Gaza was ‘a high-tech military pogrom’

by on January 20, 2009 12
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John Ging of the UN said Gaza was more disturbing than Rwanda or the Balkans, which he had also witnessed. How could that be? Those conflicts killed so many more people. Rwanda had horrifying scenes. My friend Mohammad, following up on his earlier statement re genocide, and said what he finds so disturbing about Gaza: "high tech military pogrom. This to me describes it the best." I think that is also what was so disturbing. A defenseless people subjected to such high tech weaponry, with so little risk to those wielding the weapons, except from one another.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Gaza

{ 12 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. syvanen says:
    January 20, 2009 at 4:51 pm

    Holding a kill ratio of nearly 100:1 is militarily impressive. Looking at past insurrections against overwhelming military we can see how effective the Israeli killing machine has become. In the Phillipines where the US killed 10% of the population, the ratio was 30:1 and in vietnam the Americans maintained a 50:1 kill ratio.

    I think Israel just bought itself another uninterrupted 5 to 10 years of West Bank occupation before there is another attempted resistance.

  2. Me says:
    January 20, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    Wait for Witty to with the usual blabla.

    And here – we – go!

  3. samuel burke says:
    January 20, 2009 at 5:06 pm

    israel is a rogue state…a myth.

    The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.

    Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel belonged.

    "Apparently American," the chief controller replied.

    Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted compartments below the ship's waterline.

    Related links
    How the Israeli attack unfolded Graphic

    Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk

    The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.

    "The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.

    "The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors."

    Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely."

    "He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."

    Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.

    Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots' communications.

    One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.

    "It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."

    Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.

    The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said. "The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?'

    "And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"

    Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.

    "There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way pilots and controllers communicate."

    Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that "the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article

  4. Crimson Ghost says:
    January 20, 2009 at 5:13 pm

    Israeli nukes threaten world'
    Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:31:47 GMT

    Medics said they found traces of depleted uranium being used on some Gaza victims.
    An Iranian diplomat says the Israeli crimes committed against Gazans should alarm the world about the threat of Israel's nuclear arsenal.

    Geneva-based Iranian diplomat Ali-Reza Moayyeri said Tuesday that Israel's extreme measures against Gazan civilians should bring world attention to the threat posed by Tel Aviv's stockpile of nuclear warheads.

    “No word can do justice to the extent of Israel's war crimes in the Gaza over the past three weeks,” said Moayyeri.

    Although Israel neither denies nor admits of possessing an atomic arsenal, former US President Jimmy Carter has described Tel Aviv as the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.

    Moayyeri said that Israel's refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its nuclear weapons program should be the cause of serious concern for Middle Eastern countries.

    Tel Aviv has so far refused to join the NPT or submit its nuclear installations to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.

    Norwegian medics in Gaza said on January 4 that traces of depleted uranium on Gaza victims suggested that Israel used the illegal weapon in its war on the impoverished territory, which houses some 1.5 million Palestinians.

    According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), there is a “high risk of developing cancer from exposure to radiation emitted by … depleted uranium weapons. This risk is assumed to be proportional to the dose received.”

    The Geneva Convention has classified depleted uranium ammunitions as 'illegal weapons of mass destruction' due to their high radioactivity and toxicity.

    Israel faces potential war crimes charges over its excessive use of other controversial weapons on the densely-populated coastal strip.

    Human rights group Amnesty International said Tel Aviv's used white phosphorus munitions “indiscriminately and illegally” in overcrowded areas of Gaza.

    "The repeated use [of White Phosphorus] in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime," said Donatella Rovera of the Amnesty International.

    White phosphorus is a high-incendiary substance that bursts into all-consuming flames that cannot be extinguished with water, burning flesh to the bone and often leading to death.

  5. samuel burke says:
    January 20, 2009 at 5:22 pm

    whats most disturbing to me as an american is that in my country our press and politicians are muzzled and silenced by the fear of being tagged as an anti semite or the fear of losing their jobs…

    ode to the press and american politicians who cower from the israeli lobby.

    Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie,
    O, what a panic's in thy breastie!

  6. Gallows says:
    January 20, 2009 at 7:37 pm

    I oppose the Israeli invasion of Gaza, as I do the bombing of Israeli towns by the Gazans, (while still respecting the right of Gazan's to resist the Israelis), but as horrific as it was I'd still rather have been a Palestinian in Gaza than a Tutsi in Rawanda. It's grotesque to compare horrors, but for my money, being cut up with machetes by your neighbors is even more horrific than dying from shrapnel, though both are hellish. If you were a citizen and identified as one by the IDF you weren't fired on,assuming you weren't in the way of a combatant. If you were a Tutsi citizen in Rawanda and identified by Hutus as such you were chopped to pieces with machetes, and if you were a woman you were first raped and then chopped to pieces with a machete.

    Gaza is actually most like Hama in 1982.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre

  7. Tommy says:
    January 20, 2009 at 8:22 pm

    In Rwanda the poor killed the rich, while in Gaza the rich kill the poor. Killing by machete cannot be sustained for decades, but killing by high tech machine can be incrementally improved over long periods of time. The horror, measured by body count, is won by systematic, institutional killing.

  8. samuel burke says:
    January 20, 2009 at 8:38 pm

    http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
    January 19, 2009

    British Academics Slam Israel

    On the war:

    "…Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides… against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
    We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war. Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.

    We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders. We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions."

    Full letter and signatories…
    On the humanitarian consequences:

    "…casualty data are indicative of a military campaign being waged in an indiscriminate, disproportionate, and therefore under International Humanitarian Law, illegal fashion. Failure of the international community to ensure legal culpability would provide military forces around the world with a clear message that the Geneva Conventions can be discarded with impunity, as in Gaza today. If this happens, children and women will continue to pay heavily in future conflicts."
    University College London, CIHD

  9. Sol says:
    January 20, 2009 at 11:21 pm

    The Jews are without doubt now Nazis. Hitler is laughing in his grave.

  10. Mohammad says:
    January 20, 2009 at 11:55 pm

    i love the fact that Zizek is finally abandoning his completely ignorant understanding of the idea of resistance to Israel. As someone who has been very influenced in my thinking by him, I welcome him in the ranks of those who seriously challenge Israel.

  11. citizen says:
    January 21, 2009 at 12:42 am

    If Israel is NAZI, ten the USA is Krupp (Corrupt) Steel, Inc. US industry kills Pals.

  12. Rowan Berkeley says:
    January 21, 2009 at 12:43 am

    Zizek is beginning to see the light? remarkable.

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