Al-Jazeerah: Cross-Cultural Understanding

www.ccun.org

www.aljazeerah.info

News, February 2009

 

Al-Jazeerah History

Archives 

Mission & Name  

Conflict Terminology  

Editorials

Gaza Holocaust  

Gulf War  

Isdood 

Islam  

News  

News Photos  

Opinion Editorials

US Foreign Policy (Dr. El-Najjar's Articles)  

www.aljazeerah.info

 

 

 

Editorial Note: The following news reports are summaries from original sources. They may also include corrections of Arabic names and political terminology. Comments are in parentheses.

 

Spain Zigzags Between Probing Israeli War Crimes and Amending Law to Avoid Such Trials



By Hassan El-Najjar

Editor of ccun.org

February 7, 2009


Just last week, the Spain government announced its intentions to amend its laws in an attempt to avoid trying Israeli war criminals in Spanish court. This was an unequivocal evidence of a Zionist pressure of that government. Today, we have a new development, that a Spanish court will go ahead with a probe of a 2002 Israeli war crime.

While this is hailed by Palestinian and Spanish human rights organizations, I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to happen, knowing the Zionist control over NATO governments.

Israeli war crimes should be investigated by prosecutors of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, who should indict all the involved Israeli political and military war criminals. It shouldn't be left to a Belgium or a Spanish judge here and there, with all due respect to them.

Israeli war crimes have not stopped since 1948 but have intensified since 2000 throughout the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Until these Israeli war criminals are prosecuted, indicted, arrested, and tried in the Hague, the international system is nothing but an arrangement of beneficiaries, who are controlled by and work for World Zionism.


Spanish court to probe Israeli war crimes in 2002

[ 07/02/2009 - 02:23 PM ]

PARIS, (PIC)--

The international federation for human rights, the human rights association in Spain and the Palestinian center for human rights hailed the decision taken by the examining magistrate in the central Spanish court on the 29th of January which confirms the court's eligibility to investigate a complaint about war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip in 2002.

The crimes date back to July 22, 2002 when an Israeli warplane dropped a one-ton bomb on a densely populated area in the Gaza city killing a Hamas leader and 14 Palestinian citizens.

In a statement received by the PIC, the three organizations said that the investigation targets seven Israeli security and military officials, namely, Benjamin Ben Eliezer, Dan Halutz, Doron Almog, Giora Eiland, Michael Herzog, Moshe Ya'alon and Abraham Dichter.

According to the statement, in January 2006, the Israeli high court had said that the Israeli bombing was proportionate to the military objective, which was the assassination of the Hamas leader.

Six Palestinian survivors of the bombing filed on June 24, 2008 a complaint in Spain with the assistance of the Palestinian center for human rights, based on the doctrine of international jurisdiction.

The doctrine allows prosecution in Spain of crimes against humanity or crimes such as terrorism or genocide, even if they are committed in another country.

Suhair Belhasen, the head of the international federation, said that the decision is an important step in the struggle against impunity in respect of the crimes committed by the IOF troops in Gaza.

 

Spain amends law to avoid trying Israeli war criminals, another evidence of Zionist control over NATO governments

By Hassan El-Najjar

ccun.org, February 1, 2009

 Editor's Note:

Like what happens in Third World countries when a dictator changes the law to allow himself to continue in power, or to allow his son to inherit him as a head of state, the Spanish government has succumbed to the Zionist Israeli pressure and decided to change its laws regarding the trial of Israeli war criminals in Spanish courts.

Thus doing, Spain is second to do so after Belgium which failed to try the war criminal Ariel Sharon for his responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, in 1982.

Of course, Spain and Belgium were more courageous than other NATO countries in mere contemplating to try Israeli war criminals. But this is a reminder to Americans and Europeans that they are living under a Zionist-Israeli dictatorship, which rules them through fake politicians, who are nothing more sorry figure heads.

This is just another evidence in support of the fact that US-EU governments are controlled by World Zionism, which helps politicians reach power in return for serving Israel and global Zionist interests.

It's time for people in the US and Europe to stand up against this humiliating and immoral submission to Israelis and their Zionist supports.

 

Spain to amend law to avoid trying Israeli war criminals

[ 31/01/2009 - 03:03 PM ]

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)--

The Spanish government has decided to amend the country's law dealing with prosecuting military commanders involved in war crimes.

Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni announced the news following a meeting with her Spanish counterpart Miguel Moratinos after a Spanish court accepted a lawsuit against former Israeli war ministry Benjamin Ben Eliezer and the then head of the air force Dan Halutz on charges against humanity.

The Israeli 2nd TV channel quoted Livni as expressing satisfaction over Moratinos's decision and informed both Israeli premier Ehud Olmert and justice minister Daniel Friedman on the latest developments in this regard.

She stressed that Israel would continue in its efforts to settle such cases not only in Spain but in the whole world, the TV report said.

Spanish judge Fernando Andreu agreed to look into the case against Ben Eliezer and Halutz along with five other former Israeli officials for ordering the assassination of Hamas commander Salah Shehadah that also led to the killing of 14 innocent civilians mostly women and children.

The judge said that the assault on the densely populated Gaza Strip was a "crime against humanity" and the lawsuit was in conformity with the international law that incriminates mass murder in any country.

Shehadah was killed in July 2002 in the Israeli air raid that bombed his home using a one ton bomb.

