NOVANEWS
Front view of a pelvis imbedded with nails and metal fragments.X-rays taken from victims of suicide bombings reveal pieces of metallic fragments embedded in their skin, muscles, organs and bones, says Dr. Michael Messing, who visited the victims of suicide bombings while at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Suicide bombers pack their bombs with nails and other objects so even survivors of suicide bombings will suffer from the bomb’s effects.
“They’re trying to maximize the number of people they kill and injure,” said Messing of the terrorists.
The accusation became an essential component of the demonization of Palestinians:
Those sadists who dip their hands in the blood of lynched reservists, who gouge out the eyes of two thirteen-year-old boys in a cave, who murder and mutilate an unarmed shepherd, who target a ten-month-old baby girl playing with her father, who fill their suicide bombs with flesh-tearing nails -or who cheer such abominations in the streets of Jenin or Ramallah are indeed egged on by words, and drunk on anti-Zionist venom.
That was the difference between them and civilized people; the Jews didn’t do those things:
When have you last seen a Jew detonating bombs with nails blowimg gentiles to smithereens in the name of Moses?
Fast forward to 2009, the year that Argentinian Juan Martín del Potro won the US Tennis Open and South African Richard Goldstone wrote a damning report on the Israeli activities in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. While del Potro was crushing his rivals, Goldstone was busy finding facts. And among other things, he found what follows:
864. On 4 January 2009 the Israeli armed forces struck an ambulance in the Beit Lahia area with a flechette missile as it was attending a number of wounded persons who had been hit in an earlier attack. Those wounded in the first attack had also been hit by a flechette missile. As a result of the attack on the ambulance, one of the first-aid volunteers in the ambulance crew, Arafa Abd al-Dayem, suffered severe injuries. He died later the same afternoon.
865. The following day, as is the custom, the family set up condolence tents where family and friends would pay their respects and comfort the grieving relatives. The family home is in Izbat Beit Hanoun, a built-up area in the north-east corner of the Gaza strip. It is located between Jabaliyah and Beit Hanoun, about 3 kilometres from the border with Israel both to the north and to the east. Although the Israeli armed forces had entered Gaza at the time of the incident, in this area they remained on the Israeli side of the “Green Line” border. Two tents were set up – one for male visitors and one for female visitors. They were positioned at about ten metres from each other. The male tent was outside the house of IK/11. The tents were struck three times in two hours, again with flechette missiles.
866. The Mission spoke to several of the witnesses who had attended and survived the attacks on the condolence tents. The Mission noted the great pride Arafa Abd al-Dayem’s father had in his son and the deep sense of loss he clearly felt.
867. As regards the attacks on the condolence tents, witnesses stated that at around 7.30 a.m. on 5 January, the house of IK/11 was hit by a shell. The shell struck the fourth floor of the fivestorey building causing the roof to collapse.477 Three men at the gathering, including the father of the deceased, were slightly wounded and taken to the Kamal Idwan hospital in Beit Lahia for treatment. They returned to the house at around 8.15 a.m. where a decision was taken by the mourners to end the condolence ceremony for fear of further attacks.
868. The witness stated that at around 8.30 a.m. when the people were leaving the house of IK/11 and moving towards the women’s condolence tent, two flechette missiles struck within a few metres of the tent and less than half a minute apart. Around 20 to 30 persons assembled there were injured. The injured include a 13-year-old boy who received a flechette injury to the right side of his head and a 33-year-old man who sustained injuries to the chest and head, his body punctuated with little holes according to a witness who saw his corpse being prepared for burial. A 22-year-old man was wounded in the abdomen, the chest and the head. A 16-year-old boy sustained injuries to the head and the neck. A 26-year-old man sustained injuries to his chest, head and left leg. These five persons died of their injuries. Another 17 persons present at the scene, including 14 men, two children (aged 17 and 11) and one woman were injured.
869. RA/14, who survived the attack, still has several flechettes embedded in his body, including in his chest, and is unable to move freely without pain.(…)
877. The Mission notes that, during the condolence ceremony, flechette shells were fired in the vicinity of a large group of civilians, killing 5 and injuring more than 20. To consider the attacks indiscriminate would imply that there was a military objective underlying the attacks in the first place. The Mission has no information on which to base such a conclusion and notes the silence of the Israeli authorities on the incident.
Do you know what a flechette shell is? Here‘s some basic info:
A flechette shell is an antipersonnel weapon that contains ten to fourteen thousand 1 .5-inch steel darts which, as they are released from the canister, spread out in an arc that can reach a maximum width of about ninety-four yards.
