Qana was the moment that destroyed Israel's case in the Lebanon war. 50-odd people huddled in a house for fear. 28 killed by an airstrike. Half of them children: I watched the images of crushed bodies pulled out of the dust repeat and repeat on Arabic television in East Jerusalem. At least international TV crews could get into Lebanon.
Well Palestinians are saying that an attack on a U.N. school in Gaza has now killed 34. Hundreds were said to have gathered at the school as a refuge.
Rick Hertzberg, join us man, you are sage and witty and a lot of people trust your judgment.
Related posts:
- ‘Little Baghdad’ at 11:30 a.m., and all the children in school
- UN calls on Israel to express ‘public regret’ over Gaza school attack
- A playground, a marketplace, girls walking home from school (and calls for revenge)
- Israel Blocks Hundreds of Gazans from Pursuing Graduate Study
- Report from U.S. Capitol: Gaza wreckage included school text on Jackie Robinson and ‘meaning of prejudice’
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Once again, the contemptuous Israeli predilection for destroying hated foreign symbols — the USS Liberty, the American school in Gaza, now the UN school in Gaza — in on nauseating display.
How long before these vile assaults are answered in the proper manner — by cutting off funding and arms sales to the world's most dangerous aggressor state?
Unlike the Lebanese, many of whom were able to get into their cars and head north and east [some only to be murdered from the air], Gazans have no such option.
How far is too far? If Israel starts … excuse me, CONTINUES blowing up apartment buildings, killing dozens at a time, will THAT be enough?
If the death toll reaches 5,000 instead of 500, will THAT be enough?
These atrocities are reaching, at the minimum, a Milosevichian scale. Where are the International Criminal Court indictments of 'Slobo' Barak and 'Ratka' Livni? Or do the ICC work for 'the Quartet'?
JH, you raise an important point: double standards.
The attacks on Gaza amount to war crimes and should be dealt with as such.
Israel's political and military leaders should be delivered up to The Hague for a reckoning.
Sadly, fat fcking chance…
I don't get it what is israel doing other than , what are they trying to accomplish, if they are trying to stop the rockets hamas is firing then they have failed because all this bombs they are droping on gaza and killing children who have nothing do to with hamas is not helping israel .
I said they would do it, didn't I? These people who had taken shelter there, should've known better. The sad part is, by taking shelter there, they had assumed that there was anything off-bound to Israelis, which is an assumption of the existence of some moral boundaries within which even the zionist state functions… of course, that was a stupid assumption, but then, with nowhere else to go, I probably would've tried my luck there too, if I were in their shoes. Israel proves to any doubters out there that it has no respect for any boundaries. Not that the events of the past week weren't sufficient, but it seems that some people wear some pretty thick blinders on.
Great analysis of Zionist brain-washing and overcoming it:
The Real Estate War in Gaza
The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing
By VICTORIA BUCH
I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement, which set out to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation. Under these conditions, one has, at most, a moral right to strive for a bi-national state; establishing a national state implies, more or less by definition, ethnic cleansing of the previous inhabitants.
Albert Einstein grasped this fallacy a long time ago. A short time after WWI "Einstein complained that the Zionists were not doing enough to reach agreement with the Palestinian Arabs…He favored a binational solution in Palestine and warned Chaim Weizmann against `Prussian style` nationalism"[1]
http://www.counterpunch.org/buch01062009.html
See also
http://www.alternet.org/audits/116855/?page=entire
next up is Shifa hospital. mark my words. mark my words. they will once again say it was an errant shell. israel gets away with its mass-murder and genocide ==> israel will continue doing what it loves doing most.
I would like to commend CNN International. For the past three hours I've been listening; only one IDF propaganda person, and he was cut off after 20 seconds. They've had a series of well-spoken people telling the Palestinian story. Many people from the UN; the editor of al-Quds in London; Reza Aolam, author, excellent; HelpUPA's Badawi, again excellent. They are now explaining how one can donate to Palestinian charities, see CNN.com/Impact. Imagine that, on a US-based network.
BBC World just keeps on "interviewing" spokespersons for the IDF massacre machine, and saying "Thank you very much for your time."
To Leila Abu-Saba: imperialists always project their OWN barbarous savagery on the "barbarians" and "savages" they kill, enslave, and oppress, just as the English did to the Welsh, Irish, Scots:
the English branded those they Occupied with stereotypes like "fighting Irish."
Nationalism is just as dangerous as colonialism and leads to it.
