Why Israel kills so many civilians
From Zionist.com, a picture worth 1000 words. We’ve all heard that the Palestinians use children “as human shields,” but perhaps never knew quite what that meant… or weren’t ready to believe they could be so callous.
Every wonder why, despite Israel’s insistance that it goes to tremendous effort to avoid harming civilians in its war on terror, so many more Arabs than Jews end up dying in this conflict?
This is why:
Those are children packed in close around Hamas gunmen as they engage Israeli forces. Children being used as human shields. You want to try someone for war crimes? There are your defendants.
So why isn’t this comment in WashingtonPost, NYTimes etc?
Or at the very least in the Jerusalem Post. A picture is worth a thousand words.
It’s salutory to know that there are many photos like this that never make it into the newspapers. One has to ask oneself why.
But please note, I think this particular photo is old – I first saw it (or one very similar) in perhaps 2003 or 2004.
And how about the two kids enjoying the scenery on the lower left?
As much as I’d like to believe what you wrote, in order to be honest, you need to rule out all other possibilities.
Here’s one: The kids are not human shields brought in to protect the gunners.
The kids have run to the ditch for protection from fire (Israeli, or other arab faction), and are being protected by militants.
Pictures can be very misleading, and can be used in a number of diff. ways.
“Militant” in its younger years was a mere adjective, but it grew up to be promoted to noun, to create a handy euphemism for use by the terror-enablers and terror-apologists in our media.
Akiva, it’s unlikely that the kids ran to the ditch for protection. They are sitting up and looking around. They also look relaxed. If they were looking for protection, I’d expect them to be lying down (even if they didn’t know that’s the right thing to do, the gunners probably do).
However, this picture does admit to one other interpretation. It could be that the gunners are showing off or training, and there is no opposing force in sight. In such a case having the kids there just shows bad military discipline, nothing worse than that. The size of the crowd behind the gunners, and the fact that they appear to be standing around looking at the sights, supports that theory.
Along with the very good points made by other commenters here, I must ad that this phoot dates to 2004 – at least: http://backspin.typepad.com/backspin/2004/10/flirting_with_d.html
Thanks to Joseph for reassuring me that my memory isn\’t completely unreliable!
Akiva – your comment isn\’t unreasonable. However, this is only one of several photos taken at the time (some of them in series) and all showing the same thing: children and terrorists intermingling during confrontations with the Israeli military. This is beyond reckless, it is children responding to official indoctrination to become martyrs -a they want to be with the terrorists because they was to be injured and/or killed. And they want these things because they\’ve been taught to by the Palestinian Authority\’s teachers using official textbooks (mainly paid for by European taxpayers) jam packed full of antisemitic, suicidal and murderous drivel. And this was all before Hamas was elected!
In a similar vein, here are a few more pictures of Palestinian education.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/pictures/PalestinianChildAbuse/