The suicide of American sovereignty

7:14pm

As London locks down in feverish anticipation of the arrival of The One,Commentary publishes an important essay by John Bolton on an academic paper articulating what he correctly perceives to be the underlying rationale for Obama’s foreign policy – nothing less than the ending of American sovereignty.

The progressive classes in Britain and Europe have signed up to this idea for years. Dubbed ‘transnational progressivism’, it is based on the belief that the nation state is in and of itself the cause of all the ills of the world, from prejudice to war. Nations cause nationalism; nationalism causes conflict; abolish nations and you abolish conflict and usher in the brotherhood of man. War is replaced by diplomacy, and transnational institutions and values trump national ones. It’s the rationale behind the European Union; it accounts for the near religious veneration of the UN as the supreme global arbiter of international legitimacy and ethics; it explains the enthusiasm for supra-national institutions such as the International Criminal Court, the obeisance to ‘international law’ and the supremacy of ‘universal’ human rights law.

Unfortunately, this latest formula for Utopia is wholly inimical to democracy, actively undermines or prevents countries from acting in their own national self-interest to defend their own citizens, institutionalises deliberately mediated injustice and even terror through appeasement policies instead of ‘just wars’ against tyranny and aggression, and is a recipe for more conflict rather than less as the people progressively rise up against this erosion of their powers of representative self-government.

 A large part of Obama’s appeal to the intelligentsia in Britain and Europe is precisely the understanding that he stands for the repudiation of American exceptionalism and the so-much resented swaggering imposition of American values (aka freedom and democracy) through military might abroad in favour of a Europeanised, multilateral diplomacy-based approach. Bolton points out that this approach has its distinct limitations, over and above eroding sovereignty by subordinating it to other people's interests:

The difference arises in the consideration of a tiny number of cases—cases that prove entirely resistant to diplomatic efforts, in which divergent national interests prove implacably resistant to reconciliation. If diplomacy does not and cannot work, the continued application of it to a problematic situation is akin to subjecting a cancer patient to a regimen of chemotherapy that shows no results whatever. The result may look like treatment, but it is, in fact, only making the patient sicker and offering no possibility of improvement.

... Time is one of the most important variables in a diplomatic dance, because it often imposes a cost on one side and a benefit to its adversary. Nations can use the time granted by a diplomatic process to obscure their objectives, build alliances, prepare operationally for war, and, especially today, accelerate their efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missiles that might carry them.

He’s talking about Iran.

Meanwhile, Obama has picked for a high-ranking post in his administration yet another official who appears to embody values antithetical to American interests --including American sovereignty. The New York Post reports that he has nominated Harold Koh, until recently Dean of Yale Law School, to be the State Department’s legal adviser – in which role he would  forge a wide range of international agreements and help represent the US in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice:

It's a job where you want a strong defender of America's sovereignty. But that's not Koh. He’s a fan of ‘transnational legal process,’ arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.

...The primacy of international legal ‘norms’ applies even to treaties we reject. For example, Koh believes that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child -- a problematic document that we haven’t ratified -- should dictate the age at which individual US states can execute criminals. Got that? On issues ranging from affirmative action to the interrogation of terrorists, what the rest of the world says, goes.

Including, apparently, the world of radical imams. A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that ‘in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.’

A spokeswoman for Koh said she couldn’t confirm the incident, responding: ‘I had heard that some guy . . . had asked a question about sharia law, and that Dean Koh had said something about that while there are obvious differences among the many different legal systems, they also share some common legal concepts.’

... Koh has called America’s focus on the War on Terror ‘obsessive.’ In 2004, he listed countries that flagrantly disregard international law – ‘most prominently, North Korea, Iraq, and our own country, the United States of America,’ which he branded ‘the axis of disobedience.’

Get that – the man Obama wants to be a top law officer has equated the US with North Korea and Iraq as flouters of international law, and sees no problem in sharia being used to settle American law suits.

The destruction of US sovereignty and legal and cultural integrity at home and the appeasement of tyrants abroad by a President who holds his own nation in such contempt that he wants to emasculate its powers of self-government and grovel to its mortal enemies – it’s certainly change, all right, but whether such a national suicide programme is one that Americans can actually believe in is quite another matter.

 

 

 

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The essential history

2:25pm

An excellent article by Victor Sharpe on American Thinker provides a resume of what most people in Britain and the west are so ignorant of – that the history of Britain in the Middle East is one of systematic betrayal of the Jews and appeasement of the Arabs from 1921 onwards. There have been serial ‘two-state solutions’ on offer – each one reneging on Britain’s legally binding obligation to the Jews in order to buy off Arab interests and appease Arab terror:

In 1920, Great Britain was given the responsibility by the League of Nations to oversee the Mandate over the geographical territory known as Palestine with the express intention of reconstituting within its territory a Jewish National Home. The territory in question stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the eastern boundary of Mandatory Palestine, which was a border that would separate it from what was to become the future state of Iraq.

