Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Jenin: the bloody truth
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/article/0,,178-273694,00.html ^ | April 21, 2002 | Marie Colvin

Posted on 04/21/2002 10:28:29 AM PDT by RWCon

Was it a massacre? in the ruins of the refugee camp found cold comfort for propagandists on either side

THE first medical teams allowed into the Jenin refugee camp last week followed the chickens. Human senses were overwhelmed by the devastation and the stench of death, but the birds were not distracted. They were hungry. Two rusty-coloured fowl pecking away at a bundle in the street drew a Red Cross team to the remains of Jamal Sabagh.

He wasn't really recognisable to an untrained eye. His body had been lying there for more than a week. The Israeli army had banned ambulances from the camp for 11 days, and neighbours were too terrified to go to him.

Tank tracks led to his body, over it and onwards through the mud. What had once been a young man was rotting flesh mingled with shredded clothing, mashed into the earth. One foot was all that looked human.

Sabagh was no fighter, his brother and friends say. He was 28 and a father of three. His wife and children had fled on the first day of the Israeli invasion, Wednesday, April 3, but he stayed because he was diabetic and was too ill to run away. He was also afraid he would be mistaken for a fighter.

Two days later, he left his house when the Israelis yelled over megaphones that they were going to blow it up. He walked, directed by soldiers in armoured personnel carriers, with other men to Seha Street at the centre of the camp, carrying his bag of medicines. He joined the crowd. Soldiers yelled at him to take off his shirt, then his trousers. He clung to his bag of medicine as he tried to unbuckle his belt, and he was slow. The soldiers shot him, friends say.

Medical workers shooed away the chickens, wrapped Sabagh's remains in a rug, then lifted them into the back of a small open-bed truck. It drove off, past burned and shell-holed buildings, looking like a medieval plague wagon.

Across the narrow street was a forlorn pile of men's jeans, polyester tracksuit tops and cheap shoes - left by those who had got their clothes off in time, to prove they had no bombs strapped to their bodies, and had been taken to the Israeli army base at the nearby village of Salem.

As the rescue teams spread out over Jenin camp last week, after the Israeli army claimed victory in its battle against several hundred armed Palestinian radicals, it was clear something cataclysmic had occurred.

Instead of the Hawamish neighbourhood -previously a jumble of mismatched cinderblock homes - a vista lay open to the hills beyond.

Stunned and dusty in this new world, returning Palestinians wandered around a moonscape the size of two football pitches. It was littered with the detritus of human life - blankets, a little girl's tartan skirt, a child's orange boxing glove, shoes, a musical keyboard. Women in hijab headscarves dug at the crushed rubble with buckets and bare hands. Five-year-old Ahmed Hindi cried: "I want to go home." He didn't know he was standing on it.

Images of this man-made earthquake zone have flashed around the world as evidence that the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is responsible for another war crime in Jenin on a par with the massacre of Palestinians in the Chatila and Sabra refugee camps in Beirut 20 years ago.

Israel has responded that the devastation was the consequence of a pitched battle against entrenched terrorists.

What really happened? Tragedy doesn't necessarily breed truth. The propaganda war had begun before the white dust settled over Jenin.

Rafi Laderman, a personable Israeli reserve major, emerged from the battlefield and made the rounds of the media in his rumpled green uniform. His clear plastic spectacles signalled his real job as a marketing consultant.

Laderman insisted that all the buildings in the refugee camp had been destroyed by explosive booby traps set by the terrorists, or levelled by Israeli bulldozers because they "presented additional engineering difficulties" that could endanger civilians. He himself had stopped the fighting to lead Palestinian civilians to safety.

All that seemed disingenuous. Equally unlikely were Palestinian claims that the Israelis had killed 500 Palestinians in cold blood, most civilians, and buried them in mass graves under the rubble after running them over with tanks. Israel said about 70 had been killed.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations envoy to the Middle East, cut through the propaganda by stating the obvious: "No military operation can justify this scale of destruction. Whatever the purpose was, the effect is collective punishment of a whole society."

