IDF versus Hamas

Recently emails have been circulating showing images and purveying views that present a distorted portrayal of Operating Cast lead, the Israeli response to thousands of terrorist assaults, including thousands of missiles fired from Gaza into Israeli population centers.

I'd like to thank Augean Stables for this excellent analysis.

The Battle for Accuracy in the Media is Engaged: The IDF Weighs in on Casualty Figures

Filed under: Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Media — Richard Landes @ 3:19 am — Print This Post

It may be four weeks later, but we now have some important information from the Israeli army on civilian casualty figures during Operation Cast Lead. They weigh in with a highly detailed report.
See Yaakov Katz: World duped by Hamas’s false civilian death toll figures
David Horovitz: Analysis: Counted out: Belatedly, the IDF enters the life-and-death numbers game
The Elder of Zion: The UNRWA school story was a lie

Basing its work on the official Palestinian death toll of 1,338, Levi said the CLA had now identified more than 1,200 of the Palestinian fatalities. Its 200-page report lists their names, their official Palestinian Authority identity numbers, the circumstances in which they were killed and, where appropriate, the terrorist group with which they were affiliated.
The CLA said 580 of these 1,200 had been conclusively “incriminated” as members of Hamas and other terrorist groups.
Another 300 of the 1,200 - women, children aged 15 and younger and men over the age of 65 - had been categorized as noncombatants, the CLA said.

In other words, in terms of identifiable dead according to this report, two-thirds were valid targets of the assault, one-third collateral damage. This is the opposite of the impression given by the claims of the PCHR:

While the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose death toll figures have been widely cited, reports that 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the fighting, amounting to more than two-thirds of all fatalities, the IDF figures shown to the Post on Sunday put the civilian death toll at no higher than a third of the total.

The implications here are enormous, particularly given the vastexpressions of hatred of Jews and Israelis that the MSM coverage of this conflict — what Shmuel Trigano called a “media progrom” — provoked around the world, much of it based on imagining and believing the damage caused to civilians was “absolute carnage.”
If, indeed, both in the specific figures now presented — two-thirds military death rate, rather than the two-thirds civilian mortality rate as reported by both Palestinian “human rights groups” and journalists — then the situation changes dramatically.
Actually, given how often the media told us that Gaza was the most densely-concentrated population in the world, and that an aerial attack could not help but cause great collateral damage to the civilians, we would expect a very high rate of civilian casualties. Perhaps one of the reasons that the Palestinian figures strike so many as reliable, is that they are actually fairly conservative in terms of collateral damage in aerial attacks on areas densey populated with civilians.

If we compare them with WW II (Dresden, Tokyo) or even Vietnam, these casualty figures are astoundingly low for civilian casualties, which run in the 80-99% range. Even if we compare them with NATO in Belgrade or the US in Mosul, the lowest figures for such activity on record outside of Israel, then the Israeli army outperforms virtually every military on record in the world for its ability to minimize civilian casualties.
(It’s not clear whether the rough comparison the study makes with American figures in Iraq is a sop to American sensibilities, or a fair equivalence. My impression is that acceptable US collateral damage rates, certainly in target killings, is considerably higher than Israel’s.)
When we add to that, the well-known practice of Hamas to hold civilians captive in areas of conflict in order to increase the number of their fatalities, one might consider the Israeli achievement in Gaza — how to minimize civilian casualties while attacking an insufferably vicious enemy who hides in their midst while attacking you — one of the most extraordinary in the relatively recent history of international humanitarianism under conditions of war.
The report presents a revealing difficulty in establishing figures (all statistics are sketches of reality, no more):

Counted among the women, however, were female terrorists, including at least two women who tried to blow themselves up next to forces from the Givati and Paratroopers’ Brigades. Also classed as noncombatants were the wives and children of Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas military commander who refused to allow his family to leave his home even after he was warned by Israel that it would be bombed.

