Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel, for the past seven years has been comatose, but his brain is showing significant activity. Sharon, 84, suffered a severe stroke in January of 2006 that also caused a brain hemorrhage. At that time, it was presumed he would remain in a vegetable state.
However, on Monday a team of doctors and neuroscientists were surprised that it appeared that Sharon’s brain had responded when he was shown pictures of family and when he heard the voice of his son. Tactile stimuli were also used by doctors, to measure the reaction of Sharon.
However this does not mean the man once dubbed by Israelis as Lion of God, will wake and doctors have urged a great deal of caution.
Sharon was once considered to be one of the finest military commanders of Israel and was involved with almost all of the major conflicts between the country and its Arab neighbors. During the 1970s through to the 1990s, Sharon encouraged the construction of Israeli settlements in Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He led the Likud Party for over 15 years and was the country’s prime minister between 2001 and 2006.
In 2011, former President Clinton said that two of the greatest tragedies of Middle East politics of today, which make you think if God wanted peace in the Middle East or not were the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the stroke of Ariel Sharon.
Since Sharon’s stroke, there has been a rise and fall of tensions throughout the Middle East, victories in the West Bank by Hamas, a new revolutionary movement popularly known as Arab Spring that spread from Tunisia in 2010 to Egypt in 2011 that toppled decades old government regimes pushing democracy further into North Africa and the Middle East.
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