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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (65060)	4/22/2006 2:36:13 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362361

Ignoring The Assault On Gaza "Israeli disregard for human life." When human rights activists claim that the U.S. is sabotaging any potential peace process, they don’t mean just the stuff that reaches the headlines, like stopping crucial aid to the new Palestinian Authority government.This morning, Ha’aretz reports that the U.S. has blocked a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s recent, continuous, indiscriminate shelling of the Gaza Strip. Since last Friday, Israel has been pouring more than 300 artillery shells a day into Gaza, the most densely-populated region on the planet. That’s 2,100 shells. At least 18 Gazans, including Khadeel Ghabeen, an 8-year-old girl, have been killed. Scores have been wounded, including 11 other members of Ghabeen’s family. The entire month of April so far has been marked by shellings and missile attacks by Israeli airships and naval vessels, including the destruction of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ helicopter pad in Gaza as he came to visit the strip. Typical American coverage of Israel-Palestine conflicts tends to bend over backwards to appear “balanced,” thus reinforcing the common myth that the conflict is a “tit-for-tat” cycle of violence. Thus The New York Times covers the shelling (under the ambiguous headline “Gaza Attacks Are On The Rise As Factions Vie For Power”) as “an artillery duel,” quoting Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz saying, “As long as it’s not quiet here, it won’t be quiet there.” In placing increased Qassam rocket attacks on Israel alongside Israel’s pounding of Gaza, the Times never mentions that of the 360 Qassam rockets that have fallen on Israel this year—many fired fall on Palestinian territory— not one has killed an Israeli. Only 8 Israelis have been killed by the rockets since the first Qassam landed in Israel in 2002. To use them, or the new Hamas government—which has maintained a cease-fire with Israel for the past year—as an excuse to ramp up attacks on Palestinians is grossly cynical on the part of Israel. As Ha’aretz notes, the shellings are “ineffective” at deterring rocket attacks, which come from small, light launchers that can be easily moved. One can almost detect a certain sarcasm in Israeli suggestions that Palestinians “have to ask themselves why terrorists are exploiting them . . . The terrorists have no respect or care for Israeli civilians or Palestinian civilians." Palestinians report being shot at by militants after begging them to move elsewhere. On the other hand, Israel admitted that last week, before Ghabeen was killed, it reduced the “margin of safety” of known civillian locations from 1,000 to 300 feet. At a Passover seder Wednesday night, an aquaintance working on American intelligence matters told me that Israelis invented “reconaissance by artillery”—instead of trying to determine the location of a target through costly or dangerous traditional methods, just pound an area and assume that whoever fires back is a target and civillians will run away as best they can. At the same time, it looks like Ehud Olmert has learned the lessons of his old boss, Ariel Sharon. Before preparing to strategically withdraw from Gaza, Sharon spent weeks bloodying the Palestinians, just to make sure that he still looked “tough.” It doesn’t matter what the Palestinians do, Olmert needs to show his constitutuents that he’s no wuss for planning a pull out from the West Bank. That’s not a cycle of violence. That’s Israeli disregard for human life. tompaine.com