Just as I was about to post this, I found this memorable essay that makes a similar point, better with MUCH else;
Buch beautifully describes seeing beyond Zionist lies.
The Real Estate War in Gaza
The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing
By VICTORIA BUCH
http://www.counterpunch.org/buch01062009.html
[I]nstead of "thwarting an existential danger", in 1967 the State of Israel carried out an effective military operation to acquire some real estate. There is nothing new about that "existential danger" propaganda. Acquisition of real estate by conquest has been already called pleasing names by various other conquerors and occupiers, throughout the old and new history: such as "manifest destiny", "white man's burden", "spreading true religion / culture / democracy", whatnot.'
'Most Israeli Jews have convinced themselves that they have a moral right to expropriate and expel Palestinians because Palestinians are such barbarians, who did not respond to Israel's"generous peace offers" and "only wanted to throw us to the sea". Because we are a nation of Holocaust survivors. My compatriots imagined themselves starring in a modern version of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" – starring as beautiful elves, of course, who were forced by sad fate to fight ugly goblins the Palestinians (goblins = "terrorists"). Human mercy does not apply to "terrorists". You do not make territorial compromises or peace agreements with "terrorists".'
Last night at the end of story about the horrific conditions at a hospital in Gaza on one of the network news programs, the news reader quoted an Israeli official as saying the hospital was harboring Hamas militants. Expect that hospital to be blown up with American made weapons today.
Any truth to the IDF claims that Hamas was shooting mortars at them from the school?
An IDF spokesman said that troops had fired mortar rounds at the school, after militants barricaded inside shot mortar shells at the Israeli forces.
"Initial checks … show that from inside the school mortars were fired at Israeli forces," a spokesman said. "In response, the forces fired a number of mortar rounds into the area."
A Hamas representative in the PA legislative council this year expressed pride in the fact that women and children are used as human shields in fighting Israel. He described it as part of a "death industry" at which Palestinians excel, and explained that the Palestinians "desire death" with the same intensity that Israelis "desire life."
The following is the full text of the comments by Hamas representative Fathi Hamad:
"For the Palestinian people death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life."
Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas) Feb. 29, 2008
I agree, Kassandra. CNN International has been much better than anyone else on TV.
Juan Cole has a great post on how the US CNN mistakenly broadcast a bit of CNN Int. and hurriedly switched it back to CNN regular–the former had too much Palestinian perspective presented in accents that were too lucid for American ears.
Prof. Cole points out, rightly, that CNN-US ralways interviews Palestinians with heavy accents (and, I'd add: off-screen, over staticky phone lines) so that the average untraveled American can't understand them.
And now NPR's "Talk of the Nation" is going to discuss the US $3 billion a year financing of the Israeli war machne
What's Wrong?
What’s wrong with the views of my people, the Jews
Who, time and time again,
Will turn our heads and hearts from God
And choose to worship men.
Averting our eyes from traditional ties
We lust after every diversion.
Quick to rejoice in freedom of choice
Forgetting the threat of dispersion.
We’ll do as we may, we’re free, so we say
The American way we adore
Our future we cast, not laws of the past,
Forgetting what happened before.
The Jews of Berlin
Were practiced in sin
A cult of high culture they led
They worshipped the stranger
Dismissing the danger
And now we remember our dead.
Why can’t we admit
That the world where we sit
Wasn’t created by men
With weapons fulfilling
And arrogance chilling
We’re sure to be crying again.
"BBC World just keeps on "interviewing" spokespersons for the IDF massacre machine, and saying "Thank you very much for your time.""
I AGREE. It is truly disgusting. That said, CNN International's coverage, while MUCH better than BBC's, is rather irrelevant, as it pretty much is "preaching to the converted…."
Next year in Den Hague…
Joe asks whether there is any truth to the claim that Hamas was directing mortar fire from the UN-School hit by Israeli shells.
This is what John Ging, the head of UNRWA there, said according to the Guardian:
"He said UN staff vetted Palestinians seeking shelter at their facilities to make sure militants were not taking advantage of them. "So far we've not had violations by militants of our facilities," he said. Ging called for an independent investigation of the strikes near UN facilities."
This statement is notably lacking in the New York Times report on the matter. The NYT limited itself to saying that the IDF has been castigated many times in the past for the inaccuracy of its shelling. To assume that there was merely an error here takes the IDF off the hook of course. But the Israelis themselves claim that this was directed fire which, if Ging's statement is true, is enough to put at least some people on a plane to The Hague.
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