[Washington Post] Lally Weymouth - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published Saturday: The so-called human rights commission accuses Israel, that legitimately defended itself against Hamas, of war crimes. Mind you, Hamas didn't commit just one type of war crime. It committed four. First, they called for the destruction of Israel, which under the UN Charter is considered a war crime - incitement to genocide; secondly, they fired deliberately on civilians; third, they hid behind civilians; and fourth, they've been holding our captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, without access to the Red Cross, for three years. And who gets accused of criminal behavior at the end of the day? Israel - that sent thousands of text messages and made tens of thousands of cellular phone calls to Palestinian civilians [to warn them to evacuate]. This inversion of justice is patently absurd.... What the Goldstone report actually accuses Israel of is deliberately targeting civilians, which is patently false. This gives terrorist regimes a new weapon against democracies....It allows them to attack entire cities with weapons of mass terror and get away with it simply because they fire the rockets from populated areas. There has yet to be a Palestinian leader who actually turns to his people and says - it's over....We recognize that Israel is the Jewish state just as we ask the Israelis to recognize the Palestinian state. The Arabs fought wars and terror campaigns in the 1920s, '30s and '40s against any Jewish state, and then they rejected the partition. Our presence in the territories is not the cause of the conflict but one of its results....The cause is the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize the Jewish state at any point.
2009-10-26 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive