NOT THAT BAD, BUT QUITE MISLEADING ARTICLE BELOW!
The Teen Who Taught Me the Truth About Israel's Expulsion of Palestinians
Even in New York, no one lives this land's problems more than a Palestinian exile and an ex-Israeli
By Odeh Bisharat Aug 08, 2017
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Israel had no 'expulsion policy' (?) against the Palestinians in 1948
For the Nakba, there's no need of an 'expulsion policy'
Opinion When Israel threatens Palestinians with a new Nakba, it threatens itself with extinction (?)
We met in Central Park. The summer heat, still mild that day, would become oppressive on my last day there. Our walk brought us to Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon located not far from where he was murdered. The word “Imagine” on the mosaic inexplicably radiated sadness (?). We exchanged a few words about this great artist, and soon returned to rehash the problems of our home region. It seems that no one lives its problems more than a Palestinian exile and an ex-Israeli.
In 1966, when he was 16, Yair Svorai was exposed to the events of 1948, including the stories of the Arab (?) villages whose residents were expelled. This was his first insight: Whatever happens, people do not leave their villages. Period. From the insight of this teen, I looked down, with contempt and disgust, at the monstrous arguments fed to us for generations to justify a people’s expulsion from its homeland. Do you truly believe it when you claim the Palestinians were expelled because they rejected the UN partition plan (?), or that in every war there is a winner and a loser?
I also became angry with myself, with my pathetic attempts to rebuff such claims with specific responses that miss the main point: Even if the Arabs rejected partition, were defeated, fired shots from some village; even if the Arab states started the war, even if the grand mufti of Jerusalem came up with the “Final Solution,” not poor Hitler (as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims), it does not justify the expulsion from Ma’alul of my family and all their neighbors.
I met this teen 51 years later, on a visit to New York. Svorai is no longer young, but his truths still shine with the truthfulness of youth (?) . In the battle against those who distort history, Svorai is a fortress, whether in his home in Manhattan, or in Kibbutz Mizra, where he attended high school, not far from his parents’ home in Kiryat Tivon.
“You may have a brother your mother did not birth”
Yair emigrated to the United States in the early 1970s, but not to get rich. He wanted to discover America at the time, the protests against the Vietnam War and the nascent women’s movements. He stayed, partly because of the personal freedom America offers and that today are under threat. He worked hard, he married, he retired and now he writes and tries to attract the world’s attention to repairing the injustice done to the Palestinian people.
Why do I write about Svorai? Because there are good people in the world Marina Grechanik
Why do I write about Svorai? Because there are good people in the world. He is Jewish and I am Palestinian (?), and our peoples have been in conflict for generations. But we share the ideals of freedom, peace, brotherhood and human dignity. In the words of an old Arabic poem: “You may have a brother your mother did not birth.”
Svorai did not come from an extreme leftist or pacifist family (?) , just the opposite. Tova and Moshe Svorai famously hid the head of the Lehi pre-state underground militia, Yair Stern, from the British Mandate police. (?) When their Tel Aviv home was raided, in 1942, Tova tried to shield Stern with her own body, but British policemen shot and killed him.
The shocking information
Yair Svorai remembers Mizra as the best part of his childhood, and over 30 years later he is still close to his “adoptive family” there. As a member of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement there, he heard stories from his counselor about the Nakba, though of course the Arabic term was not used at the time. He didn’t know how many villages were destroyed in the course of Israel’s War of Independence (?), their residents expelled, but he realized the number was large.
“In my [high-school] class there were over 20 students who heard what happened, but they didn’t become activists as a result of the shocking information; it also didn’t stop the counselor from joining an elite unit when he was drafted, a year later. Some people are deeply affected by what they hear, and others aren’t,” Svorai says, referring to his 16-year-old self. 1966 was also when he bought “The Arabs in Israel,” by Sabri Jiryis, which came out that year. Svorai still has it.
“The book influenced me greatly. I read about the theft of the Arabs’ land, about the concept of ‘present absentees,’” referring to Israel’s absentee property law, “which allowed the state to expropriate Arab land, even of those who were in the country. Of course, it was all the direct continuation of what happened during the Nakba,” he says.
Svorai transferred to a high school in Kiryat Tivon in 1967, for 11th grade. In early August, two months after the Six-Day War, he went to Jerusalem to visit friends. “Someone there told about what went on in what was called then the Latrun “finger,” the destruction of the villages of Emmaus, Yalu and Beit Nuba, and it spurred us to visit the area,” says Svorai. He photographed the ruins. The villages were destroyed completely after the battles ended, exactly the way it happened in 1948.
He took his photographs to the offices of Haolam Hazeh, in Tel Aviv. He remembers quite well that the editor of the weekly, Uri Avnery, was not interested in the story. The wave of national enthusiasm that flooded Israel after apparently did not pass by Avnery. But Svorai did not give up. A month later he wrote a letter to the editor, accompanied by one of his photographs from Latrun. It was published in the letters section.
At the time, Haolam Hazeh had a custom of leaving white space in items that had been censored, to show the diligence of the military censor. In Svorai’s letter, the white “windows” covered three-fourth of the text.
The Arab lover
The story did not end there. The propaganda Hebrew radio from the Voice of Cairo was popular among Israeli high school students at the time, partly because of the ridiculousness of the broadcasts and the lame accents of the Egyptian announcers. And then the Egyptian newscaster told about Yair Svorai’s letter in Haolam Hazeh. In school they called him the “Arab lover.”
