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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (23411)	4/4/2002 11:40:43 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I found this entry regarding the ICRC and Israel/Pal situation on instapundit. (Side note on the ICRC -- they still refuse to recognize the Israeli chapter of the Red Cross, Magen David Adom, because it uses a Star of David as its symbol. They say only the Cross or the Crescent are valid symbols. At least, that's what they give as their reason): INSTAPUNDIT HAS SPIES EVERYWHERE, and one of my moles at the ICRC sends this interesting report. As with all intelligence (er, or journalism) it cannot be guaranteed reliable, but this informant has been accurate in the past and his/her emails contain other evidence of accuracy: I thought I'd write you again to update you on the latest from the International Red Cross here in Geneva. I recently read the piece in the New York Times about the legality of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights in which the author claimed that the occupation, contrary to what the UN was saying, was indeed legal since no peace agreement had yet been reached. From what I can tell, this is more or less the concensus among experts, except here at the UN and the Red Cross where anti-Israeli sentiment is part of the initiation course. Anyhow, more so than the prisoners at Gitmo, the Israeli/Palestinian situation shows how biased the Red Cross is. Apart from anti-semitic e-mails floating around and the rather odd habit the Red Cross has of providing Palestinians with assistance that goes far beyond anything given to any other group anywhere else in the world (we provide Palestinians with jogging suits, t-shirts, running shoes and school backpacks, while Eritreans and Ethiopians who are in much worse shape get peas and cooking oil) [Emphasis added], the most interesting thing is the situation regarding the Palestinian Red Crescent and the ambulances funded by the International Red Cross. You might have seen recently that one of the ambulances was stopped and searched by the Israeli Defense Force which found explosives under a stretcher carrying a three-year old boy. There have also been instances where Palestinians have used ambulances for cover from the IDF. The interesting point is that the issue of the IDF stopping ambulances and searching them is the one thing over which the Red Cross makes the biggest fuss. We're constantly giving the Israelis hell for doing it, saying they're contravening the Geneva Conventions and all that sort of thing. However, when the explosives were discovered in the ambulance recently, the ICRC had to admit that this was a problem. But in its statement regarding the discovery, the Red Cross still denounced Israel for stopping ambulances. If this wasn't bad enough, the Red Cross knew all along that the Palestinians were using the ambulances to transport weapons, but were refusing to admit it until the recent revelations forced them to. . . . When it came time to write the final report on the operation, there were already allegations regarding the use of the ambulances to transport weapons and Palestinian fighters, but the Red Cross claimed there was no proof and ignored the complaints. The Red Cross wanted to sweep the whole thing under the carpet because the organization is highly anti-Israel. In effect, the Red Cross was assisting the Palestinians against the Israelis in clear contravention of the Geneva Conventions, while simultaneously accusing the Israelis of going against the Conventions by stopping the ambulances for inspections in the first place. [Emphasis added]. I can't say much about this now, but I do plan to write something about it when I leave the ICRC in the next year or so. However, someone else could write about it and start asking some questions. Well, here's a heads-up for any investigative journalists interested in the Red Cross. Tally ho! And even aside from possible antisemitism, isn't there something, well, racist about doing so much more for the Palestinians than for Ethiopians and Eritreans? God knows people would be saying all sorts of things about, say, the United States government if its email were full of racist jokes and it discriminated in this fashion.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (23411)	4/4/2002 11:49:59 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 281500

Milosevicz also had the support of the Serbian people. Until the day after he was deposed, when you couldn't find a single person who had ever supported him. It seems to me that the central difference between Nadine and others on this thread is that she believes that the ultimate goal of the Palestinian leadership is to destroy Israel (please correct me if I am wrong about that). If you were to accept the fact that this is the Palestinian goal then I think the current Israeli actions are justified. Does anybody believe that you can negotiate with an enemy that only wants your total destruction? Israel would first have to negate even the thought of this occurring before negotiations could ever bear fruit. OTOH....if you believe that all the Palestinians want is a two-state solution then the current attacks are counterproductive. Israel will never be able to remove that goal from the Palestinian mind (nor would they be justified in doing so). Each person's position follows almost inexorably from their reading of Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian leadership. Slacker