Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- Begin Message ---
-Caveat Lector- Israel learns of a hidden shame in its early years
Soldiers raped and killed [Palestinian] girl in the Negev
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
The Guardian (UK), November 4, 2003
For 54 years the fate of a young Bedouin girl who disappeared in the Negev desert was relegated to rumour and a single entry in the diary of David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of the fledgling Israeli state. "It was decided and carried out: they washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her," he wrote.
After that the case became one of the state's earliest secrets, and no more than hearsay passed between soldiers.
Now the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz has used previously classified army documents to reveal the full story of what Mr Ben-Gurion called a "horrific atrocity".
In August 1949, an army unit stationed at Nirim in the Negev shot an Arab man and captured a Bedouin girl with him. Her name and age remain unknown, but she was probably in her mid-teens.
In the following hours she was taken from the hut and forced to shower naked in full view of the soldiers. Three of the men then raped her.
After the Sabbath meal the platoon commander, identified by Ha'aretz as a man called Moshe who had served in the British army during the second world war, proposed a vote on what should be done with her.
One option was to put her to work in the outpost's kitchen.
Most of the 20 or so soldiers present voted for the alternative by chanting: "We want to ****". The commander organised a rota for groups of his men to gang rape the girl over the next three days. Moshe and one of his sergeants went first, leaving the girl unconscious. Next morning, she complicated matters by protesting about her treatment. Moshe told one of his sergeants to kill her.
She was forced into a patrol vehicle with several soldiers, two carrying shovels, and they drove off into the dunes. When the girl realised what was about to happen she tried to run, but only made it a few paces before she was shot by a Sergeant Michael.
Her body was buried in a grave less than a foot deep.
A few days later the battalion commander, Yehuda Drexler, asked Moshe if he had carried out an order to return the girl to her village.
"They killed her," replied Moshe. "It was a shame to waste the petrol." He was ordered to write a report. Ha'aretz has obtained a copy.
It said: "In my patrol on 12.8.49 I encountered Arabs in the territory under my command, one of them armed. I killed the armed Arab on the spot and took his weapon. I took the Arab female captive. On the first night the soldiers abused her and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world."
He and most of the soldiers at the outpost were tried in secret. Some said they were carrying out their commander's orders. The military judges rejected that line of defence. Moshe denied rape. "Morally speaking, it was impossible to sleep with such a dirty girl," he told the court.
He was acquitted of rape but convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The judges likened his stated willingness "to murder even women and children in cold blood" to "Hitler's methods in France".
Nineteen other soldiers received light sentences of between one and three years, mostly for "negligence in preventing a crime".
The appeal court reduced their sentences, saying: "At the time there was a general feeling of contempt for the life of Arabs ... and sometimes wanton events occurred in this sphere. All this helped create an atmosphere of 'anything goes'.
"We are convinced that this atmosphere existed at the Nirim outpost, too."
But the government and army understood the shame that would fall on the armed forces if the girl's fate became known to wider Israeli society, so the murder and trial were classified as secret.
The case was briefly resurrected at the trial in 1956 of Israeli soldiers and police officers who murdered 43 Arab civilians in Kafr Qassem, to help establish the precedent that there is no defence in obeying illegal orders.
Then it disappeared from view again.
Several years later members of a kibbutz near the Nirim base noticed that the wind had uncovered a small hand.---------------Israeli soldiers accused of raping 11-year-old
· Allegation erodes public respect for armed forces
· 17 military personnel and five civilians questionedConal Urquhart in Tel Aviv and Agencies in Jerusalem
The Guardian (UK), May 2, 2006At least 17 soldiers and five civilians are under investigation for the rape of an 11-year-old girl at an Israeli air base, the military confirmed yesterday.
A spokesman for the Israeli army told the local press that the incident was very grave and "seriously deviates from appropriate behavioural norms and values".