He and his family received telephone death threats from Israeli callers for his pains.

Under pressure from many sides - including the United States, Britain, the United Nations and the European Union - Israel has agreed to a UN fact-finding mission. The trouble with such missions, however, is that they become bogged down by obfuscation while evidence goes cold.

To get an objective idea of what happened in Jenin requires an almost forensic investigation, weeding out lies and half-truths and the rumours that a stunned and terrified population has come to believe are true. By doing so, I have come to conclusions that are unlikely to satisfy the propagandists of either side.

Jenin was bound to be a prime target for the Israeli military backlash after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 28 Israelis as they sat down to dinner in Netanya on Passover eve three weeks ago.

There has been a refugee camp in Jenin since the foundation of Israel in 1948 when Palestinians fled there from the Haifa area. The first residents worried only for their next rations and fretted impotently as their rich orange groves in Haifa were rebranded Jaffa oranges by Israel and exported around the world.

Since then, Jenin has become a stronghold of radical Palestinian nationalism with a population of 11,000 refugees. The Israeli defence force (IDF) believes half the suicide bombers who have struck Israel in the past year were trained in the Jenin refugee camp.

When the Israelis invaded Ramallah on March 29, in retaliation for the suicide bombings, radicals in Jenin knew they would be next. Sources there said local leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, including its militant Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades offshoots, organised small fighting cells that included members from each group.

At 2am on Wednesday April 3, five days after the invasion of Ramallah, Merkava tanks and armoured personnel carriers rumbled through Jenin and headed for the refugee camp on the edge of the city.

The Namal brigade and commandos entered from the west; the Golani brigade from the south; and the Fifth Brigade, a unit of reserve troops called up from their day jobs, went in under the command of Laderman.

The odds were far from equal. The Israelis had tanks, armoured personnel carriers and rocket-firing helicopter gunships. Its soldiers were in full battle gear with bulletproof vests, helmets and M-16s. Against them was a guerrilla force of several hundred men armed with Kalashnikovs and home-made bombs called kuwa - Arabic for elbow - manufactured from pieces of plumbing.

The two sides faced each other in a camp about 21/2 miles long by 1/2 mile wide. In this tiny battlefield the radicals not only resisted the might of the Israeli army longer than the combined Arab armies did in the 1967 six-day war, but turned themselves and their militant cause into the stuff of instant Palestinian legend.

"The fighting was the fiercest urban house-to-house fighting Israel has seen in 30 years," said Laderman.

The narrow dirt alleys provided perfect ambush hides for Palestinians who grew up in this maze. The Israelis tried to keep off the streets, progressing from house to house by breaking through the walls with explosives and hammers.

On the first night of the invasion, Israeli soldiers blew out the yellow metal door of Ismael Khatib’s home in the Hawamish district and hauled him out to act as a human shield as they knocked on his neighbours' doors.

As they did so, two gunmen across the alley opened fire. Hugging Khatib in front of him with his left arm, an Israeli soldier balanced his M-16 on Khatib's right shoulder and fired back wildly.

Kuwa bombs were hurled by Palestinians. Khatib threw himself on the ground and crawled away, only to circle around and climb in his back window. "I felt like I died and came alive again," he says.

The next day another Israeli patrol crashed through the wall into his living room. They stayed, keeping him, his wife and children hostage in a room.

A far more serious ambush sealed the Hawamish area's fate. By Monday, April 8, most of the surviving gunmen had been forced into this neighbourhood. Early next day, 16 reservists of the Fifth Brigade moved into an alley in Hawamish, searching for a house to use as a lookout post. Their leader, Major Oded Golomb, set charges to blow the door.

As he did so, a Palestinian bomb exploded and gunmen began firing from the opposite roof. Thirteen Israelis were killed.

Israel's retribution was swift. Armoured bulldozers, two-storey behemoths as impregnable as a tank, began knocking down houses in Hawamish.

