56 thoughts on “IDF T-Shirts Boast of Killing Babies, Pregnant Women, Sodomizing Hamas Leaders – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. And Ethan Bronner calls the confessions of murder as “allegations”. Is that man really on the planet with the rest of us?

  2. What’s incredible is how bad things got in the last decade. When I served, in the mid 90’s, these shirts had jokes about the service and our officers. Those kind of racist remarks and murder jokes weren’t even heard.

    That only goes to show that if you want to support Israel in any way, ending the occupation is the most urgent thing to do. But go explain this to AIPAC.

    1. How terribly sad. These young men are as indoctrinated as the Hitler Jugend. This does irreparable damage to an entire generation and it will be carried through to the next one. It is puzzling why the leadership of Israel fails to see the lasting damage.

  3. I agree – the tee shirts are an eruption of a deeper feeling that has been forming Israeli society. The young ones who go to war have little to no experience with the Arabs behind checkpoints, walls, separated and second class within Israel proper in their own villages. (Criticize Carter for daring to use the word apartheid!) This ugliness starts when the kids are very young and it’s even here in the US, in the religious schools, (I suspect with cause) ingrained into those who will be pressured to make aliyah when they graduate.

    It may not be in the textbooks but it’s taught just the same.

    They don’t know Arabs, they are taught and have formed negative ideas about them. Arabs are the eternal enemy and they have to be fought and killed. I have to say also that the response to occupation, especially the suicide bombing campaign and now the rockets, feeds this, helps justify this shameful ugliness.

  4. Apparently some of the extremist rabbis pushing the Gaza massacre saw it as a religious war against the hated gentiles.

    But heaven forbid any should call these people”bigots” — the term used by ADl types against any American seriously critical of Israel or its US lobby.

    Soldier says rabbis pushed “religious war” in Gaza
    20 Mar 2009 14:52:04 GMT
    Source: Reuters
    (Adds background, edits)
    JERUSALEM, March 20 (Reuters) – Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive they were fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published on Friday.
    “Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.
    The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper in the second day of revelations that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com “Shooting and Crying, 2009”).
    They were leaked from a Feb 13 meeting of armed forces members to share their Gaza experiences.
    Some veterans, alumni of an Israel Defence Force (IDF) military academy, told of the killing of civilians and their impression that deep contempt for Palestinians pervaded the ranks of the Israeli forces.
    Haaretz and the daily Maariv, which also published the accounts, quoted over half a dozen soldiers and airmen. The institution’s director, Danny Zamir, confirmed that Thursday’s published accounts were authentic.
    In longer excerpts in its Friday “Week’s End” edition, the daily quoted ‘Ram’ as saying his impression of the 22-day operation was “the feeling of an almost religious mission”.
    There was a “huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out”, he said. The corps’s pamphlets told the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present, but the rabbinate’s message imparted the sense that “this operation was a religious war”.
    The rabbinate of the IDF provides religious services, including overseeing preparation of kosher food, providing prayerbooks and prayer sessions and religious counselling to any soldier wants to participate. Involvement is not obligatory.
    RELIGION IN THE MILITARY
    The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) has put the Palestinian death toll during the war at 1,417 — 926 civilians, 236 fighters and 255 police officers. Israeli officials have disputed those figures. Thirteen Israelis were killed.
    Israel faced global criticism over its assaults in densely populated areas of Gaza in the campaign, launched with the declared aim of ending rocket attacks from Hamas and other Islamist militant groups in Gaza aimed at its southern towns.
    Hamas clerics have often called for “Zionist” blood to be spilled. The Islamists carried out dozens of suicide bombings in Israel before and during a Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, blowing up buses and cafes.
    The Jewish state tries to balance the needs of its non-observant majority with religious tradition. While the military does not provide data on the disposition of personnel, observers report a disproportionately high number of soldiers and officers wearing skullcaps — a symbol of Jewish faith.
    One week after the Gaza offensive ended on Jan.18 Israeli human rights group Yesh Din called on Defence Minister Ehud Barak to dismiss the chief chaplain, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, who holds the rank of brigadier general.
    It said he had distributed a booklet to soldiers fighting in the Gaza conflict quoting an ultra-nationalist Israeli rabbi as saying that showing mercy towards a “cruel enemy” was “terribly immoral” and advising soldiers they were fighting “murderers”.
    Barak responded to the IDF revelations on Thursday by repeating Israel’s description of its armed forces as the most moral in the world. The IDF said its judge advocate-general had ordered an investigation. (Additional reporting by Dan Williams) (Writing by Douglas Hamilton; editing by Philippa Fletcher) (For blogs and links on Israeli politics and other Israeli and Palestinian news, go to http://blogs.reuters.com/axismundi)

