UN and EU go on the attack with the aid of the BBC

By Ted Belman

Haaretz reports the following remarks from EU and UN

The European Union has joined the United Nations in condemning what it calls the “disproportionate” use of force by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza after more than 60 Palestinians were killed in the highest single day toll since fighting erupted in 2000.

In a statement, the EU urged Israel to halt activities that endanger civilians saying they were contrary to international law.

It also called for an immediate end to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli territory and insisted that the peace process should not be interrupted.

Good for them. Everybody should play nice and the “peace process” should continue notwithstanding.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a similar condemnation of what he termed Israel’s “excessive and disproportionate” response to Palestinian rocket fire, while also denouncing the ongoing rocket attacks on Israeli towns and cities.

“While recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself, I condemn the disproportionate and excessive use of force that has killed an injured so many civilians, including children,” Ban told the emergency session of the council.

Now here is something new.

“I condemn Palestinian rocket attacks, and call for the immediate cessation of such acts of terrorism, which serve no purpose, endanger Israeli civilians, and bring misery to the Palestinian people,” he said.

It is new because the UN has never called Palestinian “resistance”, “terrorism”.

The permanent Palestinian observer to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said Israel’s actions, including the closure of all border crossings into Gaza, were war crimes.

“Such actions are clearly prohibited by international law and are being committed by the occupying power on a scale and scope amounting to war crimes,” Mansour told the council.

As my many articles have testified, Israel is not guilty of committing war crimes and must be considered innocent until proven guilty.

The Libyan draft resolution, has the council “expressing grave concern … about the killings of innocent civilians, including the killing of several Palestinian children as a result of recent Israeli military attacks in the Gaza Strip.”

It also calls for “an immediate cessation of all acts of violence, including military attacks” and urges Israel “to immediately open the Gaza Strip’s border crossings.”

Innocent people are always being killed in warfare. That’s legal providing its not intentional. At least Libyan isn’t claiming that. It also avoids calling the “resistance”, “terrorism”. Maybe it wants its resolution to get passed.

The draft does not mention the months of daily Palestinian rocket fire against Israel, which Israel has cited as the reason they closed all the border crossings into Gaza in January, allowing only humanitarian aid into the territory.

Western diplomats on the council had no immediate reaction to the Libyan draft proposal, though they said there was a general feeling that the Security Council should say something about the escalation of violence.

“It doesn’t have to be a resolution,” one diplomat said. “We could just issue a statement.”

The council has been deadlocked on the issue of the closure of the border crossings into the Gaza Strip, partly because Libya and other Arab states refuse to condemn the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in June 2007, as the United States has demanded.

Melanie PHILLIPS reports on The mother of all mistranslations

Ye gods. The BBC has put out this story:

Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’

Israeli leaders are warning of an imminent conflagration in Gaza after Palestinian militants aimed rockets at the southern city of Ashkelon. The deputy defence minister said the stepped-up rocket fire would trigger what he called a ‘bigger holocaust’ in the Hamas-controlled coastal strip.

This reported remark by deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai caused widespread shock and absolute horror. For an Israeli minister to use the word ‘holocaust’ to describe a limited war of Israeli self-defence, when for Jews of all people the ‘Holocaust’ means one thing: genocide — and this at a time when the calumny of the ‘Jews as Nazis’ is rampant around the world, putting Israel and the Jewish people at risk — was simply beyond belief.

It was indeed without any credibility — because Vilnai never said it. It was an appalling mistranslation by Reuters, the source of the BBC story. Vilnai said:

‘The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger “shoah” because we will use all our might to defend ourselves’.

Reuters translated the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ as ‘holocaust’. But ‘shoah’ merely means disaster. In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance. The word ‘Hashoah’ alone means ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘retzach am’ means ‘genocide’. The well-known Hebrew construction used by Vilnai used merely means ‘bringing disaster on themselves’.

But this grotesque mistranslation has given Hamas a propaganda gift which they lost no time exploiting:

Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said of Vilnai’s comments: ‘We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people.’ [..]

It is not enough for Reuters to try to cover its backside in subsequent stories. It must issue an explicit retraction, and so must the BBC. Instantly.

Israel will continue acting and the UN and EU will continue talking.