In 1921, however, Churchill unilaterally gave away most of this territory to the Hashemite dynasty to create what later became known as Jordan.

This was the first partition of Palestine and created a brand new entity 87 years ago covering some 35,000 square miles or nearly four-fifths of the geographical territory of Palestine. Immediately Jewish residence in the territory was forbidden and it became in effect judenrein - the German term for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from a territory.  

This betrayal by none other than Winston Churchill, the Colonial Secretary at the time, was a devastating blow to the Jewish and Zionist leadership, which now saw the promised Jewish homeland reduced to the remaining narrow territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan - an area barely 50 miles at its widest. Shortly after, in 1923, the British and French colonial powers also divided up the northern part of the Palestine Mandate. Britain stripped away the Golan Heights (ancient biblical Bashan) and gave it to French occupied Syria...

The succeeding history of the remaining one fifth of the original territory promised to the Jewish people by Lord Balfour and the British government was one of continuing British betrayal as each successive Mandatory administration displayed pro-Arab and anti-Jewish policies. During its administration up until 1947, Britain severely restricted Jewish immigration and purchases of land while turning a blind eye to massive illegal Arab immigration into the territory from neighboring Arab states. Britain's sorry record of appeasement of the Arabs, at the expense of Jewish destiny in the remaining territory, culminated in the infamous 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to just 75,000 souls for the next five years. This onerous and draconian policy, coming as it did on the eve of the outbreak of World War 2, was a death blow to millions of Jews attempting to flee extermination by Nazi Germany. Britain’s mismanagement of the Mandate finally led to the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947. The Jewish Agency reluctantly accepted this additional dismemberment of what was left in Mandatory Palestine of the promised Jewish National Home.

It is only if the true history of the Middle East is understood that certain things become inescapably clear: the scale of the monumental lie that has been so assiduously promulgated about the nature of this dispute, a lie which is now generally assumed in the west to be true and which is driving the genocidal hysteria against Israel; the fact that the fundamental cause of this tragic impasse was the repeated British appeasement of Arab terror, illegality and injustice, a policy which continues to this very day; and the immorality and absurdity therefore of believing that today's ‘two-state solution’ – which among other things means that the ‘progressives’ who support it thus support the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the putative state of Palestine – would be anything other than a Final Solution for the Jews of Israel, not to mention an incalculable victory for the forces waging war against the free world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The real lobby and its acolytes

1:40pm
Those who are regularly left open-mouthed at the way in which the British media puts across an overwhelmingly Arab narrative about Israel and the Middle East, trasmitting lies and distortions as facts and reversing victim and victimiser to present Israel as the regional aggressor and the Palestinians as their targets, may well also scratch their heads at being told with monotonous regularity that ‘the Jews control the media’.

Well now Arab Media Watch lifts a curtain to show us the real lobby at work. It boasts:

Some 200 guests gathered at Kensington's Royal Garden Hotel on 21 March 2009 to attend Arab Media Watch’s fifth annual fundraising dinner, and to mark its ninth anniversary. Among the guests were almost three-dozen senior journalists from the BBC, Al Jazeera English, Financial Times, Reuters, Daily Mail, Independent, Asharq Al Awsat, Al Quds Al Arabi, Al Hayat and others.

The evening began with a welcome speech by AMW chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi, who outlined the extensive work done by the organisation during and since Israel's invasion of Gaza, including:

-         forcing the media to correct factual errors
-         meeting with editors and journalists
-         providing them with information
-         being interviewed by them or arranging interviews for them
-         getting letters and articles published
-         being quoted and cited in articles
-         publishing studies, press releases and Action Alerts
-         organising and speaking at events
-         helping university students and researchers

‘All this was done,’ Nashashibi reminded the audience, ‘while continuing our work on media portrayals of the entire Arab world, a huge but vital task undertaken on a budget that’s dwarfed by that of the pro-Israel lobbies.’ He added: ‘We've proven the sceptics wrong for the last nine years, establishing ourselves as a credible, professional, dynamic organisation with the recognition, respect and support of much of the British media, and high-level contacts in every news organisation…AMW is making a considerable and invaluable difference, and wants to continue doing so.’

Here are some of the ‘factual errors’ that on its website AMW has tried to correct:

• The ‘myth that Hamas is out to destroy Israel
• The ‘myth that Palestinian rockets are a grave threat to Israeli civilians’
• The ‘myth that five Arab armies tried to wipe out Israel in 1948: ‘Strictly speaking, therefore, the Arab states did not launch a war against Israel, but undertook an armed intervention which was both lawful and justified.’

