If you can find a shred of hard evidence in this supposed news report, I will print out this post and eat it.
There is evidence that Israel committed war crimes during its 22-day campaign in the Gaza Strip and there should be an independent inquiry, UN investigator Richard Falk said on Thursday. The mental anguish of the civilians who suffered the assault is so great that the entire population of Gaza could be seen as casualties, said Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
I do believe we’ve found the Andrew Sullivan of the UN. Let’s talk hyperbole, shall we?
Falk, speaking by phone from his home in California, said compelling evidence that Israel’s actions in Gaza violated international humanitarian law required an independent investigation into whether they amounted to war crimes.
And what is that evidence?
“I believe that there is the prima facie case for reaching that conclusion,” he told a Geneva news conference.
Excuse me. What is that evidence, please?
Falk said Israel had made no effort to allow civilians to escape the fighting.
Once again, what is that evidence?
“In my view the UN charter, and international law, does not give Israel the legal foundation for claiming self-defense,” he said.
One last time. Can we see the evidence, please?
Falk said the entire Gaza population, which had been trapped in a war zone with no possibility to leave as refugees, may have been mentally scarred for life. If so, the definition of casualty could be extended to the entire civilian population.
I see. In other words, there is no evidence of war crimes, and Reuters is passing along a load of crap as news. But wait. What would a Richard Falk statement be without a reference to Godwin’s Law?
“To lock people into a war zone is something that evokes the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto, and sieges that occur unintentionally during a period of wartime,” Falk, who is Jewish, said, referring to the starvation and murder of Warsaw’s Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two.
(Falk is not a Jew. He’s an Ex-Jew. There’s a difference. But you guys can have him. We don’t want him. Please. Take him.) To sum up: There is no physical evidence of war crimes. There is only the accusation of such by Richard Falk, who has already stated his complete revulsion for the Jewish State and compared Israel to the Nazis on several occasions. Once again, the demonization and delegitimization of Israel is carried out by the United Nations, its tools, and the ever-ready uncritical world media. If only Reuters would apply the same critical standards to stories about Israel as they do to, say, stories about George W. Bush. If only.
Being subject to Islam is the very definition of being “mentally scarred for life.”
How did richard falk become an UN “investigator”? MY, this sounds like a wonderful job. Go wherever you want. Make things up. Sort of like story time for the preschool.
And what in the world is an “ex-Jew”? Did he decide to be something else and give up his ethics? His scruples? And glom a kapo card from his benefactors? Or did he just get a part-time job at the Carter Center?
Actually, they do use the same standards for stories about George Bush and Israel. It just means that anything bad is defined as true and anything good is ignored or defined as a lie.
“Ex-Jew” is Meryl’s term for Jews who advance the cause of genocidal antisemites like Hamas.
Falk, what a traitorous tool. Hamas is America’s enemy just as much as Israel’s. Why do so many of Western Civilization’s elites have a death wish for their civilization? Do they think things will be so much better in a country ruled as the Wahhabist Entity is? Or as Saddam ruled Iraq? Swine.
No, I take that back. To call men like Falk swine is an insult to honest pigs everywhere.
Do you think the good Dr. Falk will write about the mental anguish of Israelis suffering under 8 years of thousands of war crimes perpetrated by Palestine?
Waiting …
Waiting …
Waiting …
Will never happen.
Unfortunately for Dr. Falk, while his time on earth is but an eyeblink the period he will spend in … um … the smoking section is literally all eternity.
For pity sake alone I wish him a long life; for his soul will be in torment for ever.
Pragmatist, are you aware of the fact that there is no hell in Judaism, and that while I call him an ex-Jew, that doesn’t mean I wish your Christian notion of eternal torment on him?
I really do not like comments like that on my blog.
Falk is a former colleague and now successor to John Dugard, the one-eyed leftie South African Special Rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Commission.
Falk sees suicide bombing as a valid method of “struggle”. He was expelled from Israel on 15 December 2008 when he tried to visit Gaza and the West Bank.
He’s also a 9/11 “troofer”.
Falk has form – a track record of hostility towards Israel. Whatever he says is coloured by his symathy for Hamas. “Ex-Jew” is indeed correct.
That’s right, I knew I recognized the name somewhere! He was involved in the 9/11 conspiracy theory bunk! When I took Business Law, our professor, a sitting Judge, told us there is no such thing as “International” law. Kind of hard to be a professor of something that doesn’t exist…
Meryl,
If I have upset or offended you in any way I apologize.
Pragmatist
International Law does exist. But there is no statutory international law. It is a matter of contract (treaties and other agreements) and custom. For example, the Fourth Geneva Conventions are international law, supposedly enforceable on those states that have signed them. International Law is weak, in that there is no real enforcement mechanism as there is for municipal law (the internal law of individual states). In actual fact the only real enforcement mechanism is if the USA decides to enforce some aspect of it, as when we went in and ousted Saddam Hussein after his government mooned the UN as well as the USA over sixteen binding UN resolutions. You will notice that all the clowns who scream to high heaven about how international law must rule were hysterically opposed to actually enforcing it in that case. Perhaps that is what your law professor meant by its nonexistence.
