Posted on 05/06/2002 3:54:52 AM PDT by kattracks
Accusations are all that count
Posted: May 6, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
The battle in the refugee camp of Jenin was a gauntlet thrown at the simple, highly effective assumption that is the ace up the sleeve of Palestinian propaganda all over the world: The Israelis are Goliath and the Palestinians a poor weak David, crushed beneath the tanks, but strong in their just cause.
Even suicide terrorism has not totally dismantled this contention, which is still generally accepted by the media (except for a couple of hours before and a couple of hours after every attack). The perverse comment that follows in the wake is generally, "What else can those poor people do except use their bodies as a weapon against the Israeli army?"
Well, Jenin is a different matter entirely – or at least it would be if the truth were out. Jenin is the story of a terrible, two-week long battle and a fight to the death. It was a battle where one of the two contestants (Israel) chose the wrong tactics because it underestimated the enemy and had to rectify things, awkwardly abiding by its own principles.
Jenin is the story of large-scale use of the tactics of suicide terrorism, when instead of an individual, it is an entire country killing itself, setting booby traps to blow itself up, mindless of its own life as long as it can fight the enemy. It is also the story of how to avoid this sort of turning point. The media have taken the dangerous step of describing a massacre that it then had to disclaim – very slowly, without looking bad. Jenin is a tragic case study of a new war, where people did indeed suffer, not only because of the Israelis, but also because of a series of deceptions.
"I just spoke with my colleagues who were there and they told me of a slaughter." That is what CNN reporter Andrea Koppel said in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel, explaining to someone why she used that word speaking about the battle of Jenin.
"Did they see the shooting, the bodies?"
"Palestinians told us about the slaughter."
"And you believe it without evidence? They lie and distort facts"
"Oh, so they are all lying?" said Andrea. That has a certain philosophical importance that later on, in the same conversation, was intertwined with bias and vanity when, the diplomatic correspondent of the American news network confided her eschatological prediction to her listener who said, "We could lose our lives, our country." And Andrea answered, "Yes you could lose your country; yes I believe we are seeing now the beginning of the end of Israel."
Andrea Koppel denies it all, but it is hard to believe her. The things she said make her just a normal reporter. Janine di Giovani of the Times of London wrote, "The refugees ... were not lying. If anything, they underestimated the carnage and the horror. Rarely in more then a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such a deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." The Washington Post: "Some of the most brutal urban battles, heaviest air barrages and most devastating ground tactics in more than two weeks of Israeli assault against Palestinian towns and communities across the West Bank have been waged here." The Independent: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed."
Events in Jenin are a milestone in the history of the perception of the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In just two sentences, Koppel summarized the information she was passed on and what she was ready to convey to the world: supine acceptance of the version supplied by the Palestinians and their friends. Which means the perception of Palestinians as poor victims, with no exceptions.
It means the absence of feeling about the tragedy of a society assailed by the catastrophic terrorism like what has beset Israel day after day and that has caused around 500 deaths and thousands of injuries. It means total ignorance of Palestinian firepower and organizational capacity, despite the fact that it has been displayed in 18 months of war by the terrorist, paramilitary groups of Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It reflects the unconscious desire that Israel, alas, should finally disappear from the scene, the instigator of a hate that ultimately affects everyone, Americans and Europeans alike and the conviction that Israel is a temporary phenomenon. Above all, that Israel is bad, bad, bad.
It is so bad that it strikes out against innocent civilians, committing a useless massacre. In September 2000, this message gushed out of descriptions of battles where Palestinians with bare hands, and even children, fought the super-armored and super-armed Israeli Goliath. The message was later enriched with pictures of poor Arafat sitting in candlelight in his rooms in Mukahta. That message painted the armed Palestinians who occupied the Church of the Nativity as medieval refugees who were the guests of its good-natured clerics.
Jenin contains all the symbols that confirm Israel's wickedness, which is why it became the media's battleground as well as a real one – a battleground where the Palestinian Authority shot its heaviest weapon: "a new Sabra and Chatila, a massacre with 500 people killed." Nothing was more appropriate. Israel enters a refugee camp, the real symbol of Palestinian oppression and whom does it kill? It shoots at civilians, families, women and children. It slaughters them … a massacre.
