Ariel Sharon (1928-2014)

by Ken

I suppose we should have laid the son of a bitch to rest yesterday, but given the eight years during which he was already withdrawn from the world in the vegetative state that followed his incapacitating stroke shorty into the new year of 2006, I thought he could wait a day while we heard New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer remember another newly departed son of a bitch, Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes.

The habit of speaking little ill of the dead is especially unfortunate in the case of Sharon, who developed into a full-blown monster. Here's how Ian Welsh remembered him yesterday:

Just to note the obvious: he was a war criminal, and a butcher who killed women and children and encouraged that plus rape, in Lebanon.  He was largely responsible for the Israeli settlement policy, which will doom Israel either to fully ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, or losing their Jewish identity.  (Which Israel should, in any case. A state which classifies residents by their religious ethnicity is an abomination).

The inability of the vast majority of newspapers to state that Sharon was a war criminal plainly is what is wrong with them.  Controversial doesn’t cover it.

Sharon was bad for Israel, and will be seen as one of the architects of its demise in the future.  He was a monster to non-Israelis.

Ironically, the grumbling about Sharon in Israel is coming primarily from the Right, which is to say the even-farther-Right, from those who remember only that he actually forcibly removed settlers from Gaza.

Here's how Wikipedia remembers it (links and footnotes onsite):

[I]n 2004–05 Sharon orchestrated Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Facing stiff opposition to this policy within the Likud, in November 2005 he left Likud to form a new Kadima party. He has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006. His stroke occurred a few months before he had been expected to win a new election and was widely interpreted as planning on "clearing Israel out of most of the West Bank", in a series of unilateral withdrawals.

Compare the way more recent Israeli pols have pandered to the settler slime, it's a reminder that when it comes to vileness, there are always new depths to probe.

This photo of the younger Arik came as a shock to someone who knew the man visually in his "mature" form -- gross and repulsive, an eerily accurate reflection of the inner Arik.

#