Winter Patriot Community Blog

Don't know about the others, but everything from "Writing from the Gaza Strip" to "threw into the toilet" is enmeshed with the column on the right with all the links. Difficult to decipher.

This was posted in the guardian uk Jan. 27/09.
Fueling the Cycle of Hate
War is teaching the children of Israel and Gaza that the other side is a bloodthirsty monster, and destroying any desire for peace

by Neve Gordon and Yigal Bronner*

Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: "Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?" sang the crowd. "Because all the children were gunned down!" came the answer.
more at link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/27/israel-palestinians-...

*There are no links in the article for confirming if this is true nor is it clear if the author( is reporting after witnessing the event.
Neve Gordon is the chair of the Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and is the author of Israel'sOccupation, University of California Press, 2008. His website is israeloccupation.com. Yigal Bronner teaches in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations at the University of Chicago

"I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v

Format problems still here Feb 1...in Firefox.

This is from Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky, page 512. After the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel:

Israel’s image was not improved, at least for the Lebanese, by the behavior of the forces that occupied Beirut. The entire 25,000 volume library of the PLO Research Center was stolen, along with a printing press, microfilms, manuscripts, archives, telephones and other equipment, while what remained was smashed. “They have plundered our Palestinian cultural heritage,” the director, Sabri Jiryis, said; Jiryis is a well-known Palestinian moderate, actually an Israeli Arab who left Israel when it was made clear that the alternative was one or another form of detention. The research center, established with the approval of the Lebanese government, had diplomatic immunity.270 In the same building, Israeli soldiers broke into the apartment of Prof. Khalidi, chairman of the department of biochemistry at the American University of Beirut. They looted extensively, taking art objects, ancient pottery, cooking pots, tools, etc. Sculptures were thrown into the street. Lecture notes and books that were not stolen were put on the floor, then soldiers “defecated on them” and “broke raw eggs on the pile.” The looting and vandalizing were stopped only through the intervention of Malcolm Kerr, the president of American University.

You'd think the Israelis would at least potty train their troops during basic training. Talk about subhuman behavior...

...what was that "other" shell? I've got this crazy idea that it's a spent D/U shell and that most if not all of the people around it (including the reporter) will acquire leukemia and/or lung cancer sometime in the next 5 years...the same type of stuff Clinton dumped on Kosovo and Somalia and da' Busheets dropped on Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=80443&sectionid=351020202
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
oh and here is the round in it's glory...
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/m829a1.htm

...btw look at the balcony after he shows the shell...it is definitely a penetrating round

From Anitwar.com: http://www.antiwar.com/avnery/?articleid=14176
The Black Flag Is Waving
by Uri Avnery

snip:
..."Israeli TV viewers have lately been exposed to a bizarre sight: army officers appearing with their faces hidden, as usual for criminals when the court prohibits their identification. Pedophiles, for example, or attackers of old women.

On the orders of the military censors, this applies to all officers, from battalion commanders down, who have been involved in the Gaza war. Since the faces of brigade commanders and above are generally known, the order does not apply to them.

Immediately after the cease-fire, the minister of defense, Ehud Barak, promoted a special law that would give unlimited backing by the state to all officers and soldiers who took part in the Gaza war and who might be accused abroad of war crimes. This seems to confirm the Hebrew adage: "On the head of the thief, the hat is burning."

..."Among those suspected of war crimes, the rabbis have a place of honor".

..."The most outstanding example is the "chief army rabbi," Col. Avichai Ronsky, who has declared that his job is to reinforce the "fighting spirit" of the soldiers. He is a man of the extreme Right, not far from the spirit of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was outlawed in Israel for its fascist ideology. Under the auspices of the army rabbinate, religious-fascist brochures of the ultra-Right "rabbis" were distributed to the soldiers.

This material includes political incitement, such as the statement that the Jewish religion prohibits "giving up even one millimeter of Eretz Israel," that the Palestinians, like the Biblical Philistines (from whom the name Palestine derives), are a foreign people who invaded the country, and that any compromise (such as indicated in the official government program) is a mortal sin. The distribution of political propaganda violates, of course, army law.

The rabbis openly called upon the soldiers to be cruel and merciless toward the Arabs. To treat them mercifully, they stated, is a "terrible, awful immorality." When such material is distributed to religious soldiers going into war, it is easy to see why things happened the way they did."

"I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v

Every time I think this can't get more disgusting...I'm wrong!! Not that I think any army is 'good', however the IDF has become an abomination. I fear that the slaughter in Gaza is not over and worse that it may be just a warm up for greater invasions to come (ie. Iran, Syria and Lebannon and whoever else they may have in their sights). I posted an article in the forum by James Petras called "Israel Asserting Middle East Supremacy: From Gaza to Tehran" - http://www.winterpatriot.com/node/280. It is worth reading. And there is more on the subject of religious indoctrination in the IDF in Jonathon Cook's latest post, "Religious groups are ‘penetrating’ Israeli army" - http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0370.htm#Top.

Snip:
“We have reached the point where a critical mass of religious soldiers is trying to negotiate with the army about how and for what purpose military force is employed on the battlefield,” said Yigal Levy, a political sociologist at the Open University who has written several books on the Israeli army.
The new atmosphere was evident in the “excessive force” used in the recent Gaza operation, Dr Levy said."
"...The greater role of extremist religious groups in the army came to light last week when it emerged that the army rabbinate had handed out a booklet to soldiers preparing for the recent 22-day Gaza offensive.
Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, said the material contained messages “bordering on racist incitement against the Palestinian people” and might have encouraged soldiers to ignore international law.
The book advises, "When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers … This is a war on murderers.”
"The booklet was approved by the army’s chief rabbi, Brig Gen Avichai Ronsky, who is reportedly determined to improve the army’s “combat values” after its failure to cush Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006."
"...Over the past year the rabbinate has effectively taken over the role of the army’s education corps through its Jewish Awareness Department, which co-ordinates its activities with Elad, a settler organisation that is active in East Jerusalem."
"...the booklet handed out to troops in Gaza had originated among Hebron’s settlers."
“The document has been around since at least 2003...But what is new is that the army has been effectively subcontracted to promote the views of the extremist settlers to its soldiers.”
"...The army has encouraged this trend by creating some two dozen hesder yeshivas, seminaries in which youths can combine Biblical studies with army service in separate religious units. Many of the yeshivas are based in the West Bank, where students are educated by the settlements’ extremist rabbis.
Ehud Barak, the defence minister, has rapidly expanded the programme, approving four yeshivas, three based in settlements, last summer. Another 10 are reportedly awaiting his approval."

And here is a result:
The story of Khaled Abd Rabo - a police officer in the Ramallah government.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m51518&s1=h1
"The soldiers were eating chips and chocolate, and they were smiling when they killed my daughters.
My mother, my wife, and my three daughters all held white flags...
"...We asked him why he thought they would kill his children. He replied, "I am certain they were drunk, or were given orders to kill everyone including the children."

"I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v

John Pilger did an excellent report that covered the Israeli tendency to leave piles of shit behind when they invade Palestinian houses. Actually, in this case, it was the Ministry of Culture offices they were shitting on. Watch it on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk56hqboxNc

I hate to use this wording, and yet...

...don't they say

that Karma is a bitch? (Sorry Robert Jensen and Twisty. Linguistics.)