Tom Hurndall case [Israeli soldier tried for murder of British student]

[Grojlach]

Article dated on the 10th of May:

Israeli tried for killing UK man An Israeli soldier charged with killing a British student in the Gaza Strip has gone on trial in Israel. Tom Hurndall, 22, from north London, was shot in April last year while trying to help Palestinian children to safety during clashes in Rafah. His family campaigned for a trial after an initial army inquiry cleared those responsible for the shooting. In recent years, hundreds of civilians have been killed in the conflict but few cases have been investigated. Confession 'doubts' Mr Hurndall was working alongside the Palestinian rights group, the International Solidarity Movement, when he was shot in the head. He fell into a coma and died nine months later, in January 2004. The soldier faces six charges, including manslaughter and obstruction of justice. Mr Hurndall's family says the charge should be murder because he was shot by a rifle with an advanced telescopic lens and was clearly identifiable as a civilian. But the soldier's lawyers told the court that their client was not guilty and that a confession he signed had been forced from him under duress. 'Show trial' Mr Hurndall's mother, Jocelyn, sat just a few metres away from the accused soldier in the courtroom at a military base in southern Israel. She said she still found it difficult to believe that justice would be done. "It is not sufficient to come this far merely for the staging of a show trial," she said. The BBC's Middle East correspondent James Reynolds says there is an inescapable feeling among many that this trial is going ahead because the victim was British, not Palestinian. The trial was adjourned for nine days and a verdict is not expected for several months. Source: BBC

Excerpt taken from the obituary on the Guardian site:

The initial IDF field report, which went to the British Embassy in Tel Aviv and to Tom's family, exonerated the soldier who had killed him. He claimed that Tom was in camouflage, and wielding a gun. In the face of a clutch of witness statements, such suggestions were withdrawn.

Note that there are actual photographs of Tom Hurndall right after being shot, wearing a fluorescent bright orange vest. I could link to a picture of it if necessary, but I suppose we're seeing enough blood already through the media as it is.

Oh, and here's another article, this time from Times Magazine.

And the reason why this is back in the news, is the following news article:

British MPs 'fired at' in Gaza A group of British politicians were shot at by Israeli soldiers during a UN-supervised fact-finding mission, they have claimed. The cross-party group, including MPs Huw Irranca-Davies and Crispin Blunt, was on a visit to Rafah in Gaza, where UK student Tom Hurndall was killed. Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Northover said one bullet hit a wall about 10ft above her head. "I thought 'they're trying to kill us'," she told BBC News Online. Speaking from the West Bank city of Hebron on Saturday, the peer said they would be demanding an explanation and apology from the Israeli ambassador to Britain when they returned on Monday. The Israeli embassy in London said it had not received an official complaint from the UN or the politicians, but said it was checking with the military. A source said it was unclear whether shots had been fired, and if so by whom. He said the exchange of fire between both sides was "commonplace" in the area and had not necessarily come from Israeli forces. The group had emerged from their UN vehicle at around 1600 (1300 BST) on Thursday when they heard a burst of machine gun fire, said Conservative MP Crispin Blunt. 'Extremely frightening' They were visiting the site of the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli authorities, near the spot where Mr Hurndall was killed last April. Mr Irranca Davies said the first he knew of what was happening was when he heard the rattle of a machine gun. "We withdrew to the jeeps and as we were getting in, it was followed by some pretty accurate warning shots which fired above our heads and hit a building. It was a pretty clear indication they didn't want us there. "It was extremely frightening. "I will be taking it up with Jack Straw and the Foreign Office because it's simply not acceptable," he added. A Foreign Office spokesman said it was in touch with the MPs and seeking an explanation from the Israeli Government. 'Indiscriminate violence' Lady Northover told BBC News Online when shots rang out she wondered if she would make it back to their vehicle. "Our UN companions later said that if they had wanted to kill us they would have, but it was certainly our group they were targeting and seeking to scare. We were the only adults around. "One of the most perturbing things was that we had been surrounded by children as we arrived, but they were not terrified by this - it's obviously a fairly common occurrence," she added. In an earlier statement Lady Northover, the Liberal Democrats' international development spokesperson in the Lords, said the incident had shown her "the indiscriminate violence faced by Palestinians on a daily basis". She and Mr Blunt said the action may have been an attempt to stop the group seeing the effect of Israel's policy of demolishing Palestinian housing in Gaza. The group's fact-finding visit was arranged through the British consul-general in Jerusalem. Tom Hurndall, 22, from Tufnell Park, north London, was shot in April last year while trying to help Palestinian children to safety in Rafah. An Israeli soldier is being tried for the killing. Source: BBC

[ 06-20-2004, 03:18 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

[Black Baron]

Regarding the visit of the baroness and Company.
Their visit was not coordinated with IDF. The soldiers had no idea of whom they were. Besides a palestinian shooter could have fired. The baroness is so used probably of accusing israel, that the possibility of palestinian fire was not even considered. The atrocity (sp?) of this group is impressive. No coordination, basicly incognito, and then blaming israel. Brilliant.
If someone will say-"but they wore UN clothes", i will answer that the UN soldiers revealed our ambushes to hizballah fighters, helped to kidnap our 3 soldiers, and can as well sell clothes for the right price.

