28-Sep-17: Now that the Palestinian Arabs are embraced by Interpol...

October 2016: Jibril Rajoub is hosted by the chief of the

Palestinian police [Image Source]

Interpol voted this week to admit the Palestinian Authority civil police as a full member in what Al Jazeera calls "a new victory in its drive for international representation despite strong Israeli opposition".

This raises some pretty deep concerns here in Israel where the assumedly-secure sharing of intelligence on terrorism is viewed as a life-and-death matter by ordinary folk.

The current head of the PA police is modestly referred to in formal documents and press releases as "His Excellency Major General Hazim Attallah". He was appointed to the role in March 2008, promoting a US official to submit this brief backgrounder up the reporting chain from where it eventually found its way into Wikileaks.

Some highlights [italics mean direct quotes]:

• Attallah previously served as "the military secretary and a security advisor in the Office of the President" of the PA. 
• He became "a security advisor to President Abbas in 2005 and military secretary to PM Salam Fayyad in September 2007."
• A "savvy internal operator who has managed to effectively navigate between PM Salam Fayyad and President Abbas and make himself necessary to both... [An] unusual choice for police chief--he spent most of his security time in the Preventive Security Organization (PSO) and his recent assignments have been advisory/political, not management."
• "The PA police headquarters is full of senior figures who will, at least initially, view Attallah as a political interloper." 
• "Born in 1959 in Bayt Surik (near Jerusalem)..." That's an interesting note: it's the small village from where the Palestinian Arab shooter who murdered three Israelis at Har Adar two days ago ["26-Sep-17: At Har Adar's entrance, an Arab-on-Israeli shooter with problems and a solution"] came. 
• "Attended Bulgaria's military academy from 1980 to 1984... the son of Husni Muhammad Attallah ("Abu Za'im"), a former head of Fatah military intelligence and senior PLO official until a high-profile break with Arafat in 1986..." 

August 2017: His Excellency visits Interpol [Image Source]

From other sources:

• A profile article last year surveying the PA's multiple and overlapping security arms ["The many layers of the Palestinian Security Forces", Ynet, April 26, 2016] calls him "intelligent, albeit arrogant, and as someone who views himself as superior to others". 
• Human Rights Watch, offering faint praise when Attallah was appointed to the Excellency position, wrote that the PA police organization "appears to be the least abusive force in the West Bank". In the circumstances, actually quite a compliment.
• The Facebook page of the loathsome and violent Jibril Rajoub displayed a photo (at the top of this post) on October 19, 2016 of him standing with Major General Attallah in the latter's Ramallah official office. Both senior officials are clutching holding a plaque featuring a PA map of Palestine. Palestinian Media Watch points out repeatedly that the PA's version "completely erases Israel from the map". This is clearly true - you only have to look at it. Rajoub's hideous public views on terror are well-documented. This for instance: "I say that whoever carried out individual acts of heroism, we in the Fatah movement bless and encourage them. We consider them heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian..." [Official PA TV, January 2, 2016 via PMW]. This is the honored guest of the head of the PA's police? 

Attallah, who has been busy traveling in Europe during these last few weeks, presumably to help ensure backing for the PA's Interpol strategy, will be going to Hamas-controlled Gaza this coming Monday "to discuss security matters with Hamas" [Jerusalem Post yesterday]. He has not been there since the Islamists seized control in 2007's blood-soaked violence. 

With Interpol having now opened its arms to Attallah and the Palestinian police, we're thinking - like commentators who frequently ask when speaking of events in our area - what could possibly go wrong.

09-Feb-16: The unthinkable things Palestinian Arab society wants for and from its children

Video grab depicts  passionate toddler explaining
what she wishes Palestinian Arabs would do to the Jews
[Source: Palestinian Media Watch clip - here]

Is there a name for the psychological condition that holds an entire society in its grip, causing it to invest its children in a death cult that will certainly lead to the deaths of many of those children, and to the justification of those deaths on the grounds that the enemy's children are harmed, injured and/or killed?

In the past five days alone:

• A Palestinian teen girl attempted to stab Israeli troops at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate on Tuesday morning, police said. The suspect, 16, was arrested after pulling a knife on border guards when they asked to search her, police said. There were no Israeli injuries reported. “The police reacted quickly, pushed her away and subdued her,” a police spokesperson said. Police said the teenager, a student, had concealed the knife in her backpack. When police asked to search her bag, she pulled the knife “and tried to stab the policemen,” police said. [Source]
• [Also today, a] Palestinian teenage girl armed with a knife was detained outside the West Bank settlement of Carmei Tzur. The girl, said to be around 13, was arrested by the security guard at the entrance of the settlement in the Etzion bloc.  [Source]
• An 11-year-old Jewish boy was stabbed and wounded Monday [February 8, 2016] in an attack in the central Israeli town of Ramle. The attacker fled the scene, apparently toward the Jawaresh neighborhood of the city. The boy was hospitalized with moderate injuries, the Magen David Adom emergency service said. The child said that the assailant was an Arab. A 17-year-old Arab youth was arrested a short time later on suspicion of carrying out the attack. [Source]
• [A] guard at the bus station in [Ramle] was lightly injured when he was stabbed by two 13-year-old girls in a nationalistic attack [on Thursday, February 4, 2016]. One of the girls’ mothers subsequently apologized for her daughter’s action. [Source] ...Central District spokesman Ch.-Supt. Ami Ben-David said that the two teens approached the metal detector at the entrance to the station around 10:30 Thursday morning, at which point the security guard asked them to show him identification. At that point the two girls pulled knives and stabbed the guard, lightly wounding him in the hand and leg, Ben-David said... One of the two girls was carrying a school backpack and a picture taken at the scene by a police photographer showed the contents of the bag scattered on the pavement, including schoolwork, a calculator, a juice bag and two knives. [Source]

There's quite a collection out there of human rights groups that claim to be working for the protection of Palestinian Arab children. The Ramallah-based Defence for Children International - Palestine, for instance, says this on its website

We defend children’s rights three ways: offering free legal aid, documenting violations of international law, and advocating for greater protections... [The organization] is committed to securing a just and viable future for Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

A viable future? Greater protections? If they have commented on, let alone condemned, the systemic and systematic incitement of Palestinian Arab children to become martyrs and killers for their grandparents' society's glory, then they are being awfully quiet about it. If any reader knows of any instance of DCI-P criticizing the fostering among Pal Arab children of martyrdom/murder as supreme values, click here please to tell us.

Another instance: the phenomenally-well-funded Human Rights Watch, who write this on their "Children's rights" page:

Millions of children... are forced to serve as soldiers in armed conflict... Young and immature, they are often easily exploited. In many cases, they are abused by the very individuals responsible for their care. We are working to help protect children around the world, so they can grow into adults.

Since they speak of "easily exploited", they're surely enraged by what's being done to Palestinian Arab children by the religious, educational and political leaders of their communities. Because if they are, we're surely not seeing any sign of it. If anyone knows of HRW condemnation of the fostering among Pal Arab children of martyrdom/murder as supreme values, please click here to enlighten us.

Some months ago, we quoted here [20-Oct-15: Children and what a soulless society can do to them] the words of an acclaimed leader of oppressed people:

"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." - Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, addressing the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Pretoria, South Africa, May 8, 1995 [source]

Not for the first time, we ask: where is UNICEF? Or Save the Children, or Terre des Hommes, or the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement or even the dishonorable Amnesty International (on whom we have not yet entirely given up hope)? Or the other well-funded, high-profile public interest organizations that purport to care for the welfare of children but that take so little interest in the unfolding tragedy of the children of the Palestinian Arabs and the terror-obsessed jihadists cheating them of their future?

19-Jan-16: Children with knives and what they destroy

The victim's family arrive at the cemetery for Monday's funeral [Image Source: Reuters]

Anyone paying attention to the nature of the many Arab-on-Israeli attacks launched on Israel's streets and inside its shops and homes and buses these past four months (in particular) will be struck by an aspect that continues to go largely un-noted by the mainstream news reporting media: the age of the attackers. Many of them are children. (Click for some recent posts about child-executed terror attacks against Israelis.)

An individual believe by authorities to be the killer of Dafna Meir z"l was arrested overnight (early Tuesday morning), according to Times of Israel:

The suspect, said to be 15 years old, was arrested by IDF troops and agents from the Shin Bet security service in a village near Otniel, where he was hiding out, and was taken in for interrogation. He is suspected of entering Meir’s home and killing her before fleeing the scene. Three of Meir’s six children were home when she was killed, and one, 17-year-old Renanaa, gave security forces a description of the terrorist. Police officers and IDF soldiers set up roadblocks in the area surrounding the settlement as they launched a manhunt for the stabber, who was believed to have escaped to a nearby village, possibly Khirbet Karme, located just north of Otniel, on foot. According to reports Tuesday morning, he did not possess a permit allowing him to work in Otniel, despite early assessments to the contrary.

Haaretz says the finding and arrest of the boy, said to be named Marawad Badr Abdallah Ada'is, was done by soldiers in the Duvdevan unit

an elite special operations force within the Israel Defense Forces, directly subordinate to the Judea and Samaria Division. Duvdevan are particularly noted for conducting undercover operations against militants in urban areas. During these operations, Duvdevan soldiers typically wear Arab civilian clothes as a disguise... [Wikipedia]

The knife-wielding attacker who seriously wounded a pregnant Israeli woman in Tekoa yesterday is allegedly fifteen. Other recent Arab-on-Israeli knifers have been as young as 11. [See "11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children".]