And then, perhaps under the inspiration of Lennon (?), he reminded me of another truth that has worn away over the years and distortions: The terrorist operation directed at civilian targets that caused the greatest number of deaths in the entire history of the bloody conflict was that of Menachem Begin’s pre-state underground militia Etzel, also known as the Irgun. In 1946 it bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. And even after that, they are not embarrassed to paint the Palestinian struggle in the colors of terrorism.
It is very important for Svorai to talk about the occupation of 1967 as the continuation of the Nakba. Because the goals of the two events were identical: as large a territory as possible with as small a Palestinian population as possible.
Even the means they used, and continue to use, were similar. And the ethnic cleansing in both cases was similar too. Svorai says that in general it is a process of “replacing a people,” and in legal terms it is ethnic cleansing, which is considered to be one of the most serious crimes in international law. He expounded on this in a piece he published in Haaretz in March of this year.
When we talked about the hot-button issue of the Israeli-American demand to stop the Palestinian allowances to the families of Palestinian prisoners and of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces — “terrorists,” according to Netanyahu, Svorai said: There are terrorists and there are freedom fighters, it depends which side you ask. In the eyes of the Palestinians, the Israeli army carries out terrorist acts and the armed Palestinians are freedom fighters; in the eyes of most Israelis, the Palestinian gunmen are terrorists and the soldiers are heroes. And if a leader who seeks peace and reconciliation does not also understand the other side and its perspective, it will only perpetuate the suffering of both peoples.
Odeh Bisharat
Haaretz Contributor
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.805649
CHRISTians and EARTHlings gone COMPLETELY MAD, CLAIM FRIENDS OF ISRAEL THE THIEF AND MASSMURDERER!+
THIEVES and MURDERERS accepted by the world as a LEGITIMATE NUCLEAR ARMED DEMOCRATIC STATE BUILT ON STOLEN LAND! AND THE VICTIMS OF THE THIEVES ARE LABELLED TERRORISTS! IT IS A WORLD UPSIDE DOWN! CHRIST CRUCIFIED AGAIN, AND BY THE SAME PEOPLE, JEWS AND EUROPEANS!
IF YOU LIKE READING SHIT, YOU ARE SERVED COPIOUSLY HERE BELOW!
Christians Who Libel Israel THE THIEVE AND MASSMURDERER: The Iona Community
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- "Why Gaza does not have bomb shelter[s]? Hamas took control of Gaza Strip in 2005 following Israeli withdrawal. However, hostilities never ended... Had Hamas built bomb shelters, the causalities would have been reduced. It seems Hamas does not pay much attention to the number of dead Palestinians." — Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, journalist, Arab News, 2014.
- Israeli soldiers do not set out to kill Palestinian children. Palestinian terrorists, however, knowingly and with malice aforethought, shoot, blow up, and slit the throats of Israeli children. You come from a Christian community, yet you appear to show compassion only for Palestinian children. If you do have feelings for Jewish children, I have never heard you say so.
- Israeli children are never taught to hate and kill Palestinians. Their schools inculcate peace-making and the Jewish ethic of tikkun olam, "repairing the world," making it a better place. No international body has ever shown otherwise. But there is a vast body of evidence showing that Palestinian teachers and leaders do the exact opposite. British and other foreign aid money paid to the Palestinian Authority goes "into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models."
- You have close connections to the Palestinian people and ought to have influence on them, to preach a Christian message of love and brotherhood. Are you willing to tackle them on their destructive use of children as cannon fodder and their educational system that turns little boys and girls into Jew-hating fanatics? Will you have the humility to apologize to the Jews of Israel for your unjustified accusations, to speak with them, to meet senior officers in their military, and to learn at first-hand how they work for eventual peace, however many times their efforts to bring it are thwarted by Palestinian rejection? I think you owe them that.
The Iona Community, about which I have written here before, is an ecumenical Christian fellowship in Scotland. Its headquarters are in Glasgow, but its main activities take place on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, which is seen as a place for spiritual retreats. It has an international reputation for preaching love, a spiritual vocation, and fellowship among Christians. To me however it is also deeply anti-Semitic through its extreme hatred for the state of Israel and its one-sided support of the Palestinian narrative – according to the definitions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the US State Department.
Earlier this year, Sammy Stein, chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, complained to the group about remarks made at a meeting addressed by Iona's Leader-Elect, Dr. Michael Marten. Marten had argued[1] more than once that Israeli soldiers routinely and deliberately shoot Palestinian children, while knowing that they are children. In a reply[2] to Mr. Stein, Marten and the Reverend Peter Macdonald, the community leader, asserted that Marten's statement had been true, and tried to back up their vilification by referencing a number of media and UN reports, including anti-Israel NGOs such as B'Tselem and Electric Intifada. I was asked to respond to their diatribe; the result is the letter below. Will Macdonald and Marten, take in what it says and find a more honest way to express Christian concern, not just for the children of Gaza and the West Bank, but for Jewish children murdered in their beds and at school by Palestinian terrorists?
Dear Rev. Macdonald and Dr. Marten,
Earlier this year, you co-signed a letter to Mr Sammy Stein, Chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, in which you cited sources and made statements regarding the belief that "Israeli military forces routinely attack children", regularly shooting and killing them. Mr Stein has asked me to respond to your letter, which I believe to be anti-Semitic under the most widely accepted definition of the term, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Definition, signed by and accepted by 32 countries, including the UK and the European Parliament, and therefore having force in the jurisdiction in which you live and act. I am not Jewish, but for most of a long life I have defended Israel as the only safe haven for Jews and Middle East Christians, faced on all sides by violent enemies and by the rapid recrudescence of vicious anti-Semitism across Europe as well as a centuries-old hatred of Jews across the Islamic world.