There was certainly a war, but there was no carnage. Still, the blemish of an attack on civilians will remain on the army. No matter if the refugee camp was turned into an organizational center for terrorism and guerrilla warfare or if the Israeli war count was 23 dead and 70 wounded. Setting aside important elements of judgment on this conflict to make room for bias and the virtue of judges is a specialty of international public opinion.
If Arafat refuses to give Colin Powell even a miserly cease-fire for the terrorist attacks, if documents prove that the office of the Palestinian Rais was the headquarters of financing and coordination of the Al Aqsa Brigades and the tanzim, if at Bethlehem, the Israelis tried to arrest dangerous terrorists, ultimately, the accusations are all that count.
The media completely erased the fact that the origin of the conflict lies in Arafat's refusal at Camp David and then transferring all responsibility to Sharon for walking on the Temple Mount. In the same way, it confused, simplified and switched causes for effects in the battle of Jenin.
Jenin was the battlefield where Palestinian forces decided to test their war skills. From a strategic point of view, they spared none of the lessons learned in the months of intifada: over time Fatah, the Al Aqsa Brigades, Hamas and Jihad mastered the art of working together. Arafat and Barghouti have directed, more or less from close range, most of the suicide terrorism, without taking away from Hamas and Jihad the glory of their own suicide attacks. Suicide terrorism and the use of explosives is a distinctive sign of this war, and Jenin is a leading center.
Fifty percent of the last wave of attacks – and even one with eight victims after the army encircled the city – came from Jenin. All in all, 24 terrorist attacks originated from the refugee camp that hosted about 13,000 people before the attack. Besides that, the civilian population (which did suffer terribly, because a child is a child, and an old man is an old man), was a strategic, and fundamental pawn of this war, from primary school to the tomb. Some soldiers narrate that when the guerrillas came out into the open with their hands up, they made sure that a couple of old men were following right behind, one on the right and one on the left.
Every Palestinian is a fighter, the wall of the houses inside and out are papered with colored pictures of the shahid. A reserve solider told me that he stopped a 6-year-old boy with a sack in his hand. "What's inside?" he asked. The boy dropped the sack and fled: It held 2.5 kilos of explosives.
I saw a tailor's shop smashed in amidst the ruins: There were two Singer sewing machines, bobbins of colored thread, a large box of tea next to a gas stove, and the torment of people looking at the demolished roads from inside. I hear the women's cries, as they spoke to me in rapid-fire Arabic, pointing to under the ruins, there below, there below. On the wall of the shop, a large picture stood out. It was the portrait of a terrible terrorist, Ra'ed Karmi, one of the men responsible for the Dolphinarium massacre.
Amira Haas, one of the most determined paladins of the Palestinian cause, writing for Ha'aretz: "Haija was killed on one of the first days of the IDF attack, hit by a rocket. Haija was an activist of Hamas, who together with members of other armed groups had sworn to defend the camp to death. J.Z. estimates that they numbered no more than 70, but (he says that) everyone who helped them saw himself as active in the resistance: those who signaled from afar that soldiers were approaching, those who hid them, those who made tea for them." "According to him," Haas writes, "no door in the camp was closed to them when they fled from the soldiers who were looking for them, then the people of the camp decided not to abandon them, not to leave the fighters to their own devices. This was the decision of the majority, taken individually by each person."
"Rather then emphasizing their role of victim," James Bennet and David Rhode wrote in the April 21 edition of the New York Times, "Palestinians could have presented this fight as a brave but losing struggle." Instead, even though it is becoming clearer and clearer that there was no massacre, the press has not taken that road. It prefers to cling to single episodes that demonstrate the victimization of the civilian population. It is irrefutable that the population was subjected to what civilians endure in every war, but this suffering increasingly appears neither particularly vast – and certainly not voluntary – but caused by the use of guerilla warfare in the city and among the people.
But the Third World, anti-imperialist ideology that distinguishes reports coming out of the Middle East does indeed love the force of the guerrilla and broods over the arrest of Barghouti, but would still rather emphasize the sufferings of the poor at the hand of the rich, the injustice of the tyrant against the wretched. It is the memory of that kefia tied around necks at universities in the '70s and '80s that leads the way to the Manicheist vision of an imperialist Israel and a downtrodden Palestine. It has even more influence than any secret stupidity of a vaguely anti-Semitic flavor.
