THE WAR CRIMES LIE

New York Post | 4/22/02 | John Podhoretz

[kattracks]

April 22, 2002 --

THE Palestinian big lie against Israel keeps shifting as the truth emerges.

The first big lie was that the Israelis had perpetrated a massacre in Jenin, killing more than 500 people and then stashing them in mass graves. Then, as aid workers and journalists uncovered no evidence of mass graves, the lie was that the Israelis had secretly transported the dead bodies in refrigerated trucks.

Now it's that the Israelis have violated international law relating to war. Ac- cording to the BBC on Thursday, "International officials say some actions by [Israel's] troops, there and elsewhere, would appear to have breached the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the protection of civilians in war or under occupation."

Why? Well, "the convention forbids violence being used against civilians, as well as inhumane or degrading treatment . . . It is claimed that civilians died in Jenin when their houses were demolished. The convention prohibits the destruction of property except where military operations make it absolutely necessary."

Lies. Lies lies lies. Damnable, outrageous, unseemly lies.

The simple truth is this: International law relating to the conduct of the incursion exculpates the Israelis and convicts the Palestinian Authority. Period.

The Israelis went into Jenin and made a systematic search for bomb laboratories and terror cells that had been hidden among civilians. The purpose was to destroy the laboratories and take prisoner or kill those who had been building the suicide bombs and directing the suicide attacks.

The Palestinian intifada describes itself as an armed struggle, an uprising. The word that describes the leaders and planners of such an armed struggle, in legal parlance, is "combatants."

And international law could not be any more plain. On June 8, 1977, the Fourth Geneva Convention was updated. The document is called "Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts."

Article 37 outlaws the use of civilian populations as a shield for military actions. It explicitly prohibits "the feigning of civilian, noncombatant status; and the feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict."

What the leaders of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hamas and Islamic Jihad do is hide among civilian populations to make it as difficult as possible for their enemies to attack them. The Geneva Convention denounces this as "perfidy."

Peter Bouckaert, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York who sneaked into Jenin on Thursday, told the Washington Post, "It's been incredibly difficult to tell the difference between fighters and civilians. If a combatant uses the civilian population as a shield in this way, the deaths incurred are the moral and legal responsibility of those who are hidings out in this grotesquely cowardly fashion.

Previously, Palestinians and their apologists had claimed the Israelis were violating the Fourth Geneva Convention by refusing to allow ambulances operated by the Red Crescent Society to move freely between Israeli hospitals and the West Bank towns in which the incursions were taking place.

Article 38 specifically addresses the ambulance issue: "It is prohibited to make improper use of the distinctive emblem of the red cross, red crescent or red lion and sun." And yet this is precisely what the Palestinians have done. The Israelis have stopped and searched ambulances emblazoned with the Red Crescent and found suicide belts hidden in them. One of these incidents, on March 27, was captured on videotape.

By using this internationally accepted symbol as a diversionary tactic - in essence turning ambulances into tanks - the Palestinians thus bear the moral and legal responsibility under international law for the Israeli refusal to allow the free conduct of Red Crescent vehicles.

The violators of international law - the criminals in this war - are the Palestinians who devised these shameful tactics.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com

[section9]

These Red Crescent ambulances are not going into Israel. They are working in the occupied territories.

Of course they're not going into Israel. Their function was to move fedayeen and shahid around from one place to another. This would facilitate either the transfer of fedayeen from one city to another city or to assist shahid as they infiltrate their weaponized selves towards Israeli civilian targets.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[ThreeOfSeven]

Constant demonization of Palestinians. That's what defending the Israeli occupation is all about.

[section9]

No, I am not defending the Occupation. There is a difference. The Occupation and Settlement policy was an act of monumental strategic stupidity on the part of the old Labour governments that left most of the political initiative in the hands of the ultramontaine right (the Kahane crowd and other settlers and rightists that some poet in Great Britain wants to see lined up against the wall and shot...). I believe that there exists a consensus within the Israeli body politic to withdraw to borders which are just east of the '67 "Green Line" boundary, one that is more acceptable. It will be for the next, post-Sharon government to withdraw the borders from the most untenable settlements leaving few, if any of them, left (only those which are tactically defensible and contiguous with the Old Israel).

What I object to is the demonization of Israel for the act of defending herself against a corrupt, criminal gang of terrorists that some call the Palestinian Authority. Arafat and his people made a conscious political decision to reject peace because, as Dennis Ross pointed out, he couldn't think of any other way to coexist with the Jews save conflict. They then instituted, through front groups like the Tanzim and the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, a campaign of mass terror aimed at Israeli civilians, not at the Army. At the same time, Arafat maintained a veneer of deniability in order to maintain contacts with the Americans and, of greater importance, to make sure that he had access to the money that the European Community was sending him (a lot of Arafat's political contortions are done in order to secure the money that the Eurotrash send him every year.). A lot of that cash probably ended up in a few Swiss accounts, by the way.

The more recent killings were done almost certainly at the behest of Saddam. Saddam sees the Pallies as his first line of defense. What he didn't count on was the fact that the Israelis crushed the PA so decisively. He also didn't count on the fact that George W. Bush has basically put the Pallie issue on the backburner while plans for the "Fuhrerbunker" operation in Iraq are finalized and weapons stocks restored.

So what you'll see is low level diplomacy between the Israelis and the Pallies conducted by mid-level envoys like Zinni, punctuated by the presence of Powell to move things along from time to time. Meanwhile, the real action shifts to Baghdad, and Saddam.

Be Seeing You,

Chris