Amnesty International condemns Palestinian attacks as crimes against humanity

by Andy Thu Aug 01, 2002 01:27

No shit, and what do they call what happened in Gaza? the so called settlers are anything but civilians, they are heavily armed and have committed many crimes against the Palestinian population on the West Bank, not to mention colonising Palestinian land.

The Palestinian resistance have displayed great courage against overwhelming odds and will never be defeated, something Sharon cannot comprehend.
There will never be peace on the West Bank or the Gaza Strip until the Zionist army and the so called settlers leave. If the "settlers" wish to stay in one piece, they should go home to the States or whereever else they came from.

by Sean Thu Aug 01, 2002 09:39

Earlier this week, Israel succeeded in killing Salah Shehada, a savage Hamas mastermind, and one of his top aides. A dozen Palestinian civilians died in the attack, including members of Shehada's family.
The civilian deaths may be lamentable, but they also were justifiable. A terrorist leader used his relatives and neighbors as shields, and they died with him. Their deaths were Shehada's fault, not Israel's.

Once again, much of the world has applied a double standard, accusing Israel of barbarity for inflicting civilian casualties as part of a legitimate military operation, while overlooking the hundreds of Israeli civilians killed intentionally by Shehada and his subordinates. For Europeans, especially, Jewish lives count no more today than they did in 1944.

Why are Palestinian terrorists allowed to target civilians without exciting an international outcry, while every accidental civilian death inflicted by Israel is a crime against humanity?

Europe's reflexive anti-Semitism doesn't really matter much, since today's Europeans lack the power, will and courage to act upon their bigotry.
But the Bush administration needs to stop pandering to corrupt Arab regimes and to recognize that Israel is fighting for its life; that Israel is fighting with great restraint; and that Israel's pursuit of terrorists is every bit as legitimate as our own. Instead of criticizing Israeli policy, we should be studying it.

Recently, our own forces were demonized for causing civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Some Afghan factions, with their intricate agendas, claimed we had attacked an innocent wedding party.
Of course, the global media were only too willing to deplore American evil (despite the fact that we overthrew a monstrous regime and conquered an "unconquerable" country while causing, at most, a few hundred civilian casualties).
Though combat videos proved that our aircraft was fired upon first, we nonetheless stumbled through witless apologies and promised to impose greater safeguards in the future.

As with the Israelis, our military response was justified. It is the apologies that make no sense.

The war against terrorism must be prosecuted judiciously, but the terrorists themselves must be pursued without remorse.

When terrorists attempt to hide amid the civilian population, we must pursue them without hesitation. They cannot be allowed a single safe haven.
If they use their neighbors as shields, it is the terrorists who are to blame should civilians die. If they attempt to use their families as cover, they will be responsible for the deaths of their own loved ones. The world must learn that, when civilians allow terrorists to use them, the civilians become legitimate military targets.

This is not about diplomatic table manners. It is a fight to exterminate human monsters.

Earlier this month, the Israelis were attacked for a plan to deport the families of terrorists from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
Of course, the Europeans and our own tattered left began comparing the plan to death trains bound for Auschwitz. While Europe's incurable nostalgia for the Wannsee Conference makes their hatred of Israel understandable on some level, the enthusiasm American leftists show for equating the Holocaust's survivors with the Holocaust's perpetrators is as dishonest as it is tasteless.

The fact is that the Israelis have begun to make a crucial link in dealing with terrorists: their families. In the Middle East, Arab armies fight ineptly because the soldiers feel no deep loyalty to their states.
In the Arab world and in related cultures, earthly loyalties are, above all, to family. If left with no useful alternative, the Israelis - and we Americans - must be willing to pursue the terrorists through their relatives.

Of course, our outdated conventions make this proposition anathema to us. Thus, when dealing with a culture in which only faith and family matter to our enemies, we insist on making war on governments and negotiating with political organizations that are no more than mobs with diplomatic representation. We are punching thin air.

