Guardian Report Misses the Real Child Abuse
January 24, 2012 12:27 by Simon Plosker
NBC News reports:
The images grow no less shocking with time — a gaping wound on a tiny skull, the hair matted with blood; a gunshot that pierced the skin of a small torso and went straight toward the kidney; and finally, the broken neck and severed penis of a 13-year-old boy, his mangled body contorted on a plastic sheet.
This isn’t, however, a story from Israel but the shocking example of what is happening to Syrian children being tortured and murdered by the Assad regime.
Meanwhile, in Israel, The Guardian runs a special report on the alleged mistreatment of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military. With the report is an 11 minute video which includes footage of an interrogation. A Palestinian child cries, not as a result of torture but because he is going to miss some school exams.
By opening this critique with the emotive and disturbing description of a dead child, we could be accused of being deliberately manipulative. Just like The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood who also set the scene in a similar fashion:
The room is barely wider than the thin, dirty mattress that covers the floor. Behind a low concrete wall is a squat toilet, the stench from which has no escape in the windowless room. The rough concrete walls deter idle leaning; the constant overhead light inhibits sleep. The delivery of food through a low slit in the door is the only way of marking time, dividing day from night.
This is Cell 36, deep within Al Jalame prison in northern Israel. It is one of a handful of cells where Palestinian children are locked in solitary confinement for days or even weeks. One 16-year-old claimed that he had been kept in Cell 36 for 65 days.
It is an ugly scene for an equally ugly story that paints Israel as a serial abuser of Palestinian children. The real child abuse in reality, however, is that caused by Palestinian society and media that glorifies terrorists, suicide bombers and “martyrs”, encouraging Palestinian youth to follow the same path.
A vulnerable child is easy pickings for recruitment by terrorist organizations. In recent years the most predominant activities characterizing involvement of minors were involvement in suicide bomb attacks, Molotov cocktail throwing, stone throwing and stabbing. Minors have also been involved in grenade throwing, use of explosives, shooting, car bombs, transfer of weapons, kidnapping, rocket launching, as well as assault and murder.
See here for more on Children Dying to Kill.
And while it suits Palestinian propaganda to promote the image of children armed with stones facing Israeli armor, the reality is that stones can kill. As recently as September 2011, Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan were killed after the vehicle he was driving overturned as a result of Palestinian rock throwing.
The Israeli response: Unpublished by The Guardian
There are often complaints that Israel does not react in a timely manner to address allegations such as those made by The Guardian. While Israeli Government spokesman Mark Regev does appear in The Guardian’s video along with a token paragraph in the main article, most of the Israeli Security Agency’s (ISA) response went unpublished as Harriet Sherwood picked out only a few quotes.
Here, for the record, we are including the response from the ISA that was sent to The Guardian before its article was published. In it, the ISA states:
- The claims that Palestinian minors were subject to interrogation techniques that include beatings, prolonged periods in handcuffs, threats, kicks, verbal abuse, humiliation, isolation and prevention of sleep are utterly baseless.
- Those detained for ISA questioning receive the full rights for which they are eligible, in accordance with international treaties of which the State of Israel is a signatory and according to Israeli law, including the right to legal counsel and visits by the Red Cross.
Click here for the full ISA response.
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Leon
4:43 am
Feb 21, 2012
Some commentators seem to think that being “the good guy” means committing suicide.
Like the Arab despatchers of homicide bombers, these commentators advocate their “remedy” to Israel, but would not dream of using it themselves.
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Jan Cosgrove
5:00 am
Feb 21, 2012
Are you saying there were no Arabs living in that area before 1922? The UN superceded the LoN and it is now where such matters are determined. The UN says Israel has a right to exist, it exists within defined borders, Israel is part of the UN, and in becoming a member it recognised that territorial acquisition by force is not lawful any more, and also that people have a right to self-determination. Don’t just claim that for yourselves. If Israel wants more territory, it has to negotiate. The same applies to the Arab nations. In fact, as things stand, neither party has a case for more territories and Israel has no case to hold onto the occupied territories permanently. Negotiations may require land swap. The Jewish people sought and got their nation, it is recognised internationally. It had to be so, based on the call of justice. But you cannot then deny the Palestinian people their desire and right in this. Neither has to right to deny the other. Arab nations illegally occupying territory is not the same as the Arabs who were living there. Your own Israeli Arabs prove the point. If you claim illegal occupation then they may well point back to your unilateral declaration of independence as illegal. The world doesn’t agree with them. And it doesn’t agree that the Palestinians should be denied their nation state. The Palestinian Authority has had to accept Israel’s right to exist, Egypt has done so.
