Ariel Sharon Has Gotten What Jahi McMath Deserves

by Thomas A. Droleskey

One of the moral monsters of Modernity, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has taken what is called a "turn for the worse" nearly eight years to the day after suffering a massive stroke on January 4, 2006, that placed him on life support. He has been in a comatose state for the past eight years, although physicians were surprised earlier about a year ago now when brain tests indicated that he responded to hearing the voices of family members and when he was shown a photograph of his own house.

The head of New York University's Langone Medical Center's Division of Medial Ethics, Dr. Arthur Caplan, did not know what to make of the fact that Sharon recognized the voices of family members and that photograph of his own house. Poor Dr. Caplan did know one thing, however: that it was better to let the Butcher of Beirut die rather than to keep him on life support:

Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister of Israel, has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a massive stroke on January 4, 2006. For the past seven years, a respirator and a feeding tube have kept him alive at Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer, Israel. He has never shown any reliable signs of awareness or consciousness – until last week.

The stroke left the man once dubbed by Israelis as “the Lion of God” bedbound and technologically dependent on machines for his existence.

In the past, some of his family felt that he was able to slightly move a finger and show some signs of responsiveness but his doctors believed that the strokes so damaged his brain that both recovery and any serious mental activity were impossible.

But last week, a team of doctors and neuroscientists from Israel's Soroka University Medical Center subjected the 84-year-old Sharon to a series of sophisticated brain scans. They were surprised at what they saw.

They showed him pictures of random houses, which he would not be expected to know. Then they flashed a picture of his own house before his eyes. When the images of his own home were shown, areas of his brain "lit up" with activity. Similarly his brain ”fired up” in response to hearing the voices of family members but did not when nonsensical gibberish sounds were presented to him.

Sharon is not the first person to surprise doctors who doubted that anything could be going on in a brain located in a body that was otherwise unresponsive for years. Other patients with massive brain injuries have shown some brain activity included one case in which a 23-year-old woman, when asked to imagine different scenarios including playing tennis, showed strikingly similar patterns of brain activity to those found in scans of healthy volunteers.

So what are we to make of this? Can doctors say with certainty that he won’t recover?  Is Sharon really “in there” unable to move but alert and awake?  Should we ever remove life-support from someone who has been severely brain injured by a stroke or traumatic injury or asphyxiation? These questions are hardly trivial since families and health care teams face them every day all over the world.

Can Sharon come back? Many Israelis and his family fervently hope so but older patients, especially 84-year-olds who have been through two strokes and remained unresponsive for seven years, do not come back.

Is he “in there”? Let’s hope not. Being trapped in your own body year after year unable to move anything or communicate in any way would be horrific.

What about the brain activity? The data that the doctors and scientists see is very hard to interpret.  Something is going on in Sharon’s brain when he sees or hears familiar things. But is he really aware of what he sees or are well-worn neural pathways firing up when familiar stimuli are present without anyone home to appreciate them? No one really knows for certain, but it seems fair to say that a very damaged brain is not ”thinking” or aware or self-conscious in a manner similar to healthy human brains.

So what is the case for keeping Sharon alive?  He is not dead—he has brain activity. Still, he may be suffering if he has any awareness of being trapped inside his own body. Prolonging his life may be causing incredible misery to him and others like him. 

The best we can do is to let families try to decide what to do as long -- as they understand the facts and the uncertainties. And as long as they are willing to help pay the bill.  Keeping Sharon or others like him alive in a very damaged, extremely limited state with no hope of recovery is not something that the government should pay for without some support from those who want life to go on.

The choice to keep Ariel Sharon alive is one that deserves respect but is also one that demands involvement—emotionally and fiscally. The choice to let him go also deserves respect. In this case, uncertain medical science can only give way to well-intentioned ethics. (Brain test results don't mean Ariel Sharon will 'come back,' bioethicist says.)