On and on its goes, lie after smear after brazen lie. And now just look at how, as AMW goes on to detail, the British media fawned over these purveyors of gross and inflammatory untruths:

Ian Black, the Guardian’s Middle East editor, was unable to speak at the dinner due to illness, but he wrote a statement of support that Nashashibi read out. ‘I'd like briefly to pay tribute to the work of AMW,’ the statement began.

 ‘For anyone in the British media writing about the Middle East or the wider Arab world, AMW - very ably run by Sharif Nashashibi - has become a force to be reckoned with. It has served notice that inaccuracy, misrepresentation, half-truths and prejudice are simply not acceptable - and has done much to monitor and combat them.’

Black continued:  ‘AMW has played an especially important role on Iraq and Palestine. Its work on the Gaza war was both combative and effective. Its letters to editors, op-ed articles and complaints about biased or misleading coverage have become part of the landscape.’

He added:  ‘To some extent AMW has filled the gap left by the failures of the Palestinians and Arab governments to state their case as effectively as they could and should've done. That's especially true with regard to the Arab Peace Initiative, which surely remains the only workable basis for a just and comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’

Black concluded:  ‘The work of AMW is necessary, courteous and professional. I commend it to you wholeheartedly.’

The next speaker was Barbara Serra, presenter for Al Jazeera English (formerly with the BBC, Sky News and Channel 5), whose introduction was followed by projected footage of her heated interview of Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev during the Gaza invasion.

 ‘It's easy to forget, when one works closely with and in the Middle East, how little knowledge the general public across the world often has about the issues behind the continuing tensions, from the illegal occupation in the West Bank to the continuing expansion of settlements there,’she said.

 ‘That's why the work of AMW is so invaluable. They don't just fight against prejudice and distortion in the media, but also highlight inaccuracies which, if left unchecked, would only reinforce the misconceptions many hold towards the Arab world.’

A performance by comedian Ian Stone was followed by the presentation of AMW's annual award for excellence in journalism to world-renowned reporter, author and documentary filmmaker John Pilger, whose daughter Zoe accepted the award and read out a statement by him.

 ‘This is an honour I very much appreciate, and I send warm thanks from Australia to all of you at AMW, ‘he wrote.  ‘I pay tribute tonight to AMW, and to Al Jazeera, and to all the courageous Arab journalists who have brought us the truth...’ Attendees watched clips of Pilger’s documentaries  ‘Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror’ and  ‘Palestine is Still the Issue.’

A three-course dinner was then served, with Arabic music in the background, quotes from the night's speakers projected on screen, and a raffle and auction which included five-star holidays, paintings by renowned Arab artists, and antique Arab furniture.

Peter Oborne, political columnist at the Daily Mail and contributing editor at the Spectator, was unable to speak at the dinner because he had to travel unexpectedly to Afghanistan, but he wrote a message of support that Nashashibi read out:

 ‘The most noble purpose of journalism is to tell the truth and expose falsehood. Too often, British journalism achieves the exact opposite. It tells lies and glorifies falsehood. That's why the work of AMW is so important. It sets out to combat the climate of deception that dominates too much of our reporting.’

And here is more feedback from AMW’s grateful media client base:

‘Thank you…We did enjoy it.’ - Financial Times / Reuters

‘Many thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed it.’ - The Independent 

‘I enjoyed the programme and the company of your nice guests.’ - BBC

‘Thank you very much for the invitation. I wish you all the success you deserve.’ - BBC

‘Thank you very much for the invitation. I really enjoyed the annual dinner. It was refreshing.  It was, as before, perfectly organised…’ – BBC 

‘Thank you so much for your generous invitation…The event was wonderful and the presentation was flawless…Best wishes for continued success…’ – BBC.

So now we know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Israel's real rotten apple

12:13pm

In today’s Ha’aretz, Anshel Pfeffer has written a wounded defence of the paper’s publication of the claims by Israel Defence Force soldiers that their comrades had deliberately killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, having been given explicit orders to do so. Pfeffer had nothing to do with the story but, feeling besmirched through ‘guilt by association’ as a result of being given a lot of grief over his paper’s behaviour, he seeks to defend it.  

In particular, it appears he was mortified by my blog posts here and here about ‘the Ha’aretz blood libel’. Anshel makes his points in a gracious and rounded way, acknowledging the need to fight the onslaught of anti-Israel hatred and Zionophobia around the globe.  But unfortunately he does not acknowledge the part played in this onslaught by his own paper.

