In a report published Thursday, human rights group B’Tselem said that the Israel Defense Forces is still using Palestinian citizens as ‘human shields’ during dangerous operations.
William A. Cook
“ISIS is an extremist Islamist organization that doesn’t play by the rules, is prepared to behead Americans, smuggle Americans and Europeans into America with evil intentions on their mind…. “The only difference is ISIS is much further away from the United States than Hamas is from Israel, but they use the same tactics” (Dershowitz, Interview on Newsmax, 9/5/2014).
Dershowitz hypocritically creates a “strawman” in the elected government of Gaza, Hamas, to justify Israel’s crimes against humanity waged against the Gazan people for more than fifty days, a primitive savagery of military might against a defenseless people surrounded by the invading forces resulting in “2,104 Palestinians (were) killed in Gaza, including 1,462 civilians, among them 495 children and 253 women. Those U.N. numbers would mean that 69 percent of the total killed were civilians” (the Washington Post, August 29, 2014).
In order to justify Israel’s inordinate deployment of the most advanced ordinance available today against a population that had no defense except home-made rockets and rocks, totally contained within walls of chain link electrified fencing and gunships off the Gaza coast, he makes Hamas an uncivilized controlling power that has made every man, woman and child in Gaza a terrorist intent on killing every citizen in Israel. By yoking Hamas to ISIS, Dershowitz grabs the most terrifying action that group has employed to frighten its enemies, the video beheading of two journalists. He then injects his pathological fear into the receptive American by using that beheading as a “smuggled” act into the United States and Europe “with evil intentions on their minds.”
What he does not suggest is a reason for such an act being played out to the western world except those “evil intentions on their minds.” What if what America and Israel have done since 1948 looks very much like a primitive, barbaric and totally ruthless enemy intent on division and destruction of the Arab world?
I described in an article yesterday, “Let Us See through Our Victims’ Eyes,” how absolutely horrific 50 days of incessant bombing, day and night, is on the spirit and the psyche to say nothing of the destruction to the body. What the eyes on the ground see as they flee from their homes to shelters in UN schools or mosques or a neighbor’s building not yet demolished is nothing human but rather the crunching sounds of screeching bombs as they burst around them, flying debris slamming into walls and cars and people running beside them. What they hear are thunderous roars and whining screams of missiles and humans crying in fear caused by unknown humans not visible to them, indeed, not close to them in any way as they are dropping their ordinance from 30000 feet above or from warships at sea or from tanks on the borders in Israel beyond the steel barricades that keep the people locked inside their prison, invisible indeed to those stumbling to see what to avoid and how to get to shelter and checking always where the children are and the elderly. What they know inside is immediate fear of death, of torn limbs, of a mother or a father or a child caught in the maelstrom of destruction through which they must run if any hope for survival exists beyond the despair of the moment.
How different this scene from that of the ISIS hangman, hooded in his isolation, his indifference, his inhumanity that lets him assassinate another human that he does not know or care about. That act illuminates a capability of a man to take the life of another, a stranger because he has been told that is his job. We see that act and we are repulsed, incensed at the barbarity of it. But the scene of the Gazans running in fear from unseen gunman, unseen hangmen, unseen knives that can strike against the throat, we do not see; no visible human stands beside the crippled mother or the dying child, no person even in the computerized bulldozer; our modernized, oh so very civilized society deplores the gruesome scenes ISIS exhibits, prefers not to expose its own to such terrible sights except for entertainment purposes as they sit comfortably as spectators at the pillars of rising smoke that cut the head off of another unseen human in Gaza, after all there are many ways to behead a person, some with a knife, some with a guillotine, some with steel prongs let loose from their mother bomb, the fleshette, raining down on the unprotected civilian running from the unseen hangmen that hurl these clean instruments of war from the heavens.
Yet these unseen hangmen do live, do act on orders to kill, do train to become marksmen and operators of instruments of death as skillfully as the hooded hangman that killed our journalists. Our civilized cultures have delivered the knife into trained automatons who act upon demand, who slaughter as determined by their governors, who see no evil because they have been told by the likes of Alan Dershowitz that what they do is right even though it is a lie as was the slaughter of one and a half million Iraqis who died because George W. Bush and his asp Dick Cheney lied; but if we cannot see the assassin, if we cannot see the orange jump suit and the black hooded figure of death, then it’s alright, it is the civilized way to destroy people and the civilized way to ensure obedience to those who control our world.
And Dershowitz would have the world blind to the truth, blind to the father uncontrollably weeping over the son whose mangled head stares back at him caused not by a knife wielding hangman but by an invisible, cultured, society trained soldier acting on behalf of a power that can devastate a hapless people using our state of the art weaponry that has no man’s fingerprints on it and that exonerates all from responsibility. That I put it to you is barbaric insanity and thrusts our contemporary world into the pits of human degradation.
