Israel - as evil as Nazis

"But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them ..."

- Deuteronomy - 20:16-17

In April 2003, a US tank deliberately aimed at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, where foreign reporters used as a media centre. The US Army were then pretty pissed off by some of the non American press whose reports were too truthful and succinctly analytical, meaning they had been critical of the American conduct of the war.

The tank raised its gun, aimed at a part of the hotel, waited for two minutes and then fired and killed two journalists.

All these were captured on film by France 3 television which had coincidentally positioned two cameras in two rooms facing the bridge outside the hotel.

Herve de Ploeg, the journalist and film editor who filmed the attack, said: "I did not hear any shots in the direction of the tank, which was stationed at the west entrance of the Al-Jumhuriya (Republic) bridge, 600 metres north-west of the hotel. It was not a case of instinctive firing."

In other words, de Ploeg disputed the American commander who gave the excuse that the tank was being shot at from the hotel; de Ploeg also implied it was deliberate cold blooded shooting at two innocent journalists.

The Melbourne Age reported that “The incident killed a cameraman for the Telecinco Spanish television station and another for the British news agency Reuters. Three Reuters staffers were also wounded.”

It also stated: “A reporter for the Arab satellite television Al-Jazeera died earlier today and a cameraman was injured after the station's offices in Baghdad were hit in a separate attack that the Qatar-based channel charged was a deliberate US strike.”

my underlining above & below

Intimidation was the name of the killing, a warning to other journalists.

See my post How Does the US Military Plea: Never Guilty! to fully comprehend the evil of the US military. I am not talking about individual US military personnel but the evil machinery that poses as an armed service of a western democracy. It displayed that unmitigated evil in Vietnam, and it hasn't changed since.

Well, its accomplice (or master) in the Middle East, Israel, has done the same thing, killing a Reuters reporter with a tank shell, despite the vehicle in which the victim was travelling was clearly emblazoned (even on its roof) with markings ‘PRESS’ and ‘TV’, and his flak jacket similarly clearly marked.

Fadl Shanaa, a Reuters cameraman, had rushed to the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza where an Israeli helicopter fired four missiles at targets at the camp, killing at least 12 Palestinians, including five children aged 12-15.

Fadl Shaana was killed by several of the 3 cm-long darts, known as flechettes. The darts sliced into his legs and chest.

Advocacy groups have repeatedly sought to have flechettes banned on the ground that they kill indiscriminately, stating that their use in civilian areas contravenes global conventions because of their potential for harming civilians and their indiscriminate nature.

Apparently, according to al Jazeera, thousands of the darts are released in mid-air when a tank shell explodes. These darts would spray out over hundreds of metres. Even Israeli doctors had voiced their objections to the US-supplied weapons and had tried to have it banned in Israel five years ago.

But the Israelis' total abdication of due civilised care for civilians has not been unlike their immoral and murderous evil of sowing millions of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon where the likely victims would be children – see Evil in Full Storm (2) - Israel's 100,000 cluster bomblets.