MGibson: No apology necessary, my friend. I wasn’t even aware you had done anything wrong.
Sam Stone: It is true Colin Powell said he had not seen “evidence of a massacre”; however, I would like to point out the following:
Much as I respect Powell’s sincerity (in fact, he’s the only Bush Admin. official I respect!), he did not visit Jenin. He flew over the site of a Jerusalem suicide bombing, and he also visited Arafat in Ramallah. IIRC the Palestinians were pretty disappointed that he didn’t go to Jenin.
“No evidence” does not mean that the allegations are discredited. Can you cite any evidence that the Palestinian witnesses in my cites were conspiring to lie?
The Palestinians interviewed in those articles I cited did not refer so much to a single “massacre”, if we understand “massacre” to mean a cold-blooded mass killing. However, they did definitely refer to killing of civilians, either by snipers or by bulldozers, plus looting and denial of medical attention. Semantically, one could perhaps refer to the cumulative effect of all these individual killings as a “massacre”; however, nobody is saying it was another Sabra-Shatilla. Nevertheless, you can have atrocities without having a massacre. Even the article you cited makes that distinction!
The Palestinian witnesses in the articles I cited were interviewed individually by journalists who snuck into Jenin. War correspondents do tend to pick their own interview subjects, nobody was leading them around.
The earlier articles could be the more accurate ones, if memories are fresher, witnesses are still around and the spin doctors haven’t had time to work yet.
In the 26th post of this thread, istara cited a whole bunch of on-line sources pointing to atrocities, and some of them are later than mine. I only cited the ones I had found myself. (It is true that both istara and I have found the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to be good sources of these allegations.)
Uh, Squink. your cite confirms that Sommaruga said, “If we’re going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?” It claimed that the statement was made in some non-offensive context. However, that was baloney. There is no non-offensive context.
And, the US was right to refuse.
Just because some action is supported by a group of countries doesn’t make it right. It’s unfortunate, but true, that politics can spoil international forums.
BTW, I would challenge any UN-supporters to justify the makeup of their selected panel. Why wouldn’t they have chosen military experts and people without an anti-Israel record? My explanation is a combination of anti-Israel feelings, arrogance, and ineptness. Can you finid a better one?
Um, December, you made the same statement in another thread and never got around to defending your point of view. Perhaps you should read the rest of the newspaper article:
Baker, who was present at the time of the remarks, said that using this comment to allegedly show an anti-Jewish bias on Sommaruga’s part “is a vile manipulation of something said in a different context.”
“I know the context because I was there,” Baker said. “When we were talking about adding additional emblems in the Red Cross movement, Sommaruga remembered that the old historic Indian symbol of the swastika, before it was used by the Nazis, was proposed as a humanitarian red cross symbol. To take it out of context as something he said - in an anti-Semitic context - is vile, manipulative, and destructive.”
IMHO, it’s inoffensive. Especially when uttered by someone who speaks English probably as a third or fourth language.
Uh, december. Sam Stone implied that it was Bernadine Healy, **not Sommaruga ** who made the comment. He was wrong, as are you when you claim that there is no context in which the statement could be considered non-offensive. Please re-read the article, and try to comprehend what the Buddhist swastika has to do with the context. Damn those anti-semite Israeli government officials anyway, they keep messing up your BS
When Sommaruga mentioned the swastika in front of a group that included Jews, that had too be offensive.
Even if the comment had mentioned some other Buddhist symbol, it still would have been offensive. AFAIK Buddhist countries are a part of the ICRC; Israel has been blackballed. So, the comment was apparently meaningless.
Or, maybe it was one of the “two-for-one” insults. Maybe Sommaruga meant:
“If we let the Jews in, then we’ll have to let the Buddhists in too, and the whole neighborhood will really go to pot!”
I challenge you, Squink to explain to the SDMB what Sommaruga’s context was and why it was not offensive.
BTW, Israel is a democracy, and Israelis take their politics really seriously. You must bear that in mind when a liberal spokesman disagrees with a conservative governement, or vice versa.
I already have december, in the recent thread in which you tried to foist off Krauthammer’s vile intimations as the gospel truth. If you need a refresher, do a search for threads by “december” in great debates over the past week. You seem to be deliberately repeating bullshit in the hope that the unwary will accept it as true, and thus buy whatever other stories you have for sale.
There are more versions of the truth than can be contained in your limited worldview.
BTW, expanding on my BOHICA post: Suppose the UN panel conducts an investigation and finds that there wasn’t a massacre. Which is the more likely report, (1) or (2)?
We are terribly sorry to have wronged Israel by accusing them of a massacre. We were fooled by Palestinian lies. Next time, we will believe Israel, not the Palestinians. Furthermore, we will look into the cases where the PLO executed peace-seeking Palestinians,
We were looking for all sorts of infractions. Civilians X, Y and Z were killed during the battle. Certain buildings were destroyed. We were right all along. Israel committed war crimes.
BTW, expanding on my BOHICA post: Suppose the UN panel conducts an investigation and finds that there wasn’t a massacre. Which is the more likely report, (1) or (2)?
