re: Let me cite their leader, Israeli prime minister Sharon, one more time.
Ariel Sharon never said those words; they have been falsely attributed to him. From today's opinionjoural.com:
Rocky Mountain Lie
We expect to read anti-Israel lies in the newspapers of Riyadh or Cairo, but Denver? On Saturday Holger Jensen, international editor of the Rocky Mountain News, published a column bearing the headline "Obsessed Sharon Applies Brutal Philosophy to Advance Zionism." Jensen quoted at length from an interview he claimed Ariel Sharon gave to the left-wing Israeli author Amos Oz in 1982. Here are some of the things Sharon supposedly said:
"You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a murderer. . . . Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint. . . .
"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us. . . . What you don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it."
Just one problem: Sharon didn't say any of these things. When Oz published the interview, he didn't name the soldier who was its subject, identifying him only as "Z." Oz later told Jensen, "I have never met or interviewed Sharon." (Lengthier excerpts, also falsely attributed to Sharon, appear on the fringe-left site Counterpunch.org.)
Jensen was forced to retract his column; his mea culpa is accompanied by an editor's note: "RockyMountainNews.com corrects any errors in articles published on the site. Jensen's Saturday column was removed because the erroneous material was so extensive." But the column still appears (with a less inflammatory headline) on Jensen's own Web site.
There's no reason to doubt that Jensen believed the quotes were genuine when he published them, but is that really an excuse? Presumably Jensen's credulity reflects his own prejudices, and while it's to his credit that he set the factual record straight, there's no reason to think he's any more free from bias than he was last week.
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