I would ask you not to make a knee-jerk dismissal of my arguments before you come to them, and I ask you to reflect on what I have to say and to pray about it. For I hope to show how far you stand as Christians from a fair, honest, and compassionate understanding of the sufferings endured by the people of Israel, whether they be Jews, Muslims or Christians. I say that because Israel is quite literally the only country in the Middle East and far beyond that provides freedom of religion and equal rights for all its citizens. As a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies, a Middle East historian, and the holder of a doctorate in Iranian Studies, I make that statement in the firm understanding that it is true.
The limited sources you cite in evidence of routine attacks on Palestinian children include several, such as B'Tselem and Electric Intifada, that are notorious as anti-Semitic and unreliable in the extreme. As an academic, I would not touch them with a bargepole. It is also vital to ask why you do not cite a single Israeli or pro-Israel source in an attempt to seek a balanced approach to the issue. When you wrote your letter, I believe you had already made up your mind and showed no interest in a more informed examination. Three of the sources you cite are dated from 2014, from the time of a war that was started by Hamas, disseminating information that was even then unreliable.
Yes, Palestinian children are often killed. The real questions are: why are they killed, who kills them, and whether the Israeli army, the Israel Defence Force (IDF), has a policy that leads to routine killings. Before going further, I assure you that no such policy exists or has ever existed. As I shall show, the exact opposite is true. I also want to ask why you do not once mention the frequent deaths of Jewish children by Palestinian terrorists. I shall return to that later, but I would like to know why your reported compassion for dead children recognises only Palestinian children, not Jewish boys and girls who have had their throats cut while asleep in bed or blown to pieces by suicide bombers seeking paradise by slaughtering Jews. Do you care about them at all? How far does Christian love extend?
In 2015, a body known as the High Level Military Group (HLMG) visited Israel six times in the wake of the 2014 war with Gaza, to which conflict several of your sources refer. The HLMG is made up of eleven former senior military personnel who issue reports on conflicts between democratic armies and terrorist organizations. These officials had held top positions in the US, British, German, Spanish, French, Indian, Australian and Colombian defence forces and were, they said, afforded a level of access to the Israeli military that was "undoubtedly in excess of what our own countries would afford in similar circumstances." They included a former chairman of NATO's Military Committee, Klaus Naumann, and sometime commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp. All were from NATO and other democratic countries. Unlike yourselves and the commentators you cite, these are individuals of deep experience in warfare and in the command of soldiers in combat. Like yourselves, I am not a military expert, so I have a high appreciation of their insights into the IDF. I trust that you too will show respect for their conclusions.
Their 80-page report on the Israel Defence Force and its third war with Hamas in 2014 should surprise if not shock you with information that calls into question your portrayal of Israeli soldiers. It will only have such an import however, if your minds and hearts are open to the possibility that your judgement may be grossly distorted. You may also like to read and ponder on an article by this author, asking whether Israel committed war crimes in that war – an allegation which all the evidence, confirmed by the HLMG report, disproves.
In its report, the HLMG states:
Hamas does the exact opposite, not just with its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers, but in its callousness regard for its own civilians, including children. There is overwhelming evidence that Hamas used human shields in various ways. Children have been used to protect fighters, who physically hold them or open fire right next to them.[3] Numbers of civilians have been ordered onto roofs, to remain in homes that may be targeted. Hamas places rocket launchers inside or directly next to civilian sites. There is much evidence that Hamas military structures, rocket launch pads, and command centers have been situated directly in or next to civilian dwellings, a church, hospitals,[4] mosques, and schools.[5] Even the UN has admitted this. If you will take the care to watch the videos I have linked to, you will see stark evidence of those crimes.
Does it not shock you to learn that Hamas fired rockets from 31 UN facilities, 41 hospitals, 50 children's playgrounds, 85 medical clinics, 248 schools, 331 mosques, and 818 other civilian sites. One report reads that "Hamas uses UN facilities, schools, children's playgrounds, water towers, mosques and countless other active civilian facilities as launching sites for rockets and attacks. In this operation [2014 war] alone, Hamas has launched above 1,600 rockets from civilian sites."
This is historically a deliberate Hamas policy, as is clear from a 2008 video of a speech by Fathi Hammad, the Hamas Interior Minister:
In your letter, you say nothing about Hamas or the Palestinian Authority which carry out or condone terror attacks, frequently inciting their own children to carry out stabbings or teaching them to become suicide bombers. As far back as 2014, Hamas killed 160 Palestinian children used to build terror tunnels, some of which ended under Israeli kindergartens. You say not a word about any of this.
It is a matter of record that Islamic terrorists use children from an early age as fighters and suicide bombers, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. Iran used children to explode landmines during its war with Iraq, and is still calling for young boys to fight in Syria. ISIS has used around 1,500 children (as young as seven) as fighters, suicide bombers, and executioners, putting them in harm's way and causing severe mental illness for any who may survive.
These things are well known across the world. I do not doubt that you condemn this. But Hamas, whom you do not condemn, is part and parcel of the international Islamic terrorist campaign against the West. Their use of children falls into the same category as that of the Taliban, ISIS, and other murderous criminal enterprises. Yet you criticize Israel whose soldiers fight to defend their people from this evil.
