TOM GROSS” ARIEL SHARON- THE MYTHS, LIES AND BLOOD LIBEL ****
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001422.html
* Tom Gross: Sharon’s long and controversial career – as Israeli general, politician, and builder and then dismantler of settlements (in Sinai, Gaza, and four in the West Bank) – has inspired so much vituperation and calumny that it has often been difficult to separate fact from fiction.
* Time magazine was one of many publications to slander Sharon, falsely claiming he ordered the 1982 the Sabra and Shatilla massacre of Muslims by Christians in Beirut. Sharon successfully sued Time.
* In the last few minutes BBC Radio News at 4 pm eulogized Sharon by giving the floor as the sole speaker to a Palestinian man who claimed Sharon should not have been allowed to die of natural causes.
* BBC (breaking its own charter) already repeating lies on its website that Sharon caused the second intifada. (It has repeated it in at least 11 links in at least four different articles on its website just in the last five days.)
* Intifada leader Marwan Barghouti (contradicting anti-Sharon Western journalists): “The intifada did not start because of Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa”.
* PA Communications Minister Imad Al-Faluji: “Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong. This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton.”
* Arafat’s widow Suha on Dubai TV: The intifada was pre-planned: “Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations], I met him [Arafat] in Paris upon his return and he said to me, ‘You should remain in Paris.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because I am going to start an intifada. They [Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak] want me to betray the Palestinian cause. I will not do so.”
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* Tom Gross: In the past, much coverage of Ariel Sharon in the European and Arab media has been accompanied by blatant anti-Semitism. In Spain, for example, on June 4, 2001 (three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis at a Tel Aviv disco, in the midst of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire), the liberal magazine Cambio 16 published a cartoon of Sharon (with a hook nose he does not have), wearing a skull cap (which he did not usually wear), sporting a swastika inside a star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: “At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect.” (** You can see the cartoon here: http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001422.html **)
* A week earlier, El Pais, Spain’s equivalent of The New York Times, published a cartoon of an allegorical figure carrying a small rectangular-shaped black moustache, flying through the air towards Sharon’s upper lip. The caption read: “Clio, the muse of history, puts Hitler’s moustache on Ariel Sharon”.
* Cartoons in the Greek press in 2004 showed Sharon as a Nazi officer. One of Italy’s leading papers, Corriere Della Sera, ran a cartoon on March 31, 2002, showing Sharon killing Jesus. (The cartoon, which was timed to coincide with Easter that year, was published as Israelis lay dying from the Netanya Passover massacre three days earlier.)
* Hundreds of similar anti-Semitic motifs have been applied to Sharon in recent years. The Economist magazine in London compared him to Charles Dickens’s infamous anti-Semitic stereotype, Fagin.
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