  5. “Of course they hate Arabs. They were brought to do so. And they have so little contact with a real Palestinian that they can easily delude themselves into believing that they don’t actually hate them. The truth is they don’t know them and it is terribly easy to hate what you don’t know.”

    This suggests to me that, for long-lasting peace, what is needed is some kind of one-state solution in which both nationalities (Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs) deal with each other through the mechanisms of a democratic society.

    The two-state solution (which more and more looks like an unattainable dream) will perpetuate the misunderstandings between the two groups, because once again they will not be interacting with each other as people.

    1. If Palestinians & Israelis hate ea. others guts & would just as soon kill ea. other as look at ea. other, do you really think the solution is to throw them together & tell them to sink or swim? I’m agnostic about one or 2 state solutions. I prob. think the latter would work best in the short term. But if you force a 1 state solution on the 2 groups it might end up as Iraq may turn out when the U.S. leaves–that is, a possible bloodbath.

      1. “If Palestinians & Israelis hate ea. others guts & would just as soon kill ea. other as look at ea. other, do you really think the solution is to throw them together & tell them to sink or swim? I’m agnostic about one or 2 state solutions. I prob. think the latter would work best in the short term. But if you force a 1 state solution on the 2 groups it might end up as Iraq may turn out when the U.S. leaves–that is, a possible bloodbath.”

        Perhaps as part of a 2-state solution there could be some sort of confederation similar to the European Economic Union, and eventually the 2 states could be merged.

      2. “If Palestinians & Israelis hate ea. others guts & would just as soon kill ea. other as look at ea. other, do you really think the solution is to throw them together & tell them to sink or swim?”

        The two formerly warring groups in Northern Ireland also hate each other, but they still manage to live together, despite all the history of violence and terrorism between them. It can be done, if the circumstances are right.

        And note that Israeli Arabs (currently a fifth of the population) are not on the best of terms with Israeli Jews, but there is no civil war or bloodbath between them, because they live in the framework of a society which (at present) establishes and maintains certain rights for each group. The one-state solution means, at minimum, an expansion of the category of “Israeli Arabs” to include other Palestinians as well. That would certainly threaten the currently accepted version of Zionism, but in principle it could be a peaceful (if uneasy) solution to the impasse.

        “But if you force a 1 state solution on the 2 groups it might end up as Iraq may turn out when the U.S. leaves–that is, a possible bloodbath.”

        I don’t propose forcing anything on the two groups. I envisage a South Africa style struggle for equal rights on the part of the occupied Palestinians, international pressure on Israel to accept this (through some kind of BDS movement), and negotiations leading to a one state settlement: assuming both sides become sufficiently sick of the conflict that they do not want to disturb the arrangement, this could be a peaceful end to the issue.

  6. hugh,

    while one state solution might be moral – given the recent history, don’t you think it will be a state in a constant civil war? sad as it might be, seperation is needed in the near future, I think.

  7. *RE: “I often think that about readers and commenters here who vent their disgusting racist and hateful comments both towards me personally and Arabs in general (and a few toward Israelis). They don’t know me. They don’ t even have to see or meet me to write the things they do.”

    *SEE: “The Authoritarians” (261 pages), by Bob Altemeyer, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba

    Chapter 1 Who Are the Authoritarian Followers?
    Chapter 2 The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself
    Chapter 3 How Authoritarian Followers Think
    Chapter 4 Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism
    Chapter 5 Authoritarian Leaders
    Chapter 6 Authoritarianism and Politics
    Chapter 7 What’s To Be Done?

