The Everyday Lies about International Law in order to Justify Murdering Jews

Law is a matter of interpretation. Since the "international community" decided to pretend to make war more humane, through the Hague conventions before World War One and the Geneval conventions after World War Two, the deliberate misinterpretation of law has become a prime weapon of parties in conflict AND their backers among the great powers. Britain [United Kingdom] has supported the Arabs against the Jews in Israel fairly consistently since 1920, in violation of the San Remo decision [April 1920] and League of Nations Mandate for a Jewish National Home [1922], an endorsement and elaboration of the San Remo decision. Ironically, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were agreed upon under the auspices of the International Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross, a Swiss government agency. During the Holocaust, the ICRC collaborated with the German Nazis, even sending Swiss physicians to provide succor to the German forces on the Eastern Front where most and the worst atrocities were taking place. These physicians reported the mass murders of Jews on the Eastern Front [Ukraine, Belarus, etc.]. These reports made their way into the Swiss press by 1942, however, the ICRC, which was in possession of these reports, took a vote among its 25 Swiss government-appointed members and decided that "international law" forbid it to announce the massacres of Jews to the world. How unlike ICRC in more recent years in regard to Arab accusations of Israeli atrocities!! Later in WW 2, ICRC representatives visited concentration camps for Jews [not all camps] and pronounced them sufficiently humane. Yet, in 1949, the Geneva conventions were promulgated under IRC and ICRC auspices in Switzerland.

Not surprisingly, the ICRC hired the veteran Swiss Nazi, Francois Genoud, as one of its agents in Belgium after WW2. Further, in Israel, during the Israeli War of Independence, the ICRC delegate in Israel was one Jacques de Reynier, a fervent Judeophobe, who invented atrocities that had supposedly taken place at Deir Yassin village which even the Arabs had not reported or claimed at that time. [Just by the way, de Reynier worked with the British government of Israel at that time which was pro-Arab and anti-Jewish]. Now, since the Swiss government has interests like any other, its ICRC department makes false interpretations of international law when these false accusations can harm Israel. In this, the ICRC is in harmony with other Judeophobic propaganda agencies, such as the BBC [the BBC role in the Holocaust is discussed in earlier posts on this blog]. For the record, here are articles of the Geneva Convention that have to do with 1) the presence of non-combatants 2) the property of civilian individuals and institutions:

Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [quoting Geneva Convention, adopted 12 August 1949]
Article 28

The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations

Below are the words of Mr Niemann, a prosecutor in the case of a Croatian Bosnian accused of war crimes against Muslims in Bosnia, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 22 March 1999:

7 Turning now to the issue of human shields. . .

. . .

9 Article 28 of the Civilian Geneva Convention 4

10 of 1949 provides that the presence of protected persons

11 may not be used to render certain points or areas

12 immune from military operations.

The following article 53 deals with the issue of protected property [from site of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights {see first link above}:

Article 53
Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.

This reminds us that Israel was justified in destroying civilian infrastructure that could serve the military/terrorist/mass murderous/ purposes of the Hizbullah. Further, Hizbullah deliberately places rocket launchers and other military installations and equipment among civilians, not only those civilians who support the Hizbullah [mainly Shi`ites but also among Christian villagers whose village, such as `Ain Ebel [or `Eyn Ebel] are near Hizbullah strongholds in the south of Lebanon. This was reported by none other than the New York Times a few days ago. Bear in mind that the Geneva Conventions were drawn up under major influence by great powers that expected to fight wars in the future and would certainly not want to hamper their own military actions with what they would have seen as excessive humanitarianism. But when it comes to fighting Israel, a war in which most of the major EU powers are auxiliaries to the Arabs, then international law is misrepresented in order to besmirch Israel. The "international community" is at least as hypocritical and bloodthirsty [especially for Jewish blood], as ever, using the Arabs as fronts for their own genocidal drive. The UK and its propaganda arm, the BBC, are among the most proficient and skillful in this endeavor, at turning victims into aggressors and the reverse.

Bear in mind that the Hizbullah and its Syrian and Iranian sponsors have a clearly Judeophobic world view going back to the early days of Islam. The Hizbullah is Nazi. If the EU and UN defend the Hizbullah from Israel, then they are defending Nazis. A cease fire in Lebanon without destroying the Hizbullah means supporting Nazi murderers. Meanwhile, the plight of Black Africans in the Sudan is of no interest to the fake "humanitarians" of the EU, UN, Amnesty Int'l, Human Rights Watch, etc.
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Coming: more on Jews in Jerusalem, Jews in Arab lands, etc.

