Top Iranian commander Hassan Firouzabadi says Zionists are behind recent Norway terrorism as they fuel rightist sentiments and foster terrorism for personal gain.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Iran's Armed Forces said on Saturday that people in the West need to be aware of the Zionist agenda as the group is 'toying with people of the world in pursuit of their objectives," the Armed Forces information office reported in a press release.

Major General Firouzabadi's comments come on the heels of recent attacks by Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik who has revealed in his confessions that he sought to send a strong signal with the July 22 attacks that killed scores of people.

Breivik claimed that he had carried out the attacks to save Europe from what he called the “Islamization” of the continent, the Norwegian daily Aftenposten reported.

Maj. Gen. Firouzabadi further pointed out that when the Zionist regime [Israel] feels downbeat and defeated, it attempts to create deviations within Christianity and spread “Christian Zionism” which the world needs to be on the alert for.

The Norwegian terrorist has said there are tens of far-right terror cells ready to overthrow European governments that tolerate Islam.

Breivik, who claimed responsibility for the recent terrorist violence in Norway, has noted that he is only one of about 80 like-minded extremist cells throughout the west of Europe, which are ready to carry out similar violent attacks.

He made the remarks in a 1,500-page handbook he emailed to some 5,700 people just hours before the twin attacks that left at least 76 people dead in Norway.

The title of the handbook is "2083: A European Declaration of Independence."

Elsewhere in the handbook, he further reveals links with British far-right groups, noting that he was recruited in a meeting in London in 2002.

His Islamophobic and anti-multiculturalist remarks echo statements already made by European leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on the failure of multiculturalism to hold culturally different communities together.

On July 22, a massive bomb explosion rocked government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight people and leaving several more injured.

On the same day, a gunman opened fire on members of the youth wing of Norway's Labor Party on nearby Utoeya Island, killing 68 people.

it was a mistake made in war and not an intentional bombing of civilians a massacre is what is going on in Lybia and syria, or the hselling of civiliansa by terrorist organizations.

Life is not just different for Jews in Israel...........but in actual fact without Egyptian manpower the Arab world was not going to be a military threat.
It is simply that the moribund Iranian theocracy needs some narrative to preserve its grip on power now Saddam is gone..............the only counterbalance is to create Kurdistan and throw Syria and Iran into turmoil

Next time Hezbollah picks a fight with Israel Israel should bomb Lebanon like we bombed Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama sends drones to Pakistan in response to a FAILED BOMBING IN NEW YORK, killing 13 Pakistanis.

If that's Obama's doctrine, why shouldn't Israel follow in the noble-peace prize winners foot steps?

These hezbollah terrorists are thugs. Israel should't bother sending infantry into the country to be killed by camping terrorists who hide in hospitals and churches and mosques. Bomb from the air.

The Geneva Convention explicitly forbids enemies from attacking from civilian areas. And it does not make them immune from attack because they hide amongst civilians.

So if civilians are killed when Israel bombs Hezbollah positions, the fault rests on Hezbollah - not Israel.

the article, I disagree that we're looking at a new 'flashpoint' war between Israel and Hizbllah.

First Hizballah finds itself on the wrong side of the mandate of heaven (as the old Sun Tsu line goes) in terms of its relationship between the Lebanese population over the assassination of Lebanese Premier Hariri, and the organization's support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria (word is they're burning Hizballah flag's and pictures of Nassrallah).

So Hizballah's supply lines have the potential to be interrupted, it's reserves are weakened and its political support is undermined.

Hardly a recipe for going to war with a more powerful neighbor.

Second, the so-called ocean borders call for resistance. As of today, the nautical boundaries stand, regardless of Hizballah's table pounding. Lebanon already agreed to see boundaries with neighboring Crete, and the lines between Israel and Lebanon are based off of those negotiations. Israel has already pushed this issue into the realm of the UN, to confirm the legitimacy of these boundaries.

The idea that the 2006 war was the conclusive summation of the conflict between Israel and Hizballah seems somewhat short sited. The catalyst for the war, was not a plan by Israel to invade Lebanon, but Hizballah's decision to attack Israel with a focus on kidnapping its soldiers. While Israel's forces were strong enough to respond with a very robust level of firepower, strategic goals, whatever they were, were not set up with the ground level troops. It's forces were set up to repel an attack, not initiate one.

