"Suffer the little children..."

"Pat I am enclosing some photos which were just sent to me by a concerned colleague in Egypt.  Perhaps SST readers will find them of interest.  Also some SST readers may have more documentation which they can share.

Best,

Cliff

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There are a lot more pictures.  Neither Cliff nor I can vouch for them.  These are not the most difficult.  Is this Gaza?  I do not know.  Who or what killed these kids?  I do not know.  Someone killed them.  May God forgive them.  pl

Comments

[jr786]

This is from a week ago - the little child I mentioned on another thread.

http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/phopto-gallery-of-gazas-martyred-children/

[Maureen Lang]

Needed: any provenance available for any of these horrifying photos so they can circulate in the blogosphere (as they no doubt will) w/out being dismissed as other than what I'm thinking they are.

[b]

Please also take a look at the comparing photo line Norman Finkelstein posted.

[b]

And a pic of Kaukab Al Dayah, who died in this one-sided war.

[Homer]

It might interesting for some to look at those pictures and then read CHILDREN DURING THE HOLOCAUST http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005142

Perhaps the murdering of little children, who have nothing to do with the actions of Hamas, is seen as a sort of pre-emptive strike against future suicide bombers?

Obviously, Israel is heavily populated with some seriously sick sociopaths that have an unquenchable thirst for the blood of children that is equal to or perhaps far greater than some Nazis.

[Homer]

It might interesting for some to look at those pictures and then read CHILDREN DURING THE HOLOCAUST http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005142

Perhaps the murdering of little children, who have nothing to do with the actions of Hamas, is seen as a sort of pre-emptive strike against future suicide bombers?

Obviously, Israel is heavily populated with some seriously sick sociopaths that have an unquenchable thirst for the blood of children that is equal to or perhaps far greater than some Nazis.

[G Hazeltine]

I believe the photo on the upper right was taken in South Lebanon, in an incident where villagers were ordered by the IDF to evacuate, which they did, but were then shelled.

[mo]

Colonel,
Not for a lack of photos (I no longer look at the photos sent to me, the effect has meant that I have slept very little over the last few weeks), but the third picture from the left on the top row and the middle picture in the bottom row are from the massacre of the Marwahin refugees in Lebanon in 2006 (families who were ordered out of their homes by the Israelis and then executed by an Israeli Apache - Perhaps the same Israelis who, according to the ex-IDF posters on here, do not kill civilians)

[b]

Music of our times.

We will not go down
In the night, without a fight
You can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schools
But our spirit will never die
We will not go down In Gaza tonight

[John Minnerath]

A sad commentary on the cruelty of modern man.
No matter whose war, it's always the innocent who suffer most.

[Alex]

I think they are Gaza. They are definitely Arab and Levantine, not Iraq. Where else are there so many dead children?

I think myself there will be a much higher figure for the dead than what is said now. They've hardly had a chance to clear the bombed buildings. Probably a lot more dead under the rubble.

[Cloned Poster]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIhVbD0Ocoo

Yes

[Highlander]

These are very sad and tragic pictures, if indeed they are actually the truth floating around on the internet.

Digital photography is a hobby of mine. With easily available software programs such as Photoshop, you can make up any image of anybody doing anything (including dead babies wraped in Hamas flags). Photography simply can't be taken at face value anymore. For an islamicist propagandist it's almost better than getting the "72 virgin" deal.

I've created a little propaganda and disinformation in my time.(The Colonel is very familar with the concepts. He may have even done a little himself.) I'm not saying some innocents weren't killed in Gaza. But I'd say these particular photos smell like propaganda to me.

I have no way of knowing for sure, and neither do any of you. But my personal bet about these photos is to paraphrase one Mr Valdimir Ilyich Lenin (lead man in slaughtering a 100 million or so innocents) "boys let's create some good propaganda and fish for useful idiots".

[PeterHug]

May God have mercy on their souls--and on the souls of those who did this.

Don't expect much of that from the relatives of these dead kids. Consider how you would feel, if that was your son or daughter, or niece or nephew lying there torn to bits in the dust. I know how I would feel, and I have to say, that if I could identify someone to focus that on, the results wouldn't be particularly pretty.

