Spot the Connection: Dead Baby Jokes, The Rules of Engagement in Gaza, & The Immorality of Showing Mercy to the Enemy During a Holy War (A News Round-Up)

by Damozel | Sarah Palin and many lefties who despise Sarah Palin are taken aback by Obama's unthinking  "Special Olympics" gaffe -- even Sarah Palin can be right sometimes, it seems -- and we do well to be.  Being shocked and disgusted is the right response to a joke implying a certain degree of disdain for the predicament of the disabled. 

So what about all this then?  Haaretz reports -- with an illustrative photograph:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him.

A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants....

This is what Andrew Sullivan -- who is generally right when it comes to the issue of torture and war crimes -- means when he says, " The Cheneyfication of Israel deepens."  Though, to be fair, it's clear from the reports that many Israeli soldiers find it deeply disturbing and disgusting.  Just not enough of them, I guess, to stop it.

In many cases, the content is submitted for approval to one of the unit's commanders. The latter, however, do not always have control over what gets printed, because the artwork is a private initiative of soldiers that they never hear about....

A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.

"It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," he explains. "The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him."

Does the design go to the commanders for approval?

The Givati soldier: "Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant. We ordered shirts for 30 soldiers and they were really into it, and everyone wanted several items and paid NIS 200 on average." ....

These shirts also seem pretty extreme. Why draw crosshairs over a child - do you shoot kids? ...

"As a sniper, you get a lot of extreme situations. You suddenly see a small boy who picks up a weapon and it's up to you to decide whether to shoot. These shirts are half-facetious, bordering on the truth, and they reflect the extreme situations you might encounter. The one who-honest-to-God sees the target with his own eyes - that's the sniper."

Have you encountered a situation like that?

"Fortunately, not involving a kid, but involving a woman - yes. There was someone who wasn't holding a weapon, but she was near a prohibited area and could have posed a threat."

What did you do?

"I didn't take it" (i.e., shoot).

You don't regret that, I imagine.

"No. Whomever I had to shoot, I shot."

A shirt printed up just this week for soldiers of the Lavi battalion, who spent three years in the West Bank, reads: "We came, we saw, we destroyed!" - alongside images of weapons, an angry soldier and a Palestinian village with a ruined mosque in the center. (Haaretz, Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009)

What is all this in aid of?

"I was in Gaza and they kept emphasizing that the object of the operation was to wreak destruction on the infrastructure, so that the price the Palestinians and the leadership pay will make them realize that it isn't worth it for them to go on shooting. So that's the idea of 'we're coming to destroy' in the drawing."  (Haaretz, Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009)

I see; it's a tactic.  Well, I don't have much moral high ground from which to criticize, considering the outrages perpetrated in my country's name at Abu Ghraib, at CIA black sites, at Guantanamo. But Andrew Sullivan who generally gets it right on the issue of torture and war crimes wrote:

The message of these t-shirts has been essentially condoned by Israel's leadership. Soldiers will always do bad things; and they will say profane things; and the pressures they are under are immense. But when the leadership of a country gives a quiet pass to this kind of animus, the dogs of war get very hard to rein back in.  (emphasis added)

Yes, that's right.  Because what about this?

Soldiers' accounts of two killings of women and children appeared Thursday in Haaretz and Maariv. Both papers followed up Friday with lengthy excerpts of the soldiers’ comments about confusion and doubt over the rules of engagement during the 22-day offensive, which left an estimated 1,400 Palestinians dead.

The accounts came from a Feb. 13 discussion at a military preparatory academy. The school's director, Danny Zamir, who led the discussion, disclosed the transcript this week. Here are recollections of Aviv, a squad commander in the elite Givati Brigade, other Givati soldiers and an air force pilot. The transcript didn't use their full names  (LA Times)

To get  back to the dead baby jokes.  People make jokes about the things that cause them anxiety.  That, I believe, is true.  But I also believe that the reason they make jokes about these things might be in order to get past their anxiety.  And it is not acceptable for people to get past anxiety about something like this.

Adam Horowitz of Mondoweiss wrote, and it was well said:

I don't imagine these types of shirts are unique to Israel. I bet there are similar ones created by US soldiers in Iraq. But the shirts do point to an environment where mass war crimes can be carried out. They reflect a mindset where Palestinian life is disdained, when it's even acknowledged. One of the soldiers says it best in their testimony describing the killing of a mother and her two children: "the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way." 

Consider the reported testimony of these soldiers who participated in Gaza, where the violence that was bred from the violence is 100% guaranteed to go on breeding more violence:

Less than a month after the end of Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, dozens of graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory program convened at Oranim Academic College in Kiryat Tivon. Since 1998 the program has prepared participants for what is considered meaningful military service. Many assume command positions in combat and other elite units of the Israel Defense Forces. The program's founder, Danny Zamir, still heads it today and also serves as deputy battalion commander in a reserve unit.

You might find their reminiscences even more disturbing than some of those jokes we were just considering. 

“I went to our soldiers and said, ‘The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out … This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment.

One of my soldiers came to me and asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What isn’t clear? We don’t want to kill innocent civilians.’ He goes, ‘Yeah? Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist, that’s a known fact.’ I said, ‘Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.’ He says, ‘That’s clear,’ and then his buddies join in: ‘We need to murder any person who’s in there. Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist,’ and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media....

“And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we’ll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor - something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn’t really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it’s cool.

“You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.”(Haaretz, "Shooting and Crying"; emphasis added)

There's more.  A soldier said:

Gilad: "One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious - I don't know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood....Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the Second Lebanon War was the way the IDF goes in - with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers' lives by means of firepower. In the operation the IDF's losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed."(Haaretz, "Shooting and Crying"; emphasis added)

More shooting than crying for the IDF, clearly.

But God will know his own and sort them out, I guess.  After all, this was apparently framed to the soldiers as a religious mission. 

Rabbi (and Brigadier General) Avichai Rontzki...told soldiers that it was “immoral” to show mercy to the enemy in the operation. (Jonathan Turley)

As Avedon Carol remarks, ""Yep, nothing helps soothe things and bring the opposing sides closer to peace like a bit of holy war. For every crackpot Muslim defender-of-the-faith loony, we have twelve apocalyptic Christian loonies and even a couple of Rabbis to keep the fires burning.""

So.  I never thought I'd get to this point; not all that long ago, I supported Israel's cause without qualification or qualm.  This is indeed a new generation.

Jonathan Turley reports:

The Israeli Military Advocate General Avichai Mandleblit is investigating accounts of religious extremists pushing soldiers to view the Gaza invasion as a “religious war” against gentiles as human rights groups call for the removal of...Rabbi...Rontzki...

Of course, we have had our own holy warriors in combat such as...William Boykin in Somalia. Yet, the combination of these recent accounts and the controversial destructions in Gaza has led to a formal investigation into whether soldiers were encouraged to view this as a holy war. To their credit, many in the Israeli military are alarmed by how the intrusion of religious extremism may have eroded the professionalism and restraint of the military.  (Jonathan Turley)

For a note on the ongoing resistance of some Israeli soldiers to this trend, see "Breaking the Silence": Israeli Soldiers Speak Out" (4-08)

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