'Israeli War Crimes' signs to go on Metro buses

[mudplanet]

SEATTLE – "Israeli War Crimes," the enormous advertisement reads. "Your tax dollars at work."


To the right of the image is a group of children -- one little boy stares out at the viewer, the others gawk at a demolished building, all rebar and crumbled concrete.

It's an ad you'll be seeing soon on a handful of Metro buses in downtown Seattle.

A group calling itself the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has paid King County $1,794 so that 12 buses will carry that message around town, starting two days after Christmas. That's December 27: the two-year anniversary of Israeli attacks on Gaza, aimed at stopping rocket attacks and weapons smuggling.

http://www.king5.com/news/local/Israeli-War-Crimes-signs-to-go-on-Metro-buses-112108154.html

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. I can see it now...in January there will be pictures of Siderot and talk of Arab/Muslim war crimes

The only winner in that fight will be the ad men.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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[oberliner]

3. Palestinian War Crimes?

Would that be an improvement?

[mudplanet]

4. The difference: Palestinian war crimes aren't carried out with my tax dollars making me a war

criminal by proxy. Giving the Palestinians the same jets, helicopters and rockets we give the Israelis: would that be an improvement? How about we stop giving the Israelis money to murder people with impunity? Would that be an improvement? I'd really like to know what you think.

"Of those killed in the conflict, 4,228 have been Palestinians, 1,024 Israelis, and 63 foreign citizens. For every person killed, approximately seven were also injured. 3/

As shown in Graph I,the total number of Israelis,both civilians and Israeli Defence Force (IDF) combatants, killed by Palestinian armed groups and individuals, is declining.

In contrast the total number of Palestinians, both civilians and combatants killed by the Israeli security forces or Israeli individuals, remains relatively high. In 2007, for example, for every one Israeli death there were 25 Palestinian deaths compared to 2002 when the ratio was 1:2.5."
http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/BE07C80CDA4579468525734800500272

[oberliner]

5. They are with some of them

The US does send a pretty fair amount of money to the Palestinians.

Certainly not as much as what Israel gets, but we do send the Palestinians some of your tax dollars.

[Name removed]

7. Deleted message

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[azurnoir]

8. thats not quite true

under Bush we trained Fatah's militia and we gave some light military armament guns that is the Fatah forces that we trained were some the ones that were thrown out of Gaza during the Hamas take over

[oberliner]

10. Thankfully a fellow poster has corrected your misinformation

Millions of your tax dollars have been spent on military aid to Palestinians.

Palestinians have used that US military aid to kill other Palestinians.

[shira]

9. Your tax dollars have funded Palestinian terror for the last 20 years...

Who do you think keeps Hamas paid and cared for? Fatah gets money from the US and pays Hamas salaries. Since the Oslo accords were signed in the early 90's, Fatah's military wing paid for by your tax dollars has killed more than 50 American citizens.

Where's your outrage?

This talking point of yours is morally lazy. Apparently, and correct me if I'm wrong, what Israel actually does with your tax dollars wouldn't bother you in the least if you didn't feel you were paying for it. That's essentially your argument. War crimes (International Law) isn't high on your list either, since countries that are far worse than Israel presumably can do whatever they want so long as your tax dollars aren't paying for it.

The UN Human Rights Commission is mostly paid for with your tax dollars too and they have Libya and Saudi Arabia representing women's rights on it. Just recently the UN decided not to protect gay rights internationally. Even UNRWA is paid for with your tax dollars and UNRWA employs terrorists.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

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[oberliner]

12. Israel has not even been close to the top receiver of US funding over the past decade

Iraq and Afghanistan easily dwarf Israel's distant third place in that regard.

In fact, far more tax money has been spent on war with Iraq in just one year than all of the tax dollars that has gone to Israel since it became a country.

Just looking at the budget for FY2010 - the US has approved $750 billion dollars worth of spending on Iraq alone. And that's with the war supposedly winding down.

The same budget includes $336 billion dollars for Afghanistan.

That is over a trillion dollars in spending for Iraq/Afghanistan in just one single fiscal year.

Aid to Israel represents about less than one-third of one percent of that amount of the spending of your tax dollars this year compared to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Furthermore, with respect to your claim that "in no case does US foreign policy so outrageously directly enable human rights crimes on a continuous basis as it does in Israel and Palestine", I would direct you to the statistics regarding the number of civilian casualties caused by US forces in Iraq since the beginning of that conflict.

Firstly, well over 2 million people have been displaced from their homes in Iraq over the course of the US-led invasion of that country - many of whom remain refugees.

