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-- This Al Jazeera article nails Israel
This Al Jazeera article nails Israel
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/...2723260741.html
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One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling. The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled "Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report," confirmed that the June 19 truce was only "sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by ... "rogue terrorist organisations". Instead, "the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement" occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day. One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling. The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled "Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report," confirmed that the June 19 truce was only "sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by ... "rogue terrorist organisations". Instead, "the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement" occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day. He claimed that such tunnels were "as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnels," and offered as proof the "fact" that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo. Israel's self-image The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them. With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way to diminish civilian casualties - long a centre-piece of Israel's image as an enlightened and moral democracy - is falling apart. Anyone with an internet connection can Google "Gaza humanitarian catastrophe" and find the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded it. The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives. Meanwhile, the United Nations has flatly denied Israeli claims that Palestinian fighters were using the UNRWA school compound bombed on January 6, in which 40 civilians were killed, to launch attacks, and has challenged Israel to prove otherwise. War crimes admission Additionally, numerous flippant remarks by senior Israeli politicians and generals, including Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, refusing to make a distinction between civilian people and institutions and fighters - "Hamas doesn't ... and neither should we" is how Livni puts it - are rightly being seen as admissions of war crimes. Indeed, in reviewing statements by Israeli military planners leading up to the invasion, it is clear that there was a well thought out decision to go after Gaza's civilian infrastructure - and with it, civilians. The following quote from an interview with Major-General Gadi Eisenkot that appeared in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October, is telling: "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases," he said. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised." Causing "immense damage and destruction" and considering entire villages "military bases" is absolutely prohibited under international law. Eisenkot's description of this planning in light of what is now unfolding in Gaza is a clear admission of conspiracy and intent to commit war crimes, and when taken with the comments above, and numerous others, renders any argument by Israel that it has tried to protect civilians and is not engaging in disproportionate force unbelievable. International laws violated On the ground, the evidence mounts ever higher that Israel is systematically violating a host of international laws, including but not limited to Article 56 of the IV Hague Convention of 1907, the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (more specifically known as the "Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949", the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the principles of Customary International Humanitarian Law. None of this excuses or legitimises the firing of rockets or mortars by any Palestinian group at Israeli civilians and non-military targets. As Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur, declared in his most recent statement on Gaza: "It should be pointed out unambiguously that there is no legal (or moral) justification for firing rockets at civilian targets, and that such behavior is a violation of IHR, associated with the right to life, as well as constitutes a war crime." By the same logic, however, Israel does not have the right to use such attacks as an excuse to launch an all-out assault on the entire population of Gaza. In this context, even Israel's suffering from the constant barrage of rockets is hard to pay due attention to when the numbers of dead and wounded on each side are counted. Any sense of proportion is impossible to sustain with such a calculus. 'Rogue' state Israeli commentators and scholars, self-described "loyal" Zionists who served proudly in the army in wars past, are now publicly describing their country, in the words of Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, as a "rogue" and gangster" state led by "completely unscrupulous leaders". Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, has declared that Israel's actions in Gaza are like "raising animals for slaughter on a farm" and represent a "bizarre new moral element" in warfare. "The moral voice of restraint has been left behind ... Everything is permitted" against Palestinians, writes a disgusted Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy. Fellow Haaretz columnist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Amira Haas writes of her late parents disgust at how Israeli leaders justified Israel's wars with a "language laundromat" aimed at redefining reality and Israel's moral compass. "Lucky my parents aren't alive to see this," she exclaimed. Around the world people are beginning to compare Israel's attack on Gaza, which after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers was turned literally into the world's largest prison, to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Extremist Muslims are using internet forums to collect names and addresses of prominent European Jews with the goal, it seems clear, of assassinating them in retaliation for Israel's actions in Gaza. Al-Qaeda is attempting to exploit this crisis to gain a foothold in Gaza and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, as well as through attacking Jewish communities globally. Iran's defiance of both Israel and its main sponsor, the US, is winning it increasing sympathy with each passing day. Democratic values eroded Inside Israel, the violence will continue to erode both democratic values in the Jewish community, and any acceptance of the Jewish state's legitimacy in the eyes of its Palestinian citizens. And yet in the US - at least in Washington and in the offices of the mainstream Jewish organisations - the chorus of support for Israel's war on Gaza continues to sing in tight harmony with official Israeli policy, seemingly deaf to the fact that they have become so out of tune with the reality exploding around them. At my university, UCI, where last summer Jewish and Muslim students organised a trip together through the occupied territories and Israel so they could see with their own eyes the realities there, old battle lines are being redrawn. The Anteaters for Israel, the college pro-Israel group at the University of California, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that, "Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza". I have no idea who the "us" is that is referred to in the appeal, although I am sure that the membership of that group is shrinking. Indeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish leaders. Trap Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses against Israel - and through it - their own governments. What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel's so-called friends, the US political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership, seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into - in good measure with their indulgence and even help. It is one that threatens the country's existence far more than any Qassam rockets, with their 0.4 per cent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, which by weakening Israel's deterrence capability in some measure made this war inevitable. First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting the primary demand of Hamas - an end to the siege. Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006, will have won. Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge. Second, Israel's main patron, the US, along with the conservative Arab autocracies and monarchies that are its only allies left in the Muslim world, are losing whatever crumbs of legitimacy they still had with their young and angry populations. The weaker the US and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious becomes Israel's long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons has been buried in Gaza. Third, as Israel brutalises Palestinians, it brutalises its own people. You cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale without doing even greater damage to your soul. The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and war eat away at people's moral centre. While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating. The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the collective Israeli soul is incalculable; the notion that it can survive as an "ethnocracy" - favouring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic - is becoming a fiction. Violence-as-power Who will save Israel from herself? Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of violence-as-power has reached the level of collective mental illness. As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on January 10, "Israel has created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it". Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to the same condition. Not the Middle East Quartet, the European Union, the United Nations, or the Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy. Not the organised Jewish leadership in the US and Europe, who are even more blind to what is happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal debate about the wisdom of their government's policies. Not the growing progressive Jewish community, which will need years to achieve enough social and political power to challenge the status quo. And not senior American politicians and policy-makers who are either unwilling to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the constant barrage of propaganda put out by the "Israel Lobby" that they are incapable of reaching an independent judgment about the conflict. During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a messiah-like figure. The idea does not sound so funny now. It is hard to imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another four years of mindless violence. Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989. |
Al Jazeera is like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman... she can dress up and play the role of a high class individual but is still just a whore.
This line from the article submarines the whole thing:
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| observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter |
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| Originally posted by The17sss Al Jazeera is like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman... she can dress up and play the role of a high class individual but is still just a whore. This line from the article submarines the whole thing: |
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| Originally posted by Krypton lol, coming from someone who holds Rush Limbaugh as a good source. |
Rush doesn't try to be a worldwide news organization. He's one guy with an opinionated radio show.
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| Originally posted by The17sss Rush doesn't try to be a worldwide news organization. He's one guy with an opinionated radio show. |
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| Israel Is Committing War Crimes Hamas's violations are no justification for Israel's actions. By GEORGE E. BISHARAT Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel's acts. The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an "armed attack" from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them -- as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable -- to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting. Israel had not suffered an "armed attack" immediately prior to its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Since firing the first Kassam rocket into Israel in 2002, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have loosed thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, causing about two dozen Israeli deaths and widespread fear. As indiscriminate attacks on civilians, these were war crimes. During roughly the same period, Israeli forces killed about 2,700 Palestinians in Gaza by targeted killings, aerial bombings, in raids, etc., according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. But on June 19, 2008, Hamas and Israel commenced a six-month truce. Neither side complied perfectly. Israel refused to substantially ease the suffocating siege of Gaza imposed in June 2007. Hamas permitted sporadic rocket fire -- typically after Israel killed or seized Hamas members in the West Bank, where the truce did not apply. Either one or no Israelis were killed (reports differ) by rockets in the half year leading up to the current attack. Israel then broke the truce on Nov. 4, raiding the Gaza Strip and killing a Palestinian. Hamas retaliated with rocket fire; Israel then killed five more Palestinians. In the following days, Hamas continued rocket fire -- yet still no Israelis died. Israel cannot claim self-defense against this escalation, because it was provoked by Israel's own violation. An armed attack that is not justified by self-defense is a war of aggression. Under the Nuremberg Principles affirmed by U.N. Resolution 95, aggression is a crime against peace. Israel has also failed to adequately discriminate between military and nonmilitary targets. Israel's American-made F-16s and Apache helicopters have destroyed mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations. These institutions were part of Gaza's civilian infrastructure. And when nonmilitary institutions are targeted, civilians die. Many killed in the last week were young police recruits with no military roles. Civilian employees in the Hamas-led government deserve the protections of international law like all others. Hamas's ideology -- which employees may or may not share -- is abhorrent, but civilized nations do not kill people merely for what they think. Deliberate attacks on civilians that lack strict military necessity are war crimes. Israel's current violations of international law extend a long pattern of abuse of the rights of Gaza Palestinians. Eighty percent of Gaza's 1.5 million residents are Palestinian refugees who were forced from their homes or fled in fear of Jewish terrorist attacks in 1948. For 60 years, Israel has denied the internationally recognized rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes -- because they are not Jews. Although Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, it continues to tightly regulate Gaza's coast, airspace and borders. Thus, Israel remains an occupying power with a legal duty to protect Gaza's civilian population. But Israel's 18-month siege of the Gaza Strip preceding the current crisis violated this obligation egregiously. It brought economic activity to a near standstill, left children hungry and malnourished, and denied Palestinian students opportunities to study abroad. Israel should be held accountable for its crimes, and the U.S. should stop abetting it with unconditional military and diplomatic support. Mr. Bisharat is a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. |
"Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge."
quoted for truth.