Israel builds bomb shelters to protect its civilians, including children, from Hamas rocket attacks. Most Israelis have a small shelter in their homes: "In 1951, three years after the State of Israel declared its independence, the country instituted a civil defense law requiring all homes, residential buildings and offices to be equipped with shelters or 'safe rooms'." In Sderot, however, close to the Gaza border, Jewish children have a mere 15 seconds to run from playgrounds to shelter. On July 2, 2016, in Sderot, a Hamas rocket landed directly in an early childhood development center. A 2012 study showed that almost half all pre-teen children living in Sderot suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Writing in Arab News in 2014, journalist Abdulateef Al-Mulhim asked a simple question:
I mentioned above the many deaths of Israeli children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists who deliberately set out to take innocent lives. Allow me to mention just a few, and then to ask you why, to my knowledge, you have never condemned your Palestinian friends whose schools, television and radio broadcasts, political speeches, and religious sermons encourage their fellow citizens to go out to kill Jews, telling their own children that they should regard murderers as role models and aspire to carry out similar attacks once they are old enough.
In May 1974, three armed members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine entered Netiv Meir elementary school in Ma'alot in the Western Galilee and took over 115 people hostage. The victims were male and female student visitors from a religious high school together with escorts. Of the 115 hostages, 105 were children. The siege lasted two days, with demands made for the release of 23 terrorist prisoners. When IDF soldiers stormed the building, 25 hostages, 22 of them children, were killed, while 68 were injured. In the struggle, the terrorists killed children with grenades and automatic weapons. (For a full account of the massacre, see here.)
Between 2000 and 2005, the Second Intifada -- an outbreak of senseless violence targeting Jewish civilians -- hundreds of children were murdered in suicide and bus bombings, car shootings, and sniper fire. See Here for some of them. In March 2011, five members of a religious Jewish family, the Fogels, were slaughtered in their beds in Itamar by Hakim Awad, an 18-year-old Palestinian. He cut the throats of the father, and the mother, then proceeded to do the same to 3-month-old Hadas, 4-year-old Elad, and 11-year-old Yoav. Three other children, who were not at home, survived but were mentally scarred for life.
Last year, a 13-year-old Israeli girl, Hallel Yaffe Ariel, was stabbed to death while sleeping in her bed after a 19-year-old Palestinian man broke into her family home. Her mattress and the floor of her room were covered in blood.
Israeli soldiers do not set out to kill Palestinian children – the moral qualities of the Israeli military have been made clear above. Palestinian terrorists, however, knowingly and with malice aforethought, shoot, blow up, and slit the throats of Israeli children. You come from a Christian community, yet you appear to show compassion only for Palestinian children. If you do have feelings for Jewish children, you never say so.
Israeli children are never taught to hate and kill Palestinians. Their schools inculcate peace-making and the Jewish ethic of tikkun olam, "repairing the world," making it a better place. No international body has ever shown otherwise. But there is a vast body of evidence showing that Palestinian teachers and leaders do the exact opposite. British and other foreign aid money paid to the Palestinian Authority goes "into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models." Last summer, "a Gaza kindergarten graduation ceremony sponsored by the Islamic Jihad, featured children dressed in military fatigues, holding toy weapons, acting out attacks on an Israeli army base, firing mortar shells, planting explosive devices, kidnapping soldiers and even delivering mosque sermons that praise martyrdom." In 2012, senior Hamas commander Zaher Jabarin told Hamas' Al-Quds TV that Hamas labors "day and night" to educate Palestinian children in Gaza to become suicide bombers. In 2013, Gaza's Hamas-run al-Aqsa TV showed children singing the virtues of suicide attacks, and wishing to blow themselves up to "liberate" Jerusalem and Palestine.[6]
You have close connections to the Palestinian people and ought to have influence on them, to preach a Christian message of love and brotherhood. Are you willing to tackle them on their destructive use of children as cannon fodder and their educational system that turns little boys and girls into Jew-hating fanatics? Will you have the humility to apologize to the Jews of Israel for your unjustified accusations, to speak with them, to meet senior officers in their military, and to learn first-hand how they work for eventual peace, however many times their efforts to bring it are thwarted by Palestinian rejection? I think you owe them that. Surely, that is what Jesus would have done.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
[1] Cited in private letter by Mr Stein and in letter signed by Marten, shared with author.
[2] Ibid.
[3] See also here.
[4] See also here.
[5] On all of these, see here.
[6] See also here, here, and especially here, where a Hamas fighter uses a little girl to fire a sub-machine gun at Israeli troops.
The Abbey of the Iona Community, on the island of Iona, Scotland. (Image source: Akela NDE/Wikimedia Commons)
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Earlier this year, Sammy Stein, chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, complained to the group about remarks made at a meeting addressed by Iona's Leader-Elect, Dr. Michael Marten. Marten had argued[1] more than once that Israeli soldiers routinely and deliberately shoot Palestinian children, while knowing that they are children. In a reply[2] to Mr. Stein, Marten and the Reverend Peter Macdonald, the community leader, asserted that Marten's statement had been true, and tried to back up their vilification by referencing a number of media and UN reports, including anti-Israel NGOs such as B'Tselem and Electric Intifada. I was asked to respond to their diatribe; the result is the letter below. Will Macdonald and Marten, take in what it says and find a more honest way to express Christian concern, not just for the children of Gaza and the West Bank, but for Jewish children murdered in their beds and at school by Palestinian terrorists?
