In his new book on the one-state solution Hussein Ibish says that too many people in my camp hate Israel and want it to go poof. I think he has a point, there’s a lot of anger. That said, Israel has displayed such monstrousness toward the Palestinians, and our own country has issued not a murmur of protest over these acts, and it is hardly surprising that some become enraged. What are we to make of this case of a baby with a heart condition at the Gaza border, prevented from leaving for treatment for two weeks? What monsters would do this to another people? And I say it is Zionist ideology that did this, Zionism as it has worked out over 120 years, with help from European nationalists.The Christian Science Monitor says the case got a lot of coverage, ultimately freeing the child. Why wasn’t it on the front page of the New York Times?
The case of 9-month-old Mutasem Billah Abu-Mastfa, a Gazan baby diagnosed with a severe heart condition, illustrates well the delay and confusion Palestinian families with urgent health issues are facing – and the powerlessness of human rights groups to help. Due to a deterioration of his condition, his doctors in Gaza referred him for treatment at Sheba Hospital at Tel Hashomer, Israel.
His family submitted an application to take him there on Aug. 28, and the hospital was expecting them on Sept. 13. But the family never got a response from the Israeli authorities and missed the appointment they didn’t know they had. The case was taken on by PHR Israel, which has been successful in the past in expediting the handling of urgent medical cases.
"We couldn’t do a thing, since COGAT has stopped answering our phone calls and stopped cooperating with us," says Ran Yaron, director of PHR-Israel’s Occupied Territories department.
"The lower-level officers were told not to pick up the phone, and on the rare cases that they do, they tell us, ‘We don’t work with you. If you need answers or to check the status of a case, go ask the Palestinian Authority.’"
However, he points out, only the Israeli military and COGAT, which is a division of Israel’s Defense Ministry, has the ability to decide on an individual case.
The attitude of the military toward human rights groups has changed significantly since the war in Gaza, Mr. Yaron notes, and in particular this summer since the group Breaking the Silence released a series of controversial anonymous soldier testimonies that suggested shocking behavior in Gaza, which army officials have declared unreliable because they cannot be verified…
The increased media attention over baby Mutasem in the past week, when the human rights groups lodged an official complaint against the new policy and launched a campaign to reverse the decision to shut them out, was likely what helped him get out of Gaza on Thursday.
As his father was crossing through the Erez checkpoint at midday, he told a Monitor reporter of a long ordeal from the day his son was born.
"Today I am here at Erez, and the life of the son I’m holding is in the hands of the Israeli army, which can help him survive or let him die," said Mohammed Abu-Mastfa, from the Khan Younis area of Gaza. After the family waited for weeks for an answer, he explained, they were told by the Palestinian Ministry of Civil Affairs that their permit was refused. No reason was given. "We’ve spent a lot of time just watching him suffering," he said.
Maj. Guy Inbar, the spokesman for COGAT, says that the human rights groups have blown the issue out of proportion
Sometimes I refer to israel simply as The Monster – it seems so much more descriptive and to-the-point, so I was interested to read that Phil used the word “monstrous” and “monsters” and, yes, that sums it up.
It is so interesting to me that since 9/11 when a great many Americans discovered for the first time israel’s nefarious influence over America and their spy network, the stranglehold of their lobby, etc. etc., that under the glare of exposure the Likkudnik arch-zionist government and their supporters have become even nastier, more ruthless, more cruel, and ready to exact more pain and suffering and death rather that take a single second to look at the horrors they’re inflicting and the inhuman way they’re behaving … the government of israel and the nationalist-racist-zionists who support it seem ready to let loose rivers of blood and care not that affects America in the negative and care not that human beings are suffering and being killed.
Thats giving monsters a very bad rap..wouldn’t you agree?
Monsters are Jeff Dahmer type in my view. It would seem three branches of the U.S. gov are in bed with the very people supporting them and this is not as if this genocidal aparthied occupation dressed up as a religous control around the very fibers of the people’s being giving them false hope in something that does not exist but since a majority of people could not handle the fact religons are just controls that are created by man to control man, and that when brainwashed along side the media mongrols whose spouse works in the very positions that are directly efffected or in wolf blitzers case his own, aipac personel….I wonder are they in for life like a mafia…all gung ho ..? They repeated the lies for so long it has dumbed down the public and made them completely as puppets.
