Mr. Valdron research was a fairly faithful attempt to debunk my "explosive" views.

Several problems persist:

1) The first piece he quoted, "The Case Against Ariel Sharon" (http://www.coastalpost.com/02/05/06.htm), was almost certainly written by a completely biased Palestinian supporter whose blatant disregard for history and complete and total lack of supporting bibliographic material to justify his outrageous claims nullifies the text.

2) The article from the J (http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/1709/edition_id/27/format/html/displaystory.html)

is also quoted out of context. The "he" referrent in the quote Den included in his piece was not Ariel Sharon. It was the retired general who decided to liquidate his prisoners because he couldn't guard them. Whatever the moral implications of this decision, it wasn't Ariel Sharon's. All you had to do was read the piece to understand.

3) I'm not going to argue the points raised about Lebanon. The General made a mistake. He didn't pull the trigger. He didn't drop the bombs. But he was complacent while others died. Having said that, it's not Israel's job to protect

the Arabs living in the refugee camps. Their fellow Arabs left them there to rot and many of the terrorists who've joined the ranks of Hezbollah and Hamas come from those camps. Those people, like all other refugees on the planet, should have been resettled.

And finally, these tirades against Sharon are all about Israel. Sharon was a general defending a tiny nation in their homeland beseiged on all sides by people who, even now, call for its destruction. The same people who decry how horrible and despicable Sharon was seem to be eerily quiet about Arafat, Abu Mazen, the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the many, many others. Arafat was a cold-blooded murderer. Not a General in a uniform fighting wars but a cold-blooded criminal murderer. Mr. Valdron saves his anger for the Jewish general and not self-proclaimed murderers and says he's not anti-Israel. Maybe someday he'll look in the mirror and see a more true reflection.

>Whatever Sharon is, monster or hero, at least when he went out to fight, he wore a uniform.

Does wearing a uniform justify massacring a village?

>Funny thing about Palestinian terrorists, Hamas sheep and other Islamic thugs: when they fight, they don't go out in uniforms. They get their children to throw rocks and Molotovs in their school clothes....

>I just don't buy that all the "innocent civilians" and "helpless women and children" supposedly slaughtered by Sharon or any other Israeli commander were innocent. This is an ancient terrorist trick -- taught to the rest of the world by Arabs and Palestinians -- striking under the cover of peasant's garb, and later mugging for sympathy on Al Jazeera after they've had their asses most deservedly kicked.

Egyptian POW's were in uniform. They were murdered. How do you justify that.

In 1953, inside the borders of Jordan, 69 people were murdered in the massacre of a village. Half of them were women and children. Are you okay with that?

The victims in Sabra and Shattillah were noncombatants. The military or paramilitary wing, the Palestinian Fedayeen had left the country. The people left behind *really were* noncombatants, really were women and children. How do you justify that?

You take a fairly complex and tragic situation on both sides, and in my view, you simplify it to reduce Palestinians to subhuman moral degenerates. I think the situation is not so clear as you believe. On the other hand, I'm unwilling to get into the big issue.

The issue is really only Sharon. Did he murder innocent people? Did he commit atrocities?

If you think its okay to simply wipe out a village or enable the slaughter of refugee camps, feel free to come right out and say it.

Jeffrey would rather acknowledge his laziness than do anything about it. His position is that he'll look at a few pro-Sharon web pages and then stop when he gets tired of clicking.

Rather than going through all the tedious work of actually sifting the pro and the con, and having nothing else to go on, he accuses me of his own faults:

>But Den is blind to history

Au contraire...

>George Washington made his reputation slaughtering Indians

There's a certain amount of truth to this. George Washington did compare Indians to wolves and call for their extirpation. As a Colonist and as a commander in the United States he prosecuted savage wars. He bought and sold Indians land without their consent. He owned 500 slaves. On the other hand, Washington was also known for 18th century gentlemanly courtesy, which included aid to the wounded, truces, avoiding needless destruction and courtesies. In a quick search, I found a letter from Washington in which he returned a stray dog to an enemy British General.

