Gaza -- not the hell hole it's portrayed as

Peter Hitchens shows us the "other Gaza" -- the one that doesn't make it into the news. PETER HITCHENS: Lattes, beach barbecues (and dodging missiles) in the world's biggest prison camp

A Visit Inside Turkey's Islamist IHH

A lengthy piece from The Weekly Standard: A Visit Inside Turkey's Islamist IHH

Flotilla: Before the Commandos Landed

Scott Johnson at PowerLine calls attention to film footage of a pep talk that occurred before the Israeli commandos reached the Mavi Marmara:

 Ynetnews reports reports that Israel's Foreign Ministry has released an illuminating new video filmed on board the Mavi Marmara before the IDF's interception of the ship. The footage was found among the possessions of one of the flotilla's passengers and shows Bulent Yildirim, leader of the IHH group that organized the flotilla to the Gaza Strip, speaking to the passengers on board.

Islam seems to have something to do with the mission to break Israel's blockade of Gaza. "We don't want to be recorded in Allah's book as cowards," Yildirim said. "Now they are saying that they will launch a fleet against us. That they will send the commandos here. And we say, 'If you send the commandos, we will throw you down from here and you will be humiliated in front of the whole world'," he told the assembled passengers, who responded by chanting "Allahu akbar."

Ynetnews adds that another speaker told those present in Arabic: "Don't be like the ones who turned back and don't turn back." An Egyptian parliament member then shouted to the crowd: "Millions of martyrs marching to Gaza," and the crowd echoed his words. Hamas supporter Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement's northern branch, can be seen sitting among the crowd.

The Mavi Marmara was no ship of fools. Those on board knew exactly what they were doing. The fools are on dry land, reaching right to the top of the Obama administration.

Gaza: So what?

Michael J. Totten posts at Contentions that nobody cares about Gaza.

...Few activists, journalists, or diplomats genuinely seem to care what those people are going through.

Consider this: Hamas, not Israel, refuses to allow donated food and medicine in. If it's "collective punishment" when Israel restricts certain items, what should we call it when Hamas refuses all of the items? Few seem to have given it any thought. So far I haven't found a single person indignant about the Israeli blockade who has said or written a word about Hamas refusing to allow donated goods into the territory. Even those who actually donated and delivered the items are quiet about it.

....

An extraordinary amount of time and energy has been spent in the last ten days denouncing Israel for its supposedly inhumane treatment of Gaza, but Hamas — under which Palestinians fare orders of magnitude worse — gets a pass from most of the people yelling at Israel. It's not hard to figure out who and what all the fuss is really about. If Gaza weren't at war with a half-Western Jewish country, Palestinians who suffer as a result would get no more attention than victims of the civil conflict in Yemen.

What they're teaching at Duke University

Jay Schalin attended a "teach-in" at Duke University (Dookoo?) on the recent war between Gaza and Israel.

I attended a "teach-in" about Israeli-Palestinian relations at Duke University the other night. Part of my job is to attend college lectures and report on them, in order to provide the public with some idea of who is being invited on to the American campus and what ideas they present. As I entered the lecture hall, I saw a stack of blank Amnesty International petitions, asking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to support a U.N. investigation into the commission of war crimes by the Israel during the recent Gaza conflict.

Essentially, the "teach-in" taught that Israel had no rights, was the cause of all the problems, and the poor Palestianians had no choice but to lob missiles, use suicide bombers, and hide behind women and children.

Jay Schalin is Senior Writer at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. He wrote this for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Violations of international law

David Bernstein, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy:

One thing that's clear from the recent Gaza conflict is that to many leftists, "violations of international law" is simply shorthand for "a country is engaging in military action that I don't approve of."

A case in point is a statement, via Brian Leiter, by self-styled "American Jewish progressives" (some of whom, I note, seem to assert their Jewish identity only when its useful for bashing Israel) on Gaza. The statement claims that Israel acted "with little or no consideration for human rights or the laws of war."