Hurriya Kreini was in her home with her family when an Israel bulldozer began destroying the house without warning. She and her husband managed to push their children out of a window before the house tumbled down.

By Thursday, April 11, Hawamish had disappeared. That was the day the Israeli operation officially ended, but hours after the Israelis announced that the last 35 fighters had surrendered (they ran out of ammunition) I stood in a village called Borqin looking down into the camp. The sound of heavy machinegun fire still rose from the valley. Helicopter gunships shot bursts of heavy-calibre bullets. Explosions sounded and white puffs rose above the camp.

The Israelis let in the outside world slowly and grudgingly. The camp was finally opened to international aid agencies on April 14, but journalists were barred. Until only two days ago, Israeli soldiers shot at journalists they spotted trying to slip through the olive groves that slope up from the camp, or along a back dirt road.

The obstruction fuelled speculation that the Israelis were trying to hide something. There were mass graves, some said; bodies had been hauled off in refrigerated trucks; others swore hundreds of bodies were under the bulldozed homes.

Israelis bridled. "Our mission was to penetrate into Jenin area and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and we did that," insisted the ubiquitous Laderman. "I have a five-year-old daughter and now I feel I can let her out in the playground."

I eventually gained access last Tuesday, walking in with as open a mind as I could muster.

Late in the day, when all was quiet, I was walking past the Jenin hospital. Nearby, women and children were slowly making their way back to temporary lodgings after a day trying to find their homes and relatives. An armoured personnel carrier pulled up at end of street behind us. The Palestinians took no notice - until the soldier in the turret opened fire straight down the street with his machinegun.

I dived for shelter. Children cried in terror. The soldier initially fired over our heads, but now bullets flashed by at chest height. The screams turned to moans as the APC headed towards us down the street.

It rolled into sight, stopped the gunfire and swivelled the huge barrel to point directly at us. Then the soldier waved his hand in anger, yelling: "Go, go." I think he just wanted everyone off the streets.

If I was now convinced by claims Israelis opened fire indiscriminately on civilians, weighing up the truth of other allegations would be much more difficult. Even what can seem obvious is not necessarily true.

From a house hit by a missile in the centre of what the Palestinians now call their own Ground Zero, rescue workers pulled human remains that people said were of a small child. They lay on a rug and seemed indeed very small to the eye. But when I found a doctor, he was dubious.

"This person has been reduced; I think in a fire," the doctor said. "See that bone?" He poked around and found a large thigh bone. Not a child.

When I tracked down the owner of the house, he said that four fighters had been holed up in his house firing on the Israelis when a missile hit it.

Scores of interviews in the camp did show consistency, however. Story after story - from people who had not yet met one another since they fled - indicated the Israelis had used Palestinians as human shields and had taken families hostage to protect their makeshift posts set up in their houses.

In a house overlooking Hawamish, the Sabagh family were sweeping out after having Israeli soldiers there for eight days. Trying to scrub off Hebrew slogans, Jamili Sabagh, 52, said the family were held in a tiny room upstairs.

"They gave us no food, no water. The room they put us in was too small for 13 people. They fed our dog to torment us, and not the children," she said. "Our home was a garbage heap when they left."

It is one of the few on the block untouched by missile strikes, a sign that it was indeed used as a post by the Israelis.

Ismahan Stati is a pretty, shy university student. Israeli soldiers came to her house on the third day and blew open the door, she said.

"They took me as a hostage," she said. "They were afraid."

They knocked on a nearby house, and when nobody answered they blew open the door with a grenade fired from a gun. In fact, Afaf Dusuqi, 52, had been slow coming to the door and was killed instantly by the shrapnel.

Afaf's mother held her body, covered in blood, and screamed for an ambulance but the soldiers fired into the house to drive her back. "I was shaking with fear," Stati recalled.

Outside the Dusuqi house, there is still blood on the concrete stoop, and there is a 6in hole in the yellow door where the lock used to be.

Afaf's body stayed in the house for five days until the family could smuggle it to the cemetery for burial in a hurried mass grave. I found her name scrawled on a stone where she will lie until her family can give her a proper burial. Doctors at the Razi hospital have her death certificate.

