Israel strikes Hard at Hamas In Gaza- Dec/ 27/ 2008

[Kirkhill]

Fresh from the G & M:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090129.wgazaschool29/BNStory/International/home

Interesting how the story evolved and how quick some were to condemn Israel (on this particular issue).

cheers,
Frank

I'm reminded of Kosovo.

I remember hearing the interview, on CBC, where some poor gent was being questioned about the dead and dying.  He said that "hundreds, uh, thousands are being killed".  Next thing I know CBC and everybody else is reporting that "hundreds of thousands are being killed".  Although the tape was clear, the record was never corrected.

In this case though, it doesn't look as if the Israelis did themselves any favours.  It sounds as if their PAFFOs panicked.

 

[geo]

In this case though, it doesn't look as if the Israelis did themselves any favours.  It sounds as if their PAFFOs panicked.

Works a lot better when you say... I don't know - I will check & get back to you....yada, yada, yada.

 

[leroi]

Placed here in memory of Daniel Pearl :hearts:

Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil: When Will Our Luminaries Stop Making Excuses For Terror

The Wall Street Journal (Reproduced in accordance with the Fair Dealing Provision of the Copyright Act.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123362422088941893.html

By JUDEA PEARL

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy?

The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance." Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism -- the ideological license to elevate one's grievances above the norms of civilized society -- was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable "tactical" considerations.

This mentality of surrender then worked its way through politicians like the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. In July 2005 he told Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man's second nature. "In an unfair balance, that's what people use," explained Mr. Livingstone.

But the clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel." Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.

Mr. Carter's logic has become the dominant paradigm in rationalizing terror. When asked what Israel should do to stop Hamas's rockets aimed at innocent civilians, the Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, did not hesitate for a moment in her response: "They should end the occupation." In other words, terror must earn a dividend before it is stopped.

The media have played a major role in handing terrorism this victory of acceptability. Qatari-based Al Jazeera television, for example, is still providing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi hours of free air time each week to spew his hateful interpretation of the Koran, authorize suicide bombing, and call for jihad against Jews and Americans.

Then came the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar, the unrepentant killer who, in 1979, smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl with his rifle after killing her father before her eyes. Al Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role model. No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al Jazeera's management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs.

Some American pundits and TV anchors didn't seem much different from Al Jazeera in their analysis of the recent war in Gaza. Bill Moyers was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a "resistance" movement, together with honorary membership in PBS's imaginary "cycle of violence." In his Jan. 9 TV show, Mr. Moyers explained to his viewers that "each [side] greases the cycle of violence, as one man's terrorism becomes another's resistance to oppression." He then stated -- without blushing -- that for readers of the Hebrew Bible "God-soaked violence became genetically coded." The "cycle of violence" platitude allows analysts to empower terror with the guise of reciprocity, and, amazingly, indict terror's victims for violence as immutable as DNA.


When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas -- the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains -- to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.

At my own university, UCLA, a symposium last week on human rights turned into a Hamas recruitment rally by a clever academic gimmick. The director of the Center for Near East Studies carefully selected only Israel bashers for the panel, each of whom concluded that the Jewish state is the greatest criminal in human history.

The primary purpose of the event was evident the morning after, when unsuspecting, uninvolved students read an article in the campus newspaper titled, "Scholars say: Israel is in violation of human rights in Gaza," to which the good name of the University of California was attached. This is where Hamas scored its main triumph -- another inch of academic respectability, another inroad into Western minds.

Danny's picture is hanging just in front of me, his warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in the eyes and say: You did not die in vain.

Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote cross-cultural understanding.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

 

[PanaEng]

Thanks leroi, great article.

 

[a_majoor]

real facts and figures are now emerging. The intent to form some sort of rapid response information team to counter propaganda is interesting, but getting these reports published in a hostile of indifferent MSM is the real challenge:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304788684&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

IDF: World duped by Hamas's false civilian death toll figures
By YAAKOV KATZ

Four weeks after the cessation of Operation Cast Lead, the IDF finally opened its dossier on Palestinian fatalities on Sunday for the first time, and presented to The Jerusalem Post an overview utterly at odds with the Palestinian figures that have hitherto formed the basis for assessing the conflict.

While the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose death toll figures have been widely cited, reports that 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the fighting, amounting to more than two-thirds of all fatalities, the IDF figures shown to the Post on Sunday put the civilian death toll at no higher than a third of the total.

