"Thirst for Blood"

Israel has been hugely criticized around the world (and at this blog) for it's dismissive attitude towards civilian casualties in both the Gaza and Lebanon campaigns. Each time senior Israel defense officials and politicians have assured the world that they take the safety of civilians very seriously. Now, out of the mouths of the IDF's own soldiers:

Now testimony is emerging from within the ranks of soldiers and officers alleging a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and reckless destruction of property that is sure to inflame the domestic and international debate about the army’s conduct in Gaza. On Thursday, the military’s chief advocate general ordered an investigation into a soldier’s account of a sniper killing a woman and her two children who walked too close to a designated no-go area by mistake, and another account of a sharpshooter who killed an elderly woman who came within 100 yards of a commandeered house.

When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”

The Haaretz column the NY Times is reporting on can be found here. I'm sure that as I type these words, right-wing Israeli and American bloggers are now excusing these incidents as "isolated" or accusing these soldiers of being traitors or not "real" Israelis or some other nonsense.

Karadzic Caught

Radovan Karadzic, former President of the Serbian Republic who is widely suspected of having ordered the killings of thousands of Bosnians in Srebrenica during the Bosian war, has finally been caught after a thirteen year manhunt. He was apparently living out in the open in Belgrade, though his appearance is apparently dramatically different form his days as President of the Republic and high-flying mastermind of the ethnic cleansings of Bosnia-Herzogovina. There is still no word on the whereabouts of his right-hand man and former general of the Army of the Serbian Republic, Ratko Mladic, though he cannot be resting very easily right now.

UPDATE: Guess I should look at the blog before I post, as Nat-Wu already caught this news. My post is more link-y, but I agree with the general sentiment of his.

Radovan Karadzik arrested!

If anybody deserves the death penalty, it's this bastard.

Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, was arrested Monday in a raid in Serbia that ended a 13-year hunt.

Mr. Karadzic, a nationalist hero among Serbian radicals and one of the tribunal’s most-wanted criminals for more than a decade, is said to have eluded arrest so long by shaving his swoopy gray hair and disguising himself as a Serbian Orthodox priest. His reported hide-outs in caves in the mountains of eastern Bosnia and in monasteries. Before his political career, he was a medical doctor who worked as a psychiatrist in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital.

If hell really did exist, he'd go there.