There is a bizarre twist to this story. A rumour began that Stati was a suicide bomber. The story started, her family believes, when a neighbour saw her standing in the group of soldiers, heard an explosion and ducked, then looked again to see the body of a woman.

The rumour is still around the camp, illustrating why every fact must be tracked down here.

Stories of cold-blooded executions were told to me in detail but could not be substantiated. A woman said she saw "with my own eyes" the execution of eight Hamas members and a 16-year-old boy who was the son of one of the men but had nothing to do with politics.

It sounded difficult to believe of the IDF, but she had a name. In the end, I found the true story; an awful tale, but not a cold-blooded assassination.

Fathi Chalabi, a bird-like elderly man, showed me where the Israelis had blown a hole in his door to enter his home at night. About 30 soldiers had forced their way in and separated out Chalabi, his son Wada'a, 32, and another man, Abed Sa'adi, 27, in the courtyard.

"They told us to face the wall and take off our shirts," Chalabi said. "They were looking for suicide bombers. But we were not. My son was the caretaker at school. He was one month from getting his university degree."

It was dark, and as Wada'a picked up his shirt, the Israelis spotted an elastic bandage he wore for back pain. Someone shouted in Hebrew. Chalabi remembers the officer's name was Gabi. They opened fire, hitting the two younger men, who fell on Chalabi.

The last he remembers is some kind of argument between the soldiers. Then they shone lights on the bodies and he played dead. "I was covered in Wada'a's blood," he said. The Israelis left up the alleyway. Dark dried bloodstains still marked the concrete when Chalabi spoke to me.

Equally callous was the shooting of Omar Nayel, a shop owner. "I was in my house looking out, trying to see what was happening," said Fathi Abu Aita, a neighbour. "I saw him walk across his courtyard, I think going to the loo." Two shots rang out and he fell. Nayel's body lay in the garden for days.

My conclusion after interviewing scores of refugees is that there is no evidence Israeli troops entered the camp aiming to "massacre" Palestinian civilians. But in many cases they shot first and did not take much care to find out if the target was a civilian or not.

Under the fourth Geneva convention, they are required to protect the civilian population, and wilful killing of a civilian is a potential war crime.

I am also certain that numerous Palestinians were held hostage in their homes while Israeli troops used the building as a base or a firing post, and that others were taken door to door as a human shields, sometimes thrown into rooms ahead of Israeli troops.

Both are violations of international law, which protects civilians in wartime.

As for the bulldozing of the Hawamish area, this seems to have been out of a combination of fear and revenge rather than premeditated.

I asked Laderman how he felt now. He said he was satisfied that the "nest of snakes" has been snuffed out. As for the new generation of suicide bombers the military operation has probably created, he said: "They would have become suicide terrorists anyway."


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Foreign Affairs; Israel; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS:
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 161-180181-200201-220221-232 next last
To: Jethro Tull
Your,,,,, err,,,,,point is understood and noted, but please nazi Tom, if this isn't always the case, please provide us with some historic examples to support your conclusion.

Exactly what conclusion are you talking about? I have made the statement that land changes ownership via wars of conquest. I hope you wouldn't need examples of that? I have also made the statement that the previous statement isn't ALWAYS the case, Japan and Germany in WWII.

Did the Sinai become Israeli's property simply because it was they who conquered it?

Yes.

Also, if your peculiar land changing theory is correct, would Tel Aviv become the property of Palestine, if somehow tomorrow it were captured by waves of Arafat's walking bombs?

Unlikely. But if the Palis would grow some balls, use the millions of dollars other Arab countries give them and buy military equipment, and then invade and take over Israel, yes, they would claim it as their own. Would the US recognize the new country? No. But since all the other countries in the area would, it doesn't matter.

I suspect you're inventing and applying another round of 'neocon foreign policy rules?,which are crafted solely in Israeli's best interest.

Obviously not. I'm just pointing out the facts of history.

