The Talmud and the Conservative Supreme Court Justice

Justice Scalia, Talmudic Scholars On Privacy, Free Speech

NEW YORK -- (January 29, 2009) By Dvora Lakein (lubavitch.com) 

Gossip columns may plaster the internet and paper newsstands. But is this commerce of secrets permissible according to Jewish or American tradition?

"Jewish tradition is duty-oriented," explains Rabbi Michael Broyde, "the holder of data has no right to use it indiscriminately; it is his obligation to apply it responsibly." Broyde is a law professor at Emory University and a member of Beth Din of America, the nation's largest Jewish court. "American common law," he contrasts, "protects freedom of speech," and otherwise assumes a person's inalienable rights. According to this expert of both legal systems, Jewish law and the American legal tradition "are at two completely different places."

Not so, opined the Honorable Antonin Scalia, who believes that the American system is based closely on Christian tradition which likewise regards gossip as odious and sinful.

This friendly debate occurred not on the floor of the Supreme Court, where Justice Scalia spends much of his time, but at the offices of Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP abutting Central Park. Over 300 lawyers, judges, and professionals gathered to hear the Justice and a dozen other legal experts discuss the right to privacy and individual liberties. The daylong seminar, sponsored by the Institute of American and Talmudic law, featured a smorgasbord of legal offerings based on the traditional Jewish perspective and that of the American legal system.

IAT Law, under the auspices of Chabad of Midtown, aims to, "bring the ethics and morals of the Talmud to the masses," explains director, Rabbi Noach Heber. Since its 2001 inception, the Institute has hosted over 1,000 attorneys at its monthly seminars and annual conferences. Lawyers must complete a certain amount of credit hours (between 24 and 32 in New York state) in order to maintain licensure. Rabbi Joshua Metzger, Chabad of Midtown's executive director, hopes that lawyers practicing the world's youngest legal system will learn from the oldest, the 3,300 year old Jewish tradition.

"The incredible dimension that IAT offers, as opposed to other institutions where I have completed CLE credits, is that it makes an effort to analyze how Talmudic and secular law agree and differ," states Bernard Maister, a New York city attorney who has attended several of IATL's programs. "The organization has offered so many varied courses that I have come to realize how Talmudic law truly covers every aspect of human life."

Vikki Zeigler, a prominent divorce attorney and regular contributor to FOX, CNN, and MSNBC, agrees that, "it is important for lawyers to gain a rudimentary understanding of how the Jewish legal system compares to American jurisprudence." In her own divorce practice, Zeigler "has an arsenal of rabbis to consult" and assists Jewish clients with obtaining Jewish divorces along with their civil proceedings.

Zeigler has been both a lecturer and student at IAT Law since 2006. "Obtaining CLE credits through the IATL is a cerebral, thought-provoking experience," she states. "Today we discussed various aspects of the Fourth Amendment. I haven't thought about the Fourth Amendment since law school over a decade ago."

The Fourth Amendment, guaranteeing "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," served as a springboard to the day's discussions about privacy from Talmudic times to today's era of Web 2.0.

It was certainly a hot topic at the main session featuring Justice Scalia, Broyde, Talmudic expert Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe, and Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum. Nathan Lewin, a prominent lawyer who both shared a classroom with Scalia at Harvard in 1960 and later argued several cases before him in the Supreme Court, chaired the session.

"I assume I'm here to talk about federal law," joked Scalia, "because I must confess that my Daf Yomi (daily study of Talmud) attendance has been lackluster." Scalia has been opining on issues of federal law since well before his Supreme Court appointment in 1986. A vocal conservative, Scalia believes the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original intent, and not based on evolving circumstances.

Minus his court robes, but still radiating a judicial bearing, Justice Scalia expressed his feelings on the court's role in deciding privacy-related issues. "The notion that everything is private is extraordinary," stated Scalia, "and I don't think that's what Talmudic law was referring to." He noted that medical records and drug prescriptions should continue to be off limits, while a person's internet searches do not carry the same level of privacy.

Though the main session was the day's highlight, it was surrounded by complementary talks given by prominent attorneys and Talmudic scholars of varied backgrounds. "These classes provide opportunities to incorporate Torah teachings of ethics and morality into everyday law practices," says Yisroel Schulman, president of the New York Legal Assistance Group and cofounder of IATL.

Falling precisely on International Data Privacy Day, the conference melded Jewish and secular, ancient and contemporary, in an effort to understand the range of often complicated privacy issues. This, asserts Heber, is merely following Talmudic tradition in which emperors and scholars consulted with Talmudists to broaden their knowledge.

Perhaps the two legal systems are not that different after all. (Emphasis supplied)

This article is online

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Abrahamowicz to the rescue!

EDITOR'S NOTE: Courage is always contagious. The sight of one human being standing alone against a mob or a crowd often inspires others, in spite of threats and insults from the majority. In the Western heritage particularly, this is seen as a hallmark of nobility.

In an autumn afternoon, long ago, my maternal grandfather came into a room where the television was broadcasting a college football game. One of his friends asked him, "Which team are you rooting for, Joe?" Not being familiar with either team that day, my grandfather replied, "Which one is the underdog?" and that would be the team he rooted for.

In the past week, Bishop Richard Williamson has faced more pressure than most human beings encounter in a lifetime. He has been silenced and humiliated by his superiors, and banned from the cathedrals and churches of Germany. Throughout this ordeal he has refused to recant his views about execution gas chambers. As is often the case, this defiant 'underdog' has in turn inspired other human beings who despise bullying, and are suspicious of consensus realities fomented by howling mobs certain of their omniscience, and emboldened by the sense that their behavior is approved by popes and rabbis (actually here one should perhaps say, "papal-rabbis and regular rabbis," since certain popes have acted as crypto-rabbis, rather than as St. Peter would).

The good news is that Bishop Williamson now has company, in the form of another outspoken priest of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX; "Lefebvrist" in the jargon of newchurch), by the significant name of Floriano Abrahamowicz, himself of Judaic descent.

Rev. Abrahamowicz is an independent thinker, not at all didactic, an agnostic on the subject of the dogma we are all forced to believe --homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz-- and a man willing to think outside the box. His remarks (see below) are refreshing in their belief in the right to question man-made dogmas rendered sacred by tyrants posing as progressives.

The Establishment media, including in particular the media of the Novus Ordo Catholic Church, are so biased they write mendacious headlines even after the subject of the headline has corrected them. Hence, the false accusation "...questions (the) Holocaust" in the headline from the National Catholic Reporter newspaper.

These sly scribblers think they are getting away with their deception, taking advantage of the Orwellian "Holocaust" Newspeak which has been imposed on the question of the gas chambers, to make it appear that in questioning ONE DETAIL of the history of World War II, the informed skeptic is in fact a madman who questions the WHOLE HISTORY of World War II.

They cannot afford to omit their pet "Holocaust" word lest people focus on the issue at hand: there is not one single autopsy report showing that a single person was "gassed in Auschwitz." Not one! When asked at the 1985 show-trial in Toronto of publisher Ernst Zundel, to produce scientific evidence of homicidal gasings, Norman Finkelstein's hero, Dr. Raul Hilberg, the dean of American "Holocaust" historians, told the court, "I'm at a loss."

This dearth of scientific evidence of executions by gas, most ably documented by the imprisoned Max Planck chemist Germar Rudolf (http://www.vho.org/dl/ENG/loth.pdf), is the focus of the revisionists, not a so-called "Holocaust" (a word which was neologistically imposed on this field of study circa 1967), which can mean anything from innocent Judaic civilians cruelly forced into concentration camps (true) and shot in large numbers on the Eastern front (also true), to Elie Wiesel's aunt being made into a lampshade (false) and Rudolf Vrba seeing death by gassings in Auschwitz (also false, as this "infallible eyewitness" reluctantly admitted under Zundel defense attorney Doug Christie's cross-examination in Toronto).

Holocaustianity must traffic in generalities, received opinion and hysteria to maintain its cachet. Revisionism is concerned with specifics and exactitude, according to the same standards of empirical skepticism deemed appropriate in all other historical inquiries, as applied to all other atrocity claims, as for example the current evasion by Israeli officials of war crimes charges in Gaza, an evasion considered quite respectable by the very same media that mock and deride those who cast doubt on a gas chamber tale that has transmogrified its narrative and its architecture numerous times since 1944.
--Michael Hoffman

Italian Lefebvrite priest questions Holocaust

By John L. Allen, Jr,
National Catholic Reporter (NCR) 
Jan. 29, 2009
http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3191

In the wake of a global furor triggered by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to lift the excommunication of four traditionalist Catholic bishops, including one who cast doubt on the Holocaust, another leader in the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X has questioned whether the Nazis used gas chambers for anything other than “disinfection,” and said that people who hold revisionist views on the Holocaust are not anti-Semites.

Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz, a pastor and spokesperson for the Society of St. Pius X in northeastern Italy, also referred to Jews as “a people of deicide,” referring to the death of Christ, and suggested that the Jewish Holocaust has been “exalted” over what he called “other genocides,” such as the Allied bombing of German cities and the Israeli occupation of the Gaza strip.

On the other hand, Abrahamowicz insisted that the traditionalist movement founded by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre is not “anti-Semitic.” Among other things, Abrahamowicz said, he himself has Jewish roots on his father’s side.
The comments came in a Jan. 29 interview with the Italian newspaper La Tribuna di Treviso.

(An NCR translation of the full text of the interview appears below.)

Abrahamowicz is himself a well-known figure in Italy. In 2006, he gave a television interview in which he said that Erich Priebke, a German SS officer convicted of war crimes for a 1944 massacre in Rome, in which 335 Italian civilians were killed in reprisal for the deaths of 33 German soldiers, should not be seen as an “executioner” but rather a soldier who acted “with regret and a heavy heart.”

In 2007, Abrahamowicz celebrated a Latin Mass for Italian politician Umberto Bossi, leader of the far-right Northern League party.

La Tribuna di Treviso
Interview with Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz, Jan. 29, 2009
By Laura Canzian

Fr. Floriano, is the Lefebvrite community anti-Semitic?

It’s truly impossible for a Catholic Christian to be anti-Semitic. I myself, on my father’s side, have Jewish roots. My last name even suggests this. This entire polemic regarding the statements of Bishop Williamson concerns the existence of gas chambers, and has been strongly instrumentalized for anti-Vatican purposes. Williamson simply expressed his doubts, and his ‘denial’ is not of the Holocaust – as newspapers have falsely said – but of the technical aspect of the gas chambers.

In your view, what’s the ‘technical aspect’ of the gas chambers?

Certainly, it was imprudent of Williamson to get into technical questions. In the famous interview, you can see that the journalist was obviously leading up to this specific aspect. But you have to understand that the theme of the Holocaust is situated on a much higher level than the question of knowing whether the victims died from gas or from other causes.

What do you think? About the gas chambers, I mean.

Truly, I don’t know. I know that gas chambers existed at least for disinfection, but I don’t know if they were used to kill people or not, because I haven’t studied the question. I know that, alongside the official version [of events], there’s another version based on the observations of the first Allied technicians who entered the camps.

Do you cast doubt on the number of victims of the Holocaust?

No, I don’t cast doubt on the numbers. There could have been more than six million victims. Even in the Jewish world, the number has a symbolic value. Pope Ratzinger says that even one person killed unjustly is too many, which is a way of saying that it’s equal to six million. To speak about numbers doesn’t change anything with respect to the essence of genocide, which is always an exaggeration.

An exaggeration? In what sense?

The number [of six million] is derived from what the head of the German Jewish community said to the Anglo-Americans shortly after the liberation. In the heat of the moment, he fired off a number. But how could he know? For him, the important point was that these victims were unjustly killed for religious motives. If there’s a criticism to be made of the way in which the tragedy of the Holocaust has been handled, it’s in giving it a supremacy with respect to other genocides.

To which other exterminations are you referring?

If Bishop Williamson had gone on television to deny the genocide of 1.2 million Armenians by the Turks, I don’t think that all the newspapers would have talked about his statements in the same terms they’re using now. Who has ever talked about the Anglo-American genocide in the bombing of German cities? Who has ever talked about Churchill, who ordered the phosphorous bombing of Dresden, where there were not only many civilians, but also many Allied soldiers? Who has spoken about the English air force, which, in the bombing of the cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians? And the Israelis certainly can’t tell me that the genocide they suffered from the Nazis is less serious than that of Gaza, simply because they’ve taken out a few thousand persons, while the Nazis took out six million. This is where I fault Judaism, which exasperates rather than honoring the victims of genocide decently. It’s as if there were only one genocide in history, that of the Jews during the Second World War. It seems like you can say anything you want about all the other exterminated peoples, but no one at the global level has spoken in the terms in which people are speaking today after the declarations of Bishop Williamson.

Why do so many people still cast doubt on the Shoah (Holocaust)? Why is it a subject that still divides people so viscerally?

Because the whole history of humanity is marked by the people of Israel, who initially were the people of God, who then became the people of deicide, and who at the end of time will reconvert to Jesus Christ. Behind it all is a mysterious theological aspect, which is that of the people of God which rejected its Messiah and which still combats him. It’s a mystery of doctrine. Anti-Semitism is born from the illuminated liberal and Gnostic world. The church throughout history has always protected the Jews from pogroms, as one reads, for example, in Domenico Savino’s book on ritual homicide.

What do you think of [Holocaust] denial?

Denial is a false problem, because it focuses on methods and numbers and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. Those who have studied the technical data, and who have cast certain doubts on the versions that we find in history books, aren’t anti-Semites. It’s enough to recall that the first ones to find this data were also those who saved the Jews, meaning the Allies.

Do you want to offer a message to the Jewish community?

One message: As a Catholic Christian, adding that (a) little Jewish blood that runs in my veins, I express the hope that the Jews will embrace Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Speak on, Bishop Williamson

Richard N. Williamson, SSPX

By Michael Hoffman

www.RevisionistHistory.org

There is a rather startling hue and cry for the head of Bishop Richard Williamson, the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) bishop who doubts the existence of execution gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and whose excommunication, along with that of his three brother bishops, has been lifted by Pope Benedict XVI.

Extraordinary misrepresentations amounting to false witness have been made against this bishop and World War II revisionists in general. Ignorant persons who have never read a revisionist text have concocted wild fantasies about the character of revisionists and what they believe.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the SSPX who was an implacable foe of Judaism, is being made out to be a prelate solely focused on restoring the old Latin Mass, as if that restoration alone, separated from all the ills that beset us, is a panacea. This is an error which Msgr. Lefebvre never indulged. He insisted on the Kingship of Christ in our culture and society. How can such kingship exist when an enormous homicidal gas chamber fraud shackles the minds of millions of Christians?

Some considerable portion of the constituency of the traditional Catholic movement consists of middle class reactionaries and aesthetes almost exclusively concerned with protocol and looking good in the eyes of the Vatican and the world, so as to have at their disposal a lovely liturgy, music, incense, bells and candles. Christ's radical teaching is not part of their gestalt, and I venture to say they would be embarrassed by Him if He were among them today, since He had a tendency to utter harsh truths about Pharisaic Judaism in very public venues, something considered bad form for those engaged in lobbying the Vatican (and the Zionist media!) today.

Whether or not Bishop Williamson "denies" the existence of execution gas chambers operating in Auschwitz-Birkenau, should not in the least effect his standing in the Church of Christ, or his right to speak, teach and publish, anymore than Neocon Catholics who deny that the recent Israeli massacre of 1300 Palestinians, including 400 children, some of them burned by phosphorous poison gas (irony of ironies), lose any standing in the hierarchy, or their local church, with their abject denial of the Israeli holocaust against Arabs. 

God said, "My ways are not your ways," but many of Richard Williamson's detractors imagine God to be as the Talmud envisions him, a subsidiary of the ruling Sanhedrin, the rabbinic judiciary before whom we are all expected to genuflect, swallowing their outrageous exaggerations and lies in order that we may be considered good little boy scouts.

One is free to reject or embrace Bishop Williamson's views, but we should all defend his right to express them, especially in light of the fact that some "Holocaust survivors" seem to think that their suffering under the Nazis (both real and imagined), gives them a license to massacre the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine with impunity.

If Bishop Williamson's courageous remarks, however ill-timed, cause us to think twice about the alibi for Israeli genocide, then people of good will should be heartened. Instead, we witness the sorry spectacle of prissy Catholic school marms frantically running amok, seeking to smooth the ruffled feathers of rabbis whose talons are fresh with the blood of Gaza.

Holocaustianity is the last truly believed state religion in the otherwise agnostic West. Auschwitz has replaced the Resurrection as the central ontological event in our history, a substitution easy to prove: no one goes to jail for denying the Resurrection. Meanwhile, revisionists are serving long prison sentences in Europe for doubting the homicidal gas chamber icon. Among those prisoners of conscience is the brilliant, former Max Planck Institute doctoral candidate in chemistry, Germar Rudolf.

Far from complementing Christianity, as the Vatican imagines, Holocaustianity is its deadly rival for the hearts and minds of mankind. The typical "ultimate lesson of the Holocaust" imparted in the synagogues dedicated to the Six Million idol which masquerade as "holocaust history museums," hold that the historic Christian faith, as recorded in the Gospel of John and implemented by the early and medieval church, inevitably fostered the "evil bigotry" that "paved the way for the mass gassings in Auschwitz."

In spite of the thundering anathemas of the prostitute press and the prelates of newchurch, how can any true shepherd submit to this false religion and its Orwellian "Holocaust" Newspeak, which at its core represents the pernicious and perpetual libel of Jesus Christ and His authentic disciples?

Speak on, Bishop Williamson, the victims of counterfeit-Israel desire that you give voice to the agony of the oppressed and the bondage of the free.

Copyright © 2009. All Rights Reserved

This column has been translated into Italian here

Hoffman is the author of Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit.

Hoffman's "Revisionist History Newsletter no. 46"

The latest issue of Michael Hoffman's hardcopy Revisionist History Newsletter is now on sale

Featuring the cover story: "'The Rag Economy - Debt Bondage Under the West's Shylock System"

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CBS News' Bob Simon's Video on Plight of Palestinians

Watch CBS "60 Minutes" segment on life for Palestinians, reported by Judaic journalist Bob Simon.

God bless you, Bob!

***

Writers and Scholars Urge Academic Boycott of Israeli

International Writers and Scholars Endorse Academic Boycott of "Israel"

We stand in support of the indigenous Palestinian people in Gaza, who are fighting for their survival against one of the most brutal uses of state power in both this century and the last.

We condemn Israel's recent (December 2008/ January 2009) breaches of international law in the Gaza Strip, which include the bombing of densely-populated neighborhoods, illegal deployment of the chemical white phosphorous, and attacks on schools, ambulances, relief agencies, hospitals, universities, and places of worship. We condemn Israel's restriction of access to media and aid workers.

We reject as false Israel's characterization of its military attacks on Gaza as retaliation. Israel's latest assault on Gaza is part of its longtime racist jurisprudence against its indigenous Palestinian population, during which the Israeli state has systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited the Palestinian people.

We reject as untrue the Israeli government's claims that the Palestinians use civilians as human shields, and that Hamas is an irredeemable terrorist organization. Without endorsing its platforms or philosophy, we recognize Hamas as a democratically elected ruling party. We do not endorse the regime of any existing Arab state, and call for the upholding of internationally mandated human rights and democratic elections in all Arab states.

We call upon our fellow writers and academics in the United States to question discourses that justify and rationalize injustice, and to address Israeli assaults on civilians in Gaza as one of the most important moral issues of our time.

We call upon institutions of higher education in the U.S. to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, dissolve study abroad programs in Israel, and divest institutional funds from Israeli companies, using the 1980s boycott against apartheid South Africa as a model.

We call on all people of conscience to join us in boycotting Israeli products and institutions until a just, democratic state for all residents of Palestine/Israel comes into existence.

Diana Abu-Jaber
Breyten Breytenbach
Van Brock
Hayan Charara
Alison Hedge Coke
Vicente Diaz
Marilyn Hacker
Sam Hamill
David Lloyd
Sunaina Maira
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Marcy Newman
Viet Nguyen
Simon J. Ortiz
Vijay Prashad
Steven Salaita
Therese Saliba
Sarita See
Andrea Smith
Frank X. Walker
and dozens of others

***

Lots of outrage over Pope and "Holocaust Denier"

These disgusting Zionist hypocrites who criticize the latest Vatican clemency make affirmation or skepticism of the Auschwitz execution gas chamber tale a litmus test for Christian church membership (and general respectability in society), while they themselves vehemently "deny" the Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians. Gaza holocaust denial suits Talmudic supremacism just fine. 

