Bubba2
08-04-2006, 11:28 AM
IDF War Crimes: HRW Issues a Meaningless Report
Thursday August 03rd 2006, 8:22 am
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=497
Once again, in predictably worthless fashion, Human Rights Watch has complained about “serious violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war) by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon between July 12 and July 27, 2006, as well as the July 30 attack in Qana. During this period, the IDF killed an estimated 400 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and that number climbed to over 500 by the time this report went to print. The Israeli government claims it is taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm, but the cases documented here reveal a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians.”
It should be common knowledge Israel is an outlaw, criminal state and has violated every humanitarian law on the books since its inception in 1948. It should be, but in fact it isn’t, as the corporate media continues to portray Israel as a poor besieged state, the only democracy in the Middle East, and increasingly the Arabs of the area are vilified as Hezbollah dupes deserving to be bombed and slaughtered. As Alan Dershowitz writes, some civilians are more innocent than others and there is little empathy for the Hezbollah babies and grandmothers of southern Lebanon. Human Rights Watch is up against the disgusting bulwark of the pro-Israel corporate media, but you have to hand it to them for banging their heads against the wall, screaming for us to notice Israel’s “indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives” and not finding any “cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack,” although this fabrication is the daily mantra on Fox News, where proffered IOF nightvision videos are shown ad nauseam as decisive evidence.
“By consistently failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians, Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets,” complains HRW. “The pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures cannot be explained or dismissed as mere accidents; the extent of the pattern and the seriousness of the consequences indicate the commission of war crimes.”
HRW is clueless because it fails to report that these “war crimes” (actually crimes against humanity) are cours de rigueur, an established policy of the criminal and racist state of Israel. HRW fails or refuses to make the obvious connection—in Israel, not only killing Arabs but starving them, preventing them from obtaining medical assistance, demolishing their homes and orchards, locking Palestinians in a huge open-air prison, torturing prisoners, etc., is the very essence of the state, its raison d’etre, as should be obvious after reading a few paragraphs of Zionist literature, spanning back over more than a century.
HRW tells us its finding is not comprehensive and “further investigation is required to document the war’s complete impact on civilians and to assess the full scope of the IDF’s compliance with and disregard for international humanitarian law.” One may thank HRW for documenting these crimes, however this report and any future reports will be ignored out of hand and the crimes will continue to occur, as there is no world body capable of putting an end to the slaughter of innocents in Lebanon—nobody, that is, short of the United States, the bankroller of Israeli crimes. If you believe our leaders here in the United States will stop funding this criminal and homicidal madness—let alone denounce it—I have a bridge to sell you in Lebanon, never mind the Israelis have flattened all of them.
“In addition to strikes from airplanes, helicopters, and traditional artillery, Israel has used artillery-fired cluster munitions against populated areas, causing civilian casualties.” In fact, regardless of the pabulum we see, hear and read excusing these civilian casualties (i.e., Hezbollah uses civilians as “human shields,” see above) by way of the pro-Israel corporate media, Israel deliberately targets civilians, as the Zionists in control of Israel consider all Arabs untermenschen, cockroaches, beasts on two legs, depictions rife throughout the entire body of Zionist literature and public pronouncements. Instead of simply rolling out a laundry list of Israeli atrocities, HRW should connect the dots—Israel is a racist and genocidal state and it will continue to violate international and humanitarian law so long as it receives not only a wink and a nod from the United States, but also billions of dollars each year, money used to perpetuate barbarous crimes, as designed and condoned, most notably by millions of pretrib Christians, otherwise known as Christian Zionists.
In its recommendations, HRW believes all “forces should be immediately ordered to uphold fundamental principles of international humanitarian law” and this task apparently falls to the purview of the United Nations, a sick joke at best, as the United Nations has long suffered pathetic emasculation, thanks to the domination of the United States in the so-called Security Council, where dozens of resolutions against Israel have suffered routine and predictable veto. “Human Rights Watch urges the Secretary-General of the United Nations to establish an International Commission of Inquiry to investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law, including possible war crimes, in Lebanon and Israel and to formulate recommendations with a view to holding accountable those who violated the law.” In other words, HRW believes the Secretary-General should locate the nearest wall and bang his head against it, as any recommendations will be pertinaciously ignored, even cited as evidence of antisemitism. Olmert and his gaggle of war criminals, on par with the Nuremberg defendants, should be arrested immediately and imprisoned at the Hague. Of course, hell will freeze over before this happens.
As an exercise in futility, HRW cites the “applicable law,” that is to say Article 3 Common to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, “to which Israel is a party.” Again, HRW misses the point—for Israel and its patron, the United States, the Geneva Conventions are less than meaningless, they are in fact an irksome impediment standing in the way of realizing the imposition of “democracy” over the heads of benighted Arabs and Muslims (according to the neocon lexicon, “democracy”—a prime example of doublespeak—is divorced from its traditional and widely accepted meaning; for an example of the Bushian version of democracy in action, consider the chaos and mass murder currently underway in Iraq).
Finally, HRW suggests the United States “[i]mmediately suspend transfers to Israel of arms, ammunition, and other materiel that have been documented or credibly alleged to have been used in violation of international humanitarian law in Lebanon, as well as funding or support for such materiel, pending an end to the violations” and “[c]onduct a full investigation into Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied arms, ammunition, and other materiel in violations of international humanitarian law.” Again, fat chance of this happening, as the United States government was long ago hijacked by Israel First Zionists of the most obstreperous sort (including Betar fascists), unashamed of their plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians and Lebanese and “reshape” the Middle East—that is to say carpet bomb and destroy its civilian infrastructure—and realize the historical objective of “Pax Americana and pax Israelica,” as Naseer H. Aruri notes in his preface to Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (mandatory reading for those who want to understand the historical roots of Israeli crimes and uninterrupted predation).