British Empire Holds on to a Good Chunk of Cyprus' Real Estate

British diplomacy is entering another hyperactive phase, girding its loins for a humanitarian struggle to make Israel live with mass murderers on Israel's northern border. Kim Howells, a deputy foreign secretary [or whatever his exact title may be] is serving as the point man. The BBC, another UK government agency, is being mobilized for the task of besmirching Israel's self-defense efforts against the Hizbullah, a Nazi-like gang of terrorists, fanatics, etc., who are coddled by Iran, whose leader, Ahmadinajad, utters Nazi trivia as table talk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Kim Howells came to Beirut to sanctimoniously pontificate on behalf of Shaykh Nasrallah and Ahmadinajad, in the guise of concern for civilians. If they had real concern for civilian victims then they would have stopped the slaughter in Sudan, which for many years was mainly in the South and has recently [2002 or 2003] spread to the western part of Sudan called Dar Fur [Home of the Fur tribe].

Several million people have been slaughtered in Sudan's genocidal policy since "independence." Actually, Britain set up the Sudan slaughters by giving independence to Sudan in 1956 as a unitary state under Arab/Muslim control. That is, the Arab-Muslims of northern Sudan, who had raided the South for slaves for hundreds of years, were given control of the descendants of their old victims [yes, I know that most of the northerners are mainly black Africans arabized and islamized long ago, which does not stop them from vicitimizing the authentically African tribal blacks of the South].

If the UK had real concern for Jewish civilians during the Holocaust, then they would have bombed the gas chambers in Auschwitz which they were perfectly capable of doing militarily. More than a half dozen earlier posts discuss British policy towards Jews and Arabs, respectively, before and during the Holocaust. See here, here, here, here, etc, [see other posts on this blog, search for bbc and/or british]. Indeed, the UK was a silent partner in the Holocaust and the BBC was a most vocal and/or inappropriately tongue-tied agency of the government in concealing the Holocaust from the public, as much as possible, and in misrepresenting it.

The present war between Israel and Hizbullah [a proxy for Iran and Syria] has elicited from Kim Howells, a master tongue-slinger, and other holier-than-thou Britishers and Europeans [Jan Egeland, Louise Arbour, etc.] a host of fake pathos and sanctimonious hypocrisy. The public has been told to mourn the sad fate of bridges and roads and TV transmitting antennas in Lebanon ["The poor, poor infrastructure!"]. This is the personification of concrete and steel. Howells came to south Beirut and insinuated that Israel may have committed war crimes or offenses against that humanitarianism that the UK does not seem to apply to the southern Sudan. [Egeland and Arbour are so unspeakably loathesome that I will not discuss them for the sake of decency].
Howells worried about those poor innocent civilians who just happened, apparently unbeknownst to Howells, to have katyusha rockets in their guest rooms or their basements, or parked next to the kitchen. Are they too innocent?

Anyway, the island of Cyprus has been much in the news in the last few days on the humanitarian time slot as a refuge for evacuees from Lebanon. Yet, one major expression of British hypocrisy is the maintenance of "sovereign" British bases on the island of Cyprus. These bases take up 98 sq. miles of Cyprus' 3572 sq. miles of total area. No one dares call this imperialism, not even the Cypriot government, which fears its master's wrath. The London agreement of 1959 signed by Greece, Turkey, and Britain provided for independence of the island and that "Britain retains sovereignty over the areas containing her bases on the island" [Statesman's Yearbook, 1976-77 (London: Macmillan 1976), pp 295-302].

Below is a passage from the official British defense ministry website for the "SBA"s:

Sovereign Base Areas Administration (SBAA)

The Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) in Cyprus were established in 1960 when Cyprus gained its independence from British rule. The Areas cover 98 square miles of the island and are home to some 7,000 Cypriots and a total of 3,650 Service personnel and UK based civilians, along with nearly 5,000 of their dependants. The British military bases of RAF Akrotiri and Episkopi, Ayios Nikolaos and Dhekelia Garrison are located within the SBAs.

The SBA Administration is the civil government of the SBAs and employs approximately 450 people. The SBAA sets its own laws and has its own police force, courts, a prison and a Customs service. The headquarters of the SBAA is within the wire at Episkopi.

