American-supported Israeli war crimes: Intentional targeting of health care workers & rescuers.
Democracy Now! (5/17/18)
As Palestinians vow to continue protesting against the Israeli occupation of Gaza, we speak to a Canadian doctor who was shot by Israeli forces in both legs Monday while he was helping injured Palestinians. Israeli forces shot dead at least 61 unarmed Palestinian protesters taking part in the Great March of Return Monday, including one doctor. Canada, Britain, Germany, Ireland and Belgium have called for an investigation into the killings. The United Nations Human Rights Council has announced that it will hold a special session Friday to discuss escalating violence in Gaza.
We speak with Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room medical doctor, one of 19 medical personnel shot in Gaza on Monday. Loubani is an associate professor at Western University in London, Ontario. He is a Palestinian refugee and a member of the Glia Project creating open-source medical devices for low-resource settings.
Link to Story, Transcript and 23-Minute Video
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )
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Israeli Supreme Court Gives Military ‘Green Light’ To Keep Killing Unarmed Palestinians
“The Israeli Supreme Court refused to watch video clips documenting Israeli shootings of demonstrators and, rather than actually examining the case, fully accepted the claims presented to it by the state.”
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams (5/25/18)
Once more affirming its role as an enabler of Israel’s brutal occupation and murder of Palestinians, the Israeli Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a legal effort by human rights groups to revoke military rules that permit soldiers to use live ammunition against unarmed civilians.
In its unanimous ruling—which comes less than two weeks after Israeli soldiers massacred more than 60 unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and injured over 2,000—the high court gave “a green light” to Israel’s “continued use of snipers and live fire against Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip” and “fully adopted the Israeli military’s position,” noted the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, one of the groups involved in the effort challenging the rules.
“The Israeli Supreme Court completely ignored the broad factual basis presented to it by the petitioners, which includes multiple testimonies of wounded and reports of international organizations involved in documenting the killing and wounding of unarmed protesters in Gaza,” Al Mezan said in a joint statement with the Palestinian rights group Adalah on Thursday.
“It is worth noting that the Israeli Supreme Court refused to watch video clips documenting Israeli shootings of demonstrators and, rather than actually examining the case, fully accepted the claims presented to it by the state,” the groups added. “The extreme nature of the ruling is also highlighted by the striking absence of any mention of the casualty figures that had been presented to the court.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling prompted a flood of outrage on social media, with analysts and advocacy organizations arguing that the court is endorsing killings that have been condemned by most of the international community as unlawful and “horrifying.”
As Common Dreams reported last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council has overwhelmingly voted to dispach war crimes investigators to probe Israel’s killing of Palestinian protestors earlier this month.
“Those responsible for violations must in the end be held accountable,” U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a speech denouncing Israel’s massacre. “In this context, as in all conflicts where impunity is widespread, unless ended by a peace settlement, excessive violence—both horrifying and criminal—flows easily from the barrel of a gun.”
(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.)
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Mass Shootings In Israel & U.S.
By Pierre Tristam
Flagerlive (5/20/18)
You can always depend on Israel periodically to mass-murder bunches of Arabs in proportions as lopsided and unforgiving as our own mass shootings in the United States, often more so. And as with mass shootings, which we now automatically blame on everything in the known and unknown universe but America’s rabid debasement for guns, you can always depend on the American public to scapegoat Israel’s war crimes, blame them on anything and everyone (terrorists, animals, Hamas ragheads, stone throwers and other synonyms for “Arab”) but Israel’s bigoted death machine.
The dehumanization of Palestinians rings true with a segment of the American audience because we saw this with Black Lives Matter.
While Ivanka Trump was flashing the toothy grin of a flossed and fluorinated Marie-Antoinette at the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem this week, 60 unarmed Palestinians were getting massacred by the Israeli military a few miles away in Gaza. It was nothing new except for the scale of the massacre and its concurrence with Trump flipping the bird to anyone who still thinks Palestinian lives matter, or that there’s anything left of the two-state solution. The Israeli army has been murdering unarmed Palestinian protesters for months now without a peep from Trump, only encouragement. Sixty Palestinians were killed Monday, But 112 have been killed since protests at the so-called fence began in March.
Incredibly, the response from the United States has been either indifference or a defense of Israeli war crimes (it is a war crime for soldiers to kill unarmed protesters), using the sort of language last heard when white supremacists defended the massacres of black protesters and their supporters during the civil rights era. Blacks were compared to terrorists then, too. They were dehumanized, as they had always been, making killing them not only easier, but more desirable. So the killings went on until the sights of southern violence against non-violent protesters became too much for the nation’s conscience. …