By 2008, Israel had corrected many of these issues, and we saw what its military was capable of doing in Gaza, during Cast Lead. It is also likely that since 2006, Israel's intelligence services have increased their focus on Hizballah's military capability and its strategic arm on how to counteract Hizballah's tactical competancies.

It is here that the reserve lines become key. Remember, after 30 days, Lebanon's political leaders were calling for a ceasefire. A future war with Hizballah, would only exacerbate the internal Lebanese tensions and Hizballah's sources of supply would be all that more difficult to tap given the challenges faced by both Syria and Iran.

Indeed, while Hizballah benefitted from Iran's largese post 2006, that country's financies are in worse shape and have a greater domestic burden than six years ago, that situation is unlikely to change in the coming 12 to 18 months.

Should Hizballah decide to attack Israel, or one of its gas facilities, it would provide a legitimate cause for Israel to again attack Lebanon, this time with greater force and focus.

Remember, last time the two armies clashed, Israel was in the middle of the second intifada. Since then, that conflict has also been reduced in intensity and violence.

And as always, Hizballah runs the real risk that an outside conflict, if not outright defeat could spur one of Lebanon's other internal ethnic groups to take the opportunity to further weaken the Iranian proxy army.

Here is a quote from this article: "In the five years since the second Qana massacre and the war's conclusion." A MASSACRE, really? A massacre is an INTENTIONAL mass killing of unarmed people. Israel faces a terorist group in Lebanon hiding among civilians, just as the Taliban (an islamic fundamentalist but not a declared terrorist organization ) does in Afganistan, yet these authors would not dare calling the US frequent unintentional killings of Afghan civilians massacre; they provide a perfect example of the media's (and the world) double standards when it comes to Israel. I used to be a Professor at the University of Maryland where Bilal Y. Saab is a Ph.D. candidate. If I were on his dissertation committee he would not receive his Ph.D until he learns the definitions of certain basic terms. There is no need for more biased and non-professional political analysts; that field is already too crowded.

The authors also conveniently state Hezbollah's claim for the gas fields off the northern Israeli coast without mentioning that the claim was rejected by the UN.

I was involved the other day in a debate with a commenter named “Cliff” on the Mondoweiss blog about whether or not Hamas and Hezbollah used human shielding in the Lebanon and Gaza conflicts of 2006 and 2009 respectively. Since my most recent response to this commenter has been inexplicably banned on the Mondoweiss site, I thought I would enter my response here, where the same discussion is occurring.

When I denounced Hamas’ “cowardly and deliberate use of civilians for shielding purposes, booby trapping homes, and their use of mosques, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure for military purposes” I was told the following by commenter “Cliff”:

“Your generalized statements about the IDF are built on absolutely no systematic evidence. The IDF has been shown to use human shields, and Hamas and Hezbollah have been shown to NOT use human shields – both in systematic studies.”

He further said:

“Israel and its supporters regularly blame the disproportionate amount of civilian deaths on Hamas’s tactics of human shielding. However, in one such example – the 2006 Lebanon War – the US Army War College found no ‘systematic’ usage of said tactic”

Well, that depends on what you mean by “systematic.” The War College study referenced here, “The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy” by Dr. Stephen Biddle and Jeffrey A. Friedman is a monograph that argues that modern nonstate actors (Hezbollah in this instance) can wage conventional warfare in state-like ways. Their analysis assesses this claim in a detailed analysis of Hezbollah’s conduct of the campaign at the tactical through theater-strategic levels of the war. It deals only cursorily with the issues of distinction and human shielding, and concludes:

“Hezbollah is often described as having used civilians as shields in 2006, and, in fact, they made extensive use of civilian homes as direct fire combat positions and to conceal launchers for rocket fire into Israel. Yet the villages Hezbollah used to anchor its defensive system in southern Lebanon were largely evacuated by the time Israeli ground forces crossed the border on July 18. As a result, the key battlefields in the land campaign south of the Litani River were mostly devoid of civilians, and IDF participants consistently report little or no meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah fighters and noncombatants. Nor is there any systematic reporting of Hezbollah using civilians in the combat zone as shields. The fighting in southern Lebanon was chiefly urban, in the built-up areas of the small to medium-size villages and towns typical of the region. But it was not significantly intermingled with a civilian population that had fled by the time the ground fighting began. Hezbollah made very effective use of local cover and concealment (see below), but this was obtained almost entirely from the terrain—both natural and man-made.”