His essential point is that such discussion about Israel’s ‘rotten apples’ must be brought out into the open, and that the angry responses have been merely to

brand Israelis who are sincerely concerned for their society and the actions of their government as traitors to the cause.

This is to miss the point by a mile. Of course valid criticism must be made of Israel’s ‘rotten apples’. But the whole point is that these were not valid criticisms because they were not true.

The article gave the impression of widespread war crimes having been committed, which in fact boiled down to two allegations of intentional killing of Palestinian civilians made by two soldiers. But there was zero evidence to support these allegations, and it rapidly became clear that they were no more than recycled rumour -- with one of the soliders admitting that he was relying solely on hearsay. Subsequently, the IDF said that one claim was a false rumour arising from a warning shot having been fired but which did not kill anyone, and the other incident never happened at all.

Furthermore, the transcript of the soldiers’ conversation, which Ha’aretz published on the second day of its running story, revealed that other soldiers in this discussion had not only cast doubt upon these false claims but had produced evidence of their own of the extraordinary lengths to which IDF soldiers had gone to behave decently towards the Palestinians. (As for Danny Zamir, the ultra-leftist instructor who presided over their discussion and whom Anshel defends, the transcript shows how Zamir perversely described an account of soldiers being instructed to wash the floor of a Hamas activist’s house as evidence of  ‘an army with very low value norms, that's the truth...’). It was Haaretz that had chosen to spin this transcript – and indeed, its own published story -- in a way that was wholly misleading and most damaging to the IDF and to Israel.

Also disgraceful was the way in which Ha’aretz implied that ultra-nationalist rabbis were somehow instrumental in causing the IDF to behave in an unethical way – a suggestion which is wholly unfounded but which is now being taken up not just by enemies of Israel but by secularised Jews with obsessive scores to settle against religious Zionism, and who are now themselves thus contributing to the global auto-da-fe. The only disquieting part of the soldiers’ chat which actually stood up – the disclosure that soldiers were wearing tee-shirts with disgusting motifs glorifying ‘kills’ of Palestinians – rightfully drew instant IDF condemnation. But reprehensible as that practice is, wearing tee-shirts is not a war crime.

The Ha’aretz claim that Israel had committed war crimes provoked the widespread flak which has so upset Anshel Pfeffer because the story fell apart and was shown to be merely maliciously spun froth. Presented with such allegations made about the conduct of a war, any reputable paper would check them out before sailing into print with them. For Ha’aretz not to have done so in the current circumstances, with both the Arab and Muslim world and the western intelligentsia incited by the constant bombardment of such lies to genocidal frenzy against Israel, was beyond appalling.

Anshel makes it very clear that he recognises the pogrom-style atmosphere towards Israel in the UK. The contribution to that irrational hatred made over the years by the distortions and lies pumped out by Ha'aretz – which, consumed by the obsession with the disputed territories of its publisher Amos Shocken, long ago lost its journalistic marbles along with any claim to integrity – is incalculable. It is Ha’aretz that is one of Israel’s ‘rotten apples’.

Anshel is a good reporter who has fallen amongst thieves. I sympathise. I did after all work for Guardian Newspapers for two decades. But he is defending the indefensible. And I think he knows it.

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The Iranians betrayed

10:11am

Amil Imani has written an impassioned piece about the way in which Obama is betraying Imani's fellow Iranians:

President Obama said, ‘The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.’ But, Mr. President, the Iranian nation does not wish to be associated with this occupying regime, whatsoever. In fact, they want the Islamic Republic to be thrown into the dustbin of history as quickly as possible. Mr. President, today, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the greatest threats to the stability of the civilized world and humanity at large. It continues to impose its horrendous ideology on the Iranian population.

It also looks like my people are going to be betrayed once again by a badly misguided American president. Jimmy Carter helped give birth to the virulent Shiite Islamism by forbidding the Shah of Iran to crush the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khomeini and his band of rabid Islamists. Now, President Obama intends to confer legitimacy on the illegitimate child, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

... It is worse than appeasement to negotiate a ‘deal’ with the Islamists in Iran because any deal struck with these mullahs is only another ruse for them to further their plans... Misguided advocates of negotiation with the mullahs, beware. The mullahs are on an Allah-mandated mission. They are intoxicated with Petrodollars and aim to settle for nothing less than complete domination of the world under the Islamic Ummah. It is precisely for this reason that they consider America and the West as ‘Ofooli,’ setting-dying system, while they believe their Islamism as ‘Tolooi,’ rising-living order. They are in no mood for negotiating for anything less than the total surrender of democracy, the very anathema to Islamism.