The SBAA is led by the Administrator. The senior British military officer in Cyprus occupies this role, in addition to his role as Commander British Forces (CBF). On a day-to-day basis, the Administration is run by the Chief Officer (a senior civil servant) and the Administration works closely with the HQ British Forces Cyprus to provide political advice to the British military in Cyprus.

Further information about the SBAA can be found at www.sba.mod.uk-------[quoted from http:// www.bfc.mod.uk/html/sba.html ]

Another hypocritical British tidbit is expressed in the differential attitude toward Arab refugees from Israel and Greek Cypriot refugees. The world hears constantly about the Arab refugees, rechristened "Palestinians" back in the 1960s for psychological warfare purposes against the Jews and Israel. Meanwhile, the Greek Cypriots who became refugees in 1974 are seldom heard from and refrain from suicide bombings to express their despair over their refugee status. The number of Arab refugees in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence ranges from 450,000 [Israeli estimate] to 900,000 [Arab estimate]. The Greek refugees in 1974 were 200,000 --not much fewer really. But there is no great international campaign on their behalf to mobilize all the tender humane souls in the world for their return to their homes. The Arab refugees, on the other hand, are constant objects of pity no matter what atrocities they commit. Even their leaders' collaboration in the Holocaust is forgotten. "As a result [of the Turkish invasion of 1974] 200,000 Greek Cypriots fled to live as refugees in the south" [of Cyprus]. [Statesman's Yearbook, same biblio data as above]. Those refugees have never gone back to live in their old homes and they are seldom heard of outside Greek circles and occasional flurries of interest or publicity at the UN. But the saintly "palestinians" on the other hand. . . . And the UK continues to hold a significant portion of the country's real estate, mainly in the Greek south, which is only about 60% of the island, including the "sovereign" British bases.
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Coming: More on Jews in Jerusalem, British misrule, etc.

Mark Twain on Israel's Landscape [1860s]

In ancient times, the Land of Israel --previously known as Canaan-- was called a land of milk and honey. During the Second Temple period up to 70 CE, the land flowed with olive oil, an agricultural product that was exported and made the prosperity of the ancient Jews. Even after the devastation of Roman suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, most of the Land continued to flourish. Jews of Second Temple times built terraces on the hillsides of Judah and Samaria to hold the rainwater, a system which Professor Menashe Harel is convinced was a Jewish innovation. Many of these ancient terraces are visible to this day. However, after the Arab conquest, agricultural deterioration set in. Woods on the hills were cut down and the hills were not reforested. Walter Lowdermilk, an American expert on agronomy, wrote the once-famous book, Palestine, Land of Promise in the 1930s, which described the process from a scientific point of view. However, many earlier travelers had noted the ecological deterioration of the land under Muslim rule.

As a comparison, consider Mesopotamia, now called Iraq. It too was a flourishing land under Persian rule and before, and was cultivated by various ancient peoples, including Jews. Iraq's agricultural prosperity depended on an extensive and well-planned irrigation system. The Mongols, not the Arabs, are usually credited with destroying this irrigation system. However, what is significant is that the irrigation works of ancient Iraq were not rebuilt by Arabs or subsequent Muslim rulers of Iraq to this day. And today, the desert area of Iraq is greater than in ancient times. The Arabs, particularly the Badawin [=Bedouin] are called in Arabic, Awlad al-`Arab. This means "Children of the Desert." It would be just as accurate to call the Arabs "Fathers of the Desert." Consider Iraq and Israel under Muslim rule. By the way, the very word `Arab means desert in Arabic and is cognate to the Hebrew word `arabah, which can be translated as desert or steppe.

Here are excerpts from Mark Twain's book, Innocents Abroad, also quoted in the previous post, in which he depicts with his artist's pen the desolation of the Land of Israel under Arab-Muslim rule, specifically the Ottoman Empire in which many Arabs held high posts, including scions of wealthy, notable Arab families from Jerusalem and Sh'khem [=Neapolis > Nablus].

Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? [referring to a Christian tradition that the land had been cursed]
Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition -- it is dream-land.

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective --distance works no enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.

Palestine sits in sack-cloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.

Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided in and out among the rocks or lay still and sunned themselves. Where prosperity has reigned and fallen; where glory has flamed and gone out; where beauty has dwelt and passed away; where gladness was, and sorrow is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its high places, there this reptile makes his home, and mocks at human vanity. [see previous post for book data]

In the title, Twain calls the country "Holy Land." Unfortunately, in the body of the text, as quoted here, he calls it "Palestine." Perhaps, as a man who considered himself scientific and modern, he preferred a name not used in the Jewish Scriptures or the Christian New Testament, a name lacking in religious connotations. Be that as it may, his description of the land in his day [the late 1860s], was confirmed by the accounts of many other travelers and Western and Jewish residents of the Land in the 19th century. Who was to blame for this desolation in a land once flowing with milk and honey? In these passages, he refers to the Christian tradition of a curse on the land. However, in the previous post, Twain is quoted as blaming Jerusalem's wretchedness on Muslim rule. By the way, today the Sea of Galilee, called in Hebrew the Kinneret, is surrounded by beautiful greenery. Even the Dead Sea, still mostly surrounded by desert, has its green patches around kibbutzim like `Eyn Gedi and Kalia, and around the hotels, and the `Eyn Gedi nature reserve, etc.
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Coming: more on British misrule in Israel, Jews in Jerusalem, etc.

Mark Twain on Jerusalem and the Jews There in the Late 19th Century

One of America's greatest authors and greatest humorists, Mark Twain, visited Israel in 1867 as part of a guided tour. His account of the trip, with often humorous depictions of his fellow tourists, was published in 1869. It was called:

THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
or
THE NEW PILGRIMS PROGRESS
Being some Account of the Steamship Quaker City's Pleasure
Excursion to Europe and the HOLY LAND;
with Descriptions of Countries, Nations,
Incidents and Adventures
as They Appeared to the
AUTHOR
with two hundred and thirty-four illustrations
by
MARK TWAIN
(Samuel L Clemens)

Twain wrote a dozen or so books. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is generally acknowledged to be the greatest of his books and, in my not so humble opinion, the greatest American novel since the English language began to be spoken on the western shore of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, "His first travel book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), made him famous. . . " [Justin Kaplan in Brief Lives (Boston 1965)]. That is, it was this book that made him famous.

Here are excerpts from the book describing Jerusalem and the Jews there:

Jerusalem!
Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun. So small! Why, it was no larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants, and no larger than an ordinary Syrian city of thirty thousand. Jerusalem numbers only fourteen thousand people.

Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was the pride and glory of Israel, is gone.

At the ancient wall of Solomon's Temple which is called the Jew's Place of Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble every Friday to kiss the venerated stones and weep over the fallen greatness of Zion, any one can see a part of the unquestioned and undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same consisting of three or four stones lying one upon the other, each of which is about twice as long as a seven-octave piano, and about as thick as such a piano is high.

It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

Twain's depiction of Jerusalem's wretched poverty at that time is grim indeed. His description of the Land of Israel in general is one of desolation, depopulation, and poverty. We will quote his descriptions of the country on another post. At this point, when discussing the desolation of Israel in the 19th century, we ought to refer to a book by Saul S Friedman [Youngstown State University] which has gotten very little attention. It is a book undeservedly neglected, probably because its truths do not fit the line being promoted so assiduously by the enemies of civilization.
Friedman supplies a host of excerpts from many authors who visited or lived in the Land of Israel in the 19th century and up to World War One. One of the authors was an Arabic-speaking Christian who had learned English. It is unfortunate that Friedman uses the name "palestine" in the title of his book, although in the 19th century it was solely a Western name not used in Hebrew of course, nor in Arabic [that is, not even in the form Filastin, which Arabs use nowadays]. Nor was there any territorial division of the Ottoman Empire with that name or that corresponded in its boundaries even roughly to those of the new political entity called "Palestine" set up by the international community in 1920 at the San Remo Conference to embody the Jewish National Home. Note that Mark Twain calls the country "The Holy Land" in the title of his book. It is not clear what "Syria" meant in Twain's usage. At that time, Lebanon, the Land of Israel west of the Jordan, and Transjordan, were all often considered parts of Syria in the broad sense. Friedman's book is:

Saul S Friedman, Land of Dust: Palestine at the Turn of the Century (Washington, DC: University Press of America 1982).

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Coming: More of Mark Twain on the Land of Israel, Jews in Jerusalem, Glubb Pasha's follies, etc.

"palestinian" Arabs are Also Bosnians, Circassians, Turks, Egyptians. . .