    *FREE PDF DOWNLOAD – http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf

  8. Mr. Silverstein notes:

    “Iris Hefets also informs me that Israeli blogger and seruvnik Idan Landau has compared Haaretz’s Hebrew version of the eyewitness transcript to the original and finds several telling phrases omitted (he uses the term “censored”). If you read Hebrew you can follow that interesting sidebar of the main story.”

    Cannot someone post the “telling omissions” here so we who cannot read Hebrew can know them.

  9. This attitude of the IDF Rabbinate is nothing new. On the 7th June 1967 The IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren demanded that Uzi Narkiss OC Central Command destroy the Mosque of Omar with high explosives.
    Narkiss refused and Goren left the scene without another word.

  10. It seems clear to all who have spent time in the West Bank during the past few years that there is almost zero possibility of two states. Israel would have to give up every single one of its settlements, including the Palestinian villages it has annexed and now calls “neighborhoods” of Jerusalem, and return all of the land to the Palestinians. Otherwise, the existing network of “bantustans” isolated from each other by these illegal settlements and Apartheid road system show that Israel as usual does not bargain in good faith when it continues to promise the Palestinians a state.

    A single state seems the only solution, and yes, it will be an apartheid state until the world steps in and forces change. I dream of a day when those Zionists who are unwilling to live in peace with their fellow citizens will leave, and (in my dream) those who stay will live and work together with their Arab neighbors to make Israel (or whatever it will be called)
    a land for all its people and a true democracy, which as a “Jewish” state it can never be.

  11. Whether there is a single state or a two state solution, Israel will still have to give up the settlements on the West Bank. That has to be part of any peaceful settlement to the conflict. The only other alternative or option would be that many Palestinians who were displaced from Israel inside the green line, would have a right of return. I am actually not opposed to a single state solution. My focus is on getting a peaceful and just settlement however that can be done. Having said that, if this conflict isn’t resolved soon the Palestinians will probably give up on a two state solution and demand a single state. If events turn out that way, then at that point that will be my position. Israel must no longer be able to exist as an occupier or oppressor nation.

  12. I’m lost, I try not to be lost, but I am lost with this conflict. I’ve just come across your website and want to thank you for highlighting important points to me. It is hard to remain positive and to keep an open mind … and simply just keep talking, which I believe, in the end, is what it will have to come down to. Anything which helps dialogue works for me. Again, thank you.

  13. The UN ruled, A VERY LONG TIME AGO, that Israel was to cease to occupy Palestine lands seized in the 67 war. Why does Israel still feel it has a right to continue seizing more and more Palestine lands and deny the Palestine people what is rightfully theirs. NOT ISRAEL,s
    When will the USA stop arming Israel and stop meddling in other countries affairs.
    Perhaps Obama will soon see the light and tell Israel ” No more Arms until you leave the occupied lands as required by the UN.
    And if he does not, the UN should place the label, terrorist State on the USA as well as Israel.

  14. You have my symp Richard. You love Zionism but hate what it does to your tribesmen. To think that a “Blut und Boden” ideology could exist in a benign form is naive at best. When it result in removing an entire population from their land criminally insane. I was a staunch supporter of Israel until it started to deploy it’s own citizens on occupied territory. That was some 40 years ago. Since then the Lies have been too many, too big and for too long for me to have anything but contempt left. Maybe in your mind you rationalize operation “Cast Lead” and these t-shirts as aberrations and the work of a few “rotten apples”. It is not. They are pathognomonic for the disease , the notion that Jews have the Godgiven right to take the Land belonging to other people.

