AC writes:
The Israeli military has concluded in a report that the shelling of Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish's house that killed his daughters was "reasonable".
In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, after deciding that he was indeed an übermensch, and, as such, was possessed with the right and responsibility to rid the world of scum for the sake of humanity and to ease his "intense repulsion", and after triumphing over moral qualms associated therewith, was left with one challenge: whether in the course of his ghastly act he will be "...subject to a failure of will and reasoning power...." Says the narrator:
In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, after deciding that he was indeed an übermensch, and, as such, was possessed with the right and responsibility to rid the world of scum for the sake of humanity and to ease his "intense repulsion", and after triumphing over moral qualms associated therewith, was left with one challenge: whether in the course of his ghastly act he will be "...subject to a failure of will and reasoning power...." Says the narrator:
At first—long before indeed—he had been much occupied with one
question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily
detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He
had come gradually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his
opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impossibility
of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every
criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a
childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence
and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse
of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease,
developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the
perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment
of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the
individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The
question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the
crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of
the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.
When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the simple reason that his design was "not a crime...."
When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the simple reason that his design was "not a crime...."
The Israelis have reached very much the same conclusion as Raskolnikov: their "reason...would remain unimpaired...," for their shelling of the doctor and his children was "not a crime." Unlike Raskolnikov, however, they're unlikely to pay their penance in Siberia.
Nice connection you make there, Phil.
Incidentally, I read Crime & Punishment for the first time in July 2006, while Lebanon was getting bombed in much the same way as Gaza was..
Of the various motivations, the most pervasive were: his pride, his elitist theory of social superiority.
Prophetically, in 1918, thirty years before the State of Israel was established, the great Jewish philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Buber, said he rejected the concept of a "Jewish state with cannons, flags, and military decorations."
SOURCE – link to counterpunch.org
The fact that you equate projectile drift with deliberate murder shows that you have no knowledge of the environment of a modern battlefield. The fact that (probable) spotters were identified and engaged (who else would be on a rooftop in a war zone DURING an exchange of fire? Occam's razor) means that a legitimate target was aimed at and the doctors' daughters accidentally hit. Hamas should not have been using that rooftop for spotters to engage the IDF.
"Projectile drift"–the new collateral damage.
Eurosabra,
How do you reconcile your position that all civilian casualties in Gaza were accidental with reports of Rabbis within the IDF pronouncing the war in Gaza a War against Amalek, a reference to the Torah where genocide, including murder of babies, were supposedly blessed by God?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1056132.html
With use of phosphorous against the UN Relief building and elsewhere within a heavily populated civilian zone? Against police academy graduation classes?
If you don't condemn war crimes, then, at a certain level, you become complicit, especially if you defend them.
"The boss has lost it," many Israeli military and political officials, and people on the street, were reportedly joking after their army's recent devastation of the Gaza Strip. As Israeli journalist Uri Avnery observed, the jest means that: " … in order to deter our enemies, we must behave like madmen, go on the rampage, kill and destroy mercilessly."
SOURCE – link to commondreams.org
Doppler: quit the fucking bullshit.
I'm not going to debate halacha with an anti-Semite. Obviously you think that Judaism is a mirror-image of the Sharia of Jihad.
The WP is quite clearly an airburst, thus probably a stray.
You just want Israel not to have the right to reply to fire with fire.
PA police are combatants, as seen by their track record of killing Israeli civilians in Israel.
Wikipedia's (rather anodyne, just the facts) page for the good doctor is topped by this:
'This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezzeldeen_Abu_al-Aish
The discussion about whether it stays is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ezzeldeen_Abu_al-Aish
It's like Stalin's airbrushing of enemies out of the photographic record. I wonder if those sayans are paid by the Israeli government, or if the perversion and suppression of history for Eretz Israel is payment enough.
Whoever is trying to delete it probably made certain that the page has no link to the wrenching footage we saw here and elsewhere after the incident:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UxJWdCwOpc
Perhaps it was the same person who wrote this there:
'The shelling received world wide media attention when Channel 10 called him shortly after the shelling, prompting numerous calls of concern to the station.'
As if that were the nub of the story, rather than the murder of the innocents. Grudgingly mention the piece in question but for God’s sake don’t show it.
In any case, you wonder whether the calls to the station which came from Israelis did express such 'concern', when you remember that well over 90% of Israelis still support the massacre, and you read things like this:
'What happens next is not shown on the clip that Al Jazeera put on You Tube and their own site, but they showed last night.
