Welcome back, Prime Minister Sharon. We trust that your stay in our country is a pleasant one.

We here in the United States are glad that you came by yourself to hang out here and receive a hero’s welcome. You have done great things and we want to meet with you personally. We would never want to meet with Yasser Arafat. After all, our National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is a demanding person. She sure has taken a tough stance on Arafat. We think he’s a bad guy too.

Here’s what Rice had to say about Arafat this week, according to the British paper The Guardian on Thursday, “We are asking nothing more of Chairman Arafat than we have asked of every other leader in the world,” she said. “If he’s going to be the leader of the Palestinian people it begins with dealing with the terrorists in his midst.”

See, Mr. Sharon. We here in the United States of America, we take a tough stance on “terrorists.” That’s right, we just don’t deal with those folks. We put incredible demands on the leaders of the world. We are the people who know what constitutes and what does not constitute “terrorism.” You see Mr. Sharon, it is all relative. When we pulverize bomb shelters in Baghdad, burning alive the cowering civilians, it’s “collateral damage,” not “terrorism.” We sure don’t cause any terror to those people, their families or neighbors.

Or in your case, Mr. Sharon, when people strap explosives to their bodies and detonate the bomb in a public place, that is definitely terrorism. But when your armored vehicles bulldozed 50 meager shacks in a Gaza refugee camp, home to hundreds of people, in late December, that was for “security purposes.” We definitely wouldn’t deal with those other terrorist people, but you are welcome Mr. Sharon.

A quick look at our history shows just that stance. Look at Saddam Hussein of Iraq. We sure show him who is boss nowadays. The whole world knows that he’s one of our enemies. It was just last week that President Bush said Hussein’s country was one of three he considered part of the “axis of evil.”

But it must have been a different Saddam Hussein who in the 1980s we supported with weapons and money. Back then we had problems with Iran, and Saddam was at war with our enemy. So we helped the guy out, and according to some, helped keep him in power in those times. Just don’t tell anyone about that now though, we’re fighting the war on terrorism.

But then we’ve got those damn Europeans. They are such a pain. It’s a good thing so few Americans can read articles in major U.S. newspapers about what they say to us, because they are annoyingly right.

Thursday Hubert V‚drine of France said in the Guardian that our policies toward Israel were “mistaken” and “dangerously simplistic.”Mr V‚drine said Europeans think it was a “mistake to blindly accept the policy of pure repression” on the part of U.S. policy toward your country Israel.

Mr V‚drine went on to say to us, “We are threatened today by a new simplism which consists in reducing everything to the war on terrorism. We cannot accept that idea. You have got to tackle the root causes, the situations, poverty, injustice.”

Anyway, that Arafat isn’t the greatest guy, but wow, you are a great example of a leader to whom we should extend our heartfelt welcome.

After all, it must have been a different Ariel Sharon whose army surrounded and shelled the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila and then allowed about 150 doped-up and blood-thirsty Lebanese Phalange militia fair game on the mostly women, children and the elderly imprisoned inside. That man was said to be in large part responsible for the 40 hours of rape and murder that ensued on Thursday, Sept. 16, 1982. The estimate of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) to 3,500.

We’re glad that wasn’t you, Mr. Sharon.

It must have been a different Ariel Sharon who was found “indirectly responsible” by the Kahan commission in his own country of that crime. It must be a different man who is under review in Belgium as we speak for those very crimes.

No Mr. Sharon, the United States certainly will not deal with terrorists.

And it surely must have been a different man that was a chief architect of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in which shelling of civilian areas of West Beirut was a common affair. It was Robert Fisk of the London’s Independent, who reported the war from the ground, in its entirety, who said that as many as 17,500 people killed, the vast majority of them civilians.

So please Mr. Sharon, accept our warmest welcome. We sincerely hope that you are pleased in your visit with its talks and posh benefit dinners.

We certainly don’t want you to think we have a double standard in bringing one side of a conflict to the discussion table.

Omar Tesdell is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication and technical communication from Slater. He is online editor of the Daily.