Nice Alan Dershowitz piece in Hudson-NY:
The Goldstone commission adamantly refused to accept testimony that would have shown that the Israeli army took greater care to reduce civilian deaths than any other armed forces fighting comparable wars. For example, they refused to hear the proffered testimony Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and a recognized expert on asymmetric warfare, who would have testified that:
"[F]rom my knowledge of the IDF and from the extent to which I have been following the current operation, I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.
The recently published book about Wiki Leaks strongly confirms Colonel Kemp's assessment.
The Guardian summarized one Wiki Leaks disclosure about Afghanistan as follows:
"We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported…."
And another:
"The logs disclosed a detailed incident-by-incident record of at least 66,081 violent deaths of civilians in Iraq since the invasion. This figure, dismaying in itself, was nevertheless only a statistical starting point. It is far too low. The database begins a year late in 2004, omitting the high casualties of the direct 2003 invasion period itself, and ends on 31 December 2009. Furthermore, the US figures are plainly unreliable in respect of the most sensitive issue—civilian deaths directly caused by their own military activities.
For example, the town of Falluja was the site of two major urban battles in 2004, which reduced the place to near-rubble. Yet no civilian deaths whatever are recorded by the army loggers, apparently on the grounds that they had previously ordered all the inhabitants to leave. Monitors from the unofficial Iraq Body Count group, on the other hand, managed to identify more than 1,200 civilians who died during the Falluja fighting."
...No "Goldstone Commissions" have ever been appointed to investigate the far greater number and proportion of civilian deaths caused by British, German and U.S. military actions—and the frequent lack of credible investigators.
Whenever efforts are made to put Israel's actions in a comparative context with other democracies, demonizers of Israel, who always impose a double standard on the Jewish state, respond by arguing "we're talking about Israel now; don't change the subject by talking about other democracies." That reminds me of a famous story about Harvard's notoriously anti-Semitic president, A. Lawrence Lowell, near the beginning of the 20th Century. In an effort to defend his decision to impose an anti-Jewish quota, he said, "Jews cheat." A distinguished Harvard alumnus, Judge Learned Hand, wrote President Lowell a letter saying that "Protestants also cheat," to which Lowell responded, "you're changing the subject; we're talking about Jews now."
You can't just talk about Jews, or about the Jewish state when making accusations of war crimes or violation of international law. Comparison is everything, especially since international humanitarian law is expressly based on how democratic nations customarily behave in comparable situations.
According to the materials disclosed by Wikileaks, Israel shines in comparison to other democracies. It has a significantly better ratio of combatant to civilian deaths; it takes greater steps to avoid such casualties, and it does a better job investigating negligent and criminal behavior on the part of its soldiers. Moreover, it is seeking to protect its own civilians directly from ongoing cross-border rocket attacks and other terrorist acts, whereas the other democracies are fighting wars of choice many miles from its civilian areas.
This is not to suggest the need for "Goldstone Reports" against Great Britain and Germany and the United States. It is to demand that a single standard be applied to all democracies.
(h/t Zach N. via FB)
Today, the leftist group Breaking the Silence released a report on how awful the IDF was during the Gaza war.
As usual, the stories have no context and no details, so it is difficult to know what exactly happened.
But I went to the BTS site to see testimonies from Gaza last year. Here was the first one I saw:
There were a few times where it was just too much and I had to say something. Because in two months of fighting, people make mistakes, mistakes happen. It’s our good fortune, and I mean both as a nation and as the IDF, that there are some people who know how to stand up and say, “Hang on, something bad is happening here.” I remember one incident in which there was permissiveness of sort on the part of the upper levels with regard to wanting to open fire, and it was fortunate that somebody stepped up and said something.
What was the story?
Some militant was being monitored, he had been incriminated, and he was on his way to a meeting with other militants, and on his way there he was joined by another person who started walked alongside him, and the moment their paths linked up – despite the fact that it was totally against regulations – the second guy got incriminated too, and nobody knew from where he had popped up. So you couldn’t incriminate him ‘dry.’ And in that case, there were people there who said, “Hang on, this is no good.” And in the end the strike wasn’t carried out, it wasn’t executed. What I’m trying to say is, that sometimes even the commanders up top make mistakes, and I was present during an incident where it was stopped. I can’t know if there were incidents in which it wasn’t stopped, but in my estimation there were cases in which incriminations were made against the regulations.
So someone walking next to a militant was almost accidentally killed and in the end he wasn't because someone spoke up.
Doesn't this show how horrible the IDF is?