Because of the way in which Iran is under-reported in the western media, few appreciate the terror under which the civilised Iranians, natural friends to the west, are being subjugated by the regime which runs their country. As Imani says, those Iranians have been systematically betrayed by ignorant, stupid, greedy and short-sighted American and western governments, with the result that even now the Iranian regime is playing them for suckers while moving its pieces on the geopolitical chessboard into the nuclear checkmate position. And now Obama has gone grovelling to that regime and even validated it, he has not only further weakened the free world against it but has also taken the ground from under the feet of the very people who so urgently need the world’s support to get rid of that regime.

Those Iranians are indeed the free world’s best hope of averting the coming cataclysm. Obama’s appeasement strategy is as suicidally stupid as it is unprincipled.

 

 

 

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Universities of hate

11:33pm

The incomparable Khaled abu Toameh, the Palestinian Jerusalem Post journalist who tells the truth about Israel and the Palestinians, has been visiting American campuses – and found more sympathy there for Hamas than in Ramallah. Not from Arab or Muslim students – but from western so-called liberals. This is what he writes: 

Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber. I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel’s ‘apartheid system’ is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.

... What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to ‘resist the occupation’ even if that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.

I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.

Ironically, many of the Arabs and Muslims I met on the campuses were much more understanding and even welcomed my ‘even-handed analysis’ of the Israeli-Arab conflict. After all, the views I voiced were not much different than those made by the leaderships both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. These views include support for the two-state solution and the idea of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in this part of the world.

...The majority of these activists openly admit that they have never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories. They don’t know -and don’t want to know - that Jews and Arabs here are still doing business together and studying together and meeting with each other on a daily basis because they are destined to live together in this part of the world. They don’t want to hear that despite all the problems life continues and that ordinary Arab and Jewish parents who wake up in the morning just want to send their children to school and go to work before returning home safely and happily.

What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the ‘occupation’ as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel.

...What is happening on these campuses is not in the frame of freedom of speech. Instead, it is the freedom to disseminate hatred and violence. As such, we should not be surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university campuses across the U.S.

Read it all.

 

 

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Another shutter comes down

10:52pm

As predicted, the UN’s satirically named ‘Human Rights Council’ has now passed a resolution aimed at restricting criticism of Islam religion, or ‘religious defamation’. As Roy W Brown writes on Index on Censorship,

... the majority of member states of the Human Rights Council are united in a single purpose: not the promotion and protection of human rights, but the prevention of the exposure of their own human rights abuses.

Another shutter comes down on freedom.

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Bulletin from Planet Pogrom

10:26pm

Yesterday, Ha’aretz reported (as did the Telegraph today) official Palestinian casualty figures for Operation Cast Lead released by the Israel Defence Force, which I reported below. 

Those figures -- 1,370 fatalities of whom 600 were terrorists and 309 innocent civilians, of whom 189 were children under the age of 15 -- were attributed to the IDF’s Coordination and Liaison Authority for the Gaza Strip. But today, the IDF put out a different set of figures which it said were produced by the Research Department of the Israel Defence Intelligence. This said there were 1166 fatalities, 709 of them terrorists and 295 uninvolved civilians, 89 of them under the age of 16, and 49 of them women.

Well, which set of figures is the final authoritative tally? What is the IDF doing putting out two different sets of figures on consecutive days – and when so much mischief is being made on this issue?

The Telegraph, meanwhile, chose to spin the Wednesday figures in this way:

Israel’s armed forces admitted on Wednesday that 189 Palestinian children under the age of 15 were killed during the assault on the Gaza Strip (my emphasis).

Whether it was 189 or 89 children, this was too many; every such casualty is to be regretted. But in war, the innocent do get killed. To say that only a figure of zero civilian fatalities is acceptable is to say that no country can ever go to war to defend its civilians against
aggressive attack. But of course no-one does say that. The media pay virtually no attention at all to civilian casualties in any other conflict. In Afghanistan, for example, untold numbers of civilians are being killed in air strikes which are truly indiscriminate.

Yet no newspapers or NGOs are leaping up and down about those. There is virtually no media interest whatever in the civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It is only Israel whose figures are so incendiary – and so inflated; it is only Israel which is not to be allowed to kill any civilians or children in war; thus it is only Israel which is not to be allowed to defend itself; and thus those who single it out in this way are effectively saying they are content for Israel to be wiped out.

And in this particular war in Gaza, only the bigoted can ignore (as they will) these points: that the number of child casualties was greatly inflated by the Hamas strategy of deliberately placing their children in harm’s way, in order that they should be killed as ‘martyrs’; and that 189 – let alone 89 -- children out of a total fatality figure of 1370 is extremely low, remarkably so when one considers that more than half the population of Gaza is said to be children. So if, as the bigots claim, Israel had been indiscriminately killing civilians, the child fatality figure would have been around 750. The fact that it was as low as it was relative to the population demonstrates the truth of the repeated IDF assertion that it was doing everything it could to avoid killing civilians.

