Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The Phony War Crimes Accusation Against Israel

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/the-phony-war-crimes-accu_b_160050.html
Alan Dershowitz
The Phony War Crimes Accusation Against Israel
Every time Israel seeks to defend its civilians against terrorist
attacks, it is accused of war crimes by various United Nations
agencies, hard left academics and some in the media. It is a totally
phony charge concocted as part of Hamas' strategy -- supported by many
on the hard left -- to delegitimate and demonize the Jewish state.
Israel is the only democracy in the world ever accused of war crimes
when it fights a defensive war to protect its civilians. This is
remarkable, especially in light of the fact that Israel has killed far
fewer civilians than any other country in the world that has faced
comparable threats. In the most recent war in Gaza fewer than a
thousand civilians -- even by Hamas' skewed count -- have been killed.
This, despite the fact that no one can now deny that Hamas had
employed a deliberate policy of using children, schools, mosques,
apartment buildings and other civilian areas as shields from behind
which to launch its deadly anti-personnel rockets. The Israeli Air
Force has produced unchallengeable video evidence of this Hamas war
crime.
Just to take one comparison, consider the recent wars waged by Russia
against Chechnya. In these wars Russian troops have killed tens of
thousands of Chechnyan civilians, some of them willfully, at close
range and in cold blood. Yet those radical academics who scream bloody
murder against Israel (particularly in England) have never called for
war crime tribunals to be convened against Russia. Nor have they
called for war crime charges to be filed against any other of the many
countries that routinely kill civilians, not in an effort to stop
enemy terrorists, but just because it is part of their policy.
Nor did we see the Nuremburg-type rallies that were directed against
Israel when hundreds of thousands of civilians were being murdered in
Rwanda, in Darfur and in other parts of the world. These bigoted hate-
fests are reserved for Israel.
The accusation of war crimes is nothing more than a tactic selectively
invoked by Israel's enemies. Those who cry "war crime" against Israel
don't generally care about war crimes, as such, indeed they often
support them when engaged in by country's they like. What these people
care about, and all they seem to care about, is Israel. Whatever
Israel does is wrong regardless of the fact that so many other
countries do worse.
When I raised this concern in a recent debate, my opponent accused me
of changing the subject. He said we are talking about Israel now, not
Chechnya or Darfur. This reminded me of a famous exchange between
Harvard's racist president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and the great
American judge Leonard Hand. Lowell announced that he wanted to reduce
the number of Jews at Harvard, because, "Jews cheat." Judge Hand
replied that "Christians also cheat." Lowell responded, "You're
changing the subject. We are talking about Jews."
Well, you can't just talk about Jews. Nor can you just talk about the
Jewish state. Any discussion of war crimes must be comparative and
contextual. If Russia did not commit war crimes when its soldiers
massacred tens of thousands of Chechnyans (not even in a defensive
war) then on what basis could Israel be accused of accidentally
killing a far fewer number of human shields in an effort to protect
its civilians? What are the standards? Why are they not being applied
equally or selectively? Can human rights endure in the face of such
unequal and selective application? These are the questions the
international community should be debating, not whether Israel, and
Israel alone, violated the norms of that vaguest of notions called
"international law" or the "law of war."
If Israel, and Israel alone among democracies fighting defensive wars,
were ever to be charged with "war crimes," that would mark the end of
international human rights law as a neutral arbitrator of conduct. Any
international tribunal that were to charge Israel, having not charged
the many nations that have done far worse, will lose any remaining
legitimacy among fair-minded people of good will,
If the laws of war in particular, and international human rights in
general, are to endure, they must be applied to nations in order of
the seriousness of the violations, not in order of the political
unpopularity of the nations. If the law of war were applied in this
manner, Israel would be among the last, and certainly not the first,
charged.
----
"i nostri amici ebrei" (Luca Logi / rodewalder)
cfr 
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2008/12/luca-logi-e-i-piselli.html

 Alan Dershowitz
ma perchè non ha pietà di se stesso?