lubna
06-12-2004, 12:48
Smart Bombs vs: Intelligent Bombs
Israel is justifying its continuing assassination of Palestinian civilians and destruction of their property on grounds that Palestinian "terrorist" bombers are intentionally killing innocent Israelis. What if, in fact, the human bombers attack military targets and not civilians...is this still terrorism?
Though the rest of the world sees it the other way around, most Americans seem to be persuaded that the Israelis are the good guys and the Palestinians are the bad guys. According to recent polls, these beliefs are derived largely from the media, which uses the label "terrorist" repeated day after day to describe Palestinians, while labeling Israeli actions as purely defensive. For instance, according to Fox News on May 5, 2002, a mother from Jenin and her three and four year old children were all shot to death, each hit in the head or upper body, and in a separate incident the same day a nine year old boy from Tulkarem was shot twice in the chest and killed...all in one day. But Israel excused these as military targets and provided various excuses. The media has persuaded many Americans that if Palestinians kill Israeli civilians, that's Terrorism which must be fiercely punished. But when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians, often children, that's "collateral damage." Israelis shrug and say they were aiming at government buildings; that civilians were acting suspiciously; or children just got in the way.
A majority of Americans buy into the label "terrorist state" to describe Palestinians based on the acts of 55 Palestinian human bombers. This number and our information regarding these acts comes to us from military press releases prepared by Ariel Sharon's government, previous governments, and also from this author's personal observation of military presence in Israel. It can be shown that all or most Israeli death reports carried in the US media purposely omit mentioning of persons who happen to be in the Israeli Defense Forces or paramilitary, and that the "55 terrorist bombing of innocent civilians" were undoubtedly aimed at Military personal.
WHTT thinks it is time to examine the one-sided use of the label "terrorist," and to ask whether there is any real difference between Israeli "smart bombs" and Palestinian "human bombs" that warrants one being called "terrorist," but not the other.
Touring Israel on a Military Bus The station at Ashqelon where I boarded the noon bus for Jerusalem was like every one of the half-dozen stations I had seen in my tour. Except for military passengers in uniform, it was nearly empty; tourism is at a halt countrywide. Those in uniform were of both sexes, in their early twenties or younger, wearing the khaki colors of the Israeli Defense Forces. Most men and women were armed with short, banana clipped carbines slung, barrel down, from the shoulder. Several other military-age men with short haircuts were present, but not in uniform, presumably off duty.
In Israel the buses are owned and subsidized by the government; each is a military transport, dropping the armed forces off at bus stops and duty stations along the way where jeeps and trucks sometimes wait. The communication system appears to be the cell phone, which many carry. Though I had been through the stand-in-line-and-get-squeezed by people carrying guns exercise several times before, this was the first time it occurred to me that I was boarding a military transport, a natural target. (Note 2)
A young girl caught my eye, for it was fresh in my mind that several of the human bombers had been females. She did not look or act quite like the rest of the crowd. She was alone, she had a large handbag, which she did not stow, she was dressed in modestly loose clothes, she was not mixing with anyone and she appeared preoccupied. Her face could have been Arabic... My imagination began to run wild; could she be a human bomb?
The moment passed, and so did the bus ride; it was not bombed. But the lesson was not lost on me; anyone who boards an Israeli bus is taking a military position, just as if you hitchhiked through town in one of the Army's jeeps. This answered a question I had often wondered about--why buses have been bombed so often during the years I have been reading about suicide bombings. Now I knew why: every bus is full of armed Israelis.
Not one of the four buses I rode on for a total of over a thousand kilometers while in Israel was less than 25% military-occupied at any time, and most were well in excess of that. It occurred to me, why would a Palestinian bomber waste his life on a civilian target, when he could target a busload of armed soldiers on their way to or from attacks on Jenin or Ramallah? The answer was obvious--Palestinian guerillas do target buses, and they hit buses more often than any other target, perhaps more often than all other targets combined.
The Israeli Foreign Minister has admitted the deaths of military personnel in only two of nine bus bombings in an official report. In the others, the victims were called "Israelis" without stating if they were civilian, military or both. Having seen the Israelis bend the truth before our eyes in Jenin, there is no reason to think they would not also make omissions about their IDF casualties in order to make the Palestinians out to be terrorists. *see note
Because the body bombers act in a logical fashion, I have chosen to call them "Intelligent Bombs" and consider them more efficient than the American-made "smart bombs" used by Israel in their ability to select and hit military targets. "Smart bombs" have killed and injured many times the number of civilians than Intelligent Bombs have. The difference between them is not that one kills civilians and the other doesn't. The difference is that one targets Israelis and the other targets Palestinians.
The reason Americans are told that every attack by a Palestinian human bomb is against innocent Jewish civilians and every Israeli smart bomb attack is against "terrorists," even though Arab casualties are mainly civilian, is because the Israeli government and its American media supporters are the ones who issue the reports. These biased reports always paint Israel's objective as "military," even when snipers kill four-year-old children who slip out of their mothers' grasp. And Israelis are always said to be responding to acts of "terrorism," even when they are slaughtering civilians in their beds, as I witnessed from a rooftop in Gaza, when four civilians were killed an 30 injured by an Apache smart bomb attack launched from 1.5 miles away.
