OHCHR Report on the Gaza Raid
October 1, 2010 1:53 PM   Subscribe

"Israeli soldiers continued shooting at passengers who had already been wounded, with live ammunition... Forensic analysis demonstrates that two of the passengers killed on the top deck received wounds compatible with being shot at close range while lying on the ground: [American Citizen] Furkan Doğan received a bullet in the face..."
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights released a comprehensive report (pdf) on the Gaza flotilla raid. Responses from Salon, Huffington Post (a republishing of an article on Truth-out.)
posted by griphus (5 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: I realize you may have completely missed this recent metatalk thread, but we're feeling like another post about this is not a great idea in the best case and leading off posts with bloody pullquotes is really kind of a bad idea for any subject. -- cortex



 
The money quote from the Salon link:

The fact that a 19-year-old American citizen was one of the dead -- among those whom the report concluded was "summarily executed" by the Israelis -- makes the U.S. Government's silence here all the more appalling.  One of the prime duties of a government is to safeguard the welfare of its own citizens.  It's inconceivable for most governments in the world to remain silent in the face of formal findings that a foreign nation "summarily executed" one of its own citizens.  One of the reasons Turkey was so emphatic in its condemnation of Israel was because the dead were Turkish citizens; that's what governments do when a foreign nation kills its own citizens.  Yet not only does the U.S. Government sit silently, but its prior statements defending Israel were disgustingly cavalier.  Virtually the entire world -- literally -- vehemently condemned Israel for what it did here, yet the U.S. refused and continues to refuse to do so, notwithstanding these findings that one of its own citizens was essentially murdered.
posted by Joe Beese at 2:04 PM on October 1, 2010 [2 favorites]


The Obama administration is calling the report "unbalanced" (because the Israelis apparently refused to answer any of the UN panel's questions) and is the only vote of 30 against the report.

Well that must be a huge surprise for nobody.
posted by Artw at 2:05 PM on October 1, 2010


Christ, this is just so stupid. It's not like the guys in the boat were any reral threat, and -- even putting aside the morality of it -- the litersll overkill just creates more problems for Israel and the peace process.

Which may be accidental, but I think more likely indicates that the Israeli government and a significant number of Israelis just don't give a damn about finding a peaceful resolution, don't even see Palestinians as really human, and have consciously decided that their solution to the problem is just to be as as hard line and bloody-minded as possible until the Palestinians give up and go away. (Which, of course, they won't.)

Which leaves me in despair, because if one side just doesn't want peace, just wants to brutalize the other side and expand settlements in hope of defusing a "demographic bomb", well, we're never going to see peace.

Israel is really becoming a failing state, rife with conflict between Israeli and Palestinian, Jew and Arab, Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jew, Orthodox Ashkenazi and Orthodox Sephardi. And the sad thing, so many of the most intransigent, on all sides, seem to savor and fetishize being as intransigent and intolerant and smug and as contemptuous of every other group as they possibly can be, because God or Nationalism or Ethno-tribalism is, they think, on their side and vindicating their every brutality.

It's called the Holy Land, but to me at least, it seems the very vision of Hell on Earth.
posted by orthogonality at 2:06 PM on October 1, 2010 [2 favorites]


The seven European Union members on the body abstained, joining the United States in saying that the text failed to recognize that another flotilla inquiry set up by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took primacy.

Where do you find out who else abstained, and was it on these grounds or the US grounds that it was a biased report?
posted by shinybaum at 2:10 PM on October 1, 2010


Artw: "The Obama administration is calling the report "unbalanced" (because the Israelis apparently refused to answer any of the UN panel's questions) and is the only vote of 30 against the report.

Well that must be a huge surprise for nobody
"

What a tragedy. Not much more to say, really, except that those kinds of decisions build up and poison the well for years and years.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:11 PM on October 1, 2010


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