(In a foot note, however, the authors posit a caveat: “There are reports of occasional exceptions. In Bint Jubayl, for example, a woman wasseen waving a white flag from what was believed to be a Hezbollah occupied house: LTC A int., MHI:121607a. “A few women” were spotted in At Tayyibah: LTC R int., MHI:121807p4. Some civilians were seen in Aytarun in the early days of the war, but not later: 1LT O int., MHI:031308a1. Isolated movement by civilian vehicles was reported in Haddatha: MAJ K int., MHI:031608p2. We heard no accounts, however, of any significant civilian population on any battlefield south of the Litani, or any systematic effort by Hezbollah to exploit civilian intermingling as a shield.”)

As far as the ground combat south of the Litani river is concerned, this is largely the truth, though far from the whole truth, which, unsurprisingly, is not expanded upon considering that this is largely study of tactics and operations. But this reference in the study only addresses the practice of deliberately coercing civilians to remain in combat areas, which even the IDF admitted only occurred in two instances. What this ignores however, is that there is abundant evidence of Hezbollah’s positioning of military infrastructure in homes, cellars, mosques, and heavily populated residential areas, thus rendering them vulnerable to air assault—and thus violating one of the principal tenets of distinction, in direct contravention of international humanitarian law ("The Parties to the conflict shall, to the maximum extent feasible: …(b) Avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.” -- Geneva Convention (Protocol 1), Article 58)

There is also abundant testimony along with extensive video and photographic evidence attesting to Hezbollah’s positioning of rocket launchers and firing rockets from residential areas outside of the ground combat zone, but vulnerable to air assault, and thus endangering the lives of civilians.

Photos that were smuggled out of Lebanon on July 17, 2006 by a Melbourne journalist published in a story in the Sunday Herald Sun on July 30, 2006 show Hezbollah terrorists having taken up a position in the Christian neighborhood of Wadi Shahrour, east of Beirut, on a truck mounted with a Russian ZSU-23X2 anti-aircraft cannon. The militants/terrorists were dressed in civilian clothing so they could quickly disappear among the local population.

There are other photos showing Hezbollah operatives having stationed a truck carrying ten long-range Iranian Zelzal missiles in Wadi Shahrour in order to launch missiles from there against Israeli cities. The truck carrying the missiles was targeted by the Israeli Air Force before they could be launched. Until the Hezbollah terrorists arrived with the missiles, this residential area of Beirut had not been touched by the IAF. Said Sunday Herald Sun reporter Chris Link:

“THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon's battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia. The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-caliber weapons.

Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon. The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.

The images include one of a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun metres from an apartment block with sheets hanging out on a balcony to dry. Others show a militant with AK47 rifle guarding no-go zones after Israeli blitzes. Another depicts the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block blown up in an Israeli air attack.

The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut and did not wish to be named said he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated.

"Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets," he said.

"Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated. It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more."

According to a July 25, 2006 AP report, quoting UN Humanitarian chief Jan Egeland (who is, BTW, hardly an admirer of Israel)

"Consistently, from the Hizbullah heartland, my message was that Hizbullah must stop this cowardly blending ... among women and children," he said. "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men."

On July 22, 2006 IDF forces destroyed a vehicle in the village of Mervachin, in southern Lebanon, containing anti-tank missiles. A missile stockpile was found in the basement of the village mosque, as evidenced in photos taken.

Two reports, one by Sonia Verma of the Canadian National Post, and another by John Lee Anderson of the New Yorker:

“Hezbollah's Deadly Hold on the Heartland” - Canada National Post, Aug ??5??, ??2006??:

“The surgeon led a group of journalists over what remained [of his hospital in Tyre]: ?mangled debris, shredded walls and a roof punched through by an Israeli shell. “Look ?what they did to this place," Dr. Fouad Fatah said, shaking his head. "Why in the world ?would the Israelis target a hospital?" The probable answer was found a few hours later in ?a field nearby. Hidden in the tall grass were the burned remnants of a rocket-launcher. ?Confronted with the evidence, Dr. Fatah admitted his hospital could have been used as a ?site from which to fire rockets into Israel.”

And,

"We've been preparing ourselves for this fight for the last five years. We can fight this for much longer," said Abu Ismail, a local Hezbollah leader near the village of Bint Jbeil who uses a nom de guerre, like most of his fellow fighters. Residents of the cluster of villages closest to the Israeli border, Hezbollah's most loyal supporters, helped stow the weapons away.

