Two summers ago, I went back to Shatila Camp where I had lived and
worked for so many years, the first time since 1982, and I have
returned many times in the past two-and-a-half years. Twenty-three
years ago we had been evacuated from the city, with the rest of the
PLO, at the end of the siege of Beirut, and only two weeks before the
massacres. But we only agreed to leave with international guarantees
that the civilian refugee camps would be protected from the fascist
Lebanese militias. Instead Sharon invaded Beirut (that he could not
take while we were there), surrounded the refugee camps, and had his
forces light up the night sky with flares, while the Lebanese militia
did their work with knives and axes and guns, day after day. He let
busloads of them in, no Palestinians allowed out.......
For Egyptians Sharon, who was head of the 9th brigade of the Israeli army in the 1967 war, was responsible for the murder of hundred´s of POW and civil workers in the Sinai.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv published accounts given by two Israeli officers, Arye Biro and Mordechai Brown. They confessed, giving facts and figures, that they and other officers had carried out collective massacres of Egyptian POWs during both wars. Biro and his unit killed 49 unarmed POWs in Sinai during the 1956 war, and Brown, commander of battalion 890, was responsible for the deaths of more than 500 POWs, including civil workers, during the 1967 war.
The pair also revealed that the murdered POWs were forced to dig their own graves using only their hands. They were then shot in the back.
For me Sharon is the proto-type of a man without a conscience and the most prominent representative of not only Nihilist theory but practice.
Power for himself and power for Israel are the only aims of his politics. And for this he walks over thousands of dead bodies.
For me Sharon is a character straigt out of Orwell' 1984. He says peace when he means war. His lies flood the main-line media and have taken in all mainline politicians in America and in Europe.
Just yesterday the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, said: "Even in difficult times, we stand steadfastly on the side of Israel".
He is the man who has so much influence within the American government, that he can walk into the Pentagon without restrictions making demands of any kind.
He is most likely one of those pressuring America into the Iraq war.
And still, while I cannot fault anybody who has suffered under Sharon, or see his family and friends suffer under him to hate him, it will not do for me.
For I know this hatred would spread in my mind.
Sharon´s attitude and politics are not unique in Israel. And although most Israelis know about his crimes against humanity, far too many see him as a hero.
If I hate Sharon, I will start to hate others as well.
But I know deep in my heart, that hatred even of the most guilty is counterproductive in a quest for peace.
Hatred will cause fear in those who are hated, not insight in what they have done to deserve this hatred.
Hatred and fear are the greatest obstacles in coming to a mutual agreement of living together, for a beginning of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Hatred asks for aggressive revenge and fear for protection through violent aggression.
The circle of violence will never end in a framework of hatred and fear.
So all I can do is repeating the prayer, Jesus said on the cross: "Father forgive him, for he knew not what he did." For his mind was clouded, by lies told to him, and lies he told to himself, clouded by an ideology, which makes murderes out of men.
And Father forgive those, who have followed his command, his orders and his lead, for they knew not what they did. For their minds were clouded by fear and hatred towards those they feared and still in reality were never a danger to them.
And Father forgive us, the rest of the world, for standing by and doing nothing to prevent the murders and the terrible sufferings, for we knew not what we did. For our minds were clouded by ignorance and cowardice.