Dear Rev. Macdonald and Dr. Marten,
Earlier this year, you co-signed a letter to Mr Sammy Stein, Chairman of Glasgow Friends of Israel, in which you cited sources and made statements regarding the belief that "Israeli military forces routinely attack children", regularly shooting and killing them. Mr Stein has asked me to respond to your letter, which I believe to be anti-Semitic under the most widely accepted definition of the term, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Definition, signed by and accepted by 32 countries, including the UK and the European Parliament, and therefore having force in the jurisdiction in which you live and act. I am not Jewish, but for most of a long life I have defended Israel as the only safe haven for Jews and Middle East Christians, faced on all sides by violent enemies and by the rapid recrudescence of vicious anti-Semitism across Europe as well as a centuries-old hatred of Jews across the Islamic world.
I would ask you not to make a knee-jerk dismissal of my arguments before you come to them, and I ask you to reflect on what I have to say and to pray about it. For I hope to show how far you stand as Christians from a fair, honest, and compassionate understanding of the sufferings endured by the people of Israel, whether they be Jews, Muslims or Christians. I say that because Israel is quite literally the only country in the Middle East and far beyond that provides freedom of religion and equal rights for all its citizens. As a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies, a Middle East historian, and the holder of a doctorate in Iranian Studies, I make that statement in the firm understanding that it is true.
The limited sources you cite in evidence of routine attacks on Palestinian children include several, such as B'Tselem and Electric Intifada, that are notorious as anti-Semitic and unreliable in the extreme. As an academic, I would not touch them with a bargepole. It is also vital to ask why you do not cite a single Israeli or pro-Israel source in an attempt to seek a balanced approach to the issue. When you wrote your letter, I believe you had already made up your mind and showed no interest in a more informed examination. Three of the sources you cite are dated from 2014, from the time of a war that was started by Hamas, disseminating information that was even then unreliable.
Yes, Palestinian children are often killed. The real questions are: why are they killed, who kills them, and whether the Israeli army, the Israel Defence Force (IDF), has a policy that leads to routine killings. Before going further, I assure you that no such policy exists or has ever existed. As I shall show, the exact opposite is true. I also want to ask why you do not once mention the frequent deaths of Jewish children by Palestinian terrorists. I shall return to that later, but I would like to know why your reported compassion for dead children recognises only Palestinian children, not Jewish boys and girls who have had their throats cut while asleep in bed or blown to pieces by suicide bombers seeking paradise by slaughtering Jews. Do you care about them at all? How far does Christian love extend?
In 2015, a body known as the High Level Military Group (HLMG) visited Israel six times in the wake of the 2014 war with Gaza, to which conflict several of your sources refer. The HLMG is made up of eleven former senior military personnel who issue reports on conflicts between democratic armies and terrorist organizations. These officials had held top positions in the US, British, German, Spanish, French, Indian, Australian and Colombian defence forces and were, they said, afforded a level of access to the Israeli military that was "undoubtedly in excess of what our own countries would afford in similar circumstances." They included a former chairman of NATO's Military Committee, Klaus Naumann, and sometime commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp. All were from NATO and other democratic countries. Unlike yourselves and the commentators you cite, these are individuals of deep experience in warfare and in the command of soldiers in combat. Like yourselves, I am not a military expert, so I have a high appreciation of their insights into the IDF. I trust that you too will show respect for their conclusions.
Their 80-page report on the Israel Defence Force and its third war with Hamas in 2014 should surprise if not shock you with information that calls into question your portrayal of Israeli soldiers. It will only have such an import however, if your minds and hearts are open to the possibility that your judgement may be grossly distorted. You may also like to read and ponder on an article by this author, asking whether Israel committed war crimes in that war – an allegation which all the evidence, confirmed by the HLMG report, disproves.
In its report, the HLMG states:
We can further be categorically clear that Israel's conduct in the 2014 Gaza Conflict met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations' militaries. It is our view that Israel fought an exemplary campaign, adequately conceived with appropriately limited objectives, displaying both a very high level of operational capability as well as a total commitment to the Law of Armed Conflict. The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield at significant tactical cost, as well as in the humanitarian relief efforts that accompanied its operation. (p. 11)On the other hand, they say the following about Hamas, an internationally identified terrorist group that started this war as it did two earlier conflicts:
Hamas in turn not only flagrantly disregarded the Law of Armed Conflict as a matter of course as part of its terrorist-army hybrid strategic concept, but rather it abused the very protections afforded by the law for military advantage.So high were Israel's standards that even the HLMG's rapporteur, Davis Lewin, was concerned that "Some of the precautions were so extensive they worried that they could become norms in international law in terms of having to fight their own battles elsewhere." It is Israeli policy to warn enemy civilians of impending attacks by dropping thousands of leaflets, making telephone calls, sending text messages, and even dropping projectiles called "knocks on the roof" to give residents advanced warnings to evacuate the premises. This practice alone makes Amnesty International's accusation of "callous indifference" to civilian deaths utterly indefensible. Giving advance warning of attacks is disadvantageous for the Israeli Air Force in two ways: it warns Hamas fighters and rocket-launching teams that they have been spotted and designated as targets, and it allows Hamas to order civilians to remain in buildings or go onto flat roofs to dissuade Israelis from firing. This policy of warning civilians of a coming attack is stated clearly in Israel's Manual on the Rules of Warfare (2006).
