Usha Khanna - Aao Yaro Gao
So, what has been going on lately? Haaretz had a report that really grabbed me last week about the recent investigations of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. It has testimony from Israeli soldiers that say Gazan civilians were used as human shields. Well, that's kind of the opposite of what we hear over here, isn't it? Here's a bit from the article:
"The practice was not to call it 'the neighbor procedure.' Instead it was called 'Johnny,'" the soldier said, using IDF slang for Palestinian civilians. The IDF employed this practice extensively during the second intifada, before it was outlawed by the High Court of Justice in 2005.
At every home, the soldier said, if there were armed occupants, the house was besieged, with the goal of getting the militants out of the building alive. The soldier said he was present at several such operations.
In an incident his commanders told him about, three armed militants were in a house. Attack helicopters were brought in. "They ... again sent the [Palestinian] neighbor in. At first he said that nothing had happened [to the armed men]," the soldier said.
"Again they brought in attack helicopters and fired. They again sent in the neighbor. He said there were two dead and one still alive. They then brought in a bulldozer and began to knock the house down on him until [the neighbor] entered." The soldier said he had been told that the only militant remaining alive was captured and turned over to the Shin Bet security service.
So of course people have accused Hamas of using human shields too, and maybe they have, but there are some pretty compelling arguments that suggest otherwise (I found Israeli activist Uri Avnery's assessment here very interesting - he goes into the role that propaganda plays in the conflict too). At any rate, I guess this looks pretty bad for the IDF. The BBC also had a good piece on some of the same stuff. They even link to a copy of the official report from Breaking the Silence (a campaign group made up of Israeli soldiers) on Operation Cast Lead.
Meanwhile, things aren't getting any easier in the settlement department: Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected US calls to suspend a planned housing project in East Jerusalem. While I don't think the US should be telling other countries what to do, this seems like it might be sort of an exception since pretty much every other country in the world has been calling for the same thing for years now and the settlements are still illegal under international law (last time I checked).
Oh snap, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president of Iran, powerful and influential cleric, and a supporter of Mir Hossein Mousavi, delivered the Friday sermon at Tehran University two days ago. There were more demonstrations in which people were tear gassed and batoned. Reza Aslan has been giving some good insight and analysis about the events in Iran and he has a good analysis of Rafsanjani's sermon here. Rafsanjani pretty much directly criticized the government's handling of the post-election drama (or is trauma a better word?) and actually hinted that he's making some progress in reaching some kind of deal with people. As vague as that sounds, apparently it's all that anyone can come up with as to what on earth he's talking about. The crowd seemed to be yelling slogans and shouting throughout the sermon (mostly pro-Mousavi, anti-government, "death to the dictator" type of slogans), so I guess they're still pretty angry about the whole government killing people thing. It'll still be a matter of whether the reformists can turn the appropriate wheels of government or whether the government can actually deceive the people enough to make all the anger go away. The government has already proven with their communication lockdowns, newspaper shutdowns, and state television propaganda that they are pretty serious about it. Still, it's a lot of wool to pull over a lot of eyes.
Alright, that's all for now. Back to biology.
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