But as the conflict continues, there is an undercurrent of anger among some residents.

"Hezbollah are using [us] as human shields," said Rima Khouri, gesturing overhead as Israeli warplanes sliced through the sky.

The Lebanese Christian woman fled from her village of Ain Abel to one of the swelling refugee shelters in the city of Tyre. She was one of few people to speak freely about her anger at Hezbollah and their strategy of firing rockets into Israel from civilian areas.

"Their protection comes with a heavy price. We want nothing to do with them," she said.

Nasser Kareem shared her sentiments.

During a pitched battle in his village of Bint Jbeil last Thursday, the 48-year-old dentist watched from his kitchen window as Hezbollah fighters dragged a rocket launcher across the torn street in front of his house.

A few minutes later, he heard four successive blasts. Kareem barely managed to cover his four-year-old son's ears before the rockets were fired. His own ears are still ringing.

"Five minutes after they fired the rockets, the Israelis started bombing," he recalled from the safety of a shelter in Beirut.

"They are making us magnets for the Israelis," he said.

“Letter from Beirut: The Battle for Lebanon,” ?by Jon Lee Anderson - New Yorker Magazine, Aug 7, 2006:

“ We turned north, to a hospital in Sidon. Near the hospital, a mosque lay in ruins. A man approached and told me that he was a teacher at the Hariri school. I asked him why he thought the Israelis had hit a mosque, and he said, simply, “It was a Hezbollah mosque.” A younger man came up to me and, when we were out of earshot of others, said that ?Hezbollah had kept bombs in the basement of the mosque, but that two days earlier a ?truck had taken the cache away. It was common knowledge in Sidon, he said, and ?everyone was expecting the mosque to be hit. When, the previous evening, displaced ?people from the south had gathered on the grounds, they had been warned away.”

As James G. Zumwalt, a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf and Vietnam wars, and a military analyst and correspondent for the Washington times wrote:

“By way of background, in the early 1980s, Syria, which then controlled Lebanon, reluctantly allowed a group of 500 Iranian Revolutionary Guards into the Lebanese city of Baalbek, providing the seed from which Hezbollah sprang forth. Funded by Tehran, this terrorist organization began currying favor with the local population, providing many social services. Thus, when the popular Hezbollah secretly embarked upon activities with a more sinister purpose — putting a Lebanese citizenry at risk it purportedly sought to protect in order to gain tactical advantage against Israel in any future conflict — the local population blindly accepted this activity without knowledge of what it involved.

The activity upon which Hezbollah had embarked was conversion of private homes into mini-military sites from where it could easily target Israel’s civilian population. Cloaking itself as the protective shepherd, Hezbollah effectively prepared an unwitting Lebanese civilian flock as sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered in furtherance of its own war-fighting capabilities.

Long before hostilities erupted on July 12, Hezbollah construction teams had gone out and modified numerous Lebanese homes. Sometimes with, but most the time without, the homeowner’s permission, workers began adding on a large, single-function room. These rooms were unique for, when completed, they lacked an essential element of all rooms — a door. Each room was sealed shut — but only, and immediately, after an object was placed inside.

Often homeowners and neighbors did not know what exactly was entombed within the room as the object’s insertion and the subsequent sealing of the room normally took place at night — with the object always kept under wraps.

The residences Hezbollah selected for these unsolicited “home improvements” were chosen for their proximity to the Israeli border. When the fighting started after Tel Aviv responded militarily to Hezbollah’s July cross-border raid, resulting in the deaths of three Israeli soldiers and the capture of two more, the purpose of the covert home improvements became evident to the owners — though many were destroyed by Israeli air strikes before they could be activated.

When war erupted in southern Lebanon, designated leaders of Hezbollah combat teams received envelopes, each containing an address of one of the modified homes. The team quickly deployed to its assigned location, immediately breaking through an exterior wall of the sealed room. Each envelope contained aiming and firing instructions for the object prepositioned inside the room before it was sealed — a surface-to-surface missile atop a launcher. After removing part of the room’s roof to allow for unobstructed flight and on command, the team was to fire the missile, raining death and destruction down upon Israel’s civilian population.

