Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Elder of Ziyon
His latest report to the UN Human Rights Council includes this passage:
The continued reports of inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual assault, of children in detention is further deplorable....In the Ariel settlement in the occupied West Bank, children reported that they had been given electric shocks by Israeli interrogators in the settlement. The children, one as young as 14 years of age, were each accused of throwing stones at a settler bypass road in the occupied West Bank. Following the electric shocks, the boys provided their interrogators with confessions, although they maintained their innocence. In May 2010, a 14-year-old boy reported that his interrogator in the Israeli settlement block of Gush Etzion, in the occupied West Bank, attached car battery jump leads to the boy’s genitals and threatened to electrify the cable. After further abuse, the boy confessed to throwing stones, although he maintains his innocence.
The footnotes for these accusations come from DCI-International Palestine where they simply ask children who were detained by Israeli authorities whether they were abused, and the kids happily answer with what the Israel-haters want to hear.
The accusations are so ridiculously lurid and absurd that only people who are already convinced of Israel's pre-determined guilt could possibly believe them.
Hence, Richard Falk quotes them approvingly.
DCI-PS counted some 40 more children killed in Cast Lead than PCHR did. Invariably, any of the children who were known to have been killed while fighting (and even those that PCHR admitted were combatants) their deaths were described by DCI-PS this way: “Despite DCI-Palestine’s best endeavours to collect affidavits from eyewitnesses to [the child’s] death, no reliable evidence could be gathered.”
More evidence of DCI-PS's disregard for the truth comes from their descriptions of the fictional "massacre" in Jenin in 2002, from April 12th and 16th, the second being copied in a separate report to the UN on the 19th after it was already becoming obvious that there was no massacre:
Reports emanating from residents of the Jenin refugee camp indicate hundreds of dead, a significant percentage undoubtedly children, as well as mass destruction of homes, businesses, and vital infrastructure.
With a limited number of journalists finally allowed entry into Jenin refugee camp, the picture of the massacre that occurred there has become increasingly clear. Testimony from survivors of this massacre present a harrowing picture of a bloody military offensive designed to destroy a civilian population and raze Jenin refugee camp to the ground. Survivors estimate that 1/3 of the camp has been completely destroyed. Moreover, eyewitnesses from the camp describe how Israeli soldiers dug mass graves for those killed in an attempt to hide evidence of the massacre. Thousands of residents have been made homeless and are now seeking refuge in neigbouring villages while desperately trying to seek missing family members.
It is estimated that several hundred residents of the camp were killed during the Israeli attack, including a large proportion of children. Video documentation and photographs from the camp are images of horror that no words can ever describe. They overwhelming illustrate the mass destruction wreaked on the camp and its residents. Journalists in the camp are describing that the air is filled with a noxious stench of rotting bodies that remain lying in the street or buried under rubble. There are also reports of summary executions carried out by Israeli soldiers in the centre of the camp.
As far as I can see, DCI-PS never retracted their lurid claims of a massacre in Jenin that killed possibly hundreds of children. And this report also shows how DCI will happily swallow any lies being given to them by "eyewitnesses" who make up stories.
Just like the kids who claimed to be given electric shocks by Israel.
In other words, the group has no compunction about lying, and they certainly would have no hesitation to ask kids released by Israel leading questions to indicate abuse when there was none. It is no surprise that they support BDS and that they do not say a word about Hamas' abuse of children and use of child soldiers.
So DCS-PS is a really great fit for Richard Falk, for whom facts that contradict his beliefs are ignored and for whom absurd rumors that confirm his beliefs are God-given truth.