These ad hoc rules go something like this, "What's ours is theirs, and what's theirs is theirs."

More words in my mouth. You do a nice job of debating yourself.

Sorry bub, the world isn't buying your swill....

You globalist swine don't intimidate me.

201 posted on 04/23/2002 10:20:27 AM PDT by TomB
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 198 | View Replies]

To: Jethro Tull
WHoops! I almost forgot to ask you:

Where is the evidence of the "massacre" at Jenin? And what about those aerial pictures?

202 posted on 04/23/2002 10:22:20 AM PDT by TomB
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 198 | View Replies]

To: Jethro Tull
Jethro stopped looking for the Juden under the bed long enough to type:

Your,,,,, err,,,,,point is understood and noted, but please nazi Tom, if this isn't always the case, please provide us with some historic examples to support your conclusion.

Now, now, stop with the projection. Haven't you burned enough Torah scrolls for one day?

Did the Sinai become Israeli's property simply because it was they who conquered it?

No. But it was in Israel's national interest to give it back.

Also, if your peculiar land changing theory is correct, would Tel Aviv become the property of Palestine, if somehow tomorrow it were captured by waves of Arafat's walking bombs?

Again no, but I don't expect that Arafat's people would even dream of giving Tel Aviv back to the Jews. However, your protestations do not alter the fact that territorial conquest often precedes territorial acquisition. Ask any American Indian.

I suspect you're inventing and applying another round of 'neocon foreign policy rules‘,which are crafted solely in Israeli's best interest.

As Israel is an ally of the United States, and as Israel is the sole democracy in a region ruled by cads, mountebanks, petroleum monarchs, and psychopaths, there are times when these so-called "neocon" policies of the U.S. Government make eminent good sense.

These ad hoc rules go something like this, "What's ours is theirs, and what's theirs is theirs."

Okay, see if you can get it right. Are you speaking of the Israelis or the Pallies, or the Americans, or all three? I suspect that you're posting yet another example of the perfidy inherent in the Zionist Entity. There have been plenty of examples, beginning in the Sinai in 1956 all the way through Camp David, in which the U.S. and Israel's interests have diverged. For instance, if you'll recall, we forced the IDF to halt its advance on Damascus in 1973 when President Nixon believed that such an action might bring about Soviet intervention. We pushed the Israelis and Barak to offer more to Arafat at Camp David. That's just two examples of the U.S. asserting its interest in no uncertain terms.

We didn't force Sharon to suspend his operation because we didn't want to! We had Special Forces on the ground, working with the IDF, because we wanted to get our hands on some of the intelligence that the Israelis had tying the PA to Saddam, and, indirectly, to al-Qaeda.

Sorry bub, the world isn't buying your swill....

Oh right, like your pseudointellectual malt liquor is going over like gangbusters in comparison!

Be Seeing You,

Chris

203 posted on 04/23/2002 10:34:28 AM PDT by section9
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 198 | View Replies]

Comment #204 Removed by Moderator

Comment #205 Removed by Moderator

To: Jethro Tull
You already have section8....

You realize, of course, that you've just admitted that you can't debate your way out of a paper bag.

What a clown, what a bozo, what an intellectual fast-buck artist! Go drown your sorrows with Robert Fisk!

Now, back to "Summer Camp" with you...

Be Seeing You,

Chris

206 posted on 04/23/2002 10:42:14 AM PDT by section9
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 199 | View Replies]

Comment #207 Removed by Moderator

Comment #208 Removed by Moderator

To: RWCon
"I eventually gained access last Tuesday, walking in with as open a mind as I could muster."

To the author of this liberal trash piece:

Really? Try harder next time. Did you walk through Berlin in the 1940's after the USAF/RAF retaliated for the bombing of London? Would your mind have been "open" then?

War is hell. Muster this.

209 posted on 04/23/2002 11:04:22 AM PDT by Gargantua
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

Comment #210 Removed by Moderator

To: Jethro Tull
Obviously, there is so little hope of supporting your arguments, that you are simply playing games, but I'll play along....