The Arab home front generally provides a reliable cover for fugitive killers of Jews, hence the need for expert undercover security people to go right inside those towns and villages and extract the alleged killers and terror-minded thugs who can be expected to otherwise remain clutched close to the nurturing bosom of Palestinian Arab society. As for outrage and condemnation, there may be some Palestinian Arab voices but no one hears them and they don't get reported - assuming they exist.

The moral depravity that brings government officials and ordinary folk to stand with, instead of against, the wielders of kitchen knifes and axes is mirrored by the strategic silence of the world's well-funded children's rights industry -  UNICEF, Defence for Children International, Human Rights Watch, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development to name just a few donor-supported, PR-savvy entities who have seem to have collectively lost their voices, their senses and their moral compasses when it comes to what Palestinian Arab society is doing to their own children. And to ours. 

(We no longer mention Amnesty International in that list. Amnesty's increasingly explicit identification with the practitioners of the Palestinian Arab brand of terror makes plain their abandonment of principle and betrayal of their supporters' values. There's no longer anything to expect from them.)

The arrest, in the wake of an intense manhunt, came some hours after the funeral of his victim:

Hundreds arrived at [Jerusalem's] Givat Shaul cemetery on Monday morning to accompany Dafna Meir, who was murdered by a terrorist in her home, on her final journey. Meir, 38, is survived by her husband Natan and their six children: Renana, 17, Akiva, 15, Ahava, 10, Noa, 11, Yair, six, and Yaniv, four. The four older children are Dafna and Natan's biological children, and the two younger ones - Yaniv and Yair - are brothers that the couple adopted. At their mother's funeral, the children could not stop crying... [Ynet, January 18, 2016]

Image Source

Children with knives: it's a phenomenon worth pondering as Red Hand Day, February 12 each year, approaches. So too is the choking silence that accompanies the devastation it brings. (If you visit the Red Hand Day website, notice that it is published in four languages but Arabic is not one of them.)

Given what a heavy toll the reality of killers-who-are-children exacts from Palestinian Arab society, it's surely top of the list of matters to which the lavishly-funded editors of Ma'an News Agency will be turning their journalistic attention and moral fury today. Let's just not stop breathing while we wait.

24-Dec-12: Fell short? Not HRW

HRW press conference in Gaza, 2010 [Image Source]

We're mentioning Human Rights Watch for the second time today. We undertake not to make a habit of it.

HRW came out today with a report entitled "Gaza: Palestinian Rockets Unlawfully Targeted Israeli Civilians" [online here]. If the intention was to alert the world to something new and disturbing, it would be an outstanding example of too little, too late. Perhaps there was a more sophisticated strategy that we're just not getting.

Here's how it starts:

Palestinian armed groups in Gaza violated the laws of war during the November 2012 fighting by launching hundreds of rockets toward population centers in Israel. About 1,500 rockets were fired at Israel between November 14 and 21, the Israel Defense Forces reported. At least 800 struck Israel, including 60 that hit populated areas. The rocket attacks, including the first from Gaza to strike the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem areas, killed three Israeli civilians, wounded at least 38, several seriously, and destroyed civilian property. Rockets that fell short of their intended targets in Israel apparently killed at least two Palestinians in Gaza and wounded others, Human Rights Watch said.
“Palestinian armed groups made clear in their statements that harming civilians was their aim,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “There is simply no legal justification for launching rockets at populated areas... Statements by armed groups that they deliberately targeted an Israeli city or Israeli civilians are demonstrating their intent to commit war crimes.”

In the real world, as distinct from the fantasy-land routinely depicted in HRW's reflexive criticisms of (to an absurd extent) Israel, those rockets and those Palestinian statements and intentions have been a factor for years.

How HRW can find the courage (yes, there are probably more evocative, more accurate words than 'courage') to come out now, a month after this latest eruption of intense fighting and discover America and the barrage of Gazan rockets is something to think about. We mean, something for us to think about.

It's fairly plain that no one at HRW especially cares to view the ongoing deadly war waged by Palestinian terrorists under the leadership of the Hamas regime as something that deserves to be watched (to borrow from the organization's name), perhaps because HRW doesn't perceive any threat to the "Human Rights" (to borrow from the organization's name) of Israelis. Whatever.

But HRW's report, in our estimation and contrary to some of the analysis we are seeing this afternoon on the web, is not a complete and utter waste of time and insult to the insult and moral sensibilities of civilized people living in this area. No, not entirely. Because if you go down to paragraph 24, you see something novel and ground-breaking.