Embedding its entire military machinery in civilian locations and sensitive sites, including those of the United Nations, Hamas indiscriminately targeted Israeli civilians throughout the conflict with extensive rocket fire and willfully sought to draw the IDF into battle in a prepared urban stronghold amid the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, for which it located its operational headquarters in Gaza's main hospital.
It is important to note that Hamas's strategic concept actively seeks the death of its own civilians as an advantageous reinforcement of its strategy aimed at the erosion of Israel's legitimacy. (p. 11)
Hamas does the exact opposite, not just with its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers, but in its callousness regard for its own civilians, including children. There is overwhelming evidence that Hamas used human shields in various ways. Children have been used to protect fighters, who physically hold them or open fire right next to them.[3] Numbers of civilians have been ordered onto roofs, to remain in homes that may be targeted. Hamas places rocket launchers inside or directly next to civilian sites. There is much evidence that Hamas military structures, rocket launch pads, and command centers have been situated directly in or next to civilian dwellings, a church, hospitals,[4] mosques, and schools.[5] Even the UN has admitted this. If you will take the care to watch the videos I have linked to, you will see stark evidence of those crimes.
Does it not shock you to learn that Hamas fired rockets from 31 UN facilities, 41 hospitals, 50 children's playgrounds, 85 medical clinics, 248 schools, 331 mosques, and 818 other civilian sites. One report reads that "Hamas uses UN facilities, schools, children's playgrounds, water towers, mosques and countless other active civilian facilities as launching sites for rockets and attacks. In this operation [2014 war] alone, Hamas has launched above 1,600 rockets from civilian sites."
This is historically a deliberate Hamas policy, as is clear from a 2008 video of a speech by Fathi Hammad, the Hamas Interior Minister:
"The enemies of God do not know that the Palestinian people have developed their methods of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, as do all the people living in this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahidin [i.e. the jihad fighters] and the children. This is why they have formed human shields [duruq bashariyya] of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahidin, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: 'We desire death, just as you desire life.'"Read that again -- "they have formed human shields [duruq bashariyya] of the women, the children...." -- and you are outraged that Palestinian children are killed, and blame that on soldiers in an army that goes morally far beyond any other army in the world, and that puts its own troops' lives in danger in order to avoid hurting enemy civilians?
In your letter, you say nothing about Hamas or the Palestinian Authority which carry out or condone terror attacks, frequently inciting their own children to carry out stabbings or teaching them to become suicide bombers. As far back as 2014, Hamas killed 160 Palestinian children used to build terror tunnels, some of which ended under Israeli kindergartens. You say not a word about any of this.
It is a matter of record that Islamic terrorists use children from an early age as fighters and suicide bombers, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. Iran used children to explode landmines during its war with Iraq, and is still calling for young boys to fight in Syria. ISIS has used around 1,500 children (as young as seven) as fighters, suicide bombers, and executioners, putting them in harm's way and causing severe mental illness for any who may survive.
These things are well known across the world. I do not doubt that you condemn this. But Hamas, whom you do not condemn, is part and parcel of the international Islamic terrorist campaign against the West. Their use of children falls into the same category as that of the Taliban, ISIS, and other murderous criminal enterprises. Yet you criticize Israel whose soldiers fight to defend their people from this evil.
Israel builds bomb shelters to protect its civilians, including children, from Hamas rocket attacks. Most Israelis have a small shelter in their homes: "In 1951, three years after the State of Israel declared its independence, the country instituted a civil defense law requiring all homes, residential buildings and offices to be equipped with shelters or 'safe rooms'." In Sderot, however, close to the Gaza border, Jewish children have a mere 15 seconds to run from playgrounds to shelter. On July 2, 2016, in Sderot, a Hamas rocket landed directly in an early childhood development center. A 2012 study showed that almost half all pre-teen children living in Sderot suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Writing in Arab News in 2014, journalist Abdulateef Al-Mulhim asked a simple question:
"Why Gaza does not have bomb shelter[s]? Hamas took control of Gaza Strip in 2005 following Israeli withdrawal. However, hostilities never ended. In one of the conflicts around 1,500 Palestinians lost their lives and the Israeli side sustained few casualties. Undoubtedly, Israel is militarily more powerful than Hamas. Had Hamas built bomb shelters, the causalities would have been reduced. It seems Hamas does not pay much attention to the number of dead PalestiniansYou do not even refer to these facts or mention other places inhabited by children, and instead blame Palestinian children's deaths on Israeli soldiers. This is morally irresponsible and reprehensible, and I do not hesitate to call you out for this transparent obliquity.
I mentioned above the many deaths of Israeli children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists who deliberately set out to take innocent lives. Allow me to mention just a few, and then to ask you why, to my knowledge, you have never condemned your Palestinian friends whose schools, television and radio broadcasts, political speeches, and religious sermons encourage their fellow citizens to go out to kill Jews, telling their own children that they should regard murderers as role models and aspire to carry out similar attacks once they are old enough.
In May 1974, three armed members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine entered Netiv Meir elementary school in Ma'alot in the Western Galilee and took over 115 people hostage. The victims were male and female student visitors from a religious high school together with escorts. Of the 115 hostages, 105 were children. The siege lasted two days, with demands made for the release of 23 terrorist prisoners. When IDF soldiers stormed the building, 25 hostages, 22 of them children, were killed, while 68 were injured. In the struggle, the terrorists killed children with grenades and automatic weapons. (For a full account of the massacre, see here.)
