Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Human rights in war

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Abu Sayyaf rebels are Islamist terror groups in the south Philippines. This is the border line between the Muslims to the south in Indonesia and the Catholics to the north in the Philippines. Christians are not attacking Indonesia, no, as expected, Muslims are attacking the Philippines from the south. So far ca. 3,600 people have been killed there in the past 5 years. But, this insurrection and the Philippine Government's military response are not being investigated by the UN Human Rights Council or any other body.
During WWII there were innumerable cases of racial injustice and murder. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians were murdered in the streets of towns and villages all over Europe, from Estonia in the north to Italy in the south, from France in the west to Russia in the east. In Lithuania, in Fort IX of Kovno, thousands of Jews were thrown into a pit and left to die. After WWII and the Nuremburg trials, anti-racist laws were propounded in international agencies, including the UN, in order to try to stop this horrendous uncivilized act of murdering and raping civilians.
However, this did not stop the practice, from Rwanda to the Balkans from Sri Lanka to the Philippines, such racially motivated attacks still occur. As someone who abhors any attacks on civilians as an excuse to destroy an enemy culture, I can state emphatically that I would be devastated if I thought that the IDF, the army that protects me and the other citizens of Israel, was engaged in such acts, Let me state categorically that the IDF is a moral army, in which all soldiers and officers receive training in avoiding civilian casualties. Not only is this Jewish morality, but they are explicitly told that they can disobey an illegal order to do such a thing.
Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2006 has been put under the microscope unlike any other conflict in history. During this conflict ca. 1,300 Palestinians were killed, and the estimate of civilian casualties varies from ca. 300 (IDF) to ca. 750 (Goldstone). I can state positively that no indisputable evidence has come forth of any deliberate human right's crime, no war crime and no crime against humanity by the IDF. The Goldstone Report certainly does not provide such evidence, since most of its claims are based on uncorroborated Palestinian civilian (or terrorist) statements and false claims. These have been rehearsed many times in the media, such as an attack on a mosque, that never happened, just as the so-called "massacre" that never was in Jenin (again uncorroborated Palestinian civilian reports) and the murder of the boy Mohammed al Dura in Gaza, that was blamed on the IDF but has been proven to have been staged.
Recently, not only did the IDF investigate all reports of any kind of civilian death, but also they publicized this fact in Gaza in Arabic and offered to provide travel and recompense for any individual who could provide evidence of a civilian death or injury caused by the IDF. There have been responses, but so far, according to reports in the press, no case of deliberate murder of Palestinian civilians has been found. All cases were caused by accident, misdventure or because Hamas was using the civilians as shields and firing from civilian locations. This in itself is a human rights' abuse, and in fact the Geneva Conventions allow a combatant to fire back at civilian locations from which fire is directed at him.
So we have a situation in which the enemies of Israel, the Islamic States, unable to defeat the IDF on the battlefield, are seeking to destroy its credibility and morale in public opinion. Don't be taken in! If only all armed forces were as disciplined and as moral as the IDF, this would be a better world in which human rights abuses against civilians in war would not happen.

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