The sad story of the Palestinian family blown up on a beach in Gaza lead the Pali supporting folks at Human Rights Watch to leap to the conclusion that it must have been either an errant or, worse, targetted Israeli shell which did the damage. This assertion was unsupported by any actual, well, evidence. The IDF denied it after conducting an investigation. But the lefites took it up as yet another example of the nasty Jews blowing up the Palis in retaliation for the Palis sending rocket barages directly at Israeli civilian targets.
Now HRW is back away from its claims:
Garlasco told Klifi during the meeting that he was impressed with the IDF’s system of checks and balances concerning its artillery fire in the Gaza Strip and unlike Hamas which specifically targeted civilians in its rocket attacks, the Israelis, he said, invested a great amount of resources and efforts not to harm innocent civilians.
“We do not believe the Israelis were targeting civilians.” Garlasco said. “We just want to know if it was an Israeli shell that killed the Palestinians.”
Lucy Mair - head of the HRW’s Jerusalem office - said Klifi’s team had conducted a thorough and professional investigation of the incident and made “a good assessment” when ruling out the possibility that an errant IDF shell had killed the seven Palestinians on the Gaza beach. ”
jerusalem post
Now, HRW might go one step further and condemn Hamas and the Pali terrorists who it admits could care less if they hit Israeli civilians…
And we can look forward to fulsome appologies from the left for taking the Pali spin at face value….
Written by jay on June 20th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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It seems to me a very modern, very contemporary city, very connected for its size. There’s a lot of coming and going in Vancouver, which is a very contemporary phenomenon. One thing I’m always struck by — and if this comes off as a dis to Toronto, well, so be it — is how Torontonians know hugely less about what is going on outside of Toronto. They know a ton about what’s going on inside Toronto — this is a broad and unfair generalization — but people in Vancouver, it seems to me, know roughly what’s going on in their city, but the attention is largely outward. In my experience, anyway.
The people that I meet in Vancouver seem to be residents of Vancouver but citizens of a broader world. Torontonians are really incredibly Torontonian. There’s a lot going on in that city and I guess it occupies a lot of their attention. So in that sense, Vancouver seems like a more contemporary city. It seems much more connected, much more international. Its visible and audible cues are international. And that’s all very much to my taste.
the tyee
Tayor wrote the surprisingly successful Stanley Park a few years ago. Matt Mallon interviews him in the Tyee’s new books section.
I think he has it about right in his remarks about Vancouver and Toronto. When I lived in TO I was always struck by how little the denizens actually knew about the rest of Canada or the world. While they were often pretty sophisticated urban types their event horizon petered out at about Kingston to the East and Hamilton to the West.
Likely because Vancouver is too small to be that self-contained, Vancouverites tended to see themselves as part of a world conversation - even before the net.
It’s an interesting interview.
Written by jay on June 20th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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