More disturbingly, estimates of the number of civilians killed as a result of the US invasion of Iraq ranges from 100,000 to over 600,000. These represent just the civilians that have been killed, not any militants or soldiers. Estimates for the number of civilian causalities in the Afghanistan War similarly occupy a wide range by certainly number at least in the tens of thousands.

The highest estimates of civilian Palestinian casualties since the conflict began in the 1940s is far less than the number of civilians killed in just a few months of the Iraq War.

And the Iraq War was paid for almost entirely by your tax dollars to the tune of almost one trillion per year.

If you want to talk about "US foreign policy...outrageously...enabling human rights crimes" - you seriously need a reality check.

[azurnoir]

13. Yes your right we give more to counries that we invade and bomb than those we do not

that being said we give more to Israel than any other country where those 2 factors do not apply

[oberliner]

14. And I would add that invading and bombing a country is pretty serious morally

Certainly at least on par with funding other countries doing the same.

[azurnoir]

15. Yes I would agree but it should be noted

that the US was under Republican leadership at the time these morally reprehensible acts were committed

[oberliner]

16. Very good point

Perhaps with more enlightened leadership those wars could have been avoided.

[mudplanet]

17. At the risk of sounding patronizing, that's a silly thing to say. I guess

Germany and Japan were the largest recipients of US aid between 1941 and 1945 then, if you consider what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan "aid".

I'm not going to provide a link for you because I'm pretty sure you're not unable to use a search engine, and if you do you'll find that every single reference you find will report that Israel has been the top recipient of US aid every year since around 1970, which Egypt being the second. I could find not one source referring to US funds spent in Iraq and Afghanistan as aid, as in both case these countries were invaded and occupied by the US and any monies going to them goes directly to US puppet regimes.

I hope you aren't accusing me of supporting the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: my humble opinion is that those who are responsible, the leaders of the criminal enterprise, should be imprisoned for life. Well, maybe we should have a second Nuremberg Trial, that would be more fitting.

I agree that on the scale of crimes, Iraq comes first, but Israel/Palestine isn't far behind is certainly worse than Afghanistan by the number of civilian casualties and people displaced. And it's been going on for over a half-century: Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been and continue to be forced to live in exile, often in "resettlement camps" and hundreds of thousands have been killed.

# Monitoring and documentation of internal displacement has been largely ad hoc and numbers of IDPs and demolitions have been systematically recorded by OCHA only since 2006.
# Lack of agency specifically addressing internal displacement within the OPT renders it difficult to provide global figure on currently displaced in the OPT.
# There are no confirmed statistics of the number of IDPs in the OPT. BADIL suggests that more than 128,700 persons have been displaced since 1967 to 2009 (excluding displacement as result of Israeli incursion in January 2009 in Gaza, see below).
# ICAHD estimates that 24,145 Palestinian homes have been demolished in the Occupied Territories since 1967 to 2009.
# In 2009, in the West Bank, OCHA recorded demolition of a total 225 Palestinian-owned structures, resulting in the displacement of 515 Palestinians. Figures of Palestinians that were internally displaced during the conflict in Gaza vary from 50,000 to 200,000 (League of Arab States, 30 April 2009, para.100-1006). As of December 2009, more than 20,000 people displaced during the Operation »Cast Lead« continue to be displaced.
# Risks of displacement continue due to construction of Separation wall and associated regime, military incursions, revocation of residency rights, settlement expansion and settler violence, effects of closure regime.
# Estimates note of 30,000 to 90,000 at risk of displacement. In 2009, an estimated 60,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem alone are at risk of displacement, due to the possible home demolitions by the Israeli authorities.
http://www.internal-displacement.org/idmc/website/countries.nsf/%28httpEnvelopes%29/98F0726BF7D6AA45C12574B30055BD32?OpenDocument

Palestinian refugees are people who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.<32> The number of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from Israel following its creation was estimated at 711,000 in 1949.<33> Descendants of these original Palestinian Refugees are also eligible for registration and services provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and as of 2010 number 4.7 million people.<34> One third of the refugees live in recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The remainder live in and around the cities and towns of these host countries.<32> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict


So, is it ok to enable the ongoing murder in the Israel/Palestine conflict with my tax dollars because they're also committing crimes in other places in the Mideast?

[oberliner]

18. Can you provide a source for your claim that "hundreds of thousands of Palestinians" were killed?

I have never in my life heard of anyone making any such claim.

Certainly none of the links that you've provided say anything of the kind.

Can you tell me where you got that estimate from?

With respect to your other points, I do not dispute that after Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel receives the most US aid. I was just pointing out how tiny that amount is relative to the over $1 trillion dollars a year we continue to spend on those two wars.

I certainly am not accusing you of supporting those conflicts, and I, of course, believe that one can be critical of both the actions of Israel and the other crimes of the Mideast.

