January 14, 2014
by Marco Torres
PreventDisease.com
Source: Health Impact News Daily
The risk of children suffering from flu can be reduced by 50% if they
take vitamin D, doctors in Japan have found. The finding has
implications for flu epidemics since vitamin D, which is naturally
produced by the human body when exposed to direct sunlight, has no
significant side effects, costs little and can be several times more
effective than anti-viral drugs or vaccines according to research in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Only one in ten children, aged six to 15 years, taking the sunshine
vitamin in a clinical trial came down with flu compared with one in five
given a dummy tablet. Mitsuyoshi Urashima, the Japanese doctor who led
the trial, told The Times that vitamin D was more effective than vaccines in preventing flu.
Vitamin D was found to be even more effective when the comparison
left out children who were already given extra vitamin D by their
parents, outside the trial. Taking the sunshine vitamin was then shown
to reduce the risk of flu to a third of what it would otherwise be.
Dr. Damien Downing, a doctor and medical consultant has publicly
stated that governments “do like” epidemics as a chance to impose their
will. The London based doctor has been advising patients to increase
their vitamin D intake rather than get the vaccine.
You might be shocked to know that there are many physicians in both
Canada and the United States who prescribe as much as 50,000 IU of
vitamin D daily as a treatment for a long list of chronic diseases.
Dr. John Cannell, MD, suggests high-dose vitamin D (50,000 IU) be
consumed for three days at the first sign of a cold or the flu. If you
have an infection, the truth is you need more vitamin D. That’s a given.
In other words, vitamin D acts as a natural antibiotic. It works
against every type of microbe (viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites).
Vitamin D deficiency is common during the winter months, especially
in countries far north of the equator. Vitamin D acts as an immune
system modulator, preventing excessive production of inflammatory
cytokines and increasing macrophage (a type of white cell) activity.
Vitamin D also stimulates the production of potent anti-microbial
peptides in other white blood cells and in epithelial cells lining the
respiratory tract, protecting the lungs from infection.
50 Percent Reduction In Flu Infections Using Vitamin D
Altogether 354 children took part in the trial. Vitamin D was found
to protect against influenza A but not against the less common influenza
B.
The trial, which was double blind, randomised, and fully controlled
scientifically, was conducted by doctors and scientists from Jikei
University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Japan.
The children were given a daily dose of 1200 IUs (international
units) of vitamin D over a period of three months. In the first month
children in the group taking the vitamin became ill just as often as
those taking the dummy tablet. But by the second month, when the vitamin
level in the children’s blood was higher, the advantage of the vitamin
was clear.
The Japanese scientists, writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
say that the anti-viral drugs zanamivir and oseltamivir reduce risk of
flu infection by 8 percent in children who have been exposed to
infection, compared with a 50 percent or greater reduction with vitamin
D.
Anti-virals are typically more effective than vaccines for the
influenza virus which suggests that both forms of medical intervention
would consistently fail in similar studies when pitted against vitamin
D.
Anti-virals are also too expensive, and possibly too toxic, to be
given to the population as a whole whereas vitamin D has additional
benefits. The sunshine vitamin not only prevents bone fractures but is
also believed to reduce risks of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and
other illness, including various bacterial as well as viral infections.
The Japanese finding supports a theory that low blood levels of the
sunshine vitamin occurring in winter explain why flu epidemics generally
peak between December and March.
Vitamin D activates the innate immune system, enabling the body to
produce several proteins such as defensin and cathelicidin which trigger
cell activity and disable viruses.
Dr John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary School of
Medicine, London, said: “This is a timely study. It will be noticed by
scientists. It fits in with the seasonal pattern of flu. There is an
increasing background of solid science that makes the vitamin D story
credible. ”
Dose and Vitamin D Levels Are Critical
Researchers have recently pinpointed the mechanism behind vitamin D3′s ability to enhance the immune system and why it is so critical to our health.
- Vitamin D is not a vitamin, but a steroid hormone precursor, which has profound effects on innate immunity.
- The amount of vitamin D in most food and nearly all multivitamins is literally inconsequential.
- The correct daily dose of vitamin D for adults is approximately
5,000 IU/day, not the 200 to 600 IU recommended by the Institute of
Medicine, the National Institutes of Medicine and the FDA.
- The only blood test to determine vitamin D adequacy is a
25-hydroxy-vitamin D, not the 1,25-di-hydroxy-vitamin D test many
physicians now order.
- Healthy vitamin D blood levels are between 70 and 90 ng/ml, levels obtained by fewer than 5% of Americans.
- The mechanism of action of vitamin D in infection, dramatically
increasing the body’s production of broad-spectrum natural antibiotics
(anti-microbial peptides or AMP), suggests pharmaceutical doses of
vitamin D (1,000 IU per pound of body weight per day for several days)
will effectively treat not only influenza and the common cold, but help
treat a host of other seasonal infections, including meningitis,
septicemia, and pneumonia, in both children and adults.
Read the full article here: http://preventdisease.com/news/13/102213_Vitamin-D-Proven-More-Effective-Anti-Viral-Drugs-Vaccines-Preventing-Flu.shtml
Marco Torres is
a research specialist, writer and consumer advocate for healthy
lifestyles. He holds degrees in Public Health and Environmental Science
and is a professional speaker on topics such as disease prevention,
environmental toxins and health policy.
Sources:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ajcn.nutrition.org
mydoctor.ca
timesonline.co.uk
Link: http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/vitamin-d-proven-more-effective-than-both-anti-viral-drugs-and-vaccines-at-preventing-the-flu/.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Egypt: appeal from a Swedish citizen on hunger strike at a Cairo prison
12 January 2014
Source: Middle East Monitor
A Swedish citizen imprisoned at a Cairo prison called on the Swedish prime minister and Cairo's ambassador to intervene to free him from his unjust imprisonment.
In a leaked message from Wadi al-Natron prison north of Cairo published by Al Jazeera website and dated December 6, Ahmad Fouad, a Swedish citizen of Egyptian origin, mentioned that he had been locked up since October 10 without commiting any crime.