The New York Times article mentioned above clearly states that "what precisely happened will not be known at least until the debris is sifted and the residents return home … but dozens of interviews with residents of the camp, hospital officials, Israeli soldiers and officials produced no evidence of a large scale, deliberate killing on civilians in the camp."
But later on, even if one senses that the "militants" are still there in the background, it underlines many examples that make one think of the inhuman cruelty, of the tragic indifference of Israeli soldiers. "The morning the fighting started, Fadwa al Jammal, 27, from Tulkarem, was there visiting her sister, Rufaida. Fadwa, a nurse wearing a white scarf and lab coat, stepped outside with Rufaida to ask where the Palestinian field hospital was, so she could offer her services, her sister said. The two women were talking to a group of fighters when Rufaida was shot in the leg. As Fawda ran to help her she was shot and collapsed over her sister's legs. "She breathed three breaths, she was dead"
Rifaida said. Hani Abu Ramaileh, a 20-year-old fighter, tried to come to the women's assistance, and was shot in the chest and the stomach. A 13-year-old boy was also shot dead that day." The sequence of the civilian casualties – as described in the many articles written after Jenin opened to the press – suggests a terrible aggressiveness of the Israelis against the civilian population, a useless thirst for blood. "Leaning on a cane, the man stood on a huge pile of ruins … a jumble of a crushed concrete, twisted iron rods, shreds of mattresses, electric cables ... bits of water pipes ... 'This is my home and my son is inside' [under the rubble] ... His name is Abu Rashid; his son is Jamal, confined to a wheelchair." And that is the beginning of the article by Haas.
The dreaded Hamsin wind, 35 degrees Celsius in the shade, was blowing the day I arrived, first by armored bus and then by nagmash (armored vehicles). I, too, saw the desperation of the residents of Jenin – women and children, and far away, in the background, behind a veil of fine white dust, there were men circling as behind the scenes. A tragedy had taken place, no doubt about it, and first and foremost, it was the tragedy of Palestinian deaths, militants, women and civilians.
As of then, there had been 39 deaths. It was also the tragedy of the 23 Israeli reserve soldiers who were killed at the camp, doctors, kibbutz farmers, lawyers and shopkeepers. It is true, as the U.N. envoy, Terje Larsen said, that "it looks like an earthquake." Toward the square located in the southern part of the city, on the street where the worst battle took place, the ruins were growing into a horrible, high white hill.
The part of Jenin that was destroyed is heart-rending: the inhabitants who fled, or were hospitalized, the children killed, poor lives dashed in a vortex, that pretentious red sofa suspended in a house split in half, the crying of women pointing down to the ground, explaining that there was no food or water, telling their tragic personal stories.
But the area that was destroyed covers between 8 and 10 percent of the entire refugee camp. You can see that area on television. The rest is still standing, some trees in the gardens still color the April air with their flowers. They say that there were 13,000 inhabitants living in the refugee camp. But the Israelis say that, when the battle started (between Tuesday April 2 and Wednesday April 3), most of the families had fled or were in safety in the surrounding villages so that there were actually only a few thousand people in the camp, militants and civilians, fighting the army.
Even before the soldiers started saying that they had "fought one of the most difficult battles in the history of Israel, I walked down the streets, noting that the ruins rose higher as I reached the square. At first, when the fighting was house, by house, there was much less destruction and few victims.
But the Israelis died suddenly, unexpectedly, from exploding booby traps set everywhere. There were ambushes from courtyards and doorways and daring people padded with TNT and a few hand grenades. The risk was enormous, helicopters tried to eliminate sniper fire with direct hits to certain windows, but the standard techniques did not help against a compact, well-protected host of men who planned a new type of battle. When the Israelis lost 13 men all at once only a week after the battle began, they finally realized that they had made a mistake in their calculations.