We say: Stop the denial of the Israeli holocaust - 400 children serially murdered by Judaics in Gaza since Dec. 27 --including gassing children with phosphorus.

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Pope reprieves Holocaust-denying priest
Jan. 25, 2009

THE JERUSALEM POST

In an attempt to heal a two-decade old schism, Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunications of four bishops, including one who is a Holocaust denier.

Richard Williamson, a British bishop, was shown in a Swedish state TV interview this week saying that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed."

Williamson has said that only 200,000-300,000 Jews died during World War II and that gas chambers were a fiction.

He has also endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery used since the late 19th century to fuel anti-Jewish violence, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Williamson is one of four bishops, all members of the Society of Saint Pius X, which rebelled against the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

Jewish leaders, including Rome Chief Rabbi Ricardo Di Segni, have urged Benedict not to lift the ban.

The American Jewish Committee's director of Interreligious Affairs, Rabbi David Rosen, said that "while the Vatican's reconciliation with the SSPX [Society of Saint Pius X] is an internal matter of the Catholic Church, the embrace of an open Holocaust denier is shameful, a serious blow for Jewish-Vatican relations, and a slap in the face for the historic efforts of Pope John Paul II, who following his predecessors, made such remarkable efforts to eradicate and combat anti-Semitism.

"I am sure that the lifting of the excommunication was not an affirmation by the Church of Holocaust denial. However, the failure to take into consideration his outrageous opinions is deplorable. Williamson should not have been included in this embrace," Rosen said.

Father David Neuhaus, professor of Bible at Bethlehem University, said on Saturday evening that the lifting of the excommunications had nothing to do with the "odious views" held by some of the bishops.

"Rather the pope has a burning desire to put an end to the schism in the Church. Discussion is going inside the Church regarding the pope's attempt to bring back into the fold ultra ultra conservatives who never accepted the reforms of Vatican II and were illicitly consecrated. There are those in the Church he feel that the pope is humiliating himself for men unrepentant of their views."

Neuhaus, who is also secretary-general of the Hebrew Speaking Catholic Vicariate in the Holy Land, said the Church's position on the Holocaust was a very sensitive issue for the local Catholic community.

"It touches on the very heart of who we are here in the Holy Land as promoters of historical reconciliation of Jewish and Catholic relations so that Jews and Catholics understand each other more," he said.

"I would like to be optimistic and say that the move to bring these ultra-conservatives under the influence of the pope will force them to tow the line with regard to the Church's contempt for Holocaust denial."

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said Williamson's views had no impact on the decision to lift the excommunication decree.

The pope's decision by no means implies "sharing [Williamson's] ideas or his comments, which will be judged on their own," the ANSA news agency quoted Lombardi as saying.

Marcel Lefebvre founded the Society of Saint Pius X in 1969, a breakaway traditionalist Catholic priestly society that protests the liberalizing reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, particularly its allowing of mass to be celebrated in local languages instead of Latin.

The four bishops were excommunicated in 1988 after Lefebvre consecrated them without Rome's consent. Lefebvre was excommunicated as well.

In a statement on Saturday, the current head of the society and one of the rehabilitated bishops, Bernard Fellay, expressed his gratitude to Benedict and said the decree would help the entire Catholic Church.

The Society believes the Church is in crisis and blames in part the doctrinal reforms of Vatican II, including its ecumenical outreach, for causing it.

"Our Society wishes to be always more able to help the pope to remedy the unprecedented crisis which presently shakes the Catholic world," Fellay said.

Benedict made clear from the start of his pontificate that he wanted to normalize relations with the Society, meeting within months of his election with Fellay and convening cardinals to discuss bringing it back into the Vatican's fold.

Benedict has in the past praised the society for its stance against "moral permissiveness."

In 2007, Benedict answered one of Fellay's key demands by relaxing restrictions on celebrating the old Latin mass. In lifting the excommunication decree, he answered the society's second condition for beginning theological discussions about normalizing relations.

In lifting the decrees, Benedict risked a new clash with Jews, who had already been angered by the rehabilitation of the Latin mass because it contained a prayer calling for their conversion.

Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson, whose return to the church would have a "political cost" for the Vatican.

"I'm certain as a man who has known the Nazi regime in his own flesh, he understands you have to be very careful and very selective," Samuels said.

While Williamson's comments may be offensive and erroneous, they are not an excommunicable offense, said Monsignor Robert Wister, professor of church history at the Immaculate Conception School of Theology at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

"To deny the Holocaust is not a heresy even though it is a lie," he said. "The excommunication can be lifted because he is not a heretic, but he remains a liar."

Neuhaus said in response to Wister's comments that while he might be technically right, "William's views contradict the teaching of the Catholic Church. The pope has been very clear on this and continues John Paul II's tradition of inculcating total contempt for Holocaust denial and of asking whether Church clergy did enough during the Holocaust."

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Pope Reinstates Four Bishops, Including Holocaust Denier

NY Times Jan. 24, 2009 By RACHEL DONADIO

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI, acceding to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy has proven increasingly hostile to moderates and to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church.

Most contentious was the inclusion of Richard Williamson, a British-born cleric who in an interview last week said he did not believe that Jews died in the Nazi gas chambers. He has also given interviews saying that the United States government staged the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a pretext to invade Afghanistan.

The four reinstated men are members of the Society of St. Pius X, which was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Archbishop Lefebvre made the four bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II.

Later that year, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, sought to regularize the church’s relationship with the society. Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991.

In a statement Saturday, the Vatican said that the pope would “reconsider” whether to formally affirm the four as full bishops, but referred to the men by that title.

In recent years, Benedict has made other concessions to traditionalists like the Lefebvrists, including allowing the broader recitation of the Latin Mass, which includes a Good Friday prayer calling for the conversion of Jews.

Bishop Williamson’s recent comments inevitably overshadowed the debate about traditional and liberal strains in the Roman Catholic Church.

In a November interview broadcast on Swedish television last week and widely available on the Internet, the bishop said that he believed that “the historical evidence” was hugely against the conclusion that six million Jews had been “deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Saturday that Bishop Williamson’s comments had “nothing to do with” the pope’s decision to welcome the schismatic bishops back into the fold. He added, “These are declarations that we don’t share in any way.”

Father Lombardi called the revocation of the excommunications a fundamental step toward the unity of the church, after two decades of rift. “We have to consider it very positive news,” he added.

Jewish groups criticized the decision to reinstate the men. In a statement released Friday ahead of the decision, the Anti-Defamation League said that lifting Bishop Williamson’s excommunication “could become a source of great tension between Catholics and Jews.”

“The readmittance to full communion of a bishop who appears to publicly reject key teachings of the Second Vatican Council could provide succor to those whose views threaten the Jewish people and the church’s desire to improve and deepen its relationship with us to benefit all mankind,” Abraham Foxman, the A.D.L.’s national director, wrote in a letter to Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Commission on Religious Relations With the Jews.In a statement released Friday, Rabbi David Rosen, the director of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, said, “We urgently call on the Vatican to reiterate its unqualified repudiation and condemnation of all and any Holocaust denial.”

In welcoming the cleric back into the church, Benedict is “making a mockery of John Paul II, who called anti-Semitism ‘a sin against God and man,’ ” Rabbi Rosen added.In revoking the excommunications, the Vatican said it was responding to a letter sent in December by the director of the Society of Pius X, in which the bishops said they were “firmly determined to remain Catholic and to put all our efforts to the service of the church.”

The letter appeared to stop short of saying that the society would embrace, or even accept, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

“This is certainly a major concession to the traditionalists, part of a long effort by Rome to heal the only formal schism after Vatican II,” said John L. Allen Jr., a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.

“Politically, this certainly emboldens the conservative reading of the council and emphasizes what Benedict XVI has repeatedly called the ‘continuity’ of Vatican II with earlier periods of church history,” he added.

Father Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the Vatican was “still holding discussions” with the Lefebvrists about the Second Vatican Council.

***

Justice Antonin Scalia to lecture at Rabbinic Law Travesty

At the "Institute of American and Talmudic Law" January 28

"American and Talmudic Law" (that's one abortion he doesn't oppose).

The seminar is valid for continuing education credits for New York lawyers: "This program is certified in the state of New York for 2.5 Ethics, 1.0 Skills, 5.0 Professional Practice."

Separation of synagogue and state? Ha.

***

The Strange Case of Barack Obama's Oath of Office

"At Mr. Obama’s second swearing-in on Wednesday...(t)he photo released by the White House had been taken by its own photographer." (NY Times, Jan. 23, p. A16).

A Cryptogram from the Cryptocracy?

Michael Hoffman investigates

Jan. 23, 2009 • RevisionistHistory.org

"For a couple of smooth-talking constitutional experts, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and President-elect Barack Obama sure had a hard time getting through the constitutional oath of office...The chief justice seemed to say 'to' rather than 'of,' but that was not the main problem. The main problem was that the word 'faithfully' had floated upstream...Mr. Obama seemed to realize this, pausing quizzically after saying 'that I will execute –'

"The chief justice gave it another go, getting closer but still not quite right: “faithfully the office of president of the United States.” This time, he omitted the word 'execute.' Mr. Obama now repeated the chief justice’s initial error of putting 'faithfully' at the end of the phrase. Starting where he had abruptly paused, he said: 'the office of the president of the United States faithfully.” ("I Do Solemnly Swear…(Line, Please?," NY Times, Jan. 20, 2009)

Yes, indeed these two "smooth-talking constitutional experts" couldn't manage to recite the brief oath as it was written. This was largely Chief Justice Roberts' fault. We can believe that this flub was due to human fallibility and that may very well be the case, or we can also wonder whether the very intelligent Chief Justice deliberately mishandled the oath so that it would be administered a second time, under very different circumstances.

Here's how the media reported the second rite: ...After a day’s worth of chatter over whether the president had been properly sworn into office...(i)n 25 seconds, President Obama became president again. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. re-administered the oath to Mr. Obama on Wednesday evening, one day after the two men stumbled over each other’s words during the inauguration ceremony at the Capitol. For their do-over, the two men convened in the White House Map Room at 7:35 p.m. for a brief proceeding that was not announced until it was completed successfully...Only hours after aides told reporters there was no reason to administer the oath again, they concluded it was easier to do it on the first day, rather than have someone challenge the legitimacy of his presidency...Mr. Obama raised his right hand and did not use a Bible....only nine people witnessed the do-over. There were four aides, four reporters and a White House photographer..." (NY Times, Jan. 22, 2009).

This second-time-around doppelganger oath was the real oath, since the flawed first one, done in the sight of millions and upon the Bible of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln was a "challenge (to) the legitimacy of his presidency..."

There was no Bible the second time and with Obama having been compared to John F. Kennedy during the campaign, and with all of the macabre parallels between Kennedy and Lincoln (Lincoln was killed in Ford's theatre, Kennedy was killed in a Ford automobile; Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy, Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln; Lincoln and Kennedy were both succeeded by vice-presidents named Johnson, etc.), I'm not sure that if I were Barack Obama I would have wanted to step into the middle of such a highly charged symbol palimpsest -- unless of course the first inaugural oath-taking was little more more than shadow-play.

What appears to be the authentic inauguration took place in a basement, and was an elite rather than a populist rite, with just nine witnesses. It occurred in former President Franklin Roosevelt's secretive, war-era "map room." Before FDR, under presidents from Chester Arthur through Wilson and Coolidge, it was reputedly used to play the game of billiards.

The omission of the Bible is not invalidating since the father of our country did not use one at his inauguration and Lyndon Johnson, on the plane to Washington after's Kennedy's killing, used a Roman Catholic mass book ("missal"), rather than a Bible. Hence, the absence of a Bible per se does not invalidate the oath, but the peek-a-boo nature of the inaugural Bible may be deliberate, in that its momentous presence at the botched inauguration is all the more glaring in its inexplicable absence at the real inauguration.

If symbolism is a language, what is being signaled by this apparently deliberate omission?

Another equally striking aspect of the second oath are the photographs of the ceremony, which feature the looming presence of a vintage portrait above the mantle on the wall behind the president and the chief justice.

The oath is a ritual and this ritual has an icon hovering over it, as if by way of spiritual benediction and patronage. As of this writing, in all the prominent photos of the second oath which this writer has seen, no caption has been provided by the establishment media that identifies the enigmatic man in the portrait. Yet, symbolically, he is the "genius loci," the presiding spirit of the authentic inaugural ceremony of Barack Obama as President. Like the omission of the Bible after so much was made of its presence at the first oath-taking, the omission of any identification of the figure in the painting at the second oath-taking would seem to be significant.

Let us recall that the second oath was performed in secret: "...the two men convened in the White House Map Room at 7:35 p.m. for a brief proceeding that was not announced until it was completed..."

In Freemasonry the god of the secret societies is covertly substituted for the One True God. This false god is identified in the masonic lodges as "the Great Architect."

The mysterious man in the portrait who silently presides over the authentic inauguration of Barack Obama as Commander and Chief, is Benjamin Latrobe, the great architect of the U.S. Capitol.

Copyright 2009 • All Rights Reserved

Michael Hoffman's latest book is Judaism Discovered, now in its second printing; available from www.RevisionistHistory.org

***

Catholic Bishop: Six Million "Jews" Were Not Gassed

In an interview recorded in Bavaria, Germany on Nov. 1, and broadcast on Swedish television this week, Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson states: "No Six Million 'Jews' Were Gassed in Gas Chambers"

Watch a Five Minute Video excerpt from the broadcast Interview here

German state prosecutor investigating Richard Williamson

From Vatican radio

The prosecutor in Regensburg is investigating a priest of the Priestly Society of St. Pius X because of allegations of race hatred. The Deputy Director of the office, Edgar Zach confirmed on Friday a report on Bavarian Radio. The British traditionalist, Bishop Richard Williamson, in an interview with the Swedish television channel SVT, denied that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews.

"I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps died, but none of them in gas chambers." Williamson said in the interview which can be seen on the website of the channel. It was not about emotion, but historical evidence, said the traditionalist bishop. This evidence supports the idea that concentration camps like Auschwitz were not for the gassing of human beings as the chimneys were too short and the doors could not be tightly sealed enough.

Williamson relied on the well-known Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter. The denial of the Holocaust has been since 1994 a separate criminal offense in Germany and can be punished with up to five years in prison.

The television interview was recorded in Bavaria in the Seminary of the Society of St. Pius X at Zaitzkofen to the south of Regensburg. Thus, the public prosecutor responsible is the one in Regensburg. The almost six minute long interview was recorded in English. On the recording in Germany, Williamson at the end of the interview, admits that his remarks were punishable in Germany. The reporter could ensure that he will go to prison, "before I leave Germany."

***

Poetic Presidential Inaugurations of the Past

Poetry and Power: Robert Frost's Inaugural Reading

I was edified by parts of the Obama inauguration: Aretha's stirring rendition of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and the classical music interlude provided by Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Anthony McGill (clarinet), and Gabriela Monteroat (piano), performing "Air and Simple Gifts," the latter the magnificent Shaker hymn composed by a humble New Englander, reworked by the great Aaron Copeland, and in this arrangement, John Williams. (Watch the video here). Jan. 22 update: it has now been determined that the quartet faked their performance at the inauguration. 

Less successful was the "poetry" by the Yale University prof that seemed more prose than poem. I confess that my taste runs more toward Robert Frost, who is too easily understood to be regarded as anything other than strictly for plebes by the highbrows (the same criticism was leveled at Tennyson). Frost was a profound thinker and a true American from his head to his toes. For sake of comparison, here is the story of how Frost came to read his poetry at President Kennedy's inauguration:

When Robert Frost became the first poet to read in the program of a presidential inauguration in 1961, he was already well regarded in the capital: he read and dined at the White House; the Attorney General assisted his successful campaign to release Ezra Pound from St. Elizabeth's Hospital who was under indictment for treason; he was offered the Consultant in Poetry position by the Library of Congress; and the United States Senate passed a resolution naming Frost "America's great poet-philosopher." In the words of the poet William Meredith, the decision to include Frost in the inauguration "focused attention on Kennedy as a man of culture, as a man interested in culture." Kennedy's decision to include Frost, however, was more likely a personal gesture to the poet, who was responsible for much of the momentum early in the President's campaign.

On Marth 26, 1959, prior to a gala to celebrate his 85th birthday, Frost gave a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Among the questions asked was one concerning the alleged decline of New England, to which Frost responded: "The next President of the United States will be from Boston. Does that sound as if New England is decaying?" Pressed to name who Frost meant, he replied: "He's a Puritan named Kennedy. The only Puritans left these days are the Roman Catholics. There. I guess I wear my politics on my sleeve."

The national press picked up Frost's prediction that the junior Senator from Massachusetts, who had not formally declared his candidacy, would be elected the next President. Less than a month later, Kennedy wrote Frost, stating: "I just want to send you a note to let you know how gratifying it was to be remembered by you on the occasion of your 85th birthday. I only regret that the intrusion of my name, probably in ways which you did not entirely intend, took away some of the attention from the man who really deserved it—Robert Frost."

Frost repeated his prediction in many, if not most, of the lectures and public appearances he gave over the subsequent months, and continued to endorse the candidate whenever possible. Kennedy in return quoted the final couplet of Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" at the close of many of his campaign speeches: "But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep."

In response to the news that Kennedy had won the election, Frost called the outcome "a triumph of Protestantism—over itself."

Stewart L. Udall, who had met Frost during his tenure as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, and who was invited by Kennedy to serve as Secretary of the Interior, suggested Frost take part in the inauguration ceremonies. Kennedy jokingly responded, "Oh, no. You know that Robert Frost always steals any show he is part of."

Kennedy's invitation came to Frost by telegraph and the poet answered by the same means the following day: "IF YOU CAN BEAR AT YOUR AGE THE HONOR OF BEING MADE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, I OUGHT TO BE ABLE AT MY AGE TO BEAR THE HONOR OF TAKING SOME PART IN YOUR INAUGURATION. I MAY NOT BE EQUAL TO IT BUT I CAN ACCEPT IT FOR MY CAUSE—THE ARTS, POETRY, NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME TAKEN INTO THE AFFAIRS OF STATESMEN."

Kennedy asked if Frost planned to recite a new poem. If not, could he recite "The Gift Outright," a poem Frost has called "a history of the United States in a dozen [i.e., sixteen] lines of blank verse." Kennedy also requested changing the phrase in the last line to "such as she will become" from "such as she would become." Frost agreed. The original last line, which Frost claims to have written in the middle of the Great Depression, was first published in the spring 1942 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review and read, "Such as she was, such as she might become." It seemed appropriate that Frost agreed to further change the poem to reflect the optimism surrounding the new Presidency.

As inauguration day approached, however, Frost surprised himself by composing a new poem, "Dedication" (later retitled "For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration"), which he planned to read as a preface to the poem Kennedy requested. But on the drive to the Capitol on January 20, 1961, Frost worried that the piece, typed on one of the hotel typewriters the night before, was difficult to read even in good light. When he stood to recite the poem, the wind and the bright reflection of sunlight off new fallen snow made the reading the poem impossible. He was able, however, to recite "The Gift Outright" from memory.

Though Frost was somewhat embarassed by his faltering, it made for a memorable and dramatic moment. The Washington Post reported that Frost "stole the hearts of the Inaugural crowd," somewhat as Kennedy had jokingly predicted.

Before leaving, Frost called on the new President and First Lady at the White House to receive Kennedy's thanks for participating in the event. He presented Kennedy with a manuscript copy of the "Dedication" poem, on which he wrote: "Amended copy. And now let us mend our ways." He also gave the President the advice: "Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don't be afraid of power."

At the foot of the typed thank-you letter Kennedy sent, he wrote, "It's poetry and power all the way!"

Source: www.poets.org

***

Judaics cannot enter a church

Orthodox group: Rabbi violated rules by joining National Prayer Service

By Jacob Berkman · January 21, 2009

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The main Modern Orthodox rabbinical association says a prominent member violated its rules by participating in the National Prayer Service.

A Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) official told JTA that Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the religious leader of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York City, broke the organization's rules by participating in the service Wednesday at the National Cathedral on the morning after Barack Obama's inauguration.