Yes, I want examples.

Examples? Of land changing ownership via wars of conquest? Are you serious? Do you realize what this says about your grasp of history?

How about...

North Vietnam annexing South Vietnam?

Germany (WWII) annexing Poland, France, Belgium etc......?

The US taking Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines after the Spanish-American war?

The US taking California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah after the the Mexican American War?

Pretty much ANY war ever fought in Europe?

I could go through the rest of the history of the world, but that would make a long thread.



So, my assumption was correct.

You neocon nazi?s have created a two tracked foreign policy.

What Israel takes by force becomes their property, and what America conquers becomes annexed and a tax payers nightmare via a Marshall Plan (read, Germany and Japan).

Lord, you are a dim bulb, aren't you?

Going back, I've made no proclamations of US or Israel foreign policy. I have merely stated what is obvious for those of us without brain damage. That is, territory SOMETIMES, but not ALWAYS, changes hands during wars.

Every conflict is different, and in the future if the US decides it is our best interest to annex some land, say, oh, Iraq, to ensure our safety, then there is nothing wrong with that.

Your attempt at obfuscation is very weak.

The fact reamins that Israel overran the Sinai and only returned it to Egypt when it was in their own best interest to do so.

211 posted on 04/23/2002 4:30:34 PM PDT by TomB
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 204 | View Replies]

Comment #212 Removed by Moderator

Comment #213 Removed by Moderator

To: Jethro Tull
GET A LOAD OF THIS NAZI-BOY

Ahaaaaa. That's better. You made your first mistake, as I knew you would.

Notice, everyone, that our friend from the Northeast Idaho Totenkopfverbande stopped calling Tom and I Neocon Nazis? Now he just calls us plain old Nazis (that is, when he's not wiping up the spittle off the keyboard).

Now why was this? Rather simple, really. I found it curious that my opponent from the Hitlerjugend kept using that term. In my post to Lazmataz, I had pointed out that the most prominent Neoconservatives in this country are Jewish. This movement didn't start with William Kristol or Paul Wolfowitz. Indeed, it goes all the way back to the great schism that occured in the New York Jewish literary community in the 1970s. In those days, the flagship magazine of Jewish opinion was Commentary, edited at that time by Norman Podhoretz (his son, John, had a dorm room across from mine at the University of Chicago).

Commentary started out in the forties as a magazine of liberal Jewish opinion. It reflected the Roosevelt/Socialist consensus of Reform Judaism that dominated the Jewish community in America. Eventually, Podhoretz, as well as Commentary became very left wing, especially during the Sixties. Then the Left showed its True Face and turned on the Jews after the Six Day War. As a result, Podhoretz and his small band of Jewish writers and editors began to turn away from Socialism and towards American capitalism, American patriotism, and a ringing defense of the Jewish state.

Again, you can't separate Neoconservatism from its Jewish origins, and when I called him on it, our friend the storm trooper had been smoked out. So now its just plain "Nazis". Sorry Jethro, but your pathetic attempt to backpedal out of your own Jew-baiting won't work. But there is a rich comedy of errors that follows here, so let's all go to the Party Day Rally and watch Jethro really burn a few Torah scrolls.....

ISRAEL FIRST BUTCHERS INNOCENT CIVILIANS, AND THEN DEMANDS TO BE ALLOWED TO APPOINT THE INVESTIGATORY TEAM!

There is no proof that Israel "butchered" innocent civilians. Your ridiculous assertion implies a systematic, planned massacre of innocents, not the chaotic barbarism of urban combat. The more you type, the more you reveal your own level of ignorance and the more you display your latent sense of disgust with the Jewish people. You peddle the first blood libel against Jews at the mere drop of a hat? Yet where was your outrage when Jews were being blown up in restaurants, at shopping centers, and at Seder?

(....sound of crickets...)

I thought so.