And by extension, think about Thomas Jefferson's comment, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." He was talking about slavery, but the thought is just as relevant here--in the end, what goes around comes around, and chickens generally come home to roost.

I think that it's about time (PAST time) to begin formulating an intellectual foreign policy that includes a moral dimension as a first-order component.

[mo]

"you can make up any image of anybody doing anything (including dead babies wraped in Hamas flags)"

Highlander, maybe you should have been watching something other than the MSM (if you are in the US) then you would have seen the children dying in the hospitals. In fact, if you contact Al Jazeera, Press TV or Ramattan they have footage of one of the children in the top left picture dying on camera. I presume he was dying but hey he could have been a really good 3 year old actor.

[Thomas]

The Angry Arab has been posting many photos like these over the past 3 weeks.

One can only expect that the Palestinians will want to return the favor.

[Nancy K]

Highlander, always remember all sides look for useful idiots, and you could just as easily be one.

[Charles I]

Highlander, re:

"But my personal bet about these photos is to paraphrase one Mr Valdimir Ilyich Lenin (lead man in slaughtering a 100 million or so innocents) "boys let's create some good propaganda and fish for useful idiots".

What planet are you living on.

There is no need to fake anything. Hundreds of real beseiged human beings trapped in the mostdensly populated tiny little patch of the ME have been slaughtered by real state-of-the-art weapons. Hundreds of them children. Thousand upon thousands wounded. 21 days of aerial bombardment, shelling and tank fire, replete with the cold-blooded murder of a little girl by an Israeli Captain, reported here earlier, apparently documented by the captain's own contemporaneously recorded words.

The stomach-churning evidence is readily available from a plethora of sources in only a bit longer than it takes to quote Lenin.

The useful idiots are those who allow this carnage and criminality to rage on unabated as intended by the criminals and their armourers. The people who call for securing Gaza against arms smuggling whilst saying nothing about arms smuggling to the aggressor Occupying Power, Israel.

Nevermind semantics about the divided nature of Fatah/Hamas control of the Occupied Territories. They have been at war, occupied and under siege. Legally Gaza and the West Bank are one political entity occupied and abused by Israel for decades. Legally, they are entitled to engage in armed struggle against the occupier from any part of the occupied territories by the feeble means available.

The international community, under international law, the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions has a duty to give succor to the Palestinians and to prosecute Israel.

Sadly, you live on the same planet I do. Where talk is of sealing the Gaza border from arms smuggling instead of ousting the Israelis from Gaza and the West Bank, and securing Israel's neighbours from it, then extracting massive reparations to rebuild the destroyed lands.

I'd be prepared to trust material from here:
http://electronicintifada.net/;

and from the Palestinain Centre For Human Rights here:

http://www.pchrgaza.org

The latter has a lot of pictures and video. It also has daily reporting from the scene detailing the specifics - names, addresses, ages, times of incidents - of buildings struck, deaths, injury and casualty reports, including more deaths announced daily by hospitals in Gaza.

Please go to these sights and let us know if you divine them frauds after actually reviewing them in some depth.

[parvati_roma]

This link contains a series of photos of child victims of the Israeli attack on Gaza complete with sources (mostly WAFA and AFP) and context, i.e. place, date, names of victims. The children shown in 2 of the pictures you posted: those in the top line - far left and middle - are from this same tragic occasion (Zaitoun, Gaza Strip, 5th Jan).
http://group121.blogspot.com/2009/01/gaza-photo-gallery.html

[PeterHug]

Dear Highlander,

You're absolutely right that digital photography and Photoshop have allowed people with agendas to fabricate "evidence" to support those agendas. But the baseline truth--and there is NO avoiding this--is that the policies of both Israel (and by extension the United States) and Hamas have directly, and predictably, resulted in the deaths of many children in Gaza. There is just NO way that anyone can avoid that conclusion. These pictures may or may not be accurate (my guess is that they probably are), and they may or may not be from this particular conflict (at some point I guess I really don't care about that--we're talking about dead babies one way or another). Even if you are a propagandist and you want to wrap a dead child in an Israeli or Palestinian flag (notice, please, that this is not the case with all except perhaps one pictures), you have to start with a baseline picture--which in this case is a dead kid. I'm sorry, but that attempt at whitewashing these pictures just won't fly.

