August 30, 2010

Heartless Israeli Army Officer Acquitted For The Murder of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl

Chris McGreal of The Guardian (from November 2005):
An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. Continued. . .

I was shocked when I heard about this story, but I am less shock of the verdict by the Israeli Army. I’m passed the point of getting mad at Israel. I don’t even think of it as a country anymore. I wish it was a country because the Jewish people deserve better. But it’s not a country, just as Nazi Germany wasn’t a country.

On some level I can understand why the soldier has the mindset of "shoot everything moving." I remember watching a documentary on TV about the experience of Canadian/American soldiers in the Middle East, and one very young soldier said something to the effect of, "you don’t know who the enemy is in Iraq, so everyone becomes the enemy, children, women, taxi drivers, everybody." This isn’t the exact quote, but it’s probably true that a lot of soldiers share that same sentiment. An occupying army can’t help but be at war with the entire population, from three year old girls to grandparents. Nobody is safe. It is Full Spectrum Dominance of a whole society. It is Total War. What the Israeli soldier did is what’s expected of him in the army – his job is to kill anything moving in Israel’s security zone. So it’s perfectly understandable why his superiors want to maintain troop loyalty, and protect him at all costs, no matter the crime against the oppressed population. The motto of any army; loyalty come first.

The greater crime is Israel’s system of control, and daily humiliation/occupation of Palestinians. It is absolute barbarism. Chris Floyd’s comments about the verdict:
After all, Israel is a "bastion of Western civilization" in the midst of all those swarthy savages, isn’t it? I mean, can there possibly be a clearer expression of civilization — especially its ultra-modern Western version — than Captain R’s Aristotelian formulation? It bears repeating — nay, memorizing, searing deeply into the brain and heart — for it is clearly the guiding principle of all our glorious terror-fighting democracies today, not only plucky little Israel but also its patron and paymaster, the United States
Gideon Levy reflected on Israel’s thoughtlessness with British journalist Jon Snow last week in London’s Amnesty International UK’s Human Rights Action Center. Click here for the video.