“The long-standing policy of the Rabbinical Council of America, in accordance with Jewish law, is that participation in a prayer service held in the sanctuary of a church is prohibited," the RCA said in a statement. "Any member of the RCA who attends such a service does so in contravention of this policy and should not be perceived as representing the organization in any capacity."

The Rabbinic Council of America said that Lookstein’s participation was problematic...because the service was held in the sanctuary of a church, which Orthodox Jews are prohibited from entering...the RCA's rule...is based on an edict from the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Modern Orthodoxy's longtime spiritual leader.

(Emphasis supplied)

***

The Unilateral People

by Gilad Atzmon

They withdraw unilaterally
They ceasefire unilaterally
They invade unilaterally
They win unilaterally
They destroy unilaterally
They massacre unilaterally
They bathe in blood unilaterally
They spread white phosphorus unilaterally
They kill women and children unilaterally
They drop bombs unilaterally
They live on stolen land unilaterally
They support their homicidal leaders unilaterally
They love their ‘Jewish Only State’ unilaterally
Their democracy is unilateral
They love themselves unilaterally
They are the unilateral people.
Living behind walls of concrete, hatred and arrogance
They are still united and lateral failing to love their neighbors

***

Israeli propaganda lines for use in Gaza

"An Israeli military official involved in the operations said Hamas had three main goals: harming Israel, ruling in Gaza and extending its rule to the West Bank.

“He understands that he needs to get bloodshed and delegitimize us in the international arena,' the official said of Hamas. 'So he cynically used people and hit us from within schools and mosques and inside civilian places. If our army wants to hit back, it has to hurt the civilian population.” --Ethan Bronner, "Parsing,' Jan. 19, 2009 N.Y. Times

Hoffman observes: It's never their fault. Israelis slaughter 400 children and it was all a case of a cynical Hamas hiding behind the children in schools, hospitals and U.N. facilities. Hence, poor little 'Israel' was forced, against its will, to flatten the schools, hospitals, UN buildings and apartment blocs.

Judaics are never guilty for anything, not even for crimes broadcast for all to see. Always they invent a rabbinic loophole to exculpate their guilt. But who besides the most degraded pew-warmer in some Protestant fundamentalist megachurch, believes the Israeli alibi for mass murder?

***

NYTimes admits Israeli policy was to go insane in Gaza

...The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here (in Gaza) is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.

“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.

It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.

The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza...

"Parsing Gains of Gaza War" by Ethan Bronner | N.Y. Times, Jan. 19, 2009

***

Norman Finkelstein: Israel is a Satanic state

American Jewish Professor Norman Finkelstein has heavily criticized Israel over its operation in Gaza. A son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein has been barred from Israel for 10 years and was denied tenure at DePaul University in Chicago because of his critical stance on Israeli policies.

According to Finkelstein, Israel, a state built on the ashes of the Holocaust, is now committing a holocaust against Palestinians in Gaza. In a telephone interview with "Today's Zaman," Finkelstein said Israel was a "terrorist state" created by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. Praising Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish people for their courage in supporting Palestinians, Finkelstein referred to Israel as a  "satanic" and "lunatic" state. Finkelstein's parents survived the Nazi camps in World War II and then immigrated to the US.

After his book “The Holocaust Industry,” in which he accused many prominent Jewish leaders of abusing the victims of the Holocaust, was published, Finkelstein was almost declared persona non grata by America’s influential Zionist circles.

What does Israel want to achieve with this operation?

Basically, Israel wants to achieve two goals: to restore what it calls its deterrence capacity -- that means to spread fear among Arab states about itself. This is a core principle of Israeli strategic doctrine. Arab states have to be afraid of Israel, afraid of its military might, and Arabs should do what Israelis want. They shall follow Israeli orders.

Israel’s military deterrence suffered a setback in May 2000, when Hezbullah succeeded to expel Israeli occupying forces from south Lebanon. Almost immediately in the aftermath of the failure, Israel planned another war with Hezbullah to re-establish its deterrence capacity. In 2006, after long preparation and using its air force, Israel suffered another ignominious defeat in Lebanon against Hezbullah.

The second goal was to defeat the Palestinian peace offensive. This has been another basic principle of Israeli doctrine: You do not negotiate with Arabs. You give them orders. The Palestinian organization Hamas was becoming too moderate; it was transmitting, giving the signal that it was ready to go along with the two-state settlement based on pre-1967 borders. The leadership of Syria and the West Bank have also been making statements like this. So Israel started to get worried that it would be obliged to negotiate a settlement which the international community has been supporting for the last 30 years.

Those who are against this settlement are the US or Israel, backed by the US. So when Hamas was becoming moderate and holding to the cease-fire it agreed in June 2008, it was showing herself to be a credible negotiating partner. Hamas was standing by its word. In the meantime, Israel has neglected another core principle of cease-fire, namely easing the blockade. So Israel had to defeat this Palestinian peace offensive. It always does this. It provokes Palestinians into reacting, and it wants to either destroy Hamas or inflicts so much damage that Hamas will have to say it will never negotiate with Israel. That is exactly what Israel wants. Israel never wants a moderate negotiating partner because if there is one, pressure on Israel will grow. Hamas is willing for a settlement; Hamas stands by its word. But Israel does not want to negotiate.

What you are basically saying is that Israel is not interested in peace at all.

Israel wants peace in its terms, and its terms are that West Bank should belong to their state.

Will the operation be successful?

First of all, we have to use proper language. There is no operation, and there is no war. What is happening is a slaughter, a massacre. When you have 200 to 300 kids killed, that is not a war. When you have a strong military going in against a defenseless population, that is not a war. When you shoot a fish in a barrel, we do not call it a war. As an Israeli columnist put it, it does not need too much courage to send jets and helicopter gunships to shoot inside a prison. What just happened was not a war. One-third of the casualties were children. It was not a war; it was a just a massacre.

In terms of the Israelis’ goals, you have to say it was successful. It inspired fear among Palestinians and Arabs generally that Israel is a lunatic state and that you have to follow its orders. No. 2, it destroys Hamas as a negotiating partner. You now hear from Hamas that it will not negotiate peace. That is what Israel wanted.

On your Web site, there is an argument that the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by the Nazis. Do you agree with that?

I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war. In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.

But do you agree with the characterization?

Look at the pictures and decide for yourself. I am not going to tell people what they should think about it. But what I say is they should look at the pictures and decide for themselves. (For the pictures go to: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2510)

Why have you been barred from entering Israel for 10 years? As the son of Holocaust survivors, you cannot enter Israel.

Let’s be clear on a certain point. I was not entering Israel; I have no interest in going to Israel. I was going to see my friends in the occupied Palestinian territories. And Israel blocked me to go and see my friends in the West Bank. Under international law, I do not think they have any right to do that. I was not posing any security threat to Israel. The day after I was denied entry to Israel, the editorial of "Haaretz" was asking, “Who is afraid of Norman Finkelstein?” They were also saying that I was not a security threat. I do not have any particular interest to go and visit that lunatic state.

There are Jewish intellectuals who now call Israel a “terrorist state.” Is that a correct description?

I am not sure how you cannot agree with that. The goal of the operation was to terrorize the civilian population so that Palestinians would be afraid of Israel. This is the dictionary definition of terrorism. The dictionary definition of terrorism is targeting a civilian population to achieve a political goal. The goal of this operation or rather massacre was to terrorize the civilian population and to wreck and destroy as much civilian infrastructure such that the Palestinians would submit. When you attack schools, mosques, ambulances, hospitals, UN relief organizations, what is that? If this is not terrorism, then what is terrorism?

In your famous book, The Holocaust Industry, you argue that the state of Israel, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, cast itself as a victim state in order to garner immunity to criticism. Have we seen this during the Gaza operation?

They tried to use the Holocaust; it was funny in a very sick way. The leader of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, wrote an article, and he said it is no coincidence that this war in Gaza is occurring around Jan. 27, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day. He wants to pretend some connection. In fact there is a connection, and the connection is Israel is committing a holocaust in Gaza. But that is not the connection he had in mind. He wanted to play the Holocaust card; I think that it is not working very much anymore. It was clear that during this last massacre in Gaza, liberal Jewish public opinion turned against Israel. If you look at the petitions, demonstrations, letters, support to Israel, not only in the international community but also among the Jewish community, is diminishing. So the Holocaust card, the anti-Semitic card, is not working as efficiently as it was working once.

You will probably be called anti-Semitic as well.

I do not think this propaganda is successful anymore.

In your book Beyond Chutzpah, you argue that Israel was created after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but the question whether it was premeditated remains to be answered. If it is premeditated, then can it be called genocide?

Well, it was premeditated, and I think the record is pretty clear. Even Israel’s former minister of foreign affairs, Shlomo Ben-Ami, in his book published several years ago called “Scars of War,” said that it was quite clear that it was a premeditated expulsion in 1948 and it was anchored in the Zionist philosophy of transfer. Ethnic cleansings are ethnic cleansings, and they are war crimes.

Why do you think US media is so one-sided and so pro-Israeli?

I think it has two components. First of all, Israel serves American interests in the region and American media always give a free pass to those states that serve American interests. That is the overall picture and not much different from other parts of the world. The horrendous governments like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, they also get free passes in the American media. This is the larger context.

And there is, of course, the secondary factor, which is the ethnic element. In many of these newspapers and the media in general, there is a large Jewish presence, and there is a sense of Jewish ethnic solidarity, which plays a role. But I think we have to qualify the secondary factor in two ways. We should not lose sight of the primary factor, which is Israel is the client state of US.

No. 2: In this past war, the liberal Jewish population mostly under the age of 40 completely defected from the war, the massacre. They have been opposed to the massacres from the first day.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been very critical of Israel on Gaza, and some American circles lambasted him in return. What do you think about his stance?

I wish he had gone further. I wish he had gone as far as Qatar, Mauritania, Bolivia and Venezuela in breaking diplomatic relations with that lunatic state. But as far as he has gone, the point on which he stands, has been terrific. And I was glad to see Hamas respected the gestures of the Turkish government and said they would be willing to have Turkish troops stationed on “our border.” That is a very high praise for the Turkish government.

Turks are showing Palestinians compassion, decency and justice. All the Turkish people should take pride in this stance, as was the case on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was the Turkish people and government who showed courage. Ninety-six percent of the Turkish people opposed the war in Iraq. The Turkish government refused to give Americans use of their land to attack Iraq. Now Turkish people and the Turkish government are redeeming themselves again by standing on what is right, what is decent and what is just. I say the highest praise for Erdogan and the Turkish people.

How do you feel about Israel’s operation in Gaza personally as the son of Holocaust survivors?

It has been a long time since I felt any emotional connection with the state of Israel, which relentlessly and brutally and inhumanly keeps these vicious, murderous wars. It is a vandal state. There is a Russian writer who once described vandal states as Genghis Khan with a telegraph. Israel is Genghis Khan with a computer. I feel no emotion of affinity with that state. I have some good friends and their families there, and of course I would not want any of them to be hurt. That said, sometimes I feel that Israel has come out of the boils of the hell, a satanic state. Ninety percent of the population continues to cheer, to exalt and feel proud and heroic. They send a Sherman tank to a playground and torch children. Is this heroism? Is this courage?

You were not allowed to teach at DePaul University despite a very good academic record and also had some problems in getting your Ph.D. from Princeton. Why?

Well, I had some problems. I really cannot discuss my problems in the face of what is going on in Gaza. It will be so silly, trivial and stupid. Three hundred or so children -- they were incinerated to death; phosphorus bombs were thrown indiscriminately over Gaza. Everything these people wanted to rebuild was destroyed again. This Israeli state invaded in 1978, again in 1982, again in 1993, again in 1996, again in 2006, and 2008, and it always destroys, destroys and destroys. And then these satanic narcissistic people throw their hands up in the air and ask, “Why doesn’t anybody love us? Why don’t our neighbors want us to be here?” Why would they?

Interviewed by
SELÇUK GÜLTASLI

"Today's Zaman" (Turkey) Jan. 19, 2009

***

Actual purpose of the Israeli invasion of Gaza

Another War, Another Defeat

The Gaza offensive has succeeded in punishing the Palestinians but not in making Israel more secure.

John J. Mearsheimer

University of Chicago

Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win.

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.” What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.

Let’s begin with Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. The conventional wisdom is that Israel was serious about making peace with the Palestinians and that its leaders hoped the exit from Gaza would be a major step toward creating a viable Palestinian state. According to the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman, Israel was giving the Palestinians an opportunity to “build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the Mediterranean,” and if they did so, it would “fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.”

This is pure fiction. Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner where they hate to be.”

Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

In January 2006, five months after the Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing, and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.

To make matters worse, the national unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into Gaza.

Israel rejected that offer and with American backing set out to foment a civil war between Fatah and Hamas that would wreck the national unity government and put Fatah in charge. The plan backfired when Hamas drove Fatah out of Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge there and the more pliant Fatah in control of the West Bank. Israel then tightened the screws on the blockade around Gaza, causing even greater hardship and suffering among the Palestinians living there.

Hamas responded by continuing to fire rockets and mortars into Israel, while emphasizing that they still sought a long-term ceasefire, perhaps lasting ten years or more. This was not a noble gesture on Hamas’s part: they sought a ceasefire because the balance of power heavily favored Israel. The Israelis had no interest in a ceasefire and merely intensified the economic pressure on Gaza. But in the late spring of 2008, pressure from Israelis living under the rocket attacks led the government to agree to a six-month ceasefire starting on June 19. That agreement, which formally ended on Dec. 19, immediately preceded the present war, which began on Dec. 27.

The official Israeli position blames Hamas for undermining the ceasefire. This view is widely accepted in the United States, but it is not true. Israeli leaders disliked the ceasefire from the start, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF to begin preparing for the present war while the ceasefire was being negotiated in June 2008. Furthermore, Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, reports that Jerusalem began to prepare the propaganda campaign to sell the present war months before the conflict began. For its part, Hamas drastically reduced the number of missile attacks during the first five months of the ceasefire. A total of two rockets were fired into Israel during September and October, none by Hamas.

How did Israel behave during this same period? It continued arresting and assassinating Palestinians on the West Bank, and it continued the deadly blockade that was slowly strangling Gaza. Then on Nov. 4, as Americans voted for a new president, Israel attacked a tunnel inside Gaza and killed six Palestinians. It was the first major violation of the ceasefire, and the Palestinians—who had been “careful to maintain the ceasefire,” according to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center—responded by resuming rocket attacks. The calm that had prevailed since June vanished as Israel ratcheted up the blockade and its attacks into Gaza and the Palestinians hurled more rockets at Israel. It is worth noting that not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian missiles between Nov. 4 and the launching of the war on Dec. 27.

As the violence increased, Hamas made clear that it had no interest in extending the ceasefire beyond Dec. 19, which is hardly surprising, since it had not worked as intended. In mid-December, however, Hamas informed Israel that it was still willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire if it included an end to the arrests and assassinations as well as the lifting of the blockade. But the Israelis, having used the ceasefire to prepare for war against Hamas, rejected this overture. The bombing of Gaza commenced eight days after the failed ceasefire formally ended.

If Israel wanted to stop missile attacks from Gaza, it could have done so by arranging a long-term ceasefire with Hamas. And if Israel were genuinely interested in creating a viable Palestinian state, it could have worked with the national unity government to implement a meaningful ceasefire and change Hamas’s thinking about a two-state solution. But Israel has a different agenda: it is determined to employ the Iron Wall strategy to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless subjects of a Greater Israel.

This brutal policy is clearly reflected in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War. Israel and its supporters claim that the IDF is going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, in some cases taking risks that put Israeli soldiers in jeopardy. Hardly. One reason to doubt these claims is that Israel refuses to allow reporters into the war zone: it does not want the world to see what its soldiers and bombs are doing inside Gaza. At the same time, Israel has launched a massive propaganda campaign to put a positive spin on the horror stories that do emerge.

The best evidence, however, that Israel is deliberately seeking to punish the broader population in Gaza is the death and destruction the IDF has wrought on that small piece of real estate. Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 4,000. Over half of the casualties are civilians, and many are children. The IDF’s opening salvo on Dec. 27 took place as children were leaving school, and one of its primary targets that day was a large group of graduating police cadets, who hardly qualified as terrorists. In what Ehud Barak called “an all-out war against Hamas,” Israel has targeted a university, schools, mosques, homes, apartment buildings, government offices, and even ambulances. A senior Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, explained the logic behind Israel’s expansive target set: “There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel.” In other words, everyone is a terrorist and everything is a legitimate target.

Israelis tend to be blunt, and they occasionally say what they are really doing. After the IDF killed 40 Palestinian civilians in a UN school on Jan. 6, Ha’aretz reported that “senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.” One officer explained, “For us, being cautious means being aggressive. From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock.”

One might accept that Israel is waging “a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians,” as Ha’aretz put it in an editorial, but argue that it will eventually achieve its war aims and the rest of the world will quickly forget the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza.

This is wishful thinking. For starters, Israel is unlikely to stop the rocket fire for any appreciable period of time unless it agrees to open Gaza’s borders and stop arresting and killing Palestinians. Israelis talk about cutting off the supply of rockets and mortars into Gaza, but weapons will continue to come in via secret tunnels and ships that sneak through Israel’s naval blockade. It will also be impossible to police all of the goods sent into Gaza through legitimate channels.

Israel could try to conquer all of Gaza and lock the place down. That would probably stop the rocket attacks if Israel deployed a large enough force. But then the IDF would be bogged down in a costly occupation against a deeply hostile population. They would eventually have to leave, and the rocket fire would resume. And if Israel fails to stop the rocket fire and keep it stopped, as seems likely, its deterrent will be diminished, not strengthened.

More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger.

But even if the unexpected happens and the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will become an apartheid state. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said, Israel will “face a South African-style struggle” if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own. “As soon as that happens,” he argued, “the state of Israel is finished.” Yet Olmert has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and create a viable Palestinian state, relying instead on the Iron Wall strategy to deal with the Palestinians.

There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term future at risk.

Emphases supplied

The American Conservative | Jan. 26, 2009

***

Let's lift a glass to Eddie today...

On the occasion of his 200th birthday

Edgar A. Poe, born Jan. 19, 1809

"that strange Southern saturnine solitary...whom the Devil and Dame Chance bred in America...the progenitor of half a dozen...literatures" (he invented the detective story, wrote the first science fiction story)...The New Englanders gave us sneers about Poe, and they themselves are now merely a convention that will die when the last New Englander has disappeared before the Celt and the Calabrian.

"...their only protest against the Poe notion of 'art for beauty's sake' had been the publishing of a periodical strictly for the dollar's sake...

"Sometimes, like Arlo Bates, they admitted Poe's failings with pious regrets...a halo of inebriety often encircles his head...Rum, riot and rhyme...there has been no other in America, drunk or sober, so single in devotion to art, so careless of money, so entirely honest in his literature...Poe was entirely, without greed or selfishness, a man of letters...art was not the slave of commerce then that it is now. ...Poe was a critic, not a press agent; there are only press agents today. Read Poe's critical chapters and then find why they hated him...

"Let us not be hyprocrites. We pretend, some of us, that if Poe lived today he would not have had so bad a time. We lie; he would have worse..."

"What Literature Owes to Edgar Allan Poe"
Percival Pollard
New York Times, Jan. 10, 1909

***

Thirteen Editorial Rules for Middle East Reporting

1) In the Middle East it is always the Arabs who attack first and always Israel that is defending themselves. This defense is called a reprisal.

2) The Arabs, Palestinian or Lebanese have no right to kill civilians. That is called “terrorism.”

3) Israel has the right to kill civilians. That is called “legitimate defense.”

4) When Israel kills civilians en masse, the western powers claim that it is more measured. This is called “reaction of the international community.”

5) The Palestinians and the Lebanese have no right to capture soldiers of Israel inside military installations with sentries and combat posts. This is called, “Kidnapping of defenseless people.”

6) Israel has the right to kidnap anytime and anywhere as many Lebanese and Palestinians as they want. Currently there are more than 10 thousand, 300 of whom are children and a thousand are women. No proof of guilt is needed. Israel has the right to keep kidnapped prisoners indefinitely, even if they are authorities democratically elected by the Palestinians. This is called “terrorist prisoners.”

