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10.12.00, 10:24 p.m.

Tait is a long-time friend and intellectual property rights lawyer. He is writing a series of articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and sent me this:

Journalists this past week have frequently referred to Israeli rightist Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as the act that provided the spark for the latest round of resistance by Palestinian freedom fighters. In turn, I've seen several letters to the editor in various American newspapers to the effect of "what is wrong with one Jew visiting a holy site? These Arab terrorists are just stirring up hatred." I have no doubt that the people who write these letters know full well that Ariel Sharon is no ordinary Jew, and that Palestinians have good reason to loathe him. Unfortunately, the US media has done little to provide the necessary background. I'll fill in the holes.

Ariel Sharon has dedicated his life to the destruction of Palestinian life and culture in what he sees as Greater Israel, and he has been at it for almost 50 years. In the early 1950s, as the leader of an Israeli commando group called Force 101, he led assaults on two Arab villages where scores of civilians were brutally murdered. In the infamous attack on Qibya in 1953, Israeli troops set Palestinian homes on fire while women and children cowered inside.

During the 1970s, Sharon oversaw brutal activity against Palestinians in northern Israel (the Galilee) as Israel moved to expropriate their land to make way for Jewish "settlers." In the later 1970s, he was the architect of a particularly totalitarian clampdown in the occupied West Bank, which saw, over the years, thousands of Palestinians beaten, arrested, and so on. Sharon led the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an act which killed tens of thousands of civilians, most notably the hundreds of Palestinians massacred by machine gun fire at Sabra and Shatila by Israel's Phalangist allies while Israel troops stood nearby. Even the Israeli government later found Sharon indirectly responsible for this stunning atrocity.

Finally, in the 1990s, Sharon served as Israel's "housing minister" a position that allowed him to speed up the expropriation of Arab lands in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem to a rate never before seen. His racist goal, of course, is to create "facts on the ground," or settlements of extremist Israelis in the occupied territories, to maintain Israeli control over those areas.