What is happening to the Palestinians is appalling for many reasons. In my lifetime I have heard of many atrocities. The situation with the Palestinians stands out in my mind for a number of reasons. Since I’ve been alive (I’m 53) most atrocities are perpetuated by a ruthless dictator or military leader. They are realtively short lived, and other nations either protest, minimize or ignore the situation. In time the chaos either burns itself out or succumbs to international pressure.
The Isreali atrocities have occurred over decades of time and not the work of one meglomaniacal leader but rather a national policy of a democratic state. This is not to say that Isreali citizens openly support the murderous actions of their government, but somehow the organized political process does nothing to end the aggressive policies of the state. While many Americans have protested the War in Vietnam, Iraq, etc. I know of no mass outrage expressed in Isreal.
Much of the world is aware and angry at the situation with the US being the major obstacle to international unity in pressuring Isreal to be humane. The US does not stop at ignoring the problem, but actually aids and supports the atrocities. The US uses its veto power to keep the UN powerless in addressing this issue in a substantive manner.
While the US press stays mute the rest of the world expresses its horror and sadness. The folllowing articles discuss the facts while painting the picture of the situation in the middle east.
These facts are from one of the articles below. Take a moment and really feel these statistics before moving on
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the final tally read: 1,314 Palestinians killed, including 416 children and 106 women; 5,320 injured, including 1,855 children and 795 women.
In comparison, the number of Israelis killed included four civilians and nine soldiers, along with 84 injured.
And according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the buildings destroyed included 4,100 residential homes (with 17,000 damaged), 20 mosques, 25 educational institutions and medical facilities, 31 security offices, 16 government buildings, and 1,500 factories and shops.
The Office of the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator pointed out that 16 health facilities and an equal number of ambulances were destroyed or damaged during the 22-day conflict.
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America’s Shame
By Paul Craig Roberts
January 08, 2009 “Information Clearinghouse“ — Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine doesn’t?
This is the question of our time.
For sixty years Israelis have been stealing Palestine from Palestinians. There are maps available on the Internet and in Israeli publications showing the shrinkage over time of what was once Palestine into what Palestine is today–a small number of unconnected ghettos or bantustans.
Palestine became “the occupied territory” from which Palestinians were ejected and Israeli settlements built for “settlers.” Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are full of refugee camps in which Palestinians driven off their lands by Israeli force have been living for decades.
Driving people off their land is strictly illegal under international law, but Israel has been getting away with it for decades.
Gaza is a concentration camp of 1.5 million Palestinians who were driven from their homes and villages and collected in the Gaza Ghetto.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created 60 years ago in
1949 to administer refugee camps for Palestinians driven from their lands by Israel. As of 2002, the registered Palestinian refugee population was 3.9 million.
Caterpillar Tractor makes a special bulldozer for Israel that is designed to knock down Palestinian homes and to uproot their orchards. In 2003 an American protester, Rachel Corrie, stood in front of one of these Caterpillars and was run over and crushed.
Nothing happened. The Israelis can kill whomever they want whenever they want.
They have been doing so for 60 years, and they show no sign of stopping.
Currently they are murdering women and children in the ghetto that they have created for Palestinians in Gaza. The entire world knows this. The Red Cross protests it. But the Israelis brazenly claim that they are killing “Hamas terrorists who are a threat to Israel’s existence.”
The American media knows that this is a lie, but does not say so.
Israel has been able to slowly exterminate a people for sixty years without provoking sufficient outrage to stop it.
The United States, “Christian America,” has been Israel’s greatest enabler in its long-term murder of the Palestinian people. Millions of “evangelical Christians” endorse Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The rest of the world condemns the Israeli military attack on the Gaza Ghetto. Last week the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution requiring a ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Israeli SS from Gaza.
The United States abstained.
While the rest of the world condemns Israel’s inhumanity, the US Congress–I should say the US Knesset–rushed to endorse the Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The US Senate endorsed Israel’s massacre of Palestinians with a vote of 100-0.