The refugee camp of Jenin was not a refugee camp. It was a fortress that had long been the place where efforts were concentrated at equipping all the Palestinian formations for war. It was the base for the terrorist attacks. The innovation, as far as my experience as a reporter is concerned, was the huge number of booby traps that I saw over a distance of just a few meters. It was a pathway of explosives ready for the enemy's attack: in the middle of the roads, in the walls of the houses, on the sides of the sewers.
Many of these mined holes were hooked up by white plastic wires that entered houses or gardens to an electric device that detonated the mines one after another. I almost stepped on one of them, a metal can covered with white powder. A soldier stopped me at the last minute and then warned the other reporters not to come near. "Now do you understand why we didn't let rescue workers come in?" he asked, defending the soldiers from the accusation of having caused a humanitarian disaster by delaying the UNRWA ambulances.
He added that the army offered medical assistance which was refused. And that when the soldiers took tanks of water into the alleyways, they were shot at and so they had to throw the bottles of water into the houses, letting them roll in. But some of the elderly and the sick allowed themselves to be treated and taken away, an officer told me. He added that it was hard for him, especially after the death of one of his friends, to take care of a 20-year-old with the symbol of the Jihad tattooed on his arm who looked at him with "eyes flaming with hate."
Israeli soldiers were scandalized when asked whether the rumor about mass graves was true, and the tone of the reserves was scandalized when they were asked about a possible massacre. "With one hand tied behind our back, we fought a battle we could have won in a few hours, especially if we had used planes like the Americans. Instead, fear of striking the population made us chose a house to house battle. We covered 100 yards a day, and risked our lives at every house. What we found is just incredible. A suicide terrorist pretended to surrender and blew himself up by extending his arms."
The soldiers weren't ready. There were bombs in refrigerators, in toilets, in water pipes, under beds. Much of the explosives were homemade with agricultural chemicals. Right from the start, there was an attempt to round up the terrorists from the city outskirts toward the center, assemble them in the square and arrest them. It worked, in part – three dozen gave themselves up on the 11th day. But before that, Israel changed its strategy, and that's where international suspicions arose.
When the 13 reservists were killed, all at once on Tuesday, April 9, the bulldozers went to work. They leveled houses where they suspected the attacks. Amira Haas narrates that a Palestinian family told her that the bulldozer hit a house. The owner came outside to protest and the destruction stopped. "We gave them a long time to leave the houses," the soldiers say. "None of the houses were leveled without a number of warnings. We stopped the males between the ages of 15 and 50 and let the others go."
Seven hundred people were arrested, including Tabah Mardawi, one of the three dozen who turned themselves in on April 11. He is an Islamic Jihad activist, who sent 11 suicide bombers to their deaths and is responsible, according to Israeli IDF sources, for the murder of 20 Israelis and the wounding of 150 others. He started his terrorist activity in 1994 and has already spent four years in prison. In his deposition, he said that he "blew up cooking-gas containers, thereby causing the destruction of civilian homes." It is still not known how many houses exploded because they were booby-trapped.
General Eyal Shlein who served there said, "A balanced person doesn't booby trap his own house with the intent to come back to it." Shimon Peres added: "There wasn't a house that wasn't booby-trapped, and there was no way to neutralize the danger without demolishing the structures. We also encountered booby-trapped men, Palestinians that raised their hands to surrender while wearing their explosive vests, in an attempt to detonate themselves among the soldiers."
Jenin has always had a tragic destiny, even though the pleasant area in the green valleys of Galilee where it is located promise otherwise. I will never forget a spring day (just like the one when I arrived in a nagmash and wore a blue, bulletproof jacket) at the time of the Oslo Agreement. Amidst the collective joy, the Israelis left and the Palestinian Authority arrived. One of the people I interviewed was a lawyer, a moderate type with a little moustache wearing a blue t-shirt with a crocodile on his chest. I asked him about his future plans and, after speaking light-heartedly and hopefully for a little while, he turned serious. "My wife," he admitted, "doesn't agree with me. She's started doing charity work for Hamas. She helps take care of widows and orphans and she's started covering her head and wearing long skirts again." Why now, I asked. He replied that her choice filled him with admiration, that he was looking for the courage to follow her into religion and help the poor, instead of taking the fleeting road of success and tranquility.