The Pro-Arab Mythmakers have been working overtime on persuading the world that there is such a thing as a "palestinian people" that has been inhabiting "palestine" [read: Land of Israel] since the Stone Age. The idea is to totally delegitimize Israel and the Jews' rights to their ancient homeland by replacing the Jews with a "palestinian people." The very notion of a "palestinian people" was meant from the beginning to prevent peace between the Arabs and Israel, as well as to persuade the world that the Arab war on Israel is justified.

The mythmakers, both Arabs and their Western and Communist supporters, claim that the "palestinian people" goes back to prehistory. However, this big lie is contradicted by a huge mass of information and documents. Here below Laurence Oliphant tells of some of the non-Arab Muslims who were settled in the country by the Ottoman Empire or by Muhammad Ali of Egypt. Oliphant was a writer and British Christian Zionist. While living on Mount Carmel in the late 19th century, he hired Naftali Hertz Imber to work for him. Imber was a Hebrew poet and his poem that he wrote in Israel, HaTiqvah --when set to music-- became the Zionist and Israeli national anthem. He wrote the account below after the Congress of Berlin [1878] assigned Bosnia as a protectorate to the Austro-Hungarian [Habsburg] Empire. When the rulers over Bosnia changed, many Bosnian Muslims decided to continue to live under Muslim rule and left Bosnia for the remaining Ottoman territory, following an old Muslim rule that Muslims are not to live under infidel control [on this see historian Kamal Karpat, etc.]. The Ottoman Empire assigned the Bosnian Muslims lands in various parts of the empire, including Israel.

. . . it is a singular fact that the strip of coast from Haifa to Caesarea seems to have become a center of influx of colonists and strangers of the most diverse races. The new immigrants to Caesarea are Slavs. Some of them speak a little Turkish. Arabic is an unknown tongue to them, which they are learning. Their own language is a Slav dialect. When the troubles in the [Ottoman] provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina first broke out [1875], which led to Russo-Turkish war, a howl of indignation went up from the philanthropists. . . When it [the agrarian question] was settled by handing over the provinces to Austria, the Slav-Moslem aristocracy, finding themselves in their turn persecuted by their former peasants and the Christian power which protected them, migrated to the more congenial rule of the sultan. So the curious spectacle of a Slav population migrating from Austrian rule to Asia, in order to be under a Moslem government.

Close beside the new Bosnian colony there are planted in the plain of Sharon two or three colonies of Circassians. These are the people who committed the Bulgarian atrocities. The irony of fate has now placed them within three or four miles of colonists belonging to the very race that they massacred. They, too, fleeing from government by Christians [Austria], have sought refuge under the sheltering wing of the sultan, where, I regret to say, as I described in a former letter, they still indulge in their predatory propensities. In the immediate proximity to them are the black tents of a tribe of Turcomans. They belong to the old Seljuk stock, and the cradle of their tribe gave birth to the present rulers of the Turkish Empire. They have been here for about three hundred years, and have forgotten the Turkish language, but a few months ago a new migration arrived from the mountains of Mesopotamia. These nomads spoke nothing but Turkish, and hoped to find a warm welcome from their old tribesmen on the plain of Sharon. In this they were disappointed, and they have now, to my disgust, pitched their tents on some of the spurs of Carmel, where their great hairy camels and their own baggy breeches, contrast curiously with the camels and costumes of the Bedouins with whom we are familiar.
[Lawrence Oliphant, Haifa, pp 238-39; quoted in Bat Yeor, The Dhimmi (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1985), pp 385-388]

In this passage, Oliphant points to three distinct Muslim peoples who settled in Israel in the 19th century who WERE NOT Arabs, but were Bosnians, Circassians, and Turkomans. Arabs too from outside the country came to settle in Israel. Such Arabs came from Egypt and Algeria. Our earlier post quoting from the 17th century Turkish traveler, Evliya Chelebi, mentions Kurds living in Safed near the Jews there. Consider some of the family names fairly common among Arabs in Israel which indicate an origin outside the country: Busnachi [Bosnian], Turk and Turki, Akrad [Kurdish], Masri and Masrawi [Egyptian], Halabi [from Haleb = Aleppo]. Note that some of these groups came from Europe or the Caucasus. The Muslims in the country did not mind them since they too were Muslims. Today's mythmakers somehow forget to mention the very mixed ancestral background of their dear "palestinians."
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Coming: Mark Twain on Israel, Jews in Jerusalem, General Glubb Pasha's follies, etc.