Israeli school kids autograph artillery shells | More photos here
Bill Kristol launched into a diatribe on Washington Journal yesterday about the propagandised enemies of Israel. According to him, it’s not the imprisonment and torture of family members, or the extrajudicial assassinations that murder anyone in the vicinity of the missile strikes. It’s not the theft of their land, sea and livelihoods, or the daily humiliations of occupation that compel young people to strap bombs to their chests they detonate in Tel Aviv. The lies told them since birth about the benevolent Israel, a state that desires nothing but peace, manufacture hatred that would not manifest otherwise. What can be said of a society that disseminates such blatant trash even as yet another country is being destroyed?
Are these children allowed to see what happens to a human being that’s been hit by one of these shells? Would they still put their names on them if they were? Or would they agree with John Bolton, that “It’s simply not the same thing to say that it’s the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their deaths, to fire rockets and use explosive devices or kidnapping versus the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense.”
Do the children in the picture know their soldiers take Palestinian children out of their homes, in the dead of night, and tortures them? If they were told, would they smile like the woman standing behind them in the picture, because that is what exceptional people do to lesser beings in the insane state of Israel?
Josh Buermann flags a BBC report on Israel’s kidnapping of brothers Osama and Mustafa Abu Muamar, sons of Hamas activist Ali Muamar, a seizure that preceded the capture of IOF soldier Gilad Shalit and continues to be denied by some who should know better. Ali Muamar was beaten by the IOF during the raid but was left behind as his sons, who do not belong to Hamas, were taken in for “questioning.”
I don’t expect Anderson Cooper or Chris Matthews to point out the horrific disregard for life and law of the events that are taking place, or to condemn these war crimes rather than term it self defence. But as As’ad AbuKhalil asks, what excuse do those on the so-called Left have?