To Palestinians, Mr. Ibish is widely unknown, and to Palestinian Americans and the many people fighting for the Palestinian struggle, Mr. Ibish comes across as a joke with no credibility except for being a prominent member of an irrelevant “Task Force” based in D.C. and actually had ATFP President Ziad Asali (a leader of which was recently sentenced for allegedly embezzling donors of $100,000) preface his book!
History has shown, in Ireland, India, and everyplace else it has been tried, that partition of a territory along lines of descent whether called “racial” or “religious” is a guarantee of permanent war. To dismiss the fact that Israel has no intention to withdraw from Samara and Judea and that the reality on the ground is already a de facto one state makes you question Mr. Ibish’s true intentions with this homemade puiblication. To accept as a substitute for justice a Palestinian State built on less than a fourth of their original land would be a crime and any conflict resolution analyst will agree (and have for many decades) that that is not the way to peace.
Helena Cobban on Ibish here: link to justworldnews.org
Make no mistake. That baby hates your freedom and all of Western civilization!
/sarcasm>
“Maj. Guy Inbar, the spokesman for COGAT, says that the human rights groups have blown the issue out of proportion.”
Well, you know how excitable these natives are when their children are about to die (and how hypocritical these “human rights” groups are). The important thing to remember is that they don’t love their children like we love ours. They teach them to hate and die. It is their culture of death. They use them as shields and make us kill them. They are willing to sacrifice their own children just to make us look bad. They are monsters. It breaks our hearts that we must kill so many children. How dare they do this to us! Peace.
Yes. I’m absolutely certain that Mrs. Abu-Mastfa purposely gave birth to a baby with a heart-defect just so she could make the IDF look bad.
It’s sad, isn’t it, that we know all the lines that are used to justify Palestinian deaths?
It is indeed sad. It is even sadder that so few of us see through these preposterous excuses for genocide – which necessarily include the dehumanisation of the victims.
Where’s Witty? I’m waiting for him to blame this on Hamas or the BDS movement. I’ve got some choice words for him when he does.
But we know all of Witty’s lines already too: Isolated incident. BDS is punitive. Are you sure of all the facts? BDS is punitive. Notice that the baby was to be treated in an Israeli hospital. BDS is punitive. What about babies in Sderot? BDS is punitive. Why does Phil use the unflamatory word “monster”? BDS is punitive. Why does Phil blame “Zionist ideology” for an unfortunate and tragic act of God? BDS is punitive. The biased left should read up on Zionism as described by objective sources such as Laqueur. BDS is punitive. Ibish is a very reasonable man, unlike Phil. BDS is punitive. The weather in Gaza is lovely this time of year. Oh, and BDS is punitive.
Feel free to waste your time pre-emptively responding to some or all of the above.
Hey thanks man! Now I can get a head start.
LOL. Shmuel, you sure have got Witty down pat. The complete Witty–and with a lot less words.
Citizen, how many times do I have to tell you? You have Witty complete in four little phrases:
1. Israel Rocks!
2. Arabs Suck!
3. You Suck!
4. Oy, the whole world Sucks!
The first two are obvious, of course, but for a full explanation of No. 3 and 4, see:
link to jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com
On monsters. I want to acknowledge that many (political) zionists started out with the strong sincere conviction that the cause is just and morally simple. This as opposed to “we know it’s bad but we lie about it.”
Let’s imagine a slider control of how ‘bad’ ideologies are preceived, it covers how you can retreat giving up defense of implementation, then design and finally aims.
1. “The cause is morally right and every moral person should join this cause”
2. “it’s just misunderstood”.
3. “just a few bad apples”
4. “mistakes have been made, it only needs some fixing”
5. “it needs some thorough fixing”
6. “fundamentally good but it has lost its way and it’s beyond repair”
7. “essentially good and morally just but started on the wrong track and never recovered”
8. “designed with the best of intentions and feeling morally right but still fundamentally flawed from the start”
9. “essentially bad and morally sick”
Now in the case of zionism I’m sure that many people have started at 1 at some stage.
On the other hand for people like Einstein it may have started right away at 8 on the scale.
You can imagine people gradually shifting on the scale(unless of course an existential threat keeps them from thinking about it), and others picking a not too ambitious setting, say 5, and building a fortress of arguments around it. Imagine applying it to communism.
I used a rather essentialist phrasing here, which requires a note of caution. Compare with Tony Judt who talks about ‘the country that wouldn’t grow up’. This phrasing suggests things can sometimes be fixed along the way.