The IDF has also now released the preliminary results of its investigation into the allegation by Human Rights Watch that it made indiscriminate use of white phosphorus in civilian areas contrary to international law. The IDF says:

This particular investigation is dealing with the use of ammunition containing elements of phosphorous, including, amongst others, the 155mm smoke shells which were referred to in the Human Rights Watch report. This type of ammunition disperses in the atmosphere and creates an effective smoke screen. It is used by many Western armies.

The investigation is close to conclusion, and based on the findings at this stage, it is already possible to conclude that the IDF’s use of smoke shells was in accordance with international law. These shells were used for specific operational needs only and in accord with international humanitarian law. The claim that smoke shells were used indiscriminately, or to threaten the civilian population, is baseless.

It should be noted that contrary to the claims in the report, smoke shells are not an incendiary weapon. The third protocol of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) - which defines particular limitations on incendiary weapons - makes it clear that weapons intended for screening are not classed as incendiary weapons. The State of Israel is not a signatory of the third protocol, however, in any, case, as noted this protocol does not ban the use of smoke shells for the purpose of screening.

This accords, by the way, with the Red Cross statement that there was no evidence that Israel had used white phosphorus unlawfully. It was, however, Hamas that fired at least one white phosphorus rocket specifically and deliberately at Israeli civilians and thus broke (again) the law of war – a fact that HRW unaccountably fails to mention.

NGO Monitor provides some context to explain that HRW hardly has a track record of objectivity or even rationality:

HRW’s record exhibits a strong anti-Israel bias. Its reporting in 2008 reflected the portrayal of Israel as the second worst abuser of human rights in the Middle East. Even before the renewal of the military conflict on December 27, 2008, HRW focused disproportionately on Gaza: 18 out of 27 HRW statements in 2008 dealing with Israel addressed Gaza, accusing Israel of ‘collective punishment,’ ‘continued occupation,’ and contributing to a ‘humanitarian crisis’ – charges that are inconsistent with international law and lack supporting evidence.

HRW also has a history of inaccurate reporting.  During the Second Lebanon War (2006), HRW promoted the myth of a Qana massacre, inflating the death toll to 54, although officials knew at the time that the Red Cross was only reporting 28 casualties. HRW eventually retracted its false report. Similarly, HRWs major report on the conflict, ‘Fatal Strikes’ (August 2006), claimed the NGO ‘found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians’ - i.e., operated from civilian areas - despite a wealth of documentary and video proof of the extensive Hezbollah activity in many of the specific villages where HRW claimed it was absent. Nine out of 21 cases described in ‘Fatal Strikes’ were contradicted by later HRW reports - a remarkable inaccuracy rate of 43% - even before independent analysis of the evidence.

The latest report on the use of white phosphorus continues HRW's pattern, including:

• Complete omission of the context of the broader conflict, including Hamas' deliberate exploitation of civilian areas to launch attacks. For example, HRW claims that there was no Hamas activity around the Al-Quds Hospital in Tel al-Hawa, yet, a Gazan ambulance driver reported that Hamas operatives ‘made several attempts to hijack the Al-Qud’s Hospital’s fleet of ambulances.’ In another instance, HRW alleges there was ‘no indication’ of ‘Palestinian armed groups’ operating in Beit Lahiya; photographic evidence shows Hamas fortifications in the town.
• Reliance on Palestinian eye witnesses whose credibility or links to Hamas cannot be verified: ‘Palestinian de-miners showed Human Rights Watch an additional 48 shells that they said they had removed from civilian areas, although the precise location where they found these shells is unclear.  It is unlikely that the de-miners collected any of these shells from open areas near the Gaza-Israel armistice line.’
• The main claim of ‘evidence of war crimes’ stems from HRW's allegation that the IDF intended to ‘willfully-that is, deliberately or recklessly’ harm civilians (despite a complete absence of evidence regarding IDF motives).
•  The authors include Marc Garlasco, who has a significant record of anti-Israel bias in reporting at HRW; Fares Akram, who publicly stated ‘I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza;’ and Darryl Li, whose inflammatory pseudo-legal arguments published in the pro-Palestinian propaganda journal, MERIP, describes Gaza as a ‘bantustan, internment camp, animal pen.’
• HRW extensively relies on Palestinian NGO Al Mezan, thanking them in the report. Among other claims, Al Mezan lists a child as deceased, who was subsequently interviewed by Garlasco in Gaza.
• The report reflects HRW’s inconsistent definition of ‘human shield.’  When reporting on Sri Lanka, HRW condemns the LTTE for ‘deploy[ing] their forces close to civilians, thus using them as “human shields.”’  Yet in Gaza, HRW claims that it ‘found no evidence of Hamas using human shields in the vicinity at the time of the attacks’ despite the fact that ‘In some areas Palestinian fighters appear to have been present…’