Thursday August 03rd 2006, 8:22 am
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=497
Once again, in predictably worthless fashion, Human Rights Watch has complained about “serious violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war) by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon between July 12 and July 27, 2006, as well as the July 30 attack in Qana. During this period, the IDF killed an estimated 400 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and that number climbed to over 500 by the time this report went to print. The Israeli government claims it is taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm, but the cases documented here reveal a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians.”
It should be common knowledge Israel is an outlaw, criminal state and has violated every humanitarian law on the books since its inception in 1948. It should be, but in fact it isn’t, as the corporate media continues to portray Israel as a poor besieged state, the only democracy in the Middle East, and increasingly the Arabs of the area are vilified as Hezbollah dupes deserving to be bombed and slaughtered. As Alan Dershowitz writes, some civilians are more innocent than others and there is little empathy for the Hezbollah babies and grandmothers of southern Lebanon. Human Rights Watch is up against the disgusting bulwark of the pro-Israel corporate media, but you have to hand it to them for banging their heads against the wall, screaming for us to notice Israel’s “indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives” and not finding any “cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack,” although this fabrication is the daily mantra on Fox News, where proffered IOF nightvision videos are shown ad nauseam as decisive evidence.
“By consistently failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians, Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets,” complains HRW. “The pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures cannot be explained or dismissed as mere accidents; the extent of the pattern and the seriousness of the consequences indicate the commission of war crimes.”
HRW is clueless because it fails to report that these “war crimes” (actually crimes against humanity) are cours de rigueur, an established policy of the criminal and racist state of Israel. HRW fails or refuses to make the obvious connection—in Israel, not only killing Arabs but starving them, preventing them from obtaining medical assistance, demolishing their homes and orchards, locking Palestinians in a huge open-air prison, torturing prisoners, etc., is the very essence of the state, its raison d’etre, as should be obvious after reading a few paragraphs of Zionist literature, spanning back over more than a century.
HRW tells us its finding is not comprehensive and “further investigation is required to document the war’s complete impact on civilians and to assess the full scope of the IDF’s compliance with and disregard for international humanitarian law.” One may thank HRW for documenting these crimes, however this report and any future reports will be ignored out of hand and the crimes will continue to occur, as there is no world body capable of putting an end to the slaughter of innocents in Lebanon—nobody, that is, short of the United States, the bankroller of Israeli crimes. If you believe our leaders here in the United States will stop funding this criminal and homicidal madness—let alone denounce it—I have a bridge to sell you in Lebanon, never mind the Israelis have flattened all of them.
“In addition to strikes from airplanes, helicopters, and traditional artillery, Israel has used artillery-fired cluster munitions against populated areas, causing civilian casualties.” In fact, regardless of the pabulum we see, hear and read excusing these civilian casualties (i.e., Hezbollah uses civilians as “human shields,” see above) by way of the pro-Israel corporate media, Israel deliberately targets civilians, as the Zionists in control of Israel consider all Arabs untermenschen, cockroaches, beasts on two legs, depictions rife throughout the entire body of Zionist literature and public pronouncements. Instead of simply rolling out a laundry list of Israeli atrocities, HRW should connect the dots—Israel is a racist and genocidal state and it will continue to violate international and humanitarian law so long as it receives not only a wink and a nod from the United States, but also billions of dollars each year, money used to perpetuate barbarous crimes, as designed and condoned, most notably by millions of pretrib Christians, otherwise known as Christian Zionists.
In its recommendations, HRW believes all “forces should be immediately ordered to uphold fundamental principles of international humanitarian law” and this task apparently falls to the purview of the United Nations, a sick joke at best, as the United Nations has long suffered pathetic emasculation, thanks to the domination of the United States in the so-called Security Council, where dozens of resolutions against Israel have suffered routine and predictable veto. “Human Rights Watch urges the Secretary-General of the United Nations to establish an International Commission of Inquiry to investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law, including possible war crimes, in Lebanon and Israel and to formulate recommendations with a view to holding accountable those who violated the law.” In other words, HRW believes the Secretary-General should locate the nearest wall and bang his head against it, as any recommendations will be pertinaciously ignored, even cited as evidence of antisemitism. Olmert and his gaggle of war criminals, on par with the Nuremberg defendants, should be arrested immediately and imprisoned at the Hague. Of course, hell will freeze over before this happens.
As an exercise in futility, HRW cites the “applicable law,” that is to say Article 3 Common to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, “to which Israel is a party.” Again, HRW misses the point—for Israel and its patron, the United States, the Geneva Conventions are less than meaningless, they are in fact an irksome impediment standing in the way of realizing the imposition of “democracy” over the heads of benighted Arabs and Muslims (according to the neocon lexicon, “democracy”—a prime example of doublespeak—is divorced from its traditional and widely accepted meaning; for an example of the Bushian version of democracy in action, consider the chaos and mass murder currently underway in Iraq).
Finally, HRW suggests the United States “[i]mmediately suspend transfers to Israel of arms, ammunition, and other materiel that have been documented or credibly alleged to have been used in violation of international humanitarian law in Lebanon, as well as funding or support for such materiel, pending an end to the violations” and “[c]onduct a full investigation into Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied arms, ammunition, and other materiel in violations of international humanitarian law.” Again, fat chance of this happening, as the United States government was long ago hijacked by Israel First Zionists of the most obstreperous sort (including Betar fascists), unashamed of their plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians and Lebanese and “reshape” the Middle East—that is to say carpet bomb and destroy its civilian infrastructure—and realize the historical objective of “Pax Americana and pax Israelica,” as Naseer H. Aruri notes in his preface to Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (mandatory reading for those who want to understand the historical roots of Israeli crimes and uninterrupted predation).