I suppose you thought that I wouldn't read the story, or didn't pay attention to the pap you posted? In point of fact, the Israelis objected to some of the members on the board because they were suspicious of their motives: it does no good for Israel for the United Nations to create a massacre out of whole cloth (which it would do if left to its own devices, and you know it) while the U.N. slaps together a report blaming the IDF for a massacre that never was.

I SAY THIS MUCH SECTION8, ISRAEL DOESN'T LACK FOR NERVE.

I would say "sticks and stones may break my bones...", but that would be a waste of time. Expecting you to actually stick to the FACTS and argue reasonably and dispassionately is akin to expecting a towel boy at a whorehouse to lead a discussion group on the Nichomachaean Ethics.

Oh, and ALL CAPS DO NOT HELP THE DEBATER IF THE CONTENT IS NOT THERE TO SUPPORT THE DEBATER'S CENTRAL THESIS!!!!!!!!!

However, I do realize that you're trying to come to terms with your inner brownshirt, so I understand.

And now, on with the fun.....a Deconstructing We Will Go!!!!

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Israel protested Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites)'s appointment of a fact-finding team to establish what happened during its military assault on the Jenin refugee camp and demanded that a retired American general be made a full member of the panel.

Something that I hear the U.N. finally relented on. General Nash is his name, I believe. The Pallies will definitely try to pull one over on the Eurotrash who are making up this commitee. It's good that General Nash has been appointed.

Arab nations have accused Israel of a massacre of civilians in the camp, but Israel says the deaths and destruction resulted from gunbattles between its soldiers and Palestinian gunmen.

The Arab charges, especially those emanating from the Palestinian spokesmen, always should have been treated with a high bollocks quotient. It was in their interest to scream "massacre". Yet the small scale of destruction in a 100m by 100m intensive combat zone puts the lie to stories about hundreds being buried by bulldozers. Of course, I don't expect my Skinhead friend to agree with me, but there you have it.

The fighting in Jenin, which lasted eight days and ended April 11, was the fiercest the West Bank offensive Israel launched late last month after a spate of Palestinian suicide attacks.

Good On Ya', IDF! By the way, everybody's favorite impartial observer from The Independent, Robert Fisk, reported that the missile that killed an Al Aqsa brigade commander yesterday was made by none other than the boys over at Lockheed-Martin of Orlando, Florida. Good equipment leads to good results, I always say. There's another terrorist who won't be killing any Jewish children.

While the Palestinians welcomed the appointment of the three-member fact-finding team, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer called Annan on Monday afternoon to complain that its members were not picked in coordination with Israel, as was requested.

Annan has his own agenda. It pays for him to look tough on the Israelis. It pays for him for this report to come back looking as bad as possible for the Israeli Army. Of course, Jethro thinks that the UN is the soul of impartiality here, don't you Jethro?

Earlier Monday, Annan announced that former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari will lead the team, which will also include Cornelio Sommaruga, ex-president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Sadako Ogata, the former U.N. high commissioner for refugees.

Oh Christ, this is like picking Olaf Palme and Gunther Grass to attend a Republican National Convention and give their impressions of Christian Conservatism. The only one I hold out hope for is Ogata. He's Japanese, and the Japanese government doesn't have a dog in this fight.

Annan said retired U.S. Maj. Gen. William Nash, who commanded a multinational force in Bosnia in 1996 and was the U.N. administrator in northern Kosovo in 2000, would serve as military adviser to the team. "It's important to have someone who understands how military campaigns are mounted," he said.

This team should be treated for the pack of amateurs that it is unless and until General Nash is made a full member with a right of review of the committee's report.

Former Irish assistant police commissioner Peter Fitzgerald, who commanded U.N. police in Cambodia in 1992-93 and later headed the U.N. police force in Bosnia, was named police adviser.

I don't see any problems here.

Ben-Eliezer demanded that Annan make Nash a full member of the team rather than an adviser, Israel's Defense Ministry said in a statement. He also asked that the team limit its mission to Jenin.