Fouad narrates that he was in a taxi on October 10 near Cairo's Tahrir Square when "thugs" attacked the taxi and severely beat him, apparently because he was bearded, and smashed the taxi. They then handed him over to the Dokki security directorate.
Fouad added that he was beaten and tortured inside the police station along with supporters of the ousted President Mohamed Morsi.
Link: www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/9186-egypt-appeal-from-a-swedish-citizen-on-hunger-strike-at-a-cairo-prison.
Source: Middle East Monitor
A Swedish citizen imprisoned at a Cairo prison called on the Swedish prime minister and Cairo's ambassador to intervene to free him from his unjust imprisonment.
In a leaked message from Wadi al-Natron prison north of Cairo published by Al Jazeera website and dated December 6, Ahmad Fouad, a Swedish citizen of Egyptian origin, mentioned that he had been locked up since October 10 without commiting any crime.
Fouad narrates that he was in a taxi on October 10 near Cairo's Tahrir Square when "thugs" attacked the taxi and severely beat him, apparently because he was bearded, and smashed the taxi. They then handed him over to the Dokki security directorate.
Fouad added that he was beaten and tortured inside the police station along with supporters of the ousted President Mohamed Morsi.
Link: www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/9186-egypt-appeal-from-a-swedish-citizen-on-hunger-strike-at-a-cairo-prison.
Friday prayer banned in small mosques in Egypt
11 January 2014
Source: Middle East Monitor
Egyptian minister for religious affairs in the coup government, Mohamed Mokhtar Jomaa, has banned the Friday prayer in mosques with an area of less than 80 Sqm in Egypt.
The ban has already taken effect in several governorates in the country. It started five weeks ago in the city of Banha in Al-Qalyoubiyya Governorate and caused mass congestion in large mosques, which expressed their anger over the ban.
Source: Rassd
Link: /www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/9171-friday-prayer-banned-in-small-mosques-in-egypt.
Source: Middle East Monitor
Egyptian minister for religious affairs in the coup government, Mohamed Mokhtar Jomaa, has banned the Friday prayer in mosques with an area of less than 80 Sqm in Egypt.
The ban has already taken effect in several governorates in the country. It started five weeks ago in the city of Banha in Al-Qalyoubiyya Governorate and caused mass congestion in large mosques, which expressed their anger over the ban.
Source: Rassd
Link: /www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/9171-friday-prayer-banned-in-small-mosques-in-egypt.
Monday, January 13, 2014
15 Palestinians killed by starvation in Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria
31 December 2013
Source: Middle East Monitor
At least 15 Palestinians have died from starvation since last September in the besieged Yarmouk refugee camp, just south of Damascus, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) told Agence France Presse on Monday.
UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness said: "We have received reports over the weekend that at least five [more] Palestinian refugees in the besieged refugee camp of Yarmouk in Damascus have died due to malnutrition, bringing the total number of reported cases [of starvation] up to 15."
He warned of the deteriorating situation in the camp, where 20,000 Palestinians have been trapped with limited food and medical supplies, noting that: "Since September 2013, we have not been able to enter the camp in order to provide the necessary assistance required by the people."
He added, "The continued presence of armed groups that entered the area at the end of 2012 and its closure by government forces have thwarted all our humanitarian efforts."
Armed opposition forces are in control of the majority of the camp, which is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Regime forces have besieged the camp for almost a year now, resulting in a humanitarian crisis, and the displacement of tens of thousands of its 170,000 residents.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Friday that five more people had died of hunger in the camp, including an elderly man, a woman and a person with special needs.
UNRWA launched a humanitarian appeal on 20 December to allow the agency to provide more assistance to the residents of Yarmouk, stressing that the conditions of life in the camp are extremely tragic, and that about 20,000 people are still trapped inside.
Link: /www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/9001-15-palestinians-killed-by-starvation-in-yarmouk-refugee-camp-in-syria.
Source: Middle East Monitor
At least 15 Palestinians have died from starvation since last September in the besieged Yarmouk refugee camp, just south of Damascus, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) told Agence France Presse on Monday.
UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness said: "We have received reports over the weekend that at least five [more] Palestinian refugees in the besieged refugee camp of Yarmouk in Damascus have died due to malnutrition, bringing the total number of reported cases [of starvation] up to 15."
He warned of the deteriorating situation in the camp, where 20,000 Palestinians have been trapped with limited food and medical supplies, noting that: "Since September 2013, we have not been able to enter the camp in order to provide the necessary assistance required by the people."
He added, "The continued presence of armed groups that entered the area at the end of 2012 and its closure by government forces have thwarted all our humanitarian efforts."
Armed opposition forces are in control of the majority of the camp, which is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Regime forces have besieged the camp for almost a year now, resulting in a humanitarian crisis, and the displacement of tens of thousands of its 170,000 residents.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Friday that five more people had died of hunger in the camp, including an elderly man, a woman and a person with special needs.
UNRWA launched a humanitarian appeal on 20 December to allow the agency to provide more assistance to the residents of Yarmouk, stressing that the conditions of life in the camp are extremely tragic, and that about 20,000 people are still trapped inside.
Link: /www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/9001-15-palestinians-killed-by-starvation-in-yarmouk-refugee-camp-in-syria.
Egypt: detained female students subjected to pregnancy tests
12 January 2014
Source: Middle East Monitor
The family of Amena Yaser, a 17 year old high school student, said Sunday that Amena and four other students detained with her since the December 17 protests in front of Al-Azhar University have been subjected to pregnancy tests at Naser City security directorate where they were being held in provisional custody. The girls were transferred to al-Qanater prison on Sunday.
Safeya Yaser, Amena's sister, said in a Facebook post that her sister underwent a pregnancy test in a bid to humiliate her and her fellow students. They were denied food and drink for an entire day, and the security officers threw away their clothes and other belongings on their way to prison.
Link: www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/9188-egypt-detained-female-students-subjected-to-pregnancy-tests-.