Arguably, this shows that the IDF's rules of engagement are too permissive. Depending on the value of the target, according to the laws of armed conflict, the IDF could have killed both of them without the slightest worry about it being a war crime or even immoral.
Akiva Bigman at Mida last year looked at many more testimonies and was equally underwhelmed. Every story he read either didn't show anything very wrong, minor problems or issues that would happen any time you deal with human beings, or at worst, some problematic episodes that don't describe the context of the danger that the soldiers were in at the moment of decision.
I'm seeing other stories that are just as unimportant. But BTS and its sponsors know that most people wouldn't bother reading the stories themselves that often show the morality of the IDF, and will only read the most lurid ones that are cherry-picked for Haaretz.
If any other Western army had a similar initiative to BTS, chances are they would come out much worse.
Yet "Breaking the Silence," as with so many other NGOs, is funded by the EU with the intent to bash Israel and only Israel.
Because you've gotta start somewhere. And, apparently, when Israel is your target, you've gotta end at the same place you start.
(See also NGO-Monitor)
Another BTS post coming up next.
Remember Gabriel Latner, the Cambridge student who stunned the world with his defense of Israel at a debate? My transcript of the speech went viral with over 9000 hits.
He is now working at UN Watch, and here you can see him take on the UN Human Rights Council's hypocrisy.
The topic is a debate on racism and discrimination. When Latner mentions human rights abuses in Cuba and China, he is interrupted by those countries' representatives and the Council president warns him not to continue to bring up cases of council members!
An important video:
One of the best parts of Michael Totten's book was where he described exactly how Hezbollah tries to intimidate and threaten reporters - and how reporters are reluctant to report this story.
There are two reasons for this, Totten says. One is that the intimidation often works. The other, simpler reason is that editors will not allow journalists to be part of the story. (p. 157)
Even though readers need to know the context of how a journalist obtained his or her information, so we can evaluate how accurate it is likely to be, it is the rare journalist like Totten who actually explains the situation. So we see a very skewed view of the world in closed societies.
From AP via Daily Star Lebanon:
OCCUPIED RAMALLAH: A leading Palestinian advocacy group says human rights for people living in the Palestinian territories are at their "worst" in years.
The annual report by the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights said hundreds of people were tortured by authorities in Gaza, ruled by the Islamic militant group Hamas, and in the West Bank, governed by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
It says several people died in Hamas detention and one died while incarcerated in the West Bank. It also says Hamas took 16 prisoners from their jail cells and killed them during the war with Israel last year.
Commission chief Ahmad Harb said other violations include bans on peaceful gatherings. He said rights violations "increased in volume" over the past four years.
Kudos to AP for reporting what is generally unreported.
And brickbats to practically every major subscriber to AP for not bothering to choose this story.
I found this in very few sources; a few Israeli papers and this Lebanese one, plus some generic news aggregators. But when stories about Israel are instantly reproduced in thousands of news sites within minutes, it is very telling that something like this gets all but ignored.
Also, it is interesting that while the original AP story uses a dateline of "Ramallah," the Daily Star says "Occupied Ramallah." I wonder if AP allows subscribers to change their datelines for political purposes.
(h/t Yenta Press)
I just read another ignorant article in OnIslam.com, this one describing the Muslim view of anti-semitism. (Hint: it is very similar to Helen Thomas'.)
The article ends off with
This is indeed our call to Christians and Jews. As people who believe in God and follow His revelations, let us rally to a common formula - faith. History proves that when we all return to the true altruistic teaching of our religions, harmony and a successful civilization will follow.
Whenever I see any Muslim group telling us that Islam was historically tolerant towards Christians and Jews, I feel compelled to dig up a new counterexample.
Today's comes from The encyclopædia of missions: descriptive, historical, biographical, statistical, Volume 1, published in 1891, meant as a reference for Christian missionaries in far-flung places.
It says, in the entry on Alexandria, Egypt:
The Mohammedans have acquired a very bitter feeling toward the Christians and the Jews, and are ever ready to join in any demonstration or insurrection against them, if they have any reason to suppose such a movement agreeable to the rulers of the city. Given a chief of police like the one in office in 1882, and another scene like that of June llth of that year, with all its barbaric horrors and cruelty, would be enacted, for the elements suitable for such an act are ever ready.
Here's what happened then:
On 11 June 1882 a row over a fare between an Egyptian donkey boy and a Maltese man triggered a riot in the city in which several hundred people were killed, including about 50 foreigners.
Must have been those Zionists.