7) When the word Hezbollah is mentioned, it is compulsory in the same sentence to contain the words “supported and financed by Syria and by Iran.”

8) When the word "assassination" is mentioned, it is compulsory to say in the same sentence, "Syria's role in an assassination in Lebanon in 2005," and never mention Israel's role in the assassination of Elie Hobeika in Lebanon in 2002 (shortly before Hobeika was to testify in Belgium concerning Ariel Sharon's war crimes).

9) When you mention “Israel” it is forbidden to make any mention of the words “supported and financed by the U.S.” This may give the impression that the conflict is uneven and that Israel’s existence is not in danger.

10) When referring to Israel, expressions that are prohibited: “Occupied Territories,” “UN resolutions,” “Violations of human rights” or “Geneva Convention.”

11) Both the Palestinians and the Lebanese are always “cowardly,” they are hidden among the civilian population, which does not want them. If they sleep in their homes and live with their families, they are using "human shields." Israel has a right to destroy with bombs and missiles the homes, apartment blocs and neighborhoods where they are sleeping. This is called a “precision surgical operation.”

12 The Israelis speak better English, French, Spanish or Portuguese than the Arabs. Therefore they and those who support them must be interviewed more and have more opportunities than the Arabs to explain the present Rules of the Editorial Staff (from 1 to 11) to the general public. That is called “journalistic neutrality.”

13) All those who are not in accordance with the preceding editorial rules are “highly dangerous anti-Semitic bigots and terrorist sympathizers."

***

Inside the Israeli terror arsenal

Is Israel using illegal weapons in its offensive on Gaza?

By Amira Hass

Haaretz, Jan. 16, 2009

The earth shaking under your feet, clouds of choking smoke, explosions like a fireworks display, bombs bursting into all-consuming flames that cannot be extinguished with water, mushroom clouds of pinkish-red smoke, suffocating gas, harsh burns on the skin, extraordinary maimed live and dead bodies.

All of this is being caused by the bombs Israel is dropping on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, according to reports and testimonies from there. Since the first day of the Israeli aerial attack, people have been giving exact descriptions of the side effects of the bombing, and claiming that Israel is using weapons and ammunition that they have not seen during the past eight years.

Furthermore, the kinds of grave injuries doctors at hospitals in the Strip have reported are providing yet another explanation for the overwhelming dread inhabitants are experiencing in any case.

It is precisely for this reason that Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW), has come to Israel. His mission: to examine whether the weapons that both sides are using are themselves legal and whether the use of them is legal.

The American-born Garlasco has not been permitted to enter Gaza - as is also the case with people from other human rights organizations and foreign journalists. Therefore, he says, since he is unable to examine actual remnants of the explosives and see the wreckage with his own eyes, he can only guess or make assumptions in some cases. But even from afar, he has no doubt: Israel is using white phosphorus bombs. That was immediately clear to him while he stood last week on a hill facing the Gaza Strip and observed the Israel Defense Forces' bombings for several hours.

Last Saturday HRW hastened to publish a call to Israel to "stop unlawful use of white phosphorus in Gaza." The use of white phosphorus is permitted on the battlefield, explains Garlasco, but the side effects on humans and the environment are severe and highly dangerous. The statement notes that the "potential for harm to civilians is magnified by Gaza's high population density, among the highest in the world."

The fireworks-like explosions, the thick smoke, suffocating gas, and flames that are not extinguished by water, but rather are heightened by it - all of these are characteristic of the white phosphorus bombs the IDF is using. Garlasco believes the decision to make such extensive use of these bombs, manufactured by America's General Dynamics Corporation, stems from conclusions drawn from the Second Lebanon War, in which the IDF lost many tanks.

"The phosphorus bombs create a thick smokescreen and if Hamas has an anti-tank rocket, the smoke prevents the rocket from tracking the tank," he explains. There are two ways to use the bombs: The first is to impact them on the ground, in which case the resulting thick smokescreen covers a limited area; the second way is an airburst of a bomb, which contains 116 wafers doused in phosphorus. 

The moment the bomb blows up and the phosphorus comes in contact with oxygen - it ignites. This is what creates the "fireworks" and billows of jellyfish-shaped smoke. The fallout covers a wide area and the danger of fires and harm to civilians is enormous. The phosphorus burns glass, and immediately ignites paper, trees, wood - anything that is dry. The burning wafers causes terrible injury to anyone who comes in contact with them. The irony is that tear gas is included in the Chemical Weapons Convention and is subject to all kinds of restrictions, whereas phosphorus is not.

And in the meantime, in the hospitals in Gaza there are people lying in beds - among them many children - whose severe injuries and burns have appalled the medical teams.

Missing the target

Another new weapon that has forced itself upon Gazans is the GPS-guided mortar - a system equipped with satellite navigation, developed in Israel in late 2006-early 2007, in the wake of the Second Lebanon War. According to local military sources, it was this kind of mortar that missed its target by 30 meters and erroneously hit a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school last week; according to the UN report, 30 people were killed immediately and others died later of their injuries. "It really boggles my mind," Garlasco comments. "According to the literature, it has 3 meters' error - not 30." It is a mortar that is launched in an arc toward an unseen target, he explains, with the intention of being precise and to some extent minimize civilian casualties.

Garlasco says this is the first time the weapon has been used in any military conflict: "The Palestinians say, 'Oh, they use it on us, experiment with it for the Americans.' Experimenting has a different meaning for Americans. We think animal experimenting, but it is indeed a field test."

The new mortar was developed jointly by the Israeli weapons industry and a private American company called Alliant. Israel, notes Garlasco, has learned a lot from the wars the U.S. is waging in Afghanistan and Iraq, but above all learned from its own war in Lebanon in 2006. The mortar that was not supposed to have landed on the school was developed with the knowledge that troops "are fighting an enemy that is in a densely populated area, and here is the first time they use it."

Another important lesson Israel learned from the Lebanon war is that it cannot rely entirely on the U.S. to provide weapons. During that war, when the IDF ran out of cluster bombs, Israel asked for an emergency shipment of 1,200 such munitions (each containing 644 bomblets). The United States refused, and at that point, Garlasco notes, Israel realized it could not rely solely on American help in this realm.

Therefore, Israel has, for example, developed a new type of rifle, the (Tavor) TAR-21 ("an incredible weapon," says Garlasco; he can't help being complimentary) to take the place of the U.S.-made M-16. It has also invented the Delilah guided missile, but Garlasco does not know whether it has been used in Gaza. But not to worry, he adds: Despite the cluster bombs and independent Israeli development, Israel and the United States "still have a great relationship. By and large, the weaponry that Israel is using is American."

Not all of the weapons are new and innovative. Most, in fact, are American products developed during the Cold War. The artillery and incendiary weapons in Israel's possession were designed to destroy Russian tanks "and not Palestinian homes," he notes. The weapons being produced now are developed in the knowledge that the target is militants who operate from within a civilian population. Yet, much of the killing and destruction in Gaza are the result of old-fashioned, cheaper and less-sophisticated weapons.

Only last September did the United States grant Israel's request to supply it with 1,000 bombs of a new type, the GBU-39. They arrived at the beginning of December, and inhabitants of Rafah have witnessed their use - without knowing what they were - since the first day of the aerial attacks on the tunnels there. (The Jerusalem Post was the first to identify these as GBU-39s.) Gazans were surprised when they did not hear an explosion immediately after the Israeli aircraft fired; instead, the earth shook beneath their feet.

The manufacturer of the GBU-39 is the Boeing Corporation. The small diameter and light weight of these guided bombs ensure that any fighter plane can carry a large number of them and thus increase the number of attacks in every sortie. Garlasco says that the weapon is very accurate and penetrates deep into the earth. It is also designed to minimize collateral damage, since it does not explode over a large area like other bombs do. But other types of bombs are also being used and are destroying houses along the border with Egypt.

Gazans have noticed that there are bombs that produce mushroom clouds in various shades of red. Here, Garlasco admits, "I can only speculate. It looks like Israel is maybe using a new weapon that it was not using before: DIME - the dense inert metal explosive, consisting of 25 percent TNT and 75 percent tungsten, a heavy metal. You mix the two, in a fine grain, like pepper, and when the bomb hits the ground it aerosolizes. In less than a second, the mist dissipates and explodes."

He says the advantage of DIME is that "it strikes a very small area, 10 to 20 meters, and the fire it ignites burns out very quickly; if it hits us now, we will die, but no one around us will be hurt. The problem is that when you are killed - you are ripped to shreds and there is nothing left." Indeed, the injuries DIME causes are in general more severe than those caused by a "regular" bomb.

A paramedic at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Jabalya refugee camp has told the Palestinian Center for Human Rights that about 90 percent of the wounded he has rescued during the past few weeks were brought in with at least one limb missing. Is it the DIME that is causing the severe injuries being reported by the medical staff? Garlasco says there are "only rumors. No one has ever seen it used before, maybe it is being used now, but with Israel not letting in journalists and human rights organizations, these rumors are growing, and people say that Israeli is using terrible new weapons."

Perhaps, he says, the redness is a result of the metal in the explosives, but it will only be possible to ascertain this if experts are allowed into the Gaza Strip, or they talk to the IDF. Garlasco notes that herein lies the big difference between the Israeli army and the American army: As a worker for a human rights organization, he receives daily e-mails from the U.S. Air Force with a detailed report of the bombs it has dropped in Afghanistan and Iraq. "The Israelis would never do that," he explains. "They would never talk about what weapons they use and will never allow any discussion in society of whether the weapons should be used."

Another new weapon that he believes is now in use is the Spike: "It is very new, [from] 2005-2006, a special missile that is made to make very high-speed turns, so if you have a target that is moving and running away from you, you can chase him with the weapon. It was developed by the U.S. Navy jointly with Rafael [the Israel Armament Development Authority]. Rafael is the manufacturer."

Drones, incidentally, are a totally Israeli product, he notes; Israel is the world leader in this field, and America is learning a lot from it. The warships bombing Gaza are also Israeli made. But the cannons on the ships are Italian, produced by the Oto Melera company.

From his frustrating observation point outside Gaza, and on the basis of Israel's "very bad record of using cluster bombs in Lebanon and selling them to Georgia," Garlasco says he is worried that Israel is also now using the APAM (Anti Personnel/Anti Materiel) - a new type of round, or unit of ammunition, for tanks that was developed after Lebanon, each of which contains six cluster bombs. The tank guns aim above a target that is hiding behind some kind of cover and the ammunition explodes above people's heads - like those of Iz al-Din al-Qassam cells, for example, when they are firing rockets.

The other side

Garlasco and Human Rights Watch also examine the other side, and he says, "We believe that the Grad and Qassam are illegal weapons because they are not accurate enough to be used in this situation." He adds that Hamas makes frequent use of land mines and explosive charges that are liable to injure civilians.

However, because he and his fellow experts can't go into Gaza, "We don't know what the extent of any [Palestinian] civilian casualties is because of Hamas - whether they are shooting soldiers and their bullets end up killing civilians, or whether their anti-tank missiles miss an Israeli tank and hit a house. We don't know."

In 2005, Garlasco met with a political representative of Hamas and told him that use of Grads is a contravention of the Geneva Convention. The reply he got from the Hamas man was: "'All Israelis are military.' And I explained to them that their reading of international law is wrong." It is amazing, he adds, that the Palestinians can manufacture the Qassams under the conditions in Gaza. The Grad, however, "is a real military weapon, three meters long. It has a significant warhead. The problem is that it is designed to be fired in mass, to be fired 21 rockets at a time, so that you are covering an area and you are having a shock effect. You don't only have an explosion, but also a shock and it covers a big area. Shooting one at a time is almost useless from a military perspective."

As for the Israeli claim about weapons and ammunition being hidden in public buildings such as mosques, Garlasco reiterates that only independent sources will be able to examine this claim and clarify its veracity. If the mosques blown up in the heart of densely populated residential neighborhoods indeed served as hiding places for weapons and ammunition, he would expect to see many secondary explosions, which would have caused significant collateral damage and deep craters. It is difficult to analyze the Israeli claims on the basis of photographs, he notes.

Garlasco is not prepared to accept without question the Israeli claim that Hamas hides behind civilians and makes use of civilians. "Israelis are very quick to say they are doing it, but very short on proof. By keeping the independent people out, they leave doubt in people's minds." Furthermore, he believes, Israel has a record of not telling the truth: "They said in Lebanon they did not use cluster bombs. We found 4 million. They evade answering that they use phosphorus, and we stand there every day watching. They claim to have bombed a truck full of Grad missiles, and according to witnesses who spoke with Haaretz, it turned out to be a truck with oxygen tanks. Not everything that is long is a missile. How can anyone trust the Israeli military?'"

The IDF Spokesman responds: "The IDF is fighting the terror elements while meticulously observing the rules of engagement under international law. For understandable operational reasons, the IDF will not relate to a detailing of the materiel that is in its possession and the parameters in which it used. It should be emphasized, however, that the IDF uses only methods and materiel that are permitted under international law."

***

U.S. Promotes Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians

By Professor Francis A. Boyle

(Excerpted from Tackling America’s Toughest Questions)

As long ago as October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian people, most of whom are Muslims. The reader has a general idea of what a war crime is, so I am not going to elaborate upon that term here. 

But there are different degrees of heinousness for war crimes. In particular are the more serious war crimes denominated “grave breaches” of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987, the world has seen those heinous war crimes inflicted every day by Israel against the Palestinian people living in occupied Palestine: e.g., willful killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army and by Israel’s illegal paramilitary settlers. These Israeli “grave breaches” of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandate universal prosecution for the perpetrators and their commanders, whether military or civilian, including and especially Israel’s political leaders.

But I want to focus for a moment on Israel’s “crimes against humanity” against the Palestinian people—as determined by the U.N. Human Rights Commission itself, set up pursuant to the requirements of the United Nations Charter. What are “crimes against humanity”? 

This concept goes all the way back to the Nuremberg Charter of 1945 for the trial of the major Nazi war criminals in Europe. In the Nuremberg Charter of 1945, drafted by the United States Government, there was created and inserted a new type of international crime specifically intended to deal with the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people:

Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The paradigmatic example of “crimes against humanity” is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people. This is where the concept of “crimes against humanity” came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission determined that Israel is currently doing to the Palestinian people: crimes against humanity. 

Expressed in legal terms, this is just like what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews. That is the significance of the formal determination by the U.N. Human Rights Commission that Israel has inflicted “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian people. The Commission chose this well-known and long-standing legal term of art quite carefully and deliberately based upon the evidence it had compiled.

Furthermore, the Nuremberg “crimes against humanity” are the historical and legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The theory here was that what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people was so horrific that it required a special international treaty that would codify and universalize the Nuremberg concept of “crimes against humanity.” And that treaty ultimately became the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide in relevant part as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the very foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and is ongoing and even intensifying against the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza. Zionism’s “final solution” to Israel’s much touted “demographic threat” allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always been genocide.

Certainly, Israel and its predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs—have committed genocide against the Palestinian people that actually started on or about 1948 and has continued apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Articles II(a), (b), and (c). For at least the past six decades, the Israeli government and its predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs—have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, and economic campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) group constituting the Palestinian people. 

This Zionist/Israeli campaign has consisted of killing members of the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also deliberately inflicted on the Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part in violation of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention.

Article I of the Genocide Convention requires all contracting parties such as the United States “to prevent and to punish” genocide. Yet to the contrary, historically the “Jewish” state’s criminal conduct against the Palestinians has been financed, armed, equipped, supplied and politically supported by the “Christian” United States. A

lthough the United States is a founding sponsor of, and a contracting party to, both the Nuremberg Charter and the Genocide Convention, as well as the United Nations Charter, these legal facts have never made any difference to the United States when it comes to its blank-check support for Israel and their joint and severable criminal mistreatment of the Palestinians—truly the wretched of the earth!

The world has not yet heard even one word uttered by the United States and its NATO allies in favor of “humanitarian intervention” against Israel in order to protect the Palestinian people, let alone a “responsibility to protect” the Palestinians from Zionist/Israeli genocide. The United States, its NATO allies, and the Great Powers on the U.N. Security Council would not even dispatch a U.N. Charter Chapter 6 monitoring force to help protect the Palestinians, let alone even contemplate any type of U.N. Charter Chapter 7 enforcement actions against Israel – shudder the thought!

The doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” so readily espoused elsewhere when U.S. foreign policy goals are allegedly at stake has been clearly proved to be a joke and a fraud when it comes to stopping the ongoing and accelerating Israeli campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

Rather than rein in the Israelis—which would be possible just by turning off the funding pipeline—the United States government, the U.S. Congress, and U.S. taxpayers instead support the “Jewish” state to the tune of about 4 billion dollars per year, without whose munificence this instance of genocide – and indeed conceivably the State of Israel itself – would not be possible. What the world witnesses here is (yet another) case of “dishumanitarian intervention” or “humanitarian extermination” by the United States and Israel against the Palestinians and Palestine. In today’s world genocide pays so long as it is done at the behest of the United States and its de jure or de facto allies such as Israel.

Of course miracles can always happen. But I anticipate no fundamental change in America’s support for the Israeli campaign of genocide against the Palestinians during the tenure of the Obama/Clinton administration.

Boyle is Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois

***

Democrat Controlled Congress Supports Israeli war crimes

In a direct challenge to the credibility of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Red Cross and other reputable humanitarian organizations, an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress has gone on record supporting President George W. Bush's position that the Israeli armed forces bear no responsibility for the large and growing numbers of civilian casualties from their assault on the Gaza Strip.

...Shattering hopes that an expanded Democratic congressional majority and a new Democratic administration might lead to a more moderate foreign policy, the resolutions put forward an extreme reinterpretation of international humanitarian law, apparently designed to exonerate nations with superior firepower from any liability for inflicting large-scale civilian casualties.

The Senate resolution, primarily written and sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., passed the Senate by unanimous consent on a voice vote. Among the 33 co-sponsors were such otherwise liberal Democratic senators as Barbara Boxer, Calif,; Richard Durbin, Ill,; Carl Levin, Mich.; Sherrod Brown, Ohio; Barbara Mikulski, Md.; and 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry, Mass.

An even stronger House resolution, sponsored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., passed the House by a lopsided 390-5 roll call vote (with 22 members voting "present"). Both resolutions placed the blame for the death and destruction exclusively on the Palestinian side and are being widely interpreted as a rebuke to the international human rights community and the United Nations, which have cited both Hamas and the Israeli government for war crimes.

The resolutions favorably quote Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice extensively, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, regarding responsibility for civilian deaths and for the causes of the conflict. No one else is cited in the resolutions, indicating who Pelosi, Reid and the resolutions' other sponsors see as the authoritative sources of information on international humanitarian law in the region.

Although some analysts are already referring to the Gaza war as "a final and eloquent testimony to the complete failure of the neoconservative movement in United States foreign policy," Pelosi, Reid and virtually the entire Democratic membership of Congress have decided to ally themselves with this failed ideology of the outgoing Bush administration rather than blaze a new trail of moderation and common sense in anticipation of new leadership in the White House. Indeed, Pelosi's and Reid's strategy in pushing through these resolutions may have been part of an attempt to box in Obama -- to force him to continue Bush's hard-right foreign policy. That is, a policy in which, in the name of the "war on terror," fundamental principles of international law are deemed to be expendable.

To the Right of Bush

Some of the language in the resolution put forward by Pelosi, Reid and their colleagues even place the Democratic Party to the right of the Bush administration. For example, while the Jan. 8 U.N. Security Council resolution -- which received the endorsement of Rice and other administration officials -- condemns "all acts of violence and terror directed against civilians," the congressional resolution only condemns the violence and terror of Hamas.

Indeed, just as the Security Council unanimously passed its resolution stressing "the urgency of and calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza," Congress immediately weighed in with language apparently designed to prevent one. The Senate and House resolutions called for a cease-fire only on the condition that it "prevents Hamas from retaining or rebuilding the capability to launch rockets and mortars against Israel." Given that most of these rockets and mortars are of a rather crude design that can be made in local machine shops from scrap metal and other easily obtainable materials, and is therefore the kind of capability that can not really be completely eliminated, it appears that this clause would make a cease-fire impossible. Emboldened by this strong bipartisan support from the legislative branch of its most important ally, Israel rejected the U.N.'s terms for a cease-fire.

