Take note of the words uttered by Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch:
“Prime Minister Haniyeh and other Palestinian leaders should be renouncing, not embracing, the tactic of encouraging civilians to place themselves at risk,” said Whitson.
She was responding to the attempts by the Hamas leadership to encourage the use of human shields as glorious resistance: civil obedience:
We are so proud of this national stand. It’s the first step toward protecting our homes, the homes of our children,”
And she was also responding to the interior ministry spokesman, Khaled Abu Hilal, who said,
We salute our brave people who formed human shields to prevent air strikes by the Israeli enemy, who doesn’t spare any effort to terrorize us and attack us day and night.”
If Whitson spoke so plainly about the use of human shields, a practice that has being going on in the Palestinian territories for a long, long time with the full knowledge of (if not the cooperation) of the world press, which looks the other way (see Stephanie Gutmann’s The Other War; and see Harry Evans’s condemnation of his colleagues, which I wrote about here), it is only because of the persistent efforts of bloggers such as Charles Johnson of LGF, who brought the matter to the attention of the world during the confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel this past summer.
Hats off to Charles.
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