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Leon
9:05 am
Feb 21, 2012
The UN, upon its establishment, declared that all the determinations of its predecssor, The League of Nations, remained valid.
Jews have lived in The Land of Israel uninterruptedly since about the second millennium BCE.
They lived there under Ottoman rule; they lived there during World War One.
During and immediately after that war stakeholders in the post-war territorial settlements staked their claims. The international community endorsed the Jewish claim ( just as it endorsed the Czech, Polish etc claims.) This was done because of the recognition that :
1. The only nation for which The Land has ever been a nation-state is the Jewish nation, and
2. Jews lived there and they had a right to national self-determination, and any Jew living in exile had the right to join them.
The Arab leadership initially supported Zionism, but then degenerated into racist chauvinism.
The Arabs were awarded 99.9 % of the territory of the Middle East, but greed and anti- Jewish mentality turned them against legitimate Jewish aspirations.
Opposition to Zionism has its roots in one or more of the following mindsets:
1. the view that Jews must always remain a vulnerable minority in other people’s nation-states.
2. the view that Islam mandates Jewish inferiority.
3 the view that Jewish values, morals and ethics are inconsistent with those of ideologies such as Christianity, communism, socialism etc
4. realpolitik, whose adherents believe that expediency mandates opposition to legitimate Jewish rights and that lies, distortions, libels, discrimination and other base tactics are legitimate weapons against the Jewish nation.
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Jan Cosgrove
2:40 pm
Feb 21, 2012
Yes, but those LoN determinations have been superceded by later UN determinations. If that were not so, the British would still be expected to carry out their LoN Mandate. Namibia was a LoN mandate, this was superceded by the UN recognition of Namibia. The other inhabitants ofn the West Bank etc also have lived there for a very long period. This claim extending back to your stated period has no more or less legitimacy than, say, the Celts in Britain claiming ownership of the whole of these Islands. No one disputes they have a claim to part of the land.
The antics of Arab states is not the main issue, the right to self-determination of the people living in the Occupied Territories is. Given your stance I cannot see how you morally can deny that claim, to continue to do so risks further generations of bloodshed. I fail to see how that is consistent with Judaism.
If anti-semites trade on supposed Christian, Islamic and Socialist beliefs, they deny that all of these have their roots in the basis of justice and truth that lies at the heart of Judaism. Islam recognises the Jews as the people of the Book, so does Christianity. Also, given that the Palestinians are also a semitic people, I can assure you I have have heard racist, anti-semitic Jews in my time. No prettier than their anti-Jewish nazi colleagues.
What if your claim to all these lands were achieved, mainly by force (so not permitted by the UN Charter). What would happen to the Palestinians? Would they become Israelis? Or expelled if they did not? No one has yet answered me on this in various exchanges on the net.
You cannot label me anti-semitic or as denying the right of Israel to exist as a nation, and as a homeland for the Jewish people as an ethnic grouping. When I see nazis locally I speak against them, I always wish for the sudden appearance of a coachload of the League of Jewish Ex-Servicemen. But if people like me also say the Palestinians deserve their place in the sun, surely you are not surprised. They will continue to flock to leaders such as they have whilst they see no hope. You are prepared to fight for your homeland – at least extend that understanding to them. They have nowhere to go.
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Leon
9:58 pm
Feb 21, 2012
Zionism is the best thing that’s happened to the Arabs in the last 900 years.
The Zionist enterprise in The Land attracted Arab illegal immigrants in large numbers from all over the Middle East as far away as Sudan.