I mused over that episode as I wandered through the ruins. When the Oslo Agreement was signed, the entire population of Jenin was in the main square with the band. They were building offices, banks and shops. But the fate of Jenin was sealed. The influence of its political extremists was outlined in that wife's anti-modern choice. The refugee camp, built in 1953, lay at the edge of the city where a number of qualified agencies – coordinated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency – should have provided not only relief and assistance but hope and a spur towards rehabilitation and a free life.
Instead, the people and humanitarian organizations who took care of the refugees throughout the years, became an integral part of the rank and file. And if Jenin was turned into a fortress, it is also their responsibility. In the name of that widely accepted concept of self-determination, the officials of UNRWA and anyone else who had anything to do with the camp accepted the directives of the grassroots, meaning, in other words, a de facto acceptance of the present leadership.
So the textbooks used in Jenin have always been full of words of hate for the Jews, the shahid are adored and imitated, public morality is based on war and not on the dream of peace and on every lie that defines the Israelis as hateful occupiers determined to remain just that. In the refugee camp of Deheishe, for example, I confirmed in person that no one knows that Arafat refused the generous offers made by Barak. They believe that the Rais was deceived and double-crossed by the Israelis.
Jenin has suffered an unfair fate. For the last 50 years, its refugee-inhabitants, like others in other refugee camps but more militarized because of certain conditions, have been prisoners of the organizations that should have taken them away from there. There are 27 refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza and another 32 in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. In 2001 alone, the UNRWA spent $310 million in the camps. Now, according to respectable international agreements, the UNRWA is requesting damages to pay for the disaster in Jenin.
But who will pay for the structural and human disaster that has transformed this camp and almost all the others from a bunch of people to support into a world to organize for the struggle and suicide terrorism? Who will pay damages for the waste of lives, the ones sitting without hope in the dust, those wasted in an endless struggle for a goal that Arafat could have attained without a war in the refugee camp of Jenin?
Fiamma Nirenstein was born in Florence and lives in Jerusalem as a foreign correspondent and a columnist for La Stampa and Panorama in Italy. Holding a doctorate in modern history, she is the author of several books about the Middle East and other subjects.
The New Destruction of Civilization --- on CNN
==========================
Monday:
A program on 'The Future Destruction of Israel'
narrated by Andrea Koppel and ABC consultant Terrorist Arafat.
Tuesday:
A startling program on the Destruction of 'Old-Switzerland'.
Wednesday:
Ms. Fonda Turner returns for 'The Future Destruction of America'
There is something awfully bloodthirsty about the press salivating at the idea of a massacre by the Israeli's, and a culture,(Arafats Palestinians) inculcated not in the idea of survival, but of death, that is willing to feed those expectations. At the end of the day, the press will move on, the leaders of the Palestinian people will continue not to build a country but to try to destroy Israel. The crying women in the refugee camps will mean nothing to anyone, but the ones they love, and a people will have been sold to the folks with the Nikkons, timed to hit the evening news cycles. And as long as the European and American media are willing to wring thier hands of the "plight" of the Palestinians, at the hands of the evil Israeli's, Arafat and his terrorist brethren will make sure they keep that plight in place to wring their hands over.
I'sure tho, we'll never see the "news analysis" story about how the media contributes to terrorism. Too bad.
regards
| 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 |
| WSJ: The Massacre That Wasn't - Part VI http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/678521/posts Pali grave-digging and UN jury-rigging |
Jenin's 'Massacre' Death Toll Reduced to 56 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675752/posts Say it slow: Israel told the truth; Palis did not |
| 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 - Part I 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 |
| Jenin War Diary of a Hasidic Soldier - Part II http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/678298/posts There is no army as humane as the IDF |
Massacre Claims Unsupported by Pali Fighters http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675129/posts Pali eyewitnesses all support the Israeli version |
| And so, in conclusion: | |
| The 'Jenin Massacre' Hoax http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/677148/posts Living in a world of monstrous moral inversion |
The Phantom Massacre http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/672761/posts War Crimes in Jenin were committed by the Palis |
| The Jenin Probe Ends http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675737/posts UN unhappy about Israel's possible exhoneration |
Jenin's War Criminals http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675340/posts What the Palestinians did was the real war crime |
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