Dr Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish was sitting in what looks like an entrance, possibly to the hospital his children are in, but that is not clear, he has just lost three children, others are injured, and he is devastated, but giving an interview to Israeli press. He talks about how this cannot be the future, his children attended peace camps with Isreali children, killing innocents cannot be the way ahead. Midstream, a lady passing-by stops and screams at him, furiously waving her arm and then pointing at him accusingly, yelling that she has a son in the army and if he hadn’t had weapons in his home, they wouldn’t have targeted him. He looks up in disbelief, the people around him move closer in a bid to shield him, while another two men join in the verbal attacks. He shakes his head and says, “They don’t understand”.'
Take a look at the lady at 0:45 (in another clip not deemed worthy enough for Wiki) and remember that we stand behind her, and Eurosabra and all those like them, and tell me what's in it for us but an enhanced possibility of our children dying (via delayed blowback) in much the same way that Dr Al-Aish's did:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh_F0p8Jcrc
You might also usefully contrast Dr Al_Aish's dignity with the behaviour of this woman, who you would think is more the rule than the exception in Israel. Hell, it may even be more the rule than the exception in New York:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FABqq_jjRRo
And for a taste of the tenor of the discussion following the incident on Israeli TV, have a look at this cowardly attempt to pretend the bomb may not have been from the IDF at all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ll9J0H25NA
That didn't make it to Wiki either. I am especially impressed by the doctor at the end who says the IDF investigation will find the truth of the matter. Perhaps Hippocrates wasn't Jewish enough for him. The Nazis had regime doctors too I suppose. You can't expect some medical training to be a prophylactic against a racism you grew up marinating in.
No wonder they are trying to purge the man and his grief from history. His tragedy was a lightning strike, even in Israel itself. If we remember him, we may remember the murderous racism that killed his children, and the shameless subterfuge and lies that followed in an attempt to cover the shameful event up.
And we might think 'why is my country supporting these people'? We can't have that, can we? So heads down, tails up little sayanim, go to war against the truth, because it’s ‘good for the Jews’.
I wonder, do many of these people have the sort of doubts that bothered Raskolnikov? Could Raskolnikov have shot children in the face? Could he have closed exits and bombed a captive population? Could he have shat in the burned out homes of his victims?
My guess is no.
BTW, if this gets thru it will be my 4th attempt to post it. Why?
Killing Donkeys for Sport: Time-Honored IDF Tradition – by Richard Silverstein @ Tikun Olam
In my grad school days I pursued a PhD in Hebrew literature. One of the most powerful literary evocations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was in the writing of S. Yizhar. I even prepared a translation of his novella Hirbet Hiza–(recently published in English and featured here) about the decimation of an Arab village during the 1948 war–I loved the work so.
One of the hallmarks of Yizhar’s writing was an affinity for portraying the small-talk, ennui and cruelty of the Israeli soldier pulling duty in villages like this one. One of the more compelling portrayals is a story of a soldier killing an Arab donkey for sport. What shocks is partly the cruelty and depravity of the act; the pleasure the soldier takes in showering it with bullets and watching its death throes; the relief from boredom it provides…….
ENTIRE POST – link to richardsilverstein.com
Glenn, it looks to me like the possibility of deleting the Wikipedia article on Dr. Al-Aish is related to standard Wikipedia policy that a person doesn't automatically deserve an encyclopedia entry just because they were in the news at some point. The murder of the doctor's children by Israel is appalling, as is the official conclusion that it was "not a crime", but if every atrocity survivor ever interviewed by journalists got their own article in the encyclopedia, these pieces would amount to half of Wikipedia. It's true that Dr. Al-Aish is better-known than most such people, but still, I think there's room for honest disagreement about whether he meets the notability standard. It's unnecessary and rather paranoid to write off the possibility of deletion as some sort of Zionist conspiracy.
Is this in comparison with the pregnant jewish woman and her 4 young daughters killed with a bullet, each, to the brain?
It would seem that many of your admirers find Palestinian donkeys to be worth more than Jews.
Eurosabra–
There are real antisemites in the comments section at this blog, but when fire that accusation at Doppler for his 3:54 statement you merely demonstrate that the accusation is a cheap rhetorical ploy when it comes from you. I can't remember if Doppler has said anything that I thought was antisemitic, but that particular comment certainly didn't fit the bill.