As a practical matter the only two countries that are actually expected to conform to it, and indeed to imaginary laws as well, are Israel and the USA. The Euros will conform when it suits them, and massacre those they consider wogs (for example as the French did in the Ivory Coast a few years ago) when it doesn’t. Nobody else pays the slightest attention to it, except as a stick to beat on the US and Israel.
You know, I hate to say this, but perhaps Meryl will allow me to expound on this further, but I wonder, has it occured to anybody else, that the primary impediment to pushing Israel back into the sea is – the United States. If the US were taken out of the picture…
I don’t have a problem with your expounding on something like that. If the US stopped supporting Israel, so would the few nations that still do, and the Israel haters would be able to launch those boycotts that would strangle Israel. One reason the Jewish State cannot ignore world opinion is because Israel doesn’t have the natural resources needed to survive.
Pragmatist, thank you. Let’s keep our thoughts on the afterlife out of political discussions and we’ll be fine.
If the US stopped supporting Israel the latter would quickly be disarmed, so many of Israel’s important weapons are US made. Israel would then be in the same position as South Vietnam after the Congress cut off aid and supplies to that country in 1974. The best army in the world cannot fight when it has no ammunition, no artillery shells, no spare parts, etc.
It is possible that we may soon have to turn our attention from Israel’s survival as a state to how to prevent a new genocide of her 5+ million Jews.
Which is my point. The more the US “spreads the wealth” and spreads her military thin, the less resources we have to defend Israel if it comes to that. Where does the breaking point come when we can no longer afford to pay for the National Defense of France, Germany, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Japan, and still have the forces to help defend Israel.
Opening more fronts on the War on Terror weakens our position in every area of the world. In the meantime, the Hate-America-First crowd is trying desperately to weaken our economy, and the military-industrial complex. New weapons development, including SDI and missile defense will undoubtably be curtailed under the new Administration and Congress, and Israel depends on our military research and development. I realize that Israel often upgrades our equipment, but there is no where in the entire Middle East that can produce a basic tank or artillery piece.
Al Qaeda, Iran, et.al. don’t need to fight us directly, they can keep us busy enough that we will eventually collapse under our own weight if we don’t learn how to use our resources wisely. And I don’t see that happening in our current Socialist Government. Indeed, radical Islam may defeat us – and Israel, the same way we defeated the USSR, just sit by and wait until the corruption of Socialism leaves nothing more than a rotting carcass of a welfare State.
Everyone focuses on ICBM’s as being the only nuclear weapon possible. The first atomic chain reaction in history took place on the squash court at the University of Chicago. Starting an uncontrolled chain reaction in an improvised atomic pile in a large city is quite possible – without large quantities of nuclear material or no-how. Yet the results would be devastating, both to our country and our economy.
We didn’t beat the USSR militarily, we beat them economically…
And where exactly did two of the attacks on 911 strike? The WTC? In the Financial district…
Robert
The reason the Iraq Campaign stretched the US military thinly is that we maintain only a small ground combat power. Military expenditures, even in wartime, are not driving the US into economic distress. We spend about 4.5 percent of GDP on the military, which is probably too little right now. We could easily spend more, if we did not lavish enormous sums on wasteful other government projects. There is a close connection between the health of the economy and the health of the military however. Our mode of warmaking is capital intensive. We spend lots of money per soldier for high tech and various weapons that multiply the individual’s combat power. It is the equivalent of improved productivity in industry per worker due to mechanization and computerization.
But the US must be able to fight in the full spectrum of possible warfare, from space weapons down to the individual rifleman facing a guerilla or terrorist. This is something that Obama and his boyos don’t understand, I believe.
Obama talks about outlawing weapons in space. Well China and Russia will sign treaties about that then ignore them. That’s what happened during the Cold War with attempts at arms control treaties, and I don’t see any reason why we should let ourselves be rolled again by such bad faith interlocutors.
Obama claims he wants to abolish nuclear weapons. He has no sophisticated understanding of how to do that, for he is dead against anti-missile defense. Reagan wanted missile defense because he wanted to abolish nukes. But then Reagan was smarter and had a better understanding of these things than any Democrat does.
Missile defense is essential to abolition of nukes because in its absence possession of any nukes by one country gives it an overwhelming advantage over others. As nuke arsenals are drawn down possession of a small number gives outsize power to its possessor, even if it is a ramshackle wasteland like North Korea. If the US has 200 nukes and Iran 100, Iran is almost as powerful as the US, no matter if its economy is falling apart and the populace is sullenly hostile to the Ayatollahs. In some ways it is more powerful, since Iran will use the immunity of nuke possession to aggressivly gain positions of power and make attacks, nuke or terrorist. But Obama and his advisors will not understand this, all they see is an attractive ideal that makes them feel superior, “abolish nukes”.