I was interviewed for a segment on Russia Today TV about the Anat Kamm-Uri Blau affair. This is a short version of a long story which ran on TV inside Russia. My full interview is available in three segments here.
One of the things that’s interesting about the interviews is that the father of one of the Palestinians assassinated during Twin Towers says that 500 soldiers participated in the operation. He notes that you don’t come to arrest someone with 500 soldiers. Maan News Agency’s reporting notes that 30 military vehicles were involved. An Israeli friends says this was a battalion-size undertaking. He also emphasizes that no IDF action that is purely meant to detain someone involves something on this scale. This would reinforce Blau’s claim that this was a targeted killing and not what the IDF and Attorney General have claimed.
I will be writing a more detailed post about this later today.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Journalists_killled_in_Russia
Not one of them from Russia Today, isn’t that nice.
Blau and Kamm are pampered compared to (real) Russian journalists.
Is Russian journalism the standard by which you want to judge Israeli journalism? I would hope not.
And btw, Russia Today did an excellent segment on this story. Do they have to be killed for doing it in order to be good journalists in your book?
Look, if you want to grandstand or score pts or make yrself look smart, you’re in the wrong place.
A prelude to the Kamm affair began in July 2009, when Kamm’s brothers in spirit from Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights group published 54 testimonies from Israeli soldiers regarding their experiences during Operation Cast Lead.
The testimonies exposed the gaps between the reports given by the army in January 2009 regarding the “accepted practices; the destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques for no military purpose, the firing of phosphorous gas in the direction of populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the destruction of private property, and most of all, a permissive atmosphere in the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions.”
On February 3, 2010, The Independent reported that a high-ranking officer who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, admitted that Israel’s army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives and “that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as ‘means and intentions’– whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter.”
This week, Jonathan Cook reported that Haaretz had also revealed that, in a highly unusual move shortly before Israel’s attack on Gaza, it agreed to pull a printed edition after the army demanded at the last minute that one of Mr Blau’s stories not be published. His report had already passed the military censor, which checks that articles do not endanger national security.
The rest of “Deja Vu: Vanunu, Kamm and Blau and the Fragility of Freedom” @
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1703&Itemid=232