Some rockets launched by Palestinian armed groups fell short and struck inside Gaza. On November 16, a rocket that appears to have been launched from within Gaza hit a crowded street in the Gazan town of Jabalya, killing a man, 23, and a boy, 4, and wounding five people.

We have noted repeatedly the devastating effects of the Gazan Palestinian Arab use of their own neighbours, and especially children, as human shields. We have also written again and again (there's a summary in yesterday's post: ("23-Dec-12: The terrorist rocket-men of Gaza are back in action") about the deadly and almost entirely unreported phenomenon of terrorist "fell short" rockets. No one, as far as we can tell, other than Israelis and supporters of Israel makes a fuss of these Arab-on-Arab outrages, and certainly not via the news media. We say that unless outsiders know about, and therefore start to understand, the contempt which the Palestinian Arab terrorists have for their own brethren, children and neighbours, the essence of what they are doing will remain elusive and misunderstood.

So hooray for HRW. Their reporting cannot be considered an insult to the intelligence, and an ongoing offence to those of us holding rational views about terrorism and the people who do it. Not any more. Not since today. Not since paragraph 24 of the most recent HRW report.

23-Dec-12: Journalists, the right to live, and other human rights

Gaza's media center, November 2012 [Image Source]

Here's the AP report of a widely publicized assault (the Jerusalem Post called it "a scathing attack") on Israel's moral standing made three days ago by the New York-based Human Rights Watch organization.

Group: Israel broke law by targeting media in Gaza

JERUSALEM (AP) — Human Rights Watch says Israeli army attacks on journalists and media facilities in the Gaza Strip during last month’s military operation violated the laws of war. Two Palestinian cameramen were killed and at least 10 media personnel were wounded in the offensive, which was launched after weeks of rocket attacks on Israel. The Israeli government says each of the targets was a legitimate military objective. A statement released Thursday by the New York-based rights group says it found no indications that these targets were valid military objectives. Sarah Leah Whitson, the Mideast director at HRW, says that “just because Israel says a journalist was a fighter or a TV station was a command center does not make it so.” The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the report. [Source]

As director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division and the person leveling these charges [full text here], Sarah Leah Whitson lays serious claim to the description about her on the HRW site: she's a general expert on "Middle East and North Africa issues", though - like the organization itself - she has not been free of controversy. (We will not dwell here on the serious allegations made against her; they are adequately detailed in her Wikipedia entry and in some trenchant, well-argued critiques published by NGO Monitor this week as well as in January 2012.)

For all the impressive human rights work it does, HRW has some exceedingly bitter critics. In a major and very critical op ed in the New York Times, Robert L. Bernstein, the man who created HRW, wrote this about the organization he brought into existence:

As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state...  Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. [more]

Sarah Leah Whitson was HRW's key Middle East person when Bernstein wrote those words.

Bernstein then proceeded in that 2009 essay to make some prophetic references to HRW allegations about Israel engaging in allegedly illegal forms of warfare:

Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism... [Yet] Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region... How does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes... Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

He ended his 2009 words with a warning to HRW that unless it returned to "its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it", HRW's "credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished".

Which brings us to December 2012 when news sources throughout the world seized on Ms Whitson's well-formed words:

Just because Israel says a journalist was a fighter or a TV station was a command center does not make it so.

And also to the apt rejoinder offered by Anne Herzberg, legal adviser to the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor:

Just because HRW claims something is a war crime does not make it so.

We don't claim to have the depth of experience of Ms Whitson or HRW. But we do say our experience in losing a greatly-loved daughter to a bestial act of Islamist terror in 2001 has made us more sensitive than many people to nuances. We tend to pay attention to little-reported aspects of news events that somehow don't get that much coverage or attention by the likes of HRW.

For instance, here's a photo of a particular Arab journalist with a little-known back-story:

Portrait 1: Female reporter presents the evening news from Ramallah

The image in Portrait 1 is a screenshot taken from a video recording of an evening news report originating in the Ramallah studio of a station called Istiqlal that went to air some years ago. The young woman, a reporter/presenter, was relatively new to the job at the time the picture was taken. Even so, she evidently showed journalistic promise because management at the television station at the time assigned her to the role of presenting the evening news.

Now some speculation: what if this woman had been (let's just imagine) intercepted by IDF soldiers or by an Israeli Border Guard patrol while she was peaceably en route to the nearby city of Jerusalem?

We're betting that Sarah Leah Whitson and her HRW Irregulars would have screamed bloody murder at the temerity of the Israelis. The young woman is, after all, clearly a working journalist with all the privileges and protections that come with the job.

