Posted on 10/24/2009 11:50:46 AM PDT by DavidAccord
Too healthy to die, too injured to rule, Israel’s legendary warrior and former prime minister lives in a comatose limbo—just like the Middle East peace process. The old soldier’s eyes are open. Sometimes he’s propped up in front of a TV, where images of nature and animals, especially cows, flicker across the screen. His family tells him the day’s news, the goings on at his beloved farm. They read to him, alternating between two books at a time, just as he used to do for himself. They play classical music. When his white hair grows long, they trim it. And once in a while, when someone tells him to move a toe, he does. Whether Ariel Sharon takes in any of this activity, no one knows for sure. Because Israel’s once-robust prime minister and legendary battlefield hero—the decorated warrior, the controversial hawk and finally, beginning in 2001, the centrist prime minister who transformed the political landscape—has been in a coma for nearly four years, felled by a massive stroke. While not brain-dead, the 81 year old exists in a persistent vegetative state. He generally breathes on his own, but must be fed by a tube. He cannot speak, walk, or think. Probably.
“There is a feeling of communication, of realization—I mean, the eyes are open and there is kind of, like, you feel that he feels your presence,” says Dr. Shlomo Segev, Sharon’s longtime personal physician and the head of the Institute of Medical Screening at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center, just outside Tel Aviv, where Sharon has been hospitalized since May 2006. “So it’s not completely what we call a coma. Not a deep coma, for sure. But if you asked me to quantify that, I cannot.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
I was wondering about it the other day.
I have been wondering what became of him.
Can he blink once for yes and twice for no?
This pullquote is the most disturbing of all. There never was, nor should there ever be "a Palestinian state."
I never understood why she was so desirous to make it happen. She’s an intelligent person, but how could she be so blind in this area ? If she thought giving Palis their own “officially-recognized” country would somehow bring peace, she’s patently delusional. Palis goals are simple and to the point: destroy Israel (and kill Jews).
I asked a friend awhile back if he knew the status of Sharon.
What a magnificent human to have have fallen to a stroke.
He knew what Israel needed, and he wasn’t chicken about producing just that.
“If Sharon hadn’t suffered a stroke? “I think we would have a Palestinian state,” says former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.” “
I liked alot of things about Rice, but she is dead wrong on the topic of a separate state for Palistineians.
Sorry, but handing back land to the enemies of Israel is not what Israel needed.
Just as an addendum, I knew when that phony Kadima party formed, it was like seeing formerly respected Conservatives join a liberal-appeasement-of-our-enemies clique. A sad, shameful spectacle. As it turned out, it was nothing but the equivalent of our RINOs, a bunch of back-stabbing crooked weasels (witness Olmert, who succeeded Sharon). Only far worse, because it would take a lot to destroy America, but in Israel, all you need is a couple of pro-Pali/pro-Mo appeasers occupying the PM position, and the country could be swiftly destroyed.
I read his autobiography. It’s certainly a worthwhile read. It’s unfortunate that now anyone can attribute whatever they want to him and he’s unable to deny it.
I think that Dr. Rice may have meant that in a “Nixon going to China” sense. IOW’s if Sharon had backed a Pali-state, then it would have happened. I don’t think that it says much about Dr. Rice’s assessment as to the liklihood that this is what Sharon would have done.
Ariel Sharon was a great hero in his early days. But he did incalculable damage to Israel in his last term in office. First he gave Gaza away. Then he founded Kadima and betrayed the party who put him into power. Then he suffered that major stroke which may (or may not) have been an act of God, removing him from the power he so badly abused.
I can’t help wondering if he may have suffered a minor stroke earlier that affected his mind. Because his conduct was almost directly opposite everything he achieved earlier in his life. It was as if Ariel Sharon had turned into Jimmy Carter before our eyes.
Rice: “But I think the terms were available, and maybe he was strong enough to lead a consensus in Israel and get it done.” “Sharon was somebody who could deliver,” she adds. “ You could trust him to do what he said he was going to do.”
Obviously you could trust Sharon to deliver, but who the heck thinks that the divided Palestinians could deliver peace. It as Sharon’s policy of unconditional withdrawal from Gaza that set up the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip.
I also question the obscene amounts of money to keep this comatose man alive.
“He is the largest vegetable in the country,” sneers Moshe Saperstein, an ousted Gaza settler and disabled war veteran who once taught Hebrew School in Brooklyn. Saperstein dissolves into tears when he compares the palmy oasis he and his wife, Rachel, built in the desert (then leveled so Palestinians couldn’t move in) to the plywood pre-fab where they now live temporarily. All because of Sharon: “We were betrayed by our own.” A different enmity comes from Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian Authority. From his office in Ramallah, in the West Bank, isolated from Jerusalem by checkpoints and the meandering “Separation Wall,” the soft-spoken, professor-turned-politician says “Sharon is perceived as the worst Israeli leader to the Palestinians.” The unilateral Gaza pullout, he says, undermined the Palestinian Authority’s power by “disregarding that there is a political partner on the other side. Sharon was doing the kind of things that would make the two states impossible
I believe his stroke was God’s way of stopping him.
The old soldier's eyes are open. Sometimes he's propped up in front of a TV, where images of nature and animals, especially cows, flicker across the screen. His family tells him the day's news, the goings on at his beloved farm. They read to him, alternating between two books at a time, just as he used to do for himself. They play classical music. When his white hair grows long, they trim it. And once in a while, when someone tells him to move a toe, he does. Whether Ariel Sharon takes in any of this activity, no one knows for sure.
With all that has happened to me since January 2006, it is hard to believe Sharon has been in a coma that long.
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