The US House of Representatives voted 430-5 to endorse Israel’s massacre of Palestinians.
The resolutions endorsed by 100% of the US Senate and 99% of the House were written by AIPAC, as were the speeches praising Israel for its inhumanity.
The US Congress was proud to show that it is Israel’s puppet even when it comes to murdering women and children.
The President of the United States was proud to block effective action by the UN Security Council by ordering the Secretary of State to abstain.
Be a Proud American. Swagger and strut. Pretend that you are not besmirched by the shame that your government has heaped upon you. Take refuge in your ignorance, fostered by 60 years of Israeli lies, that the murder of Palestinians and the theft of their lands is “Israel’s right of self-defense.”
When Israel went on a military rampage during its 22-day air strikes and artillery attacks on Gaza, it largely singled out residential neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and UN buildings on the pretext of targeting Hamas fighters.
But John Ging, director of operations for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), based in Gaza, kept insisting there were no Hamas fighters anywhere in the vicinity of UN-run schools or warehouses.
“What we have regretted in the past is that we have not been given a hearing to answer,” he told reporters Monday.
He charged that most of the allegations made by Israel were “unsubstantiated, unfounded – and continue to be repeated.”
Perhaps his strongest indictment of the Israelis was reflected in his response to a question on military tactics: “We don’t, in a civilized world, shoot the hostage to get to the hostage-taker.”
But in reality that was what the Israelis were doing in Gaza, says an Arab diplomat, echoing Ging’s comment.
“The Israelis violated every single international convention governing the rules of war and the treatment of civilians,” he told IPS. “Their military excesses can, in no way, be justified.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who praised Israel at a press conference in Jerusalem last week, describing the Jewish state as “a responsible member of the United Nations,” apparently had second thoughts when he saw the devastation caused in Gaza.
Standing outside a UN compound that was destroyed by Israel, Ban told reporters Tuesday: “I am just appalled. Everyone is smelling this bombing still. It is still burning. It is an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations.”
Despite pleas from the secretary-general, Israel bombed UN-run facilities, including schools and warehouses, on four different occasions.
One of the bomb attacks on the UNRWA compound took place on the same day Ban arrived in Israel.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the final tally read: 1,314 Palestinians killed, including 416 children and 106 women; 5,320 injured, including 1,855 children and 795 women.
In comparison, the number of Israelis killed included four civilians and nine soldiers, along with 84 injured.
And according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the buildings destroyed included 4,100 residential homes (with 17,000 damaged), 20 mosques, 25 educational institutions and medical facilities, 31 security offices, 16 government buildings, and 1,500 factories and shops.
The Office of the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator pointed out that 16 health facilities and an equal number of ambulances were destroyed or damaged during the 22-day conflict.
Nadia Hijab, senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, told IPS: “The scale of the devastation is such that Israel and its supporters are unlikely to be able to bury or bulldoze it out of the collective conscience of the world.”
There have already been calls to bring war crimes charges against Israeli leaders, she pointed out.
Although the formal wheels of international justice may grind slowly, citizens are not waiting.
“Trade unions in different parts of the world are calling for a boycott. Israel’s fruit shipments are rotting in its warehouses as importers in Scandinavia, Jordan, and the UK canceled orders,” she said.
In an open letter in the London Guardian last weekend, Israeli citizens themselves called on world leaders to impose sanctions against their own country: “This is the only road left. Help us all, please!”
Although a cease-fire has been declared, said Hijab, Gaza’s torment and siege is not over and the UN’s “We the peoples” are likely to remain mobilized until justice is done.
Speaking from Gaza, Ging told reporters that the population in Gaza remains shell-shocked, traumatized, and living in real fear.
Asked about the “most outrageous” incident he had witnessed, Ging said: “The dead children.”
Meanwhile, the United Nations is expected to lead international efforts to rebuild Gaza.
But Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the external affairs commissioner of the 27-member European Union, was quoted as saying that the EU would not fund reconstruction as long as Hamas was in control of Gaza.