We have reached quite a state of affairs in the moral abyss of Modernity when an alleged "ethicist" can assert publicly that those in his bogus line of work can play God with the lives of human beings. And while Ariel Sharon has the blood of an untold thousands of innocent Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians and others throughout the Middle East, God alone will determine the time of his death, not man. As wretched and as bloodthirsty as Ariel Sharon, who termed the Palestinians as "sub-humans" in language strikingly similar to that used by Adolf Hitler to describe adherents of the Talmud, he has been entitled to the ventilator and the feeding and hydration tubes that have helped to sustain his life in the past eight years.

Mind you, Ariel Sharon is guilty of many crimes. It is not up to medical doctors or to alleged "ethicists" to impose a death sentence upon him.

Obviously, Ariel Sharon would have been tried, found guilty and executed by now for his crimes if we lived in a world governed according to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the infallible teaching authority of His Catholic Church. As we do not live in such a world, Ariel Sharon was able to reach old age before suffering that massive stroke eight years ago.

The following article documents just some of the monstrous crimes of Ariel Sharon:

AS ARIEL SHARON'S career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as "a man of courage and peace" who had generated "hopes for a far-reaching accord" with an electoral campaign promising "to end conflict with the Palestinians."

But even if end-of-career assessments often stretch the truth, and even if far too many people fall for the old saw about the gruff old warrior miraculously turning into a man of peace, the reality is that miracles don't happen, and only rarely have words and realities been separated by such a yawning abyss.

From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants — men, women and children — still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air.

As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people — almost all innocent civilians — were killed during his Lebanon adventure.

Sharon's approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn't very different from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations — these were his stock in trade as "a man of courage and peace."

Some may take comfort in the myth that Sharon was transformed into a peacemaker, but in fact he never deviated from his own 1998 call to "run and grab as many hilltops" in the occupied territories as possible. His plan for peace with the Palestinians involved grabbing large portions of the West Bank, ultimately annexing them to Israel, and turning over the shattered, encircled, isolated, disconnected and barren fragments of territory left behind to what only a fool would call a Palestinian state.

SHARON'S "painful sacrifices" for peace may have involved Israel keeping less, rather than more, of the territory that it captured violently and has clung to illegally for four decades, but few seem to have noticed that it's not really a sacrifice to return something that wasn't yours to begin with.

His much-ballyhooed withdrawal from Gaza left 1.4 million Palestinians in what is essentially the world's largest prison, cut off from the rest of the world and as subject to Israeli power as before. It also terminated the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict by condemning Palestinians to whiling away their lives in a series of disconnected Bantustans, ghettos, reservations and strategic hamlets, entirely at the mercy of Israel.

That's not peace. As Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull would have recognized at a glance, it's an attempt to pacify an entire people by bludgeoning them into a subhuman irrelevance. Nothing short of actual genocide — for which Sharon's formula was merely a kind of substitute — would persuade the Palestinian people to quietly accept such an arrangement, or negate themselves in some other way. And no matter which Israeli politician now assumes Sharon's bloody mantle, such an approach to peace will always fail. (The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon, UCLA International Institute; see also Who is Ariel Sharon?  and Israeli Massacre of Palestinians--which contains some graphic photographs of injuries to Palestinians caused by the Israeli military, for an assessment of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.)

Even such a monster as Ariel Sharon, however, is entitled to the care given to a living human being, including nutrition and hydration.

How sad it is that the administrators of Children's Hospital in Oakland, California, are referring to a living human being, Jahi McMath, as "the body" even though she is suffering from the effects of a tonsilectomy-gone-wrong that had been performed upon her there. According to her mother, Jahi McMath, referred to so callously as "the body" by officials of Children's Hospital, is being starved to death as efforts to have a tracheotomy performed upon her to facilitate her transfer to a long-term facility are being thwarted by those same officials:

The mother of Jahi McMath said today the hospital where the 13-year-old girl is being kept on life support is not feeding her and has been insensitive in referring to the brain-dead teen as "the body."

"To watch my daughter just sit there and not have food ... I'm just so happy that she is kind of a thick girl so she still looks good," Latasha Winkfield said today. "I tell her every day, 'Jahi, you losin' weight girl, but you still look good.' I just think it's inhumane to not feed my child, to not refer to her by her name, and stop us in our tracks."

