response 325 of 604:

Apr 29 05:49 UTC 2002

Yeah.  It is set up to set out to find 'human rights violations'
and IDF is wise enough not to play that game.  

response 327 of 604:

Apr 29 07:02 UTC 2002

lk, what do you think of the latest proposal, whereby Arafat would go free
to roam the west bank, while us and british forces watch over his cohorts
at ramallah.  seems like a fair solution.  although why would arafat agree
to this when he could get shot at any time...

response 329 of 604:

Apr 29 21:21 UTC 2002

RE:  Israel's "paranoia".  Sorry about the length.  I cut out quite a bit.

The U.N.'s Israel Obsession, by David Tell, for the Editors  05/06/2002,
Volume 007, Issue 33

IN 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny,
newborn Israel in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was
a "war of extermination" against "the Jews"--the United Nations sat on its
ass.  And did not send a fact-finding mission.

But, oh, how the U.N. has been making up for that oversight ever |since.  For
more than 50 years now, the Jews have been its favorite subject.

Among the nearly 200 nations represented at the U.N., only Israel has ever
been assigned special reduced--membership privileges, its ambassadors formally
barred, for 53 straight years ending only recently, from election to the
Security Council.  Meanwhile that same Security Council has devoted fully a
third of its energy and criticism to the policies of a single country: Israel.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which regularly accepts delegations from
any number of homicidal tyrannies across the globe, has issued fully a quarter
of its official condemnations to a single (democratic) country: Israel.

No fewer than four separate administrative units within the U.N. do nothing
but spend millions of dollars annually on the production and worldwide
distribution of propaganda questioning Israel's right to exist.  The "Special
Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the
Palestinian People and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories," for
example,"investigates" Israel's continued "practice" of "occupying" not just
the territory taken in the 1967 war, but also the land within its
internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders.

And then there is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNRWA wholly
funds and largely administers the West Bank refugee camp in Jenin where the
Israeli army is purported to have just perpetrated a "massacre" of "unarmed
civilians."  It is to the site of this alleged "atrocity" that Kofi Annan now
intends to dispatch a commission of inquiry chaired by Yasser Arafat's
favorite European diplomat, former president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and
seconded by Cornelio Sommaruga, retired chief of the International Red Cross,
a man who once likened the Star of David| to a swastika.

Media accounts of Israel's incursion into a football-field-sized sector of
the camp have bubbled over with lurid details worthy of a medieval peasant's
worst anti-Semitic fantasies.  And the peasant-in-chief has been a U.N.
official, UNRWA commissioner general Peter Hansen, who has given dozens of
lip-smacking interviews recounting "wholesale obliteration," "a human
catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history," "helicopters . . .
strafing civilian residential areas," and "bodies . . . piling up" in "mass
graves."  Some of this carnage Hansen even claims to have seen "with my own
eyes."  But he is a bald-faced liar.  The Israelis have been out of Jenin--and
foreign journalists and other international observers have been back in for
more than a week.  And no evidence, literally nothing that would indicate the
presence of a civilian "massacre," has yet emerged.

Quite the contrary, rescue workers in Jenin have so far recovered the bodies
of six--not the rumored six hundred, but six--women, children, and elderly
Palestinians.  This is a "massacre"?

Maybe the U.N. picks on Israel simply because it can.  Or maybe, just maybe,
there is a darker impulse at play.

Which would explain why the U.N. has spent decades, in the guise of refugee
assistance, providing active, organized, and enthusiastic auxiliary services
to the most delusional and violent strains of Jew-hating Palestinian
irredentism.  It bears mentioning that the UNRWA camp at Jenin has been for
years what the Palestinians call a'simat al-istashidin, the "suiciders'
capital,".