You, however, made this statement:

"In no case does US foreign policy so outrageously directly enable human rights crimes on a continuous basis as it does in Israel and Palestine"

I only bring up Iraq and Afghanistan because of your claim quoted above. I would argue that Iraq and Afghanistan represent two such cases. Would you not agree?

It appears from your comments that you do, at least with respect to Iraq.

[mudplanet]

19. Here is a link with objectivity.

http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRBriefs/ACRBrief-Israel.htm is a good one.

It's not surprising you don't know the extent of the violence and killing, as in my research I discovered quit a few academic papers showing that the media coverage of Palestinian deaths in the conflict is not only not reported with parity in the media, but that Israeli deaths are literally over reported.

It's difficult to get a handle on the accuracy of stats in wars. You can find stats on Russian deaths in WWII that range from 12 million to 25 million, and on the Holocaust that range from 5 million to 13 million. As a result I tend to "split the difference" when trying to make sense of these figures which is why I stated in my post that Palestinians casualties ranged from the tens of thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands. Some of the sources will count only Palestinians killed in Israel and the West Bank, some will count Palestinians killed in Lebanon as well (probably the majority of Palestinians live in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria so that's not surprising). Some will compile infant deaths due to logistical problems with operating ambulances and hospitals (much of it intentional so I would say that that is valid). You do a little research and you'll get an idea of the scope of the problem and how these figures can be slanted by either side.

No source except extremely biased reactionary Zionist sources refutes the discrepancy in numbers of casualties between Israel and Palestine. Any given engagement during the conflict shows Palestinian casualties far in excess of Israeli casualties, often by huge margins e.g, in the recent Gaza conflict 13 Israeli casualties vs over a thousand Palestinian. That tends to happen when one side is shooting rifles and throwing stones and the other side is using Apache helicopters and supersonic aircraft, courtesy of the US.
On edit: I checked my original post and I didn't write "tens of thousands to possibly hundreds of thousands" (I wrote it in another post") and I should have given my own standards of accuracy. I have found sources that list over a quarter million but these I rejected as I judged them to be from the anti-Zionist reactionary perspective as I rejected data from obviously reactionary Zionist sources.

[oberliner]

20. The link indicates a much smaller number of Palestinian casualties than you claimed

This link claims that the total number of casualties into all of the fighting that Israel has been involved with since its founding was approximately 120,000 people. 100,000 of them, according to the link, were killed during the 1948, 1967, and 1973. These deaths would include Israelis, Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, and other forces who were party to those conflicts. The remaining 20,000 including those who were killed during two conflicts between Israel and Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. In those cases, the vast majority of casualties were not Palestinian.

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia whose citations also reference back to the Ploughshares site you provided:

A variety of studies provide differing casualty data for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 13,000 Israelis and Palestinians were killed in conflict with each other between 1948 and 1997.<154> However, other ranges have been given, including 14,500 killed between 1948-2009.<154><155> Palestinian fatalities during the 1982 Lebanon War were 2,000 PLO combatants killed in armed conflict with Israel.

I think it is irresponsible to make the claim of "hundreds of thousands of Palestinians" being killed when clearly no such thing is true - as is evidenced not only from a variety of online sources but also from the very links you are providing.

A much more reasonable estimate would be somewhat less than 20,000 Palestinians having been killed in the conflict with Israel over the past 60+ years, with several thousand Israelis being killed by Palestinians during that same time period.

[mudplanet]

21. You'll find that I corrected my post to specify

that the range was "tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands"

Irresponsible is to not try to do something, as least speak out, when you see wrong being done.

[Shaktimaan]

23. so it's kind of like saying that...

a recent helicopter crash in Iraq killed between six and one million people.

Technically true, however one end of the range is somewhat more true than the other.

Especially funny considering you wrote "It's not surprising you don't know the extent of the violence and killing as in my research I discovered quit a few academic papers showing that..." It appears that your "research" has left you somewhat less well informed than the person you're attempting to criticize.

False facts like the ones you've been reporting have been known to be responsible for the deaths of between zero and a billion children you know!

Killing billions of children... disgusting!

[ProgressiveProfessor]

6. If this ends up being an ad war, the words will get over the top fairly quickly

which was my point...the actual words used will not really matter. If not on the buses, then on other media. Bigotry is not illegal in this country and our speech is still relatively unconstrained.

[henank]

22. Anti-Israel Bus ads rejected

see here for more

The anti-Israel "Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign" group's bus billboard ad campaign shown to your right on Seattle buses, that was supposed to begin next Monday, December 27, was rejected today.

Citing the potential for disruption to transit service, King County Executive Dow Constantine today approved an interim policy from Metro Transit that calls for a halt to the acceptance of any new non-commercial advertising on King County buses.