 

Final news for today from Planet Pogrom is this loathesome  cartoon by Oliphant in the New York Times, which appears to have had its Der Sturmer moment. Barry Rubin deconstructs the image here, making this core point:

The cartoonist doesn’t hate Jews; he probably doesn’t even hate Israelis. What is involved here is a lack of understanding so enormous that it will both incite hatred; cause violence and death; and block policies needed to help people—including Palestinians who, are supposedly the object of its sympathy but thus doomed to suffer under a repressive regime with a permanent war policy. Antisemitism? Ask not for whom the bell tolls because Israel, the canary in the mine—the one who first they came for—can tell you that you are all next.

 

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Claims and facts

12:49am

Here are some updates on recent stories.

*** On the Ha’aretz allegations of Israeli ‘atrocities’ of deliberately killing Palestinian civilians in Operation Cast Lead, which boiled down to a claim that a) two women were killed by accident when they misunderstood an evacuation route and were killed by an IDF sniper and b) that an elderly woman was shot by soldiers when she approached their unit, there are unofficial but categorical assertions by IDF sources that both these claims are totally untrue. The Jerusalem Post reports:

‘All of the soldiers who were involved in the conference were questioned - not as a punishment - but in order to understand whether they had witnessed these things. From all of the testimonies we collected, we can safely conclude that the soldiers who made the claims did not witness the events they describe,’ the source said.

‘All of it was based on rumors. In the incident of the alleged shooting of the mother and her children, what really happened was that a marksman fired a warning shot to let them know that they were entering a no-entry zone. The shot was not even fired in their general direction,’ the source said.

‘The marksman’s commander ran up the stairs of a Palestinian home, got up on the roof, and asked the marksman why he shot at the civilians. The marksman said he did not fire on the civilians. But the soldiers on the first floor of that house heard the commander’s question being shouted. And from that point, the rumor began to spread,’ the source added.

 ’We can say with absolute certainty that the marksman did not fire on the woman and her children. Later, the company commander spoke with the marksman and his commander. We know with certainty that this incident never took place,’ he said.

The source said that a second allegation of killing of civilians [the elderly woman] was also false, though he could not provide further details at this stage.

The Israeli paper Ma’ariv reports that this incident was found not to have taken place at all.

 *** The media and NGOs put out Hamas casualty figures as if they were facts. So we read that some 1400+ Palestinians died during Operation Cast Lead of whom – variously – ‘most were civilians’, ‘the overwhelming majority were civilians’, ‘more than half were civilians’, ‘400 were children’.

The Israelis have now finally finished their task of attempting to identify all those who were killed in order to provide the most accurate total possible. Here it is:

More than 600 of the Palestinians killed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza have been identified as militants, while another 309 were innocent civilians, according to an updated list of Palestinian losses issued by the Israel Defense Forces. The list, prepared by the IDF’s Coordination and Liaison Authority for the Gaza Strip, is significantly different from the one the Palestinians use.

The Israeli document lists 1,370 fatalities, whereas different Palestinian lists range from 1,324 to 1,434. The IDF claims to have identified 1,249 of those on its list. According to the IDF, more than 600 of the dead have been identified as members of a militant organization.

A total of 309 are described as ‘uninvolved,’ meaning they have been confirmed as innocent civilians. Another 320 are described as ‘unaffiliated,’ which means the IDF has not yet determined whether they have any affiliation with a militant group. Finally, 14 fatalities were members of Fatah whom Hamas executed during the fighting.

Of the 309 innocent civilians killed, 189 were children under the age of 15. Palestinians describe anyone under 18 as a child. This group also includes 91 women, 21 elderly men who were not involved in the fighting, six UNRWA workers and two medical workers. Efforts to identify the remaining dead are continuing.

The fatality list presented by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has numerous inaccuracies and contradictions, the IDF says. For example, Tawfiq Ja’abari, the commander of the Hamas police, and Mohammed Shakshak, a personal assistant to the head of Hamas’ military wing, Ahmed Ja’abari, are both described as dead children on the Palestinian list.

IDF GOC Southern Command Yoav Galant said on Tuesday that the low number of civilians killed during Operation Cast Lead was unprecedented in terms of other armies fighting under similar circumstances, Army Radio reported. ‘This ratio of uninvolved [civilians] is an achievement for which there are no examples in the history of campaigns, not only in Israel but in the entire world - in this type of environment,’ Galant was quoted as saying.

To put it into a bit more context, half Gaza’s population are estimated to be children.

