You have posted this without comment, but I am making the assumption this item shocked you.

If so, why?

If the US was invaded, Americans had been ethnically cleansed for 50 years, and daily more Americans were being killed by occupation forces, what would patriot Americans teach THEIR children?

Don't feed the troll.

Well, there's no comments section on his site...so I'll just say I have to disagree with Jak's views which appear to be in line with those expressed by the Guardian.

(No comments on mine either, which I won't link to because I haven't updated it lately. I ought to be working on my own site instead of commenting here, but it's hard to resist.)

I am surprised that a difffering view here would be considered "trolling". The views I expressed are those of the majority of the world community (Isreal, the US and a few US-dominated states form the minority opinion).

I would also note that there IS a comment section on my site. It is marked, oddly enough, "Comments to Jak".

I saw a "Comments to Jak" but it was a mailto: link. I didn't see an area such as this for public discussion.

I read jak's page and it pretty much sums up the Vancouver polisci whine. The part about how those horrible Indians are oppressing the Afgans with movies is pretty sweet too. Of course he comes from my town.

What's a lot more shocking is what Israelis teach Palestinians:

"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's ****!"

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

From the "Gaza Diary" by former NYT Mideast Chief Chris Hedges. (link)

It's not so shocking these kinds of events any more. But it ought to be.

Too bad there are so many factual errors in that Hedges piece it's not even funny. Soldiers putting silencers on M-16s in broad daylight? How utterly laugable. Go check out camera.org to see why that story is a bunch of crap

Thank you for that link. Here's the piece at camera.org dealing with Hedges' article, which is indeed riddled with factual errors and demonstrable bias.

Thanks for the link to the camera piece. It seems there are a couple of factual errors in the piece. However I believe the majority of the piece passes even the rigorous CAMERA treatment. Perhaps it is biased, but then again I don't think it purports to be anything other than one man's experience and opinion. Given his excellent credentials and past history and writing, there's no reason to think that he his deliberately making distortions. Also, you'll notice that much of CAMERA's report is based on offical IDF reports, which, like any military, has certain reasons for not admitting certain difficult facts.

Fred,

Did you really read the camera piece? Saying there's "no reason to think" that Hedges deliberately distorted the facts is completely untrue. He even contradicts his own reporting:

Quote:
Hedges: "The Egyptians, who first controlled Gaza, would not allow the camp to expand, nor would the Israelis, who gained control of Gaza after the war in 1967."

Hedges is right about the first part. It is true the Egyptians did not allow any expansion or new building for the Palestinians during their rule of Gaza (1948-1967).

He is wrong in his second assertion. Many nations – including Israel – have tried to help improve the lot of Palestinian refugees. The PLO has consistently rebuffed these efforts - particularly Israel’s, preferring to keep Palestinians angry and destitute as a way of maintaining and focusing their rage on the state of Israel. Arab states abetted this, regularly introducing resolutions in the United Nations denouncing Israel for seeking to move Palestinians out of squalid refugee camps. UNRWA's Ralph Garroway said in August 1958:

"The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die."

Hedges himself is well aware of these realities. In correspondence in February 1994 to his deputy editor at The New York Times, Steven R. Weisman, Hedges wrote:

"The PLO did resist Israeli attempts to move Palestinians to housing units. And many people do charge the PLO with keeping Palestinians in squalor to prove a political point. (This correspondence came in response to a 1994 CAMERA query about another Hedges article on Gaza.)"

If these facts were known to Hedges seven years ago, why did he falsify them in his October story?

Why indeed? I urge anyone tempted to believe the allegations in the Hedges article to read this piece.

And especially the allegation that Israeli soldiers deliberately lured children into gunfire -- putting "silencers on their M16s" even though it was broad daylight and (according to Hedges) they made no other attempt to hide what they were doing.

I'm not going to quote the whole section that refutes this incredibly stupid allegation. Here, again, is the link to the piece.