Posted on 04/24/2002 7:07:22 AM PDT by Brytani
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:00:27 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Mardawi spoke enthusiastically about Israel's decision to send in infantry: "It was like hunting ... like being given a prize."
JERUSALEM (CNN) -- A senior member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad who surrendered to Israeli forces in Jenin described the battle as "a very hard fight" in which both sides took on casualties, but he said he didn't see "tens of people" killed by the Israeli army.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Asked about the allegations of a massacre, Mardawi said, "By my own standard, what happened there was a massacre. But if you are asking, 'Did I see tens of people killed?' Frankly, no. In my group, we were in an area with no other people. Three fighters with me were killed. Later when we started to move from place to place, we saw destroyed houses and could smell bodies."
"Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a militant group dedicated to the creation of an Islamic Palestinian state .,and the destruction of Israel
Your conclusion doesn't follow. The bodies could just as easily have been non-combatants killed by Israeli fire or buried in the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli missiles and bulldozers. When UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen went to Jenin he described some of what he saw:
"The stench of decaying corpses are all over the place."
"I saw personally about a 12-year-old boy being dug out, his body totally destroyed."
"I saw two brothers digging under the rubble for their father and their brothers."
"There are people all over the place digging with their hands looking for their relatives and dear ones."
Unless you and your ilk can produce hard evidence of this so-called 'massacre', all you are engaging in is a smear campaign.
The tally of dead, missing, and captive Palestinians in Jenin (and elsewhere) is still being compiled. The search for dead and injured continues. Hopefully, Israel will stop hindering aid workers and medical teams and extend full and immediate cooperation to investigators and the UN fact-finding mission. Let the chips fall where they may.
*THIS* is your evidence of a 'massacre'????
Scientifically trained, you are not. That much is evident.
Very fine. You hold up your list of armed combatants (as such are defined in the 3rd Geneva Convention of 1947) during a lawful war, and then let us hold that list up against the list of known dead and wounded civilians killed in terrorist attacks in Israel.
In a war...it doesn't matter how old the person firing the weapon at you is...you kill them. Only here does it seem to matter. I will have a little more respect for your beloved "UN inspectors" when they become equally outraged at the thousands of christians who have been killed (read: massacred) in the sudan and somalia. Amazing how this doesn't get them fired up but a gun battle in which collateral damage was the result (because the gunmen were hiding behind the skirts of women and the toys of children) does!
When you start firing rpg's and machine guns from a house...you then invite destruction of said house. When you fire from behind women and children...and then those women and children die...it is YOUR fault...not the other guy.
Again...I will give ear to what these bozos say when they show me they can be unbiased. That means going into the sudan and helping the thousands or tens of thousands (and I am being conservative in the estimate) who have been slaughtered because of their religion. And here you sit screaming about a few hundred (and not even that....) who died in a combat zone because their "men" were using them as human shields...which BTW seems to happen a lot in the arab world. "Milk Factories" and "hospitals" abound.
Cowards.
It is the same 'unseemly haste' I exhibited when Cynthia McKinney suggested we investigate George W. Bush since there was no evidence that he knew about 9/11 -- and profited from it -- in advance. But, she added, if we investigated, we might find evidence that he had foreknowledge.
Same motivation. Scurrilous charges should have something more solid than a few arm-flailing political opponents hyperventilating.
But hey, if an impartial team went in, I wouldn't have as much problem with it. But even YOU must admit the UN is *not* impartial. Not about Israel.
In Arabic he was supposed to say it was a fierce fight, we ambushed the Jews again and again, forcing them to fall back on tanks and bulldozers.
In English he is supposed to be a weak victim, overrun and brutalized by jack-booted jew-nazis.
The UN fact-finding mission was approved unanimously by the Security Council, including the U.S. I read today that Israel has dropped its objections to the composition of the team.
Armchair ruminations are no substitute for a full on-site investigation to reveal the facts. Let the chips fall where they may.
That's interesting. How can we know for sure that some of the Palestinian civilians didn't die because of accidentally setting off one of them.
Is CNN putting this at the top of every half-hour broadcast on TV and Radio, or is the story buried on its website!
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