In the first act, the principal character, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, makes his appearance on stage in the flowing black robes of a war-cleric. He is known by his kunya (name given in respect to an elder) ‘bad knees’ and is seen climbing the stairs in the manner of a man whose time is rapidly degrading and whose end is near. As he delivers a fiery oration, a magnificent digital presentation displays a collage of images from Mosul. Convoys of cars are seen leaving the city. Bakeries are closed and shops are shuttered. Schools are vacant and only men are noted outside the homes.
Because of the enforced isolation, much including Arab unwillingness to integrate the same, the residents of Gaza, “Gazans”, a term I am seeing more frequently, are positioned in time to become their own people in their own city-state.
When Hamas is gone — and it appears Hamas is working on that — the culture of Gaza may be open both to Egypt and Israel. Israel, incidentally, may have afterward plans for Gaza in the form of services made ready, starting with medicine — there’s already a built emergency field hospital for Gazans far into construction.
Actually, Israel’s emergency hospital unit for Gaza is open.
So how is this working out?
Walla reports that Hamas has actively prevented injured Gazans from going to the hospital to be treated by Israel. Even worse, on Wednesday Hamas shot ten mortars at the hospital!
Yes, Hamas is targeting a hospital, something that the “human rights” community seems not to care much about in this case.
UPDATE: Yes, the hospital is live and treating Gazans who manage to get there.
A senior Israeli cardiologist told the group that there are no dilemmas for Israeli doctors in treating children who may be the offspring of enemy combatants: “We treat them as human beings. We look at them as human beings. We see their families in their hour of dealing with an extremely sick ill child. This is a humanitarian program.”
“Of the 5000 injured [now above 6000] in Gaza, about 30% will be in need of rehabilitation, but there is no offer for them now”, al-Ashi said. He denied that the hospital was used for a military purpose as claimed by the IDF.
Israel says Hamas—which has ruled Gaza since 2007—and militant group Islamic Jihad use civilians as “human shields” and store weapons in schools, mosques, and hospitals. “Civilian casualties are a tragic inevitability of [Hamas’] brutal and systematic exploitation of homes, hospitals and mosques in Gaza”, the IDF said in a statement.
In Gaza, Syria, and northern Iraq, the moderate have been disempowered. The dictator has an army; the religious fascists have arms and sufficient martial narcissism to bully their domains, but none act in the interest of the main body of their constituencies. The more “open societies” surrounding — or surrounded by — these conflict have the challenge of moving from complaint toward useful political action and evolution toward the recognition of a common humanity and its interests, and then within the turmoil, the resident such as “Sarah” may need to realize that her interests count, that she is the change, but perhaps not empowered or organized to see her will and her interests evident in the local politics.
The title’s a bit heady and long for a brief compendium and observation on a blog . . . but on with it —
Old folk wisdom: “He who points the finger at others out to point it back at himself first.”
Mea culpa: the Israelis are not perfect, but in the site of God — or perhaps just one another, open courts, and an open democracy — they keep working on becoming better children of the universe and students of the universal in humanity.
Hamas, its associates, and its fans would seem to represent a different sort of unconscionable consciousness, one always accusing, deflecting, denying, and lying, for here is a short list of egregious accidental (on purpose?) and deliberately evil behaviors that have led to the injuring and killing of hundreds of residents of Gaza.
Shifa Hospital – Hamas Headquarters
On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming.
The station said that a “Hamas Fajr-5 rocket aimed at central Israel, which was fired from a playground outside the Shifa hospital and exploded on the site causing casualties, had at least a 100 kg (220 lbs) warhead,” according to The Times of Israel.
Reporter Nir Devori of Channel 2 and analyst Ehud Yaari confirmed the carnage was most likely the result of a failed Fajr rocket launch — aimed at central Israel.
What kind of a monster would deliberately “shield” a war room, a control room, a bunker, with a hospital of ill and injured patients above it?
Among this blog’s key terms, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” takes a good run at the anomic aspect of Hamas, which appears not to care about the humanity of its constituents. From that alone, whether it cares much about God either: it shouts a lot, collects and keeps hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of its own, and it gets other people to die for its own grandiose delusions.
___
Hamas said the explosions were a “direct” strike by Israeli drones, while Israel said they were caused by failed militant rockets. “A short while ago Al-Shifa hospital was struck by a failed rocket attack launched by Gaza terror organizations,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that “there was no Israeli military activity in the area surrounding the hospital whatsoever. “
UNRWA has admitted that a Hamas misfired rocket hit a U.N.-run school in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, according to Channel 2′s Ehud Ya’ari, but an errant IDF artillery shell also may have hit the facility, where Gaza sources claim an estimated 17 children and United Nations personnel were killed and 200 others were wounded Thursday afternoon.
I like my month/day/year style more than Israel’s day/year/month, but beyond that, these two items tells that the Big Media Story was suspect from near start.
The results of the IDF forensic investigation naturally follows, and while its conclusions may be displeasing to some and suspect by anti-Semites (because they are what they are), the data will be around for independent examination when the fighting concludes.
___
The preliminary report indicates that militants fired anti-tank missiles at IDF soldiers, who then responded by firing several mortars in their direction.
The preliminary inquiry and footage indicate that a single errant mortar landed in the courtyard of the UNRWA school, when it was completely empty.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
But there is no Iron Dome for tunnels. The tunnels give me real pause. It’s hard enough to imagine a situation in which your neighbours are quite intentionally trying to blow up your house and kill your children with rockets. But Hamas’s well-developed kidnapping strategy represents a whole other category of depravity. The handcuffs and tranquilizers are mere baroque, Pulp Fictionish details. The core depravity of Hamas is its longstanding policy of treating every Jew as a target for elimination.