Portrait 2: A female journalist conducts a live interview
for a Hamas television program (2012)

Portrait 3: Same female journalist fronts a weekly TV show
on the Al-Quds (Hamas) satellite channel (2012)

The woman in Portraits 2 and 3 above is a regular on the Al-Quds television channel owned and operated by Hamas. Its shows are beamed throughout the world to wherever there are Arabic-speaking audiences interested in the distinctive programming they offer. It has a truly global footprint and a large influence among a very specific international audience.

The woman is the central figure in a weekly television program devoted to surveying issues of interest to one of the deprived underclasses in Palestinian society. On it, she interviews guests, demonstrates cooking recipes, and summarizes and interprets recent events. The fact that an entire program aired during peak evening hours (and on Friday nights, no less) is given over to a woman suggests the prominent role she has in the tele-journalism field.

Now some more speculation: imagine for a moment that this household-name TV personality decided to carry out some research in, say, East Jerusalem. And say that the Israeli authorities, for reasons best known to them, detained her on the way for questioning; that they refused to let her go because of some dusty old and forgotten breaches of the law allegedly committed a decade or so earlier. How long do we think it would take for the righteous indignation of Human Rights Watch to boil over and traverse the oceans? Or for their furious demands to be laid at the feet of the government of Israel insisting that the inherent rights of journalists and reporters - and international legal norms - be respected, forthwith?

So now we're back in the real world. The name of the woman in all the photos above is Ahlam Tamimi.

Tamimi read the TV evening news in a Ramallah studio on Thursday evening, August 9, 2001. That is when Portrait 1 was taken. She started the program with the lead news item of the day: a horrific news report about a human bomb who had exploded inside a central Jerusalem restaurant that afternoon, killing many people, most of them children, all of them Jews. Portrait 1 shows her reading the actual report on camera.

The slight smile of pleasure that can just be made out on her lips is probably no accident. She herself, personally, planned the bombing. She ensured with the other planners that the explosive material was adequate to the task. She accompanied the bomb (who was a newly-pious young man with a fully-loaded guitar case on his back) through the IDF military checkpoints and into Jerusalem by bus and taxi. She then walked with him through the streets of Israel's bustling capital city until they reached the Sbarro restaurant where, fifteen minutes after she left him there (giving her time to safely escape to freedom), he exploded the deadly materials packed into that guitar case. He killed our teenage daughter Malki and fourteen other innocents. A sixteenth victim remains unconscious to this day.

Tamimi's journalistic career resumed a year ago. Then, as part of a deal transacted between Israel and the Hamas regime in Gaza, she was released from prison far earlier than should have been the case (she had been sentenced to sixteen life terms with a strong recommendation by the judges that no reduction should ever be considered) and flew to the land of her birth, Jordan, and to complete and unfettered freedom. There she was hired by Hamas to become the presenter of a new weekly program called Breezes of the Free, focusing on the convicted terrorists, many of them murderers of Jewish children, still in Israeli prisons and their goals, hopes and plans.

Especially their plans.

Tamimi, now living free as a bird, newly-married and with a global platform for spreading her hateful, murderous views, is famously proud of the killings for which she was convicted in an Israeli court. She has no regrets; quite the opposite, and has said so as clearly as a person ever can. [Please read one of our numerous posts about this evil person: "17-Nov-11: A monster walks the streets and she has many accomplices"]

For these and other reasons, we wonder - when we read the words of HRW, and especially of Sarah Leah Whitson - whether such critics comprehend the nature of terrorism. Do they see how the people who fire the rockets at homes, schools and buses will use everything at their disposal - every possible thing, no limits - to carry out their satanic plans?

The notion that journalists ought to be treated in some privileged way by reason of the work they do - leaving them exempt from suspicion unless there is a compelling reason to think otherwise - is an interesting one. But we're left to wonder whether at HRW they know or care how this works in a war carried out by terrorists and in accordance with the principles of Islamism.

Victims like our daughter suffered the permanent, irreparable violation by the terrorists of the most fundamental of their human rights - the right to live. Had the perpetrators (and that includes Tamimi) been stopped in time, or if they (and this includes Tamimi) were prevented from inciting others daily to do the same awful thing again in the future, lives would surely be saved.

If HRW's recent condemnation fails to take that reality into account, then - in the words of their distinguished founder, Robert L. Bernstein -  they have lost their critical perspective and the role they claim is simply illegitimate and should be ignored.

25-Oct-11: So where exactly were the human rights groups till now?