Well, this looks dangerously close to a bomb packed with nails, doesn’t it? If Israel uses it, it mustn’t be illegal, God forbid. Now if this sadistic weapon is allowed by the laws of warfare, the only issue is whether it is used against combatants or not. Mourners at a tent that include a 13-year-old are not, in my book, combatants.
You will find thousands of refutations of the Goldstone report over the Internet, mostly hurling crude ad-hominem attacks at the author and calling into question his ability to investigate because he claimed someone was wearing a shirt when actually it was a T-shirt. When it comes to the war crimes themselves, however, the refuters suddenly go silent and point to the Israeli response, which in this case is
Recently, eight additional criminal investigations by the Military Police were ordered regarding matters more closely connected to “operational activities”, including allegations of shooting towards civilians carrying white flags and directing flechette munitions towards civilians or civilian targets. Seven incidents that appear in the Goldstone report are currently under Military Police criminal investigation. In a typical Military Police investigation, evidence is taken from Palestinian and other complainants who may have witnessed the events. In such cases, the investigative office of the Military Police approaches the complainant to assist in contacting potential witnesses. For example, the investigative office of the Military Police has approached human rights NGO’s for assistance regarding currently ongoing cases. Additionally, the investigative office of the Military Police has, via Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, approached the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to receive additional information regarding an incident where claims of use of human shields were raised. That incident remains under investigation.
Or, in plain English, “we’re thinking out how to spin this, and we’re having a hard time. We’ll contact you when we come up with something.”
In any event, please notice how the outrage at bombs filled with nails is quietly being dropped from Zionist discourse. If that army uses them, they can’t be all that bad.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Dershowitz: A liar — and an illiterate one at that
In a recent piece, claims Dershowitz:
“He cannot possibly believe that Israel used the thousands of rockets that Hamas directed against its children as an excuse, or a cover, for its real goal, namely to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible.”
Of course, it would be outrageous if Goldstone believed that. But, once again, it’s a lie. In the report, Goldstone claims that
what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.
Punishing, humiliating and terrorizing are not the same as killing. Dershowitz knows it, but prefers to transform an accusation that is made by Goldstone, but which is not outrageous, into another accusation that is outrageous, but not made by Goldstone. Sorry, Alan, we’ve caught you with your pants down again.
See also Jerry Haber’s minutious destruction of Dershowitz’s “response” to Goldstone, on which his blog article is based.
As an aside, I was amused to see that, according to Dershowitz,
Goldstone (…) refused to credit eyewitness reports published by refutable newspapers, and even admissions by Hamas leaders.
Well — if the newspapers were “refutable,” Goldstone was right not to credit their reports, wasn’t he? A few hours after the article was published on Dershowitz’s blog, a reader spotted the mistake and commented,
24 | Arnold – Canada, Thursday Feb 04, 2010Editing error: paragraph 5, line 4: should be “reputable” rather than “refutable”.
The misspelling was corrected (but I preserved the cached version with the mistake here).
It’s not the first time that Dershowitz struggles with the English language. A few months back he debated arch-Zionist hawk Melanie Philips over whether Obama adequately passes the loyalty (to Israel) test. Philips argued Obama is bent on Israel’s destruction. Dershowitz’s (correct, in this case) position was that Obama would eventually “see the light” (i.e. understand the power of the Jewish lobby) and back down from pressuring Israel. In that debate, the “civil rights champion” argued:
This is simply not the Barak Obama that I know and voted for. No one who fits this characterture would have gone to Sderot (…) No one who fits that characterture would have appointed Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, Dennis Ross (…) as an advisor on Iran and Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff.
Making charactertures of American presidents is indeed horrible. But I’m a linguist, and in my professionally distorted view, grotesquely misspeling the word caricature is even more horrible.
Dershowitz’s trouble getting fairly common words straight may have cost him the book censorship he sought circa 2005. When the University of California Press was about to publish Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah, a neat exposé of Dershowitz’s bogus scholarship, Alan tried to stop the book from coming out by writing to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the crucial paragraph, the expert appeals attorney warned:
I know that you will be interested in trying to prevent an impending scandal involving a decision by the University of California Press to publish a viciously anti-Semitic book by an author whose main audience consists of neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria. The book to which this is a sequel was characterized by two imminent historians as a modern-day version of the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Of course, Gov. Schwarzenegger refused to censor the book. Among other factors, he must have taken into account that Finkelstein was slammed by imminent (i.e., soon-to-be, but not yet so) historians. If they had been eminent historians, who knows, maybe the book would have never seen the light of day.
Some people wonder how it is that Harvard continues to proudly display a professor who openly endorses crimes against humanity, such as torture or collective punishment. I, for my part, would be pleased to see the university fire Dershowitz on far simpler grounds — his illiteracy.
