Democrat Congressmen Call For Probe Of Israeli Shootings
Only the most demented of minds could single out the sole democracy in the Middle East, the country that goes much further than any other nation on earth to protect civilians in the battlefield, as possibly committing “gross violations of human rights.”
Enter from stage far-left Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Rep. André D. Carson, and nine other Democratic lawmakers with a letter asking Secretary of State John Kerry to probe claims that Israeli and Egyptian security forces have committed human rights violations.
The letter strongly implies that if the allegations are proven true, U.S. military aid to the countries should be affected.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied to the request for a probe by releasing a statement assailing Leahy’s letter: “The IDF and security forces are not murderers.”
The letter also states, “IDF soldiers and Israeli police put their lives on the line to defend themselves and innocent civilians from bloodthirsty terrorists who try to kill them.”
Letter signatories Reps. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) have long histories of petitioning for normalization with Cuba, and they have nothing to say in their anti-Israel rant to Kerry about their favorite human rights abuser off the coast of the Florida Keys.
Carson, the second Muslim to be elected to Congress, has taken campaign contributions from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror-financing trial in which the federal judge found “ample evidence” of CAIR’s links to Hamas.
And as this reporter first revealed, Israel accuser Carson has evidenced a close relationship with the Islamic Society of North America, a group listed by the Muslim Brotherhood as a “like minded” organization that shares the goal of an Islamic nation.
Now let’s get to the specifics of the lawmakers’ loose accusations against Israel. The letter specifically cited four allegations allegedly documented by the George Soros-funded Amnesty International, which in the past has accused Israel and America of “war crimes.”
The letter asks Kerry to inquire whether Israeli security forces acting against Palestinian attackers took action that would trigger the implementation of Leahy Law, a law authored by Leahy himself that prohibits the State Department and Pentagon from providing military assistance to foreign militaries that violate human tights with impunity.
Leahy asked Kerry to probe the deaths of the following individuals:
- Fadi Alloun, a 19-year old resident of East Jerusalem’s Issawiya neighborhood who stabbed a 15-year-old and was shot and killed when he fled and security forces noticed a knife in his hand. Video showed that he was stalking the streets of Jerusalem with the knife when he was shot by Israeli police officers from afar.
Far-left human rights groups have claimed that Israeli forces did not need to shoot Alloun and should have approached the knife-wielding teen to arrest him.
- Sa’ad Al-Atrash, a Palestinian accused of attacking Israeli soldiers with a knife at a checkpoint when he was shot and killed. Atrash’s family claimed without evidence that he was not armed and that he was shot for no apparent reason while quarrelling with an Israeli soldier who had asked for his ID.
- Hadeel al-Hashlamoun, an 18-year old Palestinian girl shot and killed under questionable circumstances while she was at a checkpoint. Amnesty’s own witness,, says she had a knife, yet the organization still accused Israeli forces of engaging in an “extra judicial execution.”
Amnesty claimed:
“Even if al-Hashlamoun did have a knife, Israeli soldiers, who are protected with body armour and heavily equipped with advanced weapons, could have controlled the situation and arrested her without threatening her life. Open fire regulations of the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank allow soldiers to open fire only when their lives are in imminent danger, and Amnesty International concludes that this was not the case in the shooting of al-Hashlamoun, as she was standing still and separated from the soldiers by a metal barrier.”