[img]graemlins/1puke.gif[/img]

Easy to make decisions about what was easy to see and what is actually happeneng when bullets are flying. Feel bad for the kid that got shot, but when you put yourself into a combat zone, these things happen.

[Timber Loftis]

And just why won't the US sign on to the ICC?

If Im not mistaken....was it not recently revealed that somehow Hamas had "procured" several UN vehicles and ambulances and were caught trying to use them for rather unsavory practices?

I can't remember when or where I read this...it just occured to me is all...

Heres a nice bit that maybe some people might find illuminating about why people NOW are not trying to make deals with the terrorists to satisfy them so that they do not attack...

The article is from an online blog called David Frum's Diary.


JUN. 21, 2004: IRISH LESSON
The 1990s were an era of seeming peacemaking. In Israel, in Colombia, in northern Ireland, enduring quarrels were being negotiated to apparent compromise. Nobel Prizes were awarded the Arab and Israeli peacemakers in 1994, and then the Irish peacemakers in 1998. We seemed decisively moving toward a better world--in my opinion, for what it is worth, one reason that the stock market managed to rise so high and fast in the mid-1990s despite the Bill Clinton tax increases of 1993.

I must confess that I was as caught up in the enthusiasm of those times too. Yet through it all, my phone kept ringing--and there on the other end was my friend Dean Godson, for many years the chief editorial writer of Britain's Daily Telegraph, and as thoroughly unillusioned an observer of politics as exists on either side of the Atlantic.

Dean kept pointing out that the Israeli, Colomiban, and Irish processes all shared a dangerous defect: They were attempts to make peace with terrorist adversaries who were not sincerely committed to peace. As US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair lavished their patience and ingenuity to bring the two sides together, Dean kept perceiving that Clinton and Blair were engaging in a massive self-deception--refusing to see facts as they were, because those facts were too ugly and depressing.

Dean was an editorialist, so you might have expected him to ventilate this insight through fierce little polemics of 600 words or so. His father was an American Jew born in Russia, so you might have expected him to concentrate his attention on the Arab-Israeli dispute. Instead, for no reason that any outsider could easily discern, Dean became profoundly concerned with the Irish quarrel--and passionately committed to the lonely struggle of what may qualify as the world's least popular political constituency, the predominantly Protestant Unionists of northern Ireland. He has devoted the past five years to a colossal biography of the Unionist leader, David Trimble, co-winner of the 1998 prize. The book was published last week to almost unanimous acclaim in Britain and Ireland. It may be the only book ever to win glowing reviews from the leading papers of both northern and southern Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times.

(None of these reviews were yet online as of the time of this posting.)

Himself Alone--the title is a punning reference to the Irish Republican group Sinn Fean, "ourselves alone"--is much more than just the story of one politician's career. It is an attempt through very close study of day-by-day events to show how democratic politicians can be sucked into a process of concession-making to those who intend to destroy democracy.

Like Yasser Arafat's PLO and the Colombian Marxist insurgents, the Irish republican negotiaters won concession after concession with promise after promise--only to pocket the concessions and break the promises.

The longer the process lasted, the further the democratic politicians drifted from their original intentions.

British politicians who entered the process intending to protect the union between northern Ireland and mainland Britain--a union cherished by a large majority of the population of northern Ireland--ended by inventing a new kind of multinational structure in which northern Ireland would somehow be jointly governed by Britain and the Republic of Ireland together.

Northern Irish politicians who entered the process to defend the union found themselves contemplating independence for northern Ireland--and estrangement from Britain--in order to protect themselves and their interests.

The elected politicians of southern Ireland--who privately recognized that northern Ireland could never be democratically united with the South--found themselves deputized to provide democratic legitimacy for terrorists they despised.

And the terrorists themselves grabbed everything they could get, including face time with the president of the United States, without surrendering either their ultimate intentions--or their ability to revert to violence at well.

It's an instructive story--about which more tomorrow.

[Black Baron]

The news about the UN aquired ambulances are not new. I posted an appropriate link roughly a month ago.
So much for the holy UN. [img]graemlins/1puke.gif[/img]