 

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Britain's first sharia-compliant newspaper

4:20pm

The Guardian’s editorial this morning on the government’s revised counter-terrorism strategy is raising eyebrows in a number of places, as here and here. It is indeed a classic example of the Guardian’s signature combination of languid superciliousness and moral inversion. Welcoming the fact that the government has once again avoided

conflating Islamism and terrorism

(Heaven forbid!)  it breathes a particular sigh of relief that it has not included in its definition of extremism support for sharia law

-- an approach that would have branded many mainstream Muslims enemies of the people.

From this we note that the Guardian too does not regard support for sharia law – which involves of necessity subordinating English law and liberty to principles such as condign punishment for gays and adulterers, second class status and misery for women and the death sentence for apostates ( including those to the Guardian’s favourite religion, atheism) -- as extreme. It appears that Islamic sharia law has nothing to do with militant Islamism which, as the Guardian knows, derives instead from

stunted alternative opportunities

in such fields as

wealth or health or housing

and so therefore the right response to militant Islamism is

to engage much of the welfare state

since clearly the extensive range of welfare benefits, health and education services that have made Britain the most hospitable environment in the world for militant Islamists for the past three decades and turned the UK into the most important hub of Islamist terror outside the Middle East is nowhere near enough. Employing the tone of

cool pragmatism

that it so admires in the government’s counter-counter-sharia policy, it takes a coolly pragmatic view of the Istanbul Declaration signed recently by the deputy head of the Muslim Council of Britain, Dr Daud Abdullah, which said inter alia:

Praise to Allah who strengthened His troops, aided His servants and alone routed the Zionist Jews, who says, ‘It was incumbent on Us to aid the believers.’ [Quran 30:47] And blessing and peace be on the Imam of the mujahidin who says, ‘There will remain a group of my Ummah adhering to the truth, and those who oppose them will not harm them until Allah’s command comes.’ [Hadith] (And now to our topic). This statement is addressed to the Islamic Nation, its religious scholars, its rulers and its peoples. In it we congratulate the whole family of Islam on the manifest victory which Allah has granted us in the land of Gaza, a land of pride and dignity, over the Zionist Jewish occupiers. Allah has appointed it as the first step in the complete victory for all of Palestine and the holy places of the Muslims.

We affirm that this manifest victory has clearly disclosed the volume of international and local military and political conspiracy against the jihad and the mujahidin in Gaza, as represented by the following: ... The aggressive pressure put on the mujahidin to break their will and force them to agree to their [the conspirators] terms and the stipulations of the Zionist enemy. The attempt to present the Hamas government as the cause of this malicious Jewish Zionist war over Gaza. The absence of any official and effective Arab and Islamic stance and its weakness in reflecting the will of the Arab and Islamic peoples to help our brothers in Gaza win...

This the Guardian graciously concedes was

in many ways offensive, with sweeping threats against those who stand with Israel

although it merely contained

a slip into racialised language in relation to the Jewish state.

And so clearly there was really nothing here to frighten the horses -- certainly nothing to cause the Communities Secretary Hazel Blears to depart from the

cool pragmatism

of government counter-counter sharia policy, and in an unfortunate throwback to the

frenzied outbursts of the later Blair years

cut off contact with the Muslim Council of Britain, all because the Istanbul Declaration also described

the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the Nation. This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.

In other words, the deputy head of the Muslim Council of Britain was calling on all Muslims, including those in Britain, to take up arms against British forces should they ever seek to prevent arms from getting to Hamas to be used to murder more Israeli citizens.

This treacherous call (in support of a genocidal war) was what had so upset Hazel Blears. But the Guardian thought Dr Abdullah was absolutely justified:

Very many Muslims, and indeed many non-Muslims, would agree with that - just as many in the mainstream felt anger in response to a war of aggression in Iraq.

Appearing to equate Ms Blears’s objection to incitement to violence against British forces (in support of a genocidal war) with

the folly of refusing to engage with widespread views because they are deemed disagreeable

the Guardian went onto compare Islamist terrorism with Irish Republicanism, employing a particularly curious form of words:

For all the undoubted differences with the long years of the Irish republican armed campaign - the abject lack of support for terrorism in the Muslim community being the most important ...(my emphasis).

The Oxford Concise English Dictionary defines ‘abject’ as ‘1) miserable, wretched; 2) degraded, self-abasing, humble; 3) despicable.

It would appear therefore that the Guardian very much disapproves of the Muslim community’s ‘abject’ lack of support for terrorism. Either that, or the Guardian is illiterate.

Tsk! Moral illiteracy they wear as a badge of pride -- but stupidity among the Houyhnhnms of the Guardian is, as we all know, a self-evident impossibility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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