Shepherd - Reckless Western anti-Zionism rebounds over Libya killings

Robin Shepherd
The Commentator
20 June '11

http://thecommentator.com/index.php/article/240/reckless_western_anti_zionism_rebounds_over_libya_killings

Uproar over NATO’s accidental killing of civilians shows how short-sighted and damaging was Western fury at Israel’s operation in Gaza

So now it has come back to haunt us. One stray missile landing in a residential district of Tripoli, and NATO and its member governments (including Britain’s) could, in principle, be up on war crimes charges at the United Nations.

No-one really believes the Libyan government’s claim that 800 civilians have been killed by NATO in the operation so far, but the notion being put about by large sections of the western media that this was the first event of its kind is no less implausible. Indeed, it’s fantasy.

Accidents happen. Civilians die in combat operations conducted in civilian areas. Which means that you either refuse to countenance such operations – meaning in turn that all that terrorists and tyrants have to do to survive is embed themselves in civilian areas – or you face reality for what it is.

Here in Jerusalem on a three day trip, it has been interesting to gauge the reactions to what happened in Tripoli on Sunday morning from a people well used to having to deal with that conundrum.

The tactic of hiding inside civilian populations is routine for practically all of Israel’s terrorist enemies, from Hamas to Hezbollah. They therefore have to make a decision: either engage in the messy business of turfing the terrorists out in the full knowledge that innocents will die; or do nothing and allow them to continue their attacks unabated.

The Laws of War Evidently Don’t Apply to Israel

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
06 October '10

The New York Times reported Monday on a U.S. soldier charged with killing Afghan civilians for fun. Yet much of the report was devoted to explaining why civilian killings by soldiers usually don’t result in indictments — like a 2008 case in which Marines allegedly fired indiscriminately at an Afghan road, killing 19 people and wounding 50. The case was closed because “the shootings began after a suicide bomber attacked the unit’s convoy,” and “the Marines said they had taken hostile gunfire after the explosion and had fired to defend themselves from perceived threats.” The Times explained:

It can be difficult to win a conviction, specialists in military law said, when defendants can make a plausible claim that they believed, in the confusion of the “fog of war,” that their lives were in danger and they needed to defend themselves.

“You often see cases of kids who just make dumb decisions,” said Gary Solis, who teaches the laws of war at Georgetown University. “But killings in the heat of the moment, they don’t usually try those guys. The guys you try are the ones who have an opportunity to consider what they are doing.”

Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale, added that it’s often hard to gather evidence in conflict zones.

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Dirty open secrets

Liat Collins
My Word/JPost
01 August '10

War is hell. It didn’t take WikiLeaks to tell us that. Nonetheless, the on-line publication of some 91,000 classified US military records – including previously unreported incidents of Afghan civilians killed by coalition forces, covert operations against Taliban terrorists and cooperation between Pakistan and the Taliban leadership – has put the spotlight on just how desperate warfare can be.

Dead children, slain guests at weddings, blown-up buses. Your heart has to go out to the Afghanis, who, as Robin Shepherd noted in an analysis in The Jerusalem Post last week, were “ordinary people going about their daily business who tragically found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

All is fair in love and war, goes the saying from long, long before Israelis became familiar with the name Richard Goldstone.


But, of course, not everything goes. No decent person wants to think of soldiers – even accidentally – killing innocent farmers and kids. Just how to avoid such deaths when the Taliban, like their close allies in Gaza and Lebanon, deliberately use the civilian population as a human shield is not clear, however.

As Shepherd pointed out, the recent exposure that the Taliban has been using the same tactics as Hamas, with the same results, might boomerang on the British and other coalition countries who cheered the Goldstone report through the UN. No wonder the UK’s new prime minister, David Cameron, seems to be serious about changing the universal jurisdiction law. He is as likely to find himself in the dock as, say, Israel’s opposition leader and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni.

There is something ironic about a guerrilla war being waged simultaneously from hideouts in caves and in cyberspace. Israelis over the last few years have frequently sighed that wars are now fought as much in the virtual world as on the battlefield. The WikiLeaks exposure reinforces that idea.

While attention was focused primarily on the details of the reports, among the questions which should be asked are: Just who is waging the war via WikiLeaks and why? President Barack Obama said last week that the documents could endanger soldiers serving in Afghanistan. He’s right. But only up to a point. These documents weren’t published to describe the whereabouts of coalition forces or even their mode of operation (not much of a secret to the Taliban in any case). They are not even particularly up-to-date.