 

World needs credible body to pursue Israeli war criminals

PIC, [ 07/02/2009 - 12:55 AM ]

By Khalid Amayreh

 

On 27th December, Israel carried out a genocidal blitzkrieg against the estimated 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, using state-of-the-art of the American technology of death.

These deadly weapons used against the imprisoned Gaza inhabitants include , inter alia, F-16 war planes, equipped with all sorts of lethal missiles including bunker buster bombs,  apache helicopters, white Phosphorous shells, flechette dart shells, as well as the  Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), a deadly weapon recently developed by the United States army to create a powerful and lethal blast over a small area.

DIME is believed to still be in the experimental stage. However, it is widely believed that Israel had received a green light from the Pentagon to use Gaza as a testing ground.

In addition, Israel used all other conventional weapons, including tank and artillery shells against densely populated neighborhoods.

According to David Halpin, a retired British surgeon and trauma specialist, the Israeli army used Gaza as a “laboratory for testing what I call weapons from hell.”

“I fear the thinking in Israel is that it is in its interests to create as much mutilation as possible to terrorize the civilian population in the hope they will turn against Hamas.” (see, Is Gaza a Testing Ground For experimental Weapons, Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 13 January).

By the 23rd day of the criminal onslaught, when Israel halted its blitz, Gaza looked very much like a real concentration camp, with over 10,000 Palestinians dead and mutilated, including more than 300 kids mercilessly killed and five times as many kids seriously injured or maimed.

 In addition, the civilian infrastructure all over the Gaza Strip was utterly destroyed. This includes apartment and public buildings, dozens of mosques, college and dorm buildings, businesses, schools, hospitals, power plants, water supply treatment facilities, UN Shelter schools, civilian police stations, farmland, and thousands of homes. 

It was a no-holds-barred assault, and many older people who lived through the Second World War have  likened Gaza on 18 January with the bombed-out German City of Dresden before the end of the Second World War.

The massive killing of civilians carried out by the Israeli army was done knowingly and deliberately, as Israeli soldiers were instructed not to show any mercy toward the civilian population. This explains the total annihilation of numerous entire families by bombing residential homes.

Israel claims that the offensive targeted Hamas, not the people of Gaza . However, Israeli political and military leaders as well as many  intellectuals  readily stretched  their concept of  “Hamas” to encompass virtually the entire Palestinian community in Gaza .

For example, Yaron London, a “left-leaning” Israeli intellectual and  prominent media figure told reporters that  “The time has come to shock the Gaza population with actions that until now have nauseated us-actions such as killing the political leadership, causing hunger and thirst in Gaza, blocking off energy sources, causing widespread destruction, and being less discriminating in the killing of civilians. There is no other choice.”

He added : “I am referring to both the population and their leadership; they are the same, because the population voted for Hamas. I can’t separate between one who voted for Hamas and a Hamas leader.”

There are actually numerous other quotations by Israeli leaders condoning and even gloating over the crimes the Israeli army has committed in Gaza.

Pornographic war crimes

Israeli officials and spokespersons don’t really deny that war crimes have been committed in Gaza. However, they try desperately to extenuate the severity and seriousness of   these crimes by arguing that “things like that happen in war time,” and that “Hamas, too, committed war crimes.”

Non the less,  comparing Hamas’s crimes with the holocaust-like blitz in Gaza flies in the face of the dignity of language. It is a verbal promiscuity, a sort of fornication with words.

Indeed,  using Israeli crimes and Hamas’s “crimes” in the same breath would be as absurd and corrupt  as equating the Nazi atrocities with the resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The crimes committed in Gaza by the Israeli Occupation Forces are not questionable or controversial and don’t require  much efforts to ascertain them.

The factuality of these crimes, which transcend reality,  is not only established by the naked physical reality, but are also further ascertained  by Israel’s confused efforts to cover up these crimes.

Indeed, Israel has embarked on quiet but massive efforts to cover up the Gaza war crimes by falsifying the names the alleged war criminals who are numbered in the thousands.

On 5 February, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli army began removing the names and details of army officers involved in the Gaza blitz from legal documents.

“The censor’s office issued sweeping gag orders on the names of all officers who participated in the operation, fearing their identification would expose them to legal action abroad.”

This shows that Israel is trying to evade the consequences of its crimes against humanity by hiding the facts and preventing the relatives of Palestinian victims from knowing the names of the killers.

In light, it is imperative that a credible, honest, a non-political and non-governmental body is established to thoroughly  investigate these crimes and pursue the  war criminals wherever they may be.

Luckily, the names of many of these criminals are already known.

The criminals  include not only soldiers and officers taking part in the genocidal atrocities, but also political leaders who gave the orders and instructions.

It is true that there are no guarantees at the moment that the war criminals will be apprehended, and prosecuted, let alone punished for their crimes, given the international political environment and the  absence of the international will to challenge the quasi-Nazi state and her guardian-ally, the United States.

However, if actual prosecution proves difficult, and it undoubtedly is, it doesn’t mean that the war criminals should be allowed to get away with impunity.

Therefore,  a comprehensive,  professional and highly concentrated  effort to amass, classify and  authenticate  all available evidence should get underway  immediately.

The souls of these Gaza  children,  mercilessly killed and incinerated  by the hellish Israeli-American war machine are calling on us to pursue the murderers.

We must not let these vile murderers and child killers  sleep quietly.

Indeed, pursuing  these human animals  will eventually prove instrumental in determining whether the future of our children will be governed by  the laws of humanity or the rules of the jungle.




Fair Use Notice

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

 

 

 

 

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent ccun.org.

editor@ccun.org