And I'm not surprised. Annan has a bone to pick. It's in his interest to get the UN involved in the entire West Bank operation, not just Jenin. He knows that there was no massacre, but he's hoping that he might find something else on the West Bank to hang his hat on.

But Annan, speaking at a news conference, did not rule out the possibility of visits to other West Bank cities and stressed that he expects full cooperation from Israel and the Palestinians.

As I said, without General Nash to ride herd on this posse of cat herders, this guys will find bombed out buildings painted with signs in English that say "BABY MILK FACTORY" and buy it hook, line, and sinker.

U.N. officials had no comment on Ben-Eliezer's demands.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday to back the fact-finding mission, hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Annan his country would welcome a U.N. representative "to clarify the facts" of what happened in the Jenin camp.

"Israel has nothing to hide regarding the operation in Jenin," Peres said, according to Israel's U.N. Mission. "Our hands are clean."

The Palestinian U.N. observer, Nasser Al-Kidwa, accused Israel of "war crimes" on Monday, saying its forces obliterated the camp, fired missiles into a crowded area, bulldozed homes with people inside and blocked access to humanitarian workers.

Asked whether the team would be looking into the possibility that war crimes were committed, Annan said, "I'm not sending a team of prosecutors or criminal investigators. ... They are going to establish the facts."

Ahtisaari, who was the Finnish president from 1994-2000, said he hopes the team will arrive in Jenin before the end of the week.

In the week since the Jenin camp began reopening to the outside world, Palestinian claims of a massacre of civilians have gone unsubstantiated, although doctors say women, children, the elderly and other noncombatants are included among dead and injured. About four dozen bodies have been recovered in the camp, and Palestinians — who had said the toll would run into the hundreds — insist the enormous piles of debris could yield many more corpses.

It's not often I get to see a poster destroy his own argument with his own article. But you did it here. No massacre took place, there was no butchery, and Jenin was not destroyed.

It was all a damnable lie, and you're peddling it.

Concerns about its actions in the camp have prompted some of the harshest international denunciations of Israel in nearly 19 months of conflict.

Denunciations from the usual gang of thugs, goons, gangsters, Presidents-for-Life, and "Judenraus" leftists should be taken with a grain of salt.

Much like your posts, I might add.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

214 posted on 04/23/2002 10:37:06 PM PDT by section9
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 208 | View Replies]

Comment #215 Removed by Moderator

To: Jethro Tull
Please read and learn....

That's it?! That's all you can come up with?

Out of all the points I made, you ignored all of them except for this one. As to that (weak) point, do you think the Mexicans would have signed the treaty if we hadn't been in Mexico City and blockading the country? Of course not. We CHOSE to end the war as such to reduce the chances of further hostilities. However, there's no doubt we would have retained the present territories with or without the exchange of money.

Anyway I eagerly await your further discussion of my points made in post 211.

I also eagerly await any more evidence of a massacre, and since the Palestinians are already there, you would think they could come up with some, ANY?, evidence.

And why is there so little damage shown in the aerial pictures?

216 posted on 04/24/2002 8:58:29 AM PDT by TomB
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 212 | View Replies]

To: section9
Of course, Jethro thinks that the UN is the soul of impartiality here, don't you Jethro?

Chris, have you noticed how our friend is becoming quite the globalist? First, he quotes with gusto and relish the European (socialist) Press, delighting in every word. He continually frets over what the rest of the world thinks of the situation. And then he puts his hopes and trust in the UN, of all places!?

It seems Jethro is becoming quite the shill for the NWO.

What would Pat say?

217 posted on 04/24/2002 9:09:32 AM PDT by TomB
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 214 | View Replies]

To: Jethro Tull; section9
Sorry Section8.

OUCH!!!!!

That'll leave a mark.

I can't believe it took you this long to come up with that one, Jethro.

Another couple weeks and we might be able to call your humor "juvenile".

218 posted on 04/24/2002 9:15:59 AM PDT by TomB
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 215 | View Replies]

Comment #219 Removed by Moderator

Comment #220 Removed by Moderator


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 161-180181-200201-220221-232 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson