Ariel Sharon RIP (not)

Israel and the US are mourning the loss of a crucial figure in international politics this morning. Not me though. Because despite a determined and highly effective attempt to rewrite history by the man himself and his supporters, the World needs to remember one or two indisputable facts about him.

Firstly it was Sharon who signed off on the massacre by the Lebanese phalangists of 1700 Palestinians at the Chatilla and Sabra refugee camps in southern Lebanon in 1982. This was only a small part of the devastating consequences of his country's invasion of southern Lebanon in that same year. A later internal enquiry by the Israelis themselves showed Sharon had lied to his own Prime Minister at the time over the extent of the incursion, which eventually led to the deaths of more than 17,000 people in Lebanon, most of them in Beirut.

Second, it was Sharon who decided in 2000 to make a deliberately orchestrated tour of the tunnels below the Dome of the Rock, tunnels dug without any consultation with the Muslims whose great Mosque now occupies the site on which the Jewish Temple once stood. Sharon knew his act would enrage the Muslims and correctly anticipated it would spark the third Intifada, which in turn supplied him with the justification to tighten Israel's hegemony over the Palestinians with which they share their land; in particular the building of the Separation Wall around the occupied territories of the West Bank.

These acts certainly identified him as an extremely shrewd political operator (he was also able to persuade the US that Arafat was in league with Bin Laden over 9/11- a total lie which everyone in America obediently lapped up) but despite his origins on the left of the  Zionist movement in the nascence of the Israeli state, any sober analysis of the facts will show him to have turned out to be one of the most brutal and racist leaders of the modern era.

So, farewell, Mr Sharon, but you will not be missed by me