Independent publishes op-ed accusing #Israel of “extra-judicial executions”

The charge that Israeli security forces are nonchalantly killing any Palestinians even “suspected" of a crime is a smear against police and soldiers who are trying to defend against ongoing and extremely well–documented attempts by Palestinians to stab and hack Jews to death - on ongoing spate of antisemitic violence (82 stabbings, 30 shootings, and 12 car rammings) which has claimed 22 lives and injured more than 200.

Amena Saleem is Media and Communications Officer at Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) – a radical anti-Israel organisation in the news recently after a British bank closed the accounts of 20 groups linked to PSC amid fears they may be funding terrorism.

 

Amena
Amena Saleem

Saleem, who has used her column at Electronic Intifada and social media sites like Facebook to charge Israel with intentionally killing children, recently has been advancing propaganda suggesting that Israeli security personnel have been “summarily executing” innocent Palestinian teens.

Here’s a snapshot from her Facebook page on Oct. 3

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The video Saleem links to in her FB update was posted by the Hamas affiliated Shehab News Agency, and claims that the 17-year-old seen in the photo was shot for no reason by Israeli police. In reality, or course, the girl was not “innocent”.  She was shot and then surrounded by police after she stabbed an Israeli border policeman at Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem.

In this next FB update by Saleem below, she informs her friends that a the 13-year-old boy was intentionally run over by Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem.

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In addition to the fact that they boy was hit by a civilian vehicle, not soldiers, Saleem fails to note that the boys were being chased after stabbing a 13-year-old Jewish boy nearly to death. Again, if you didn’t know anything about the incident, you’d think the boys were innocent, and that Israeli soldiers just shoot and run over Palestinian kids to gain some sadistic pleasure.

Here’s another FB update by Saleem, in which she again omits the fact that the 11-year-old boy pictured was being apprehended after he had gone on a stabbing rampage because he wanted “to die a martyr” – and had wounded a light rail security guard.

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You normally could dismiss such activists as marginal figures, at least if their hateful messages weren’t amplified by the British media. 

The Independent published an op-ed by Saleem on Dec. 1 which includes another variation in the ‘Israel summarily executes Palestinians’, including teens, merely because they’re ‘suspected’ of a crime.  The op-ed (The killers of Abu Khdeir would have faced a very different fate if they were Palestinians who killed an Israeli teen, Dec. 1) uses the recent trial of Jewish extremists in the brutal murder Mohammed Abu Khdeir to decry the “unequal justice” between Palestinian and Israeli victims of terror.  

At the end of the trial in question, as Saleem correctly notes, the three men accused of killing the Palestinian teen were convicted of murder and the third is pleading insanity.  She then, however, quotes the victim’s cousin to introduce her narrative of unequal justice.

The desperate words were spoken by Mohammed’s cousin, Ansam Abu Khdeir, who has attended almost every court session since the trial began. She added:  “If it was a Palestinian who did this to an Israeli child, they would kill him before even arresting him. Then they would demolish his house and arrest his family. What did they do for Ben-David? Did they demolish his house? They are trying to prove that he’s crazy, that’s it.”

Saleem then adds:

There is also the lawlessness of Israel’s extrajudicial killings of Palestinians who are suspected of a crime, or caught carrying out a crime. It is this unwritten law which Abu Khdeir’s cousin refers to in her anguished words. These Palestinians are not given the right to a trial, to hear the charges against them, to be found guilty or not guilty; instead they are immediately gunned down at the scene of an alleged crime.

Of course, Palestinians are not gunned down merely because they are suspected of a crime, as Saleem claims.  Since the latest round of violence began, dozens of Palestinians have indeed been shot, and many killed, by Israeli security forces while in the act of killing, or attempting to kill, Israeli soldiers and civilians.  That is, as in most countries in the world, Israeli police and soldiers have used lethal force while defending themselves and civilians from terrorists who were using lethal force.

To buttress her claim, Saleem then adds the following:

In October, Amnesty International released two reports accusing Israeli forces of carrying out “a series of unlawful killings of Palestinians using intentional lethal force without justification”. The organisation documented cases “in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead by Israeli forces…in what appear to have been extrajudicial executions.”

However, as NGO Monitor and the blogger Elder of Ziyon demonstrated, the Amnesty report relies on anonymous testimony, and presents nothing in the way of hard evidence to support its allegations.  

Moreover, the charge that Israeli security forces are nonchalantly killing any Palestinians even “suspected” of a crime is a smear against police and soldiers who are trying to defend against ongoing and extremely welldocumented attempts by Palestinians to stab and hack Jews to death – an ongoing spate of antisemitic violence (82 stabbings, 30 shootings, and 12 car rammings) which has claimed 22 lives and injured more than 200.

Saleem’s Indy op-ed once again shows the ongoing pattern in which even the most extreme and intellectually unserious anti-Israel agitprop is legitimized and given credibility by ‘respectable’ media outlets.

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