Politically Correct

I was reading an article in the Economist about the continuing horrors of life in Palestine. This is certainly relevant today because President Carter has been taking a lot of heat on the subject from the pro-Israel types ever since he wrote the book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. I think that the facts speak for themselves and once again, President Carter has the lonely task of being morally correct in a political world that won’t face the reality of Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinians.

According to B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians in 2006. Almost half were innocent bystanders, including 141 children. In this same period, Palestinian forces killed 17 Israeli civilians and 6 soldiers.

I don’t know if the link above will take you to the story, it’s a week old, but here are some excerpts.

“What rarely get into the media but make up the staple of Palestinian daily conversation are the countless little restrictions that slow down most people's lives, strangle the economy and provide constant fuel for extremists.”

“A new order due to come into force this week would have banned most West Bankers from riding in cars with Israeli license plates, and thus from getting lifts from friends and relatives among the 1.6m Palestinians who live as citizens in Israel, as well as from aid workers, journalists and other foreigners.”

“If they can travel, how long they spend waiting at checkpoints, from minutes to hours, depends on the time of day and the humor of the soldiers. Several checkpoints may punctuate a journey between cities that would otherwise be less than an hour's drive apart. These checkpoints move and shift every day, and army jeeps add to the unpredictability and annoyance by stopping and creating ad hoc mobile checkpoints at various spots.”
“Because of the internal travel restrictions, people who want to move from one Palestinian city to another for work or study must register a change of address to make sure they can stay there. But they cannot. Israel's population registry, which issues Palestinian identity cards as well as Israeli ones, has issued almost no new Palestinian cards since the start of the second intifada in 2000.”

And on and on it goes…