Adloyada

Chief Constable Fox advocates chicken coop protection rethink

It's barely ten days since a man was sent down for just two years after repeated rape of a twelve year old girl he seduced and pressured into hiding him in her bedroom over a period of three months.

The comments of a police officer involved with the case give an insight into the reality of what lay behind that:

Detective Constable Donlan said after the hearing: “This is an absolutely unbelievable case that has had a huge impact on the victim and her family.

“The girl Jennings abused was extremely young and vulnerable and he took advantage of this vulnerability.”

He added: “I hope the family can now start to come to terms with what has happened.”

Now we have a senior police officer advocating removing men convicted for sexual offences against children of 13 from being categorized as paedophiles. That's infuriating enough. But this particular senior police officer is actually the spokesman on child protection and the management of sex offenders for the Association of Chief Police Officers. That's the trade union for the people who are in charge of each of English and Welsh local police forces.

War crimes in Gaza: who you gonna believe?

Israeli-Anglo-Yiddishist poet Karen Alkalay-Gut's blog isn't the easiest to find your way into, but it's always worth making the effort.

Today, she's got this account up of what's likely to have been behind last week's Israeli shelling hit on the Gazan family home at Beit Hanoun, from a recently discharged IDF soldier who fought in this summer's Hizbollah-Israel war, and who objected to Karen's characteristic agonizing over the tragedy.

Karen saw the hit as down to Israeli dehumanization of the Palestinian other. The soldier was having none of it:

I recently discharged from the army and had the dubious pleasure of taking part in the war (I was in AMAN) so I have some experience with these things. The combination of extreme sleepiness, tiredness, irritation and irresponsibility (sadly, a very common trait in the IDF) causes these disasters, not disrespect of human life. Just to state a few examples:

During the previous Lebanese War, 4 Israeli soldiers were killed because a tank gunner didn't bother to check whether he was facing north or south and fired on an Israeli base, one of these soldiers was his childhood friend.

Almost 20 soldiers were lost to so-called "friendly fire" in the 2nd Lebanese War, sometimes because of mistakes exactly like this one, sometimes measuring in the meters.

In fact, my own grandfather was severely hurt in a mortar shelling because during WWII he gave his own coordinates instead of the Romanians' and believe me, he was thinking of the fact that he was a "human being, with motivations and needs and feelings" only he didn't sleep for a few days and was very hungry so it was easy to write 325.221 instead of 279.223...

People often make mistakes, only the mistakes of soldiers (as of doctors, cops, lawyers and drivers) result in death - often of themselves.

War Crimes? What War Crimes?

Mere Rhetoric didn't believe in mincing words about the Palestinian tactics in last week's siege at Beit Hanoun:

In the last 36 hours, Palestinian gunmen have committed the following war crimes (here):

(1) Occupied a place of worship and used it for military purposes
(2) Occupied a hospital and used it for military purposes
(3) Used civilian women as human shields in order to protect themselves and facilitate offensive and defensive military maneuvers
(4) Gotten one of their civilian human shields killed as they continued to trade fire with the IDF from within the mosque and from behind the women

Seems we got quite a different impression from reading The Guardian:

Israeli troops fire on women in mosque siege

· One killed, 10 hurt in march to free gunmen
· Beckett voices concern over civilian deaths

Palestinian women described yesterday how they were shot and injured in the face and the legs by Israeli troops as they led a protest march into the scene of the biggest military incursion into Gaza in months.

At least one woman was killed and 10 were injured as large crowds of women walked past tanks into the town of Beit Hanoun yesterday morning saying they wanted to help free a group of Palestinian gunmen holed up inside a mosque.

Elham Hamad, 48, said she left her house in Beit Hanoun at 5am yesterday with two of her daughters-in-law to join the march into the centre of the town. Her son Mazen, 30, like hundreds of other men from the town had been held by Israeli troops for questioning.

"There were about 30 women in our group, all in the main street. We were moving into the town and passing by the Israeli tanks. We carried two white flags. They didn't ask us to stop and then suddenly we saw them shooting at us," she said. "I was hit but there were no ambulances. We were calling for them but there was nothing." Her husband found a donkey cart and put the injured women on the back and led them out of the town to waiting ambulances. Mrs Hamad was hit on the forehead and in the left shoulder and was yesterday being treated at the al-Ouda hospital in Gaza.

Her daughter-in-law, Asma, 23, was in the bed next to her. She was hit just above her left ankle and suffered a broken leg. She heard the call to march on her radio early yesterday. "We wanted to see what had happened to the youngsters who were taken by the Israelis," she said. "There were tanks on the road in front of us but without telling us anything they started shooting at us." Other women on the street helped them into a nearby house, where they were briefly treated, until they could find their way out of the town.....

It makes it sound just like a spontaneous little sortie by a few curious women that turned into a "protest march" doesn't it? The "call to march" on the radio? There's just one paragraph towards the end of the article suggesting that "local radio" called the women out. Maybe some local variant on Woman's Hour? Just a variant on the Women's Institute? No war crimes there, then?

I like quirky guidebooks: 2

By the time I developed my enthusiasm for Nairn's London, I realised that my taste for this sort of arcane sightseeing had come out of an even earlier quirky London guide book. That was the I-Spy Sights of London book, which was not a conventional guide, but a spotter book for kids, a grand version of those games that adults now play with their bored children on long journeys in cars that don't have DVD players. You know, forty points for an Eddie Stobart van, that sort of thing.