Source: Middle East Monitor
The family of Amena Yaser, a 17 year old high school student, said Sunday that Amena and four other students detained with her since the December 17 protests in front of Al-Azhar University have been subjected to pregnancy tests at Naser City security directorate where they were being held in provisional custody. The girls were transferred to al-Qanater prison on Sunday.
Safeya Yaser, Amena's sister, said in a Facebook post that her sister underwent a pregnancy test in a bid to humiliate her and her fellow students. They were denied food and drink for an entire day, and the security officers threw away their clothes and other belongings on their way to prison.
Link: www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/9188-egypt-detained-female-students-subjected-to-pregnancy-tests-.
We may all pay a price for the crushing of democracy in Egypt
08 Jan 2014
By Peter Oborne
Source: The Telegraph
Britain, Europe and the United States, while not directly involved, have been complicit in much of this. Presumably afraid, as so often, to annoy the Americans, William Hague has yet even to utter the phrase “coup d’état”. Indeed, he immediately recognised the new regime. John Kerry went even further. In an interview on Pakistani TV in August, he hailed General Sisi for “restoring democracy” and praised him for averting violence.
These remarks from the Secretary of State went beyond satire. Well over 1,000 protesters have been shot dead in the streets, the bloodiest encounter coming at the Rabaa el Adawiya Mosque in Cairo last August, when more than 600 people were killed.
Egyptian police are well practised in crowd control and the use of rubber bullets. It can therefore be assumed that the mass killing was deliberate. According to survivors, more than 20 people were run over by a police bulldozer. So far, General Sisi’s regime has made no attempt to investigate these crimes. During my brief stay I met a few of the journalists who have attempted to go out and tell the truth: they are very brave.
Since my return, I have been trying to make sense of British and American policy. I guess that Western leaders are making the cynical but – as they see it – realistic judgment that a military regime led by Sisi is the best hope of stability. In the short term, that might be right. But in the longer term, I wonder.
Let’s revisit the story of Ayman al-Zawahiri, driven underground by the Nasserite reign of terror 50 years ago. For several years, one of the biggest selling points for al-Qaeda, the organisation he now runs, was the claim that the Western powers would never allow democracy in the Muslim world – meaning that there was no alternative to armed struggle. The men of violence pointed to the democratic victory of Islamist parties in Algeria in 1992, who were brought down at once by a military coup, followed by a decade of civil war.
The Muslim Brotherhood rejected this analysis, and spent eight decades plodding towards power. Eventually, it secured it peacefully, having come out top in three separate tests of popular opinion – the parliamentary elections of January 2012, the presidential elections of May and June 2012, and the constitutional referendum that December. It has now been declared a terrorist organisation.
The Brotherhood’s leaders continue to preach non-violence. But will all their followers agree to wait another 80 years before winning power through democratic means? A number are bound to turn to violence. Already, parts of the Sinai are starting to resemble northern Syria, Benghazi in Libya or Anbar province in Iraq – ungovernable havens for militant groups.
Britain cannot take sides in the great civil conflict that engulfs Egypt. But we can surely sustain the values that we claim to cherish. Thus far, our response has been poor, and will remain a blot on William Hague’s record as Foreign Secretary.
This week, a group of lawyers claiming to represent President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood asked the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity committed by all sides during the course of the revolution. Since the Sisi regime shows no appetite to investigate the killings, Britain should support this request. Since the Brotherhood continues to demonstrate its faith in Western concepts of justice and democracy, it would be more than polite to return the compliment. It would also be sensible and wise. There’s an old Egyptian doctor, hiding out somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghan border, who would be more than happy to let General Sisi just get on with it.
By Peter Oborne
Source: The Telegraph
The junta in Cairo is bent on repeating the mistakes of the past – as I saw this week
The earliest political decision made by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor
who has presided over such a dramatic resurgence of al-Qaeda since Osama Bin
Laden’s death, was to join the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even then, back in the mid-Sixties, the Brotherhood was proscribed. This meant
that it was impossible for a young man like Zawahiri to get involved in
mainstream politics. Instead, Egypt’s brutally repressive system of
government forced him down the path that led to al-Qaeda and the Twin
Towers.
Is history about to repeat itself? I ask this urgent question because I have
just returned from a very troubling trip to Cairo, a city that I last
visited in the summer of 2011. Everything seemed possible back then, when
the crowds gathered in Tahrir Square during the hopeful, happy, good-natured
months that followed the fall of President Mubarak.
Today, protest is punishable by jail. Abductions are commonplace, torture
routine. Demonstrators get shot dead. Following the coup that removed
President Morsi on July 3 last year, a military junta is in control. Acting
president Adly Mansour is a puppet. The defence minister, General Sisi, runs
the country.
Looking much younger than his 59 years, he has become a sex symbol for
middle-aged Egyptian ladies. His picture is everywhere – in shops, in cafes,
on street corners. Very often General Sisi appears in posters alongside
Nasser and Sadat, two previous military strongmen. He is expected to stand
for president in elections to be held on an unspecified date this year. He
has reportedly told friends of a series of visions, some dating back
decades, in which it was divulged to him that he is destined to emerge as
Egypt’s saviour.
Meanwhile, what of the Brotherhood, which won the presidency in free and fair elections only 18 months ago? On Christmas Day, the military junta used Article 86 of the national penal code to ban it as a terrorist organisation. The excuse was a bomb attack carried out by the Sinai-based terrorist group Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis (“Supporters of Jerusalem”) on a police station in the northern town of Mansoura, which claimed 16 lives.
Ansar Beit are long-standing opponents of the Brotherhood, having once attacked Morsi as an “unbeliever”. Never mind: anyone who attends one of the Brotherhood’s protest marches now faces five years in prison. Its supporters can no longer appear on TV, indeed, only those who concur with the official view that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organisation are allowed on air.
The entire leadership is now either in jail, or hiding, or fled the country. The organisation has retreated to the secret cell structure used to protect itself during previous periods of repression. Meetings now take place in private homes: the only objective is survival, and there are suggestions that even the cell structure has been compromised.
