Ban Ki-moon, Rachel Corrie, and the Philadelphi-Tehran route

Hagai Segal..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
03 September '12..

Rachel Corrie grew up in an eloquent family. Last week her parents addressed the court's ruling that they were not entitled to any compensation for their daughter's death by an Israeli bulldozer along the Philadelphi Route. This is a "black day for human rights,” they said with impressive western restraint and the talent of seasoned propagandists.

On the other hand, it was a great day for the truth. The court validated suspicions that the late Rachel Corrie was not a peace activist, but rather an activist for something that is the opposite of peace.

The verdict determined that the International Solidarity Movement Corrie belonged to "abuses the human rights discourse to blur its actions which are de facto violence." It further said that Corrie and her associates acted as human shields "to protect terrorists" and disrupt IDF activity.

Hezbollah Using Mentally Handicapped Children as Human Shields?

GI
CAMERA/Snapshots
14 August '10

From AP:

In an interview with The Associated Press on Mount Adir, a hill overlooking the border, an officer from the military's Northern Command pointed through the summer haze at the village of Aita al-Shaab.

One of its southernmost buildings, a white structure housing mentally handicapped children, is a Hezbollah lookout post, the officer said. Several guerrilla command posts are in civilian buildings in the center of Aita al-Shaab, she said, with several dozen fighters able to move among houses through underground tunnels.

The article points out that UNIFIL denies seeing proof of "new military infrastructure" in the area, but that wording hardly amounts to a denial that Hezbollah is using old civilian infrastructure for military purposes, as it has done before.

Indeed, the story notes that the international peacekeeping force has acknowledged such use of civilian infrastructure. "When a building at Khirbet Silim exploded on July 15, 2009, peacekeepers identified it as an actively maintained Hezbollah arms warehouse," AP explained.

Read more from CAMERA: Questions for The New York Times

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Hizballah Prepares for War Based on Using Civilians as Shields

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
19 July '10

The Israeli army has released for the first time sensitive intelligence data on how Hizballah is digging into southern Lebanon. The deliberate strategy is to store weapons and put defense positions right next to civilian houses. In the event of a war, Israel will have to choose between giving Hizballah a tremendous advantage or killing civilians.

Or as a Lebanese person remarked privately, "Hizballah is painting a big fat target on all the Shi'a down there."



This strategy is the fruit of the world reaction to the 2008-2009 war in the Gaza Strip when Hamas was rewarded for using civilians as human shields. Despite the care Israel took to avoid damaging civilian property or endangering civilian lives, there was a strong anti-Israel response. Given that behavior, others will no doubt follow this approach in future, thus leading to more suffering for civilians and stronger radical totalitarian movements, which will also oppress people where they hold power.

Remember this material when Hizballah sets off the next war and the inevitable media and other complaints against Israel begin: These condemnations will be based on--and will, in turn---reinforce a cynical and vicious deliberate effort by terrorist groups.

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Gazans Again Committing War Crimes, Killing Israeli Civilians In Rocket Attacks

Omri
Mere Rhetoric
20 March '10

The first, tragic casualty of the Obama Intifada?

Thursday's brief afternoon rain could not wash the blood out of a small pile of sand, where hours earlier the body of Thai worker Mane Singauephon had lain. He was killed around 11 a.m., when a rocket fell through the roof of a hothouse where he worked on the border with Gaza... He had come to the small community of Netiv Ha'asara more than three years ago to support his wife and child back home. "Ten workers witnessed the death of their friend," said Yair Farjun, head of the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council... Singauephon had been hit in several parts of the body, including his head, back and left arm.

The geopolitical upshot is that the post-Cast Lead deterrent which had kept peace in the south of Israel is breaking down. Emboldened by - achem - international anti-Israel diplomacy, and knowing that Israel's options are constrained by a potential Goldstone II, Hamas is back to genocidal incitement against Israeli civilians:

As noted, the IDF has thus far shown relative restraint in its response to attacks directed at our territory. One of the important reasons for this is the criticism leveled at Israel internationally because of the Goldstone Report and Gaza blockade.

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Goldstone vs. Talal abu Rahmah on Hamas’ human shields: Whom to believe

Richard Landes
Augean Stables
04 January '10

As any serious reader of this blog knows, I don’t have a lot of respect for Talal abu Rahmah, the seeing of whose rushes (see below) for September 30, 2000 inspired the term Pallywood. So what to think when he and another favorite unreliable rogue in my gallery disagree?

The Goldstone Report, at paragraph 481, takes up the subject of whether Hamas deliberately hid among civilians.

¶481. On the basis of the information it gathered, the Mission is unable to form an opinion on the exact nature or the intensity [emphasis added] of their [Hamas’] combat activities in urban residential areas that would have placed the civilian population and civilian objects at risk of attack. While reports reviewed by the Mission credibly indicate that members of Palestinian armed groups were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them from civilians, the Mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack [emphasis added].

Moshe Halbertal in “The Goldstone Illusion,” not an author known for his sarcasm, remarks on Goldstone’s cautious conclusion:

The reader of such a sentence might well wonder what its author means. Did Hamas militants not wear their uniforms because they were inconveniently at the laundry? What other reasons for wearing civilian clothes could they have had, if not for deliberately sheltering themselves among the civilians?

So imagine my surprise when I ran across the following gem from Talal abu Rahmah in a phone interview with a CNN reporter on January 2, 2009:

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