Source

From an op ed in today's Jerusalem Post (we added the hyperlinks):

Releasing more than 1,000 terrorists and murderers may be a necessary evil, but it is an evil, nonetheless. Unfortunately, human rights NGOs have refused to speak out against it... At the center of the five-year ordeal to free Schalit was an abject failure of justice and international law. The hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that operate in this region – and claim in some manner to promote human rights – never adopted the Schalit cause as a raison d’etre. On the contrary, since his captivity began, organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Euro- Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Gisha, and Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) did not conduct sustained, coordinated campaigns on his behalf. Gilad Schalit was simply not a priority for these NGOs... Gisha, for example, wrote: “We join in the sigh of relief that is palpable today throughout Israel and of course the relief felt by the Schalit family and the families of the prisoners who will be released.” ... Did Gisha feel relief for the release of Ahlam Tamimi, who drove the suicide bomber and the bomb to the Sbarro pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem in 2001 and waited calmly for the explosion that murdered 16, including many children? Tamimi is a cold-blooded mass murderer by any definition, who boasted and laughed about her “accomplishments” in television interviews from an Israeli jail after she was caught, tried and sentenced. Yet none of these self-proclaimed human rights organizations condemned her or her release...

The whole article, "Not Just Any Celebration" by Jason Edelstein and Naftali Balanson of NGO Monitor, is here and worth passing along to friends. The shabby hypocrisy of organizations that presume to take money from donors to support self-proclaimed human rights activities needs exposing - and ending.

18-Jun-11: The ordinariness of rockets being fired at ordinary people

Too often, the thugs who fire rockets like this one into civilian homes and

farms are called, as in this Gerry Image pic, 'militants'. The choice

of language is no accident, and deserves to be condemned. People who fire

rockets deliberately and indiscriminately into civilian areas

are terrorists. 

With Sabbath having just ended, we are catching up on some unreported developments here, including the fact that late Thursday evening, yet another Qassam rocket, intended to destroy or kill anything Israeli, was fired into Israel by the missile-rich Palestinian Arab terrorists of Gaza.

The rocket-borne explosives crashed into an open field in the Eshkol region, on the Israeli side of the Israel/Gaza border. Both Ynet and Jpost say there were neither injuries nor damage, but this is more a matter of the incompetence of the Gazan terror groups than a reflection of their plans.

What would your feelings be if an armed-to-the-teeth group of thugs periodically fired rockets indiscriminately in the general direction of your home and your children? How comforted would you be by the fact that there was no damage this time. 

In reality, as Human Rights Watch has noted, "The problem for most people was not being hit, but the fear, uncertainty and stress."

The numerous Palestinian-Arab terror groups that fire missiles and mortar shells into Israel state openly, proudly and repeatedly, their intention to hurt civilian Israelis. None of them denies it, and none of them denies that these actions are immoral, illegal and a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which makes them a war crime. Their rockets meet the definition of illegal weapons whether or not they are directed - as they almost never are - against military targets. They violate two fundamental principles of the laws of war: distinction (between civilian and military targets) and proportionality.

By the way, can you remember the last time a public figure or commentator referred to such attacks against Israelis as war crimes?

1-Oct-07: About carrots and sticks

Innumerable international organizations and NGO's one way or another sit in judgment on Israel. It's exceptionally rare for any of them to admit to shortcomings. Such a pigs-do-fly moment came this week via the current chairperson of the UN Human Rights Council, Doru Costea.

His council has failed to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a balanced fashion, he said in the French daily Le Temps. It concentrates too much on abuses by Israel and he's dissatisfied. "The council has failed... The council must remain simple, and concentrate on the human rights dimension, but it must look at the stance of all sides, not only one country." The fact that a majority of the Council's 47 seats are held by Asian and African countries "gives a certain power, but that does not mean that this power is always used wisely" said the man who ought to know, with straight-faced understatement.

Candor of this sort is not so common. How have other NGO's been dealing with the extremely hostile stands of some of their office-holders, constituents and members in relation to Israel and the Jews? It's a bleak picture. Look at how Israel's decision this past Wednesday to impose further economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip was treated.

The Israeli government's security cabinet sat down last week to formulate a response to the steadily increasing scale of acts of terror directed at Israel from Gaza. Its well-publicized decision raised for the first time the explicit possibility of cutting off electricity to Gaza's inhabitants. The decision defines Gaza as "hostile territory"and says that if more Qassam rockets are launched from Hamas-controlled territory, there will be possible fuel and power cut-offs down the road.

A word of background. In 2005, Israel under prime minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally pulled its forces out of Gaza and uprooted all the thriving Israeli towns that had been created in the area. The entire Gaza Strip was now in Palestinian hands. (The entry and exits remain under Israeli and Egyptian control.) The stated expectation was that this would end terrorism from the area. The result of course was the opposite: a violent, jihadist Hamas regime took over, and rocket attacks on Israel have consistently increased.