As usual with such statements, not a single documented violation of the laws of war is mentioned. Say what you will about the wisdom, or even morality, about the IDF's actions in Gaza, the idea that it acts "with little or no consideration for the law of war" is absurd. Not only does the IDF have strict internal rules promulgated by its version of the JAG, but it knows it has the entire international left breathing over its shoulder, looking for any violations of rules that could be exploited for propaganda purposes.

....

In any event, I'll lay down the challenge to the signators of the statement that one should issue whenever one sees similarly ignorant statements: Precisely what "laws of war" do you claim Israel violated in Gaza, what is your evidence for these violations, what treaties or legal precedents can you cite to support your claim, are you aware of legal authorities that disagree with your interpretation of international law, and under what legal theory is Israel bound by whatever particular international law principle that you are purporting to apply (e.g., if you are citing a treaty that Israel specifically declined to be a party to)? Comments are open below for the signators. [UPDATE: One more: Specifically, what could Israel have done differently in Gaza that would lead you to acknowledge that it had complied with the laws of war. If the answer is, as I suspect for many signators it would be, "not go into Gaza to begin with," then obviously we can go back to the first sentence of this post."]

I may have to save that challenge for use elsewhere.  Of course, it won't be answered, any more than my question to one pipsqueak asking where the cited "war crime" had ever been defined as a "war crime" when Israel wasn't involved.  (For example, this pipsqueak called cried "War Crime!" and "Collective Punishment!" when Israel shot back at Lebanon.  Where else has shooting back in a war ever been called a "war crime"?)

White Phosphorus

Max Boot examines one of the popular "war crimes" charges agains Israel -- the use of white phosphorus:

Another bogus charge relates to Israel's use of white phosphorus, an incendiary material that is used in small amounts in smoke shells designed to shield ground operations.  If you are a casual consumer of news articles like this one you would think that by deploying white phosphorous (Willy Pete in U.S. military slang), Israel has committed a war crime. Actually it is a perfectly legal weapon. Here is what globalsecurity.org, a nonpartisan website, has to say on the subject:

White phosphorus is not banned by any treaty to which the United States is a signatory. … The use of white phosphorus or fuel air explosives are not prohibited or restricted by Protocol III of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (CCWC), the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects, which regulates the use of "any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons . . ."

The only legal restriction on the use of white phosphorous comes from the 1980 Geneva Protocol III Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons. Neither Israel nor the U.S. are parties to the convention, but their armed forces nevertheless observe its terms under what is known as "customary international law."

As suggested above, Protocol III allows white phosphorous to be used to create smoke. It doesn't allow it to be used directly against a civilian population. It goes on to say that: "It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects."

I suspect the same sort of thing applies to depleted uranium.  It's OK to use it in munitions to give them added penetrating power, but not to pack it around a warhead in order to create a dirty bomb.  (Never mind that there are other substances much better suited to making dirty bombs.)

Notes on Gaza

David Bernstein has some comments on Gaza, and in particular the "balanced" BBC coverage.
He also spotted some extremely apt comments posted on, of all places, the Huffington Post.

One thing to emphasize: during the Gaza fighting, I could tell you day by day approximately how many Palestinians had been killed, because the media so emphasized this point. I don't have a clue how many Afghans have been killed by NATO's actions in Afghanistan, or by the U.S. and its allies in Iraq. And in those cases, if the media did report casualty figures, they would never conflate the deaths of noncombatants with those of "the enemy." The media consistently reported that "___ Palestinians have so far been killed," as if the deaths of Hamas terrorists were just as regrettable as the death of a child who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(FWIW, Hamas claims that only 58 of its fighters were killed, and also claims, absurdly, that it killed dozens of Israeli soldiers. The IDF claims that 3/4 of those killed were "Hamas militants." One difficulty is that besides separating civilians from "militants," one has to separate combatant civilians and non-combatant civilians. A "civilian" who stores Hamas weapons in his house, or goes to the roof of a military target when the IAF warns in advance that they plan to bomb it, may be a "civilian" if he isn't officially a member of the Hamas armed forces, but he is not a "noncombatant.")