Fury after Israeli officer in charge of prisoner's shooting is 'reassigned'
The Israeli Army have seen this same piece of footage but have decided that the officer involved in shooting a blindfolded, bound man is guilty only of "unworthy conduct" and have "reassigned" him to other duties.
Lt-Col Omri Burberg said that he only wanted to intimidate the Palestinian, Ashraf Abu Rahmeh, after he was detained near Ni'ilin, and we all know that arresting people isn't intimidating enough so it's always best to shoot someone at close range with a rubber bullet to make the "intimidation" complete.
There has been understandable outrage at this decision.
Human rights group B'Tselem, which exposed the incident – shown on Israeli television after being videoed by a Palestinian woman in the village – said yesterday: "The army treats the shooting at point-blank range of a bound man [only] as inappropriate behaviour. It disgraces the values which it pretends to uphold."Yesh Din have a point. There is no way this decision could have been reached if the Israelis took the shooting of bound and blindfolded persons remotely seriously.
And Yesh Din, the legal action group representing Mr Abu Rahmeh's family, pointed out that if the officer had been "caught smoking a joint" he would have suffered the worse penalty of a prison sentence and dishonourable discharge. It added: "This case proves once again that the military judicial system views harming innocent citizens as a public image problem and not as a moral issue."
He would have been jailed and discharged if he was found smoking a joint but, for a crime that many of us find much, much worse, he is reassigned and demoted to private.
It says a lot about how military occupation dehumanises the occupied in the eyes of the occupiers. The Israelis only see people who hate them and throw stones and protest against them, they fail to see that their occupation is, in itself, an act of dreadful violence.
They blatantly don't see this footage the way the rest of the world see it; as, if they did, they could never have handed out such a lenient punishment.
It's almost stunning in it's callous disregard for the rights of Palestinians as simply human beings.
Palestinian kids who throw stones at their occupiers face a maximum penalty of 20 years' detention for "endangering life", even if no one is hit. Few are treated that severely, but they are regularly jailed for months on end for stone throwing.
Contrast that with the punishment this soldier has been handed for shooting a young Palestinian at close range whilst bound and blindfolded and it's blatant that justice in the occupied territories simply doesn't exist if you are a Palestinian.
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