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• Monday, January 9, 2006 09:20 AM

  Sharon was a man of his time and place...

  Not to make excuses, but I think it's easy in the comfort of 2006 to look at a guy like Sharon as a monster - he wasn't: he was a human being in a time and place who did what he thought he had to. The hatred and bloodshed between Arabs and Jews pre-Israel is well documented - easily a tit fo tat existence - and for every Jewish massacre of Arabs, you can find an Arab massacre of Jews. I was a big fan of Israel growing up - I'm a child of the 60's and early 70s, and it wasn't until the invasion of Lebanon that the Israel lost the David chimera and became the Goliath of today - and even then, apologists for Arabs refuse to acknowledge that the PLO was using Lebanon to stage raids and launch rockets. Valdron talks like too many who gloss over the sins of this world to focus on the crimes of a few - and those few always seem to be the Jews and the Israelis in particular. While I'm careful with charges of anti-Semitism, it sure seems that comparing Sharon to Jeffrey Dahmer is such a push, one is either blind to history, context and reality - or one is perhaps letting anti-Semitism fuel his outrage (IOW, had Sharon been born in a world of peace - in a peaceful land, I doubt he’d be a killer, a criminal or anything other than a law abiding citizen).

  —jeffrey
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