When Did We Stop Caring About Civilian Deaths During Wartime?
The mere monitoring of bloody conflict assumes precedence over human suffering
By Robert Fisk
February 2, 2009 “The Independent” — I wonder if we are “normalising” war. It’s not just that Israel has yet again got away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza.

And after its own foreign minister said that Israel’s army had been allowed to “go wild” there, it seems to bear out my own contention that the Israeli “Defence Force” is as much a rabble as all the other armies in the region. But we seem to have lost the sense of immorality that should accompany conflict and violence. The BBC’s refusal to handle an advertisement for Palestinian aid was highly instructive. It was the BBC’s “impartiality” that might be called into question. In other words, the protection of an institution was more important than the lives of children. War was a spectator sport whose careful monitoring – rather like a football match, even though the Middle East is a bloody tragedy – assumed precedence over human suffering.

I’m not sure where all this started. No one doubts that the Second World War was a bloodbath of titanic proportions, but after that conflict we put in place all kinds of laws to protect human beings. The International Red Cross protocols, the United Nations – along with the all-powerful Security Council and the much ridiculed General Assembly – and the European Union were created to end large-scale conflict. And yes, I know there was Korea (under a UN flag!) and then there was Vietnam, but after the US withdrawal from Saigon, there was a sense that “we” didn’t do wars any more. Foreigners could commit atrocities en masse – Cambodia comes to mind – but we superior Westerners were exempt. We didn’t behave like that. Low-intensity warfare in Northern Ireland, perhaps. And the Israeli-Arab conflict would grind away. But there was a feeling that My Lai had been put behind us. Civilians were once again sacred in the West.

I’m not sure when the change came. Was it Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel’s allies of 1,700 Palestinian civilians? (Gaza just missed that record.) Israel claimed (as usual) to be fighting “our” “war against terror” but the Israeli army is not what it’s cracked up to be and massacres (Qana comes to mind in 1996 and the children of Marwahine in 2006) seem to come attached to it. And of course, there’s the little matter of the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988 which we enthusiastically supported with weapons to both sides, and the Syrian slaughter of thousands of civilians at Hama and…

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UN launches $613m appeal for Gaza
Mr Ban said aid was urgently needed in Gaza

The UN has launched an appeal for $613m to help people affected by Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

“These needs are massive and multi-faceted,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He added that funds would be used to “help overcome at least some measures of this hardship”.
In the region itself, US envoy George Mitchell said the Palestinian Authority should play a part in cementing the Gaza Strip’s shaky truce.

After meeting PA President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, Mr Mitchell said a “mechanism” was needed to stop arms smuggling into Gaza, and that should be done “with the participation of the Palestinian Authority”.

Click here to download the entire version of THE DOSE for January 29, 2009

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.”: Angelica Grimke – (1805-1879) Source: Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

‘Israel targeted UN Staff during Gaza standoff’
By Awad Mustafa, Staff Reporter

In a seminar Tuesday morning, United Nations staff claimed that they were directly targeted by the Israeli army during the 23-day standoff at Gaza.

“I mean what I am saying,” said Dr. Sami Mushasa media director for United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA.)

His agency, he said, “was targeted and a scores settlement was made by Israel to disrupt our work in Gaza and Palestine”.

According to Mushasa, ten UN buildings and numerous UN schools and aid centres were targeted during the Israeli offensive on Gaza.

“Currently the UN is conducting an investigation and compensation and an official apology is demanded for this uncalled for attack,” he said.

UNRWA is the United Nations agency that provides relief and infrastructure and economic aid to the Gaza strip.

The “UNRWA employs mostly Palestinians, we have 30,000 employees who work in road works, schools, medical centres, and general relief,” he said.

Mushasha said that since January 21, Israelis have blocked a building materials shipment worth $110 million as well as 250,000 school books and medical supplies.

Click here to access the entire version of THE DOSE for January 28, 2009

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his
own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. -
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)

..we really have to ask the question why almost all media in the western hemisphere feel they have to kiss Israel’s ar*e……..and do everything they can to ignore the facts that they have caused a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportions…..with the complicity of western governments and the press.

The BBC and Sky have once again shown themselves to be Zionist collaborators!!!!
Sky joins BBC in Gaza appeal veto
Adrian Wells: ‘We don’t want to become the story’

Sky has joined the BBC in deciding not to broadcast a charity appeal for Gaza, despite mounting political and public pressure for them to do so.

BBC boss Mark Thompson has again defended the decision, saying it would jeopardise the BBC’s impartiality.

Sky News said running the Disasters Emergency Committee advert was “incompatible” with its objective role.

About 60 MPs say they will back a parliamentary motion urging the BBC and Sky to run the appeal.
Sky News had been considering the DEC film, and only reached its decision on Monday, hours before the appeal is due to go out on ITV, Channels 4 and Five.

John Ryley, head of Sky News, said: “The conflict in Gaza forms part of one of the most challenging and contentious stories for any news organisation to cover.

Click here to download the entire THE DOSE for January 26, 2009

Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’

Click here for the complete version of THE DOSE for January 22, 2009

Gaza: ‘I watched an Israeli soldier shoot dead my two little girls’
Grieving Palestinian father says children were killed after family obeyed order from troops to leave Gaza home

By Donald Macintyre in Gaza City

January 21, 2009 “The Independent” — -A Palestinian father has claimed that he saw two of his young daughters shot dead and another critically injured by an Israeli soldier who emerged from a stationary tank and opened fire as the family obeyed an order from the Israeli forces to leave their home.
Khaled Abed Rabbo said Amal, aged two and Suad, seven, were killed by fire from the soldier’s semi-automatic rifle. His third daughter, Samer, four, has been evacuated to intensive care in a Belgian hospital after suffering critical spinal injuries which he said were inflicted in the attack early in Israel’s ground offensive.