Hezbollah had designed a tactical plan calculated to maximize civilian casualties on both sides of battlefield — by design on the Israeli side in targeting its major population centers and by consequence on the Lebanese side as Israel responded. While this tactic was, from the Israeli perspective, checkmated by virtue of good intelligence, from the Lebanese perspective, many civilians at these launch sites were forced to pay the ultimate price. Sadly, from Hezbollah’s perspective, these civilian casualties were but dispensable pawns in its chess match with Israel.” (“Hezbollah’s Deadly Chess Match,” Oct. 25, 2006, Washington Times).

According to a Nov 30, 2010-CBS/AP report drawn from the Wikileaks cache:

“Iranian Red Crescent ambulances were used to smuggle weapons to Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group during its 2006 war with Israel, according to newly leaked U.S. diplomatic memos. The memos say the "IRC shipments of medical supplies served also to facilitate weapons shipments." According to one of the documents, a person whose name was not published "had seen missiles in the planes destined for Lebanon when delivering medical supplies to the plane." The plane was allegedly "half full" prior to the arrival of any medical supplies, according to the memo.”

A lengthy report (“Hezbollah’s use of Lebanese civilians as human shields: the extensive military infrastructure positioned and hidden in populated areas. from within the Lebanese towns and villages deliberate rocket attacks were directed against civilian targets in Israel”) was produced by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, a private research group headed by Reuven Erlich, a retired colonel in IDF military intelligence, who, in the course of his analysis, worked closely with the Israeli military, and produced a report replete with video, aerial and close-up ground photographs buttressed by declassified IDF intelligence and after action reports and corroborated by Hezbollah prisoner testimony.

Some of the report’s findings:

--Hezbollah weapons storage rooms (in red) on the ground floor of a building with civilian shops in Sultaniyeh village.

--A rocket launcher about 20 feet from a home in the village of Abassi

--A van filled with missiles parked next to a mosque

--An anti-aircraft unit next to private homes

--Close-up of the mobile anti-aircraft unit

--A Kornet missile launcher in a courtyard

--Hezbollah infrastructure incorporated into the village of Maroun A-Ras

--A bunker used by Hezbollah terrorists below a home

--A Hezbollah structure built in the midst of a populated area and up against a mosque and cemetery

--A weapons cache found next to a private home.

--An arms warehouse in Qana built up against a mosque

--Missiles found in a Hezbollah weapons cache

--Anti-tank missiles in a storage room attached to a private home

--Anti-tank missiles found in a car in Marwahin

--A Katyusha missile is launched from a residential high-rise building

--A survey of the ranges of the various missiles remaining in Hezbollah's possession

--A map noting the number of missiles fired from each location in Lebanon

--Translated target-sheets with trajectories targeting Israeli cities and communities, found at launch-sites

--Shrapnel from missiles fired at northern Israeli towns and cities

--A high-powered camera and other surveillance equipment found in use inside a Lebanese living room

--A listening station located in a living room of a private home

--An extensive observation center in a residential building

--A Hezbollah frequency scanner found in a home used as a base for surveillance of IDF forces

On the battle for Bint J’Bail, the report noted:

“It should be noted that Hezbollah waged fierce fighting from inside civilian houses, where the organization’s operative units were placed. The organization’s operatives used gunfire and anti-tank fire against IDF soldiers from inside civilian houses. On more than one occasion they gained an operative advantage against IDF forces that found themselves inside a “killing zone” (while moving between Hezbollah controlled houses or while remaining in buildings identified and charges explosive placed had Hezbollah organization). The by booby traps in civilian houses where it assumed the IDF would operate. Dozens of Hezbollah operatives were killed during the fighting—a relatively high number considering the limited space.”

Within Bint J’Bail, the IDF found and photographed small arms, magazines, guns, binoculars, vests, Russian-made Konkurs antitank missiles found in the storehouse of one of the town’s houses, a camera for intelligence collection, RPG-7 launchers, US-made TOW missiles in original container, a camera for intelligence collection, and communications devices, including a radio frequency scanner.

With regard to Hamas, this commenter asserted:

“Israel and it’s supporters regularly blame the disproportionate amount of civilian deaths on Hamas’s tactics of human shielding. The Goldstone report has stated that no evidence was found of systematic human shielding by Hamas. On the other hand, it found evidence of human shielding by the IDF.”