So, Sharon was a soldier defending his new country, and Washington was a soldier defending his new country. Does this mean that they're exactly the same? I don't think so. On its simplest terms, I suppose the question is, how many villages did George Washington slaughter? It's still up to Jeffrey to prove that Washington was as much an atrocity-monger as Sharon.

But there's more to it than that. Jeffrey at one point was arguing that I had to look at Sharon as a creature of his time and place. Sharon's atrocities were legitimate, Jeffrey argued, because they were acceptable in Sharon's time. I pointed out that this was not the case and that several of Sharon's excesses were appalling by the international and Israeli standards of his time. He really was committing monstrous acts as his peers defined monstrousness.

What if we applied Jeffrey's standard to George Washington. The man of two and a half centuries ago was quite a different creature from us. Things we found appalling were commonplace. By the standards of his time, Sharon was a monster. By the standards of his time, was Washington a monster? No. Jeffrey's argument breaks down.

By the standards of our time, Sharon is truly a monster. If we argue for an independent univesal standard, and we've got evidence that Washington committed genocide... then that doesn't rescue Sharon. It merely means that we have to reappraise Washington, to wipe away the sugar coating and acknowledge the long hidden evil.

Of course, Jeffrey will get into none of this. He can't be bothered.

> - Nelson Mandela headed a group known for killing it's opponents by burning rubber tires over their heads,

Well, sort of true. Except of course that Nelson Mandela was in jail when all the necklacing was going on. Except that the group was nonviolent when he was running it. And except that his own wife, in the post-apartheid regime, went to jail for necklacing and kidnapping.

So let's hang Mandela for things he didn't do and had no control over, and lets ignore the fact that he chose to allow the rule of law to apply to his wife when she committed those acts.

Then of course there's Kennedy and Clinton but you get the idea...

The point of it all is that Sharon is a good person because everyone else is equally bad. To which I say, nonsense.

The usual place I see this sort of bad logic is with the Holocaust deniers: One of the favourite gambits of Hitler apologists is to claim that Stalin is far worse than their guy, but doesn't get half the bad press. Heck, diehard Stalinists even say nice things about him. Well, sorry. Hitler is a monster, and comparing him to Stalin doesn't make him one bit less monstrous.

Jeffrey, consider the company your arguments bring you to.

> Sharon was a soldier for most of his life - and with all that killing, horrible mistakes were made,

Not mistakes. The evidence is for quite deliberate choices. Who do you think you're defending? Brittney "Oops, I did it again!" Spears?

> - so I guess, as Den said, I'm a bad person. But I'm an honest bad person who enjoys the fruit of

Sadly, while you seem prepared to acknowledge your moral turpitude, I'm afraid I can't agree with you. You may or may not be a bad person. But if you claim to be an 'honest bad person' that's wrong. You are lazy and dishonest, which perhaps is why you are a bad person. I'm being personally insulting of course, but as I've pointed out that's how you started on me. The difference between us is that you had nothing to go on but insults, and I've been hanging you with your own arguments.

I suspect that at this point, no one is reading and no one cares. Fine with me, the discussion is on the verge of going nowhere. I'll sign off with a piece of advice - You don't have to be lazy, Jeffrey. And frankly, it doesn't do you or anyone else favours to be lazy. You don't need to be dishonest, either. Again, you don't do yourself or anyone else favours.

I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge Sharon's good points. But I'm not willing to sugarcoat his evil, or to excuse his atrocities. If you want to argue for a balanced portrait of his life, that's fine. But I suggest that you are obligated to do more than lick at sugarcoating. Take the time out to really get a picture of the man and the good and evil, and take the time out to at least wrestle with the moral questions of the harm that he has done.

Maybe the next time we get into it, we can start with a foundation of mutual courtesy, and work through a clean discussion.