To Israelis, the American press and the Celebrity Christian leadership in America, there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, regardless of age or occupation, and there is no such thing as a guilty Israeli, even one who murders children. It is inexcusable that Americans, particularly Christians, should adopt this racist Israeli mindset.
Lest there be doubt, this writer supports the Palestinian right to launch bombs on Israelis any way they know how, because they are the victims. A talk show host asked me recently, "What is the difference between a suicide bombing and a very dangerous, volunteers-only mission," such as many Americans undertook in WWII and Korea and in every other war? I do not condemn Intelligent Bombs, as so many others do. Many people have recently begun to correctly observe that the Palestinians are using the only tactic left to them. I grieve for these young people and their families, and it pains me that it is my country--America--that has deprived them of hope.
Are we to believe that every body bomber is an irrational sub-human who cleverly manages to single out "innocent civilians" and never hits at military targets, as Mr. Bush and Mr. Netanyahu suggest? The primary objective of my trip to Gaza was to answer these questions: do body bombers target innocent civilians, and if so, do they do this because it is impossible to get at the military? The answers, I discovered, are no and no. No, the bombers do not purposely set out to harm children, though Israelis have targeted over 400 school-aged Palestinian juveniles, and this number includes only those killed and not the wounded. And no, it is not hard to find Israeli military targets to strike at; if one can get into Israel, the huge military is everywhere and anywhere, day and night.
In the 18 months since the start of the Intifada II uprising, there have been a few more than the 55 human bombings that Ariel Sharon recently referenced as the cause of Israeli violence. One occurred at the bus stop at the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem on April 12th, and another on a bus in Haifa on April 10th. An unsuccessful attempt killed only the Intelligent Bomb, and no one else was hurt. And there was an attack on a settlement by two persons who, according to the Israelis, escaped. We Hold These Truths has discussed "settler" attacks in "Are Settlers Squatters."
In the same period of time, Israel tortured to death more than a hundred persons in documented cases, it killed about 1100 civilians before the Jenin massacre, and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians--many of them children--have been wounded or crippled by the IDF for life. Many of the children, some four years old or less, were shot by snipers. Are we supposed to believe they, too, were "terrorists"? Are we supposed to accept and excuse any crime that Israel commits because of the acts of the "55 suicide bombers." ........
continued......
Israel is justifying its continuing assassination of Palestinian civilians and destruction of their property on grounds that Palestinian "terrorist" bombers are intentionally killing innocent Israelis. What if, in fact, the human bombers attack military targets and not civilians...is this still terrorism?
Though the rest of the world sees it the other way around, most Americans seem to be persuaded that the Israelis are the good guys and the Palestinians are the bad guys. According to recent polls, these beliefs are derived largely from the media, which uses the label "terrorist" repeated day after day to describe Palestinians, while labeling Israeli actions as purely defensive. For instance, according to Fox News on May 5, 2002, a mother from Jenin and her three and four year old children were all shot to death, each hit in the head or upper body, and in a separate incident the same day a nine year old boy from Tulkarem was shot twice in the chest and killed...all in one day. But Israel excused these as military targets and provided various excuses. The media has persuaded many Americans that if Palestinians kill Israeli civilians, that's Terrorism which must be fiercely punished. But when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians, often children, that's "collateral damage." Israelis shrug and say they were aiming at government buildings; that civilians were acting suspiciously; or children just got in the way.
A majority of Americans buy into the label "terrorist state" to describe Palestinians based on the acts of 55 Palestinian human bombers. This number and our information regarding these acts comes to us from military press releases prepared by Ariel Sharon's government, previous governments, and also from this author's personal observation of military presence in Israel. It can be shown that all or most Israeli death reports carried in the US media purposely omit mentioning of persons who happen to be in the Israeli Defense Forces or paramilitary, and that the "55 terrorist bombing of innocent civilians" were undoubtedly aimed at Military personal.
WHTT thinks it is time to examine the one-sided use of the label "terrorist," and to ask whether there is any real difference between Israeli "smart bombs" and Palestinian "human bombs" that warrants one being called "terrorist," but not the other.
Touring Israel on a Military Bus The station at Ashqelon where I boarded the noon bus for Jerusalem was like every one of the half-dozen stations I had seen in my tour. Except for military passengers in uniform, it was nearly empty; tourism is at a halt countrywide. Those in uniform were of both sexes, in their early twenties or younger, wearing the khaki colors of the Israeli Defense Forces. Most men and women were armed with short, banana clipped carbines slung, barrel down, from the shoulder. Several other military-age men with short haircuts were present, but not in uniform, presumably off duty.