Between 2000 and 2005, the Second Intifada -- an outbreak of senseless violence targeting Jewish civilians -- hundreds of children were murdered in suicide and bus bombings, car shootings, and sniper fire. See Here for some of them. In March 2011, five members of a religious Jewish family, the Fogels, were slaughtered in their beds in Itamar by Hakim Awad, an 18-year-old Palestinian. He cut the throats of the father, and the mother, then proceeded to do the same to 3-month-old Hadas, 4-year-old Elad, and 11-year-old Yoav. Three other children, who were not at home, survived but were mentally scarred for life.
Last year, a 13-year-old Israeli girl, Hallel Yaffe Ariel, was stabbed to death while sleeping in her bed after a 19-year-old Palestinian man broke into her family home. Her mattress and the floor of her room were covered in blood.
Israeli soldiers do not set out to kill Palestinian children – the moral qualities of the Israeli military have been made clear above. Palestinian terrorists, however, knowingly and with malice aforethought, shoot, blow up, and slit the throats of Israeli children. You come from a Christian community, yet you appear to show compassion only for Palestinian children. If you do have feelings for Jewish children, you never say so.
Israeli children are never taught to hate and kill Palestinians. Their schools inculcate peace-making and the Jewish ethic of tikkun olam, "repairing the world," making it a better place. No international body has ever shown otherwise. But there is a vast body of evidence showing that Palestinian teachers and leaders do the exact opposite. British and other foreign aid money paid to the Palestinian Authority goes "into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models." Last summer, "a Gaza kindergarten graduation ceremony sponsored by the Islamic Jihad, featured children dressed in military fatigues, holding toy weapons, acting out attacks on an Israeli army base, firing mortar shells, planting explosive devices, kidnapping soldiers and even delivering mosque sermons that praise martyrdom." In 2012, senior Hamas commander Zaher Jabarin told Hamas' Al-Quds TV that Hamas labors "day and night" to educate Palestinian children in Gaza to become suicide bombers. In 2013, Gaza's Hamas-run al-Aqsa TV showed children singing the virtues of suicide attacks, and wishing to blow themselves up to "liberate" Jerusalem and Palestine.[6]
You have close connections to the Palestinian people and ought to have influence on them, to preach a Christian message of love and brotherhood. Are you willing to tackle them on their destructive use of children as cannon fodder and their educational system that turns little boys and girls into Jew-hating fanatics? Will you have the humility to apologize to the Jews of Israel for your unjustified accusations, to speak with them, to meet senior officers in their military, and to learn first-hand how they work for eventual peace, however many times their efforts to bring it are thwarted by Palestinian rejection? I think you owe them that. Surely, that is what Jesus would have done.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
[1] Cited in private letter by Mr Stein and in letter signed by Marten, shared with author.
[2] Ibid.
[3] See also here.
[4] See also here.
[5] On all of these, see here.
[6] See also here, here, and especially here, where a Hamas fighter uses a little girl to fire a sub-machine gun at Israeli troops.
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A Nuremberg Tribunal for ISIS and Friends
A dozen nations armed ISIS, protected them, some provided air support, others funneled jihadists from the far reaches of the Pacific to battle fields in Iraq and Syria.
Half a trillion dollars in oil, antiquities, entire factories, not to mention endless thousands of human slaves enriched those behind ISIS. Most involved aren’t Muslims. Many are Americans, the same corporations that profited from the War on Terror, backed ISIS as well.
Every NATO nation was involved as was Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. This was a war of corporations and banks, a commercial venture building on the real lessons learned after 9/11.
War is too important for governments, politicians can be bought and sold like any other commodity and everyone has a price. Behind it all, the media and their darlings, Assange and WikiLeaks, the Murdoch organization, the BBC, all enthrall to international thuggery on a scale previously unseen. We begin.
In early 2014, I met with Iraqi Sunni leaders to discuss security concerns. Iraq’s Sunni’s are a complex interrelationship of tribal units, complex family ties further diffused by tenuous alliance with Saddam and his Baathist regime.
As the post 9/11 US occupation dragged on, Iraq’s Sunni minority, which includes most of the business community, increasingly looked south to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates for stability. Many were fearful of Iran’s influence.
Despite warnings, this led many, including military leaders, to cozying up to ISIS. The hand of Saudi intelligence services was always there as well, promises made but seldom kept. A few short months later, many I met with had their heads displayed on pikes, their “dance with the devil” unsatisfactory and unfulfilling.
Thus, overnight, ISIS found itself in control of the vast city of Mosul and billions in American military hardware, all handed over to ISIS. Behind this was not only Saudi intelligence but the Mossad as well, the Israeli intelligence service that had set up a large headquarters in Mosul as early as 2003.
There, they played Christians and Muslims against each other and began their dance with Turkey, supplying intelligence to Turkey on the Kurdish PKK, a group Israel had helped establish some years ago. This is the reality, one never reported.
As the ISIS juggernaut rolled on, fueled by jihadists magically moved through airports around the world, rumored aided by the Israeli controlled airport security firm ICTS of 9/11 fame, all the rules of conventional warfare were set aside. ISIS, reputedly a non-state player, became the stepchild of security forces of the US, Britain, France, Israel, Turkey, India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.
Eventually, even Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Romania would join in as well, channeling both NATO and Eastern Bloc weapons through Turkey, aided by non-governmental organizations such as the White Helmets and dozens of phony refugee aid and relief groups.