I did not try to meet anyone from the Brotherhood during my visit, and not just because of fears for my own safety – though I could easily have ended up in jail alongside three journalists from Al-Jazeera who were picked up late last month. I was rather more worried about the consequences for anyone I approached.
President Morsi (I prefer to call him by that name, since the military coup that displaced him was not just illegal but immoral) is in prison. He was meant to face trumped-up charges in court in Cairo yesterday, but did not appear. The authorities mysteriously blamed “bad weather”: it was fine both in Alexandria, where Morsi is in jail, and in Cairo.
Meanwhile, what of the Brotherhood, which won the presidency in free and fair elections only 18 months ago? On Christmas Day, the military junta used Article 86 of the national penal code to ban it as a terrorist organisation. The excuse was a bomb attack carried out by the Sinai-based terrorist group Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis (“Supporters of Jerusalem”) on a police station in the northern town of Mansoura, which claimed 16 lives.
Ansar Beit are long-standing opponents of the Brotherhood, having once attacked Morsi as an “unbeliever”. Never mind: anyone who attends one of the Brotherhood’s protest marches now faces five years in prison. Its supporters can no longer appear on TV, indeed, only those who concur with the official view that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organisation are allowed on air.
The entire leadership is now either in jail, or hiding, or fled the country. The organisation has retreated to the secret cell structure used to protect itself during previous periods of repression. Meetings now take place in private homes: the only objective is survival, and there are suggestions that even the cell structure has been compromised.
I did not try to meet anyone from the Brotherhood during my visit, and not just because of fears for my own safety – though I could easily have ended up in jail alongside three journalists from Al-Jazeera who were picked up late last month. I was rather more worried about the consequences for anyone I approached.
President Morsi (I prefer to call him by that name, since the military coup that displaced him was not just illegal but immoral) is in prison. He was meant to face trumped-up charges in court in Cairo yesterday, but did not appear. The authorities mysteriously blamed “bad weather”: it was fine both in Alexandria, where Morsi is in jail, and in Cairo.
Britain, Europe and the United States, while not directly involved, have been complicit in much of this. Presumably afraid, as so often, to annoy the Americans, William Hague has yet even to utter the phrase “coup d’état”. Indeed, he immediately recognised the new regime. John Kerry went even further. In an interview on Pakistani TV in August, he hailed General Sisi for “restoring democracy” and praised him for averting violence.
These remarks from the Secretary of State went beyond satire. Well over 1,000 protesters have been shot dead in the streets, the bloodiest encounter coming at the Rabaa el Adawiya Mosque in Cairo last August, when more than 600 people were killed.
Egyptian police are well practised in crowd control and the use of rubber bullets. It can therefore be assumed that the mass killing was deliberate. According to survivors, more than 20 people were run over by a police bulldozer. So far, General Sisi’s regime has made no attempt to investigate these crimes. During my brief stay I met a few of the journalists who have attempted to go out and tell the truth: they are very brave.
Since my return, I have been trying to make sense of British and American policy. I guess that Western leaders are making the cynical but – as they see it – realistic judgment that a military regime led by Sisi is the best hope of stability. In the short term, that might be right. But in the longer term, I wonder.
Let’s revisit the story of Ayman al-Zawahiri, driven underground by the Nasserite reign of terror 50 years ago. For several years, one of the biggest selling points for al-Qaeda, the organisation he now runs, was the claim that the Western powers would never allow democracy in the Muslim world – meaning that there was no alternative to armed struggle. The men of violence pointed to the democratic victory of Islamist parties in Algeria in 1992, who were brought down at once by a military coup, followed by a decade of civil war.
The Muslim Brotherhood rejected this analysis, and spent eight decades plodding towards power. Eventually, it secured it peacefully, having come out top in three separate tests of popular opinion – the parliamentary elections of January 2012, the presidential elections of May and June 2012, and the constitutional referendum that December. It has now been declared a terrorist organisation.
The Brotherhood’s leaders continue to preach non-violence. But will all their followers agree to wait another 80 years before winning power through democratic means? A number are bound to turn to violence. Already, parts of the Sinai are starting to resemble northern Syria, Benghazi in Libya or Anbar province in Iraq – ungovernable havens for militant groups.
Britain cannot take sides in the great civil conflict that engulfs Egypt. But we can surely sustain the values that we claim to cherish. Thus far, our response has been poor, and will remain a blot on William Hague’s record as Foreign Secretary.
This week, a group of lawyers claiming to represent President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood asked the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity committed by all sides during the course of the revolution. Since the Sisi regime shows no appetite to investigate the killings, Britain should support this request. Since the Brotherhood continues to demonstrate its faith in Western concepts of justice and democracy, it would be more than polite to return the compliment. It would also be sensible and wise. There’s an old Egyptian doctor, hiding out somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghan border, who would be more than happy to let General Sisi just get on with it.
The truth about Israeli war criminal Ariel Sharon that you won't hear from Obama, Cameron or the BBC
11 January 2014
By Max Blumenthal
Source: Stop The War Coalition
An accused war criminal who presided over the killing of thousands of civilians, his foes referred to him as “The Bulldozer.” To those who revered him as a strong-armed protector and patron saint of the settlements, he was “The King of Israel.” In a life acted out in three parts, Sharon destroyed entire cities, wasted countless lives and sabotaged careers to shape the reality on the ground.
The first act of Sharon’s career began after the 1948 war that established Israel at the expense of 750,000 Palestinians who were driven away in a campaign of mass expulsion. Badly wounded in the battle of Latrun, where the Israeli army suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the Royal Jordanian Army, Sharon momentarily retired from army life. He looked back in anger at the failure to take Latrun, a strategic swath of land containing three Palestinian towns seemingly obstructing the new Jewish state’s demographic continuity. Spineless politicians and feckless commanders had tied the hands of Israel’s troops, he claimed, leaving the Jewish state exposed from within. Sharon yearned to finish 1948—to complete the expulsion project he viewed as deficient.
In 1953, Sharon was plucked out of retirement by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and appointed the head of a secret commando unit tasked with carrying out brutal acts of reprisal and sabotage. Following a lethal Palestinian assault on an Israeli kibbutz, Sharon led his men into the West Bank town of Qibya with orders from Ben Gurion’s Central Command to “carry out destruction and cause maximum damage.” By the time they were done, sixty-nine civilians—mostly Palestinian women and children—lay dead.
In the years after that scandal, Sharon carried out bloody raids on Egyptian and Syrian territory that inflamed relations with Israel’s neighbors and led them to seek urgent military assistance from the Soviet Union.
In the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Sharon was accused by one of his commanders, Arye Biro, of overseeing the massacre of forty-nine Egyptian quarry workers who had been taken prisoner and had no role in the fighting (official censorship kept the details from the public for decades).
In the 1967 Six Day War, Sharon ran up the body count on encircled Egyptian tank units, converting unprecedented kill ratios into national fame. With the Gaza Strip now under Israeli control, Sharon orchestrated the razing of Palestinian citrus orchards to make way for Jewish colonization.
During the 1973 war, Sharon waged his own parallel war for personal glory. Determined to be the first Israeli commander to cross the Suez Canal, he sent his soldiers rushing into the teeth of the Egyptian army without sufficient artillery or air support. Scores of his men died in the blind thrust while entire brigades were left exposed. But Sharon salvaged his quest for fame when his tank brigades encircled the Egyptian Third Army. After the battle, photos of the general standing proudly in the Egyptian desert, bandaged from a superficial wound and surrounded by soldiers hailing him as “The King of Israel,” circulated in the Israeli and international media. The high-flying political career he had sought was now guaranteed. In short order, Sharon helped found the Likud Party, opening the second act of his storied career.
Though set on a rightward political trajectory, Sharon owed his fortunes to the icons of Labor Zionism. His original patron, Ben Gurion, and the younger warrior-politician Moshe Dayan, constantly shuffled him up the ranks of the military hierarchy, despite a clear pattern of scandalously insubordinate behavior. His first cabinet-level post was an abbreviated stint in the 1970s government of Yitzhak Rabin, the quintessential Laborite, who imagined Sharon leading a reorganization of the army following the disaster of the 1973 war. But it was in the Likud-led 1977 coalition of Menachem Begin that Sharon was finally able to translate his influence into history-altering policies.
Appointed minister of agriculture, Sharon exploited his seemingly insignificant position to bring the messianic project of Greater Israel to fruition. With unbridled vigor, he expanded the settlement enterprise across the West Bank, boasting that he personally established sixty-four settlements during his first four years in government. He revealed his strategy in a private chat with Winston Churchill’s grandson: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
Having established himself as the visionary behind the settlements, Sharon set his sights on the Ministry of Defense, actively intimidating Begin to fulfill his ambition. When Begin finally capitulated before Sharon’s bullying, he declared only half-jokingly that Sharon might have staged a military coup if he hadn’t been offered his desired sinecure.
Sharon entered the Defense Ministry consumed with dreams of an Israeli-friendly Christian puppet government in Beirut—the bulwark of a regional Israeli empire. Clamoring for an invasion of Lebanon, Sharon withheld his true intentions from everyone except perhaps Begin, claiming he merely aimed to drive the PLO out of southern Lebanon, where it had staged periodic raids on Israeli territory. When Begin green-lighted Operation Peace for Galilee in June 1982, Sharon sent Israeli tanks rumbling towards Beirut without the approval of the rest of the cabinet, whom Sharon had deliberately deceived. Many of them were outraged, but it was too late to turn back.
Against fierce Palestinian resistance, one of the Middle East’s most vital and cosmopolitan cities was laid to ruin. Sharon’s forces flattened West Beirut with indiscriminate shelling, leaving streets strewn with unburied corpses. With each passing day, disease and famine spread at epidemic levels. In August, the day after the Israeli cabinet accepted US special envoy Philip Habib’s proposal for the evacuation of the PLO, Sharon’s forces bombarded Beirut for seven hours straight, leaving 300 dead, most of them civilians. The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling wrote that the raid “resembled the attack on Dresden by the Allies toward the end of World War II.” Sharon even requested an additional paratrooper brigade to obliterate the PLO forces besieged in the city, earning a rare rebuke from Begin, who worried that his defense minister would completely destroy Habib’s efforts to resolve the crisis.
PLO forces withdrew from Lebanon, according to Habib’s guidelines, but the worst was yet to come. Sharon had stymied a proposal for the introduction of multinational peacekeepers capable of preventing reprisals against the defenseless Palestinian refugees who had been left behind. Thus the stage was set for the most heinous massacre of the war. Following the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the Christian warlord who was supposed to serve as Sharon’s handpicked puppet president, Israeli forces helped usher Christian Phalangist militias into the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, then surrounded by the Israeli military, providing them with intelligence and operational support. Sharon and many of his officers were well aware of the Phalangists’ intention to murder as many women and children as they could. After days of slaughter, as many as 2,000 civilians were dead, with countless others raped and brutalized.
In February 1983, Israel’s Kahan Commission found Sharon “indirectly responsible” for the massacre, urging his dismissal as defense minister. With the Israeli body count was piling up in Lebanon, city squares in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were thronged with outraged mothers and a growing movement of service refuseniks. The antiwar demonstrations shook the confidence of the army’s high command. At the prime minister’s office, Sharon berated Begin and his ministers, warning them, “If we adopt this [Kahan] report, all our ill-wishers and naysayers will that what happened in the camp was genocide.” Calling the findings “a mark of Cain on all of us for generations,” Sharon adamantly refused to step down.
During the meeting, a right-wing Jewish terrorist lobbed a live grenade into a crowd of antiwar protesters right outside the prime minister’s office, killing the teacher and antiwar activist Emil Grunzweig. The incident was Sharon’s coup de grâce, prompting his resignation. Though he remained in government as a minister without portfolio, his dreams of serving as prime minister appeared to be dashed.
Sharon’s fear of prosecution did not end with his resignation. In July 2001, a Belgian court opened an inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre when a group of survivors filed a complaint under the country’s “universal jurisdiction” guidelines. Elie Hobeika, the Phalangist commander directly responsible for the killings, was assassinated months later, after informing Belgian politicians that he would testify against Sharon. “Israel doesn’t want witnesses against it in this historic case in Belgium which will certainly convict Ariel Sharon,” the Lebanese Minister of Displaced People Marwan Hamadeh remarked at the time, echoing widespread speculation about Sharon’s involvement. In September 2003, with Belgian relations with Israel at an all-time low, the Belgian court threw out the case, citing Sharon’s diplomatic immunity.
By this time, Sharon had resuscitated his political career in dramatic fashion. On September 28, 2000, following the collapse of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority at Camp David that summer, Sharon toured the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, site of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, accompanied by 1,000 armed police and security agents. It was a provocative stunt, staged to inflame rising tensions in the occupied territories. As expected, the appearance sparked widespread Palestinian rioting the next day, which was met with a draconian Israeli crackdown—Israeli forces fired 1.3 million bullets at mostly unarmed demonstrators in October 2000 alone—fueling what became known as the Al Aqsa Intifada. The following year Sharon was elected prime minister and Palestinian suicide bombings were battering the cafes and nightclubs of Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. Channeling the mood of Israel’s “peace camp,” which had called for Sharon’s ouster during the invasion of Lebanon, the liberal newspaper Haaretz demanded “a war about the morning’s coffee and croissant.”
The beleaguered peace camp was shocked at the intifada, but also cynically misled by Sharon’s predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Barak, who declared after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations that there was “no Palestinian partner” for peace. Sapped of confidence, they became quiescent while the mainstream united behind Sharon, their vengeful protector. With a free hand to deploy tanks and combat jets against Palestinian population centers, Sharon oversaw a campaign of carefully calculated brutality, culminating, in 2002, in the comprehensive demolition of the Jenin refugee camp. Baruch Kimmerling termed Sharon’s strategy “politicide,” a “gradual but systematic attempt to cause [Palestine’s] annihilation as an independent political and social entity.” As in the beginning, Sharon’s unspoken goal was to finish the war of 1948.
While Israeli bulldozers trundled across Gaza and the West Bank, Sharon announced his intention to “make separation across the land.” Though initially resistant to the idea, he resolved to fulfill a plan first introduced in the 1990’s under Yitzhak Rabin: the construction of a vast wall that would drive a nail into the coffin of the Palestinian national movement. Cutting into the West Bank and Jordan Valley, the wall would effectively annex 80 percent of settlements into Israel proper, consolidating the country’s Jewish demographic majority while relegating Palestinians to a permanent regime of ghettoized exclusion.
Next, Sharon planned to pull Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, setting the stage for a high-tech siege of that occupied coastal territory. Unlike in the past, Sharon sold his plans to the public with carefully calibrated, subtle rhetorical touches. Stunned by a new movement of mass refusal—a group of former and active Israeli air force pilots had issued a letter declaring their refusal to participate in operations in occupied territory—and by the furious opposition of the settlement movement to his plan, Sharon uncharacteristically proclaimed that the occupation was a “bad thing for Israel.” Next, he bolted from Likud, cobbling together a random assortment of politicians including his former aide, the telegenic, PR-friendly Tzipi Livni, to drive the separation plan forward under the banner of Kadima.
Sharon’s maneuvers earned him the political space he needed to fulfill his goals. Haaretz, the voice of Israeli liberalism, supported the vast separation wall as a “revolutionary” step towards two states. Endorsing the withdrawal of settlers from Gaza, The New York Times editorial board declared that Sharon “should be cheered.” Back in Tel Aviv, the anti-settlement group Peace Now and the Labor Party organized a mass demonstration in support of the Gaza disengagement plan. Winning liberals to his side was Sharon’s final political coup, and probably his most consequential.
The true goal of Sharon’s separation regime was never to end the occupation but to reinforce it under new parameters that would prevent the collapse of Israel’s international image. A top aide to Sharon, Dov Weissglass, revealed the real logic behind Sharon’s plans: “The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Another close adviser, Arnon Sofer, was even more frank:
Now that Sharon’s unilateral vision appears to have been consolidated, Israel’s government must perpetually manage an occupation it has no intention of ending. It has no clear strategy to achieve international legitimacy and no endgame. Its direct line to Washington has become a life-support system for the status quo. Like Sharon, who spent his last years in a comatose state without any hope of regaining consciousness, Israel is only buying time.
Source: The Nation
Link: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/the-truth-about-israeli-war-criminal-ariel-sharon-that-you-won-t-hear-from-obama-cameron-or-the-bbc?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr#.UtPVBPsqdRx.
By Max Blumenthal
Source: Stop The War Coalition
An accused war criminal who presided over the killing of thousands of civilians, Sharon destroyed entire cities, wasted countless lives and sabotaged careers to shape the reality on the ground.
A central player in Israeli affairs since the state’s inception, Ariel Sharon molded history according to his own stark vision. He won consent for his plans through ruthlessness and guile, and resorted to force when he could not find any.An accused war criminal who presided over the killing of thousands of civilians, his foes referred to him as “The Bulldozer.” To those who revered him as a strong-armed protector and patron saint of the settlements, he was “The King of Israel.” In a life acted out in three parts, Sharon destroyed entire cities, wasted countless lives and sabotaged careers to shape the reality on the ground.
The first act of Sharon’s career began after the 1948 war that established Israel at the expense of 750,000 Palestinians who were driven away in a campaign of mass expulsion. Badly wounded in the battle of Latrun, where the Israeli army suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the Royal Jordanian Army, Sharon momentarily retired from army life. He looked back in anger at the failure to take Latrun, a strategic swath of land containing three Palestinian towns seemingly obstructing the new Jewish state’s demographic continuity. Spineless politicians and feckless commanders had tied the hands of Israel’s troops, he claimed, leaving the Jewish state exposed from within. Sharon yearned to finish 1948—to complete the expulsion project he viewed as deficient.