According to reports in the Israeli media, the girl - whose father is a non-commissioned officer in the army - was living with her family at an air base in the south of Israel. She began to have sex with soldiers and workers at the base from the age of 11 until the age of 14.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told investigators that she agreed to sex, but according to Israeli law a girl under 16 cannot legally engage in consensual sex, and the men are expected to be charged with statutory rape.
The news was greeted with shock by Israelis, who tend to believe their army is morally superior to those in other countries. The soldiers questioned in the case said that the girl told them she was 16 or 17, and that they had no idea of her real age. One of the suspects told the daily Maariv that the girl initiated the sexual encounters.
Military police became suspicious during a separate investigation and informed the base commander. The girl´s family has since moved from the base and she has been in hospital several times for psychiatric illness, the reports said.
The soldiers under investigation are still serving although they are not allowed to be promoted or go on training courses. Police are carrying out a parallel investigation related to the civilian suspects.
The case marks a new low for the military, once Israel´s most revered institution, which has been tarnished in recent years by incidents of financial corruption and sexual misconduct.
Air force officers were horrified by the scandal. One colonel told the newspaper Haaretz: "We are still trying to understand how this happened. I don´t understand how our soldiers violated the norms of the IDF [Israel Defence Force] in such a callous way. What bothers me no less is the fact that we, the commanders, didn´t know about it.
"We´re trying to check how we missed such a serious incident for such a long time. I´m worried by the fact that not one soldier raised a red flag -- not those who participated in the acts and not their friends who might have known about it. I would have expected that there would be a righteous man in Sodom who would complain so that these terrible acts would be stopped."
A former army psychologist told Israel radio that the continued offences would have required a widespread "conspiracy of silence". Colonel Gadi Amir said: "This kind of phenomenon couldn´t have happened without many other people knowing about it, including officers. I believe there was a conspiracy of silence in this case."
Col Amir, former head of the army´s behaviour sciences department, said the scandal marked a low point in military conduct. "This is well beyond a criminal offence. It is rape and it is a breach of norms and ethical codes that, without them, our army cannot continue to exist."
Court cases against senior army officers charged with sexual harassment and assault have been on the increase in recent years. Experts say it reflects a gradual shift in Israeli society toward women asserting their rights and refusing to accept behaviour that used to be considered routine.
A pressure group of ex-soldiers called Breaking the Silence has worked for two years to force Israeli society to confront the crimes committed by soldiers in their name by recording testimonies about the abuse and murder of Palestinians.----------------Anne Gwynne, Welsh patriot turns freedom fighter for Palestine
Ex-bank manager defends Palestinian martyrs
Chris McGreal in Nablus
The Guardian (UK), March 1, 2003Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. A retired bank manager from Wales, she originally planned to join the thousands of other foreign volunteers who spend a few weeks each year picking olives, monitoring Israeli roadblocks and acting as human shields in solidarity with the Palestinians.
But after nine weeks in the West Bank city of Nablus, with bullet shrapnel in her leg and horrors she never imagined etched on her mind, she says she has come to understand - perhaps support - the more extreme and tragic tactics of a brutal conflict. She has found friends in the men with guns and the proud relatives of suicide bombers, the "martyrs" whose pictures paper the streets.
"I had never seen a tank before. I'd never seen a soldier. I've seen dead people, but I've never seen someone killed by these huge 25mm bullets. The injuries are horrific. The cannon from the tank takes the whole chest off," she said.
"This is terrorism gone completely and utterly crazy. There is no other word for this because it's not one incident, it thousands of incidents across the whole city."
<snip>
"Let's not blame the victims. It's clear who the real terrorists are here.
"I'm going to fight it."
It is not what she imagined for herself just a few weeks ago.
Ms Gwynne, age 65, retired in 1998 after 15 years as a manager for Barclays in Aberystwyth. Since then she has split her time between her two daughters, one in Germany the other, at university in California, who took her to a Palestinian solidarity meeting at which she was so outraged by accounts of children shot by the Israeli army that she decided to see for herself.
She arrived in Tel Aviv proudly announcing her intention to help the Palestinians. Immigration officers held her for three hours and tried to persuade her it was too dangerous to go to Ramallah and to ask why she wasn't there to help Israeli victims.