    1. Maybe in your mind you rationalize operation “Cast Lead” and these t-shirts as aberrations and the work of a few “rotten apples”

      I think you misread both my intent & my specific words in what I’ve written about both issues. I don’t see them as an “aberration” at all or the “work of a few rotten apples.” I think I make that clear in my writings. I may not have the antagonism you do for Zionism, but that doesn’t mean I don’t share your outrage at the results it has wrought in these cases. Both the war and the T-shirts are representative of a coarsening of the Israeli spirit and a degradation of both Zionism & the nation on which it was founded. I think the jury is still very much out on whether Israel can survive in its current state over the long term. Note, I didn’t say Israel would die or disappear or anything of the sort. But it’s present path is a disaster and I’m not sure how much longer it can be maintained.

      1. @Richard

        Both the war and the T-shirts are representative of a coarsening of the Israeli spirit and a degradation of both Zionism & the nation on which it was founded

        The relativistic principle of causality says that the cause must precede its effect. Your claim that Zionism is founded on Israel is therefore incorrect. Zionism is the cause. Born out of the European secular jews’ reluctance to assimilation. I believe this is where you and Philip Weiss diverge. As a Zionist you must adhere to Jewish exceptionalism, so believing that Zionism can exist in a benign form is naïve.

        1. Again I think you misunderstood what I wrote–that is, that the nation of Israel was founded on the premise of Zionism.

          I don’t know that I agree that I believe in Jewish exceptionalism. But I’d sure feel a whole lot more comfortable if I didn’t feel that Hamas and the Palestinians believed in Muslim exceptionalism.

          But I do believe that there is a critical, progressive Zionism that posits a nation built on different principles than the current Israeli system of Jewish supremacism.

          1. I don’t see anything wrong with the idea that Jews should have their homeland. Every people deserve that right.

            But in reality, we share the same Earth.

            There should have always been one State. Bi-national. Jews and Palestinians living together.

          2. Muslim exceptionalism ? I think not.
            The Muslim brotherhood and Hamas didn’t arise from any endogen Muslim religious movement but as a response to British and Jewish occupation of Egypt and Palestine.
            During hard times and armed conflicts people will gather under symbols. A charismatic leader, a flag or a religious banner. I don’t believe the Palestinian people are more prone to religion than you and me, but I do believe they need some thing or some one to put their faith in.
            Yes, there are a lot of progressive Jews who share your values. I believe them (and you) to be humanitarians first and utmost, and secondly jewish and Zionist. What saddens me is the fact that humanism used to be the hallmark and basis for jewish philosophy. Zionism has changed that. Humanitarians today are labeled anti-Semites by people like Foxman, Dershowitz, Pipes et. al.

        2. Please explain how it is possible to assimilate into a society which restricts occupations and imposes educational quotas.

  15. @LD

    There should have always been one State. Bi-national. Jews and Palestinians living together.

    A binational jewish state ? ..or a state where all are equal…you cannot have both you know.

    I don’t see anything wrong with the idea that Jews should have their homeland. Every people deserve that right..

    Racists, both Nazists and Zionists operates on the concept of Jews as a genetic entity.
    It is not. What is the common denominator in Jews from Alexandria, Venice, Toledo . Kiev. Brooklyn , Lima. Mumbai Oslo Casablanca Bagdad or Teheran if you remove religion ? Nothing.
    So: should all religious sects have their “homeland”, free from the fear of persecution. Of course not. That would create a state of babylonian confusion and little else. Should all or any of the 6500 different tribes around the World have a land of their own ? Again, my vote is against such division, because I believe we need fewer fences , not more.
    So, unless you demand jewish exceptionalism you cannot propagandize for Zionism

    1. It was with reference to your statement,
      “Zionism is the cause. Born out of the European secular jews’ reluctance to assimilation.”

  16. @Laurence

    You are playing the “victim” card again ? That’s too easy, and it was not under consideration by any of Zionism’s forefathers : Moses Hess i Zvi Hirsch Kalischer or Theodore Herzl .
    The sentiment behind Zionism was jewish nationalism. The same and at the same time it happened elsewhere in Europe, which led to Italian and German unification. Nationalism was, and still is, a substitute for religion.

    1. I don’t believe Jewish nationalism was is or can be devoid of Jewish history/victimization. Nor do I believe that this was so with Zionism’s forefathers, what moved them.

      I believe that Jews do deserve some affirmative action- you can call that exceptionalism, I don’t. There are limits.

