Can Israel do no wrong?

I invite you to read a rather horrendous account of what life is like for Palestinian inhabitants of the city of Hebron on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This is a diary written by two American women who visited that place with a group of political activists. Here is an excerpt of what they saw:

"The souks, Old City markets, have wire screens or makeshift netting overhead: insufficient protection for attacks from [Israeli] settlers living on the floors above. The wire screens are heavy with trash, bricks, giant concrete chunks, and exploded plastic bags that contained human waste when they burst onto the people and racks of goods below. Hisham told us one young man was in a coma after a sharpened metal rod came through the screen and penetrated his skull. Now, when one looks up, one can see piles of objects that got caught in the screen: crowbars, bricks, stones, chairs. While walking through a market, we saw a settler woman throw sand from her third story apartment down at a crowded market where Palestinians were shopping. It fell on a Palestinian woman's head, as well as on one of our delegation members, Eddie, who because of being Mexican-American has often been perceived to be Arab on this trip. [...]

Solidarity activists escort [Palestinian] children to school to protect them against stone-throwing [Israeli] settlers, and walk with herders to their grazing lands. Settler children throw stones at Palestinian children on their way to school -- children under 14 cannot be held responsible, Mikhael told us, so they are careful about who throws the stones. One school finally had to change its hours and days so that the children would not be walking to school when settler children were home to attack them -- they're the only Palestinian school not open on Saturdays, and the kids have no recess so they can leave early enough to get home safely. "

Read the whole account here.

It is really unfathomable how the very people who endured such atrocities towards themselves just for their ethnicity, can horribly mistreat other people based on their religious/ethnic identity. Why we choose to look the other way is beyond comprehension. This is racism, pure and simple. I am glad to see that there are Israelis who speak up against it. It is too bad that our propaganda machine we call news media would not report true stories like this one so that the people of this country could make a balanced opinion on what is really taking place in Israel.

One standard of George Lopez

My son loves to watch the George Lopez show late at night on Nickelodeon. I sometimes watch it with him. I remember one episode when a sex offender moves into George's neighborhood, and he is ready to rise up in arms against the predator. His mood changes rapidly when he finds out that the sex offender is a woman, and a young and extremely attractive woman at that. All of a sudden, all he does is introduces himself, welcomes her to the community and tells her he is there if she needs him. His wife is completely appalled by his behavior, and she accuses him of double standards. To which George Lopez replies: "NO! There is only ONE standard! One for men, and one for women!" Ha-ha-ha.

I sort of remembered that episode when I saw in the news today that the United Nations has released a report by its investigators who concluded that Israel's actions in the Gaza strip in December 2008 - January 2009 amount to war crimes and crimes againt humanity.

Here are some excerpts from that report:

"“The mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of willful killings and willfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility,” the report’s executive summary said. “It also finds that the direct targeting and arbitrary killing of Palestinian civilians is a violation of the right to life.”

It went on to criticize the “deliberate and systematic policy on the part of the Israeli armed forces to target industrial sites and water installations,” and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.
On the objectives and strategy of Israel’s military operation, the mission concluded that military planners deliberately followed a doctrine which involved “the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations.” (http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32057&Cr=palestin&Cr1=)

The mission did not exonerate the Palestinians in the conflict, noting "“There’s no question that the firing of rockets and mortars [by armed groups from Gaza] was deliberate and calculated to cause loss of life and injury to civilians and damage to civilian structures. The mission found that these actions also amount to serious war crimes and also possibly crimes against humanity.”

Fox News concluded its extremely short report on this matter with the phrase: "Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation, saying the U.N. Human Rights Council that ordered it was biased against the Jewish state." Any Russian would remember a phrase from a cult war movie which states that what sticks in a person's mind is the last thing you said in a conversation. So it is symptomatic that the last statement in this article was that the findings are not valid because of the anti-Semitic bias. That is what the readers are likely to remember.

Well, well, well. I remember there was a tremendous outcry in the media when last year Russia went into South Ossetia to protect its citizens from random bombing and shelling by Georgian armed forces. Senator McCain felt strongly enough about it to make a silly statement that we were all Georgians now. Our media spared no harsh words for Russia for using excessive military force - and that was the least of what the US found wrong with it. So why is the news about Israeli war crimes confined to some middle pages of the newspapers and to brief mentions? And why am I reminded of ONE STANDARD of George Lopez?

I think in relation to Israel, the US behaves totally like Ryan's Mom (for those who do not have a clue what I am talking about, please watch an extremely funny episode of a Canadian stand-up comedian Russell Peters about Ryan's Mom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVcePxjFujs). Personally, I have no respect for Ryan’s Mom's parenting methods, nor for the results it achieves.