Multiple media outlets report that Hamas’s offensive tunnel network – now known to have been composed of over forty attack tunnels dug underneath Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip – was set to be activated during the Jewish High Holidays (September 24th) as a mass terror attack.
The attack was meant to generate as many as ten thousand casualties, men, women and particularly children and hundreds of captives. Explosives were particularly placed underneath kindergartens to make certain that these “institutions” would be the first struck, even before any thing else.
The tunnel-building program involved 800 million tons of concrete, according to reports on the web, the deaths of 160 Palestinian children (that would seem the minimum number known), about $1 million per project, so now we’re about looking at $40 million or more dollars worth of wreckage — completely wasted Gazan money, except for those who got paid working underground — and that’s probably another dismal story about exploitation (I wonder how much line-level workers made).
Involving Hamas Earlier in Time
I would like to have seen more snap in this calmly narrated video, but the point of it is clear: a violent incident of some kind within Gaza and independent of the IDF took place, killing and wounding a “cast” reassembled on a beach and filmed for anti-Israel propaganda.
Again: where the data persists and the investigative method is empirical, the dead may well tell a different story than the malignant narcissist would have you believe.
The mentality: aggrandizing, bloodsucking greedy, unrestrained sociopaths.
The world has seen this pattern repeated around the world, and while it would seem to be waking up to it, it may not be doing so with the strongest hand, the ambitions of the venal outstripping efforts to get at them before they do real damage as has been deeply experienced in places as different as Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.
But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/post_8056_b_5602701.html – 7/28/2014. I don’t agree with the nastiness covered by political politeness in the first point (or similar ploys): “Yes, there’s an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it’s a human rights disaster” — for, no, there has been no Israeli occupation of Gaza since surrendering it to the refugees in 2005: there has been only a military cordon to keep out arms (which cordon appears to have failed despite its naval blockade and inspections of overland shipping. And the same cordon has not been illegal by any internationally agreed upon basis in law. That the Arab states arrange gang-ups in the UN and such anti-Semitic spectacles as the Durban conferences is just a fact of life, but that it happens doesn’t make it right.
On the basis of our ethics and practice, we are denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel.
We ask our colleagues, old and young professionals, to denounce this Israeli aggression. We challenge the perversity of a propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called “defensive aggression”. In reality it is a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity. We wish to report the facts as we see them and their implications on the lives of the people.
We are appalled by the military onslaught on civilians in Gaza under the guise of punishing terrorists.
Rightfully, the esteemed publication caught heat:
The Lancet, a top tier scientific journal by all accounts, did a great disservice to the medical community. The publication of an extremely biased one-sided analysis of such a complex situation is outrageous and full of lies.
And setting to rights, it brought also a long riposte by nearly a dozen esteemed medical professionals at the end of last week (8/15/2014). Excerpted:
For The Lancet and its editors to avoid any further embarrassment in associating this prestigious journal with such a vituperative betrayal of its scientific mission, we recommend The Lancet retract the authors’ letter on the basis of favouritism for anti-Israeli political positions, the victimisation of Israeli academia, and the competing interests of a lead author known to be a political activist with anti-Israeli stances . . . .
___
We find abhorrent that academic authors would, without evidence or data, accuse an entire academic community of crimes against humanity by association of national identity or professional affiliation, an accusation that is not only a rank dehumanisation of an entire state, but explicitly seditious in propagating virulent anti-semitic sentiments to the detriment of whole academies. Although our feelings will undoubtedly recover, the authors, through their reckless words, have inflicted a deep wound to the body and soul of global scientific and medical academia at the very moment opportunities for apolitical engagement, collaboration, and bridge-building are most needed.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
Map depicting HamaNazi tunneling incursion into Israel.
Shocking stories being told by IDF soldiers who report that Hamas terrorists are using children as human shields – including running toward IDF positions with a gun in one hand and a baby tucked under the arm.
To sum up: Hamas is not only using child labor, but likely child slavery, in building its terror tunnel network. While the world worries obsessively over the child casualties of Israeli attacks on Hamas targets in Gaza, it has ignored Hamas’s deliberate killing of hundreds of Palestinian children, over the objections of the local populace.
“I have personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back because of civilians nearby,” said Lt. Or. “In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.”
“We know that Hamas uses human shields. But why would you report this when you are sitting in the middle of the Gaza Strip, surrounded by Hamas gunmen?” — Reporter covering the war, who asked not to be identified.
The school had served as a shelter for internally displaced Gazans.
Related: Terrorists fire anti-tank missile from Al-Wafa hospital in Gaza The IDF launched an investigation, and army sources said it was unclear whether the area was hit by an Israeli or Palestinian range projectile.
Later Thursday night, the IDF said an initial investigation found that terrorists had opened fire from the vicinity of the school, and that the army returned fire. At the same time, Hamas fired in the general direction of the school, the army said. Civilians in the school were asked to vacate the area, but refused, the army added.
“For two days we were trying to move people out of that school in particular and the Beit Hanoun area in general,” said an IDF official who was involved in the interactions between the IDF, UNRWA, and International Red Cross (ICRC) leading up to the incident.
It appears that not only has Hamas been keeping Gazans in the line of IDF fire, it may have fired rounds itself at the school of interest. Following a forensic investigation — and in the west, such may be reviewed independently with time — the IDF found cause to deny firing the rounds that took more than a dozen noncombatant lives:
BackChannels 