Humanitarian aid, however, would be provided without any conditions, she added.
Hijab told IPS that “it is almost as though there are two different worlds, with the mainstream media, European and U.S. leaders, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon living in one world.”
And in the other, she said, are the leaders of the Third World, the president of the General Assembly (Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann), and millions of outraged citizens.
D’Escoto has taken a very strong stand denouncing the United Nations as ineffective in taking any action against Israel.
Hijab said the former parrot the Israeli line about Israel’s need for protection while the latter exchange UN reports and eyewitness accounts of the destruction and damage to thousands of homes, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure.
They also share photographs of phosphorus shells showering white flame on unprotected civilians; read about the killing of entire families among the thousands of dead and wounded; and respond with horror to the reports of women whose legs have been shorn off by new kinds of weapons, she added.
UNRWA Chief Appalled at Isreali Destruction in Gaza
ByThalif Deen |
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The last time the US restrained Israel in its never-ending wars of aggression was when President Eisenhower pulled the plug on the Anglo-French-Israeli effort to grab the Suez Canal in 1956.
Since then, we have not even chastised Israel when its actions hurt the United States. During the 6-Day war in 1967, for example, Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a Navy signals intelligence ship, in international waters, and murdered over 30 American sailors. The Israelis, of course, claimed it was an accident — but the Israeli claim was at least questionable, to put it charitably, because the Israeli fighter bombers made multiple attack passes, before Israeli gunboats machine gunned survivors in the water. Moreover, festooned with antennas, the Liberty had a very distinctive profile and was flying a huge American flag. Yet the US Congress never held an inquiry into Israel’s culpability (the only time in our history Congress failed investigate the root causes of a Naval disaster) and the DoD inquiry was as a disgraceful white wash.
Viewed in retrospect, the pusillanimous reaction to the assault on the USS Liberty by the United States government had a decisive grand strategic effect, however. It told Israel in no uncertain terms that it was now free to ignore or even hurt the interests of its patron in the pursuit of its own venal ambitions. History certainly suggests as much, because since that attack, Israel has operated without even a modicum of cosmetic restraint by the US. The Israelis have felt free to plant spies in the US government, like Jonathan Pollard. Most recently Israeli Prime Minister Omert bragged to Israeli citizens and the press about about he made Bush dance to his tune by interrupting a speech Bush was making in Philadelphia and telling Bush to humiliate the inept Condolezza Rice by forcing her to abstain on the UN resolution calling for a halt in fighting in Gaza — a resolution that she had helped to draft, presumably with Bush’s blessing.
Nevertheless, the American taxpayers continued to finance Irsrael’s arrogant behaviour year after year by repeatedly shovelling billions of dollars for new weapons and military/economic aid to Israel. The transfer of our front line weapons has been justified repeatedly as being necessary for Israel’s self defense, yet the Israelis have repeatedly used those weapons for offensive attacks, recently in Lebanon (2006) and now in Gaza. In the case of Gaza, it used the distraction of the US election in Nov 08 to break the cease fire (again using US weapons), and after triggering the desired response from Hamas, it unleashed its long-planned murderous attack on Gaza in late December, just weeks before the innauguration of President Barack Obama, in effect, pulling the rug out from under Obama and painting him into a corner at the very time when Obama was trying to focus his energies on and build bipartisan political support for dealing with the worst internal economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The GBU-39 guided bomb is perhaps the most egregious case point illustrating how our aid directly helps Israel to wage aggressive war regardless of American interests. After the disastrous Israeli attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, the Pentagon pushed for and Congress approved the transfer of thousands of precision bombs to replenish Israel’s stocks in August and September 2007. The GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb was not included in this gift. But then, more recently, and for no apparent reason, four months before its assault on Gaza, the Pentagon first notified Congress of the GBU-39 transfer in August 2008. Congress was in recess during August, but transfer of GBU-39s to Israel was one of the first items it disposed of in after reconvening in September, in dutiful obedience to the demands of the Israel Lobby and its wholly owned subsidiaries in the Pentagon. These weapons and their delivery racks were then rushed to Israel, and in less that 3 months from the time of Congressional approval, 1000 GBU-39s were cleared aerodynamically for release from Israel’s planes and placed in the operational inventory, just in time for Israel’s attack on the Gaza Ghetto. The GBU-39 is one of the most modern weapons in the American inventory.