The family has been fighting for time to find a facility willing to take Jahi, but hospital officials have said they don't believe any such place exists because the girl is "deceased."

"I hate it that they refer to her as just the body or the deceased; that is my child that they're talking about," Winkfield said. "They don't even use her name."

The family news conference came after the hospital filed a motion arguing the girl's family had plenty of time to find a new facility to take her and that she should be unhooked from her ventilator because she is legally dead.

The filing in federal court was the latest in the battle over Jahi, who was declared brain dead on Dec. 12 following tonsil surgery.

One hour before a court order was set to expire and Children's Hospital Oakland planned to unhook Jahi from a ventilator Monday evening, a judge extended her life support to Jan. 7.

Jahi will remain hooked up to a ventilator for at least another week as her family plots the logistics of moving her to a facility willing to treat her. The family is considering potential options in New York and Arizona, according to court documents.

Donations to a fundraiser Winfield started surged past $32,000 Monday night, according to gofundme.com, after the judge's decision.

The family has said it plans to use the money toward the cost of transferring Jahi to a new facility. But when reached by ABCNews.com Monday night, Jahi's uncle, Omari Sealy, declined to share specifics of the family's next move.

"We're just grateful," he said. "We want to thank God and everybody out there who prays for us. Keep praying, it's working."

Christopher Dolan, an attorney for the family, filed complaints in superior and federal courts on Monday to stop the hospital from unhooking Jahi when the previous court order expired at 5 p.m. PT Monday.

Also included in the federal complaint was a request that Children's Hospital Oakland perform a tracheotomy and to insert a feeding tube, which are necessary procedures before Jahi can be transferred.

Children's Hospital Oakland "does not believe that performing surgical procedures on the body of a deceased person is an appropriate medical practice," the hospital said in a statement posted on its website last week.

An attorney for the hospital wrote in today's court filing that administrators had not heard from any potential facilities the family has reportedly claimed are willing to take Jahi.

The hospital said any facility that takes Jahi would be accepting a dead body and would have to get a coroner's approval.

The hospital reiterated in a statement that it has continued "to support the family of Jahi McMath in this time of grief and loss over her death." (Jahi McMath: Brain Dead Girl's Mom Says Hospital's Not Feeding Her.)

Move over, Ariel Sharon, move over. You've got company in the pantheon of the moral monsters of Modernity.

Jahi McMath is not dead.

To refer to a living human being who is suffer from brain damage as "dead" is the same as referring to a preborn baby merely as a "product of conception" or a "miscellaneous mass of cells" or "potential human being" even though there is nothing "potential" about a human being inside of his mother's womb who has his own specific DNA and whose growth to birth can be stopped by others only by killing him.

Moral monsters must triumph in any world where men and their nations do not live under the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Catholic Church.

We need to continue praying for Jahi McMath, her family and those who are providing assistance to her, including the courageous Dr. Paul Byrne. 

Ariel Sharon has gotten what Jahi McMath deserves: proper care given to a living human being.

Today is the Octave Day of the Feast of Saint Stephen the Protomartyr in the unreformed calendar of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. It is a very good idea to pray to Saint Stephen, whose prayers during his martyrdom and from eternity effected the conversion of the fire-breathing anti-Catholic, Saul of Tarsus, who presided over his stoning, for the conversion of the moral monsters of Modernity so that they can, after being received into the true Faith and repenting of their sins and abjuring them publicly.

Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary turned back the Mohammedan fleet at the Battle of Lepanto and turned back the Mohammedans at the Gates of Vienna and drove the Soviets out of Austria, as well as keeping Dutch Calvinists from invading Lima, Peru, and Manila in The Philippines.

Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary can help us be her Divine Son's true "peacemakers" as we pray for the conversion of the moral monsters who bomb civilians and kill the innocent preborn and innocent children such as Jahi McMath and countless other innocent men and women whose only "crime" is having suffered some trauma that makes them appear to be "good candidates" to be carved up while alive.

Finally, we need to reparation for our own sins that have made us, truth be told, monsters in our own right in our various rebellions against the Most Holy Trinity.

May we pray one set of mysteries of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary now for Jahi McMath, her family and those assisting her!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?