T-shirts worn by some Jewish soldiers mock the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including pregnant women and children. “1 shot, two kills” says one depicting a pregnant Palestinian woman in a sniper’s crosshairs.
Apparently, the shirts came into fashion following disclosures that soldiers who took part in Israel’s military offensive in Gaza complained about rules of engagement allowing them to kill civilians and destroy property. According to Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, a sociologist at Bar-Ilan University, the phenomenon is “part of a radicalization process the entire country is undergoing, and the soldiers are at its forefront.”
Opened a little over ten years ago by Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Gaza Airport was a “symbol of freedom”… Today, it lays in ruins — a monument of sorts to the ravages and futility of war.
Perhaps they should update their website: “Gaza Airport covers a wide span of high standard facilities. Long history of experiences should guarantees the unique quality services…” and so on.
What do you do when you live in a concentration camp? Dig tunnels, of course.
Israeli propaganda refers to the network of underground tunnels only in connection with the smuggling of weapons by Hamas, but rarely is it noted in the media that these provide an economic lifeline of sorts to the people of Gaza and, in fact, most are operated by merchants, not terrorists.
From the YouTube video description: George Galloway condemns the “pathetic” “puppet” Arab leaders and compares the “ineffectual” but essential Palestinian resistance in Gaza to the Jewish resistance against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
“The Palestinians have a choice of dying quietly of hunger and disease on their knees, or deciding to die noisily on their feet. It’s an age-old dilemma, and it was faced most comparably by the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, who were locked up in a ghetto by the Nazi occupiers of Poland and were systematically starved to death…”
The photos in the video show the current 2009 Israeli bombardment of Gaza alongside photos of Jewish civilians and Nazi soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.The audio is an excerpt from George Galloway’s talkshow on Talksport Radio, recorded 2 January 2009.
Update: Related to the above, veteran Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman speaking out last week in a debate about the conflict in Gaza.
Sir Gerald, who was brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants “was the reply of the Nazi” and added: “I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.”
He went on to accuse the Israeli government of seeking “conquest” and added: “They are not simply war criminals, they are fools.”
Aljazeera looks at the devastating aftermath of what Ezra Levant laughably describes as “Israel’s defensive war against Hamas terrorists and their missile attacks against Israeli civilians.” More about that later, after the clips.
First of all, let me just say that the following in no way condones the reprehensible practice of firing rockets at civilian targets in Israel (or any targets, for that matter) by Hamas. But let’s get real here. From 2001 when the Hamas missile attacks started until the present, despite having lobbed thousands of evidently near useless rockets across the border, the grand total of fifteen Israelis have been killed. That works out to about two people a year being killed by missile attacks. Two. The chances of being killed in a routine traffic accident are hundreds of times greater (the number of road accident victims in Israel for 2008 stood at 444).
To launch a carefully planned military campaign — with a plainly fraudulent causa belli it should be noted — that involved raining death from above with a high-tech “shock and awe” campaign of relentless bombing (utilizing illegal white phosphorous munitions, no less), followed by a brutal rampage through the streets of Gaza with heavily armoured tank and infantry corps, leveling markets, houses, mosques, schools… and well, just about anything in their path it seems, can hardly be called “defensive” in any sense of the word. And the end result of this grotesquely disproportionate response? The reduction of an already miserably forsaken ghetto to hellish rubble, at least 1,033 people killed (including 335 children and 98 women), over 4,800 injured, and many more thousands left homeless refugees.
Clearly, this wasn’t a “defensive war” but rather, a savage and vindictive retribution — in other words, collective punishment against the people of Gaza. At the outset of the war, Israel said that it was striking at the Palestinians to “teach them a lesson”… Well, they certainly did that — but surely it was one that will do little to advance the cause of peace that the Israeli government claims to want so desperately.
If true, the allegations made by the grieving Gazan father in this news report from AlJazeera are quite shocking.
Palestinian civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip were a “product of circumstance,” Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said today. “We had to carry out this operation. I am at peace with the fact that we did it,” she told Israel Radio. Livni is running for prime minister in next month’s election.
Yesterday, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown criticized Israel’s conduct during attacks on the Gaza Strip over the past three weeks that have left more than 1,000 Palestinians dead. Our government on the other hand… [crickets]
The LA Times reports: “In declaring a cease-fire Saturday in Gaza, Israel asserted that it had achieved its goals: hurting Hamas’ military wing, discouraging rocket fire into Israel and cutting the flow of smuggled arms into Gaza. But Israel had a broader goal: sending a tough message to its arch-enemies Iran and Hezbollah.”
Unfortunately, many people like the Sammouni family in Gaza City were on the receiving end of that “tough message” from Israel. The IDF demolished their house yesterday AFTER ordering them to remain in it for safety.
Twenty-seven members of the family died. An estimated 90 people remain trapped in the rubble. And so the wheel of retribution turns…
British writer Patrick Seal (The Struggle for Syria, etc.) and Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi discuss the relative indifference (if not outright complicity) of neighboring Arab states in the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
In the second part of the program, the panel is joined by Israeli national security expert Efraim Inbar, whose charming views about the “unruly Palestinians” can be viewed here.
Seal appears to have nailed the real agenda of the Israelis, that has absolutely nothing to do with the pretext of preventing rocket attacks by Hamas.
Given the current state of the American economy, can it be long before Phil the Bricklayer, Rose the Teacher, Tom the Carpenter, Tito the Builder and so on are cynically recruited by Pajamas Media to join up with Joe Wurzelbacher to provide “average Joe Jew” stories from the Gaza conflict?
“Being a Christian, I’m pretty well protected…” Uh huh.
While I can certainly appreciate the feeling of being rather underwhelmed or somewhat dissatisfied by the official equivocations issued by the LPC with regards to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, to suggest there’s a direct connection between Ignatieff’s carefully parsed statement regarding the conflict and the tragic death of 40 people in the bombing of a school run by the United Nations is, quite frankly, depraved and utterly reprehensible.
Red Tory v.3.0.3 