      That does not absolve Jews from behaving morally.

  17. “This past January, the “Night Predators” demolitions platoon from Golani’s Battalion 13 ordered a T-shirt showing a Golani devil detonating a charge that destroys a mosque. An inscription above it says, “Only God forgives.””

    DAMN thats a cool shirt!!!

    I want one. Any idea how to get in touch with these guys to order 1?

    Btw, I don’t see any problems with blowing up mosques, as some of them preach such hatred that makes this shirts seem very holy. Probably it would compare to like, blowing up an SS camp in WWII. I doubt anyone will have a problem with that.

      1. Richard, do you deny that:

        a) SOME mosques preach propaganda and hatred? Not all, but certainly many within Gaza itself.
        b) Hamas terrorist have stored weapons and fortified mosques as strongpoints, making them legitimate targets?

        If so, I believe the only lunatic here is you..

        PS: I don’t condone sniping pregnant women or kids (unless they are armed) but mosques? Fair game, just like any other building.

        1. SOME mosques preach propaganda and hatred?

          Do you deny that some Jewish religious and political movements teach propaganda and hatred of Arabs?

          Hamas terrorist have stored weapons and fortified mosques as strongpoints

          Do you deny that in the runup to 1948 that Jewish militants hid weapons in synagogues? It’s true. Should the British have bombed the synagogues? You & I both know that if Israeli forces needed to use synagogues as weapons storage facilities they would do so. They don’t because they don’t need to.

          If you use the term “lunatic” in future to describe anyone commenting at this blog you will lose yr comment privileges.

    1. Jimmy, I really want to be there when you walk into a refugee camp and say that!
      This is a level of crass insensitivity almost beyond belief. I’ve been there and the hatred is real but it doesn’t come out of a vacuum. If I subjected you to what they have suffered you’d hate me in the same way. Not for what I am, but for what I’d done to you.
      You might view this as some sort of video game, but down there on the ground real people are having their lives destroyed on an industrial scale with your tax dollars.

  18. when will this truly come back to bite them in the ass??? the tides are turning but not fast enough in my eyes!!!

  19. You’re comparing RADICAL nationalism to an ideal form of nationalism.

    I meant it as just that – an idyllic hypothetical.

    And then I went further and said everyone should have that ‘right’ – so I don’t how you could take that as anything or than ‘in theory’.

    In reality, people were already living in Historic Palestine. Mostly Arabs.

    And no amount of Jewish suffering gave them the right to carve a State on top of another people.

    The 20th century was full of progressive movements and we now have international law and the UN and blah blah. So with that context, we should be able to dismiss the statement that “most States were formed in the same way as Israel.”

    Not that it isn’t true, but it ‘shouldn’t’ be true anymore. We have to raise the standard and APPLY it, rather than just give in to business as usual.

  20. The one state solution was already tried.
    It was tried by a Kurd named Saladin.
    Saladin won the wars and land during his time.
    He opposed a Kurdish state cause he wanted a 1 state solution.
    The Kurds are treated like garbage in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
    Saladin is the father of Kurdish suffering.
    Everything bad that happened to the Kurds in the 20th century is cause Saladin didn’t want a Kurdish state.

  21. Daga, Besides Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there was no Arab country in the Mideast and North Africa before the 7th century.
    Mohammad and his jihadist armies invaded the Mideast and North Africa and took all the lands from the Native people’s.
    They also forced everyone that wasn’t Islamic to convert to Islam. Anyone that didn’t convert had their heads cut off. So the Arabs are the colonialists.

    1. Mohammad and his jihadist armies invaded the Mideast and North Africa and took all the lands from the Native people’s

      Oh, you mean like the Israelites did when they conquered the land and eradicated the Moabites, Amalekites & Jebusites, among others?

      They also forced everyone that wasn’t Islamic to convert to Islam.

      That would give you a bit of a problem explaining the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Muslim Spain whose heads seem pretty securely fastened to their bodies.

      Arabs are the colonialists.