The international community had been given a vastly distorted impression of the death toll because of "false reporting" by Hamas, said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which compiled the IDF figures.

As an example of such distortion, he cited the incident near a UN school in Jabalya on January 6, in which initial Palestinian reports falsely claimed IDF shells had hit the school and killed 40 or more people, many of them civilians.

In fact, he said, 12 Palestinians were killed in the incident - nine Hamas operatives and three noncombatants. Furthermore, as had since been acknowledged by the UN, the IDF was returning fire after coming under attack, and its shells did not hit the school compound.

"From the beginning, Hamas claimed that 42 people were killed, but we could see from our surveillance that only a few stretchers were brought in to evacuate people," said Levi, adding that the CLA contacted the PA Health Ministry and asked for the names of the dead. "We were told that Hamas was hiding the number of dead."

As a consequence of the false information, he added, the IDF was considering setting up a "response team" for future conflicts whose job would be to collect information, analyze it and issue reports as rapidly as possible that refuted Hamas fabrications.

Basing its work on the official Palestinian death toll of 1,338, Levi said the CLA had now identified more than 1,200 of the Palestinian fatalities. Its 200-page report lists their names, their official Palestinian Authority identity numbers, the circumstances in which they were killed and, where appropriate, the terrorist group with which they were affiliated.

The CLA said 580 of these 1,200 had been conclusively "incriminated" as members of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

Another 300 of the 1,200 - women, children aged 15 and younger and men over the age of 65 - had been categorized as noncombatants, the CLA said.

Counted among the women, however, were female terrorists, including at least two women who tried to blow themselves up next to forces from the Givati and Paratroopers' Brigades. Also classed as noncombatants were the wives and children of Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas military commander who refused to allow his family to leave his home even after he was warned by Israel that it would be bombed.

The 320 names yet to be classified are all men; the IDF has yet complete its identification work in these cases, but estimates that two-thirds of them were terror operatives.

The CLA gave the Post the names of several fatalities who it said had been classified by the Palestinians as "medics," but who it stated were Hamas fighters, including Anas Naim, the nephew of Hamas Health Minister Bassem Naim, who was killed during clashes with the IDF on January 4 in the Sheikh Ajlin neighborhood of Gaza City.

Following the clashes, the Palestinian press reported that Naim was killed and that he was a medic with the Palestinian Red Crescent. The Gaza CLA, however, produced photographs of Naim posing holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and a Kalashnikov assault rifle that had been posted on a Hamas Web site.

Levi stressed that on no occasion were civilians deliberately targeted, and that every effort was made to minimize civilian casualties.

Work on the death toll list was started during Operation Cast Lead under Levi's direction. A special team was set up and led by an officer in the CLA who coordinated efforts with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and worked from statistics and information on the dead from the Hamas Health Ministry, the media in Gaza, and other Palestinian and Israeli intelligence sources.

Much controversy and confusion has surrounded the number of Palestinian noncombatants killed during Israel's three-week campaign against Hamas, with the IDF and the Shin Bet refusing to release official numbers to refute Hamas allegations. Israeli estimates were intermittently leaked to the press but not published in official press statements.

 

[geo]

When you are working at winning the fight to capture the hearts & minds of International public opinion, it will always be a case of "here are my numbers" and "prove to me that I am wrong".

A valliant effort by the IDF & their CLA but, I am not certain that the world's MsM will do anything with it...

 

[a_majoor]

At last, at least one war criminal has been aprehended and will be prosecuted:

http://www.thesurlybeaver.ca/index.php?itemid=667

When is a war crime not a war crime?
02/18/09

When it wasn't committed by a Israeli soldier. Whilst the Times, the Beeb and most other western media worked themselves into a lather over alleged Israeli war crimes, here's a clear contravention of Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions, arising from that conflict which they all somehow missed:

As Operation Cast Lead approached, members of Amazi's unit received uniforms similar in appearance to those worn by soldiers in the IDF's Givati brigades. Their plan was to confuse soldiers in order to draw close and carry out a kidnapping or suicide bombing.

Kidnapping a soldier was seen as “the most important thing, in order to stop the operation,” Amazi said.