Mr Abed Rabbo stood near the wreckage off his subsequently destroyed home on the eastern edge of the northern Gaza town of Jabalya yesterday and described how a tank had parked outside the building at 12.50pm on 7 January and ordered the family in Arabic through a megaphone to leave building. He said his 60-year-old mother had also been shot at as she left waving her white headscarf with her son, daughter in law and her three grandchildren.

Click here for the complete version of THE DOSE for January 21, 2009

If the people are not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job – yours and mine — to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America’s might.” — Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of General Electric and Truman appointee to head the Office of Defence Mobilization, in a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950

Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis
Targeting civilians was a deliberate part of this bid to humiliate Hamas and the Palestinians, and pulverise Gaza into chaos
Ben White
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 January 2009 12.30 GMT

The scale of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government’s long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, “When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?”

Despite a mass of evidence that includes Israel’s targets in Operation Cast Lead, public remarks by Israeli leaders over some time, and the ceasefire manoeuvring of this last weekend, much of the analysis offered by politicians or commentators has been disappointingly limited, and characterised by false assumptions, or misplaced emphases, about Israel’s motivations.

First, to what this war on Gaza is not about: it’s not about the rockets. During the truce last year, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was reduced by 97%, with the few projectiles that were fired coming from non-Hamas groups opposed to the agreement. Despite this success in vastly improving the security of Israelis in the south, Israel did everything it could to undermine the calm, and provoke Hamas into a conflict.

Click here for the entire THE DOSE for January 20, 2009

Robert Fisk: So, I asked the UN secretary general, isn’t it time for a war crimes tribunal?
Mr Ban said it would not be up to him to launch a war crimes tribunal. It was pathetic
Monday, 19 January 2009

It’s a wrap, a doddle, an Israeli ceasefire just in time for Barack Obama to have a squeaky-clean inauguration with all the world looking at the streets of Washington rather than the rubble of Gaza. Condi and Ms Livni thought their new arms-monitoring agreement – reached without a single Arab being involved – would work. Ban Ki-moon welcomed the unilateral truce. The great and the good gathered for a Sharm el-Sheikh summit. Only Hamas itself was not consulted. Which led, of course, to a few wrinkles in the plan. First, before declaring its own ceasefire, Hamas fired off more rockets at Israel, proving that Israel’s primary war aim – to stop the missiles – had failed. Then Cairo shrugged off the deal because no one was going to set up electronic surveillance equipment on Egyptian soil. And not one European leader travelling to the region suggested the survivors might be helped if Israel, the EU and the US ended the food and fuel siege of Gaza.

After killing hundreds of women and children, Israel was the good guy again, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire that Hamas was certain to break. But Obama will be smiling on Tuesday. Was not this the reason, after all, why Israel suddenly wanted a truce?

Egypt’s objections may be theatre – the US spent £18m last year training Egyptian security men to stop arms smuggling into Gaza and since the US bails out Egypt’s economy, ignores the corruption of its regime and goes on backing Hosni Mubarak, there’s sure to be a “compromise” very soon.
And Hamas has had its claws cut. Israel’s informers in Gaza handed over the locations of its homes and hideouts and the government of Gaza must be wondering if they can ever close down the spy rings. Hamas thought its militia was the Hizbollah – a serious error – and that the world would eventually come to its aid. The world (although not its pompous leaders) felt enormous pity for the Palestinians, but not for the cynical men of Hamas who staged a coup in Gaza in 2007 which killed 151 Palestinians. As usual, the European statesmen appeared hopelessly out of touch with what their own electorates thought.

And history was quite forgotten. The Hamas rockets were the result of the food and fuel siege; Israel broke Hamas’s own truce on 4 and 17 November. Forgotten is the fact Hamas won the 2006 elections, although Israel has killed a clutch of the victors.

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A doctor shows phosphorus bomb injuries in Gaza. Warning: contains graphic footage of war injuries

Video showing injuries consistent with the use of white phosphorus shells has been filmed inside hospitals treating Palestinian wounded in Gaza City.

Contact with the shell remnants causes severe burns, sometimes burning the skin to the bone, consistent with descriptions by Ahmed Almi, an Egyptian doctor at the al-Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.

Almi said the entire body of one victim was burned within an hour. It was the first time he had seen the effects of what he called a “chemical weapon”.

The Israeli military has denied using white phosphorus during the assault on Gaza, but aid agencies say they have no doubt it has been used.

Click here for the entire THE DOSE for January 16, 2009

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem, Peter Walker and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 January 2009 16.43 GMT
Gaza conflict: Day 18

The Palestinian death toll in the Gaza conflict climbed to more than 1,000 today after nearly three weeks of intensive Israeli bombing and fighting on the ground.

So far, 1,010 Palestinians have been killed, among them 315 children and 95 women, Dr Moawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza’s medical emergency services, told the Guardian. The number of injured after 19 days of fighting stood at 4,700, he said.

As Israeli troops fought on the outskirts of Gaza City after another night of heavy bombing and shelling, diplomatic efforts to end the conflict intensified, with the secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, in Cairo for urgent talks. He is calling for an immediate ceasefire.

With the death toll rising, Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, said his country had cut diplomatic relations with Israel. He called for Israeli leaders to face charges at the international criminal court.
The head of the international committee of the Red Cross described the situation in Gaza as “shocking” after visiting a hospital in the territory.

“I saw this dramatic humanitarian situation. There’s an increasing number of women and children being wounded and going to hospitals,” Jakob Kellenberger said later in Jerusalem, the AFP news agency reported…

Click here for the entire THE DOSE for January 15, 2009