Robert Fisk: The ‘flowers’ of the Arab Spring are so distracting that Ariel Sharon’s death has barely raised a whimper

Independent Voices

Has ever the Arab awakening – the Arab “Spring” if we were to believe the nonsense spouted at the time – looked more desperate, more bloody, more hopeless, more despairing than it does today? I am not referring to the anguish so distracting the Arab world that it scarcely raised a whimper this weekend when the man most of them regarded as a war criminal – Ariel Sharon – was mourned by the West and its frightened journos as “iconic”, “legendary”, “audacious”, a “bulldozer” and “a proudly Zionist general”.

Incredibly, the presenter of Al Jazeera English even offered her “sincere condolences” to an Israeli friend of this dreadful man. When the Israeli Kahan Commission report was quoted by reporters, they inaccurately said it held Sharon only “indirectly” responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres of up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians murdered by Israel’s proxy Lebanese militia. In fact, the official text also states that Sharon was “personally” responsible.

But why should Arabs care about the final demise of a man who, like much of the Arab world, spent the last years of his existence in a coma? For the awful truth – and it has to be stated at last – is that the Arab revolutions have brought about unspeakable slaughter, an unprecedented flood of refugees and economic disaster. As a newspaper seller put it simply to me in Cairo a few weeks ago, “the revolution was great, what followed was terrible”. Indeed, across the Middle East, millions of Arabs, I suspect, now believe that the overthrow of their dictators was a tragedy, that if dictatorship meant political and physical imprisonment, then freedom brought only bloodshed, lawlessness, insecurity and a craving for the old autocrats.

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