Amazi and his companions ultimately failed in their mission. As he and a fellow Hamas terrorist fled from a Jabalia home after firing on soldiers, they came under fire, and Amazi was wounded while his companion was killed. Amazi took shelter in a local family's home and pretended to be a civilian engaged to the family's daughter, but was apprehended by soldiers despite the ruse.

Specifically he violated Article 37 of the Protocol which forbids perfidy. He is being put on trial in Israel.

Amazi admitted that he and other members of Hamas used civilian homes during the operation, even when the homeowners objected.

State prosecutors have filed an indictment against Amazi for murder, attempted murder and membership in a terrorist organization.

So far this is the only story I have found relating to this trial. A real bonafide war crimes trial arising from the Gaza conflict and all we hear from the MSM is crickets chirping. Why am I not surprised?

However, we here at the Surly Beaver like to give credit where credit is due. Time is rightly asking questions about the number of civilian casualties from last months conflict in Gaza. Pity is close to two months since the conflict started and several weeks since it's end.

Journalists. What would we do without them?

 

[a_majoor]

New ways to deal with the threats:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/can-israels-iron-dome-blunt-hamas-rockets/?singlepage=true

Can Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ Blunt Hamas Rockets?

Posted By Allison Kaplan Sommer On March 31, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Israel,Middle East,World News | 7 Comments

For many weeks, it seemed as if Israel was successful at staying out of the turmoil rocking the Middle East. First Tunisia, then Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Jordan: as anti-regime demonstrations caught fire across the Middle East, Israel’s supporters were able to argue convincingly for the first time in decades that the presence of the Jewish state is not necessarily the source of all instability in the region.

But suddenly, it seemed as if Hamas leaders in Gaza, like angry toddlers realizing they weren’t getting enough attention, decided they needed to make some noise and grab some headlines. Perhaps they were worried that there was too much bashing of Arab dictators going on — and not enough bashing of Israel.

Whatever the reason, they began to attempt to provoke Israel into action. After months of disturbing but essentially harmless launches, the rocket attacks escalated dramatically. On March 19, without warning, 50 rockets fell in one day [1] in the area surrounding Sderot.

The attack was the biggest barrage of rockets fired in the two years following Operation Cast Lead, and it was only the beginning. In an act of deliberate provocation, not only did the number of rockets missiles fired at Israel increase, they began to be aimed clearly at the most populated areas in the south. On March 23, Grad rockets landed square in the middle of Beersheva, Israel’s fourth-largest city, which was also a target two years ago during Operation Cast Lead [2].

In what was unlikely to have been a coincidence, on the same day, a bomb exploded at the central Jerusalem bus station, killing one woman and wounding tens.

And as the week wore on, rockets hit the city of Ashdod. Schools across the south were canceled, daily life in the south of the country was utterly disrupted, and suddenly, Libya and Japan were off of Israeli television screens as people wondered whether war in southern Israel was imminent, even as the allied bombs were dropping in Libya from NATO planes.

The Israeli Air Force was making attacks of their own — consistent, but relatively restrained — with bombing targeted at the launch sites [3] in response to each wave of rocket fire on Israeli cities.

Under tremendous political pressure to do something more substantial, the government of Binyamin Netanyahu indicated that [4] a real solution with an impressive name was on its way: a counter-rocket defense system called “Iron Dome.”

The Israeli Defense Forces are billing the Iron Dome system as a comprehensive solution to the threat of short-range rockets and mortar shells fired across Israel’s borders. They promise that it will be able to identify, intercept, and destroy the weapons before — not after — they land in Israel’s civilian population. It has been under development since 2007, when Hezbollah rockets threatened northern Israel. It is one part of a three-pronged defense: systems are also being developed against mid-range and long-range missiles.
The counter-rocket defense system was tested and declared ready to operate back in February, but had yet to be deployed until now. As rockets pelted Beersheva and Ashdod, the government and the military were attacked by commentators like Yossi Melman of Ha’aretz, who asked why it hadn’t yet been rolled out [5] to protect their civilians under fire:

    There can only be three explanations for this despicable conduct. One, IDF commanders and senior officials in the defense establishment — first and foremost among them Defense Minister Ehud Barak — are indifferent to the distress of the people in the south, who have suffered repeatedly from mortar and rocket attacks. Two, the IDF is afraid of a failure in intercepting a missile, which would publicly reveal the inadequacy of Iron Dome. On the back of remarkable success in testing, developers have boasted repeatedly it is the best system of its kind in the world.