My impression is that Israel fights its wars the way America sometimes does–with that characteristically Western combination of hypocrisy and brutality. You are apparently one of those people who needs smelling salts if anyone accuses your precious government of war crimes, just as many Americans react with kneejerk accusations of "anti-Americanism" in similar situations.
"The WP is quite clearly an airburst, thus probably a stray."
Funny how those strays kept exploding over schools.
Witty's alternative critic:
He just implied that deliberate civilian casualties in Gaza occurred at the hands of the IDF, and that they were the consequence of a halachic ruling that Palestinians were Amalek, to be blotted out even unto their memory. Pure blood libel.
Duscany,
Airburst does nothing, really, unless you have the stupidity to remain standing under it. I've walked through groundburst WP smoke from an accident to collect casualties. You really have to be hit directly by flying chunks from the initial explosion of a ground-burst to be burned by it. I assume that some of the visible damage was caused by impacts of bigger chunks on the school, but so far only 1 WP injury photo of a schoolchild has been produced, of the adolescent who was moved to Jordan for treatment.
Accounts of a Gazan "burned to death" involve an accidental impact on the Abed Rabbo clan's home's upper storey hallway, a situation in which WP probably harmed FEWER people than high explosive would have, because of the lesser force of the WP round.
Just admit that you want Israel to take the rockets without shooting back and be done with it. Again, what would the use of deliberate terror against civilians be when the rocketeers don't care about civilian deaths and are immune to public pressure to stop the rockets, which doesn't seem to be coming anyway? (The more rockets and the more death the more the Gazans like it, it seems, and the more rockets and death they demand.)
"Projectile drift?"
Man, what? This is a 120mm Rheinmetall-type tank gun we are talking about here, probably fired at very close range (nothing else is feasible in an urban environment.) To have any uncalculable "projectile drift" in these conditions the gun would have to be defective, which was not mentioned in the "report".
"Rooftop" was not mentioned either. It said "upper level". The "suspicious figures" might well have been Doctor Al-Eish's family themselves.
Again, it is not mentioned in the report where the Doctor's family was killed. Nor if anybody except them was killed. Nor were the "suspicious figures" identified.
As to who you might expect to show up in one of the most densely settled urban areas in the world, where there are at best some 20000 enemy troops but 1.5 million civilians who have nowhere to flee, well I leave that for sane persons to decide.
It also confuses me why they held their fire when "screams" were heard from the house – which already implies a close proximity. Unless Hamas troopers have a habit of dying and suffering silently, this only makes sense if the IDF soldiers were close enough to the scene to actually understand words which were yelled to them – so, very close.
To me, the whole thing sounds like a fancy dress-up for an all too typical story: Some soldier, nervous and trigger-happy, got fired at and responded by a panicked "fire at everything that moves!" reaction. No premediated murder, but certainly negligence (Geneva conventions mean nothing to Israel, but tell you to assume that a target is civilian when you are in doubt.) Happened countless times before. But the IDF, like the US armed forces, of course never make a mistake. It's always the victim's fault.
Btw, the piece on the IDF site is erronously called a "report" here. It's not a report. Trust me, I know what a military report looks like, and that is not it. A report would also answer, or at least ask, some of the questions I raised above.
Tank gun also means squinting through a sight, plus the problems of using a tank close to buildings mean a minimum distance of 100m, and probably closer to 300 minimum, more likely 500. I agree that it was probably a snap shot when someone thought he saw a missile crew, so the plausible scenario is infantry in front gets hit with mortars, goes to ground under MG & AK fire, and a tank far in the rear spots a possible missile team and lights them up.
There is no problem with "negligence" from the moment the Hamas gun crews started their "mad minute" from a civilian building or civilian buildings in the surrounding areas.
You have apparently shifted your explanation from "projectile drift" to "gunnery difficulties". Okay, let's ignore the fact that these are totally different things and tackle your all new explanation instead.
This ain't WW2. Even 500 Meters is no-miss point blank range for a modern tank gun. (Actually, it's no-miss point blank range for most WW2 tank guns as well. To take another German gun, the 88mm KwK 43 had a 100% hit probability under combat conditions at that range, against a 2×2.5 meter target.)
I am fairly certain that the tank hit exactly the part of the building it was shooting at. As to "snap shot", no tank gunner in any professional military fires without orders.