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Viewpoint: Afghan war logs, war crimes and hypocrisy

Carmel Gould
Just Journalism
30 July '10

It is difficult not to resort to worn phrases like ‘double standards’ when comparing the British media reaction to the contents of the Afghan war logs with its reaction to (any) Israeli military action. The basic equation is: Israeli operation which results in civilian deaths equals ‘war crimes’ and ‘disproportionate use of force’; Nato operation which results in civilian deaths equals nothing of the sort.

The over-arching theme in media coverage of the Gaza flotilla raid (May 2010), the Dubai assassination (January 2010) and the ongoing discussion of the Gaza conflict (2008/9) has been the question of legality, or, more specifically, the suspicion of criminality of the part of the State of Israel. Was Israel’s boarding of the Mavi Marmara in international waters a war crime? Was its use of force against passengers disproportionate? Did the IDF commit war crimes in Gaza? Should Israeli officers be arrested for war crimes should they dare to visit the UK?

Followers of Middle East affairs will be desensitised to the media fixation with such questions. The crux of the matter is the underlying assumption that where alleged non-combatants have died at the hands of Israel, a crime must have been committed. So, with the release of 90,000 previously concealed records documenting the war in Afghanistan, including numerous incidents of the killing of Afghan civilians by Nato soldiers, we might have expected a similar narrative.

Not so. Of 52 articles published on the websites of BBC News, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and Financial Times on 25 and 26 July (the first two days of reportage), not one cited the international legal concept of ‘proportionality’. Hence, no accusations of ‘disproportionate’ force against Nato troops.

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Hypocrisy’s finest hour

Op-ed: Revelations of West’s crimes in Afghanistan highlight anti-Israel hypocrisy


Shaul Rosenfeld
Israel Opinion/Ynet
30 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

In an interview with PBS earlier this year, Richard Goldstone was quite amazed by a question regarding the suspicion that he and others may, heaven forbid, adopt a double standard in respect to Israel, compared to their attitude to other states, such as the US for example.

Such claims were looked into, Goldstone said without batting an eyelid, adding that the US adopted far-reaching steps in order to protect innocent civilians in Iraq. He further noted that as opposed to Israel's war crimes and vengeful policy in Operation Cast Lead, the Americans made sure to protect innocent civilians, while apologizing in cases where they erred, for example in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Indeed, why the hell should the “bold apartheid objector” (who, as we may recall, happened to enforce racist laws in the past and send dozens of blacks to the gallows) care about some insignificant, trivialities? For example, the fact that during Operation Just Cause in December 1989, US troops in Panama killed 300 to 1,000 civilians; or that in October 1993, a UN force (mostly comprising US units) killed more than 500 Somali civilians, while “carrying out an operation,” of course.”

Elsewhere, 460 to 2,000 civilians were killed during NATO bombings in Kosovo in 1999; in December 2004, in a campaign against Islamist forces in Iraq’s Fallujah, the Americans killed more than 6,000 civilians and obliterated about 10,000 civilian homes. Yet those who determine Israel’s guilt in advance have no use for such humdrum information.

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Leaks on mass civilian casualties in Afghanistan could form basis for Goldstone style prosecutions against US, Britain and other coalition countries

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
26 July '10

This weekend’s release of thousands of secret official files about coalition operations in Afghanistan paints a harrowing picture of the fog of war, most troubling of all of the accidental killings by our soldiers of hundreds of innocent civilians – revellers at wedding parties, kids in school buses, ordinary people going about their daily business who tragically found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Given that the Taliban systematically hides behind the civilian population this sort of thing is, of course, inevitable. Nonetheless, it is understandable that the revelations by Wikileaks have caused embarrassment to the governments of all the coalition countries.

But for those coalition countries in Europe – Britain first among them – who are currently cheerleading the passage of the Goldstone Report on Gaza through the United Nations this is more than an embarrassment. In the light of Goldstone, it represents an outright threat to the security of their soldiers on the ground as well as to their national interests in international tribunals.


In my experience, the MidEast crowd at the British Foreign Office and its equivalents elsewhere in Europe tend to be a little on the slow side. So, let me spell this out so there is no ambiguity.

International laws, norms and procedures to a great extent operate on the basis of precedent. So when Britain and other European countries allowed the Arab dictatorships to push a report through the United Nations specifically designed to criminalise the Israeli military’s attempts to deal with terrorists hiding behind a civilian population in Gaza, they simultaneously set a precedent for all countries, including their own.

Now that it has been revealed — via official documents — that British soldiers, for example, have been involved in exactly the same kind of operations against exactly the same kind of terror groups using exactly the same tactics and resulting in exactly the same kind of outcomes in terms of the loss of civilian lives, British soldiers and ministers could face exactly the same kind of censure and penalties as Israel.

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