September 01, 2005

like mice into a trap

I'm reading Beyond Chutzpah at the mo'. Where I'm up to at the minute is, Finkelstein's ripping Dershowitz to shreds and in the course of that he quotes something that looks familiar to me. It's a quote from the journalist, Chris Hedges
Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered - death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
I googled "like mice into a trap" and the link in the above headline was the first site out of 732 to come up. The quote is from 2001. The reason it's in the Finkelstein book is because it's in the Dershowitz book - The Case for Israel. Dershowitz is calling Hedges a liar; in fact a liar motivated by anti-semitism because it's a medievel blood libel to suggest that Israel deliberately kills children. Here's the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem's take on the same thing
Soldiers would enter in jeeps to areas where friction was common. Their objective was to provoke Palestinians to throw stones and petrol bombs. When Palestinians approached, soldiers who had taken up positions at preplanned positions would shoot at them. The stated goal of this procedure was to move the demonstrations further away. In fact, however, the soldier said,
It is a kind of sport, to "remove" as many petrol-bomb throwers as possible. It is an obsessive search. It’s called "strive to make contact." What bothers me is, if the jeeps had not entered, there would not have been any disturbances of the peace.
Next up Finkestein casts a critical eye over Dershowitz's condemnation of the Palestinians' culture of death.

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