Is this true?

[jumpy]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4314898.stm

Don't want to start a 'bashing' thread, but is/was this really true? :o

The court issued a temporary injunction against the practice in 2002 after a teenager was killed when troops made him negotiate with a wanted militant.

The army cannot use civilians for its purposes, Israel's chief justice said.

"You cannot exploit the civilian population for the army's military needs, and you cannot force them to collaborate with the army," Aharon Barak said.

Adallah submitted an affidavit by one Israeli reservist who said: "No civilian would refuse a 'request' presented to him at 0300 by a group of soldiers aiming their cocked rifles at him."

Regardless of the 'situation' or the trouble caused when dealing with security issues, if what I have just read on the beeb about this 'practice' is true, then it is soo wrong :down:

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black... The ends justifies the means? I don't think so :nope:
I'm not sure what else to say about this really, I'm shocked :-?

What do you lot think/ know about this? As we are a fairly diverse fora, has anyone seen this for themselves, or know someone who has?

[Damo1977]

I may or may not have seen items likes this.... I will grab them than have a smoke and hopefully word it properly :cry: Just cause I am blunt.

'Some' of Israel's forces (or for that matter like I have said elsewhere, 'Give a person a uniform and they believe they are God) don't care about civi's, well who remembers this,

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/16/rafah.death/

and same story, graphical content
http://www.ccmep.org/2003_articles/Palestine/031603_photo_story.htm

[Abraham]

I have heard the story before that this has happened on an incidental basis, so I guess it is true.

You see, that's what happens in a war against terrorism.
Of course it is oooohhh sooo wrong to force a Palestinian civilian to ask a Palestinian terrorist - dressed as a civilian - to surrender. I would prefer a normal detective making such an arrest in a civilised way after ringing the doorbell, just as I would prefer the terrorist to come out of his house unarmed with his hands raised above his head.
Alas, we live in an oooohhh sooo wrong world of which the Middle East seems to be the oooohhh sooo wrong center. I don't want to start 'bashing' but we all know why. We are dealing with Muslim fanatics here, who can not accept the very existence of Israel and hate the Western values it stands for (like an independant Judiciary).
I know that the terrorists of Hamas and the Islamitic Jihad value Israeli civilians. But only as legitimate targets...
Living under the constant threat of suicide attacks against its civilian population, in busses, restaurants and shopping malls, it is a small miracle that the moral aspects of these subjects are openly debated in Israel and that Israeli judges are looking over the shoulder of soldiers who are fighting terrorism.

And as Damo1977 pointed out: the Palestinians not only routinely target the Israeli civilian population but use human shields (Rachel Core) as well - and of course blame the Israeli's when things turn out ugly...
"Give a Muslim extremist a pack of explosives - in Spain, Marocco, Iraq, Britain, Turkey, Egypth, Israel, Pakistan, Indonesia or in your very own country - and he believes he's like Allah!"
(Abraham - 2005)
It may be a bit blunt, it may even be politically incorrect, but there's a big bang of truth in that quote...

[jumpy]

It's painfully obvious we don't live in a perfect world. But that's not the sort of thing I would expect or suffer from brittish military personnel without a big outcry and investigation, it's just not professional imo (acknowleges court investigations and the recognition of discussing this subject etc). However making the civilian population do the army's 'dirty work' at gunpoint is not on. You joing the army and 'takes the crown's money', then expect to go into harms way, right? as the article says : you don't exploit the civillian population for the army's military needs- irrespective of the enemy you're fighting.
Dunno, just seems very wrong to me somehow.

[Abraham]

I am not the naive and I expect - under the wrong circumstances - any behaviour from any army and any police force, be it often on an incidental basis.
And who would have expected exactly three months ago (July 6th!) that the British police would within days get orders to shoot at civilians... And that the British police would actually shoot and kill an innocent bystander!
The point is that in democracies like Britain and Israel there is a free press, there can be an outcry and there will be an investigation or a court case, like the one that took place in Israel. And Israel's chief justice ruled: "The army cannot use civilians for its purposes". I bet there will be plenty of whatchgroups keeping an eye on the Israeli army's behaviour...

But let's go and take a look at the other side of the hill, for a change.
The standard modus operandi of the 'oppostion' is usually to quote from the Koran and then slice the throat of an innocent hostage, or to exclaim: "Allah Akbar!" and press the button of a spike bomb amidst public transport passengers or in a restaurant...
That's the reality of terrorism and the war against it.

[tycho102]

The way I understand it, the soldiers walked across the street, grabbed a neighbor kid and walked him up there. I've a problem with that, because the next door neighbor might very well not know, or he might have been told not to know on pain of death.

What they (IDF) should have done is use one of the people they had already arrested.

The Iranians and Saudis and Syrians, in Iraq, use this same tactic to get people who inform on foreign insurrgent activity. The idea being that you want to bring all your people back alive after a fight, so why not use the enemy against the enemy?

Worked for Muhammed.

[jumpy]

And who would have expected exactly three months ago (July 6th!) that the British police would within days get orders to shoot at civilians... And that the British police would actually shoot and kill an innocent bystander!

Indeed, there were some fairly harsh and all-encompassing decisions made back then. The reasult of which being that the police were one nill down at halftime.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that here there's always been a heavy resistance here from the public and the government and the police themselves against the introduction of firearms to the average coppers beat kit (beat- as in his daily rounds, not a rubber truncheon lol). It promotes a kind of escalation, becoming more lethal each time.
We have armed response officers, who 'specialise' in dealing with armed confronation and high security problems etc. They killed an innocent man, so under the most severe conditions, even the most highly trained officer can balls it up.

I can appreciate the necessity for getting the job done, but that usually has some fairly far reaching repercussions tacked on.
And it's events like the one in the article about the teenager getting killed after not being given a choice to help or not, and the guy shot by police on the london tube that make me try and hold on to what is rapidly becoming a dimminishing belief in the 'best qualitys in (a) man'* after almost three decades of life. I understand it, but that doesn't make it right all the same; I guess like terrorism, that's the reality of life you can count on, that at no time in our recorded history has the ever been no war at all, it's always there in some place or other. Motive almost seems irrelevant. Wheather you're looking at a coalition of the free or brotherhood of the holy crusade, if you strip away all the rubbish and veils of culture and religion, the wrapping whith which we surround our lives, they both kill and spill the blood of their fellow man or woman and that of the innocent. For me the only reason I can see any justice in it at all is that some people still cannot reconcile the masive gulf between the understanding of what must be done and what is right.



* plato - the republic. justice in the individual / the similie of the cave.

[bradclark1]

Constant violence breeds callousness.