StrangerThan
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
quote:
ORIGINAL: kittinSol
There's a legal definition of genocide (it is not the only definition, but at least it's a legal one) in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), article 2: it defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Are you attempting to answer my question to KaineD?
If so, you give information, but fail to answer the specific question.
I'm very interested in hearing Kaine's answer.
Firm
Using the 21 deaths from homemade rockets as a debating point is a bit of a misdirection. Yeah, maybe 21 people died from homemade rockets since 2002, but the actual number of deaths from Palestinian violence and terrorist attacks is much higher. The Israeli foreign affairs ministry lists something like.. 6,500 Palestinians and 1,179 Israelis since 2000.
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+since+2000/Victims+of+Palestinian+Violence+and+Terrorism+sinc.htm
and as almost always is the case, the number of injured is usually much higher than the death toll. The same site records over 8,000 injuries in the same time frame.
I think what is missing from some here is that no one is defending using a child as a shield or any outright war crime. What comes across badly though is the immediate condemnation of the military action in the first place and it done in a way that insinuates condemnation of Israel itself. The fact of the matter is war is not pretty. Innocent people die. Innocent people always will die and for many of those cases, there is no outright national guilt or legal burden associated with it. The death of innocents is not an automatic, nor de facto war crime. The targeting of them, abuse of them, genocidial actions taken towards them is.
The nature of the warfare being played out in many arenas now makes the instant fingerpointing both easy to do and, in some cases, fairly easy to defend. Guerillas often use 'safe' areas from which to conduct operations, hide, or retreat to. And in trying to find them, locate them and engage them, forces are often surrounded both by a populace that knows where they are but damned sure aren't going to help them and international groups that scrutinize every move.
Soldiers are human. They don't decide policy or when to its time to go to war. They have a job to do and part of that job is and will always be engaging the enemy in a capture or kill modes. Violations of human rights and outright war crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent. Mistakes should be prosecuted as well, but I don't think on the same level. It is one thing to strap kids to a jeep and use them as shields and another to cause innocent death by collateral action or by actual mistake.
Israel lives with the constant threat of terrorist attack in a way that most western nations do not. People die every year, not in the occasional attacks we've seen here in the US and they manage to do it and maintain freedom for their people. Given our response internally in US to 9/11, I'm not sure we could do the same. In a few short years our elected representatives turned blind eyes to renditions, torture, arrest without warrant or access to legal counsel, surveilance that directly violated the constitution, illegal wire tapping.
One of the generals, Tommy Franks maybe, said that his greatest fear was that the Constitution would be a casualty in the next terrorist attack on US soil. Watching what we allowed as a nation. I can't disagree with him. Watching what Israel does as a nation, I can't disagree with them either. Yes, specific things need to be addressed and specific actions perhaps prosecuted. Beyond that, they have every right to use whatever means available to protect and defend themselves.
_____________________________
--'Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform' - Mark Twain
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RE: Gaza - the facts emerge - 
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