The decision last week is a carrot and stick strategy where the ass is the Hamas regime which until now has shown zero responsiveness to logic, political good sense or humane behaviour. In practice, nothing has changed yet while Israel sits and waits to see whether - against all the odds - some rare good sense prevails in Gaza's halls of power. But as the authoritative NGO Monitor points out, the practical and legal ramifications of Israel's new stand are unclear. No action has yet been taken. This is about future cut-offs of Israel-originating electricity; future cut-offs of Israel-originating fuel; future firings of Gaza-originating Qassams.

But even though Israel has done nothing so far to give effect to the threat of sanctions, let's pay a moment's attention to the mature and sober judgments of the international community.

Oxfam: Jeremy Hobbs, executive director - Israel's actions are "immoral and contrary to the Geneva Conventions."

Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) calls for one-sided international action to "prevent the starvation siege Israel plans to impose on Gaza." Note: ICAHD is funded by the EU under its “partnership for peace” budget.

Human Rights Watch (which NGO Monitor observes has a history of instant condemnations before the facts are known) says "Israel’s threat to impose additional sanctions on the Gaza Strip would constitute unlawful collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population... Israel has the responsibility to protect its citizens, but not by collectively punishing the people of Gaza, which seriously violates the laws of war."

Israeli NGO B'Tselem: "Cutting off electricity to a civilian population is collective punishment and a violation of international law… It doesn't really make a difference whether it's cutting off the supply from Israel or bombing the power station."

The list goes on.

NGO Monitor observes that all of these statements ignore the context of terrorism and downplay Israel's legitimate right to self-defense. The orgs and their spokespeople have little apparent interest in the rocket attacks and in the waves of terrorism emanating from Gaza. Instead they focus narrowly on Israel’s efforts to find a means of deterring these attacks, and that's the problem.

The reaction of Hamas is no surprise. Israel's threat is “a declaration of war against the Palestinian people, an attempt to target resistance forces and to undermine Hamas politically”. Hamas asserts that Israel "must supply humanitarian needs" and the security cabinet's decision “shows that Israel is not ready for political compromise with the Palestinians” in peace talks.

Putting this in some context, Gaza needs about 200 megawatts of electricity. It gets 80 Mw from Egypt, and almost all the rest (except for some minor supply from a Gazan plant) from Israel. A full shutdown of the Israeli supply would leave Gaza with adequate energy for its hospitals, government offices and other vital services. Its 1.5 million inhabitants would inevitably suffer periodic blackouts; these would be more severe if a fuel cut-off were also implemented. Life would be uncomfortable but not threatened.

Israel, which has always had the power to do so, says it will implement this plan if Palestinian terrorists continue to fire rockets into Israel. The overwhelming sentiment among Israelis is: why hasn't such a step been threatened before? Where else, other than in Chelm, would a government provide its enemy with enough power to allow business as usual?

And where else, other than in the context of the well-orchestrated, relentless Arab-driven campaign of delegitimization of Israel and its actions, would so many otherwise sober organizations make such jackasses of themselves?

8-Oct-06: Cluster of Critics Assails Israeli Self-Defence

In the wake of a war claimed as a "divine victory" by "Shiite and Hizbullah [forces] over the Zionist regime", Israel is now in the cross-hairs of global critics for what are claimed to be a million unexploded cluster bombs scattered across the Lebanese countryside.

A syndicated UPI story from Friday ("Unexploded Israeli bombs threaten Lebanese") covers the main issues:

"U.N. officials said it will take more than a year to clear out the estimated 1 million unexploded Israeli bomblets, The New York Times reported Friday. The Times said the bomblets outnumber the 650,000 people living in the southern Lebanon region where they are located. Unexploded cluster bombs had injured 109 people and killed 18 others as of Sept. 28, Lebanese officials said. The U.N. Mine Action Coordination Center in southern Lebanon said unexploded bombs have been found in 745 locations across the south and 4,500 of the estimated 1 million unexploded bombs have been disposed of. Israel has faced criticism from U.N. officials, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for using the cluster bombs, which are legal for use against military targets. However, the groups say the bombs are difficult to focus exclusively on military targets and can harm civilians. Israel has also been criticized for allegedly dropping most of the bombs in the final days of the conflict, while peace negotiations were ongoing."

Dr Gerald Steinberg directs the Program on Conflict Management at Bar Ilan University and is the editor of www.ngo-monitor.org. He has some pungent comments -- better to describe them as home truths -- in response. They're not yet published, but probably will be by the time this blog item reaches you:

Self-Defence and the Rules of War - Gerald M. Steinberg

Jerusalem: In the recent Lebanon war, Israel was attacked with daily barrages of hundreds of rockets, launched indiscriminately by Hezbollah from trucks and other platforms located in towns, villages and fields. These weapons struck Israeli hospitals, schools, houses, workplaces, streets, and even civilians in their cars. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had the obligation to stop these deaths and injuries. In the effort to meet this requirement, the IDF used different tactics and weapons, including cluster bombs, which break into multiple sub-munitions in order to hit weapons, including rocket launchers whose precise location is unknown or changing.
During and after the war, the United Nations Human Rights Council and powerful NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, condemned Israel repeatedly for using cluster bombs. The NGOs are running a campaign for a treaty to ban the use of these weapons, and has issued a barrage of press releases, reports and statements on the injuries caused to Lebanese by the remnants of these weapons. According to HRW, the US government heeded its demand to halt deliveries of these weapons to Israel during the war. On the surface, it would seem that the campaign on this issue was both morally justified and effective.
But a deeper examination of the issues shows fundamental flaws that undermine both the moral argument and NGO claim to a central role in negotiating arms limitation agreements.
Morally and logically, every nation under attack has the right to self-defense, and the rules of law, including various weapons bans that have been adopted, cannot result in greater slaughter of civilians. The first treaty banning the use of chemical weapons after the mass casualties of World War I was adopted in large part because they were also ineffective and did not fulfill any military objectives. Other agreements and prohibitions, such as those placed on aerial bombardment, were short-lived and largely ignored because of their military importance, both for offense and self-defense. The efforts to expand partial agreements on the prohibition of land mines have failed precisely because in many cases, no one has presented a better way to protect people, facilities, and nations from attack. Morally and tragically, in an environment of bitter conflict and terrorism, the use of land mines for security can be the lesser of the evils.
Similarly, in repeated condemnations of Israel for the use of cluster munitions, activist groups such as Amnesty and HRW failed to suggest a realistic and effective alternative against deadly rocket attacks. Although largely missing from HRW's campaigns, there is no question that morally, Hezbollah's arsenal of thousands of Syrian and Iranian-made rockets purposely used to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible constitutes the core violation of human rights and an obvious violation of international law. Massive Israeli ground and air attacks designed to find and destroy the rocket-launchers scattered throughout Southern Lebanon would have taken many more lives. This is the ugly calculus of war, and attempts to ignore this reality of human existence are both irrational and unethical.
In their campaign against Israeli use of cluster munitions, HRW and Amnesty are also coming with unclean hands and a not-so-hidden agenda. Officials from both played an active role in the infamous NGO forum of the 2001 Durban conference, which adopted a strategy to delegitimize the very existence of Israel. Their numerous publications and statements condemning Israeli responses to Palestinian terror far outnumbered the organization's reports condemning suicide bombings.
In this context, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth [not related to the authors of this blog], who clearly has no military expertise or experience, demanded that Israel arrest Palestinian terrorists in Gaza and Jenin, and bring them to trial – a policing approach, which, when attempted, often resulted in much greater violence. In the case of the cluster bomb campaign, HRW is not even suggesting an alternative.
These NGO officials have also used the millions of dollars at their disposal to join the political crusade against Israel's security barrier and in promoting dubious claims that fed boycott campaigns. The allegations in these reports were based on false or unverifiable claims of Palestinian "eyewitnesses" – a pattern repeated in by HRW and Amnesty during the Lebanon war. When Israel tried to use larger single-explosive weapons against Hezbollah rocket attacks, this was condemned as "indiscriminate force". Every Israeli defense is labeled as unacceptable.
HRW's central role in promoting international agreements to ban land mines is also tainted by a strong dose of anti-Israel propaganda. In a conference on this issue that took place in Geneva in 2000, in which I participated, HRW-funded participants from Palestinian, Egyptian, and other NGOs ignored the land mine issues and instead used this opportunity for unrelated Israel-bashing. The annual report on landmines distributed at the conference, and published by an HRW affiliate, featured a bogus cover photo related to Israel, and the chapters on Israel and the Palestinians included false or misleading information.
In contrast, those who are motivated by genuine humanitarian concerns must present workable alternatives in pursuing prohibitions on specific weapons, including cluster bombs. A treaty that effectively prevents nations and people under attack from acting in legitimate self-defense is worse than useless – it is also immoral.

Whether or not it's possible or credible for anyone to state with accuracy (is there some way for them to know?) the number of unexploded bombs in Lebanon, it's an undisputed fact that the Hizbollah leadership states very proudly, very publicly that it holds an enormous arsenal of death. And that it is preparing to deploy it against Israel's civilian population again. In his widely-reported speech in Beirut on 21st September, Hizbollah chief Nassrallah rejected international calls to disarm his terrorist army, telling a huge "victory" rally his forces have more than 20,000 rockets pointed at Israel - five times more than the total number fired by Hizbollah into Israel during the war, and higher than any previous figure Nasrallah has given. "...There is no army in the world that can (force us) to drop our weapons from our hands, from our grip."

HRW and Amnesty are presumably gearing up for a full-press media attack on his murderous plans.

In your dreams.