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

To: Ilaine who wrote (28463)	5/5/2002 8:48:11 PM
From: BigBull	Respond to of 281500

The Battle of Jenin; excellent new account in TIME. Even amnesty intl. says no massacre. I'll be interested to see if TIME does a post mortem on the Church of the Nativity stand off. Imo the Israeli accounts of Jenin were far more accurate than the Palestinian. I'm betting the same will be true in Bethlehem. We'll see. time.com The Palestinian fighters had made their own preparations. Booby traps had been laid in the streets of both the camp and the town, ready to be triggered if an Israeli foot or vehicle snagged a tripwire. Some of the bombs were huge – as much as 250 lbs. of explosives, compared with the 25 lbs. a typical suicide bomber uses. On Day 2 of the battle, when the town had been secured but the fight in the camp was just beginning, a huge Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer rolled along a three-quarter-mile stretch of the main street to clear booby traps. An Israeli engineering-corps officer logged 124 separate explosions set off by the vehicle. In the camp, the explosive charges were even more densely packed, and tunnels had been dug between houses so that Palestinian fighters could move around without exposing themselves on the street. Many noncombatants had fled; Israeli intelligence believes half the camp's residents had left before the troops arrived, and that by the third day of the battle 90% of the residents were gone. Even so, that left as many as 1,300 people inside the camp. According to leaders of Islamic Jihad interviewed by Time, around 100 of those left were armed fighters. .... The reality was different, though body counts and estimates of civilian casualties vary. Charles Kapes, the deputy chief of the U.N. office in the camp, says 54 dead have been pulled from the wreckage and 49 Palestinians are missing, of whom 18 are residents of the camp. Human Rights Watch says 52 were killed, of whom only 27 were thought to be armed Palestinians. The Israelis say they found 46 dead in the rubble, including a pile of five bodies that had been booby-trapped. Of these 46, say the Israelis, all but three were "fighters," men ages 18 to 40. The Jenin Hospital, meanwhile, says 52 camp residents died, including five women and four children under the age of 15. Of the 43 dead men, eight were 55 or older and therefore probably not involved in the fighting. No matter whose figures one accepts, "there was no massacre," concludes Amnesty's Holley.

To: Ilaine who wrote (28463)	5/5/2002 9:50:32 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Excuse me? If someone says, "I am better behaved than the other fellow," you should not expect him to behave better? Better not go around telling everyone you're better, because they will expect it. There a difference between saying, hey, you're not living up to your own standards, and saying, hey, you're not living up to my own exalted standards of how I think you should be behaving because I'm an expert on human rights, while all the time giving the other guy a complete and total pass on the whole human rights gig. That's called hypocrisy, and the Europeans have become experts at it. The problem is not so much that they hold the Israelis to standards, though most of the time they hold them to an exalted and unrealistic standard. The problems is that they hold the Arabs to no standard at all, which they think is being fair to the "opppressed," but is actually a huge form of guilt and condescension combined. The Palestinians have learned how to take advantage of the double standard, thus the excuses for suicide bombing and cries of 'Israeli war crimes' in the same breath.