"I had three people telling me how dangerous it was to come to Ramallah, which I find ironic seeing as the Israelis are the ones causing the danger," she said.
Through an encounter at a New Year's Eve party, she found herself in Nablus, which has suffered even more than most West Bank cities under virtually perpetual curfew for more than six months. She is working as a volunteer "nurse" - although she has no training - with a Palestinian ambulance driver, Feras al-Bakri, taking the wounded through Israeli army checkpoints to Raffidia hospital.
It is dangerous. Last week Mr Bakri was shot in the hand and another man had a testicle shot off by a soldier who opened fire for no apparent reason.
Nine weeks later she is something of a veteran.
"It hasn't surprised me but it has shocked me to see a baby die because it's mother has been dumped next to the roadside in the cold because the Israelis won't let the ambulance through; to see a child in a hospital with its nose shot off; to hear an Israeli soldier threaten to kill us all. He said: 'I can kill you all in 10 seconds.' This is a crime of unimaginable proportions unless you live here."
Ten days ago the Israeli army surged into Nablus's old city, the Casbah, destroying homes, searching for Palestinian fighters. The killing went on for a week. At the end 11 people lay dead, including three children, one a 14-year-old boy shotby the army alongside his grandfather.
Hundreds were wounded. Among them was a boy who took a bullet through his palate.
"It would be better if they'd killed him. He's in hospital in a terrible state," Ms Gwynne said. "I found it very difficult to handle at night. For the first week I wept, but after that I became so angry I couldn't shed any more tears."
During the fighting she caught a piece of shrapnel in the leg while trying to reach a woman who had gone into labour. She says an Israeli soldier deliberately shot between her leg, even though it was evident that she was unarmed.
"The Palestinian fighters say I am one of them now, wounded on the battlefield."
Threat of rape
"I've been arrested too. One of the Israeli commanders threatened me with rape. <<Remember, Gwynne is 65 years old.>> He was very graphic," she said.
"I've told Israeli soldiers that when you say you're just obeying orders, please remember that it's what every German soldier said."
<snip>---------------
E/CN.4/1016/Add.1
11 February 1970COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Twenty-sixth session
Item 5 of the provisional agenda
REPORT OF THE SPECIAL WORKING GROUP OF EXPERTS ESTABLISHED UNDER
RESOLUTION 6 (XXV) OF THE COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Chapter II. Analysis of some relevant proclamations and orders of the Israel Defence Forces in the territories occupied by Israel as a result of hostilities in the Middle East
Chapter III. Analysis of evidence received by the Special Working Group<snip>83. Mrs. Dawlat El Sayed Allam (RT.18) testified that the Israelis had come to her house during lunch. Her sixty-five-year-old husband, and her eight children had been present. They had been lined up and asked for their identity cards. Her husband had said he was a Sheikh and knew nothing about any soldiers. The Israelis had then beaten him savagely. She had been tied up and the Israeli soldiers had attempted to rape her. Her fifteen-year old son had seized a knife and attacked the soldiers, who had killed him. They had then raped her. The witness had been raped a second time by Israeli soldiers when she had tried to get to Egypt. The witness stated that she had not been the only woman treated in that way in the village, and some who had resisted rape had been killed.
84. Sheikh El-Hersh (RT.19) stated that as he and his family were moving towards Egypt after being forced from their home (Bir el-Abd), one of his daughters had died of thirst since they had no food or water.
85. Mr. Nasser Salem Salama (RT.19) testified that when the Israelis asked the villagers of Bir el-Abd who their chief was and when he had come forward, they tied him up, robbed him of everything and struck him with a rifle butt in the left cheek. His house was burned down.