Also on Jan. 8, Israeli forces killed two U.N. humanitarian aid workers as they were attempting to provide relief supplies, and the International Red Cross released a strongly worded statement noting that the Israeli military had "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded." The Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders noted that "Palestinian humanitarian aid and health workers have been killed, and hospitals and ambulances have been bombed." Congress, however, went on record in the resolutions praising Israel for having "facilitated humanitarian aid to Gaza."

Both resolutions "hold Hamas responsible for breaking the cease-fire," despite the fact that there had been scores of minor violations during the months of the cease-fire by both sides and that Israel had launched a major incursion into the Gaza Strip on Nov. 4, 2008, assassinating several Hamas leaders, an action the Israeli press speculated was designed to provoke Hamas into not renewing the cease-fire when it expired the following month. Israel then tightened its siege on Nov. 5, banning even humanitarian aid from coming through. Hamas appeared willing to renew the cease-fire in return for Israel renouncing further such incursions and lifting the siege, but Israel refused.

While these Israeli provocations do not justify Hamas' failure to renew the cease-fire and certainly not Hamas' decision to once again begin firing rockets into civilian-populated areas of Israel -- which is a war crime -- the language of the resolutions gives a very misleading understanding of the events leading up to the war. Ironically, despite blaming Hamas exclusively for not renewing the cease-fire, the resolutions also claim that returning to the terms of that cease-fire agreement "is unacceptable." Yet these were by no means the most egregious misrepresentations in these Democratic-led congressional initiatives.

Redefining International Humanitarian Law

In perhaps the most dangerous clause of the resolution, the House called "on all nations … to condemn Hamas for deliberately embedding its fighters, leaders and weapons in private homes, schools, mosques, hospitals and otherwise using Palestinian civilians as human shields."

According to international humanitarian law, however, "human shields" require the deliberate use of civilians as a deterrent to avoid attack on one's troops or military objects. Despite repeated calls to the offices of the resolutions' principal Democratic sponsors, not one of them could provide a single example of this actually occurring during the current wave of fighting. Similar accusations in a 2006 resolution supported by Pelosi, Reid and other Democratic leaders during the five weeks of devastating Israeli attacks on Lebanon that summer were later systematically rebuked in a detailed and meticulously researched 249-page report by Human Rights Watch.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/119252/virtually_the_entire_dem-controlled_congress_supports_israel%27s_war_crimes_in_gaza/?page=entire

***

NY Times war cheerleader urges pain for Gaza civilians

Tom Friedman offers a perfect definition of "terrorism"

The New York Times war cheerleader urges that Hamas be "educated" by "inflicting heavy pain on the Gaza population"

By Glenn Greenwald Jan. 14, 2009 

Thomas Friedman, one of the nation's leading propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel's wars, has a column in the Jan. 14 New York Times explaining and praising the Israeli attack on Gaza. For the sake of robust and diverse debate (for which our Liberal Media is so well known), Friedman's column today appears alongside an Op-Ed from The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the nation's leading (and most deceitful) propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel's wars, who explains that Hamas is incorrigibly hateful and radical and cannot be negotiated with. 

One can hardly imagine a more compelling exhibit demonstrating the complete lack of accountability in the "journalism" profession -- at least for those who are loyal establishment spokespeople who reflexively cheer on wars -- than a leading Op-Ed page presenting these two war advocates, of all people, as experts, of all things, on the joys and glories of the latest Middle East war. In any event, Friedman's column today is uncharacteristically and refreshingly honest. He explains that the 2006 Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon was, contrary to conventional wisdom, a great success. To make this case, Friedman acknowledges that the deaths of innocent Lebanese civilians was not an unfortunate and undesirable by-product of that war, but rather, was a vital aspect of the Israeli strategy -- the centerpiece, actually, of teaching Lebanese civilians a lesson they would not soon forget:

"Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

"Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: 'What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”

Friedman says that he is "unsure" whether the current Israeli attack on Gaza is similiarly designed to teach Palestinians the same lesson by inflicting "heavy pain" on civilians, but he hopes it is:

"In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims."

The war strategy which Friedman is heralding -- what he explicitly describes with euphemism-free candor as "exacting enough pain on civilians" in order to teach them a lesson -- is about as definitive of a war crime as it gets. It also happens to be the classic, textbook definition of "terrorism." Here is how the U.S. Department of State defined "terrorism" in its 2001 publication, Patterns of Global Terrorism:

"No one definition of terrorism has gained universal acceptance. For the purposes of this report, however, we have chosen the definition of terrorism contained in Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d). That statute contains the following definitions:

"The term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant (1) targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. . . .

"(1) For purposes of this definition, the term 'noncombatant' is interpreted to include, in addition to civilians, military personnel who at the time of the incident are unarmed and/or not on duty."

Other than the fact that Friedman is advocating these actions for an actual state rather than a "subnational group," can anyone identify any differences between (a) what Friedman approvingly claims was done to the Lebanese and what he advocates be done to Palestinians and (b) what the State Department formally defines as "terrorism"? I doubt anyone can. Isn't Friedman's "logic" exactly the rationale used by Al Qaeda: we're going to inflict "civilian pain" on Americans so that they stop supporting their government's domination of our land and so their government thinks twice about bombing more Muslim countries? It's also exactly the same "logic" that fuels the rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas into Israel.

It should be emphasized that the mere fact that Tom Friedman claims that this is Israel's motivation isn't proof that it is. The sociopathic lust of a single war cheerleader can't fairly be projected onto those who are actually prosecuting the war. But one can't help noticing that this "teach-them-a-lesson" justification for civilian deaths in Gaza appears with some frequency among its advocates, at least among a certain strain of super-warrior, Israel-centric Americans -- e.g.: Marty "do not f**k with the Jews" Peretz and Michael "to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause" Goldfarb -- who love to cheer on Middle East wars from a safe and sheltered distance.

Some opponents of the Israeli war actually agree with Friedman about the likely goals of the attack on Gaza. Writing last week in The New York Times, Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi noted: "This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about 'restoring Israel’s deterrence,' as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: 'The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

This AP article of Jan. 13 described how "terrified residents ran for cover Tuesday in a densely populated neighborhood of Gaza City as Israeli troops backed by tanks thrust deeper into the city." It reported that "an Israeli warplane fired a missile at the former Gaza city hall, used as a court building in recent years . . . . The 1910 structure was destroyed and many stores in the market around it were badly damaged." And it quoted an Israeli military officer as follows: "Soldiers shoot at anything suspicious, use lots of firepower, and blast holes through walls to move around."

...One might ordinarily find it surprising that our elite opinion-makers are so openly and explicitly advocating war crimes and terrorism ("inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large" and "'educate' Hamas by inflicting heavy pain on the Gaza population"). 

But when one considers that most of this, in the U.S., is coming from the very people who applied the same "suck-on-this" reasoning to justify the destruction of Iraq, and even more so, when one considers that our highest political officials are now so openly -- even proudly -- acknowledging their own war crimes, while our political and media elites desperately (and almost unanimously) engage in every possible maneuver to protect them from any consequences from that, Friedman's explicit advocacy of these sorts of things is a perfectly natural thing to see.

...UPDATE...for an American citizen to criticize Israel's wars without criticizing every similar or worse act of aggression is not to "hold Israel to a higher or different standard." The U.S. Government funds Israel's actions, specifically provides the arms for their various bombing campaigns and invasions, and continuously uses its U.N. veto power to protect what Israel does. American citizens therefore bear a responsibility for Israel's actions that is not the case for actions which the U.S. Government does not fund and otherwise enable.

This objection ("why are you complaining about Israel but not the rebels in Sri Lanka?") rests on the same fallacy as the accusation that American citizens are being "anti-American" when they criticize the actions of their own government more than the actions of other governments ("Why are you complaining that Bush waterboards when North Korea starves its citizens to death and Iran stones gay people?"). Citizens bear a particular responsibility to object to unjust actions which their own Government engages in or enables. It shouldn't be the case -- but it is -- that Americans fund, arm and enable Israel's wars. Those are American weapons which, at least in part, are being used to destroy Gaza, and Americans therefore bear a special responsibility for condemning Israel's unjust actions to a far greater extent than the actions of any other country except for the U.S.

 Meanwhile, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting -- in an item entitled "Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page" -- examines Friedman's history of making similar statements, and raises this question: is it even possible to imagine an Op-Ed or column being published by a major newspaper that enthusiastically trumpeted all of the great strategic benefits that would accrue to Muslims from the violent deaths of large numbers of Israeli civilians, the way Friedman today did with regard to the deaths of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians?

-- Glenn Greenwald (emphasis supplied)

Friedman advocated the same sort of terror against Serbian Christian civilians, writing in the NY Times (April 6, 1999) that "people tend to change their minds and adjust their goals as they see the price they are paying mount. Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around. Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance" (emphasis supplied).

***

Photos of the Israeli holocaust in the Gaza ghetto

Jan. 15, 2009: an Israeli terror-bombing of a United Nations agency in Gaza City destroyed a warehouse full of hundreds of tons of food and medicine and came a week after  40 children were killed when Israeli terrorists bombed a United Nations school.

"Israeli officials, including Mr. Olmert, on Thursday justified the attack on the refugee agency headquarters, saying that Hamas militants had fired at Israeli forces from within the compound. United Nations officials vehemently denied the allegations. Mr. Ging, as he often has during the war, denounced Israel in extended televised interviews, and he questioned why Israeli liaison officers had never mentioned Hamas activity in the area, even though he said they were in constant contact...Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said that in a meeting with its representatives on Thursday, Israeli Army officials 'privately admitted' that the source of the militants' fire was several hundred yards away from the compound. 'With every false allegation, the credibility of those accusing us is incrementally diminished," Mr. Gunness said." Source: NY Times

Israeli terror bomb explodes in Gaza

Young Palestinians view the rubble of their neighborhood in the aftermath of a bombing by Israeli terrorists

Another view of a Palestinian neighborhood destroyed by the Master Race

World Court Claims It Has No Jurisdiction Over Gaza War Crimes

Prosecutor Insists Nothing Can Be Done With Calls for Investigation

by Jason Ditz | January 14, 2009

The International Criminal Court (ICC) declared today that it has no jurisdiction over the actions of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, meaning that the growing number of calls by humanitarian organizations to investigate Israeli activities in the Gaza Strip cannot lead to any action by the Hague-based court.

Israel has been accused of a myriad of activities which the court would classify as war crimes, but as Israel signed but never ratified the ICC’s Rome Statute and the Gaza Strip is not considered a “nation” by the court, the actions of Israeli citizens, or indeed anyone else not a national of a signatory nation, would ostensibly not fall under their jurisdiction.

Yet last year, the ICC did claim jurisdiction over Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and filed genocide charges against him even though Sudan, like Israel, was a signatory of the Rome Statute that never ratified it. Bashir argued, more or less successfully so far, against the court having jurisdiction over him, but the fact that he was charged and the court won’t even consider investigating Israel’s actions is bound to lead to accusations of a double standard.

Though Israel has in the past expressed “deep sympathy” for the goals of the court, it objected to the contents of some of the laws, in particular defining “the transfer of parts of the civilian population of an occupying power into occupied territory” as a war crime.

***

Ghost of Bin Laden summoned to Gaza

It has been reported that the tortured and brainwashed "accused masterminds" of the 9/11 terror attacks will go on trial at Gitmo on the last day of George W. Bulls**t's presidency, Jan. 19. How's that for a "coincidence"?

And here's another one: a "tape" recording (not a CD, because Bin Laden's ghost has not caught up with modern technology), of the voice of none other than Osama himself hit the air waves of the dumbed down and infantilized American media today, wherein we were told that Santa Claus/Tooth fairy Bin Laden is alive and well, and issuing press releases from his cave somewhere in the armpit of western Asia.

If you accept this malarkey at face value you need read no further. For the rest of you: what do you think this latest covert-op by the western intelligence agency that operates "Al Qaeda" signifies? My hunch is that it signifies desperation, when even CNN is broadcasting reports on counterfeit-Israel's white phosphorus burning of civilians in Gaza, accompanied by graphic footage of child victims of this "nasty" incendiary, which CNN was airing yesterday.

As the justification for the Israeli holocaust in Gaza skates on ice that daily grows as thin as Paris Hilton's waistline, the white male Republican base in the US needs to be reassured that the Fox Noose fairy tale is true, the rabbis and Zionists of counterfeit-Israel really are "fighting for the West." Consequently, the spectre of Osama is summoned to the seance and made to mouth a Gaza script which implies that Hamas is an arm of the same Muslim crazies who, we are told, "masterminded" the Sept. 11 attacks.

***

Gaza gas chamber

...Palestinians interviewed in Gaza on Monday cited another reason for their flight: Israel soldiers, they said, are firing rounds of a noxious substance that burns skin and makes it hard to breathe.

A resident of southwest Gaza City on Monday showed a reporter a piece of metal casing with the identifying number M825A1, which Marc Garlasco, a military analyst with Human Rights Watch, identified as white phosphorus, typically used for signaling, smoke screens and destroying enemy equipment.

In recent years, experts and rights advocates have argued over whether its use to intentionally harm people violates international conventions.

Major (Jacob) Dallal (an Israeli military spokesman) would not say whether Israel was using white phosphorus, but said, “The munitions we use are consistent with international law.”

Still, white phosphorus can cause injury, and a growing number of Gazans report being hurt by it, including in Beit Lahiya, Khan Yunis, and in eastern and southwestern Gaza City. When exposed to air, it ignites, experts say, and if packed into an artillery shell, it can rain down flaming chemicals that cling to anything they touch.

Luay Suboh, 10, from Beit Lahiya, lost his eyesight and some skin on his face Saturday when, his mother said, a fiery substance clung to him as he darted home from a shelter where his family was staying to pick up clothes.

The substance smelled like burned trash, said Ms. Jaawanah, the mother who fled her home in Zeitoun, who had experienced it too...

Source: New York Times, Jan. 13, 2009

***

Gaza Massacre: What's missing?

by Michael Hoffman
Copyright ©2009. www.RevisionistHistory.org

This writer has the sorrowful distinction of having observed and reported more than twenty-six years' worth of Israeli massacres of Arabs, beginning with Beirut in the summer of 1982, when Ariel Sharon's military terror-bombed schools, hospitals, apartment blocs and nursing homes in an incredible orgy of violence. There were many more Israeli atrocities to follow: in Qana, Jenin, Gaza 2006, and of course carpet-bombing throughout Lebanon in 2007.

Then as now, an impotent Arab "street" along with leftist intellectuals and protesters in Europe, issued demands and furiously paraded with "smash Zionism" placards. The UN met in special session and "deplored" Israeli actions. Investigations were called for, and in Jenin, "war crimes investigations" were demanded, which, in the case of Jenin, were rebuffed by Shimon Peres, who defiantly declared, "No one judges Israel!"

As usual the Israelis in Gaza are taking a crap on an entire people, along with the infrastructure of Gaza's government, housing, educational system and their fire-fighting and medical facilities. This is not just an attack on Hamas, but as we saw in Jenin, on the Palestinian people's ability to govern, educate, house and protect themselves.

As always happens when these Talmudic war crimes transpire, Israeli hasbara (propaganda) operations go into high gear, and we are seeing the pattern repeat in Gaza now. Every single atrocity is explained away as either collateral damage or "terrorists using the civilian population as a shield." By that standard the US government was "shielding itself" in the Twin Towers in New York City in September, 2001.

Imagine if in Oakland, California, African-American guerrillas fired rockets at Sacramento in protest over the killing of a black man by transit cops. In response, the California National Guard attacks an all-black school in Oakland, slaughtering 40 children because the rocket-firings by the militants took place "near" the school. This is what occurred at the United Nations school in Gaza after Hamas fighters allegedly fired mortars in the vicinity. Would the world forgive California for the deaths of the children in Oakland because black militants had been firing near the school? Such a racist devaluation of the lives of the black children collectively punished for acts of armed resistance by guerrilla fighters in their neighborhood would appall and shock the world.

The racist component of the devaluation of Palestinian life so evident in Gaza since Dec. 27 is barely mentioned because it tends to show that the "Jewish" state is sick at its core and any such admission would tend toward an investigation into the spiritual and religious roots of the Zionist pathology which, patently, are in the religion of Orthodox Judaism, which institutionalizes the enshrinement of the humanity of the souls of Judaics while derogating the humanity of non-Judaic souls.

To counter any serious investigation of Zionism's Orthodox rabbinic patrimony, in the last stage of hasbara surrounding any massacre by Judaics in the Middle East, we witness the phenomenon of "Jews Against Zionism" and "Rabbis for Peace," intended to deflect attention away from the Mishnah, Gemara, Mishneh Torah, Shulchan Aruch and other sacred rabbinic texts which teach that when necessary, non-Judaics may be killed with impunity because they are not fully human.

Judaic protests against Israeli violence are commendable when they also condemn the roots of Israeli violence as found in the ideological doctrines of Chazal (the "sages") of Orthodox Judaism, or at the very least when not denying those roots. For example, to their credit, in the Guardian newspaper in Britain on January 10, over seventy Judaic activists wrote to condemn Israeli atrocities in Gaza. While they did not trace the roots of Zionist mass murder to the Talmud, neither did they deny it. They did, however, make an astute and damaging comparison between Governor-General Hans Frank in Nazi-occupied Poland and Matan Vilnai, the Israeli defense minister who actually spoke last February of perpetrating a shoah (extermination) in Gaza.

The hasbara does emerge in statements by Judaics such as Alexei Sayle who told a crowd of demonstrators in London, "It is long past time to stop allowing the state of Israel to call itself the 'Jewish state."

The masters at this sort of disinformation are the Neturei Karta sect of Hasidic Judaism who were received by the Iranian President at the revisionist conference in Tehran and who parade around the US and Europe condemning Zionism as being against "the Torah" (that's the Torah Shebeal Peh, the traditions of the rabbis, not the Torah of Yahweh, which the rabbis nullify).

Neturei Karta and the larger Satmar body of Hasidim, who are also anti-Zionist, are a function of the Cryptocracy at one of its highest levels of operation. The many befuddled and ignorant goyim who cooperate with these groups in disseminating the propaganda that the rabbinic Torah (Talmud) is a document of peace and love inimical to Zionism and the Israeli state, serve to rescue the religion of Judaism from the odium it so richly deserves as the ideological engine that drives the Israeli war machine.

Those who support and promote the anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbinic movements should at least be aware that they are backing 1700 years of Talmudic Judaic dogma as it existed from the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century A.D. through the nineteenth century. After their disastrous ancient military uprising against Rome, the rabbis taught that Judaism should, until the coming of the Moshiach ("Messiah"), advance almost exclusively through stealth, guile and the armies of the goyim. This "Neturei Karta" style Judaism was just as much the enemy of Christendom as Orthodox Judaism is today. The difference being that in our time the majority of Orthodox rabbis believe the most effective road to dominion is through the teachings of Moses Hess, Rabbi Kook and the "religious Zionism" that came into full flower in the twentieth century and which advocated the development of Judaic armies and the projection of Judaic military power.

The Neturei Karta rabbis are perpetrating a hoax. Zionism is just as authentically Talmudic as Neturei Karta Judaism, with the exception being that whereas Neturei Karta Judaism prefers camouflage and deceit, the religious Zionism of the Israeli state favors camouflage, deceit and Judaic military power.

As the Israeli army and air force brazenly butcher Gazans in a bloodbath on the world stage, the Arab world and the West are repeating their useless pattern of issuing the same tired and impotent protests and resolutions. Effective action and remedies are never put into place: the Israelis have too strong a hold on western institutions to be dragged before European courts for war crimes' prosecution as the Christian Serbs were, or to become the target of ironclad national "divestment" and "boycott" campaigns, as were the whites of South Africa.

This Israeli hold on the West can only be weakened and eventually dissolved if the world will come to view the connection between Orthdox Judaism and Zionism the way it perceives the connection between Islamic Wahabist fundamentalism and Al Qaeda.

The actions of the Israeli military in Gaza --mass murder and constantly lying about it--are derived from the rabbinic law ("halakha") of Orthodox Judaism, as documented in this writer's book, Judaism Discovered. This is the missing element in the analysis of Israeli war crimes and deception. The "sages," from Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai to Rabbi Moses Maimonides onward, teach the followers of Orthodox Judaism to lie and, when it is deemed politic, to slaughter dehumanized non-Judaics. Until this is widely understood, the Israelis will massacre civilian populations repeatedly and with impunity, as the history of the Zionist state, from Deir Yassin to Qana, Jenin and Zeitoun, demonstrates.  

Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit by Michael Hoffman
[Banned by Amazon.com]
For ordering information: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html

***

Israeli alibi for school attack: a lie you weren't supposed to believe

By Richard Seymour

Author of The Liberal Defense of Murder

Let's be clear about this. On 6 January, three UN-run schools in Gaza were attacked by Israeli forces, not just one. What is more, the previous day an Israeli bombing of a UN school had killed three members of the same family. This sort of killing can usually be dealth with in a perfunctory fashion ('we regret all loss of innocent life, but the responsibility belongs to those who use terror and hide among civilians...'). However, the massacre of 43 people in a UN school bearing flags and insignia and housing some 350 refugees from the fighting (many of whom had fled on orders from IDF leaflets dropped on the towns and cities), demanded a more considered explanation and justification. I just want to take a quick look at the explanations offered by Israeli spokespeople and its military.

The IDF's initial justification for the attack on the Al-Fakhura school was that Hamas had used the building to fire mortars from, and its tanks had responded. Implicit in this was an admission that they had targeted the school on purpose. The tank shells, presumably shot from quite nearby, were fired by soldiers operating under orders from command centres equipped with detailed targeting intelligence. As is now known, the Israeli military had the GPS coordinates not only of this UN school but of the other UN schools that it attacked. And the first thing the IDF let us know is that it was done on purpose. Their excuse was barbaric, of course. The idea that an invading force may attack a building filled with hundreds of terrorised civilians just in order to kill two of those resisting the invasion is nothing short of grotesque. 

But the fact that it was barbaric was part of the point: rather than bluntly condemning a war crime, you were invited to focus on whether Hamas would be so evil as to attack Israel's brave boys from within a civilian building. Because it is so frequently repeated you might be predisposed to assume that Hamas did indeed position its 'infrastructure of terror' among unsuspecting citizens but, whether you are so predisposed or not, you are already drawn into the macabre calculus of the murderer if you even get involved in that argument. You have tacitly accepted the logic in which war crimes are not merely acceptable, but actually appropriate, if the enemy really is as evil as Israel says. 

The usual suspects, of course, immediately embraced Israel's excuse: Israel's killing, they expostulated, merely demonstrates the ruthless, diabolical genius of Hamas. If anything, they added, the IDF was admirably restrained in its action. But it is doubtful that many others were taken in.

The second thing that the IDF claimed was that there were Hamas troops hiding inside the building, nestling among the refugees, thereby forcing the Israelis to slaughter the innocent. This is quite a different claim, and the first thing that would occur to any reasonable observer would be that the sudden embellishment reflected some sort of dishonesty ('the elaborations of a bad liar', as Hannibal Lecter would put it). Or perhaps there had been a failure by everyone to get their stories straight and stick to them. At any rate, the logic of the astounding claim that Israel acted in self-defense remained as tortuous as it had been. But Israel claimed to have identified the bodies of Hamas members, and even fed two names to the media, (so once again you were invited to get bogged down in the merits of Israel's claim rather than decide on an appropriate response to the slaughter).

The next part of the story is the most interesting. In order to get around the absurd idea that Hamas military operatives had sneaked into the building and launched mortars without anyone in the school noticing, Israel's spokespeople claimed that Hamas gunmen had taken over the UN building, taken the civilians hostage and used the base to fire mortars at Israeli soldiers. Mark Regev said it was a "very extreme example of how Hamas operates". Such a claim was obviously checkable in a matter of minutes. Any UN personnel present in the school at the time could easily say whether in fact they had all been suffering under Hamas captivity until Israel 'liberated' the building. 

The UN produced an emphatic denial, based on its own investigations, that there was ever any Hamas fighter in the building. By now, the fact that Israel has never provided any real evidence for its claims, which continue to shapeshift, comes into sharp focus. Moreover, since Israeli troops didn't visit the building or have access to the records of the deceased, it would be highly improbable that they would be able to not only name two of the dead, but also gather intelligence that proved they were members of Hamas' military wing, within such a short space of time.

So, the Israeli government topped that brazenness with a stroke of effrontery that is somehow not adequately captured by the word 'chutzpah'. Israel announced that as it was lodging a complaint with the UN for allowing the building to be secretly used by Hamas. Now it appears that Israeli diplomats admit that no rockets were fired from the school. They are now briefing that there was some mortar fire, but that it came from outside the school. Now, there is no evidence that there was any mortar fire at all, but perhaps you aren't really supposed to believe it. Actually, you were never supposed to believe any of it. There was no way that you were ever expected to be taken in by this pitiful subterfuge. They didn't even present a very convincing lie, or a very good case. 

What they did was tell you up front that they attacked a clearly marked UN school building filled with civilians on purpose, and then follow it up with a flimsy cover-story followed by an even more flimsy revised cover story and an outlandish allegation against the UN that they have dropped in a matter of hours in such a way as to undermine their previous cover-stories. This is obviously contemptuous, but it isn't just a sensational flip-off to 'world opinion'. They are saying they killed civilians on purpose, that nowhere in Gaza is safe, and that they reserve their right to do it again and offer the same risible mitigations and alibis as before.

***

How Israelis brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian disaster

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions

Avi Shlaim
The Guardian (UK) 7 January 2009

The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness.

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.

Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.

***

New York Times personnel: Jill Abramson

Abramson

She's the Managing Editor of the Times,  Zionism's most powerful voice in American print journalism.

This is one installment in our on-going series outing the Orwellian news-benders and censors on the staff of the New York Times, Judaism's flagship U.S. newspaper (see Judaism Discovered for data on NY Times' bias, deception, coverup and censorship)

***

Targeting the "terrorist infrastructure"

Israel’s extremely well-co-ordinated propaganda effort continues to enjoy an extraordinary level of success in dominating the mainstream media agenda, and is even branching out into new media. Meanwhile, the underlying facts of this conflict remain available - to those who know where, in the labyrinthine back-streets of the Internet, to look - and provide a chilling corrective to the official narrative.

From Heathlander:

We’re hearing a lot about Israel’s supposed assault on “Hamas targets,” or what Israel – together with the more vulgar of its apologists - likes to term “terrorist infrastructure”. Let’s have a quick - and by no means exhaustive - look at what that phrase in fact refers to.

The Guardian (5 January):

“…half of Gaza’s ambulances have already been destroyed…”

Physicians for Human Rights - Israel (5 January):

“Israeli army firing on first response units in Gaza; Ambulances unable to reach injured persons nor evacuate them from the scene of attacks to Gaza hospitals. Several ambulances have sustained direct artillery or helicopter fire, medical personnel have been killed, others critically injured. There is no possibility for the rapid evacuation of patients; those whose lives could have been saved are left to bleed to death.”

Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (5 January):

“The PRCS [Palestine Red Crescent Society] reported to PHR-Israel that they have no way of dispatching ambulances without prior coordination since ambulances that set out for evacuation duties at AlAtatra were fired at by apache helicopters. They appealed to PHR-Israel after attempts to coordinate passage via the ICRC have failed since yesterday. AlAwda hospital in Beit Lahiya also asked for our assistance since they must send out ambulances to AlAtatra and Tel Zaatar but cannot dispatch ambulances without being shot at. The hospital is urgently requesting coordination to enable evacuation…

According to our information, between 2 hours and 8-10 hours pass between a request by the ICRC for coordination until the Israeli authorities actually coordinate passage. In some cases teams waited for 24 hours for coordination”. [my emph.]

World Health Organization (5 January):

“- Two shells hit 15 metres from Al Awda hospital’s emergency room. A nurse sustained severe head injuries.

- Three mobile clinics were destroyed 5 January. All vehicles are now unusable.

- One paramedic was killed and two injured en route to evacuating a patient and their ambulance destroyed by munitions. This raises total of medical staff killed since 27 December t0 six and ambulances hit t0 three.

- All Gaza hospitals continue working on back-up generators for the third consecutive day. International Humanitarian Law requires all medical personnel and facilities be protected at all times, even during armed conflict. Attacks on them are grave violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights laws…

Hospitals warn that the generators are close to collapse and they have four more days of fuel, even with services limited t0 the mere essentials. At the Shifa hospital alone, collapse would have immediate consequences for 70 intensive care unit patients including 30 in the neonatal care. Twelve operating rooms would als0 be immediately affected, in addition t0 shutting down the oxygen extractors, refrigerators for blood units and machines for emergency laboratory services. Also, all hospitals would be without heating and lighting.”

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (4 January):

“IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] also continued to target ambulance teams who attempt to collect the injured. At approximately 10:20am today, an Israeli plane fired a missile at an ambulance in the west of Beit Lahia, destroying it and injuring the three of its crew. Two of them sustained critical wounds.”

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (5 January):

“[Today, Israeli forces] targeted medical facilities and ambulances. A Civil Defense team was hit as it tried to fight a fire following the bombardment of a clinic…In yet another attack on an ambulance crew, an Israeli aircraft fired a guided missile at an ambulance in the al-Zeitoun neighborhood, east of Gaza City. The three crewmen were killed as a result.”

Ma’an news (5 January):

“Israeli forces fired in the immediate vicinity of three hospitals in the Gaza Strip on Monday, witnesses and medical personnel told Ma’an. The Al-Wafa Hospital eastern Gaza Strip received warning that they would be shelled, but the hosptial administration and staff refused to evacuate on account of the number of injured people being treated there. Some of the wounded have been injured so severely that they cannot be safely transferred.

At Ash-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, Israeli warplanes bombed the offices of the Health Committees, about 400 meters from Ash-Shifa hospital. Last week warplanes bombed the Ash-Shifa Mosque, which is part of the medical compound. Israeli forces also shelled the parking lot of Al-Awda hospital in Jabaliya in northern Gaza.

Spanish human rights worker at the hospital Alberto Arce reported, “Two consecutive shells just landed in the busy car park 15 meters from the entrance to the emergency room of the Al Awda hospital. The entrance of the emrgency rooml was damaged. At the time of the shelling Ambulances were bringing in the wounded that keep pouring in. Medical teams and facilities are being targeted. Nowhere is safe.” … The international aid agency Oxfam has also reported that personnel working for its affiliates in Gaza have been killed, their ambulances coming under attack.”

Xinhua (4 January):

“Mo’aweya Hassanein, chief of emergency and ambulance services in the Palestinian Health Ministry, said that three more Palestinian paramedics were killed by Israeli airstrike on Sunday evening. Hassanein said the three were rescuing the injured inside a house, which was damaged in southern Gaza City, where another airstrike took place, killing the paramedics. Also on Sunday, another Palestinian paramedic was killed while Israeli warplane targeted an ambulance in west Gaza City.”

CBS news (5 January):

“[Norwegian doctor] Mads Gilbert came to Gaza last week to help out, he says, in a hospital [i.e. Al-Shifa hospital] that’s short of everything but misery. “They have no spare parts, they have no monitors. They have not enough blood pressure machines, they don’t have enough trolleys. They lack everything. And on top of this you have this huge disaster…

“More people will die who could have been saved,” he said. “We have to be even harder to select who we can treat and we have to put aside people who could otherwise die. That is the gruesome fact of the situation and we are not talking about the 17th century, we are talking about 2009.”

Amnesty International (29 December):

“The health sector in Gaza lacks equipment, medicine and expertise at the best of times and has been further depleted due to the prolonged Israeli blockade. It is now completely overwhelmed and unable to cope with the large number of casualties”.

IRIN news (31 December):

“One hundred and fifty patients were brought in at once,” said Khaled Abu-Najar, a staff nurse in Al-Shifa’s emergency room. “We lack beds, sterile gloves, sheets, scissors and gauze to treat patients.”

International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (6 January):

“Since its premises were destroyed by Israeli bombs on 30 December the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) – a member of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) – has been unable to provide care to an ever increasing number of traumatised civilians. Another IRCT member centre in Gaza, the Jesoor Organization, is also unable to operate due to the security situation…

From the headquarters of the IRCT in Copenhagen, Denmark, Secretary-General Brita Sydhoff says: “I am absolutely appalled by Israel’s targeting of densely populated urban areas. Attacks on civilian areas by both sides are deplorable, but Israel’s attacks are grossly disproportionate and are disrupting vital health services.”

“I am extremely alarmed that our two member centres in Gaza, the GCMHP and the Jesoor Organization, are unable to operate during a time when their services are desperately needed” she adds and concludes:

“Israel’s reckless attacks and blockade are endangering the lives and health of the entire population of Gaza in blatant breach of international law and fundamental human rights. I urge the government of Israel to cease its offensive and immediately take all necessary measures to ensure the access of Gaza’s civilian population to vital health services and other fundamental humanitarian needs.”

Gisha (4 January):

“Hospitals, including Gaza’s main Shifa Hospital, are struggling to function under 24-hour per day power outages…According to Shifa Hospital, fuel reserves for back-up generators will run out by the end of the week. The generators are insufficient to heat the wards or properly operate oxygen machines. The hospital has had no electricity for the past 48 hours.”

UN OCHA (2 January):

“The health system is overwhelmed, having already been weakened by the 18- month blockade.”

Oxfam (4 January):

“A paramedic working for an Oxfam funded organisation was killed when an Israeli shell struck a civilian ambulance in Gaza today according to international agency Oxfam. The tragedy illustrates the deadly dangers faced by Palestinian civilians and aid worker said the agency.

Another paramedic lost his foot and a driver was injured in the same incident, which occurred when an ambulance belonging to Oxfam’s partner organisation, Union of Health Work Committees, was hit while trying to evacuate an injured person in the Beit Lahiya area, Oxfam said.”

Reuters (5 January):

“Bombs on Monday hit a hospital morgue where a family were mourning a paramedic killed in an airstrike on Sunday. Three people were killed and 17 wounded, medical workers said. “We were sitting in the mourning tent when suddenly they bombed us, we ran to rush the casualties to hospitals but they bombed again,” Abdel-Dayem told Reuters.”

The Mirror (2 January):

“A children’s hospital was also damaged in yesterday’s blitz and a mosque and secondary school destroyed.”

John Ging, head of UNRWA (6 January):

“John Ging, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said he was “shocked” by “the brutality of the injuries” he had seen during a visit to the Shifa hospital in Gaza. He said: “There are very real shortages of medicine. This hospital has not had electricity for four days. If the generators go down, those in intensive care will die. This is a horrific tragedy here, and it is getting worse by the moment.”

Mosques

The Guardian (4 January):

“The shells could not have fallen at a worse time. Yesterday’s afternoon prayers in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya were unusually busy because worshippers had abandoned their evening prayers in the belief that if the Israelis planned to strike, they would do so at night. But as the townspeople left the mosque at dusk, the explosions began, killing at least 12 people, six of whom were children.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (31 December):

“7 mosques have been destroyed”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (2 January):

“…In addition, IOF bombarded al-Khulafa’a al-Rashedin Mosque, al-Salam Mosque…”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (30 December):

“[Israeli forces] have increasingly bombarded civilian facilities, mosques and houses, without paying attention to the lives and safety of Palestinian civilians. Israel claims that such civilian facilities, mosques and houses were related to Hamas, but investigations conducted by PCHR indicate that IOF have used excessive lethal force and that the majority of the facilities that have been targeted are public and private property located in densely populated areas, making Palestinian civilians pay a heavy price from their lives and property.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (29 December):

“[O]n Sunday, 28 December 2008, IOF warplanes bombarded ‘Emad ‘Aqel Mosque in Block 4 in the densely populated Jabalya refugee camp. The mosque and a neighboring house belonging to Anwar Khalil Ba’lousha were destroyed. The house was destroyed over the family, killing 5 of Ba’lousha’s female children: Jawaher, 4; Dunia, 8; Samar, 12; Ikram, 14; and Tahreer, 17. Ba’lousha, his wife and another three of their children were also wounded. Additionally, 17 civilians in neighboring houses, including 5 children, were wounded.”

Schools

Associated Press (4 January):

“An Israeli airstrike flattened one of Gaza’s best private educational institutions, the American International School, which had been attacked a year ago by Islamic militants. The Israeli Army said the campus on a northern Gaza hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean Sea had been used as a launching base for rockets and was a legitimate target. Most of the school’s buildings, which offered American-style curriculum in English for kindergarten through 12th grade, were destroyed by the strikes, which also killed the night watchman.”

UN OCHA (3 January):

“The American School north of Gaza was directly hit and almost completely destroyed, with one school guard killed. In addition, at least three to five schools were damaged by Israeli shelling of nearby targets.”

Ma’an news (6 January):

“Three Palestinians were killed overnight in an Israeli attack on a United Nations school that was housing people displaced by the violence in Gaza, the UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday. In a statement circulated on Tuesday, UNRWA said that Israeli forces attacked the Asma Elementary School in Gaza City, which is currently sheltering 400 people who fled their homes in the town of Beit Lahiy. The school was clearly marked as a United Nations installation. The three men, 24-year-old Hussein Mahmoud Abed Al Malek Al Sultan, 19-year-old Abed Samir Ali Al Sultan, and 25-year-old Rawhi Jamal Ramadan Al Sultan, were killed at 11:30 last night. The three men, all from the same family, were killed as they left the school toilet at eleven thirty last night when the school compound took a direct hit.

The director of the UN general commissioner’s office in Gaza Adnan Abu Hasanah said that another UN facility, the Ash-Shouka School in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, was also bombarded. At this time there were no details available about the civilians who had taken shelter in the school… Well before the current fighting, UNRWA said it had given to the Israeli authorities the GPS co-ordinates of all its installations in Gaza, including Asma Elementary School.”

Associated Press (6 January):

“Palestinian medical officials say at least three people are dead in an Israeli airstrike near a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip. It is the second deadly Israeli airstrike to hit a UN school in the past few hours. Palestinian health official Said Joudeh says three people were killed and four wounded in the airstrike in the northern Gaza town of Jebaliya. He says the school was turned into a shelter for people displaced by an Israeli offensive against the Hamas militant group.”

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (5 January):

“At approximately, 5:10pm [on 4 January] … the IOF shelled the courtyard of UNRWA’s Mustafa Hafez School in Khan Younis.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (30 Dec):

“…IOF have bombarded the campus of Islamic University, two schools…”

Associated Press (29 December):

“One strike destroyed a five-story building in the women’s wing at Islamic University, one of the most prominent Hamas symbols in Gaza.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (2 January):

“IOF have continued to target civilian facilities, mosques, schools and houses, with disregard to the lives of the Palestinian civilians.”

California Scholars for Academic Freedom (4 January):

“…[A]s educators in California institutions of higher learning, we are especially appalled at the destruction of educational institutions and student casualties.

On 27 December, Human Rights Watch reported that an Israeli air-to-ground missile struck a group of students leaving the Gaza Training College, adjacent to the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in downtown Gaza City, killing eight students and wounding 19 others. Two days later, on 29 December 2008, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, destroying the science laboratory block and destroying or damaging other blocks of buildings, including the library. Although Israel has claimed that the science laboratory facilities were used as “a research and development center for Hamas weapons,” this claim has been denied by officials of the Islamic University, and according to the New York Times of 1 January 2009 Israel has not produced any evidence for its claim.”

Government buildings and civil policemen

UN OCHA (2 January):

“The estimate on the total number of Hamas leaders’ houses targeted so far is 45.”

Palestinian Center for Human Rights (31 December):

“25 buildings of public buildings have been destroyed, including those of ministries, governorates, municipalities, the Palestinian Legislative Council, and 3 educational institutions… IOF warplanes have destroyed most buildings of the Palestinian government in the Gaza Strip, including those of ministries and security services…

The public institutions that have been bombarded are: the compound of ministries, the building of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the building of the cabinet in Gaza City; the buildings of the agricultural control department and the Municipality of Bani Suhaila in Khan Yunis; the buildings of Rafah Municipality and Governorate.”

B’Tselem (31 December):

“Another example [“of what appear to be clear civilian objects attacked by the army”] is yesterday’s bombing of the government offices. These offices included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Labor, Construction and Housing…

[A]s the entity effectively governing the Gaza Strip, it [i.e. Hamas] is also responsible for maintaining daily life. As such, it supervises the activity of all civilian frameworks in Gaza – among them the welfare, health, housing, and legal systems. Hamas must also ensure public order and safety by means of a police force. Therefore, even if Hamas is a “hostile entity” whose principle objective is to undermine the existence of the State of Israel, this does not lead to the conclusion that every act it carries out is intended to harm Israel and that every government ministry is a legitimate target… An intentional attack on a civilian target is a war crime.”

