Ariel Sharon has the audacity to say the Gaza air strike which snuffed out the lives of 15 people, nine of them children, and wounded some 176 others would not have been given the go-ahead had he known there were civilians in the target building. No one is fooled by this blatant lie. The Israelis are not eyeless in Gaza; they know the territory too well.
From the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila, and now of Gaza, there always come excuses, never any admission of wrongdoing; never any contrition. So it is again. His sole objective is to fend off criticism, not from the international community — that he scorns — but in the US and Israel itself where the barbarity of his actions has similarly stirred up a wave of disgust; even the Israeli president has pointed an accusing finger at his prime minister saying in less than diplomatic language that he must take responsibility for the event.
However, all that will not matter. Despite the condemnation of the bombing by President George Bush, Washington feeds Sharon’s intransigence when it echoes his absurd view that the problem is Arafat. More to the point, nothing Israel undertakes happens without implicit US approval. There would have been no bomb attack if Sharon imagined that Washington would disapprove — and, in reality, it has not. Bush’s words are no condemnation at all. To describe the brutal slaughter of Palestinian innocents as merely a “heavy-handed action that does not contribute to peace” has the ring of appeasement about it — the pretence of an outrage that does not exist.
Yet even that is too much for the many in the US media. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto is far from alone in seeking to turn truth on its head with the disgraceful suggestion that, far from being heavy-handed, Ariel Sharon is in fact a brother fighter in the George Bush’s international war against terrorism. Such comment serves only to taint that war in the eyes not only of Muslims but everyone who believes in justice. Who else among the world’s moral outcasts does this admirer of a butcher imagines worthy of joining Bush’s campaign? Slobodan Milosevic? Georges Rutaganda, who led Rwanda’s genocide of the Tutsis?
Sharon is the problem. It is he who has to go, not Arafat. It has been painfully evident, ever since he became Israeli prime minister, that there would be no settlement while he was in control, but almost no one has done anything about it. Unlike Israel and the US which think they can decide who should lead the Palestinians, the Arabs have accepted that they have to deal with the Israelis’ elected leader. But there is nothing absolute in that; there are plenty of precedents for refusing to deal the enemy’s leader. The Kosovars refused to talk to Milosevic, and the US backed them. Arab leaders need to take the initiative and say publicly — leaving Washington in no doubt at all — that there will be no further talks on peace while a repeat murderer remains Israel’s leader. He is as much a war criminal as Slobodan Milosevic and must be brought to the International Criminal Court for his actions; even the Israeli president seems to understand that.
No amount of propaganda, certainly not from American journalists with morality bypasses, can disguise that fact.
