Israel!
Protest of IDF recruitment at the University of Michigan.
EdwardTeller posted most of this diary (with the slightly revised title above) at FireDogLake yesterday.
Does the British Army get to recruit on U.S. campuses? How about the Canadian Army? Or the Mexican Army? No, they don’t.
But the Israeli Army – the IDF – gets to.
Increasingly, their appearances are being protested. No doubt, the U.S. Congress will soon be told by a certain foreign country’s agents to pass a law forbidding protests against these recruiting missions, and they will probably pass the bill with large bipartisan support.
Meanwhile students are doing what they can.
At the University of Michigan, the students staged a walkout, and rightly so. When the recruiter asked if there were any questions, a student (video) replied: “were the children of Gaza offered the chance to ask questions?”
Another video of the walkout.
An anonymous comment:
On October 20 2010, two IDF soldiers came to the University of Michigan campus as part of a national PR campaign by Stand With Us aimed at justifying Israel’s recent atrocities in the Middle East. Students, staff, and community members collectively engaged in a silent walk-out in memory and in solidarity with all of the silenced Palestinian children that were killed by the IDF during Israel’s most recent offensive on the Gaza Strip who are unable to take a stand and give their account today.
Similar protests of IDF recruitment took place at Arizona State University, but Youtube appears to be restricting the videos, allegedly because some users might find the material inappropriate.
Another video: protestors meeting outside after the recruitment session:
Except for the word, “SILENCED,” I had a hard time reading most of the signs on the shirts of the protestors. Here’s one:
BASAM AL-JABLAWI
Killed 1/8/2009
5 Years Old
SILENCED
Although the ASU video is unavailable, here is a recounting of events from Waging Nonviolence, IDF soldier faces silent protest at ASU, Eric Stoner reporting:
“I like the emphasis on policy rather than on the individuals within the military, which I think is always an important distinction for nonviolent activists to make.“
It is a distinction without a difference. What is the real difference between a brutal policy and those who brutally carry it out? Policies don’t kill and destroy, people do. Taking off the hook those who actually commit acts of brutality by pointing to policy as the culprit is absurd.
What if they gave a war and no one showed up?
Well the individuals only follow orders, don’t you know. That was not a wise conclusion of a peace activist to make.
Yeah – “I was just following orders” is SUCH a dandy excuse!
The “just following orders” excuse is completely invalid, and was determined to be so at Nuremberg. What is truly odious, though, is the one that holds up “the troops” who (often quite enthusiastically) commit the acts of murder and mayhem as victims of the policy along with those whom they victimize. Those who make a choice to brutalize, oppress, destroy and kill for a living are not victims, they are hit men.
From an old diary: Another Palestinian child bites the dust:
“Many Palestinian children have been killed and wounded during the Palestinian fight for freedom and independence. Israel’s attitudes toward these children are no less violent than toward adults.
This material, quoted by Lawrence of Cyberia, is about Israel’s targeting of civilians especially children in the West Bank and Gaza. Here you have a modern occupying army colonizing Palestinian lands, and Israeli soldiers given orders to take out civilians who protest it including children.
….the IDF’s record in the second intifada is much worse. Firstly, because the IDF announced in March 2003 that it would no longer routinely investigate the deaths of civilians killed by Israeli soldiers, but would allow individual Israeli officers in the field to decide whether to call in the Military Police whenever their troops killed a civilian, or to simply declare the killing an “unfortunate incident of death”, which required no investigation. A policy that has had the following, entirely predictable, result:
And secondly, because at the very beginning of the second intifada, the IDF issued extremely broad open fire regulations, concerning who might be considered a legitimate target:
So Hurria, where are the trials of the war criminals that instigated this kind of murder, and of the soldiers who carried it out, under orders presumably.
Excuse the bad editing.
Where are the trials indeed? Well, when you allow the Council of Foxes to investigate every raid on a hen house, this is what you get.
The ASU video is available on Sabbah’s Blog. For some reason, it can be viewed there but not here.
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2010/11/14/arizona-state-university-students-protest-iof-soldier/?utm_
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