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‘J Street’ says Jews worldwide mourn Sharon, and forgets Sabra and Shatilla

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Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon

Good news. Samantha Power, our ambassador to the U.N., who knows from genocide, hasn’t tweeted out any condolences on Ariel Sharon, even as she’s tweeted about violence against women and children in the Congo.

J Street lacks her restraint. “Sharon will be remembered for many things,” J Street says in “J Street honors the memory of former Prime Minister Sharon.” Yes, many things; and you’d think they might have mentioned some of the bad stuff. But Sharon is only scored for the settlement project in the West Bank. Other than that, the eulogy (published below) is full of praise, and air-brushes Sharon’s war crimes with this diplomatic language: “presided over the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.”

Also notice that Jews mourn Sharon around the world, J Street says, because as Sharon said, “Israel is a Jewish worldwide project.” Who are they trying to please? The new Israel lobby is sure beginning to look a whole lot like the old one. Remember the ending of Animal Farm?

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Here’s is J Street’s commemoration:

J Street honors the memory of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a soldier and statesman who left an indelible mark on Israel and the Middle East.

Sharon will be remembered for many things – his bold thrust across the Suez Canal during the war of 1973, his role in planning the vast expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and his tenure as Defense Minister, when he presided over the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

As Prime Minister, Sharon, like many of his predecessors, realized that Israel’s survival as a democratic, Jewish homeland depends on a two-state resolution of its conflict with the Palestinians. This understanding led him to to break with the Likud Party and to implement Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. When he was cut down by a massive stroke in January 2006, Sharon was planning a similar withdrawal from the West Bank.

One lesson from the Gaza withdrawal is that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians can only really be solved by the sides negotiating a peace agreement that ends the Israeli occupation, establishes a Palestinian state and settles all outstanding issues and claims. Still, Sharon deserves credit for the intellectual journey he took during his life and for having the courage to lead. His incapacitation, when at the height of his powers, leaves the challenge of making peace to be fulfilled by his successors, notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sharon reminded us that “Israel is a Jewish worldwide project,” and so it is fitting that the loss of its 11th prime minister will be felt not only in Israel, but in Jewish communities around the world. We offer condolences to his family and to the people of Israel.

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RE: “Sharon is only scored for the settlement project in the West Bank. Other than that, the eulogy (published below) is full of praise, and air-brushes Sharon’s war crimes with this diplomatic language: ‘presided over the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon’.” ~ Weiss

MY COMMENT: Thank God for Uri Avnery. He is a bona fide Israeli hero.

SEE: “The War of Lies” , by Uri Avnery, gush-shalom.org09/06/12

[EXCERPTS] Thirty Years ago this week, the Israeli army crossed into Lebanon and started the most stupid war in Israel’s history. It lasted for 18 years. About 1500 Israeli soldiers and untold numbers of Lebanese and Palestinians were killed.
Almost all wars are based on lies. Lies are considered legitimate instruments of war. Lebanon War I (as it was later called) was a glorious example.
From beginning to end (if it has ended yet) it was a war of deceit and deception, falsehoods and fabrications.
THE LIES started with the official name: “Operation Peace in Galilee”.
If one asks Israelis now, 99.99% of them will say with all sincerity: “We had no choice. They launched katyushas at the Galilee from Lebanon every day. We had to stop them.” TV anchormen and anchorwomen, as well as former cabinet ministers have been repeating this throughout the week. Quite sincerely. Even people who were already adults at the time.
The simple fact is that for 11 months before the war, not a single shot was fired across the Israeli-Lebanese border. A cease-fire was in force and the Palestinians on the other side of the border kept it scrupulously. To everybody’s surprise, Yasser Arafat succeeded in imposing it on all the radical Palestinian factions, too.
At the end of May, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon met with Secretary of State Alexander Haig in Washington DC. He asked for American agreement to invade Lebanon. Haig said that the US could not allow it, unless there were a clear and internationally recognized provocation.
And lo and behold, the provocation was provided at once. Abu Nidal, the anti-Arafat and anti-PLO master terrorist, sent his own cousin to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London, who was grievously wounded.
In retaliation, Israel bombed Beirut and the Palestinians fired back, as expected. The Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, allowed Sharon to invade Lebanese territory up to 40 km, “to put the Galilee settlements out of reach of the katyushas.”
When one of the intelligence chiefs told Begin at the cabinet meeting that Abu Nidal’s organization was not a member of the PLO, Begin famously answered: “They are all PLO”.
General Matti Peled, my political associate at the time, firmly believed that Abu Nidal had acted as an agent of Sharon. So do all the Palestinians I know.
The lie “they shot at us every day” has taken such a hold on the public mind that it is nowadays useless to dispute it. It is an illuminating example of how a myth can take possession of the public mind, including even of people who had seen with their own eyes that the opposite was true.
NINE MONTHS before the war, Sharon told me about his plan for a New Middle East. . .
. . . His design for the region, as told me then (and which I published nine months before the war), was:
• To attack Lebanon and install a Christian dictator who would serve Israel,
• Drive the Syrians out of Lebanon,
• Drive the Palestinians out of Lebanon into Syria, from where they would then be pushed by the Syrians into Jordan.
• Get the Palestinians to carry out a revolution in Jordan, kick out King Hussein and turn Jordan into a Palestinian state,
• Set up a functional arrangement under which the Palestinian state (in Jordan) would share power in the West Bank with Israel.

Being a single-minded operator, Sharon convinced Begin to start the war, telling him that the sole aim was to push the PLO 40 km back. . .

ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1339170910/

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RE: “‘J Street’ says Jews worldwide mourn Sharon, and forgets Sabra and Shatilla”

MY COMMENT: Some time ago I came across a 46 page PDF that is a summary of the book Charlie Wilson’s War that contained the following mention of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre during Israel’s 1982 war on Lebanon (“Operation Peace in Galilee”):

• He [Charlie Brown] visited the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. ‘In my usual knee-jerk fashion I assumed there was a
certain amount of sensationalism in the press and assumed Israel’s culpability had been exaggerated, but I also felt it my duty to see for myself.’ P98. ‘When we got into the camps,’ he recalls, ‘the grief and mourning was still going on. It had been maybe a week since the attack, and we walked down and ran into this woman who was an American Jew…she told me that her people had done something terrible.
She walked us down to where the victims had been buried in a mass grave…. And I began to get a really terrible feeling in my stomach about it. And what was hanging over me was the Israeli guilt.’
‘But when we walked about fifty feet and one of the American embassy people showed me where the Israeli command post was, and I looked at it and at that moment I lost it. My heroes were forever blemished because they would have had to be blindfolded not to have seen and heard what was happening. And then it was clear that they set up the whole thing and sat there and watched it.’
SOURCE – http://www.fruitfulresearch.com/pdfs/sample_nonfiction_summary.pdf

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He was the Jewish Milosevic and the Hague joins Judaism in really missing him.

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The attempt to curry favor with the mainstream of American Jews, many of whom prefer to forget/ignore Sabra and Shatila, certainly is not a point in J Street’s favor. J Street is betting on the Obama administration to get the Palestinians and Israelis to reach an agreement. As such J Street and their statements are not “designed” to honestly assess the past, but to encourage a specific direction- negotiations and withdrawals. Sharon represents in this narrow vision (apathetic to unhelpful history) the withdrawal from Gaza, which J street is aspiring towards, but this time arrived at through negotiation.

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