Israel’s War Crimes

 

By Richard Falk in The Nation Magazine

The Israeli air-strikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war

Those violations include:

• Collective punishment: The entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

• Targeting civilians:The air-strikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.

• Disproportionate military response:The air-strikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza’s besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.

Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel’s escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; to the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.

Israel has also ignored recent Hamas diplomatic initiatives to re-establish the truce or ceasefire since its expiration on 26 December.

The Israeli airstrikes today, and the catastrophic human toll that they caused, challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel’s violations of international law. That complicity includes those countries knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks, as well as those countries who have supported and participated in the siege of Gaza that itself has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.

I remind all Member States of the United Nations that the UN continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law–regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations. I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the United Nations system, to move on an emergency basis not only to condemn Israel’s serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people.

Let’s not get it twisted folks Israel is a country and Judaism is a religion so to be against what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people has nothing to do with being so called antisemitic or some sort of Jew hater. If the people who run Israel happen to be Jewish than that’s just what they happen to be.

Have You Heard About College Tuition?

Study: College Tuition Increasingly Unaffordable

Back in the United States, a new report shows college tuition is becoming increasingly unaffordable for most Americans. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education says college tuition and fees have increased by 439 percent since 1982. The cost of attending a four-year public university now amounts to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university would account for 76 percent. The Center’s president, Patrick Callan, said, “If we go on this way for another twenty-five years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education.”

I guess we’ll soon see an increase in the rate of college students becoming strippers to offset college costs.

Source

Seriously!? For Real!?

Ummmm……is this for freakin real?!? So it’s been like a couple of days now since the story broke that Plaxico Burress shot HIS SELF in the thigh while at the Latin Quarter nightclub and I’m still in shock and disbelief that this is a freakin story. Like for real….seriously!

OOOMG and DICTATOR Mayor Michael Bloomberg “is outraged”, for real for real, seriously! When I heard him say that I immediately though of about a hundred REAL things that the Mayor SHOULD be outraged about

• The Bus Driver who was stabbed and killed in Brooklyn, while drving the bus.
• The Recession.
• The forclosure rates in some neighborhoods in NYC.
• The increasing unemployment rate.
• The Night Time closing of firehouses.
• The fact that the MTA claims to have no more money.

This is such a waste of time and tax payer money(which there is none of anymore) over a guy who shot HIS SELF with HIS OWN gun that was not obtained illegally; his permit ran out. And apparently he must have grazed him self because there was no limp to speak of.  I also did not know that you had to report to the police a gunshot victim who wasn’t actually a victim of anything other than himself.

By the way if there are any parents out there outraged like the Mayor because this “Role-model” disobeyed the law, than you should kill yourself for even letting your children have athletes and entertainers for role models, unless the entertainer or athlete so deems his or her self, and even then you have to be careful because people like Beyonce go around calling themselves role models while grinding their barley covered vagina’s into the floor dressed in freakum dresses.  

UPDATE: Plaxico has been suspended for the rest of the season.