Meanwhile, few of Israel's critics complain when Palestinian mothers and fathers praise the gruesome suicides of their children or accept blood money from Riyadh and Baghdad.
If you want a stark indicator of the power of family in the Middle East, consider that of the many suicide bombers to date, none has been a close relative of a Hamas leader or of the leadership of any other Palestinian faction. Suicide bombers employed to inflict mass murder on Israel are always drawn from marginal families. The terrorist leaders would no more send their own sons and daughters out as suicide bombers than they would go themselves.

If you cannot kill your enemy, threaten what he holds dear. Force him to come out and confront you in desperation. Today, we do not have the stomach for this. Tomorrow, we may find it a necessity.

In the meantime, as the U.S. slowly learns the real meaning of a war on terror, the Israelis continue to struggle against the Arab vision of Jewish annihilation. Israel will do what must be done, as humanely as possible.
And Israel must accept that no matter what it does or fails to do, no matter how much success it achieves and how few civilian casualties it inflicts among its enemies, it will be hated by those who cheer on the enemies of mankind from the safety of Strasbourg, Stockholm or Harvard Yard.

Critics persist in claiming that attacks upon terrorists do not work, since results are not instantaneous. But the war against terror is a war of attrition and can only be won over decades. We may not know the real effects of Israel's current efforts for several years. But there is no course worse than cowardice and inaction.

The same critics will tell you that by killing civilians in their attacks, the Israelis - or the Americans - simply turn other civilians against them.
This is nonsense. Civilians who shield the enemies of Israel or the U.S. are already anti-Israel or anti-American. But if our strikes against the masters of terror come to seem inevitable, those same civilians will turn against terrorists who try to use them as living shields - as villagers in Afghanistan already have done.

Terrorists and their supporters must learn that they will be allowed no hiding places. Not in their homes, not in churches or mosques, and not in foreign countries to which they might flee.

This is a war that must be fought without compromise.

It is, above all, a contest of wills.

Every apology is a surrender.

by Billy Thu Aug 01, 2002 11:30

I think I'm beginning to understand why the Israel sympathisers think the way they do:

Most people think of themselves as 'Good People'.
The Jews have been persecuted down through the ages culminating in the Nazi genocide. Very few people in those days spoke up for them. Now some people are thinking ' I would have defended them, I'm not anti-semitic '. Fine. But they translate this into support for Israel. Now, that is committing the same mistake again. If you want to defend the oppressed and the downtrodden, support the Palestinians. If you support Israel you are supporting the bullies, the opressors.

Think of the following three facts:

1) If you are are of the right 'Gene Pool' (Jewish) you can emigrate to Israel where you will be given resources to get you started. If you happened to be born there but were of the wrong gene type (Palestinian) and were chased out or fled during a war you have no right to return to the place you were born. Apartheid South Africa was an international pariah for similar policies for yet Israeli leaders have been feted in Washington.

2) Most Israelis according to polls support the removal of all Palestinaians from the West bank and dumped in Jordan. Milosovic is currently on trial for such a policy in The Hague.

3) By confining thousands of people to their homes they have caused massive malnutritian among the children in the West Bank. This is attempted genocide.

There is only one conclusion: Israel is a fascist country. Anybody in Ireland who supports that country is a misguided fool who seems to think that the past suffering of a people gives the right to inflict anything they see fit on others forever.

by Des Sat Aug 03, 2002 22:32

The policies of the Sharon government bear a striking parallel to those of ther German fascists. The arrest and deportation of the family members and relatives of their opponents is an obvious example, the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people from their land is another.
It is educational to note that "Sean" considers the deaths of Palestinian children to be of no importance, even the Zionist p.r. machine have now started to put forward excuses for the murders in Gaza, "faulty intelligence", this happened only because of the world wide outrage at the murders of young children, including a baby. Initially Sharon thought that it was a great success. Even Dubya felt it necessary to state that the Gaza massacre was "heavy handed", this from the person who supplied the means to carry out the murders in the first place.
The comment made by "Sean" is the ultimate in
black humour and hypocrisy, the Taliban in the years prior to September 11 was supported by the United States government. Osama bin Laden only became a "terrorist" when he so to speak, started
to point the guns in the wrong direction.