Anti-Semites Exploit Israel’s Gaza Incursion
Israeli attacks on a hospital and refugee camp playground in Gaza on Monday, July 28th brought the total of Palestinian dead to 1,200, with more no doubt to come. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just promised his people “a prolonged campaign” in Gaza. If it is, Israel may find itself considered, even by Americans, a pariah state.
Children on a playground will undoubtedly again be among the victims. Those killed on Monday, the Israeli Defense Forces say, were not killed by them, but by Hamas missiles aimed at Israel. Diligent readers will recall that last week’s attack on the URWA school at Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, killing 16 women and children and wounding more than 100, was also a matter of “Hamas rockets or mortar shells falling short,” as the IDF explained to London’s Financial Times. Later in the day, the explanation was changed to one of Israeli forces responding to “intense fire from the school area,” intending to eliminate the threat. U.N. Refugee Works officials said they had informed the Israelis twelve times of the school’s coordinates, pleading for permission from the IDF to evacuate the civilians, which never was given.
The Israeli military is neither incompetent nor accident-prone, particularly when UNRWA schools and other U.N. or independent international aid agencies are concerned. But in its ranks there is also a theory (no doubt picked up from others) that terrorization works. By those inevitably imperfect but plausible accounts journalists and humanitarian agencies try to compile in such matters, Brit Hanoun was the fourth U.N. school hit in this campaign. On the following Monday, in Gaza, there was the third attack on a hospital since military operations began the first week in July.
This is no novelty. In previous punitive incursions, such as “Cast Lead” (in 2008-2009), into what legally is Palestine, shelling or air attacks on foreign-staffed humanitarian, educational and United Nations refugee installations and medical facilities occurred not infrequently. Fourteen schools out of 641 were destroyed and 280 damaged. This phenomenon of attacks upon foreign or international facilities and agencies in Palestinian territory is so well recognized as to require little comment. It is why the U.N. demanded the Richard Goldstone Report in 2009, and why Israel and the United States worked so hard to suppress it.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/anti-semites_exploit_israels_gaza_incursion_20140729
= new reply since forum marked as read
…as about 80% of the article is criticism of Israel's behavior and then, at the very end, a little bit about how David Duke is milking the situation. By contrast, the title seems to imply that all criticism of Israel is propaganda from some sort of organized anti-Semitic conspiracy.
Tons of babble with little important bits mentioned in passing at the end.
Not that I disagree.
Edit: but thanks for reading it, you get extra points for that.