86. Witness E. (RT.19) also stated that she had been sexually molested by the Governor of Nablus Prison when she went to him to obtain permission to visit her husband. The same witness also stated that, according to her information, four other girls had been taken into a nearby room by Israeli officers who raped them.<snip>----------------THE FIRST SUICIDE BOMBER WAS JEWISH
By Amnon Holtzman
Maariv (Israel), March 8, 2004http://www.acj.org/Daily%20News/2004/March/March_08.htm
The first suicide murderer after the Oslo Accords was Baruch Goldstein.
His motive was to sabotage any agreement. He succeeded. This was before
the cry went up "don't give the Palestinians rifles".Almost every day we hear comments such as "The Oslo Accords are
responsible for the bus bombings", "Because of the Oslo Accords over a
thousand citizens have been murdered," and so on. Is this in fact the
case? Exactly ten years ago, on Purim of 1994, early in the morning,
Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs and
murdered 29 praying Arabs and injured many more. From the date of the
signing of the Oslo Accords, on the previous September 13, until the
massacre perpetrated by Goldstein on February 25, 22 Israelis were
killed, ten of them within the Green Line. A similar number to those
killed during the years of the first Intifada. During this period there
was not a single mass attack and there were no suicide bombers with
explosive belts blowing themselves up in buses.Moreover, until 40 days after the massacre at the Cave of the
Patriarchs, self-detonating terrorists were an unknown phenomenon in
Israel. Two weeks after Goldstein's attack, the following appeared in
the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot : "Hamas yesterday distributed a
special proclamation in the territories threatening to perpetrate five
large attacks in retaliation for the massacre at the Cave of the
Patriarchs. This was issued by the operations room of the Iz a-Din
al-Kassam Brigade, the military arm of the Hamas".According to Islam, the first day of remembrance for the dead is marked on
the 40th day after death. Indeed, the first suicide bombing in Israel
took place in Afula on 6.4.94, exactly 40 days after Goldstein's
murderous attack in the mosque. The Afula massacre, in which 8 Israelis
were murdered, was the first retaliatory attack perpetrated by the
Hamas. On 7.4.94, a day after the suicide attack in Afula, Tommy Lapid
wrote the following in Maariv: "The murderous attack in Afula will
first and foremost go down in history as revenge for the attack in
Hebron. The victims of the attack in Afula are victims of Dr. Baruch
Goldstein, just as were those Moslems worshipers at the Cave of the
Patriarchs." The second revenge attack took place a week later, on the
Day of Remembrance for IDF Fallen Soldiers, April 13 on a bus in
Hadera,. These two suicide attacks occurred while the IDF was still in
control of all Palestinian cities and while Arafat was still in
Tunisia. They were followed by suicide attacks in Tel Aviv (Bus No. 5),
Beit Lid, Ramat Gan and Jerusalem. After several months of quiet, it
seemed as if the suicide attacks had come to an end. Then the bomb
"engineer" - Yihyah Ayash, was "taken out". This was followed by
another spate of suicide attacks, the first of which occurred in
Jerusalem (Bus No. 18) -- two years to the day after the murders
perpetrated by Goldstein. Goldstein's intention was to sabotage the
Oslo Accords and to prevent the transfer of Hebron to Palestinian
Authority control together with the other large Palestinian cities in
the West Bank. A week after his deed, Goldstein's widow was quoted as
saying, "Baruch was not a psychopath. He knew exactly what he was
doing. He planned it in order to halt the peace talks. He did it for
the Jewish People".The problem of suicide bombers, one that Israel has
yet not found a solution for, is the result of the massacre in the Cave
of the Patriarchs. Presumably, the murder of 29 worshippers who were
shot in the back would have resulted in a bombed bus in the heart of
Israel whenever it happened, regardless of time and of who headed the
government.The murders committed by Goldstein and the consequent
blowing up of buses undermined the trust between the two sides, caused
a decline of support for the accords by both sides and was the main
cause of Netanyahu's ascent to power in the 1996 elections, which
marked the final fatal blow to the Oslo Agreements and the final
collapse of the peace process.Amnon Holtzman is a member of Israel's left-wing Yachad Party.
www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substanceânot soap-boxingâplease! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'âwith its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright fraudsâis used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- End Message ---