As you read this, see through the eyes of our victims as you look once more at that unnamed father whose very existence has been blown away as the head of his child has been blown away. Ask yourself who did this, who shall we blame, who must be held responsible, and then read what Dershowitz scribbles as truth manipulating lies and wanton hypocrisy to achieve his end. Defense of this behavior is the definition of insanity.
What if Alan mentioned that Israel created Hamas to deflect the PLO so it could continue to avoid meaningful negotiations to creation of a Palestinian state:
According to Robert Dreyfuss, author of “Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam”:
“And beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would weaken the PLO.”
According to Charles Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, “Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet [Israeli domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO.” (David Livingston, 9/6/2011).
Is that not an “evil intent”? Perhaps Alan understands that Hamas has come back to haunt Israel in much the same way that ISIS, a creature of the US, now haunts its God or is it rather a modern Golem designed to aid the creator to destroy Syria and in its released anger turns against its maker.
Consider the argument that Dershowitz proposes here: Israel is justified in its destruction of Gaza because of Hamas, a creature they brought into existence, metamorphosed into a legit political party that won a supervised election according to “democratic rules,” abandoned its original charter statement to destroy Israel (see McGreal, The Guardian UK, 1/12/ 2006), and now returns to its master to bargain for a two state solution, the very thing it was created to prevent.
Beyond the lies created by omission of truth, Dershowitz argues that Israel’s IDF acted morally as did its government in invading Gaza. It “played by the rules’ while Hamas did not; it did not intend to kill civilians, Hamas did as did the Gazan people; it used precision weaponry to kill only militants, Hamas used rockets aimed randomly and therefore used indiscriminate military power against civilians; Israel had to act knowing that Hamas used civilians as shields, and therefore accidentally killed some civilians; Israel had no choice but to invade and destroy Gaza.
What is the truth? Nothing in International Law would allow Israel to invade an occupied territory, and indeed, Gaza is an occupied territory: Israel controls the very personal lives of each and every Gazan by identity, by travel, by home location, by egress and ingress, by acquisition of goods from building needs to food, by choosing what infrastructure it will allow to exist or destroy, by controlling all access to water, by choice of hospitals to destroy and UN schools to target, and mosques, and neighborhoods, and fish that can be caught for food. Without the means of free movement, Gazans cannot fly out of Gaza, they cannot take boats beyond the limit imposed by Israel, they cannot exit through a Israeli controlled gate nor through the Rafah gate controlled by Egypt. They have no citizenship yet that is a stipulated right of every living human on the planet according to the United Nations. Yet Dershowitz would argue that Israel has no responsibilities under UN rules.
What indeed is the truth? Which side used humans as shields? Let’s consider how Israel acted before this latest invasion. Here is a report from 2002 by Haaretz:
B’Tselem: IDF using ‘neighbor procedure’ despite court order
In a report published Thursday, human rights group B’Tselem said that the Israel Defense Forces is still using Palestinian citizens as ‘human shields’ during dangerous operations.
According to the report, the IDF has, on a number of occasions, violated the High Court of Justice ruling against the use of the ‘neighbor procedure,’ whereby neighbors of wanted Palestinians are forced to go into the wanted man’s house ahead of troops, in case it is booby-trapped.
The human rights organization says that international humanitarian law obliges the army to remove citizens from areas of conflict and to protect them from danger during army operations. “Even if there was no apparent danger to the Palestinian who was used as a ‘human shield,’ the method is completely illegal,” the group says.
And here are reports from the recent invasion:
Israel was condemned by the United Nations as recently as last year for its “continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants.” More recently, Palestinian civilians have accused Israeli forces of using them as human shields in the Khuzaa neighborhood in Gaza, which has been the site of heavy shelling.
Israel also places its military command centers among civilian populations, most notoriously HaKirya, the Israeli army headquarters, which is located in the heart of densely populated Tel Aviv, surrounded by malls, museums, hospitals, schools and so on.
(Monday, 04 August 2014 11:05 By Rania Khalek, Electronic Intifada | News Analysis)
Reuters – A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields.
Palestinian children in the Gaza and the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, are routinely denied registration of their birth and access to health care, decent schools and clean water, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said.
“Palestinian children arrested by (Israeli) military and police are systematically subject to degrading treatment, and often to acts of torture, are interrogated in Hebrew, a language they did not understand, and sign confessions in Hebrew in order to be released,” it said in a report. (Stephanie Nebehay, 6/20/2013).
The sad truth is that Alan Dershowitz, like the black garbed hangman working for ISIS, like the unseen trained sniper hiding on the roof top in a Gazan village protected by the captured family to use as security insurance against a Hamas militant, like the pilot of the F-16 releasing his missiles, like any and all who justify criminal acts for their own selfless ends or through forced indoctrination serve those in power and become in fact figures made of mud like the Golem of old Prague, but a servant of their master, lacking a soul and made indifferent to their fellow humans. For Dershowitz that very loss of his humanity is perhaps his greatest gift.