The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that "according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy."
"All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians," the statement said.
Yesha Rabbinical Council is the recognized authority on Jewish religious questions in Gaza and the West Bank. This week it decreed that at least 56 Lebanese citizens of Kfar Qanna, including at least 34 children, targeted by an Israeli air strike, were not “innocent.”
The council’s edict reflects existing Israeli military/religious law. The chaplain for the IDF forces says, “In war, when our forces storm the enemies, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians that are ostensibly good.”
Such official standards come from Jewish law, or Halakah, contained in the Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud is the highest religious and ethical authority for the state of Israel and religious Jews. The Talmudic ‘proof text’ for Yesha’s decision came from treatise Abodah-Zarah 26b, where Rabbi Simeon Ben Yohai says: “The best among the gentiles deserves to be killed. The best of snakes ought to have its head crushed.”
Rabbi Ben Yohai is one of the earliest and therefore most respected of Talmudic rabbis. He is so beloved by Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel that every year at his birth place, in Meron, tens of thousands gather for days in the festival of Lag Ba Omar to sing and dance in honor of his memory. The prestigious Encyclopedia Judaica, in its article on him, describes Ben Yohai as one of the giants of Judaism for all time.
Much of the world, not sharing Israel’s disregard for the lives of innocent civilians caught in a war zone, were shaken by IDF’s intentional strike on a huddled enclave of refugees at Qanna this week.
Israel’s “hit back” policy has repeatedly endorsed reprisals against the Arabs, not only in Israel and the occupied territories, but Lebanon, especially in 1982.
What happened then is remarkably similar to what is happening now. Listen to World Vision International’s Stan Mooneyham, who was on the scene.
Some say there was two hours notice. Others insist there was none. In a camp of 60,000, it’s not easy to get the word around, even when warning leaflets are dropped . . . the first planes came at five o’clock in the evening; from just after midnight until eight the next evening the bombing was continuous. For three days the pounding went on. Everybody here has friends who died in the attack. A woman makes a chopping motion across the knee of a baby another woman is holding, saying she saw a baby at Ein-el-Hilweh who had both legs blown off.
There is no Ein-el-Hilweh anymore. Never before have I seen such total destruction, not even in Managua, the earthquake-stricken capital of Nicaragua. If the world’s war makers and peace makers want to see what the saturation bombing looks like, they should look here. Israel, the country skilled in making the desert blossom like a rose, knows also how to turn rose into desert.
Block after block of crumpled wreckage is all that’s left. Plus the unknown number of bodies. There must be hundreds down there underneath the rubble - the permeating odor of decaying flesh tells you that much. Refugees who escaped say that as many as 8,000 died. The Red Cross puts the number at 1,500. Either way, it’s one of the major massacres of modern times. (Ed. note: The final Lebanese death toll was 17,500).
Mooneyham then describes the Israeli attack on Sidon in the darkness of the early morning:
. . . at 2:30 Monday mornings, June 14, an aerial bomb slices into Kineye School. It rips bodies apart, strews arms and legs and pieces of what a second before had been living, breathing human beings. The concussion takes the rest.
No more running. No more crying. Now they sleep.
Now here I am three weeks later, where no observer is supposed to be, seeing what no observer is supposed to see. The bodies and pieces of bodies . . . Kineye School is a charnel house: body fluids, creeping across the basement floor from the stack of bodies, are ankle deep in places. It is possible to count 50 or so bodies. The rest are piled atop each other, hurled there by the blast that took their lives. We are told there are 255 in the helter-skelter pile.
The Israelis, of course, played down the casualties and damage in Sidon, as well as Beirut. Yet Mooneyham, who managed to penetrate the area much sooner than other Western observers has this to report:
If the Israeli figure of 165 killed in Sidon is accurate, I saw all but ten of those bodies in one school basement, still unburied three weeks after the invasion. That says nothing about the township of Ein-el-Hilweh just outside of Sidon which had a normal population of 60,000 and was obliterated by saturation bombing.
As the head of an international relief organization bringing $400,000 worth of medical and relief supplies to the victims of the holocaust, Mooneyham was astonished at the refusal of the Israeli conquerors to allow distribution of such necessities, even after the fighting had ended and the area was secure.
Early delivery attempts were thwarted on several occasions by Israeli blockades . . . Causing costly delays . . . Israel refused all relief agencies access to occupied areas for more than ten days of the worst need when quick action could have saved many lives. The Red Cross ship SS Anton (carrying World Vision relief supplies) was refused permission on security grounds to land critically needed supplies to Sidon two weeks after the invasion, although our people in the city reported total security, with people fishing on the docks.
Although Mooneyham did not view other areas of Lebanon as closely as his inspection of Tyre and its environs, what he saw there prompts him to make an ominous comparison: “The sheer magnitude of this one visible piece of the Israeli war machine is incredible. David seems determined to become Goliath.”
After Israel’s saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin arrogantly defended Israel’s actions saying, “We do not have to answer to the world, only to ourselves.”
In other words, America’s business is to mutely supply the money and military hardware that enables Zionism’s bloody expansion.
Isn’t it time to ask a few commonsense questions?
George Washington warned America to “avoid foreign entanglements.” Just what are we doing spending nearly a trillion dollars and sacrificing thousands of American lives on the other side of the world to benefit nations, whether in Tel Aviv or Baghdad, who reject our values?
America was intended by its founding fathers, not to be an international meddler in the strife of foreign lands, but a beacon of truth and liberty which benighted foreign nations could turn toward for inspiration. It’s time to disentangle ourselves from the troubled Middle East and make use of the same man-power and the next trillion dollars to build a stronger America.
It’s time to come home.
Source: NPN
Where's the outrage?
I wanted millions to die and have it last for years.