In Israel the buses are owned and subsidized by the government; each is a military transport, dropping the armed forces off at bus stops and duty stations along the way where jeeps and trucks sometimes wait. The communication system appears to be the cell phone, which many carry. Though I had been through the stand-in-line-and-get-squeezed by people carrying guns exercise several times before, this was the first time it occurred to me that I was boarding a military transport, a natural target. (Note 2)
A young girl caught my eye, for it was fresh in my mind that several of the human bombers had been females. She did not look or act quite like the rest of the crowd. She was alone, she had a large handbag, which she did not stow, she was dressed in modestly loose clothes, she was not mixing with anyone and she appeared preoccupied. Her face could have been Arabic... My imagination began to run wild; could she be a human bomb?
The moment passed, and so did the bus ride; it was not bombed. But the lesson was not lost on me; anyone who boards an Israeli bus is taking a military position, just as if you hitchhiked through town in one of the Army's jeeps. This answered a question I had often wondered about--why buses have been bombed so often during the years I have been reading about suicide bombings. Now I knew why: every bus is full of armed Israelis.
Not one of the four buses I rode on for a total of over a thousand kilometers while in Israel was less than 25% military-occupied at any time, and most were well in excess of that. It occurred to me, why would a Palestinian bomber waste his life on a civilian target, when he could target a busload of armed soldiers on their way to or from attacks on Jenin or Ramallah? The answer was obvious--Palestinian guerillas do target buses, and they hit buses more often than any other target, perhaps more often than all other targets combined.
The Israeli Foreign Minister has admitted the deaths of military personnel in only two of nine bus bombings in an official report. In the others, the victims were called "Israelis" without stating if they were civilian, military or both. Having seen the Israelis bend the truth before our eyes in Jenin, there is no reason to think they would not also make omissions about their IDF casualties in order to make the Palestinians out to be terrorists. *see note
Because the body bombers act in a logical fashion, I have chosen to call them "Intelligent Bombs" and consider them more efficient than the American-made "smart bombs" used by Israel in their ability to select and hit military targets. "Smart bombs" have killed and injured many times the number of civilians than Intelligent Bombs have. The difference between them is not that one kills civilians and the other doesn't. The difference is that one targets Israelis and the other targets Palestinians.
The reason Americans are told that every attack by a Palestinian human bomb is against innocent Jewish civilians and every Israeli smart bomb attack is against "terrorists," even though Arab casualties are mainly civilian, is because the Israeli government and its American media supporters are the ones who issue the reports. These biased reports always paint Israel's objective as "military," even when snipers kill four-year-old children who slip out of their mothers' grasp. And Israelis are always said to be responding to acts of "terrorism," even when they are slaughtering civilians in their beds, as I witnessed from a rooftop in Gaza, when four civilians were killed an 30 injured by an Apache smart bomb attack launched from 1.5 miles away.
To Israelis, the American press and the Celebrity Christian leadership in America, there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, regardless of age or occupation, and there is no such thing as a guilty Israeli, even one who murders children. It is inexcusable that Americans, particularly Christians, should adopt this racist Israeli mindset.
Lest there be doubt, this writer supports the Palestinian right to launch bombs on Israelis any way they know how, because they are the victims. A talk show host asked me recently, "What is the difference between a suicide bombing and a very dangerous, volunteers-only mission," such as many Americans undertook in WWII and Korea and in every other war? I do not condemn Intelligent Bombs, as so many others do. Many people have recently begun to correctly observe that the Palestinians are using the only tactic left to them. I grieve for these young people and their families, and it pains me that it is my country--America--that has deprived them of hope.
Are we to believe that every body bomber is an irrational sub-human who cleverly manages to single out "innocent civilians" and never hits at military targets, as Mr. Bush and Mr. Netanyahu suggest? The primary objective of my trip to Gaza was to answer these questions: do body bombers target innocent civilians, and if so, do they do this because it is impossible to get at the military? The answers, I discovered, are no and no. No, the bombers do not purposely set out to harm children, though Israelis have targeted over 400 school-aged Palestinian juveniles, and this number includes only those killed and not the wounded. And no, it is not hard to find Israeli military targets to strike at; if one can get into Israel, the huge military is everywhere and anywhere, day and night.
In the 18 months since the start of the Intifada II uprising, there have been a few more than the 55 human bombings that Ariel Sharon recently referenced as the cause of Israeli violence. One occurred at the bus stop at the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem on April 12th, and another on a bus in Haifa on April 10th. An unsuccessful attempt killed only the Intelligent Bomb, and no one else was hurt. And there was an attack on a settlement by two persons who, according to the Israelis, escaped. We Hold These Truths has discussed "settler" attacks in "Are Settlers Squatters."
In the same period of time, Israel tortured to death more than a hundred persons in documented cases, it killed about 1100 civilians before the Jenin massacre, and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians--many of them children--have been wounded or crippled by the IDF for life. Many of the children, some four years old or less, were shot by snipers. Are we supposed to believe they, too, were "terrorists"? Are we supposed to accept and excuse any crime that Israel commits because of the acts of the "55 suicide bombers." ........
continued......