i'll take this one up first.
first of all, i don't see any Israelies shooting children in the west bank here.
actually, i don't see Israelies shooting
anyone,
anywhere here.
what i see here is a Gazan hospital (and here's the key phrase)
during operation "cast lead'.
now, we can debate the credibility of these photos, and we would probably get nowhere. so i'll say this, and leave at at that: the Hamas has been known to put up false presentation. however, for the sake of argument, let's assume that some of the pictures are authentic. and i'll even spare you the quantitive arguement, and accept that one dead child is as much a mark of shame as a thousand. so how can this be explained?
remember the key phrase?
then now i shall, as lord thriller might say, add context.
operation "cast lead" was a military operation Israel launced in January 2009, after over 8 years of Israely cities near the Gazan border being constantly attacked by rockets. the operation was designated to seek and destroy reservoirs of rockets and rocket manufacturing facilities.
during the operation rockets were continusly fired on cities within Israel, many of them from civilian neighborhood inside the Gaza strip. many forces received secondery mission to destroy these launchers. while persuing their mission, they encountered ressistence inside urban areas.
now, an urban enviroment is probably the most frightening enviroment for asoldier. you work in small groups, disconnected from the main force, ambush shelters are abundant, and the danger sorruonds you in a 360 degrees sphere. a soldier facing incoming fire in an urban environment will do everything in his power to neutralize the threat. and if that means throwing a grenade, or an RPG through a window, that's what he'll do. and if there's a child in a room which is used to ambush, and faces high risk of attracting fire, whose to blame for the child receiving a shrapnel injury, the person shooting from the room, or the soldier defending himself?
and a force that's been assigned a task to neutralize a rocket launcher in a school yard, is he to blame if children did not heed the ample warning given, or is the terrorist aiming that launcher at other civilians?
who's to blame, the government that deploys its soldiers to keep violence as far away from its civilians, or the one that takes the battle to the center of it's own cities?
you said you don't need me to show you videos of Hamas using kids as human shields. apperantly that's because you've found them yourself.
and one more thing. this might not be directly related, but it says
something about Israel's and the Hamas' relative prespective on the importance of life and death.
there's an expression in hebrew, "to dance over the spilled blood". a person is said to dance over spilled blood if he uses another person's grief for his own cynical uses. no hospital manager in Israel will allow cameras to record dead bodies being treated in that manner. the Hamas, it seems, will.
[KMA]Avenger wrote:tbh mate, i originally wanted to go point by point. i wanted to get this out of the way before i moved on to your other points and shoot them down 1 at a time. debunk this if you can:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnu5qPXEmkc
as for this. first, what do we see here?
at first, we see a small group protesting near what seems to be a border fence. the ending titles suggest it is part of the "separation fance" (the
West Bank Barrier) which Israel begun building after a wave of terrorist attacks during the early 2000s (and which is considered to be one of the main reasons, if not the single most important one, to the termination of that wave). the video is edited very neatly so as not to present violence by the protestors, but their body language is very aggressive. this is not a quiet demonstration, or a noisy piquet line. this is an intented provocation. next we see a small group, composed mostly of elderly women and youn people, of seemingly western appearence. the next shot are of IDF soldiers shooting riot dispersion means. we don't know if this were shot at the group we saw earlier, we don't even know if they were shot at the same event. but we know that's what the editor wants us to think. than an older woman speaking (assumingly mairead maguire. my speakers aren't functioning, so i apologise if that's being said on the video. for the same reason, i won't respond to her words). we than see a brief shot of the demonstration, showing us it's actually more then 4 or five people (sloppy editing,
). the older woman speak some more, than a semmingly arab older man, some seemingly arab children, andd the woman gets up and climbs on the bus, with no more help i would expect a woman her age might need.
now, as for the context. as you might know, Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. while that fact has nothing to do with this video, the way it was done offers us insight to what goes in the mind of an Israely soldier facing a demonstration.
as i said, israel withdrew from lebanon in 2000. until then, it held a chain of posts, a few kilometers from the Israely border, in Lebanon territory. some of them were held by IDF forces, and some by the SLA (South Lebanon Army, a force composed mostly of druze and christian soldiers, that was allied with Israel). a month or so before the day schedueled for the withdrawal, Hizebolla organised mass rallies begun entering the SLA posts. to avoid shooting at civilians, and under the assumption that some of the participants in these rallies are armed Hizebolla activist in disguise, the IDF command ordered the SLA to abandon their posts. the line quickly dissassembled, and Israel was forced to withdraw early and with disarray, which allowed Hizebolla to claim it threw Israel out of Lebanon.
following this incident, every post and border patrol in Israel was equipped with riot dispersion means, to be used in cases where live fire is unacceptble, but means must be taken as self defense.
now, let's recap. we have quite a large gruop (definietly more then the four soldiers present), displaying aggressive body language, and nearing a closed military zone. what would happen to me were i, plain clothed, to near a US, UK, or any of the EU members army camp and not heed calls to stop?
as you can plainly see, after the demonstrators pulled away from the fence, the soldiers ceased fire. Israely soldiers voluntarily shooting innocent civilians? not here.
Well, not your posts only, but they participate a bit.