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| Originally posted by tathi "Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge." quoted for truth. |
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 But your point on Rush is well-taken, so let's try an alternative news source, one that Conservatives and neocons such as yourself tend to turn to quite often |
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| Originally posted by The17sss Rush doesn't try to be a worldwide news organization. He's one guy with an opinionated radio show. |
If you think Al Jazeera is an unbiased source showing true realities of situations in Israel, as an ARAB news outlet, I'm going to have to call the guys with the strait-jackets man! 
is there something in particular you have against american professors of middle east history? moreover, are there any important points you think are obviously wrong?
Ah yes, Al Jazeera. The network that states opinions as supposed facts, the network that airs old footage of children injured as if they were new, and the preferred network of choice for Bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood. Good old Al Jazeera
Loved it when they mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Israel killed one of Hamas's top men along with his wife and children. They conveniently left out the fact that this terrorist had four wives, and that he himself sent one of his kids to carry out a suicide bombing back in 2001. You remember 2001 right? The year a couple of American planes were hijacked by radical muslims with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yup, Al Jazeera always nails the story...in the most subjective way possible.
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN is there something in particular you have against american professors of middle east history? moreover, are there any important points you think are obviously wrong? |
Al-Jazeera is everything which CNN is not. They tell truth backed by facts and not emotions or apathy.
BBC and Al Jazeera are the only two global channels, CNN should stop calling itself a global channel. They are fucking small minded with timid thoughts and opinions, a local channel.
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| Originally posted by Kinezi Al-Jazeera is everything which CNN is not. They tell truth backed by facts and not emotions or apathy. |
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| Al-Jazeera journalists become faces of the frontline By Andrew England in Jerusalem (Financial Times) Published: January 14 2009 02:00 | Last updated: January 14 2009 02:00 Ayman Mohyeldin was in a coffee shop joking with colleagues in Gaza City when the first Israeli bomb struck, smashing into a police station just a short distance from where they were sitting. The tremors from the explosion shook the caf�, but it took a few minutes for the reality to sink in - Gaza was under attack. Since that moment 18 days ago, Mr Mohyeldin and his colleagues at al-Jazeera English, the satellite channel, have worked day and night, providing 24-hour coverage of the Israeli offensive in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis it has triggered. Donning a helmet and a flak jacket, Mr Mohyeldin has become one of the faces of the war, delivering calm and balanced analysis of the chaos and destruction going on around him in a soft American accent. With Israel banning foreign journalists from entering Gaza, al-Jazeera, the Qatari state-owned channel, has laid claim to being the only international broadcast house inside the strip. It has a team working for its Arab-language network, which made its name with reports from conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. For the English-language service, launched in 2006, the war has been covered by Mr Mohyeldin, a 29-year-old American of Egyptian and Palestinian descent, and Sherine Tadros, a 28-year-old Briton of Egyptian descent. And the crisis could mark a seminal point in al-Jazeera English's fortunes - just as the first Gulf war put CNN on the map. Last year the channel was struggling following high-profile defections. Tony Burman, a former editor-in-chief at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was brought in as managing director to turn things round. He admits it was a "rocky ship" but says morale at the station is soaring. "I think one of the great morale challenges for al-Jazeera English has been a fear that a lot of its hard work is not being seen by enough people," he says. "I think that has turned around, I think people realise they are at the centre of a very important event." The channel is broadcast in 105 countries, including Israel, where it offers a stark alternative to terrestrial channels. But in the US, partly as a result of hostility to al-Jazeera from the Bush administration, its coverage is limited to a handful of states. It hopes to make further inroadswithin months, Mr Burman says. As an American citizen, Mr Mohyeldin finds the lack of coverage in the US the most annoying. "It's very frustrating to know that your work, and al-Jazeera English's work, which I think can really give people the reality of the situation . . . is not reaching people who can make an impact here on the ground immediately," he says. Minutes before the first strike Mr Mohyeldin, who has been covering Gaza since last May, and Ms Tadros, who is normally based in Doha, were joking about the improbability of an Israeli offensive, believing that no military action would take place until after the new US administration was in office and Israel had held its elections scheduled for February 10. But since then, the pair has witnessed the huge bombardment and loss of life, reporting from hospitals, rooftops and United Nations schools crammed with Palestinians seeking refuge. At night, they snatch two or three hours' sleep in their office in between working and the din of explosions. The biggest fear is the randomness of the attacks, says Mr Mohyeldin. "Even if you are just going to the supermarket to get food, there's a chance a car driving right by you could be a target of the Israeli military." On Friday, Mr Mohyeldin reported that a building next to the al-Jazeera office had been struck by Israeli fire. There were no casualties, but it was a frightening moment. "It was certainly something everybody started to read into; was it a message for this building, what were they trying to convey to journalists?" he says. "I mean, already three journalists have been killed in this war." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cba2986c-e1da-11dd-afa0-0000779fd2ac.html |
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN Well, I wouldn�t go that far, all media have interests and bias. But I would agree that al jazeera is a much better source of information than CNN and the like. |
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