Eurosabra–
"Pure blood libel" is nonsense. There are crazy rabbis in Israel and there are reports that many in the IDF are religious nuts, to the point where some question whether the West Bank settlers could be forcibly removed by the IDF if a peace agreement is reached. I don't know just how many IDF soldiers are religious nuts, but there are surely some, and in that case their presence could have something to do with the number of civilian casualties in Gaza.
FROM "THE MAGNES ZIONIST" – by Jerry Haber (nom de plume): The truth is that Israel finds it easy to justify the so-called collateral damage in Gaza for the same reason that America found it easy to justify the collateral damage in Iraq. Because most Israelis are bigots when it comes to the Arabs, whether they are Hamas terrorists or Israeli citizens. They are gnats, tics, or perhaps, some quasi-humans, who one doesn't really care about. Or as the wife of a rabbi told me, "They are animals, Jerry, all of them."
SOURCE – link to themagneszionist.blogspot.com
FROM "THE MAGNES ZIONIST" (01/04/09) – by Jerry Haber (nom de plume): "Every time you think that Israel has hit rock bottom with respect to morality, we learn the painful truth – we still can and will descend further into the muck."
SOURCE – link to themagneszionist.blogspot.com
Wonderful anecdotal information that proves Israelis to be as human as the rest of us.
However, reading the arabic newspapers, it is interesting to note all of the official bigotry geared towards Jews.
In fact, most Arabs are bigots when it comes to the Jews, whether they are Syrian, Yemenese, Egyptian, Jordan (oops, Jordanian citizenship is forbidden to Jews), Suadi Arabian (oops, Saudi citizenship is forbidden to Jews), or Israeli citizens.
Or as the wife of a Imam told me, "They are descended from pigs and apes, Chris, all of them."
And Dicky helped.
chris, your problem is simple: You lack the credibility that an Israeli has when criticizing Israel. Because, you see, criticizing the "other" is typically connected with hostile intentions, while criticizing the "us" is typically connected with friendly intentions.
Growing up, I was a citizen in a creditor nation, with the sense of
fairness encapsulated in the Declaration Of Independence. Obama is now my president. Germany has been paying reparations for decades and Ireland is finally free of "the troubles." Germany and Ireland account for the largest percentage of white America, still the most demography, though fading fast. Jews in America account for 2% of the whole.
How hard is it to see that funding Israel and Madoff & Wall Street
is against the social good? And makes the USA a terrible role model
for the world.
So we have a WW2 buff with some fancy-schmancy 88mm stats.
I am glad that the Israeli army can produce laboratory levels of accuracy in combat, obviously it will render them invincible.
Israeli tank crews identify targets and fire on their own all the time after contact, it's the only way to keep missile crews off your tanks. I assume the commander was also looking through a scope and ordered it, but no one is going to request permission up the chain of command and then wait for an answer in the middle of an ambush.
The simple explanation is that they saw a valid target and MISSED.
So obviously no German 88 was ever knocked out by an assault by any of the various T-s, or SU-s, whether 28, 34, 122, or 152, because every target was destroyed as soon as it exposed itself within 500m of the gun, and the various soviet vehicles were always closing to their lesser effective maximum ranges, at least in the latter part of the war.
These things happen. Either the Israelis missed a valid target, or hit something unexpected that they misidentified.
Maybe this'll work…
1. You are plain wrong about the capabilities of modern tank guns. Tank gunners I know would be insulted at the notion they could miss a building floor at 500 meters. These guys did not miss – and if by some incredible circumstances they did, it would have been mentioned in the statement, which it wasn't.
2. A tank *commander* can make the decision to fire. That is a huge difference from a tank *gunner* firing a "snap shot". In any case, the IDF statement makes clear that the fire was ordered by an overall force commander, so your assertion is irrelevant.
P.S.: To keep the anecdotal WW2 stuff to a minimum – a) Combat conditions, not laboratory. b) Tanks and assault guns are mobile. Building floors are not. c) Yes, closing to 500 meters in open terrain against such a gun was near-suicide.
Tank sights missile crew. Tank fires. Target is suppressed, so tank moves to next target.
Target turns out not to have been missile crew. Channel 10 carries it a little later on the evening news.
These things happen when troops in the open get ambushed from inhabited apartment buildings by non-uniformed unlawful combatants. C'est la vie.
So now we have gone the way from
"Projectile drift" -> disproved.
"Gunnery error" -> disproved.
"Judgment error, but totally okay 'cause shit happens".
I congratulate you on your shifting-goalpost-fu.