Last September, the GBU-39s were trumpeted by the Israeli press as bunker busters of choice for an attack on Iran. But that claim was preposterous and most likely deliberate misinformation, given that we now know the Israelis had been planning the assault on the Gaza Ghetto for at least three months. It was preposterous because GBU-39 has a tiny warhead (only 50lbs encased in a 280 lb bomb). Its small size and (theoretical) high accuracy, however, makes the GBU-39 a far more appropriate as a weapon of choice for assassinating individuals and small groups in densely populated urban areas, like Gaza, than for taking out deeply-buried nuclear components in Iran.
Unfortunately for the mass of innocent Gazans, the GBU 39 does not work as accurately as advertised. It has reliability problems, among other things, according to my sources some of whom have experience in using this weapon (indeed, one told me he thought its problems made it a step backward in effectiveness). To make matters worse, targeting intelligence is never as good as claimed by airpower enthusiasts. In the real world, once the bombing starts, the feed back from the effects of the attacks is ambiguous at best, and consequently target lists proliferate wildly, as was the case in WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq (I & II), Kosovo, Lebanon (I & II), and now again in Gaza.
All of which begs the question with respect to blindly supporting Israel: How much is enough? On January 19, Bruce Robbins argued in the Providence Journal that enough is enough.
Israel’s claim of self defense in Gaza was bogus because, the ceasefire was working. Robbins quotes Israeli figures, which say the number of rockets fired out of Gaza in July, August, September and October 2008 was, respectively, 1, 8, 1, and 2, whereas in the two months before the cease-fire, the Gazans fired 149 and 87 rockets. The ceasefire was broken on Nov. 4-5, when Israel launched air and ground attacks against Hamas, while the attention of the world was distracted by the U.S. election (sound familiar?). Whatever started this new and massive round of atrocities, the Israeli parliamentary election being he most probably candidate, it was not a few more rockets, rockets that may not have been fired by Hamas at all, but by splinter groups, like Islamist Jihad. What Robbins does not say is that the overwhelming majority of rockets fired from within Gaza are homemade Qassam rockets. Qassams do not even have a guidance system. Their explosive warhead weighs between one pound and 22 pounds, depending on the model, and it is made of smuggled TNT and urea nitrate, a common fertilizer. Its propellent is a mixture of sugar and potassium nitrate, another common fertilizer, and the fuse designed to detonate the warhead is made from a rifle or pistol cartridge, a spring, and a nail. In flight, the rocket is not even spin stabilized but merely settled down by primitive fins, make out of sheet metal, mounted next to the nozzles … which is a dynamically unstable configuration and is why it often leaves a crazy corkscrewing smoke trail when launched in the direction of Israel.
None of this matters, however. It does not matter that the Israelis have slaughtered over 1300 people in the Gaza Ghetto against a loss of of only 13 Israelis, because Congress is cheering, having passed a resolution of overwhelming support (390 to 5) in the House. And it does not matter that Obama is hosed and will probably be humiliated into toeing the line from the git go, because he has pledged to preserve the special relationship.
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
Articles such as these are everywhere but on and in the US mainstream press.
Every previous president, except for maybe Carter, has given in and assisted the Isreali’s in their disregard for internatinal law and human ethics.
Will Obama be any different? He had a good first day, but can he stand up for what’s right when no other president before him had such integrity.
I’m not pro-Palestine nor anti-Isreal, I’m just a person who never sees genocide as a solution.
Jim Guido
Live up to being a citizen of the land of freedom, and have the US stop leading the world in % of the populace imprisoned.