Well, that’s not surprising considering that the interviews upon which this judgment was rendered, conducted under the intimidating and watchful eye of Hamas, found the facts that the Goldstone panel wished to find: Israel had committed human rights abuses and war crimes. Even though the mission acknowledged that "it was faced with a certain reluctance by the persons it interviewed in Gaza to discuss the activities of the armed groups [Hamas]," nonetheless, the mission, incredibly, ignores the obvious implications of this dilemma and the distorting effect of it on the veracity of their testimony, and resolves virtually every issue in dispute in favor of the versions of the Hamas-furnished witnesses, and either ignores or subjects to withering skepticism any evidence to the contrary.

The laws of warfare include questions of distinction and proportionality. Distinction requires all combatants to wear uniforms or other dress that distinguishes them from civilians. The Goldstone report mostly ignores Hamas’ complete abrogation of this principle and trivializes the difficulties faced by the Israelis in combating them among densely populated areas. Hamas’ deliberate use of civilians for shielding purposes, booby trapping homes, and their use of mosques, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure for military purposes are similarly downplayed or subject to skepticism.

Questions of proportionality, whether the use of force in an engagement was excessive or not, and whether civilian deaths and damage to infrastructure was avoidable or not, hinge critically on matters of context. Data and testimony from soldiers and commanders involved in the engagement, and how and why certain battlefield decisions and actions were taken, are crucial to the rendering of judgment on matters of the use of excessive force and negligence, not to mention the questions of intentionality needed to determine a war crime. Needless to say, the Goldstone mission had no Israeli testimony to factor into their judgments, and this troubled them not at all.

Indeed, in every incident, the mission does not even ask witnesses if Hamas gunmen were nearby, and thus, in the absence of any Israeli testimony, assumes a deliberate, murderous intent on the part of the Israelis to every civilian death. On every issue where civilians were killed in the cross-fire and hospitals and other property damaged, the mission finds Israel guilty of pursuing a "deliberate policy" of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." To read the report, you would think that the Israelis found no time to fight armed Hamas gunmen and instead just went hunting around for innocent civilians to kill and houses, water-plants, and hospitals to destroy.

The Goldstone mission had thus made clear that they had come to a crime scene to assess the extent of the crime, and not to impartially investigate whether the laws of war and the rules of engagement were breached in the course of a military operation. This was illustrated by the mission’s rejection of the expert testimony of British Colonel Richard Kemp, a veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia, who testified that "during Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli army did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population." But Goldstone rejected Colonel Kemp's testimony because "the Report did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas."

Excuse me? If "the Report" did not deal with "the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas" then what, pray tell, did "The Report" deal with?! Duh!

The habit of disregarding inconvenient evidence was also on display concerning the fire that struck the Al-Quds hospital. The Israelis referred to an article in Newsweek that supported its version that Hamas gunmen had commandeered the building: "Talal Safadi, ...had said that resistance fighters were firing from all around the hospital." He said of Hamas: "They failed to win the battle." Goldstone dismissed the "journalistic gloss" of the article and said: "the comments attributed to Mr. Safadi can mean either that people were inside the hospital firing or were in positions outside but near the hospital. The journalist did not clarify precisely what was meant."

This, in fact, is a lie. The Israelis also pointed to another account reported in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, which quoted one Magah al Rachmah, 25, who said: "The men of Hamas took refuge mainly in the building that houses the administrative offices of Al-Quds. They used the ambulances and forced ambulance drivers and nurses to take off their uniforms with the paramedic symbols, so that they could blend in better and elude Israeli snipers."

The Goldstone mission was thus confronted with two independent, non-Israeli sources confirming the fact that Hamas gunmen had commandeered the Al-Quds hospital for military purposes and had compelled hospital personnel to act as human shields, a blatant war crime. The mission disingenuously dismissed the first account, and completely ignored the other one, thus completely exonerating Hamas, and charging the Israelis with the war crime of attacking a defenseless hospital. Such dishonesty and such biased and selective use of evidence and testimony permeate the whole report. It is a crying disgrace.

The video and photographic evidence compiled by the IDF found that Hamas utilized some 100 mosques in Gaza during Cast Lead for weapons storage and firing. The analysis is corroborated by captured Hamas sketches of neighborhoods that show that mosques were used as sniper positions, Israeli Air Force videos showing massive secondary explosions after mosques were hit, as well as reports from IDF after action reports. IDF video and photo evidence shows weapons caches in the mosque in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City consisting of a warehouse full of rockets and mortar shells. A rocket-propelled grenade was also fired at Israel troops from the mosque.