We are terribly sorry to have wronged Israel by accusing them of a massacre. We were fooled by Palestinian lies. Next time, we will believe Israel, not the Palestinians. Furthermore, we will now look into the cases where the PLO executed peace-seeking Palestinians,
We were looking for all sorts of infractions. Civilians X, Y and Z were killed during the battle. Certain buildings were destroyed. We were right all along. Israel committed war crimes.
Let’s not be foolish. The UN did not appoint a “fact-finding” committee, they appointed a “dig up dirt on Israel” committee. A fact-finding committee should be impartial. Those appointed were not. If you don’t think Israel should have the right to reject a committee that is not impartial, you obviously aren’t thinking. For some backup, I give you this: http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2002/04/28/Opinion/Opinion.47850.html
Now, before you accuse the source of bias, remember that you must then bring into question the other Jerusalem Post article in this thread.
Like local politics can spoil national forums. Or else why the US insisted about Milosevic being tried in The Hague, instead of in his own country, as Serbia proposed? Supporting this solution would have been more consistent with its take on the International Criminal Court.
Anyway, the US being right or wrong wasn’t my point. I was responding to a poster who said that any country including the US would have allowed an international body to investigate.
Like local politics can spoil national forums. Or else why the US insisted about Milosevic being tried in The Hague, instead of in his own country, as Serbia proposed? Supporting this solution would have been more consistent with its take on the International Criminal Court.
Anyway, the US being right or wrong wasn’t my point. I was responding to a poster who said that any country including the US would have allowed an international body to investigate.
Tanking the opposite point of view, I’m wondering how many posters who think that Israel is right to refuse this team to investigate because its member would be biased think also that Irak was right to refuse an UN team to investigate for the exact same reason.
Maybe yes, and maybe no. We have no idea because there has not been any kind of independant verification. Not even reporters, biased as they may or may not be. Now a UN group is not allowed in something like 10 days after the fighting ended.
The longer time passes, the muddier the waters become. It’s in every one’s best interest to get “impartial” obeservers into Jenin. I haven’t seen Israel propose a group, only to agree and then delay/cancel the UN team.
Mandos, I read that article. Impartial does not necessarily mean a friend of Israel. IMHO, someone who is skeptical of Israel’s claim makes a much more credible observer. Ogata has spent time in Israel, has an honorary doctorate, and this is posted in an earlier link in this thread. Her strike is the following quote: “I was in the [Mideast] region earlier this year and I know under what kind of fragile and crowded conditions the Palestinian refugees are living.” What part of this quote would be factually wrong?
Sommauga made some allegations regarding the Geneva convention. I take it to mean that he believes there were violations. The fact that there are settlements are beyond dispute. How one interprets the geneva convention may be open to interpretation, but his view is not a minority extremist one. Holding a view, backed by at least a “reasonable” amount of evidence, that Israel violated past Geneva conventions does not necessarily make Sommauga anti-Isreal.
Again, Israel could propose their own group but they haven’t. There are objections to a former PM of Finland and president of the EU. Okay fine, make a counter proposal of an elder statesman acceptable to both Isreal and Palestine. But to say this is a dirt finding committee and to continuously delay certainly appears damning.
Don’t you all get it? There are no unbiased sides. If someone goes in and counts 50 bodies, they automatically become anti-Palestinian because they found no evidence of a massacre. If they temper it by saying it is a “humanitarian catastrophe,” they become anti-Israeli. It is the nature of the region, and the nature of war in general.
In other news, aid agencies are reporting around 50 bodies found so far, 20 or so civilians. No indication on how they were judged as civilians, as 14 year old boys and young girls have been used in offensive roles in the past few weeks. They report less than 10% of homes in the camp destroyed, a little over 10% damaged, and about 25% of the camp now rendered homeless.
IMHO: Catastrophe? No. Massacre? All signs point to no right now. Devastating military operation carried out in a densely populated civilian area? You betcha.
I read this article, and it is valid anecdotal evidence against my position in this argument. Nonetheless, I maintain that if a presumably Jewish reporter from an Israeli newspaper can go out and document this collusion so easily, it should have also been easy for American reporters from the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press to see the same shenanigans. But that’s not what they saw or reported. The fakers in the JPost article could have been jumping on the bandwagon, trying to augment reality rather than invent it out of whole cloth.
december, Brit Hume works for Fox News, which is not known as a paragon of objectivity.
I went out looking this morning for every report on Jenin that I could find and there are surprisingly few probably due to the ban on reporters in the area. They few I did find (ny times, los angeles tribune, and one or two others) dealt mainly with sob stories (Israeli snipers fired at me when I went walking around outside or I saw them bulldoze my neighbors house, etc…) and the conditions are described as desolate with civilians wandering around aimlessly picking through rubble. I’m sure there is a seedy underside to it all, but either it isn’t news, there aren’t people to report it, or its not very common amoung the population. What we do know for a fact though is that the PA and its citizenry has a knack for propaganda when it comes to Israel and Jews.
