As they say: the truth will out. Gaza Solidarity salutes those IDF soldiers who have managed to maintain their humanity and spoken out against the barbarism that was 'Operation Cast Lead'. In Sabra and Shatilla they directed the Phalange into the Palestinian refugee camps to do the slaughtering. This time the IDF did it itself, and for some it was too much to take, although for others it seems to have been an task to be commemorated with vile T-shirts.
There seems to have been a step change in the way this war was conducted, and everything Palestinians were saying about the war crimes being committed by the IDF, and doubted by some in the west, were true.
We know about the weapons they used illegally and we have seen the detritus of vandalism and wanton destruction they left behind. We know from the massive number of civilian casualties that they must have shown no regard to differentiating between civilians and fighters.
But now we are learning from the horses mouth on the ground, so to speak, that they deliberately shot and killed dozens of medics, they deliberately targeted Mosques for no military purpose other than spreading terror among the civilian population. In short, the IDF soldiers shot and killed anyone they came across regardless of whether they were woman or children or unarmed men, often using them as human shields.
And this wasn't the work of mavericks but of soldiers carrying out orders. The IDF is currently refusing to tell the world what its rules of engagement were. Suffice to say they didn't have any other than shoot on sight. Before they at least made a pretence of minimising civilian casualties, not so in this war.
Nothing has brought out the systematic de-humanising encouraged by the officers and military rabbinate, than the truly revolting T-Shirts being snapped up by Cast Lead veterans. They bring to the mind the stories related in Martin Gilbert's brilliant but harrowing book on the history of the holocaust, when drunken Nazis and their eastern anti-semite collaborators took pleasure in smashing the heads of babies against the walls of one Ukrainian (I think) town. It's like an acrid smell that you can't get rid of. That 2 for 1 T-shirt image 'celebrating' the killing of a pregnant Palestinian woman is in the same league. Perhaps its the IDF version of post-traumatic stress therapy.
Now, hopefully, the Israeli state will start to pay the diplomatic and political price for its state terrorism.
The fight for Palestinian liberation needs to exploit the growing isolation of Israel to break the siege of Gaza, bring a halt to the demolition in East Jerusalem and smash the apartheid wall on the West Bank, and continue to move forward with boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
A round-up of the racist t-shirts (Thanks to Philip Weiss)
From the Washington Post
By Howard Schneider - Jerusalem - Updated: Saturday, March 21, 2009
There seems to have been a step change in the way this war was conducted, and everything Palestinians were saying about the war crimes being committed by the IDF, and doubted by some in the west, were true.
We know about the weapons they used illegally and we have seen the detritus of vandalism and wanton destruction they left behind. We know from the massive number of civilian casualties that they must have shown no regard to differentiating between civilians and fighters.
But now we are learning from the horses mouth on the ground, so to speak, that they deliberately shot and killed dozens of medics, they deliberately targeted Mosques for no military purpose other than spreading terror among the civilian population. In short, the IDF soldiers shot and killed anyone they came across regardless of whether they were woman or children or unarmed men, often using them as human shields.
And this wasn't the work of mavericks but of soldiers carrying out orders. The IDF is currently refusing to tell the world what its rules of engagement were. Suffice to say they didn't have any other than shoot on sight. Before they at least made a pretence of minimising civilian casualties, not so in this war.
Nothing has brought out the systematic de-humanising encouraged by the officers and military rabbinate, than the truly revolting T-Shirts being snapped up by Cast Lead veterans. They bring to the mind the stories related in Martin Gilbert's brilliant but harrowing book on the history of the holocaust, when drunken Nazis and their eastern anti-semite collaborators took pleasure in smashing the heads of babies against the walls of one Ukrainian (I think) town. It's like an acrid smell that you can't get rid of. That 2 for 1 T-shirt image 'celebrating' the killing of a pregnant Palestinian woman is in the same league. Perhaps its the IDF version of post-traumatic stress therapy.
Now, hopefully, the Israeli state will start to pay the diplomatic and political price for its state terrorism.
The fight for Palestinian liberation needs to exploit the growing isolation of Israel to break the siege of Gaza, bring a halt to the demolition in East Jerusalem and smash the apartheid wall on the West Bank, and continue to move forward with boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
A round-up of the racist t-shirts (Thanks to Philip Weiss)
Thanks to Philip Weiss for T-shirt round-up
- A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him.
- A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills."
- After Operation Cast Lead, soldiers from that battalion printed a T-shirt depicting a vulture sexually penetrating Hamas' prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh
- A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."
- There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!"
- A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
- "Let every Arab mother know that her son's fate is in my hands!" had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit's shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.
"It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," he explains. "The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him."
- In 2006, soldiers from the "Carmon Team" course for elite-unit marksmen printed a shirt with a drawing of a knife-wielding Palestinian in the crosshairs of a gun sight, and the slogan, "You've got to run fast, run fast, run fast, before it's all over." Below is a drawing of Arab women weeping over a grave and the words: "And afterward they cry, and afterward they cry." [The inscriptions are riffs on a popular song.]
- Another sniper's shirt also features an Arab man in the crosshairs, and the announcement, "Everything is with the best of intentions."
- A shirt printed after Operation Cast Lead in Gaza for Battalion 890 of the Paratroops depicts a King Kong-like soldier in a city under attack. The slogan is unambiguous: "If you believe it can be fixed, then believe it can be destroyed!"
From the Washington Post
By Howard Schneider - Jerusalem - Updated: Saturday, March 21, 2009
-- A soldier involved in Israel's recent military offensive in the Gaza Strip said in published reports Friday that the military's rabbinical staff distributed material characterizing the operation as a religious mission to "get rid of the gentiles who disturb us from conquering the holy land."...
..."The military rabbinate brought many magazines and articles with a very clear message: 'We are the Jewish people, a miracle brought us to the land of Israel, God returned us to the land, and now we have to struggle so as to get rid of the gentiles who disturb us from conquering the holy land.' All the feeling throughout all this operation of many of the soldiers was of a war of religions," he said. "As a commander, I tried to explain that the war is not a war of Kiddush Hashem [the sanctification of God's name, including through martyrdom] but over the stopping of the launching of the Qassam rockets."
Comments
Post a Comment