Omar Bashir in Qatar
The IDF Spokesman's Office reported this week:
According to the data gathered by the Research Department of the Israel Defense Intelligence, there were 1166 names of Palestinians killed during Operation Cast Lead. 709 of them are identified as Hamas terror operatives, amongst them several from various other terror organizations. Furthermore, it has been found that 295 uninvolved Palestinians were killed during the operation, 89 of them under the age of 16, and 49 of them women. In addition, there are 162 names of men that have not yet been attributed to any organization.
Has any army been so careful to document casualties on the other side of a defensive operation? Has any army been so precise in an attack on a cowardly terrorist force that removed its uniforms, hid weapons in mosques and fired from among its own women and children? And yet large parts of the world seem convinced that Israel went on an unchecked rampage in Gaza and there is movement afoot to charge Israeli government and military officials with crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
But what happens when there is a real unchecked rampage?
Omar Bashir of Sudan was indicted by the ICC for war crimes against the people of Darfur. It was little enough for the Court to do; the UN estimates that 300,000 people have been killed and 2.7 million driven from their homes since 2003 in attacks by militias supported by the Government of Sudan. After the indictment, Bashir ousted several NGOs that feed and care for the refugees.
Inter alia, the indictment forbids Bashir's travel and requires member governments to arrest him upon entry to their countries. No country of the 22-member Arab League is a signatory to the ICC - with which we take no particular issue - so it is not surprising that he was not arrested upon entering Qatar. But that was insufficient for the League - which issued a formal declaration rejecting the indictment and welcomed Bashir as a hero. On the other hand, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said at the summit that Israel should be held accountable for "war crimes" in Gaza.
JINSA's objections to the ICC are old and grounded in our belief that the Court is inconsistent with American Constitutional protections and would produce political indictments of Israel and the United States at the first possible opportunity. They have not changed just because the Court had a moment of sanity in the indictment of Bashir.
More interesting is the fact that Muslim Arab governments are willing to crony up a brutal dictator and turn their backs on hundreds of thousands of their Muslim brothers penned up in refugee camps, festering there with only outsiders to feed them. And crony up further when the "international community" finds its voice to object.
Sort of like the Arab treatment of the Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt as well as Palestinians living under Palestinian rule in the territories. Would that the Arabs were half as careful with the lives of their brothers as Israel has been. And would that the "international community" find its voice to object to Arab treatment of Arab refugees, even if Arabs can't do it themselves.
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