From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Sun Sep 15 2002 - 22:57:53 MDT
Lies, damned lies, and distortions by Dees(tm)
What these brilliant liars do not mention is that all Israeli men are combatants...
And when they assert: The coming months will reveal whether or not these patterns were maintained throughout the Israeli offensive. If the Jenin experience is indicative - Human Rights Watch declared that no massacre or systematic killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces occurred during heavy house-to-house fighting, notwithstanding Palestinian claims and heavy international criticism of Israel - then it can reasonably be assumed that the pattern is more or less fixed. They are being positively Deesian in their deliberate use of misdirection.
Here is what Human Rights Watch really says:
Source: http://staging.hrw.org/press/2002/08/jenin080202.htm
U.N. Jenin Report "Flawed"
(New York, August 2, 2002) The U.N. report on events in Jenin is seriously flawed, Human Rights Watch said today. The report, mandated by a U.N. General Assembly resolution after Israeli objections forced the Secretary-General to disband a U.N. fact-finding team, largely limits itself to presenting competing accounts of the events during the Israeli military operations.
"The report doesn't move us forward in terms of establishing the truth," said Hanny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. "Its watered-down account of the very serious violations in Jenin exposes the risk of compiling a report without any first-hand information."
While the report describes some general allegations that have been made about the conduct of the Israeli and Palestinian sides during the Israeli operation, it draws almost no conclusions on the merits of those claims. It makes only limited reference to the obligations of the parties under international law, makes few clear conclusions about violations of that law, and does not raise the issue of accountability for serious violations that may have been committed, some of which rise to the level of war crimes. Its information and analysis are strongest when dealing with the blockage of humanitarian and medical access to the camp.
Human Rights Watch said part of the report's problems stems from the terms of its mandate. Set up by a U.N. General Assembly resolution after the Secretary-General was forced by Israel's objections to disband a U.N. fact-finding mission, the report was collated from existing sources. The report was hampered still further when the government of Israel did not comply with the United Nation's request for information.
"Even with what they had, they could have done more," Megally said.
Examples of the report's failings include the following:
It refers to the fact that civilians died in the operation, without examining the circumstances of their deaths. It makes no mention of the strong evidence suggesting that some were willfully killed, such as Jamal Fayid, a 37-year old paralyzed man, who was crushed in the rubble of his home on April 7 after Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers refused to allow his family time to remove him from their home before a bulldozer destroyed it.
The U.N. report mentions that missiles were "at times" fired from helicopters, minimizing evidence suggesting that their use was intense and indiscriminate in Jenin camp, particularly on April 6 when missiles caught many sleeping civilians.
In its section dealing with abuses outside Jenin, the report fails to consider the systematic targeting of the offices of Palestinian media organizations, as well as the serious impediments faced by international journalists and human rights monitors attempting to document events.
It does not discuss what, if any, steps the parties have taken to investigate credible allegations of violations of international humanitarian law raised in the report-vital for ensuring accountability and discouraging future violations.
Human Rights Watch researchers spent three weeks on the ground, including in Jenin camp, immediately following the operation. Researchers gathered detailed accounts from victims and witnesses, carefully corroborating and independently crosschecking their accounts with those of others to reconstruct a detailed picture of events in the camp in April 2002. The findings were published in a 52-page report, "Jenin: IDF Military Operations." In early May, the Israel Defense Forces made a commitment to investigate every incident documented in the report. To date, Human Rights Watch has had no response from the IDF as to the progress of any such investigations.
In addition, even if only to prevent impeaching himself, Joe McPees should have been more selective in choosing the Israeli propaganda he elected to forward here.
Contrast the cited article:Finally, B'Tselem's self-referential claims are essentially trustworthy because B'Tselem cares about its international reputation. It is a past winner of the Carter-Menil Award for Human Rights and has received financial support from numerous foreign governments and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Its reports have frequently been cited by other leading international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Derechos. Similarly, both its publications and data are also referred to in official Palestinian Authority reports and in reports by Palestinian NGOs such as the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (PSPHRE) and the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG).11 In short, if there are any errors in the B'Tselem data on Palestinian mortality, they are more likely to overestimate than underestimate the number of deaths.
With Joe Dees' assertions about B'Tselem : [ "Re: virus: Dear Hermit: You Constitutionally Can't Admit When You Lose", Joe Dees, 2002-08-08 (http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=26000;start=0) ]
Most of what you have posted here, like is to be expected of the overwhelming predominance ot sources slanted in the direction of Palestinian advocacy, either turns a blind eye to the problem and ignores the collaborator deaths entirely for their particular reports, or perhaps assigns other causes or circumstances to them (for instance that they were murderers or drug dealers, or were killed by IDF or undercover Israeli forces or collaborators), causes and circumstances which may or may not be be true. The few cases they actually do mention, they mention in a purely anecdotal fashion, as if it were in fact existent but rare, but such is clearly indeed not the case.
...
The evidence you present is simply not from sources that are either as credible (due to objectivity vs. advocacy issues) or as complete as that which rhinocerous presented for an earlier period [Hermit: Worth reminding Joe McPees that Rhinoceros' source was B'Tselem]; quite simply, his evidence is more believeable than yours. And it is to be suspected that the more-out-of-control circumstances of the present intifadeh regarding terror organizations, vs. the more in-hand situation in existence during the first, augurs for more deaths, not less, as terror organizations are unquestionably responsible for the elephants' share of Palestinians murdered as Israeli collaborators in all periods.
...
I attempt, in my analyses, interpretations, acknowledgements and judgments, to both give profferred information all the credit, influence and weight it duly deserves, and to deny it more. That has always been the way I have endeavored to operate. Unlike you, apparently.
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=26611>
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