Now there’s a category to identify: Palestinian civilian casualties directly caused by Palestinian initiatives. It could include everything from this case and others of holding civilians hostage, to actual murdering of Palestinians by other Palestinians.
It is, alas, a safe bet to predict that this is a form of warfare that the rest of the world will be seeing a great deal more of in the coming years and decades, all along the bleeding borders of Islam. In that context, it’s probably safe to say that the Israeli achievement will hold up remarkably well in comparison even with military operations in the 2010s and 20s.
So again, I ask the epistemological questions: “Why should the outside observer attribute more credibility to the figures provided by the Israeli army?” Why credit these figures? When will the report be released? Or will it?
How much epistemological priority do we accord, for example, to this revision of the casualty figures from the now notoriously-misreported UN School massacre from 43, most civilians, to 12, three civilians?

As an example of such distortion, he cited the incident near a UN school in Jabalya on January 6, in which initial Palestinian reports falsely claimed IDF shells had hit the school and killed 40 or more people, many of them civilians.
In fact, he said, 12 Palestinians were killed in the incident - nine Hamas operatives and three noncombatants. Furthermore, as had since been acknowledged by the UN, the IDF was returning fire after coming under attack, and its shells did not hit the school compound.
“From the beginning, Hamas claimed that 42 people were killed, but we could see from our surveillance that only a few stretchers were brought in to evacuate people,” said Levi, adding that the CLA contacted the PA Health Ministry and asked for the names of the dead. “We were told that Hamas was hiding the number of dead. 

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY!

Happy Mothers Day to Donna Solorzano, Anna Martinez,
Michele Blackburn, Ilana Black Moalem, Mary Ann, Maureen K. Blackburn, Kelly Jo, Bonnie Marie, Christi Jenkins Robson, Margeret, Esther Rivera, Maria Nunez, Liz Blackburn,  Mercy Sanchez Blackburn, Ashley Blackburn, Sharon Busch, Tina Chavez, Jill Batterby (Jill Blackburn), Edna Monteroso. and Anna Gutierrez.


It ALL starts and ends with Mom.

What next in Afghanistan?

They believe in a religion that is grounded in the 13th century.
If someone insults the pope, he doesn't send people out to kill you.
If you insult a Rabbi he doesn't send people out to blow you up.
These people do.
Their beliefs haven't evolved like Christianity and Judaism.
Those two are thousands of years old.
Islam is 700 years old.
A guy, usually a minority, gets drawn into or is a member of the community of Islam and typically is doing okay in America, then he has marital problems, and financial problems.
He gets depressed and wants to die, and rather than die a loser, he can die as a hero.
They convince themselves that they are acting as weapons of Islam.
We kill some Muslims in Afghanistan and they try to kill some of us.
Sometimes they use this as an excuse for their own failures .
Sometimes their frame of mind is, "They killed a hundred of us, in this or that village so we are going to kill a hundred of them."

We need to fight these Jihadi with power and vigor.
We have to be honest with each other, Islam, or at least a significant portion of it, has declared those who don't follow their religion to be the enemy.
They don't wish to be brought into the 21st Century, they think the 13th century was better.
They see influence with their atavistic religion as blasphemy.
Their beliefs codify oppression of Jews and Christians, and returning woman to the "good old days", when one could beat and rape his wife, and she was a slave.
That's the bottom line.
As you can plainly see in Afghanistan and Gaza, when this portion of Islam gains power they are brutal to the extreme.

To me, however, the most obvious crimes of these Islamic  Republican Governments or regimes is their treatment of women.

The religion is primitive
We have to fight them, but I do think one idea might help a little.
We should change our role in Afghanistan to where we are bombing less and causing less casualties.
We should, the civilized world, tell the Muslim countries that are brutalizing and enslaving women, that this is a crime, and we are not  going to tolerate it.
The burka is not a fashion statement, it is a sign if inferiority, a sign of submission.
In Afghanistan women are forced to wear burkas that cover them head to foot, with a small gauze outlet, so that a man can't get a good look at her eyes and be tempted to rape her.

Their have been women in Islamic countries that have been sentenced to be publicly whipped, after reporting a rape.
Because Islamic judges determined that the women in question seduced the rapist by, perhaps a glimpse of hair, or not having the gauze over her eyes, or dancing.