The Guardian (6 January):

“The head of the Shin Bet internal security service, Yuval Diskin, told the Israeli cabinet that Hamas was finding it increasingly difficult to govern with its leadership in hiding from Israeli rockets and much of its infrastructure blown to pieces.

He was backed by the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, who said “not much” remained of the Hamas government, and by the head of military intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin. “Hamas has absorbed a very hard blow …Its ability to govern has been harmed, its leaders have completely abandoned the population and are only worrying about themselves,” Yadlin told the cabinet.” [my emph.]

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (5 January):

“[On 2 January] IOF warplanes bombarded a police station at Bani Suhila intersection in the east of Khan Yunis. A passing Palestinian civilian was wounded and a secondary school in the area was damaged.”

UN (29 December):

“[On 27 December] an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) missile targeted a group of policemen standing in the street near the building of the Gaza governorate, immediately across the street from the UNRWA Gaza Training Center, which is located within the compound housing the main UNRWA office in the Gaza Strip.

Eight UNRWA Gaza Training Center students between the ages of 18 and 20, who were standing nearby waiting for the UN buses to bring them home, were killed and 19 injured from the blast. Eight of the injured remain in hospital in critical conditions today. One of these critically injured students is unconscious with intracranial shrapnel and requires immediate transfer to an Israeli hospital for advanced central nervous system surgery.”

UN OCHA (28 December):

“Air-strike targets included civil police stations, military training bases and government buildings and installations. In one incident, at least 40 people were killed when an IAF plane fired an air-to-ground missile at the police headquarters in Gaza City during preparations for a graduation ceremony for regular civilian and traffic police. Other civilian casualties occurred among those living in residences within the vicinity of targeted buildings.”

UN OCHA (2 January):

“There has been significant destruction in the Gaza Strip, over 600 targets hit, including roads, infrastructure, the Islamic university, government buildings, mosques and civil police stations”

UN OCHA (31 December):

“Air-strikes targeted a variety of public buildings, including mosques, civil police stations, universities and sports centres in addition to government buildings and military training bases.”

Associated Press (28 December):

“In all, more than 290 people — most of them Hamas [civil] policemen, but also 20 children — were killed in some 300 Israeli air attacks over two days.” [my emph.]

Human Rights Watch (30 December):

“Israel should not target individuals and institutions in Gaza solely because they are part of the Hamas-run political authority, including ordinary police…

Human Rights Watch noted that many of Israel’s airstrikes, especially during the first day, targeted police stations as well as security and militia installations controlled by Hamas. According to the Jerusalem Post, an attack on the police academy in Gaza City on December 27 killed at least 40, including dozens of cadets at their graduation ceremony as well as the chief of police, making it the single deadliest air attack of the campaign to date. Another attack, on a traffic police station in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, killed a by-stander, 12-year-old Camilia Ra`fat al-Burdini.

Under the laws of war, police and police stations are presumptively civilian unless the police are Hamas fighters or taking a direct part in the hostilities, or police stations are being used for military purposes.”

B’Tselem (31 December):

“…the military bombed the main police building in Gaza and killed, according to reports, forty-two Palestinians who were in a training course and were standing in formation at the time of the bombing. Participants in the course study first-aid, handling of public disturbances, human rights, public-safety exercises, and so forth. Following the course, the police officers are assigned to various arms of the police force in Gaza responsible for maintaining public order… [This is just one example] of what appear to be clear civilian objects attacked by the army… An intentional attack on a civilian target is a war crime.”

Media

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (4 January):

“Israeli aircrafts also launched a series of air raids at civilian targets in Gaza City; including a print-house, the Al-Risala Newspaper’s office and the Al-Karama Charity, which cares for the orphans whose parents have been killed by the IOF.”

Associated Press (28 December):

“Palestinian sources reported early Sunday morning that IAF aircraft had targeted the Al Aqsa TV station used by Hamas.”

General civilian infrastructure

Oxfam (28 December):

“The bombing has caused severe damage to the civilian infrastructure in Gaza with many areas being left without water or electricity.”

John Ging, head of UNRWA (4 January):

“We have a catastrophe unfolding in Gaza for the civilian population … The people of Gaza City and the north now have no water. That comes on top of having no electricity. They’re trapped, they’re traumatised, they’re terrorised by this situation … The inhumanity of this situation, the lack of action to bring this to an end, is bewildering to them…

“The whole infrastructure of the future state of Palestine is being destroyed … Blowing up the Parliament building. That’s the Parliament of Palestine. That’s not a Hamas building. The President’s compound is for the President of Palestine.” (via Ben White)

UN OCHA (2 January):

“There has been extensive damage caused to thousands of houses all over the Gaza Strip.”

Ma’an news (6 January):

“More than 26 residential buildings and schools were targeted by Israeli fire on Tuesday, causing more casualties amongst women and children, witnesses in Gaza said.

Sources at Ash-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said five dead bodies arrived at the medical center in a civilian car after their homes were shelled. The sources asserted that several homes were bombarded in eastern Gaza City, and that ambulances could not access the area to evacuate victims because Israeli forces are shooting at ambulances.

Separately, A 15-year-old boy was killed when an Israeli drone fired a missile at him while he was walking in the street in the center of Gaza City. An eyewitness called Ra’fat Al-Khudari said the boy was walking a bike when the drone targeted him killing him immediately.

A home was also shelled near Al-Quds Open University in Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, and another at Al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip. Reports say there were casualties.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (5 January):

“At approximately 13:40 [on Friday 2 January] … IOF warplanes bombarded a civil defense station at the beach. The station was destroyed, but no casualties were reported…

At approximately 16:20 also on Friday IOF warplanes started to bombard the remainders of Gaza International Airport in the east of Rafah. The bombardment continued sporadically until 00:45 on Saturday, 3 January 2009.”

Reuters (4 January):

“At least 42 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed on Sunday as Israeli shells slammed into houses and Gaza’s main shopping district, medical sources said.”

The Times (5 January):

“Nobody knows what kind of shell it was that hit Gaza City’s main vegetable market yesterday morning: the explosives were falling so thick and fast that it could have come from an Israeli naval vessel, an F16 fighter-bomber, an Apache helicopter gunship, an unmanned drone, an artillery cannon or a tank.

The results, however, were unmistakable. With Gaza’s ambulance service stretched far beyond its normal capacity, the first mangled bodies arrived in private cars as locals scrambled to save the lives of the shoppers caught up in the carnage. The first to be carried in was a boy, his face masked in blood from a head wound, as medics hurried him into the overcrowded emergency rooms. The next car delivered a girl, perhaps 12 or 13 years old, her entrails blown out through a hole in her back by shrapnel.”

Ma’an news (6 January):

“Israeli artillery shelling killed four people and wounded 16 others in a market in Al-Bureij Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip late on Monday, witnesses told Al-Jazeera. The killings bring the total number of Palestinians killed on Monday to 46. Israeli tanks reportedly fired three shells into the market.”

The Guardian (4 January):

“Among the targets so far have been the Gaza Interior Ministry, police stations, television stations, prisons and a five-storey building in the women’s wing of the Islamic University. Humanitarian organisations have criticised the Israelis for bombing a number of schools and a hospital.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (2 January):

“Since the beginning of the ongoing offensive on the Gaza Strip, Israel has claimed that it does not target civilian facilities. However, PCHR’s investigations refute these allegations, and prove that IOF, by explicit orders from their political and military leaders, have used excessive lethal force and that the majority of targets have been civilian and public facilities and private property that are located in the middle of overpopulated residential neighborhoods, endangering the lives and possessions of the civilian population. Moreover, PCHR’s investigations affirm that all the casualties that have been caused during the last hours of IOF successive and intensive raids have been civilians.”

Children

AFP (6 January):

“More than a quarter of the hundreds of dead from the Gaza conflict are children and aid groups say the survivors will suffer physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated, impoverished corners of the Earth and children make up 56 percent of the 1.5 million population. Even before the Israeli offensive on the Hamas territory started on December 27, malnourishment and the winter cold had taken a heavy toll. Aid workers believe just about every Gaza child has been traumatised by the incessant bombardment…

At least 159 children are among the more than 580 Palestinians killed in Operation Cast Lead, according to the latest toll from Gaza emergency services. Whole families have been killed in their shelled homes or in cars trying to get away from the fighting, according to medics…

“Before this began, there were already 50,000 malnourished children in Gaza. There is no way of knowing how many there are now, but we are very concerned the number is going to rise,” said [Save the Children's Benedict] Dempsey.” 

AFP (5 January):

“Moawiya Hassanein, head of Gaza medical emergency services, told AFP the number of Palestinians killed since the Israeli operation was launched on December 27 was now 512, including 87 children.”

Save the Children (2 January):

“At least 13,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes in Gaza as the bombardment continues into its seventh day, Save the Children said today. More than half of those displaced people are children.”

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (5 January):

“Seventy-seven people have been killed in IOF’s attacks between 1pm yesterday and 2:30pm today. This includes 21 children and nine women.”

Sydney Morning Herald (6 January):

“On Monday [5 January], 20 children between the age of two and 15 were killed, he [i.e. Dr Moaiya Hassanein of the Gaza Health Ministry] said.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (5 January):

“The Number of Palestinians Killed Rises to 372, Mostly Civilians, Including 75 Children and 16 Women … IOF have continued their offensive on the Gaza Strip for the 8th consecutive day, causing more deaths and casualties among Palestinian civilians, especially children.”

UN OCHA [.pdf] (31 December):

“At least 32 children were killed in the first 48 hours of airstrikes”.

Chris Hedges (16 December):

“A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live…

The statistics gathered on children - half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 17 - are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18 percent have stunted growth.”

UNICEF (6 January):

“Ten days of aerial bombing on Gaza has caused extensive devastation throughout the territory and is threatening the health and welfare of many children. Most of Gaza is without electricity, and the situation is turning into a massive humanitarian crisis… The hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed by casualties and are running low on medicines. More than half the population of Gaza is made up of children.”

Dominic Nutt of Save the Children (6 January):

“They don’t have any water most of the day, there is no electricity, they are freezing cold, the windows have to be left open to stop them smashing when the bombs fall. “Children are at risk from hypothermia, they are malnourished, there is not enough food, the situation is getting desperate.”

Reuters (5 January):

“The situation has reached a critical level for children who are exposed to and experiencing violence, fear and uncertainty,” Save the Children emergency team leader Annie Foster said. Some families fear to leave their houses while others are being forced to flee them. The winter cold was also a danger to children as electricity cuts have mean many homes lack heating. “Families must leave windows open at night so that they will not be broken by percussive shocks or flying debris from the ongoing bombardment. This means that children, the majority of them poor and malnourished, are essentially spending the night exposed to the elements”, Foster said.”

UNICEF (5 January):

“The humanitarian crisis caused by the current violence in Gaza is hitting children and women the most. Children form over half of Gaza’s population of nearly 1.5 million and are bearing the brunt of the conflict. Being the most vulnerable part of the population, children are the first to be psychologically distressed, the most in need of medical support and the most exposed to injuries among civilians in times of conflict…

As of 3 January 2009, 70 Palestinian children were killed and at least 650 injured, out of a tally of 550 deaths and 2800 injuries, according to data provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health…

The children in Gaza are currently deprived not only of the basic human rights any human being should enjoy but are also denied the fundamental rights specific to children, to which the signatories of the Convention of the Right of the Child are duty bound. These include the right of children to be protected from all forms of physical or mental violence and injury, and the right to education, development and access to healthcare services… The intensity of the current violence renders impossible any action to relieve their plight.”

International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (6 January):

“Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza is causing widespread mental trauma, especially among children. In parallel, delivery of desperately needed emergency mental health services has ceased…Children are particularly vulnerable to the traumatising effect of the bombs and shells raining down on densely populated civilian areas…

“When yet another building is hit”, he added, “children of 4-5 years of age ask questions like ‘how many dead?’ and ‘are they going to shell our house?’”

“The situation is horrific right now, but it does not stop when the bombings are over.” He [i.e. a psychiatrist from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme] concluded: “I cannot even begin to imagine the scale of trauma that is building up as this goes on; it will take enormous effort to deal with the mental trauma of our children afterwards.”

Norwegian volunteer doctor at Al-Shifa hospital, Dr. Erik Fosse (5 January):

“The injured patients are mainly civilians, a lot of children with dreadful injuries. The injured patients are mainly civilians, a lot of children with dreadful injuries,” Dr. Erik Fosse told CNN on Monday, estimating that 20 percent of the more than 500 people dead were children…

Fosse said that he estimated that about 30 percent of the casualties at Shifa Hospital on Sunday were children, both among the dead and wounded…“We were operating in the corridors, patients were lying everywhere, and people were dying before they got treatment,” he said.”

Civilian population

Palestinian Center for Human Rights (27 December):

“The air strikes started at 11:25 local time, almost at the same time throughout the Gaza Strip. This timing indicates that an Israeli decision was taken to cause maximum casualties in the climax of daily activities. It also explains the high number of victims killed or wounded in a few minutes on the bloodiest day during the 41 years of Israeli occupation. The timing of air strikes coincided with the end of the morning period and the beginning of the afternoon period at schools, many of which are located near police stations that were attacked. PCHR learnt that a number of children were killed or wounded while on their way to or back from schools, and hundreds of school children and civilians were treated from shocks. PCHR learnt also that dozens of the victims are unarmed civilians who were near the places that were attacked, the majority of which are located in civilian-populated areas.” 

Ha’aretz (27 December):

“This was a massive attack much along the lines of what the Americans termed “shock and awe” during their invasion of Iraq in March 2003 … little to no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians.” [my emph.]

World Health Organisation (5 January):

“As of 5 January, the Palestinian MoH had reported 548 deaths since 27 December, of which at least 120 were children and 44 women (30% of all deaths). At least 2550 Palestinians have been injured, of which 1134 are children and women. The MoH reported that since Israel began its ground operation on 3 January, 109 persons have been killed.”

International Committee of the Red Cross (6 January):

“I cannot sufficiently underline the level of concern and anxiety that is felt at the ICRC in relation to the crisis in Gaza,” said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC director of operations.
“There is no doubt in my mind that we are dealing with a full blown and major crisis in humanitarian terms. The situation for the people in Gaza is extreme and traumatic as a result of 10 days of uninterrupted fighting.” Kraehenbuehl said ICRC staff in Gaza described the past night as “the most frightening to date” in the territory where there is no power or water and finding food is a daily struggle.” 

New York Times (January 5):

“The Samouni family knew they were in danger. They had been calling the Red Cross for two days, they said, begging to be taken out of Zeitoun, a poor area in eastern Gaza City that is considered a stronghold of Hamas. No rescuers came. Instead, Israeli soldiers entered their building late Sunday night and told them to evacuate to another building. They did. But at 6 a.m. on Monday, when a missile fired by an Israeli warplane struck the relatives’ house in which they had taken shelter, there was nowhere to run. Eleven members of the extended Samouni family were killed and 26 wounded, according to witnesses and hospital officials, with five children age 4 and under among the dead.”

New York Times (January 4):

“In recent days, most of those arriving at Shifa [hospital] appeared to be civilians. On Sunday, there was no trace here of the dozens of Hamas fighters that the Israeli military said its ground forces had hit in the past few hours in exchanges of fire … at Shifa, most of the men who were wounded or killed seemed to have been hit along with relatives near their homes or on the road. Two young cousins and a 5-year-old boy from another family were killed by shrapnel as they played on the flat roofs of their apartment buildings.”

Scotsman (3 January):

“CIVILIANS make up about a quarter of the 400-plus people who have died in Israeli bombardments in the Gaza Strip, UN officials said yesterday as the Israel-Hamas war entered its second week. “Our best estimate is that 25 per cent (of the fatalities] were civilians, of whom a not insignificant number were women and children”.

Ha’aretz (5 January):

“At least 517 Palestinians have been killed at least a quarter of them civilians, a UN agency said. Forty-two, mostly civilians were killed on Sunday, a medical source said.”

UN Humanitarian Coordinator Maxwell Gaylard (5 January):

“Large numbers of people including many children are hungry, they are cold, they are without ready access to medical facilities, they are without access to electricity and running water, above all they are terrified. That by any measure is a humanitarian crisis…

There is an overall atmosphere of fear. More than half of the population are children. The spectre of internal displacement is emerging with growing numbers seeking shelter and already there are several thousand civilians in UNRWA’s seven shelters…

Electricity and communications are down over much of the Strip both on account of lack of fuel and damage to critical infrastructure. Over a million people are currently without power, and over a quarter million without running water, some for up to six days”.

UN humanitarian chief John Holmes (5 January):

“The UN has said that there is an “a worsening and an increasingly alarming” humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, told reporters on Monday that officials believed as many as 25 per cent of the 548 people killed in the fighting were civilians and that Gaza’s health system, overwhelmed by the more than 2,500 injured, was “increasingly precarious”.

“This is, in our view, a humanitarian crisis,” Holmes said. “It’s very hard for me to see any other way you could describe it, given the conditions in which the population are living.” Holmes added that “cluster munitions are being used”, and that it was “a fair presumption” that most of the civilians killed were women and children.”

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (31 December):

“Thousands of civilians, mainly those who reside in areas close to the Palestinian- Egyptian border, have fled from their houses in the wake of several raids launched by IOF on the southern Gaza Strip. A state of compulsory mass displacement of civilians has prevailed in the area…

According to what PCHR field workers have been able to document the IOF offensive has resulted in the following deaths and casualties: 334 Palestinians, including 121 civilians, have been killed throughout the Gaza Strip … The number of civilian deaths does not include at least 165 civil police officers who were killed on the first day of the IOF offensive, when they were not engaged in any hostilities.” [see B’Tselem and HRW reports linked above: civil policemen are not legitimate military targets]

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (2 January):

“…the number of Palestinians killed since the beginning of the IOF offensive on the Gaza Strip has mounted to 375, mostly unarmed civilians, including 51 children and 14 women.”

CBS news (5 January):

“[Al-Shifa hospital’s] general manager, Hassan Khalaf, insists the majority of patients by far are civilians…“The latest figure is, the total killed people is 543 at the moment, and well, about 30 percent of them are woman and children,” he said. “As regards injured there are 2,600 and 42 percent of them are women and children.”

Refugees’ International (6 January):

“The current conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas is having a devastating impact on civilians. An immediate ceasefire is essential.”

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (5 January):

“The heavy casualties suffered by innocent civilians, including many children, are heartbreaking … As a humanitarian agency which must deal with the repercussions of violence and persecution worldwide, UNHCR expresses its profound shock and sadness at the suffering and loss of life we are now seeing. I join Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in calling for an immediate cessation of all violence.”

UN human rights experts (2 January):

“The use of disproportionate force by Israel and the lack of regard for the life of civilians on both sides cannot be justified by the actions of the other party. They constitute clear violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law. We are particularly concerned at the impact of the current violence and destruction of vital infrastructure on the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.” [my emph.]

Norwegian volunteer doctor at the Al-Shifa hospital, Dr. Mads Gilbert (5 January):

“…the large majority of the injured, the victims, are women, men and children civilians. Among the killed, 25% of the killed are children and women, and among the children, today it was, this morning it was 801 children either killed or injured”.

Gisha (4 January):

“- 7 of 12 power lines damaged - 75% of Gaza’s electricity cut off.

- Gaza City, including Shifa Hospital, entirely without electricity.

- Over half a million residents cut off from water supply.

- Sewage spilling into streets, risk of more flooding.

- No fuel permitted into Gaza since start of military operation.

Gaza’s water and sewage system is on the verge of collapse following bombardments that have destroyed electricity lines and months of preventing fuel supplies needed to produce electricity, utility officials in Gaza warned today. 75% of Gaza’s electricity has been cut off, just as hospitals, water wells, and other humanitarian institutions most need electricity to treat casualties of the fighting and provide basic necessities to civilians.”

International Committee of the Red Cross (5 January):

“The situation in regard to the water supply is alarming. Because of the disruption of four power lines that normally bring electricity from Israel to Gaza City, 10 of the 45 wells in the city are no longer functioning. Two wells have been damaged by air strikes and the remaining wells are set to shut down in the coming two to three days, when their support generators will run out of fuel.

