Posted on 05/03/2002 6:05:14 AM PDT by tomahawk
Wait a minute. Surely Al Jazeera did not get it wrong.
Or would that be "Faker Turkman"?
Whoopsy.
You are just havin' a really crappy day today.
Don't believe it, brother. Amnesty International and these guys (HRW) rival for how liberal and bleeding-heart they can get. I think HRW recently decried America's horrible human rights record, in our borders.
So if THESE guys conclude there was no "massacre", then there wasn't.
For a dose of truth: | |
WSJ: The Massacre That Wasn't - Part I http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/668601/posts Non-evidence and Pali fabrication of evidence |
Steyn: The UN is running out of blind eyes to turn http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/669411/posts Interesting link on UN backpedaling |
WSJ: The Massacre That Wasn't - Part II http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/669632/posts Palestinians drop their hyped-up "massacre" charges |
Atrocities of the British Press http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/669206/posts Huge amounts of ink devoted to unverified Pali tales |
WSJ: The Massacre That Wasn't - Part III http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/672189/posts Hey, Jimmy Carter has an opinion too!! |
Reporters Back Down From Jenin "Massacre" Reports http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/668509/posts World press forced to face the truth: No Massacre |
WSJ: The Massacre That Wasn't - Part IV http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/672160/posts Yet more non-evidence and Pali fabrication of evidence |
NY POST: THE MASSACRE THAT WASN'T http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/667529/posts Peres: There wasn't a house that wasn't booby-trapped |
WSJ: The Massacre That Wasn't - Part V http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/673145/posts The Pali's contradict themselves and blame it on Israel |
Steyn: It's time to snap out of Arab fantasy land http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/669063/posts Some great Oriana Fallaci quotes/links as well |
An interesting juxtaposition of tales: | |
Message From An Israeli On The Front Lines http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/673234/posts "Entire families exploded themselves! It was horrific." |
Palestinian Fighter admits: No Massacre in Jenin http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/671903/posts 2,000 bombs and booby-traps placed in the camp |
Pediatrician: terrorists used children in Jenin camp http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/670962/posts Doc: IDF did everything possible to avoid civilian harm |
Palestinians Booby-Trap Wheelchair in Jenin http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/670810/posts NOTE: The wheelchair was occupied!! |
Jenin War Diary of a Hasidic Soldier http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/672951/posts Israeli citizen-soldier describes what went on in Jenin |
Palestinian fighter's version of the Jenin battle http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/672896/posts Pali Plan: Trap Israeli soldiers, then blow them up |
And so, in conclusion: | |
Massacre Claims Unsupported by Palestinian Fighters http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675129/posts Pali eyewitnesses all support the Israeli version |
The Phantom Massacre http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/672761/posts War Crimes in Jenin were committed by the Palis |
Jenin's 'Massacre' Death Toll Reduced to 56 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675752/posts Israel told the truth; Palis did not |
Jenin's War Criminals http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675340/posts What the Palestinians did was the real war crime |
The Jenin Probe Ends http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675737/posts UN unhappy about Israel's possible exhoneration |
The 'Jenin Massacre' Hoax http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/jg20020503.shtml Living in a world of monstrous moral inversion |
Israel/Occupied Territories: Jenin War Crimes Investigation Needed |
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(Jenin, May 3, 2002) Evidence suggests that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) committed war crimes in the military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, Human Rights Watch charged in a report issued today after a week-long investigation. Human Rights Watch did not find evidence to support claims that the IDF massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the camp.
"The abuses we documented in Jenin are extremely serious, and in some cases appear to be war crimes," said Peter Bouckaert, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch and a member of the investigative team. "Criminal investigations are needed to ascertain individual responsibility for the most serious violations. Such investigations are first and foremost the duty of the Israeli government, but the international community needs to ensure that meaningful accountability occurs." A Human Rights Watch team of three experienced investigators spent seven days in the Jenin refugee camp, gathering detailed accounts from victims and witnesses and carefully corroborating and independently crosschecking their accounts with those of others to reconstruct a detailed picture of events in the camp in April 2002. The IDF has not agreed to Human Rights Watch's repeated requests for information regarding its military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza. Bouckaert, who headed up earlier Human Rights Watch investigations into wartime abuses in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, said that the Jenin events clearly warrant further investigation. He noted that the hallmark of a professional army is to take seriously the need to establish accountability for serious violations of the laws of war. "There have been widely divergent accounts of what happened in Jenin. A U.N. fact-finding mission could contribute significantly to the search for the truth in Jenin," Bouckaert said. "Israel should cooperate fully with whatever new U.N. fact-finding mission might be established, and there should be no immunity for persons implicated in the most serious violations of the laws of war." On April 3, 2002, the IDF launched a major military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, home to some fourteen thousand Palestinian refugees. An estimated eighty to one hundred armed Palestinians took part in the fighting. Israel claims the camp had been the launching ground for many of the suicide bombings that have killed and maimed over one hundred Israeli civilians in recent months. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly condemned this deliberate killing of civilians. Palestinian armed militants had also planted many explosive devices in the camp prior to and during the IDF incursion. Among the twenty-two civilian deaths documented during this investigation were the following:
In one case involving a wounded Palestinian militant, IDF soldiers for several hours prevented medical help from reaching him. The soldiers then killed the man, who had been left close to a hospital near the camp and was no longer armed or taking active part in the fighting. Human Rights Watch also found evidence of indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by the IDF. U.S.-supplied helicopters fired anti-tank missiles and other ordinance into the camp, in some cases making insufficient efforts to identify legitimate military targets and avoid hitting civilian houses. The helicopters struck many houses in Jenin refugee camp that were inhabited only by civilians, and where no Palestinian fighters were present. In one of many such cases, a tank shell and two helicopter-fired TOW anti-tank missiles hit the house of Kamal Tawalba, a father of fourteen children, on April 6. No fighters were present in the home. When Tawalba and his family tried to leave their burning home, IDF soldiers in the vicinity shot at them. In another case, a sixty-year-old woman was killed when a helicopter fired a missile directly into her top-floor apartment although there were no armed Palestinians in the building or the immediate vicinity. The IDF's campaign caused extensive and disproportionate destruction of the civilian infrastructure of the camp, particularly in the Hawashin district following an April 9 ambush of Israeli soldiers there. In contrast to other parts of the camp where armored bulldozers were used mainly to widen streets, in Hawashin they razed the entire district. Throughout the camp, at least 140 buildings were completely leveled, many of them multi-family dwellings, and more than 200 others were severely damaged, leaving an estimated 4,000 people, more than a quarter of the population, homeless. More than one hundred of those buildings were in Hawashin district. The extensive, systematic, and deliberate leveling of the entire district was clearly disproportionate to any military objective that Israel aimed to achieve. Establishing whether this devastation so exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction-a war crime-should be one of the highest priorities for any future U.N. fact-finding team, said Bouckaert. Human Rights Watch also documented cases in which Israeli troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice prohibited under international humanitarian law. In one case, IDF soldiers forced eight civilians to shield them by making them stand on a balcony while the soldiers fired at Palestinian gunmen. Kamal Tawalba and his fourteen-year-old son were among them. Tawalba described how the soldiers kept them for three hours in the line of fire, and used his and his son's shoulders to rest their rifles as they fired. "Even accepting the Israeli charge that Palestinian groups who used the refugee camp as a base were responsible for attacking Israeli civilians," said Bouckaert, "this does not excuse the IDF violations documented in this report." Bouckaert added that Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Palestinian gunmen forced civilians to serve as human shields during the battles in the camp, and no indication that Palestinian gunmen had prevented Palestinian civilians from leaving the camp. "As in our prior investigations of IDF operations, we also found numerous cases where the IDF coerced Palestinian civilians to take part in military operations," Bouckaert said. "Palestinian civilians were forced, sometimes at gunpoint, to accompany IDF troops during their searches of homes and to carry out some of the most dangerous tasks during these searches." During most of "Operation Defensive Shield," the IDF blocked emergency medical access to Jenin camp. Soldiers repeatedly fired on Red Crescent ambulances, and in one case shot to death a uniformed nurse, twenty-seven-year-old Farwa Jammal, who had come to the assistance of a wounded man. In another case, fifty-eight-year-old Mariam Wishahi died in her home thirty-six hours after she was injured by shrapnel; IDF soldiers repeatedly prevented ambulances from reaching her home, located just a few hundred meters from Jenin's main hospital. During the period the IDF had control of the camp, the Israeli authorities had responsibility under international humanitarian law for the welfare of the civilian population. Yet Israeli authorities denied humanitarian organizations access to the camp during their offensive, and continued to prevent humanitarian access to the refugee camp for days after military operations had ceased, despite great need. Human Rights Watch has investigated and reported on violations of international humanitarian law by governments and armed groups in conflict situations around the globe, including most recently in Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, eastern Congo, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Colombia. |
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The report is far from kind to the IDF, however, it refutes the PLO's claims of a massacre.
However, the report discussed cases of war crimes and human rights violations on the part of IDF soldiers and requested Israel investigate such incidents.
I freely concede that in any war environment, individual soldiers will cross the line. Americans did in WWII, in Vietnam, and maybe even in the Gulf War.
However, it is now time for you to finally pretend you have a shred of intellectual honesty and admit that the Jenin "massacre" never occurred.
If that were true, the Israelis would have admitted it and apologized by now. This is bunk.
Wasn't there an earlier report of Palestinians taking a dead person, tying him to a wheelchair, and pushing him out into the path of a vehicle in order to "manufacture" a war crime?
Good. There were so many attacks during one period that I know I lost count of it all. Let's see a full listing of not just the dead, but also the blinded, burned, and/or crippled. That will be gruesome, but the suffering of innocent Israeli civilians must be reported.
That sounds a lot more likely, particularly given reports of a fake Pali funeral, and of bodies being dug up and moved to a mass grave to produce the appearance of a massacre. The IDF are not barbarians, and Pali credibility is nil.
Here's a link, provided by My_Identity in post 24: Palestinians booby-trap Wheelchair in Jenin. It's not quite clear to me whether the occupant of the wheelchair was dead or alive. I hope you either saw the Fox News footage last night or read of the Pali *funeral* the other day. The Israelis had claimed that some Palestinian funerals were being stage for PR purposes and one such farce was caught on film. It doesn't help PR when the corpse gets dropped and picks himself up, y'know.
LOL. These idiot palis are the "Keystone Cops" of the modern age. If only they understood the extent to which the civilized word (with some notable exceptions: the French, neo-commie socialists, etc.) holds them in utter contempt. They have absolutely no credibility. If they pronounced that the sun just rose in the east this morning I wouldn't believe them.
BTW, isn't it interesting how the pali-loving demonrats of a few months ago are now falling over themselves to prolaim support for Israel? They must be getting some interesting polling results these days.
"Sometimes we call it a massacre when you kill one innocent person," he told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Finally the truth comes out - 1 Palestinian killed is a massacre, one innocent Jew killed by a homicide bomber is a reason to celebrate.
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