REMEMBERING ARIEL SHARON
By The Girl Who Loves Khamis
This is a transcript I have done of the start of George Galloway’s ‘Sputnik’ programme, broadcast on Russia Today TV (UK) on January 18th 2014 – as spoken by Galloway and his assistant Gayatri.
“The picture of the week has to be ‘peace envoy’ Tony Blair at Ariel Sharon’s funeral – emoting like he did that morning when Diana died. I was sure he was going to sob at any moment – Sharon was The People’s Butcher. Warmly embracing Sharon’s son, Gilad – the son that is not the two ton burger king – who is on the record as saying that Gaza, and presumably with nearly two million inhabitants, should be flattened like Hiroshima – with a nuclear bomb.
Blair seems utterly oblivious to the way he is viewed by the 350 million Arabs in the Middle East – or maybe he just doesn’t care.
While, to Tony Blair, Ariel Sharon was bold, unorthodox, unyielding; to many, if not most in the Middle East, Ariel Sharon was the Butcher of Beirut – for his role in the 1982 massacre of up to 3,500 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
I was in Beirut in 1982, when the ‘Israeli Defence Forces’ invaded Lebanon en masse. I just made it out of the country – ahead of the phosphorous bombs and tanks. I returned immediately after they were forced to withdraw by the Lebanese resistance – and went to the camps that had once been my home – Sabra and Shatila.
Some of the dead remained unburied – the stench was unmistakable – and the camps were full of wandering wailing women, children and old men.
Against the Butcher of Beirut, the women, children and old men in the camp had, of course, been defenceless – for the Palestinian fighters had all sailed away to a new exile in faraway Tunisia. They did so under a United States guarantee, signed by President Reagan’s representative…that their families would not be harmed once they were no longer there to protect them – but before the ink on the promise was dry, their families blood was running in the open sewers of the camps.
Ariel Sharon stood throughout the night of the massacre on the roof of the Kuwaiti embassy, on the perimeter of the camp – directing the giant searchlights and incendiary flares, which turned the night into day and illuminated the hovels of the camp – the better for the Phalangist militiamen to go house-to-house with their knives, bayonets and swords.
Even the Israeli government of the former terrorist leader, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, was forced to set up an inquiry, the Kahan Commission, which concluded with Sharon’s responsibility, and his dismissal – and ‘banning’ from public office.
None of this narrative made it into the eulogy of Blair and Co – so we are…remembering – the real Ariel Sharon”.