Time for a mailing campaign...
Please read this utter drivel which i discovered while researching circumstances surrounding the death of Tom Hurndall, a friend before he was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper.
If you know anything about the case, and perhaps if you don't, i'd urge you to email this guy and inform him of precisely how ignorant and partisan he is. I particularly like the part in one of his other articles where he describes the International Solidarity Movement as a 'Stalinist Arab-jihadi' organisation, neatly mixing up some handy bogeymen.
I won't publish my own letter to him, as i consider it a private matter, but i'm sure he'd welcome more comments than just mine. The website can be found at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=6196
The writer's name is Arutz Sheva.
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Wahid Taysir, a Bedouin, is a better Israeli than me, a Jew. The reason I say that is Taysir served in combat zones with the IDF defending Israel; whereas, my only combat zone is on American college campuses, where my weapon is the written word.
Who is Sgt. Wahid Taysir? He is the Bedouin Israeli soldier prosecuted for the shooting of ISM activist Tom Hurndall and sentenced to eight years in prison. What I have just learned about his trial enrages me at the Israel government.
I am a writer and pundit here in the US who frequently writes about the Middle East and anti-Israel propaganda on US campuses. I started an organization here called Stop the ISM that monitors the machinations and activities of the International Solidarity Movement here on American college campuses.
Stop the ISM has volunteers who attend ISM meetings, and we have even managed to get over 200 ISM activists deported from Israel, after we showed the government the ISM is really just a logistical front for PLO terrorists. Last February, the ISM held a recruiting and strategy session at Georgetown University to get more American anarchists to go to the West Bank and incite riots that will interfere with Israeli soldiers and border police in closed military zones. This has become a running game; every Friday at the local mosques, ISM "peace activists" go in with PLO handlers and incite the local Arabs to riot against the security fence or to interfere at checkpoints. The ISM took their role so seriously in Hebron that the local Arabs asked the Israeli army to deport them, because they were creating extra long waits at checkpoints with all their nonsense. As one anarchist leader of the ISM explained at one of their seminars, Israel is the training ground for the American anarchist movement to eventually bring their tactics over to the US.
The ISM tells its volunteers that Israel is reluctant to create international incidents with foreigners, so the volunteers are instructed to serve as human shields for Arab terrorists. This includes being arrested with them, then refusing to leave jail unless the terrorist arrested with them is released also. Believe me, I could not make this up.
Tom Hurndall was an ISM volunteer from the UK in Rafah who had just arrived from Iraq, where he was a human shield for that wonderful human being, Saddam Hussein, just before US and UK troops sent Hussein scurrying for his underground hole. Hurndall was with another ISM activist who is currently touring American colleges calling for Israel's destruction named Joseph Carr. I just learned this week that Carr was a witness for the government against Taysir at his trial.
Taysir was prosecuted for allegedly shooting and wounding Hurndall, who eventually died almost a year later while in a coma at a British hospital. The army originally exonerated Taysir, but pressure bought to bear by the Hurndall family and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to reopen the case brought on marathon interrogations of Taysir, which elicited his "confession".
Taysir allegedly confessed to discharging his weapon without authorization, but no forensics were done on the bullet that hit Hurndall to determine if it came from an IDF-issued weapon. It seems a fellow Bedouin soldier lied in saying he witnessed the shooting when he hadn't. That soldier was also punished, but not as severely.
It is important to note here that the Hurndall family's foundation in Britain that put pressure on the Israeli government was run by Iran Kahn, a Pakistani political activist in the UK with whom Osama Bin-Laden seems to have contacts. Bin-Laden provided Khan with some of his earlier tapes threatening the West immediately after 9/11.
The Hurndall family originally wanted Taysir's entire IDF military unit indicted for murder (certainly an impartial and rational request, clearly with no political motivations against the state of Israel, right?). Now they are merely demanding that Taysir be extradited to England to face trial for murder there (imagine the publicity it would gain for the PLO in Britain! Those Hurndalls certainly have no axe to grind).
What raised my temperature was when I learned that Joseph Carr had been a witness at the trial against Taysir for the prosecution. Why should that upset me? Well, let me explain: Joseph Carr is not really Joseph Carr.
His real name is Joseph Smith and he was in Israel illegally under his new false ID, after being deported and banned for ten years by the Israeli government, when he testified. Stop the ISM intercepted copies of emails sent by Carr to fellow ISM activists in which he boasts that he entered Israel illegally at four different entry points at different times by fooling the border police (something that should make any Israeli feel secure about Al-Qaeda getting into the country).
He changed his name from Joseph Smith to his mother's maiden name of Carr to get a new US passport. ISM trainers tell their volunteers to do this to get back in after being caught and deported, and Carr is an expert, serving as a trainer himself in the US.
Smith/Carr's credibility as a witness in an Israeli court of law should be suspect also for other reasons. Smith has claimed he was running alongside the D-9 tractor that crushed Rachel Corrie, another anarchist from the ISM killed in Rafah and who attended college with Smith/Carr in Washington State. I've seen the video taken by the IDF the day Corrie was killed and there was nobody running alongside the tractor. But Joseph Smith/Carr did doctor some photos taken at different hours to make it look like he had photographed Rachel Corrie moments before she was killed. Reuters ran those photos, but then refuted them when it was shown they were doctored. Smith/Carr took photo credit for them on the ISM website, however. Smith/Carr also was quoted as saying he felt his friend Rachel's death was more than worth the cost of "the revolution".
That the Israeli government would allow a manipulative liar like Smith/Carr into the country to be prosecutorial witness against Taysir is unconscionable. Smith/Carr is an inveterate liar. The day that Hurndall was killed, the ISM had erected a tent to block the path of an IDF tank in a closed combat zone. In describing those events at ISM confabs in the US, Smith/Carr mentions that Hurndall wanted to be in the center of the action. The tank driver has no way to know if that tent contains explosives or a hole for a tank trap, so in my book, that made Hurndall a combatant. At the same time, Smith/Carr claimed Hurndall was shot while running to save some children. Smith/Carr has repeatedly stated at ISM events that the tank was indiscriminately shooting at children that morning. What were children doing in a closed combat zone? Is this credible, given Joseph Smith/Carr's reputation?
It is reasonable to bet the prosecution did not know Joseph Carr's true identity or his real background with the ISM, or that he was already illegally inside Israel under a false identity to work to destroy the state. But if his testimony in any way helped to convict Taysir, this boy deserves a new trial. Given the machinations of the ISM and its leadership, which is really the PLO at the top of the food chain, it is high time the Israeli government stop playing the fool for college-trained anarchists who want to destroy the state and ruin the life of a Bedouin Israeli soldier as just another pawn in their "revolution". This is not justice.