“If the power supply is not restored immediately, half a million residents of Gaza City will be completely deprived of water,” warned Javier Cordoba, the ICRC’s water and sanitation coordinator. “Ensuring safe access for technicians to repair the power lines is now an urgent priority,” he said.”

UN OCHA (2 January):

“The humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip is significant and cannot be understated. It follows what the UN had described as an 18 month long “human dignity crisis” in the Gaza Strip, entailing a massive destruction of livelihoods and a significant deterioration of infrastructure and basic services…People are living in a state of fear and panic…80% of the population cannot support themselves and are dependant on humanitarian assistance. This figure is increasing…

The utilities are barely functioning: the only electric power plant has shut down. Some 250,000 people in central and northern Gaza do not have electricity at all due to the damage to fifteen electricity transformers during the air strikes. The water system provides running water once every 5-7 days and the sanitation system cannot treat the sewage and is dumping 40 million litres of raw sewage into the sea daily. Fuel for heating, needed due to the cold weather, and cooking gas, are no longer available in the market.”

Amnesty International (5 December):

“The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is having ever more serious consequences on its population. In the past month the supply of humanitarian aid and basic necessities to Gaza has been reduced from a trickle to an intermittent drip…

As supplies are being further withheld, most mills have shut down because they have little or no grain. People who have long been deprived of many food items now cannot even find bread at times. Reserves of food have long been depleted and the meagre quantities allowed into Gaza are not even enough to meet the immediate needs. Families never know if they will have food for their children the following day.

When people do have food, they generally have no cooking gas or electricity with which to cook it. Last week, less than 10 per cent of the weekly requirement of cooking gas was allowed into Gaza…

Shortages of fuel, electricity and spare parts are causing water and sanitation infrastructure and other crucial services to deteriorate a bit more every day. Eighty per cent of the wells are now only functioning at reduced capacity and water supply is only available for a few hours every few days…Routine blackouts disrupt every aspect of life for everyone. Hospitals are struggling to power life-saving machinery and it is ever more difficult to maintain laundry and other essential services.”

UNRWA spokesperson Christopher Gunness (5 January):

“It’s absolutely horrifying. The people of Gaza are terrorized. They’re traumatized. And they are trapped.”

UN OCHA (6 January):

“Thousands of people have fled their homes in search of security and essential infrastructure has been destroyed, or lacks the necessary fuel to operate at the required capacity. More than one million Gazans are without electricity or water…Gaza’s water and sewage system is on the verge of collapse due to a lack of power and fuel…

Over 530,000 people (approximately 400,000 people in Gaza and North Gaza, 100,000 people in Rafah, and 30,000 people in the Middle Area) are entirely cut off from running water, and the rest are receiving water only intermittently (every few days)…

The sewage situation is becoming very dangerous, posing a serious risk of the spread of water-borne disease. Five of Gaza’s 37 waste water pumping stations were shut down due to a lack of electricity and sewage is now flooding into populated areas, farmland, and the sea. The remaining 32 stations are operating only partially and will shut down within three-to-four days without additional fuel supplies…Seventy-five percent of Gaza’s electricity has been cut off. Since the ground operation, all of Gaza Governorate and most of North Gaza and the Middle Area are without electricity.”

IRIN news (5 January):

“The UN has warned that power networks were down in large parts of the Gaza Strip on 4 January, with hospitals relying on generators. Without power for pumps, 70 percent of Gazans are estimated to be without tap water…

“The water and sewage system in Gaza is collapsing, cutting people off from the water supply and causing sewage to flood the streets,” said Maher al-Najjar, deputy director of Gaza’s water utility (CMWU). He also said 48 of Gaza’s 130 wells were not working at all due to lack of electricity and damage to pipes. “At least 45 other wells are operating only partially and will shut down within days without additional supplies of fuel and electricity,” al-Najjar said.”

Norwegian volunteer doctor, Dr. Mads Gilbert (6 January):

“We are wading in death, blood, and amputees. Many children. A pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible. Now we hear tanks. Pass it on, send it around, shout it out. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We are living in a history book now, all of us”,

and Dr. Gilbert again (5 January):

“We have been doing surgery around the clock. I just spoke to one of my colleagues … who had not been sleeping for three days and the hospital is completely overcrowded, we’re running six/seven ORs and there are injuries you just don’t want to see in this world. Children coming in with open abdomens and legs cut off. We just had a child who … we had to amputate both legs and the arm, and the only crime they have done is being civilians, Palestinians living in Gaza. The relief now is not more doctors and more drugs, the relief now is to stop the bombing immediately. This cannot go on. It’s a disaster…

We came on New Year’s Eve in the morning - I’ve seen one military person among the … hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anybody who tries to portray this as sort of a ‘clean’ war against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza.”

As you can see, “Hamas targets” appears to be a technical term referring to the entire Gaza Strip and everything and everyone located within it. That Israel employs this special definition is not particularly surprising. It has long since behaved as if, in Yaron London’s approving words, “the Palestinians in Gaza are all Khaled Mashaal, the Lebanese are all Nasrallah, and the Iranians are all Ahmadinejad.” Thus, for example, earlier this year Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin claimed that Israeli forces had killed roughly 1,000 “terrorists” in Gaza over the past two years, thereby branding every Palestinian killed by the IDF in Gaza throughout 2006 and 2007 a “terrorist”, including, as B’Tselem pointed out, 152 minors, including 48 children under the age of 14, as well as “many men and women [who] were killed in Gaza who took no part in the hostilities”. Similarly, in December 2006 Ehud Olmert boasted that the IDF had killed “more than 400 members of terrorist organisations” in six months, a designation that included 206 civilian non-combatants.

So, as I say, it isn’t at all surprising to find Israel referring to hospitals, mosques, schools, residential homes, apartment blocks, shops, markets, women, children and civilians as “Hamas targets” and “terrorist infrastructure”. What’s appalling is that – despite recognising Israel’s intensive propaganda drive – so many Western journalists and commentators have gone along with it.

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Israelis gassing Palestinians in Gaza

Israel rains fire on Gaza with phosphorus shells

Times (London, UK) January 5, 2009

By Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem and Michael Evans, Defense Editor

Israel is believed to be using controversial white phosphorus shells to screen its assault on the heavily populated Gaza Strip yesterday. The weapon, used by British and US forces in Iraq, can cause horrific burns but is not illegal if used as a smokescreen.

As the Israeli army stormed to the edges of Gaza City and the Palestinian death toll topped 500, the tell-tale shells could be seen spreading tentacles of thick white smoke to cover the troops’ advance. “These explosions are fantastic looking, and produce a great deal of smoke that blinds the enemy so that our forces can move in,” said one Israeli security expert.

Burning blobs of phosphorus would cause severe injuries to anyone caught beneath them and force would-be snipers or operators of remote-controlled booby traps to take cover. Israel admitted using white phosphorus during its 2006 war with Lebanon.

The use of the weapon in the Gaza Strip, one of the world’s mostly densely population areas, is likely to ignite yet more controversy over Israel’s offensive, in which more than 2,300 Palestinians have been wounded.

The Geneva Treaty of 1980 stipulates that white phosphorus should not be used as a weapon of war in civilian areas, but there is no blanket ban under international law on its use as a smokescreen or for illumination.

However, Charles Heyman, a military expert and former major in the British Army, said: “If white phosphorus was deliberately fired at a crowd of people someone would end up in The Hague. White phosphorus is also a terror weapon. The descending blobs of phosphorus will burn when in contact with skin.”

The Israeli military last night denied using phosphorus, but refused to say what had been deployed. “Israel uses munitions that are allowed for under international law,” said Captain Ishai David, spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces. “We are pressing ahead with the second stage of operations, entering troops in the Gaza Strip to seize areas from which rockets are being launched into Israel.”

The civilian toll in the first 24 hours of the ground offensive — launched after a week of bombardment from air, land and sea— was at least 64 dead. Among those killed were five members of a family who died when an Israeli tank shell hit their car and a paramedic who died when a tank blasted his ambulance. Doctors at Gaza City’s main hospital said many women and children were among the dead and wounded. ...Israel has brushed aside calls for a ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid into the besieged territory, where medical supplies are running short...

White phosphorus: the smoke-screen chemical that can burn to the bone:

— White phosphorus bursts into a deep-yellow flame when it is exposed to oxygen, producing a thick white smoke.

— It is used as a smokescreen or for incendiary devices, but can also be deployed as an anti-personnel flame compound capable of causing potentially fatal burns.

— Phosphorus burns are almost always second or third-degree because the particles do not stop burning on contact with skin until they have entirely disappeared — it is not unknown for them to reach the bone.

— Geneva conventions ban the use of phosphorus as an offensive weapon against civilians, but its use as a smokescreen is not prohibited by international law.

— Israel previously used white phosphorus during its war with Lebanon in 2006.

— It has been used frequently by British and US forces in recent wars, notably during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Its use was criticised widely.

— White phosphorus has the slang name “Willy Pete,” which dates from the First World War. It was commonly used in the Vietnam era.

Read JUDAISM DISCOVERED: The only book about Judaism banned by Amazon.com!

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Despite Military Might, Israel is a Weak and Dying State

Editor's Note: In Judaism Discovered this writer makes the point that Orthodox Judaism is self-destructive and depends for its continuing hold on the minds and hearts of Judaic masses on an exterior victimizer who will hate and violently resist Judaics, in perpetuity. This is expressed in an oft-repeated rabbinic maxim centered on Esau and Jacob.

Without violent resistance and persecution, Orthodox Judaism would lose the allegiance of the Judaic masses. Zionism is often said to be inimical to Judaism, but in Judaism Discovered I tried to show that Zionism's secular thesis was reconciled with Judaism's religious thesis through a synthesis crafted by the 19th century ideologue, Moses Hess, the remarkable man who Karl Marx called "my Communist rabbi." Oren Ben-Dor, Professor of Law at the University of Southampton in Britain, begins to approach this understanding in the following essay, where he writes, "The sublimated Zionist desire to be hated is the fuel of Israel’s unity and self-righteousness. This self-destructive nature...comes from deep and ancient forces of which Zionism is merely a symptom and a hint" (empasis supplied).

The Self-Defense of Suicide

By Oren Ben-Dor
okbendor@yahoo.com

Counterpunch.org | January 1 , 2009

Echoing Lebanon 2006, the people of Gaza are being butchered by murderous pilots of a murderous state.  Ground forces will soon butcher many more.  This widely-expected repetition of Israel’s large scale violence is carried out after a long process that was triggered when Israel unilaterally cleared its settlements and ground presence from Gaza only to create what has been described as a remote-controlled human zoo.  Israel has maintained total control over Gaza’s borders, its air and sea space, its economy, its electricity, food and medical supplies.  The people of Gaza have been starved, humiliated and constantly intimidated.  However, whether the withdrawal was well-intended or not engages little with the reasons rockets are being defiantly shot at the Israeli towns of Sderot, Ashkelon and Beer Sheva.

Beyond achieving very short term relief from rocket attacks the scale of Israel’s violence is question-begging and thought provoking.  Israel’s actions, justified by the “no choice” (ein brera) and “self-defence” rhetoric, can temporarily put the lid on the volcano of hatred around Israel and within it but, after the initial shock and awe, it is surely destined to bring much more violence.

Assassinating individual members of Hamas, even toppling the organisation, destroying its infrastructure and buildings, will not destroy the legitimate opposition to the arrogant and self-righteous Zionist entity.  No army, however well equipped and trained, can win a combat against increasing number of people who no longer have any reason to care about dying.  If there was hatred against Israelis before the Gaza massacre, the hatred after it will be of a different order of magnitude.

Given the sure failure of attempts to bring about stability through violence, intimidation, starvation and humiliation, what, on earth, is the desire that moves the Israeli state?  What, do Israelis imagine, will be achieved by this massacre? There must be something which is suppressed here.  There must be, for Israelis, some being and thinking which is preserved, indeed defended, by the pathology of provoking a permanent state of violence against them.  What kind of self-righteousness conditions this self-destructive desire to be hated?

Gaza itself gives us a clue.  Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are descendants of 750,000 refugees who were expelled in 1948 from what is now the Jewish state.  Ashkelon is built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of al-Majdal whose people were expelled in 1948, many to Gaza.  Only by such massive ethnic cleansing could a state with a Jewish majority and character be established.  Any just realisation of the refugees’ internationally recognised right of return would effectively mean the end of the Zionist project.  Those who choose to return would not merely threaten the Jewish majority.  Upon return, they would surely press demands for equal citizenship.  In so doing, they would challenge the foundational discriminatory premise of the Jewish state, which assigns a different stake in the state to all those who pass a test of Jewishness, whether they live in the country or elsewhere.  Thus, for the same reason that Israel discriminates against its own non-Jewish Arab citizens, it will prevent the return of the refugees.

The proliferation and dominance of the self-defence discourse and its by-product - the uncritical acceptance of the legitimacy of the Israeli state - successfully hide the fact that Israel itself is an apartheid state which is based on an apartheid (separation) premise.  In the name of this apartheid premise, occupation, dispossession and discrimination affected all Palestinians whether in Gaza, the West Bank, in Israel itself or indeed all over the world.

Thus, what is in fact being “preserved” is the unwillingness, or rather the inability, of Israelis to question their own state’s apartheid foundation.  The concealing mantra about Hamas’s rocket firing versus Israel’s legitimate self-defence cynically conscripts both the Palestinians of Gaza and the Israelis of Sderot.   Shielding the Jewish state’s unwillingness to deal with colonial and racist Zionism is more important than all of them.

Accepting the right of Israel to securely exist as a Jewish state has now become the bench mark for political moderation.  Obama is already singing the song. Egalitarian anti-Zionists who challenge that right readily fail the test.  This anti-Zionist voice is inclusive and moderate. It insists that injustices to Palestinians stem from the very premise of statehood that Israel is based upon.  Injustices to Palestinians encompass the whole of historic Palestine in a way which cannot be partitioned so that they become visible only in the territories, including Gaza, which Israel occupied in 1967.  Let us, then, break the idle chatter about self-defence that merely levels “criticisms” against Israel but by that legitimises it: the origin of the violence in Gaza is intimately linked to the manner the Israeli state came into being and to the continuing toleration of the apartheid premise at its very essence.  Israel should not be “reformed” or “condemned” but replaced with a single egalitarian structure over all historic Palestine.

Israel needs a continuing cycle of violence.  As long as this cycle is provoked through daily oppression, Israelis can sustain that haven in which they can unite behind their inability to examine their apartheid mentality.   Violence maintains a zone in which that existential threat of old stifles any possibility for genuine empathy and egalitarian self-reflection.  At the same time, violence is a necessary means for entrenching the purported legitimacy of what is claimed to be the only alternative to this violence. That alternative is no other than the “surprisingly” failing, “sane,” “reasonable” and “moderate peace process” towards two states, a process which aims to legitimise the apartheid state once and for all.  The discourse has been hijacked in such a way that the urgent calls for the immediate cessation of violence resuscitate that non-starter, the essentially unjust two states project that will ensure the continuation of violence.

Alas, the pathology of generating violence against oneself, violence that suspends reflection on the core apartheid, succeeds only at the price of generating enormous hatred.  The Israeli pathology will bring about, stealthily and fatefully, that which the Israelis fear most. There is indeed “no choice” for the nationalistic project of the eternal victims but to commit suicide with those whom they oppress.

The sublimated Zionist desire to be hated is the fuel of Israel’s unity and self-righteousness.  This self-destructive nature, concealed as a desire for self defense, comes from deep and ancient forces of which Zionism is merely a symptom and a hint. That which preserves these self-destructive forces ensures that the eternal victims’ apartheid nationalistic project will be a fleeting phenomenon. When arrested in mere nationalism, the primordial victim mentality self-preserves by generating collective suicide of that nationalistic project. The self-defence of suicide points out the uniqueness of the Israeli apartheid.  Both the no-choice and the self-defence rhetoric contain a chilling chronicle of suicide foretold.  Despite its military might, Israel is a weak and dying state that desires to destroy itself. The most powerful nations in the world assist this suicidal process and this fact calls for urgent contemplation.

Oren Ben-Dor grew up in Israel and teaches Legal and Political Philosophy at the School of Law, University of Southampton, UK. 

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The futility of force in "generational" conflicts

Far from an exercise in precision fire power and deterrence, Israel's bombardment of Gaza simply fuels the flames of conflict

by Robert Fox | Guardian (UK) Jan. 2, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/02/israelandthepalestinians-middleeast

...Four years ago General Rupert Smith produced a ground-breaking book called The Utility of Force about the future of warfare. He suggested that warfare is undergoing a paradigm shift from the industrial hi-tech conflicts which run from the age of Napoleon to the end of the last century. We will now see less formal "generational" conflicts which are not constricted by time, and are fought by ragbag militias and guerrilla gangs tooted in the civilian community. These are ingredients of what he calls (borrowing a Maoist phrase) "wars among the people".

This kind of thinking proved pretty unpalatable to a lot of the old and bold of the military class, among them most of the current British top brass. Inevitably the cynics in the ranks rechristened the book "The Futility of Force."

Smith himself would agree with them. His prime example of the open-ended "war among the people" is the contest between the Israelis and the Palestinians where he sees the Israelis always resorting to tactical short-term fixes while ignoring the needs for a long-term strategy.

The notion of the futility of force is an epitaph and awful warning on the past decade, the years of the military adventures of Tony Blair and George W Bush, from Kosovo to Iraq and Afghanistan. Force in itself can deliver very little, as the campaigns in Gaza and Afghanistan seem to prove. Force only works if the aim is destruction and occupation of whole countries and communities. It cannot win the epidemic of drug production and consumption, nor change at a stroke the hearts and aspirations of tribes, villages and nations.

The addiction to force, whether against Hamas in Gaza or the Taliban in Afghanistan, results in the opposite to its perpetrators' intentions. It is the fuel to an open-ended conflict which threatens to outrun the lives of most of the current leadership.

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It was 10 a.m. at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Reyham Abdel Kareem
Washington Post | January 2, 2009; A10

BEERSHEBA, Israel, Jan. 1 -- It was 10 a.m. at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, and Jabber Howez feared telling the truth.

Since Saturday, he had lied to his 23-year-old sister, Mirvat. Their father, brother and sister had not survived an Israeli airstrike. Now, coaxed by a psychiatrist, Jabber looked at his brown-haired sibling as she lay in bed with a bruised face.

"Where is Father? Where is Fadiya? Where is Mohammed?" she asked.

"Listen, Sister. Remember how we talked about fate, how we talked about heaven?" Jabber, 26, replied nervously. "I have good news for you."

His hands shook.

"Their souls are with God now. You should be happy." Mirvat crumbled into tears.

...In Gaza City, amid continuing Israeli airstrikes, Palestinians struggled not just with a deepening humanitarian crisis but also with the conflict's emerging psychological scars.

"We have tens of cases like this, but there are still many more out there," said Yayha Awad, one of the psychiatrists helping the Howez family. "We can't reach most of the families who were bombed because of the insecurity." A day earlier, his team had treated a 7-year-old girl who became mute after an airstrike, he said.

Mirvat grabbed her brother's arm.

"Where are you, Father? Who will play with Ahmed?" she screamed at no one in particular.

She was referring to their 6-year-old brother, Ahmed. He had Down syndrome and had been transported to an Israeli hospital for surgery to remove shrapnel from his brain. Mirvat herself was recovering from abdominal wounds. On Saturday, the family had been inside their house when a missile struck nearby.

As he clutched his sister, Jabber, too, began to cry.

His ordeal was not over. Hassan al-Khawaja, another psychiatrist, told Jabber that he also needed to inform his mother of their loss. He was now the eldest male in the family. It was his responsibility. The trauma, Khawaja said, would only get worse if she didn't learn the truth. So they went to her side at another hospital. It was 11 a.m.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Nadia Howez, 50, cried. "This was your responsibility." She struggled to breathe. A nurse plied her with oxygen and then gave her an injection. She calmed down and fell asleep.

Two hours later, she woke up screaming and blaming Jabber. At 2 p.m., he was driving back to see his sister. He broke down crying, shaking uncontrollably. Khawaja took him to his clinic, where his staff gave him orange juice and a sandwich. One staffer hugged him. "You should be strong," Khawaja said. "You are now the strongest member of the family."

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