    The third, even more cynical, possibility is that Iron Dome has not been deployed because of the fear that it will be shown to have limited capabilities, which would not allow it to be sold abroad. According to reports in foreign publications over the past year, Israel is negotiating to sell the Iron Dome to Brazil, Singapore, and India.

The military, obviously, had its own explanations. One general questioned the wisdom of deploying the system before enough batteries are available to protect the entire southern region. The worry is that if only some cities are protected, Hamas will bear down and target other cities, causing more intensive damage. Indeed, when it was announced that the first battery would be set up next to Beersheva, residents of Ashdod and Ashkelon asked, “Why them and not us?”

With the knowledge that the system is still unproven, the government has taken care to lower expectations. As Iron Dome was finally deployed Sunday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made an effort to lower expectations, cautioning that it [6] “will not give a full or comprehensive solution to the missile threat.”

Even if it isn’t full or comprehensive, real evidence that the expensive system with the reassuring name represents any form of solution will offer a much-needed boost of confidence to the jittery population of southern Israel.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/can-israels-iron-dome-blunt-hamas-rockets/

URLs in this post:

[1] 50 rockets fell in one day: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-03-19-hamas-israel_N.htm

[2] Operation Cast Lead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_War

[3] at the launch sites: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-strikes-arms-depot-in-gaza-following-palestinian-rocket-fire-1.351632

[4] indicated that: http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=213741

[5] asked why it hadn’t yet been rolled out: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/what-about-the-iron-dome-1.351460

[6] cautioning that it: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4048254,00.html

 

[Edward Campbell]

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Washington Post got little (if any) attention here in Canada where admitting that Israel might be right is something the media finds very, very hard to do:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html
Emphasis in the original.

Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes

We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.
1113
The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly. The purpose of these investigations, as I have always said, is to ensure accountability for improper actions, not to second-guess, with the benefit of hindsight, commanders making difficult battlefield decisions.

While I welcome Israel’s investigations into allegations, I share the concerns reflected in the McGowan Davis report that few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded and believe that the proceedings should have been held in a public forum. Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn’t negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.

Israel’s lack of cooperation with our investigation meant that we were not able to corroborate how many Gazans killed were civilians and how many were combatants. The Israeli military’s numbers have turned out to be similar to those recently furnished by Hamas (although Hamas may have reason to inflate the number of its combatants).

As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation. The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel. I insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel. I have always been clear that Israel, like any other sovereign nation, has the right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens against attacks from abroad and within. Something that has not been recognized often enough is the fact that our report marked the first time illegal acts of terrorism from Hamas were being investigated and condemned by the United Nations. I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.

Some have charged that the process we followed did not live up to judicial standards. To be clear: Our mission was in no way a judicial or even quasi-judicial proceeding. We did not investigate criminal conduct on the part of any individual in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank. We made our recommendations based on the record before us, which unfortunately did not include any evidence provided by the Israeli government. Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing.

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.

In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.

I continue to believe in the cause of establishing and applying international law to protracted and deadly conflicts. Our report has led to numerous “lessons learned” and policy changes, including the adoption of new Israel Defense Forces procedures for protecting civilians in cases of urban warfare and limiting the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas. The Palestinian Authority established an independent inquiry into our allegations of human rights abuses — assassinations, torture and illegal detentions — perpetrated by Fatah in the West Bank, especially against members of Hamas. Most of those allegations were confirmed by this inquiry. Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Simply put, the laws of armed conflict apply no less to non-state actors such as Hamas than they do to national armies. Ensuring that non-state actors respect these principles, and are investigated when they fail to do so, is one of the most significant challenges facing the law of armed conflict. Only if all parties to armed conflicts are held to these standards will we be able to protect civilians who, through no choice of their own, are caught up in war.

The writer, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, chaired the U.N. fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.

Good for Mister Justice Goldstone, he says: ”… our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report …. Israel has done this … Hamas has done nothing.” I’m sure he will be invited to a few less trendy cocktail parties after this.

 

[Sapplicant]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143334

Just one example of many, many articles on the subject. This is gonna f*****g suck, assuming it's true.

Hopefully may 15 comes and goes with nothing noteworthy happening.