      Looking at it that way, who isn’t. We Americans certainly are. The current residents of England conquered the land from previous tribes. Ditto Germany & France.

    2. This is absolute tosh. Where did you learn this? Wherever it was you should stop trusting them.
      The Moslem invaders did NOT require conversion, but they did require submission, as did every colonial conqueror including Europeans of the first Americans. Why do you think there are still Christian and Jewish communities throughout the Moslem world? Obviously they were not required to convert and haven’t had their heads cut off. The contrast with the behaviour of Christian conquerors could not be starker.
      Try reading some proper history.

  22. @ Ken Jurist

    Besides Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there was no Arab country in the Mideast and North Africa before the 7th century.
    Mohammad and his jihadist armies invaded the Mideast and North Africa and took all the lands from the Native people’s.

    I never understood why the Zionists need to rewrite Muslim history to make their case. To me such enterprise seem both fallacious and contra-productive. Except with the ignorant ones of course, stupid enough to believe in the lies.
    The population in Egypt is not, and has never been Arabic, they are arab speaking Egyptians . and no Muslim country was colonized. I don’t think the Bedouins and Bazaar peddlers had any interest in farming .Neither did they impose Islam on the occupied population. What they wanted was money , taxation , and little else. That’s why you can find thousands of monasteries and churches throughout the Muslim world , and not a single mosque or synagogue before present time in the West.
    A telling story is when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem from the the Byzantine empire where the Jews were re-invited into the city.

    As Richard writes above: The Jews were (relative) safe in Moorish Spain. As they were in the other Muslim places in Europe.- Sicily and Thessaloniki. They even had a name for it: “La Convivencia” -living together.

  23. Next thing you know these slogans will be on the front of their undies so that they can think it is manly to do these things, and maybe even find it arousing to do so.

    After all, big guns and big warriors are just as often as not, not men at all, in this case, they are cowards hiding behind weapons and tanks and airplanes, killing women and children with truce flags, and families sipping tea on a terrace. Yep, these are not men at all but little boys with dangerous toys.

    Kinda like the guy with the biggest car is trying to compensate for his lack of female – pleasing anatomy.

    To think they are called “heroes” is laughable and an insult to men who really fought in past centuries. A man in a plane raining bombs on civilians is no hero, just a puppet pushing buttons for his evil masters.

    So he comes home and buys a tee shirt hoping it will fill in the gaps of his immorality and insecurity, and the personal knowledge it is all a bluff ~ but not to the victims.

  24. Have you posted any articles showing the anti-Israel curriculum & the related hate currently being taught in Palestinian schools?
    Have you posted any articles showing the anti-Semitic nazi like cartoons printed in Palestinian media?
    Have you posted articles dealing with the CURRENT hatred against Israel being fomented by the P.A.?
    If so, how many in relation to articles critical of Israel?

    Or do you mainly print information that is critical of Israel

    1. Pro Israel advocates like Palestine Media Watch, MEMRI, CAMERA & Daniel Pipes do quite an excellent job of circulating such propaganda. That’s not territory I choose to cover unless they lie or get it wrong as they often do.

  25. wow I really hate this t -shirts ,this just shows that our society becomes more violent inside out and the soldiers take all the bad things from the Arab enemies -very very bad I disapprove .
    I wont to believe that our army is better than that but lately i hear to much bad stories and i don’t like it at all.

    1. I dont think you realise that it is not how our society has become, but it was founded on that mentality(steeling land of palestine). I’m a jew from holland and I really disaprove of the inhuman behaviour. It makes me sad to see that israel is hijacked by non jews. I feel like if israel didnt have enemies it would implode

  26. it’s a shame that an army that has sworn to protect and serve can be so disgustingly racist, every human is born equally and deserves respect no matter where they were born or what they believe in, you can’t joke about killing children and pregnant women, why can’t people just were a normal printed shirt from a nice company without being so politicay racist?

  27. But when you see the bigger picture, the woman holds an ak-47 and the child holds a sniper rifle.
    I’m not sure where is it written but i’m pretty sure civilians that attack soldiers (with weapons) can get killed just like a soldier.

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