Look, brainlessone, if someone keeps referring to Sharon as a "butcher", the argument is over, his mind is made and facts will not change his mind. The fact of the matter is that if indeed Sharon was as "bloodthirsty" as described, then he could have legally "butchered" 30,000 Egyptian soldiers trapped in a a pocket on the wrong side of the Suez canal, with nothing but remote artillery and air power bombardment, without endangering his own. He did not, he chose to let them go, unharmed, a true humane commander and true to his oath to keep the "purity of arms" (a strange concept, derived from principles that Rabbinic law that allows killing only in self defense).
As for Sabra and Shattila, the finding (and thus Sharon forced resignation from his post at the time) was he "should have known" that the Phalangists would commit atrocities. They also found that a communication snafu caused a report from an intelligence officer in the field to be delayed by more than 12 hours, not bringing the fact that the Phalangists are committing atrocities to the top echelon (including Sharon) for a solid 12 hours. It turns out that the intelligence officer in the field, Amos Gilad (today a Major General) was "known for exaggerations and "guts opinions rather than facts, from time to time, so the receiving officer deemed the report not critical and waited till the next morning to bring it up to higher echelon. As soon as the information got to Sharon, he ordered the Israeli forces in the region to step into the breach and stop the massacre the Phalangists were carrying on. It is a little ridiculous to blame the person that stopped the atrocities to be blamed for them.
As for the Belgian court, if they were interested in Justice rather than politics, they have many murderers in their mist that have committed unbelievable atrocities in the Congo. If they finish with these, they can go to France and bring to justice a number of French Generals that stood by and did nothing when the Rwanda massacres were going on (when it was brought to the French President's attention, his comment was "no one would notice with "these people", as reported by St Exupery the son, but that one ) . If the Belgian court really feels it is its duty to expand its just arms outside of Europe, fine, but their priorities should not be motivated by politics, but by the dimension of the genocide still ongoing, for instance, more than 2 MM Christians and animists in Southern Sudan, still being murdered and enslaved now. That is happening now, not some 20 years ago and the esteemed court effort could actually do some good.
Zeev
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