The one response to these pictures (which reflect a fundamental reality whether they are themselves specifically accurate or not) that is unacceptable to me, is to deflect the discussion into a technical analysis of whether they are themselves 100% accurate, unmodified, and representative.

The bottom line is, I really don't much care if these pictures are from Gaza last week, or Lebanon a few years ago, or from Israel or for that matter from Germany in 1943. The central point for me is, enough is damn well enough. It's time to end this [expletive deleted] exercise, and stop our (I write from a US perspective) enabling of this bullshit.

The Israelis have now used up every free pass they ever could have expected to get, and as far as I'm concerned, they can go whistle for their supper until they roll back the settlements to where they were around 1975, put Jerusalem and the Golan Heights back on the table, and admit their guilt over the Liberty.

Fuck it (Pat, feel free to delete that) -- I've had enough, and this last exercise in state-sponsored terror (and there really is no other way to characterize it once you really begin to think about what they've been doing) is one step over any line I'm prepared to spot them.

[parvati_roma]

Al-Jazeera provides a list with the full names, ages and dates of death of 210 of the 300+ children killed in Gaza:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/200911591418168902.html
- accompanied by yet-another tragic funeral pic (Getty).
.....

[Byron Raum]

Homer,

Especially at this time, it is important to keep things in perspective. Nazis did not believe that the Jews represented an existentialist threat to them; many Israelis do believe that of the Palestinians, devoid of any reality that view might be, it still is true that this is what many of them believe. Israelis are not Nazis, horrifying as some of their works are. Do not let your grief run away with your common sense.

Highlander,

So we should understand that you are telling us that these could not possibly be pictures of recently dead Palestinian children? Or, are you telling us that they were all holding AK-47s in their hands when the brave Israeli soldiers shot them with great reluctance, weeping all the while, and the Hamas propagandists removed the guns and put dolls in their hands to make it look like they were innocents, gleefully chuckling all the while at that stupid American Byron who would become an instant Palestinian sympathizer?

B.R.

[mo]

This may be of some interest to those who believe that the IDF is an honorable army.

"Doctors operating the only brain-scanning machine at an Egyptian hospital near Gaza have been almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children arriving with bullet wounds to the head."

But if you don't have the time to read it or the url isn't apparent, here are some pertinent excerpts:

"Dr Yahia, a professor of neurosurgery, believes that the bullet was shot from close range. "If it changes course inside the brain it has high velocity and its penetrative force is also high. I can't precisely decide whether these children are being shot at as a target, but in some cases the bullet comes from the front of the head and goes towards the back, so I think the gun has been directly pointed at the child."

Dr Ayman Abd Al Hadi, a medical team leader at the hospital, said: "We've had one child with two bullets in the head and nowhere else."

http://archive.gulfnews.com/region/Egypt/10276545.html

[Ken Roberts]

Thank you all for info posted. The website www.pchrgaza.org is especially helpful.

The suggestion made re "formulating an intellectual foreign policy that includes a moral dimension as a first-order component" seems wise.

Perhaps the introductory of the US declaration of independence provides a starting point that will resonate.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in Dec-1948, provides a more detailed framework for moral conduct in international relations.

Maslov's hierarchy of needs is also a starting point. How can we find it acceptable to be completely at our ease while others lack food, water, shelter, and security?

The New Testament's message is one of love. Recall Matthew 22:39 "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself". That should resonate as well.

I am not as good as those declarations and as the people who exemplify best moral conduct, but at least I sometimes know what is right, and what is wrong, and have the responsibility and free will to choose.

It is useful to think globally but effective action for most of us is local, particular to our situations.

[parvati_roma]

Video - uploaded Jan 7 09 - of mass funeral of children killed in Israeli strike on UN school, showing rows of small shrouded bodies looking near-identical to those in 2 of the pics posted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-i2tbYmflI&feature=related

Info posted by uploader:

"Palestinians use three-hour ceasefire to bury children killed in Israeli strike on UN school... then firing resumes
(...)
In the city of Gaza, hundreds had taken to the streets during the hiatus to bury some of the 43 people killed in an Israeli strike on two UN 'safe haven' schools yesterday.
(...)