Israeli soldiers protect Jewish settlers attacking Palestinian village
Yesh Din | November 20, 2014
Israeli occupation forces did nothing to stop Jewish settlers from attacking Palestinian villagers, according to videos released by the Yesh Din rights group, showing soldiers pointing guns at Palestinians while Israelis are throwing stones from behind the soldiers.
The soldiers appear to be protecting the masked and armed Jewish settlers from Yitzhar during their attack on Palestinians in the village of Urif in the West Bank on Tuesday.
“IDF soldiers have the obligation, based on international law and High Court of Justice rulings, to protect Palestinian residents from violence, and IDF soldiers have the authority to detain suspects, including Israeli suspects, until the police arrive,” Yesh Din said in a statement.
“The disturbing video footage demands vigorous investigation and the immediate prosecution of the soldiers involved. An examination must also be carried out of whether the soldiers’ commanders bear liability for the conduct of their subordinates,” attorney Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, legal advisor to Yesh Din’s said.
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Part 1 Climate Sensitivity and Drought: Landscape Changes vs CO2
Part 2 Droughts and Heatwaves: Ocean Oscillations vs CO2
Part 3 Recovering Whales, Ocean Acidification, and Climate Horror Stories
Israeli settlers torch mosque, copies of the Quran in West Bank
Al-Akhbar | November 12, 2014
A group of Israeli settlers broke in and torched a mosque in the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank early Wednesday, locals told Ma’an news agency, hours after settlers attempted to assault several Palestinian security officers in Nablus.
Witnesses, who went to the mosque at around 4:40 am to perform dawn prayer, said the settlers burnt 12 copies of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, and set the carpets of the first floor of the two-story building on fire.
Racist slogans were also spray painted on the walls of the mosque, witnesses added.
The same mosque has been targeted by Israeli settlers before, locals told Ma’an.
“Every time the mosque is torched, the (Israeli) occupation police conduct an investigation just for show, and never arrest a single settler,” one resident said.
The incident is the latest in a series of attacks carried out by the settlers against mosques in the occupied West Bank.
This year, in January and October, two mosques were set ablaze in the West Bank. Similarly, in 2012, settlers torched the entrance of a mosque near the city of Nablus.
The settlers also leave behind racist Hebrew script reading “price tag” or “Arabs out!” on the walls of the mosques.
On Tuesday, Israeli settlers smashed the windshields of more than 30 Palestinian vehicles and damaged other Palestinian properties during a rally on the main road south of Nablus in the northern West Bank.
Witnesses said that settlers also sprayed racist slogans, such as “No cars for Arabs” and “No terror attacks,” on a sidewalk.
Meanwhile, also on Tuesday, dozens of Israeli settlers from the Yitzhar settlement in southern Nablus attempted to assault several Palestinian security officers after they parked their car on the road at the entrance of the settlement.
Zakariya al-Sadda, a human rights activist with Rabbis for Human Rights, told Ma’an that Israeli settlers forced five officers from Palestinian security forces to stop while on their way to Ramallah to take part in a festival celebrating the anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death.
The Palestinian Liaison Department intervened and solved the issue, Sadda said, adding that the Palestinian officers left the settlement’s entrance after dozens of settlers gathered and attempted to assault them.
Settler violence against Palestinians and their property is systematic and often abetted by Israeli authorities, who rarely intervene in the violent attacks or prosecute the perpetrators.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there were at least 399 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in 2013.
Israeli authorities have also allowed Zionist settlers to take over homes in Palestinian neighborhoods both in annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank, announced plans to build thousands of settlements strictly for Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem while ignoring Palestinian residents.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the holy city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the self-proclaimed Zionist state – a move never recognized by the international community.
(Ma’an, Al-Akhbar)
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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