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20 hours ago
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
ARAB LEADERS, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND GENOCIDE
Sudan's leader Omar al-Bashir, recently indicted by the ICC for his role in the genocide in Darfur has been greeted with open arms at the meeting of Arab leaders in Doha yesterday. (Yes, that would be the Doha that gives its name to the present round of international trade talks. Heh). The fact that the man is one of the top criminal around doesn't seem to perturb his Arab brothers. Keep this in mind the next time they or their mouthpieces rant on and on about how horrendous Israel is, where even if you take their version of events Israel hasn't done anything remotely similar to the genocide in Sudan (nor to the previous one, in southern Sudan, with 2,000,000 dead).
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
DISCUSSING ISRAEL'S ACTIONS - 2
The people who know Israel is wrong, no matter what the facts might be, will be unmoved by this New York Times item, which tells that the IDF military police has shut down the investigation into the allegations of the Oranim soldiers for lack of facts. And note: not for lack of evidence, which could imply the events happened but can't be documented well enough to indict anyone. Lack of facts mean it didn't happen.
The item does however raise a number of perplexing questions:
The academy’s director, Dany Zamir, told Army Radio on Monday that he accepted the advocate general’s report. Still, he added, “If soldiers will now feel that they cannot talk because of the outcome of this specific story, then this is very bad for us as a society and army.”
Anyone have any idea what he's talking about? Or this:
On the other hand, he stated, it was not his intention to attract news media attention by making the contents of the soldiers’ discussion public. He added that the news media’s focus on the story “truly complicated everything.”
First he leaked the discussion to the press, then he didn't mean it to be public. And of course, inevitably:
A group of nine Israeli human rights organizations issued a statement saying that the army’s speedy closing of its internal investigation underlined the need for an independent investigation into possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
Translation: since the investigation didn't give us the results we were praying for, we need to try again with an independent team who won't be swayed by such things as empirical evidence or lack there-of. You easily see the dynamic here: These folks are Israelis, so they must be reliable where the other Israelis, the ones with the training and access, are obviously not. That's the line our enemies will take, at which point these particular Israelis will cite the international opinion as proof of Israel's need to do it better, by handing its sovereign obligation to investigate to entities who have no obligations to anyone except their agendas. By the end of the day the discussion will have been transferred from crimes that didn't happen to Israel's intransigence in not allowing outsiders to say they did.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
DISCUSSING ISRAEL'S ACTIONS - 1
A rabbi from Sderot traveled to the US to tell people about life under fire. Not everyone was interested:
When I welcomed the custom of a question and answer period following my presentation, the very right of free speech that I welcomed to the audience of now over 100 people was thrown in my face and denied to me. First, an audience member verbally attacked me, expressed his support for the firing of rockets into Israel, and ended his anti-Semitic rhetoric filled rant with a question irrelevant to anything in my presentation. I then pointed out to the audience the same fact I want to point out in this article, that this person was not simply criticizing Israel but was clearly expressing his support for a terrorist organization.
Yet before I could finish answering the question, I was interrupted and silenced by the overwhelming Hamas supporters. Next, another audience member stood up and screamed out, calling me a “dirty whore” in Arabic and proceeding to grab his crotch and scream “Here’s your Qassam!” in Arabic.
The critics of Israel used to assure us they were friends worried about some of our actions; then they dropped the friends part but insisted their valid unease at our actions need be heard; there is a growing group out there who don't care in the slightest what our actions are; their problem is our existence.
Which of course isn't new at all.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
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