27th January, 2009
One of the saddest aspects of the Israeli attack on Gaza was the suffering of the civilian population, particularly the children. Israel has been accused of “lack of proportion”, but the equation is not how many dead on each side in the two week offensive.
If one does not factor into the equation the ten thousand (yes, you read that correctly – 10,000) Kassams and rockets fired on innocent Israeli civilians from Gaza prior to the Israeli offensive and the fact that Hamas deliberately uses civilians, in particular their own Palestinian children, as human shields, one is merely parroting Palestinian propaganda.
View this short film presenting visual evidence of the long-standing Hamas tactic of exploiting civilians as human shields and civilian buildings as cover for terrorist attacks.
Please watch it till the end in order to see Hamas’ own admission that they use women and children to protect their men. Honest Reporting 11th January
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A major part of this war has been fought on the air waves and here Israel has clearly lost the battle because the majority of the media is clearly pro-Palestinian and very definitely anti-Israel. The public does not have the tools to separate truth from fiction as we can see from the following example, one of many.
In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Years Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast accidentally.
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Even less does the general public have the tools to decide of the veracity of “experts” being interviewed. How can one know if they have a hidden agenda, as does Mads Gilbert, ostensibly a Norwegian doctor concerned merely for the welfare of the suffering Palestinian people.
The ‘humanitarian mask’
Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Last week CNN aired a heartrending videotape of a “dying” Palestinian child receiving “CPR,” ostensibly one more Gazan victim of Israel’s inhumanity. It was quickly blogged on by alert medical professionals as an obvious hoax.
The “war crime” was a stunt engineered or abetted by a Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, who was filmed narrating the bogus scenario for the videographer, supposedly the “victim’s” brother, but in fact the owner of a Hamas supportive Web site.
Gilbert is not your average do-gooder medic. A radical Marxist member of the Norwegian Maoist Party, he has supported terrorism against Israel for decades. Emblematic of a larger problem, Gilbert’s activism is funded by the Norwegian Aid committee, in its turn funded by the Norwegian government.
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The following excerpts are taken from an article by Dr.Yoel Donchin and appeared in the National Post on 16th January, 2009. Dr. Donchin was a colleague of Dr. Halil Al-Nahal, presently director of the Shifa hospital in Gaza, while he studied in Israel. Yes, you read that correctly. He, an Arab doctor from Gaza, was one of many Palestinian doctors from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem who have furthered their knowledge in Israeli hospitals with the costs underwritten by Israel.
“It escapes me now if Shimon Peres was serving at the time as treasury secretary or minister of commerce and industry. But, in any event, I have been thinking lately about the time he came to pay a visit to two tax collectors—who had suffered serious burns after Molotov cocktails were thrown at them—while they were being treated in the intensive care unit of Hadassah Hospital, where I work, in Jerusalem. …..
“…As burn wounds present a serious danger of contamination and infection, everyone visiting burn victims must wear a special surgical gown and mask—even people who have won a Nobel prize. As Mr. Peres approached the patients’ beds, one of the physicians on our staff tied the gown behind his back and handed him the mask. As Mr. Peres found it difficult to tie the mask himself, the task fell to the same doctor, who was very moved by the fact that he was allowed to approach the back of an Israeli minister under the unobservant gaze of the security detail, who found it difficult to watch the injured patients.
“This particular doctor—his name is Dr. Halil Al-Nahal and he is a graduate of our anaesthesia department and the intensive care unit—was interviewed several times this week on Israeli television. He is now the director of the intensive care unit at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. He was arrested in Gaza some years ago for distributing the flyers of a then-small organization called Hamas. After we vouched for him, he was released. We kept in touch by phone for many years until, for his own safety, the contacts were stopped.
“At the Al-Shifa hospital, Dr. Halil Al-Nahal has no medical equipment and an insufficient number of beds. He can not actually run an intensive care unit because he has none of the tools required for delivering intensive care. This week he said, in Hebrew, in a TV interview “Hevre … Tafsiku!” (“My friends, stop!”).
“The tunnels created in response to the blockade on the Gaza Strip constitute the main path for bringing equipment and supplies to the blockaded population. Hamas has transported dozens of tons of equipment into the strip, but this has been equipment designed for killing and destruction, such as bombs, rockets and grenades. Missiles with a range of 30 miles have been broken into three parts so that they could be moved through the tunnels and then reassembled and fired at the Zionist enemy. Fuel and food have also been moved through the tunnels, but mostly through private initiatives.
“What was not been transported through the tunnels, as far as I can tell, is medical equipment. What have not been disassembled into three parts for easy moving are respirators and monitoring equipment for Dr. Al-Nahal’s ICU.
“Had Hamas used the tunnels to import computers for their children, text books for their schools, public health equipment, beds, sheets, wound dressings, it may have been possible to save some of the victims. But it hasn’t.
“….As a physician who can understand what the enemy feels, and as a physician who is not comfortable with all that is done within the framework of Operation Cast Lead, I can nonetheless not understand how Hamas can devote so much energy to stockpiling rockets, while totally ignoring medical needs.
“Perhaps this is the difference between a terror organization and a national liberation movement“.
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The immortal words of the late Prime Minister, Golda Meir, perhaps sum up the feelings of the general Israeli public:
We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.
