topic by
Lynette
6/16/2002 (16:38) |
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Israeli soldiers pose with their murdered
victims for trophy photographs
Occupied Jerusalem - The Israeli Army is investigating reports that its soldiers are circulating “trophy” photographs of themselves posing next to their murdered and sometimes mutilated Palestinian victims: some of them are children.
The revelation, made by a group of Israeli soldiers last month, has heightened fears that Israeli soldiers have some instinctive criminal traits that make them gleeful at murdering and torturing their (often helpless) victims.
Last month, a group of soldiers told a Jerusalem weekly newspaper that they and their fellow soldiers often took pocket cameras on military missions and posed for pictures next to corpses of murdered Palestinians.
The soldiers said many of the photographs were widely distributed in military units, and appearing in such pictures had become a ritualistic “badge of honour.”
A unit of the Golani brigade, serving in the Gaza Strip, privately printed a book with stories about its soldiers’ crimes. The front cover showed the body of a Palestinian civilian, killed five months ago.
The caption read: “Thus shall we do to the man who messes with Company B.”
In another incident in the Gaza Strip, soldiers photographed a Palestinian who had infiltrated a settlement and was shot dead. A post-mortem examination showed his body had been shot at close range after death.
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Palestinian family to sue occupation army
for “callous crime against a deaf child”
Occupied Jerusalem – “My deaf child posed no risk or threat to the Occupation soldiers; he is too small, too disabled, too terrified to attack the imperial army. Then why did they shoot him, why? Why?” with these half-suffocated words spoke Ahmed Wahdan, the father of 13-year-old Eid Wahdan, at a press conference in Gaza to announce his intention to sue the Israeli government and army for “committing a callous crime against a deaf child.”
On 9 October, Wahdan was riding a donkey-hauled cart carrying wood at the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza when Israeli occupation soldiers opened fire on Eid, injuring him seriously in the chest.
His father said, “My son would have died instantly had the soldiers fired from a closer location…they were 1,500 metres away.”
He, however, laments that “they (the Israeli occupation army) kill and maim with impunity…and there is no credible or authoritative international body that can put an end to their crimes.”
“But God won’t forget the criminals and their crimes,” he adds in a reassuring tone.
Asked why he decided to sue the Israeli army for shooting his son when there is a little chance that the perpetrators will be prosecuted and punished, Ahmed Wahdan said, withholding his tears, “At least we make a testimony to the brutal ugliness of their mentality and the criminal actions of their army.”
“I know they killed so many innocent people with impunity; I know that the killers are unlikely to stand trial for their murderous crimes, but God won’t forget them; there is this life, and there will be the hereafter.”
A spokesman for the Israeli army said he had no knowledge of the incident.
“There is shooting all the time in Gaza, and people get shot and killed; we can’t keep record of every incident.”
Since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation and apartheid, the Israeli army and paramilitary Jewish terrorists have murdered over 200 Palestinian children and minors.
Virtually all the victims were shot and killed either deliberately or in random and indiscriminate strafing and bombardment of Palestinian population centres.
The apartheid State never expressed remorse or regret for the killings. On the contrary, the Israeli army continued to adopt a “shoot-to-kill” policy in the Occupied territory under the rubric of fighting terrorism.
The Zionist regime refers to aspects of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation and persecution of Palestinians as “terrorism.”
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Sharon asks U.S. to lump Islamic
resistance movement with Bin Laden
Occupied Jerusalem - Seeking to capitalize on the 11 September attacks in Washington and New York, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been utilizing timely political and public relations ploys to press the United States into treating Islamic resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon on an equal footing with Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.
Sharon, a certified war criminal for his role in the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres, repeatedly urged U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell not “to distinguish between terrorist attacks and terror acts.”
In conversations with Powell after the 11 September attacks, Sharon—a certified war criminal by any standard—argued that Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation and apartheid were “terror acts”, very much the same as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
The manifestly corrupt analogy was reiterated by several Israeli politicians, including the ostensibly more levelheaded Shimon Peres, and parroted by some American Jewish leaders who just act at Israel’s beck and call.
Sharon, of course, knew that the Jewish lobby, which he reportedly recently boasted that it controlled the Congress, the two political parties and the White House, had successfully pressurized the American administration to blacklist Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah as terrorist organizations for their struggle against and resistance of Israeli occupation, which basically means that the old Zionist mass murderer wants the U.S. to declare war on these movements for what they represent, namely the Palestinian national struggle for freedom and liberation of the Nazi-like Jewish military domination.
Sharon, according to the right-wing extremist newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, told Powell that the three Arab Islamic resistance movements emanated from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization.
Sharon’s claim to that effect is, of course, completely false. It is a cheap and vindictive exercise in Zionist propaganda and disinformation.
The three groups, whose raison d'être is, as has always been the case, the Israeli occupation of Arab land, predated Bin Laden’s group by many years.
Hizbullah is a Lebanese Shiite resistance movement and has absolutely no ties with the Bin Laden group, which describes itself as a puritan Sunni organization. Hamas and its junior sister, the Islamic Jihad, are linked to older Islamic organizations in the Arab world such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood dates back to the 1930s, more than half a century before the world ever heard the name Bin Laden.
Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, scoffed at Sharon’s “PR game.”
“Sharon himself is a grand terrorist, presiding over a terrorist State that spreads terror everywhere, murders civilians, demolishes civilians’ homes, confiscates civilians’ land, bulldozes orchards and vineyards, and turns entire cities and towns into huge concentrations camps,” said Rantisi.
“Who is the terrorist? The one who sends his F-16s and apache helicopters to rain death on innocent civilians and unprotected towns, or the one who uses stones to get rid of a satanic military occupation intent on annihilating an entire people for wanting to be free?”
He added that “putting Sharon’s terrorist impulses aside, it is sad that people like Colin Powell give ear to this criminal terrorist. We, therefore, call on the American administration not to let terrorist States like Israel and terrorist leaders like Sharon spoil their country. They should put an end to him.”
Rantisi said, “The Palestinian people can’t be terrorists since they are the victims of Jewish terror.”
“They took our land away from us; they expelled us from our towns and villages; they forced us into squalid refugee camps; they murdered hundreds of thousands of our people; and after all this murder and terror, they still have the moral brazenness to call us terrorists?”
Even the Palestinian Authority, which is normally circumspect in its outspoken reactions to Israeli terrorism, strongly condemned “the grand terrorist of the world.”
“It is most disgusting to see the greatest living terrorist distributing labels here and there and call his victims terrorists,” said PA official Yasser Abed Rabbo.
He added that “the world must be either blind or stupid to listen to this evil criminal.”
Sheikh Nayef Rajoub, the Imam of the Grand Mosque in Dura, described Sharon’s disinformation campaign against Hamas as “characteristic of Sharon’s criminal nature.”
“Sharon is responsible for the murder and death of hundreds of thousands of civilians. And he lied about his atrocities. So, a little more mendacity wouldn’t hurt,” said Rajoub sarcastically.
He pointed out the robe of lies is short, and the Palestinian people would eventually recover their rights, including Jerusalem, the holy town, whether Sharon likes it or not.
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