The Zionists created work and business opportunities for all; the Zionist enterprise taught the ordinary folk democracy, equal rights for women, secular education and modernism.Many of the Arab interlopers, however, not content to live in peace with the Jewish traditional owners/custodians of The Land, allowed themselves to be led astray by their fanatical religious mentors such as the nazi, Haj Amin al Husseini, and made war on the Zionists.
Zionists live as minorities in other nations’ states. It’s no tragedy for a tiny proportion of the Arab nation to live as a minority in the Jewish nation-state, where they have equality, by and large, and were it not for the state of war, their lot would be even better.
Western “do gooders” are utterly disingenuous when they claim to be “struggling” for “the Palestinians.”
What they are “struggling for” is to deprive the Jews of their national independence, identity and history.
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Jan Cosgrove
2:00 am
Feb 22, 2012
Leon
A study in self-righteous self-pity worthy of the Afrikaaners. Who allowed themselves to be led astray by the fanatical; religious mentors. You have none of these in Israel? Who do not preach equality of women, or arabs for that matter. Either there is equality of there isn’t.
Many countries still harbour anti-semtism. In the UK, in my childhood, even having fought that dreadful war, you could still encounter it. Now mainly, I hope, it’s confined to a very small far-right looney element, but they still get to march. Mainly about Poles and Moslems but the anti-Jewish aspect is there if hidden. Good riddance when the last of their kind are gone.
But many good people here, sympathetic to the cause of a Jewish homeland, are feeling more than uneasy about your direction over the Palestinians. as they want to be known. Still no answer about their future, still consigned to an oblivion you fought to reject for yourselves. It’s simply morally and historically unsustainable. Western ‘do-gooders’ would be happier by far were an honest accommodation reached. Both sides, by giving what is needed will gain so much more than land. If you ask me, that’s what God wants. Shalom.
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Leon
10:44 pm
Feb 22, 2012
Modern secular anti-Zionists are the heirs to the obsessive drive of Hellenism, Christianity and Islam to eradicate the Jews, whether it be by conversion, physical extermination or assimilation.
That is the reason that they are prepared to use casuistry, sophistry, rationalisation and mendacity in their campaign to deprive the Jews of their national independence.
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Jan Cosgrove
3:29 am
Feb 23, 2012
Leon
Israel has a right to exist in its present borders excluding the Occupied Territories. Your mystical destiny is a view not shared by the rest of the world any more than it is Islam’s destiny etc etc. Maybe Israel will end up with negotiated, different borders, but then a Palestinian State for its people has a right also to exist. That is the reason people like me are prepared to use Reason and Truth. Still no answer as to the fate of the Palestinians in Greater Israel? Something to hide? What’s this about Hellenism?
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Karl
4:18 am
Feb 23, 2012
It is very good that at least some of the fierce Israeli critics “agree” to the rights of Jews to have an independent state if only on a small part of their ancestors land- but that was already agreed on long time ago by the majority of the World represented by the UN. When Israel agreed on the UN partition plan they also de facto agreed on an Arab Palestinian state side by side to Israel! Unfortunately it was the Arabs that de facto did not recognise the Arab Palestinian state together with the Jewish Palestinians state. This “little fact” is the only cause for the conflict, occupation (including Arab), refuges (including Jewish) and casualties. How come this little fact is not discussed and we hear instead only about occupation, refugees, settlements – how about looking at the causes and circumstances that brought this situation? Brushing this aside as being historical=non-relevant is quite silly: Hamas still fights the 1948 war to destroy Israel (maybe with the help of Iran) and so is the so called moderate PLO in the West Bank, just look at their internal propaganda or education books or the symbol on their flags. So maybe those critics of Israel so much dedicated to “peace and justice” will go and talk to the other side to recognise Israel right to exist and to recognise all the misery Arab/Muslim regimes caused, are still causing and probably will cause to their own population in the near future.
In the meantime there is no other solution for the “Palestinians” – if they don’t initiate violence against Israel they can continue living in one of the highest standards of living in the Third World -objectively better than a couple of billion people starving to death or suffering much more oppression from their own government then Israel ever inflicted on them. Often in the REAL World the choice is between Bad and Worse and logical people don’t have much problem to choose between those options.
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