UNRWA funds and staffs the schools of Jenin, where, from fall through spring
each year, children are taught that all of "Palestine," from the Jordan River
to the Mediterranean Sea, belongs to them.  During summer vacation, those very
same schools host training camps in which those very same students are
instructed in the arts of kidnapping and rock-throwing and bomb-manufacturing
and martyrdom.  UNRWA allows its food warehouses in Jenin to do double duty
as munitions dumps.  UNRWA pretends not to know that explosives and
counterfeit currency factories are housed in the public shelters it has
constructed in Jenin.  UNRWA cannot understand how it might be that its own
administrative offices in Jenin are festooned with graffiti celebrating some
of the world's most notorious terrorist organizations. Or how some of the
world's most notorious terrorists might have found their way onto the agency's
payroll.

response 331 of 604:

Apr 30 03:32 UTC 2002

The entire team has to be pro-Israel?

response 333 of 604:

Apr 30 06:11 UTC 2002

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F04%2F28%2Fn
ira
28.xml

The Daily Telegraph
(Filed: 28/04/2002) 

IRA 'is teaching Palestinians how to blow up Israeli soldiers' in West Bank

By David Bamber, Home Affairs Correspondent

THE IRA has been teaching Palestinian terrorists to build booby-trap bombs
for use against Israeli soldiers, according to a British explosives expert
working in the Jenin refugee camp.

Paul Collinson, a former Royal Engineers bomb disposal officer working for
the Red Cross, said that the devices he had found were identical in every
detail to those he had encountered in Northern Ireland.

He told The Telegraph that he had discovered more than 200 explosive devices
while working in the camp in the West Bank after the recent Israeli invasion.
He said that he was convinced that the bombs were either supplied by the IRA
or made under their supervision.

...Despite working as an explosives expert in the Palestinian territories over
the past two years - as well as Egypt, Colombia, Afghanistan and other
countries since leaving Northern Ireland - Mr Collinson has not seen seen
replicas of the IRA bombs anywhere other than recently in Jenin.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Never mind so much the IRA connection (or what a Brit has to say about that),
but note that there were more than 200 remaining bombs and booby-traps.

According to CNN (an interview with a captured terrorist fighter) there
were between 1000-2000 bombs in total.

Perhaps David now understands why his comparisons to the Oklahoma City
bomb (and his appeal to gravity) is not well taken.

response 335 of 604:

May 2 14:21 UTC 2002

11:03   PA security official Dahlan: Arafat knows there`s no escaping major
        reform of Authority 

12:20   Hamas says will resume terror attacks in the coming days and weeks

13:06   Islamic militants kill 31, wound five in two separate attacks in
        Algeria 

response 337 of 604:

May 3 13:39 UTC 2002

Because I don't know how many Palestinian Arabs were killed in Algeria
(see #335) -- or in Afghanistan. In fact, while we all know that there
were about 3000 people murdered in the WTC, does anyone have any idea
how many Arabs have been killed in Afghanistan?

response 339 of 604:

May 3 19:44 UTC 2002

It's not nice at all -- but maybe that's something that those who chose
the path of terrorism and violence should have considered earlier.

response 341 of 604:

May 4 13:25 UTC 2002

no wait...you're supposed to *lump them all together*, those
savages.

response 343 of 604:

May 5 00:29 UTC 2002

In the case of Afghanistan, the "bad guys", ie, the Taliban, had a
strong foreign element (if they weren't mostly foreigners), who came to
power in part through foreign influence (some of which was in fact *our*
influence).  Supposedly our war in Afghanistan was in part a
"liberation" war, and it's hard to argue we weren't in part responsible
for the mess in the first place.  That's quite a bit different than
Germany or Japan, both of which had locally selected governments which,
if not democractically selected, at least enjoyed strong local support,
and weren't in real danger of being invaded or "settled" by any
foreigners.  It's also different from Palestine--at least I assume
Leeron is not arguing that they had or have any sort of independence.

response 345 of 604:

May 5 13:01 UTC 2002

My take on the "Germany and Japan" comparison would be that Israel also fits.
No, I don't think Israel is anywhere near as bad as either of those two, but
there *is* a very strong party line ("We're in danger and have to fight back")
and few people are willing to say otherwise.

response 347 of 604:

May 5 20:42 UTC 2002

Then again, neither Germany nor Japan had Baruch Goldstein.

response 349 of 604:

May 6 23:28 UTC 2002

Is Leeron really arguing that the Taliban had "strong local" support? So
far as I know, neither Germany nor Japan found it necessary to send
local militia units randomly circulating through civilian society in a
show of force of arms to cow any local opposition.

The Israeli settlement strategy in Palestine and the Gaza strip is not
"war on terrorism", it is classic "grab the land" strategy.