“Some Russian air strikes appear to have directly attacked civilians or civilian objects by striking residential areas with no evident military target and even medical facilities, resulting in deaths and injuries to civilians. Such attacks may amount to war crimes,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.
Compare that language with how Philip Luther described Israeli attacks on houses in a nearly parallel report issued last November:
“Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifferenceto the carnage caused,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International. “The report exposes a pattern of attacks on civilian homes by Israeli forces which have shown a shocking disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, who were given no warning and had no chance to flee.”
Amnesty uses much more graphic and loaded language to describe Israeli actions.
It gets worse. Amnesty’s report about Russia says that they found zero evidence of any military targets among the sites hit. But it admits that Israel did have some military targets even according to their biased investigation:
In several of the cases documented in the report, possible military targets were identified by Amnesty International. However the devastation to civilian lives and property caused in all cases was clearly disproportionate to the military advantages gained by launching the attacks.
As I have proven repeatedly, Amnesty was wrong about many of the targets, because I was able to document valid military targets in nearly every single case Amnesty mentioned. And Amnesty was wrong about international law (“disproportionate”) in the report on Israel.
But with Russia, where Amnesty cannot find a single military target, Philip Luther’s language is far less critical and more clinical.
The bias is obvious. As usual.
@ Yidvocate:
There is a benefit to being a pariah. As long as you will be hated no matter what you do, you might as well do whatever you want.
@ babushka:
Maybe that’s just why Israel keeps losing and Russia is ascendent right now.
Carpet bombing Gaza would be more than justified by all historic standards. A state of undisputed war exists and thousands of rockets have gone un-retaliated. Hamas is the democratically elected government so all Gazans are answerable for the atrocities of Hamas. There are no innocents. It would solve the Gaza question once and for all. Isn’t that what war is supposed to do after all? Not to mention restore the IDF’s badly damaged deterrence image. Of course the “community of anti-Semites, err, nations” will beat their chests. What else is new? And so what? In fact the only time it seems Israel gets some grudging respect is when it actually acts tuff – rare these days.
This is the way America once won wars, as Dresden and Hiroshima learned the hard way.