quote:
Feit blijft dat Israël steun heeft gegeven aan een genocide, en mogelijkerwijs hebben Ariel Sharon en anderen mensen vermoord :
Sabra-Shatila, Lebanon
Main article: Sabra and Shatila massacre
The Sabra and Shatila massacre was carried out in September 1982 against Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Maronite Christian/Phalange militias, near the beginning of the 1982–2000 South Lebanon conflict. The number of victims of the massacre is estimated at 700-3500. Responsibility for the massacre has been attributed to the Phalangists as the perpetrators, and indirectly to Israel as the ally of the Phalangists.[258]
On December 16, 1982, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide.[259] Paragraph 2, which "resolved that the massacre was an act of genocide", was adopted by ninety-eight votes to nineteen, with twenty-three abstentions: All Western democracies abstained from voting.[260][261]
According to William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland,[262] "the term genocide (...) had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision".[261] This opinion is a reflection of the comments made by some of the delegates who took part in the debate. While all acknowledged that it was a massacre, the claim that it was a genocide was disputed, for example the delegate for Canada stated "[t]he term genocide cannot, in our view, be applied to this particular inhuman act".[261] The delegate of Singapore added that "[his] delegation regret[ted] the use of the term "an act of genocide" (...) [as] the term 'genocide' is used to mean acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".[261] and that "[he] also question[ned] whether the General Assembly ha[d] the competence to make such determination",[261] and the United States commented that "[w]hile the criminality of the massacre was beyond question, it was a serious and reckless misuse of language to label this tragedy genocide as defined in the 1948 Convention (...)".[261]
Citing Sabra and Shatila as an example, Leo Kuper notes the reluctance of the United Nations to respond or take action in actual cases of genocide against the most egregious violators, but its willingness to charge "certain vilified states, and notably Israel", with genocide. In his view:
This availability of a scapegoat state in the UN restores members with a record of murderous violence against their subjects a self-righteous sense of moral purpose as principled members of 'the community of nations'... Estimates of the numbers killed in the Sabra-Shatila massacres range from about four hundred to eight hundred - a minor catastrophe in the contemporary statistics of mass murder. Yet a carefully planned UN campaign found Israel guilty of genocide, without reference to the role of the Phalangists in perpetrating the massacres on their own initiative. The procedures were unique in the annals of the United Nations.[263]
In a Belgium court case lodged on 18 June 2001 by 23 survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, the prosecution alleged that Ariel Sharon, former Israeli defense minister (and Israel's Prime Minister in 2001–2006), as well as other Israelis committed a number of crimes including genocide,[264] because "all the constituent elements of the crime of genocide, as defined in the 1948 Convention and as reproduced in article 6 of the ICC Statute and in article 1§1 of the law of 16 June 1993, 29 are present".[265] This allegation was not tested in a Belgian court because on 12 February 2003 the Court of Cassation (Belgian Supreme Court) ruled that under international customary law, acting heads of state and government can not become the objects of proceedings before criminal tribunals in foreign states (although for the crime of genocide they could be the subjects of proceedings of an international tribunal).[265][266] This ruling was a reiteration of a decision made a year earlier by the International Court of Justice on 14 February 2002.[267] Following these rulings in June 2003 the Belgian Justice Ministry decided to start a proceeding to transfer the case to Israel,[268] so to date the accusation that the massacres in Sabra and Shatila were a genocide has not been tested in any court.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
De wereld is er om te respecteren, omdat het ons een plaats en de kans om te leven heeft gegund.