Some people have said to me, "Well, that's their custom, it's not up to us to make them change their customs."

If their customs allow them to brutalize woman and girls, and basically prevent a female from having any opportunities in life other than having babies on demand, and their customs allow men to beat women for whatever reason,
 We have every right in the world to interfere.

We have the duty to interfere.
Women's groups in Afghanistan have asked for protection, what the military calls security.

 One important factor in our thinking should be a consideration of what the impact of casualties will be over time.
A certain amount of innocent people will be killed in any type of warfare, what is the impact of that going to be?

Imagine you are sitting at home, you haven't done anything harmful, and suddenly a missile crashes through your roof and wipes out half your family.
Then you walk up and down the street, and your neighbors homes have been bombed too.
People are killed and crippled all around you.
Then imagine the military shows up and says, "Well, we were after so and so, and to get to him we had to soften up this area. Sorry. It's for a good cause."
Or, "We shelled your house by mistake."
I'm just wondering, will we be creating as many terrorists as we kill?
I'm just wondering what the ratio would be, 10 terrorists for every innocent person we shell?
Less or more?

Afghanistan is asymmetrical warfare, we are not going to conquer the Radical Islamicists in the usual sense of the word.
What we may need to do in Afghanistan is change the focus of the mission from killing Taliban members to protecting the people of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan women's groups have asked for security, for protection of the schools where girls are learning, for the first time in their lives, many of them.
They have been told that we can't afford it, or in the words of one Congressman, "We expect you to take care of that yourselves."
If we were dealing directly with women's rights, at least the women of Afghanistan would support us.
Slavery is wrong, whether the slave is black or white or male or female.
The literal enslavement of women in Afghanistan  is a horror that goes unremarked upon for the most part.

I saw an interview with an Afghanistani woman recently, she had 8 kids, she didn't want anymore, but her husband did.
She was asked, "Who will make the decision?"
She pointed to her husband and said, "He does. We have no choice."
The  reporter, a woman, asked, "Do you know what rape is?"
The woman's eyes grew large, and she looked uncomprehending, "No." she answered, quietly.

This abuse of human beings should be stopped.
That should be the focus of our efforts in Afghanistan.

RubinReports: Obama Administration Continues to Supply Israel with Advanced Weapons

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By Barry Rubin

I have repeatedly pointed out that as of now the Obama Administration has never put any material pressure on Israel. There are wild rumors and irresponsible materials floating around to the contrary. They aren’t true.

As proof, for example, take the article by Barbara Opall-Rome in Defense News, May 3, 2010, “U.S. Backs Israeli Munitions Upgrades.” She writes of “ever-expanding bilateral security ties unharmed by the unusually high-profile political rift” that took place temporarily.

In fact, the United States is equipping Israel with GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs for its F-15I fighter-bombers and this will be followed by the same system on F-16I planes. These 250-pound bombs are called bunker busters because they are smart bombs that will go through more than six feet of reinforced concrete.

In addition, Israel has equipped F-15Is to carry the 5,000-pound-class GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrator, designed to burrow 100 feet into earth or 20 feet into concrete.

The Israel Air Force is also receiving the Laser-Guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions (LJDAM), developed by Boeing Integrated Defense Systems and Israel's Elbit Systems and able to direct smart bombs more accurately.

To put it bluntly, GBU-39s can be used against simpler installations like arms-smuggling tunnels dug by Hamas between Egypt and the Gaza Strip along with Hizballah field fortifications.

The GBU-28s could be fired at stronger Hizballah installations. They could also be used on Iranian nuclear weapons or missile installations some day. Clearly, the U.S. government is neither urging nor advocating such an action and may never do so. But it has not blocked the possibility in terms of weaponry either.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His new edited books include Lebanon: Liberation, Conflict and Crisis; Guide to Islamist Movements; Conflict and Insurgency in the Middle East; and The Muslim Brotherhood. To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books. To see or subscribe to his blog, See Rubin Reports.