From the South, vehicles by the thousands flowed into Syria and Iraq for ISIS, specially modified Toyota Hilux trucks and almost the entire production of Land Cruisers. All paid for by Saudi royal funds and, according to sources, upgraded and reinforced in Israel, larger cooling systems and heavier suspension. No serial number has ever been traced, Toyota has never been held to account, no invoices checked, not for entire container ships of “technicals” moved into Israel and then to Jordan through Aqaba, and up into the warzone.
Similarly, until Russian aerospace forces pointed it out, the river of trucks, 12,000 plus strong, mostly passing openly through Kurdish controlled regions, Erbil and Duhoc, into Turkey, the invisible partnership that funded ISIS and the political families of several nations as well, unseen, unquestioned.
Where do 12,000 oil tankers come from? Easy answer, they come from America, bought up by brokers, shipped out of the Port of Houston. Most now lie burned wrecks in Syria and Iraq. Not one serial number ever checked, no one wants to know that they once plied the interstate highways of America carrying fuel for BP, Exxon and so many others.
We mentioned antiquities. Most moved openly through the auction houses of London, Paris and New York while those reputedly investigating, I was told by Syria’s former Minister of Justice, Najm Hamad al-Ahmad, may well have been acting as “spotters” for antiquity thieves themselves.
Time now to talk Turkey. When Aleppo “fell” to ISIS, it wasn’t ISIS at all. It was Turkey. Aleppo was the industrial heart of Syria and was picked clean by “gleaners” from Turkey. According to the Syrian Ministry of Justice, every major manufacturing facility in Northern Syria was stripped clean, machine tools, inventory, even copper wire and plumbing, trucked into Turkey and either sold off or reassembled and put back into production with ISIS a business partner.
The goods and materials involved has flowed for years into the European Union.
How do we explain Raytheon Corporation, one of the best supervised and controlled entities of America’s military sector, manufacturer of key weapons systems vital to America’s defense. Their production of TOW missiles, a huge sector of their corporate profitability, has been moving directly into the hands of terrorists for years. Damascus has a warehouse of captured Raytheon weapons, taken from al Qaeda and ISIS. Why is no one held to account?
The answer is obvious, a tribunal. Let us hold those who backed ISIS to account. This includes the journalists and their reports of phony gas attacks and imaginary atrocities by the Damascus government, and all those involved in keeping ISIS and al Qaeda supplied with drones, satellite phones, signals intelligence and top quality and highly restricted military electronics.
All can easily be tracked, from the EU, from Ukraine and Georgia, but most from Turkey, followed by Saudi Arabia, then Jordan and, of course, Israel.
There are 500,000 dead and up to 10 million refugees. Perhaps a few politicians, Israeli for sure, the Saudi Royals, Americans by the hundreds, an entire Turkish regime, endless thousands of traitors in Syria and Iraq, and corporations around the world need to be held accountable for these deaths.
What is owed? Reparations for sure, every jihadist from Indonesia and the Philippines had to get to Syria somehow. Every drop of oil, every antiquity, every ton of copper wire, every human slave, all need to be priced, not just money but prison time and perhaps a few hangings as well, perhaps on a massive scale.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
https://journal-neo.org/2017/09/03/a-nuremberg-tribunal-for-isis-and-friends/
https://journal-neo.org/2017/09/03/a-nuremberg-tribunal-for-isis-and-friends/
SHABIR ALLY (EID SEPTEMBER 2017)
ReplyDeleteMay Allah accept all the duas made by the pilgrims yesterday on Arafat, and all the duas being made by Muslims everywhere today. I ask Allah to grant us the best of this life and the life hereafter, and to grant the same to everyone everywhere, starting with this joyous day of Eid.
Bayyinah Institute
To BAFS
1 Sep at 6:42 PM
We pray that you are enjoying Eid with friends and loved ones. May Allah shower blessings upon us all on this day and bring us closer to Him and each other, ameen!
Reply 1 by BAFS
CELEBRATE ONLY IF YOU HAVE DONE GODLY WORKS TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITY!
May Allah accept the prayers of all suffering people of planet earth, and all the prayers of Believers of all Faiths everywhere today and forever.
Never stop asking Allah to grant Muslims a better use of their brains by being more creative, fighting with courage and compassion, and not run away from sacrifice and universal solidarity in good works, as they have reaped the worst of this life with over 150 million having been slaughtered in the past centuries alone, and over a billion living in slavery and under Satanic terror and perversion of everything and everybody, and not giving a damn about Humanity!
But, I know that our prayers are in vain as ALLAH WILL DO NONE OF THIS UNTIL AND UNLESS WE DO IT OURSELVES AS ADVISED BY OUR WISE MEN AND WOMEN OF OLD!
ALLAHU AKBAR!
Reply 2 by BAFS
We pray that you have obeyed Allah by being sincere and just in all your actions and thoughts, by showing compassion to one and all, by loving the other as you love yourselves, and enjoy this Day with travellers, strangers, the needy, the oppressed, and last your family and friends.
May Allah shower blessings upon all humanity and bring the misled ones to repentance and guidance, and closer to each other and to Him, which HE HAS FAILED TO DO FOR QUITE A LONG TIME because Believers trust too much in Him without doing the works according to His Guidance! Shaytaan (Freemasons, Jews, etc.) works harder than the Believers, those HYPOCRITES whose only goal is to be granted Paradise in Heaven when WE HAVE IT RIGHT HERE ON EARTH, AS WELL AS HELL!
ALLAHU AKBAR
BAFS