because on one hand, people go OUT of their way to whitewash Sharon and every atrocity he's committed while at the same time decrying that Sharon neither speaks nor acts for all Jews. You can understand, can't you, that you can't have it both ways. It's like Bush- you're either with him or against him.
You know full well that in no way, shape or form was Sharon there to be "guarding the Muslims". Sharon was a warrior hawk fighting
for the expansion of Israel and ridding the areas under his control of Muslims.
------
Ariel Sharon was responsible for some 66 to 70 civilian deaths in a raid on Qibya in October 1953 (two-thirds of the victims were women and children) and he was found, even by the Israeli Kahan commission, to have been " indirectly responsible" for the mass killings at Sabra and Shatila, estimated by various authorities as somewhere between 800 and 3,000 Palestinian civilians, a large fraction once again women and children. The Kahan commission was protecting Israel's own high official in making Sharon only "indirectly responsible," but
he was on the scene, was Minister of Defense in charge of operations in the area, and knowingly invited the Christian Phalange into the killing fields. He was quite aware of what was going to happen and
failed to intervene during the 30 hours of killings.An independent court or truth commission would have found Ariel Sharon directly responsible for the mass killings at Sabra and Shatila.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Israel/Ariel_Sharon_Herman.html------
From Human Rights Watch
The
Kahan Commission (named after the President of the Israeli Supreme Court) that investigated the massacre in 1983 concluded that
“Minister of Defense bears personal responsibility” and should “draw the appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the defects revealed with regard to the manner in which he discharged the duties of his office.” The
commission recommended that Prime Minister Menachem Begin remove Sharon from office if he did not resign. Sharon did resign as minister of defense, though he subsequently assumed other cabinet positions. Annexes of the commission report have not yet been made public, and it is not known if they contain additional information specific to Sharon´s involvement.
<snip>
Details of the massacre
The massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps occurred between September 16 and 18, 1982, after
Israel Defense Forces (“IDF”) then occupying Beirut and under Ariel Sharon´s overall command as Israeli Defense Minister permitted members of the Phalange militia into the camps. The precise civilian death toll most likely will never be known. Israeli military intelligence estimated that between 700 and 800 people were killed in Sabra and Shatilla during the sixty-two-hour rampage, while Palestinian and other sources have claimed that the dead numbered up to several thousand. The victims included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed. Journalists who arrived on the scene immediately after the massacre also saw evidence of the summary execution of young men. To cite only one contemporaneous account, that of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: “Mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire.”
By all accounts, the perpetrators of this indiscriminate slaughter were members of the Phalange (or Kata´eb, in Arabic) militia, a Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied to Israel since the outbreak of Lebanon´s civil war in 1975. It must be noted, however,
that the killings were carried out in an area under IDF control. An IDF forward command post was situated on the roof of a multi-story building located some 200 meters southwest of the Shatilla camp.Findings of the Kahan Commission:
In February 1983, the three-member Israeli official independent commission of inquiry charged with investigating the events known as the Kahan Commission named former Defense Minister Sharon as one of the individuals who "bears personal responsibility" for the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.
Former Defense Minister Sharon´s decision to allow the Phalange into the camps: The Kahan Commission report detailed the direct role of former Defense Minister Sharon in allowing the Phalangists into the Sabra and Shatilla camps. For instance, then-Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Rafael Eitan testified that the entry of the Phalangists into the refugee camps was agreed upon between former Defense Minister Sharon and himself. Thereafter, former Defense Minister Sharon went to Phalangist headquarters and met with, among others, a number of Phalangist commanders. A document issued by former Defense Minister Sharon´s office containing “The Defense Minister´s Summary of 15 September 1982” states: “For the operation in the camps the Phalangists should be sent in.” That document also stated that “the I.D.F. shall command the forces in the area.”
Former Defense Minister Sharon´s disregard of the consequences of that decision:
As to former Defense Minister Sharon´s testimony that “no one had imagined the Phalangists would carry out a massacre in the camps,” the Kahan Commission concluded that “it is impossible to justify disregard of the danger of a massacre” because “no prophetic powers were required to know that a concrete danger of acts of slaughter existed when the Phalangists were moved into the camps without the I.D.F.´s being with them.” In fact, the Commission found: “In our view, everyone who had anything to do with events in Lebanon should have felt apprehension about a massacre in the camps, if armed Phalangist forces were to be moved into them without the I.D.F. exercising concrete and effective supervision and scrutiny of them…. To this backdrop of the Phalangists´
toward the Palestinians were added the profound shock ….”
<snip>
http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/06/isr0622.htm#Kahan%20Commission
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