The IDF found a mosque in Jabalya in northern Gaza that was full of weaponry including an anti-aircraft cannon. In a mosque in the Atatra neighborhood in northern Gaza City, a secret warehouse built under the podium from where the imam leads prayers, was discovered which was full of weaponry and improvised explosive devices. The IDF also discovered a bomb along a road in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip that was attached to a cable leading to a detonator in a mosque across the street, where Hamas fighters were to wait to detonate the device.

The IDF also recorded evidence and testimony attesting to Hamas operatives firing mortars at Israeli forces from a civilian rooftop, and Hamas operatives making use of civilian facilities, such as universities, for weapons development and systematically using protected civilian areas, such as schools, private homes, hospitals and mosques, for its industry of weapons smuggling, hiding and storage of rockets, explosives and ammunition, as well as the illicit harboring of combatants. They also show a weapons smuggling tunnel situated directly under a bed in a residential home. The list of documented discoveries is rather lengthy.

Asymmetric warfare, as Israel wages against Hamas in its own defense, is one of the great challenges faced by democracies like Israel and America. Targeting terrorist entities who wear no uniforms and deliberately position their war-waging capabilities in mosques, hospitals, and heavily populated areas pose challenges of terrible and tremendous complexity. The Goldstone report trivializes these complexities by deliberately and callously blurring the distinctions between inadvertent and deliberately inflicted civilian deaths.

The laws of war involve morally serious questions of necessity, distinction and proportionality. War crimes must involve intentionality to be war crimes. The Goldstone report ignores these distinctions almost entirely and does so in a transparently biased and partisan manner. It not only slanders a pluralistic democracy fighting in self defense, but through biased, selective documentation, and a series of brazen misapplications of international humanitarian law, it has used the language of human rights to exonerate and empower the Hamas terrorists, whose bloodstained mandate continues unimpeded and unabated.

"Arab land"
Why should North Africa be Arab land? Why should most of the Levant be Arab land? After all, the Arabs just came out of Arabia and conquered that land. No different than how the Jews conquered Israel in 1948.eBooks Resale Rights The Arabs arrogantly think they own every piece of real-estate they set foot on. However, the Jews, Berbers, Kurds, Assyrians, Copts would disagree. All land that they had, until the Arabs brutalized them and took it, claiming that it was now "arab land."
Since when is any land "arab land." What kind of a bullshit concept is that?

I think that
Should another war happen, we believe that it will be even larger and bloodier than the 2006 conflict. Our judgment is based on extensive field research in Lebanon covering the military preparations of both sides and analyzing their own assessments of the likelihood and nature of a future war. Over the past five years-
we interviewed and spoke with dozens of Hezbollah members, including political leaders-
advisors, commanders-
IT specialists, and foot soldiers.

Get more information:kayden kross

As always it depends on which side of the fence you sit as to who is right and who is wrong.

However, who ever is to blame - it is always the young children who suffer the most.

There is no such thing as free speech online or offline!

Half the country would be speaking German, the other half Japanese because it would have been divided by those two.rio sfr So foreign policies would have been in line with the those two empires..

Is it just me or am I the only one who believes this world is filled with hatred and brutality when the grounds for such behaviour isn't even warranted. I mean just looking at the picture of the old lady who probably needs medical treatment and whose health is deteriorating - it makes me sad that this women will probably also fight to the death for the cause... what cause?

Can they not fight? There is enough bloodshed already. seo in kent

When will this fighting end? Hasn't the innocent people already suffered too much? How much more blood do they need to spill before they stop? pacquiao vs marquez tickets I will pray for all the victims and their famiy and hope that someday soon the fighting will finally stop. watch mayweather vs ortiz online

The video and photographic evidence compiled by the IDF found that Hamas utilized some 100 mosques in Gaza during Cast Lead for weapons storage and firing. The analysis is corroborated by captured Hamas sketches of neighborhoods that show that mosques were used as sniper positions, Israeli Air Force bwin videos showing massive secondary explosions after mosques were hit, as well as reports from IDF after action reports. IDF video and photo evidence shows weapons caches in the mosque in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City consisting of a warehouse full of rockets and mortar shells. A rocket-propelled grenade was also fired at Israel troops from the mosque.The IDF found a mosque in Jabalya in northern Gaza that was full of weaponry including bwin an anti-aircraft cannon. In a mosque in the Atatra neighborhood in northern Gaza City, a secret warehouse built under the podium from where the imam leads prayers, was discovered which was full of weaponry and improvised explosive devices.