In 1953, Sharon was plucked out of retirement by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and appointed the head of a secret commando unit tasked with carrying out brutal acts of reprisal and sabotage. Following a lethal Palestinian assault on an Israeli kibbutz, Sharon led his men into the West Bank town of Qibya with orders from Ben Gurion’s Central Command to “carry out destruction and cause maximum damage.” By the time they were done, sixty-nine civilians—mostly Palestinian women and children—lay dead.
In the years after that scandal, Sharon carried out bloody raids on Egyptian and Syrian territory that inflamed relations with Israel’s neighbors and led them to seek urgent military assistance from the Soviet Union.
In the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Sharon was accused by one of his commanders, Arye Biro, of overseeing the massacre of forty-nine Egyptian quarry workers who had been taken prisoner and had no role in the fighting (official censorship kept the details from the public for decades).
In the 1967 Six Day War, Sharon ran up the body count on encircled Egyptian tank units, converting unprecedented kill ratios into national fame. With the Gaza Strip now under Israeli control, Sharon orchestrated the razing of Palestinian citrus orchards to make way for Jewish colonization.
During the 1973 war, Sharon waged his own parallel war for personal glory. Determined to be the first Israeli commander to cross the Suez Canal, he sent his soldiers rushing into the teeth of the Egyptian army without sufficient artillery or air support. Scores of his men died in the blind thrust while entire brigades were left exposed. But Sharon salvaged his quest for fame when his tank brigades encircled the Egyptian Third Army. After the battle, photos of the general standing proudly in the Egyptian desert, bandaged from a superficial wound and surrounded by soldiers hailing him as “The King of Israel,” circulated in the Israeli and international media. The high-flying political career he had sought was now guaranteed. In short order, Sharon helped found the Likud Party, opening the second act of his storied career.
Though set on a rightward political trajectory, Sharon owed his fortunes to the icons of Labor Zionism. His original patron, Ben Gurion, and the younger warrior-politician Moshe Dayan, constantly shuffled him up the ranks of the military hierarchy, despite a clear pattern of scandalously insubordinate behavior. His first cabinet-level post was an abbreviated stint in the 1970s government of Yitzhak Rabin, the quintessential Laborite, who imagined Sharon leading a reorganization of the army following the disaster of the 1973 war. But it was in the Likud-led 1977 coalition of Menachem Begin that Sharon was finally able to translate his influence into history-altering policies.
Appointed minister of agriculture, Sharon exploited his seemingly insignificant position to bring the messianic project of Greater Israel to fruition. With unbridled vigor, he expanded the settlement enterprise across the West Bank, boasting that he personally established sixty-four settlements during his first four years in government. He revealed his strategy in a private chat with Winston Churchill’s grandson: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
Having established himself as the visionary behind the settlements, Sharon set his sights on the Ministry of Defense, actively intimidating Begin to fulfill his ambition. When Begin finally capitulated before Sharon’s bullying, he declared only half-jokingly that Sharon might have staged a military coup if he hadn’t been offered his desired sinecure.
Sharon entered the Defense Ministry consumed with dreams of an Israeli-friendly Christian puppet government in Beirut—the bulwark of a regional Israeli empire. Clamoring for an invasion of Lebanon, Sharon withheld his true intentions from everyone except perhaps Begin, claiming he merely aimed to drive the PLO out of southern Lebanon, where it had staged periodic raids on Israeli territory. When Begin green-lighted Operation Peace for Galilee in June 1982, Sharon sent Israeli tanks rumbling towards Beirut without the approval of the rest of the cabinet, whom Sharon had deliberately deceived. Many of them were outraged, but it was too late to turn back.
Against fierce Palestinian resistance, one of the Middle East’s most vital and cosmopolitan cities was laid to ruin. Sharon’s forces flattened West Beirut with indiscriminate shelling, leaving streets strewn with unburied corpses. With each passing day, disease and famine spread at epidemic levels. In August, the day after the Israeli cabinet accepted US special envoy Philip Habib’s proposal for the evacuation of the PLO, Sharon’s forces bombarded Beirut for seven hours straight, leaving 300 dead, most of them civilians. The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling wrote that the raid “resembled the attack on Dresden by the Allies toward the end of World War II.” Sharon even requested an additional paratrooper brigade to obliterate the PLO forces besieged in the city, earning a rare rebuke from Begin, who worried that his defense minister would completely destroy Habib’s efforts to resolve the crisis.
PLO forces withdrew from Lebanon, according to Habib’s guidelines, but the worst was yet to come. Sharon had stymied a proposal for the introduction of multinational peacekeepers capable of preventing reprisals against the defenseless Palestinian refugees who had been left behind. Thus the stage was set for the most heinous massacre of the war. Following the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the Christian warlord who was supposed to serve as Sharon’s handpicked puppet president, Israeli forces helped usher Christian Phalangist militias into the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, then surrounded by the Israeli military, providing them with intelligence and operational support. Sharon and many of his officers were well aware of the Phalangists’ intention to murder as many women and children as they could. After days of slaughter, as many as 2,000 civilians were dead, with countless others raped and brutalized.
In February 1983, Israel’s Kahan Commission found Sharon “indirectly responsible” for the massacre, urging his dismissal as defense minister. With the Israeli body count was piling up in Lebanon, city squares in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were thronged with outraged mothers and a growing movement of service refuseniks. The antiwar demonstrations shook the confidence of the army’s high command. At the prime minister’s office, Sharon berated Begin and his ministers, warning them, “If we adopt this [Kahan] report, all our ill-wishers and naysayers will that what happened in the camp was genocide.” Calling the findings “a mark of Cain on all of us for generations,” Sharon adamantly refused to step down.
