He-he. No, I’m not ranting, I’m venting! Because the story is that it’s early in the morning. and a woman in labor and her husband are alone with 8 soldiers, and she ends up crawling behind a concrete block to give birth. And noone gives a shit. This has nothing to do with left or right, this has to do with human behavior. And according to the numbers it happens on a weekly basis. Fuck them all. They deserve some old-fashioned spanking.
This is a truly horrible thing – both the fact that mothers and babies are dying, and that the troops are standing there and letting it happen.
…but if you’re going to use ambulances as troop transports or mobile bombs, well, don’t be surprised if the enemy starts shooting at your ambulances… even when they’re full of civilians and not bombs.
Is it horrible? Sure. This is why we have RULES OF WAR, rules of engagement, and stuff like the Geneva Convention. War, all-out war, with NO rules, is among the ugliest things the human mind can imagine. And the Middle East has spawned a race of people who seem to thrive on it.
That’s crap, of course. I’d hate to think ANYONE could “thrive” under such circumstances. But until everyone can sit the hell down and shut the hell up long enough to find common cause with their enemies, there can be no rules over there… and while there are no rules, Palestinean women and their babies will die in the dirt, because some other Palestinean thought that disguising herself as a pregnant woman was a cool way to sneak a bomb through a checkpoint.
And then, they’ll all blame it on the Israelis.
So far nobody has provided a cite that a woman has tried to sneak a bomb through a checkpoint, much less that this is common. The only cite so far was, quote: “[she] was found in her parents’ apartment … disguised as a pregnant woman”. And the source is the government of Israel, no verification.
In my book, there’s no excuse for this kind of behavior. A woman in labor could be easily checked out. If nothing else, she could simply lift her sweater. :mad:
Several points here.
The pretending to be pregnant shtick would only need to be pulled once or twice, not commonly, before regs like this would be put in place. The Israelies wouldn’t give them the chance for it to become a common occurance.
Second, the majority of Palestinians are Muslim. It is considered extremely indecent to show that amount of skin to a stranger, especially a man. Him fondling her stomach would probably be even worse. Some Muslim women (or their husbands or male relatives) would not allow this to happen - the woman’s dignity means so much more than the baby’s life.
So, knowing that at least 1 person has attempted the charade, and that checkpoints and soldiers seem to be targets of some suicide bombers, do you want to be the one who goes to check it out?
The checkpoints are not managed as we see them in Iraq, where people are asked to stop 100 feets away and ordered to strip or whatever. In this story, the woman and her husband freely walked up to the checkpoint and talked to the soldier. There are hundreds of checkpoints in place, and tens of thousand passes through them every day. The checkpoints are placed to regulate traffic from one Palestinian area to another Palestinia area, these are not checkpoints into Israel.
Given the nature of the checkpoints, I don’t take it lightly that a woman in labor are asked to sit down and don’t move, then neglected, when there are nobody else around to check out. How hard could it be to check out a woman approaching on foot and who says she’s in labor?
Good point.
adam yax, I certainly wouldn’t stand by and watch a woman crawl on her knees to find cover behind a rock to give birth on the ground. And somehow I suspect, neither would you?
I’m confused. There are security checkpoints, and they check everyone coming through for weapons and so forth, kind of a super-sized airport security setup, right? So how hard can it be for a woman to expose her pregnant belly to prove that she’s actually pregnant and then proceed through? You can’t just shove bombs into a woman’s uterus to create a “fake” pregnancy. And the soldiers working at the security checkpoint should be able to search everyone going through, right? I understand that it would be considered offensive to force a woman to show her bare belly to someone who isn’t her husband in these cultures, but tough shit. I’m not saying they need to be strip-searched or have a gynecologist check them out, but it should be pretty obvious that a woman is actually nine months pregnant if you’re looking at her swollen belly. I’m obviously missing something, so someone please enlighten me.
I’ve also checked out the allegations that ambulances are involved in terrorist activity, since this is frequently brought up by some people. It turns out that in the last 11 years, since the first suicide bombing in 1993, this has only happened once, in 2002, according to several sources, story here in Haaretz. Even the extremely pro-Israel site Jewish Virtual Library can only cite two instances.
It that’s all, it’s hardly an “endearing practice” as claimed by brutus.
On the contrary, it appears from various reports that the IDF are more frequently engaged in using ambulances as shields, as in “two medics were forced out of their ambulance and made to march in front of Israeli soldiers attempting to enter a Palestinian building” and “ambulances were forced to head a convoy of Israeli bulldozers in Ramallah” according to unverified allegations cited by the BBC. Hopefully the UN has some verified data on what’s actually the thruth in this.
Any “fears” about hypothetical women faking pregancies to mule bombs past check points sound like lame-ass, fucking chickenshit excuses to me. It’s really sickening how absolutely any level of dehumanization of Palestinians is always excused and explained away and the Israelis are always made to be the victims. That’s easy to do if it’s not you or your wife giving birth in the dirt, I guess.
Maybe, just maybe, If Israel pulled back a little bit on the apartheid and the human rights abuses and the illegal settlements and the hypocritical racism then there wouldn’t be so much motivation for suicide attacks. If Israel stops fueling all the desparation and rage and despair then maybe it’ll stop biting them in the ass.
There’s no excuse for what was done to that poor woman in the OP (not to mention the baby). None. Fuck anyone who says otherwise.
You are approaching this from the comfort of your home (or office) where you do not have to worry about walking out into the street and becoming a casualty because of a bus bombing. Or a restaurant bombing. Or a suicide bombing. The list goes on.
This is why the Israelis are so knee-jerk towards the Palestinians. The Palestinians certainly had a good sized hand in the doing of all this. If they had not, and did not continue to employ, terrorist tactics, there wouldn’t be a need for measures like those roadblocks.
Now before you blow a headgasket here, I am far from a staunch Israel supporter. They fuck up, and often.
But if that widower is going to get angry at anyone, it needs to be at Arafat and his countrymen for continuing to escalate the violence and refusing to sit down and rationally work problems out.
If he had something better than shit, I’m sure he’d be happy to spew that. Alas, he works with what he has.
That it’s irrelevant to the topic.
It fucking sucks. Sheesh, it’s fucking disgusting and inhumane. Jamil Zanin died a hero. However, it’s not the topic of this thread.
Anyway Alien, don’t mind Brutus. I have never once seen anything from him that has even attempted to consider an issue from any other viewpoint. Before I joined the SDMB, I had no idea that people like him existed; I had no idea that there were flag-wavers out there with so little ability for critical thought. Yet here is one: the epitome of the unthinking, permanently manipulated stooge.
Every time I see his username in a thread, even before I read the post, I picture a little man bending over, pants down, holding his ankles and screaming “take me now!” to the entire Republican party. I find this helps one to digest the indigestible.
Thanks. I don’t. Annoyance is the word, you know, like the bug who hides under the carpet.
Damn it. You owe me a coke, a keyboard and a brain cleanse 
Uh since when can babies shoot out of the birth canal?
Once the head is out, the remainder can follow with impressive speed. Especially if the mother is squatting.
QtM, MD and former baby catcher.