Monday, March 15, 2010
The JPost has the story of a new independently done report responding to the Goldstone Report: 'Hamas used kids as human shields'
Hamas gunmen used Palestinian children as human shields, and established command centers and Kassam launch pads in and near more than 100 mosques and hospitals during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last year, according to a new Israeli report being released on Monday that aims to counter criticism of the IDF.
The detailed 500-page report, obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post, was written by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Malam), a small research group led by Col. (res.) Reuven Erlich, a former Military Intelligence officer who works closely with the army.
The IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) cooperated with the report's authors and declassified hundreds of photographs, videos, prisoner interrogations and Hamas-drawn sketches as part of an effort to counter the criticism leveled at Israel in the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report.
Work on the Malam report began immediately after former judge Richard Goldstone issued his damning report of Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip in September...
Robin Shepherd has a take on the new report: New report shows Hamas used more than 100 mosques and hospitals to fire rockets during Cast Lead
...Well, it will be interesting to see how extensively this report is covered in the western media. At the time of writing this article, the BBC website did have a report up on the use of human shields in Gaza...about Israeli soldiers allegedly using Palestinians as human shields.
Biden and Hillary R. Clinton have taken note of this, right ...?!?!
Yea, right!
Btw, "hope and change" as a theme are particularly - i.e. deeply and tragically - ironic in this context. Hope and change make for wonderful campaign slogans, but dealing with the real world via the same hopeless and changeless methods of the past, herein applied to Israel and the Sunni (e.g., Hamas, Fatah) and Shi'a (e.g., Hezbollah) Muslims in that milieu is - or rather, should be - particularly telling, particularly illuminating.
The much-reviled Goldstone Report did contain the admission by Hamas' leaders that they employed human shields. However, the report characterized this as "boasting".