During the meeting, a right-wing Jewish terrorist lobbed a live grenade into a crowd of antiwar protesters right outside the prime minister’s office, killing the teacher and antiwar activist Emil Grunzweig. The incident was Sharon’s coup de grâce, prompting his resignation. Though he remained in government as a minister without portfolio, his dreams of serving as prime minister appeared to be dashed.
Sharon’s fear of prosecution did not end with his resignation. In July 2001, a Belgian court opened an inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre when a group of survivors filed a complaint under the country’s “universal jurisdiction” guidelines. Elie Hobeika, the Phalangist commander directly responsible for the killings, was assassinated months later, after informing Belgian politicians that he would testify against Sharon. “Israel doesn’t want witnesses against it in this historic case in Belgium which will certainly convict Ariel Sharon,” the Lebanese Minister of Displaced People Marwan Hamadeh remarked at the time, echoing widespread speculation about Sharon’s involvement. In September 2003, with Belgian relations with Israel at an all-time low, the Belgian court threw out the case, citing Sharon’s diplomatic immunity.
By this time, Sharon had resuscitated his political career in dramatic fashion. On September 28, 2000, following the collapse of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority at Camp David that summer, Sharon toured the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, site of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, accompanied by 1,000 armed police and security agents. It was a provocative stunt, staged to inflame rising tensions in the occupied territories. As expected, the appearance sparked widespread Palestinian rioting the next day, which was met with a draconian Israeli crackdown—Israeli forces fired 1.3 million bullets at mostly unarmed demonstrators in October 2000 alone—fueling what became known as the Al Aqsa Intifada. The following year Sharon was elected prime minister and Palestinian suicide bombings were battering the cafes and nightclubs of Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. Channeling the mood of Israel’s “peace camp,” which had called for Sharon’s ouster during the invasion of Lebanon, the liberal newspaper Haaretz demanded “a war about the morning’s coffee and croissant.”
The beleaguered peace camp was shocked at the intifada, but also cynically misled by Sharon’s predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Barak, who declared after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations that there was “no Palestinian partner” for peace. Sapped of confidence, they became quiescent while the mainstream united behind Sharon, their vengeful protector. With a free hand to deploy tanks and combat jets against Palestinian population centers, Sharon oversaw a campaign of carefully calculated brutality, culminating, in 2002, in the comprehensive demolition of the Jenin refugee camp. Baruch Kimmerling termed Sharon’s strategy “politicide,” a “gradual but systematic attempt to cause [Palestine’s] annihilation as an independent political and social entity.” As in the beginning, Sharon’s unspoken goal was to finish the war of 1948.
While Israeli bulldozers trundled across Gaza and the West Bank, Sharon announced his intention to “make separation across the land.” Though initially resistant to the idea, he resolved to fulfill a plan first introduced in the 1990’s under Yitzhak Rabin: the construction of a vast wall that would drive a nail into the coffin of the Palestinian national movement. Cutting into the West Bank and Jordan Valley, the wall would effectively annex 80 percent of settlements into Israel proper, consolidating the country’s Jewish demographic majority while relegating Palestinians to a permanent regime of ghettoized exclusion.
Next, Sharon planned to pull Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, setting the stage for a high-tech siege of that occupied coastal territory. Unlike in the past, Sharon sold his plans to the public with carefully calibrated, subtle rhetorical touches. Stunned by a new movement of mass refusal—a group of former and active Israeli air force pilots had issued a letter declaring their refusal to participate in operations in occupied territory—and by the furious opposition of the settlement movement to his plan, Sharon uncharacteristically proclaimed that the occupation was a “bad thing for Israel.” Next, he bolted from Likud, cobbling together a random assortment of politicians including his former aide, the telegenic, PR-friendly Tzipi Livni, to drive the separation plan forward under the banner of Kadima.
Sharon’s maneuvers earned him the political space he needed to fulfill his goals. Haaretz, the voice of Israeli liberalism, supported the vast separation wall as a “revolutionary” step towards two states. Endorsing the withdrawal of settlers from Gaza, The New York Times editorial board declared that Sharon “should be cheered.” Back in Tel Aviv, the anti-settlement group Peace Now and the Labor Party organized a mass demonstration in support of the Gaza disengagement plan. Winning liberals to his side was Sharon’s final political coup, and probably his most consequential.
The true goal of Sharon’s separation regime was never to end the occupation but to reinforce it under new parameters that would prevent the collapse of Israel’s international image. A top aide to Sharon, Dov Weissglass, revealed the real logic behind Sharon’s plans: “The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Another close adviser, Arnon Sofer, was even more frank:
…when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.Eight years after Sharon slipped into a coma, the real implications of separation stand exposed. Gaza suffers under a joint Israeli-Egyptian siege, while Israel shrugs off any responsibility for its inhabitants. Though Israel controls the entrances, exits, airspace and coast of Gaza, and effectively regulates the caloric intake of each resident of the coastal territory, the occupation is over as far as its government is concerned. Israeli settlements are firmly entrenched in the West Bank and encircle East Jerusalem, reducing Palestinian areas to the “pastrami sandwich” of non-contiguous bantustans that Sharon had originally envisioned. With the peace process effectively embalmed in political “formaldehyde,” right-wing elements have achieved unfettered dominance over the Jewish state’s key institutions. Typical of the new generation of Israeli rightists is Sharon’s corruption-stained son, Gilad, who has called Palestinian society a “predator,” an “animal” and “stabbers of babies.”
Now that Sharon’s unilateral vision appears to have been consolidated, Israel’s government must perpetually manage an occupation it has no intention of ending. It has no clear strategy to achieve international legitimacy and no endgame. Its direct line to Washington has become a life-support system for the status quo. Like Sharon, who spent his last years in a comatose state without any hope of regaining consciousness, Israel is only buying time.
Source: The Nation
Link: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/the-truth-about-israeli-war-criminal-ariel-sharon-that-you-won-t-hear-from-obama-cameron-or-the-bbc?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr#.UtPVBPsqdRx.
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