Reasonable Doubt: Who/What Killed Jawaher Abu Rahmah ?

Further to my previous post:-

I am not a forensic specialist or a medical examiner and in any case, the body of the Bilin woman, Jawaher Abu Rahmah, is not available for a post-mortem examination. So, let's be clear, if the body is not to be studied, we will never know exactly what caused her death or whether anything was a contributory cause to her death.

Nevertheless, since there are people who are intent upon creating a narrative they claim to be truth and in doing so, seek to create a martyr while pillorying Israel and the IDF, one cannot but try to marshall the various assertions and ask the public: does this sound/appear logical to you?

And if there is a reasonable doubt, then don't allow anti-Zionists to sway you or be influenced by crass Arab propaganda.

Let's start with the scene (thanks to Haaretz - hardcopy edition only):

You will notice two things immediately:

(a) the soldiers are far away and on the other side of the fence. in order for the tear gas to have been used, the Arab side needed to approach the fence and to throw stones, aka, act violently. According to Haaretz, she was 150-180 meters away from the tear gas - still a very long distance for tear gas to have any toxic effect.

(b) they did indeed do that, twice.

So, it started when the Arabs acted violently.

What follows are various comments and observations I've collected and as at the moment not necessarily in any pertinent order other that being relevant to my claim: that there is resonable doubt not to believe the Arab version.

1)
If you look at the video you see that there is no cloud hanging over the valley whatsoever, that's because of the wind.(It was a winter day last friday) If you are at a distance of say 150 meters from where the cannister is falling in such circumstances there will be rarefaction. In the video you can see that a cloud is formed only at the places where the cannisters were falling and only for a few seconds. We have several witnesses who testified that the woman was at least 150 meters away. By the time the gas reached the spot where the woman was standing it would be (I estimate) 10 % gas and 90 % air.

And, when viewing the video but in retrospect isn't it interesting that none of the protesters seem to be running for their lives? They might walk fast through the clouds of tear gas. Some covered their faces. One or two picked up the grenades and threw them back at the soldiers. These same people who are alleging that the IDF used excessive force or was negligent know full well that they are not in mortal peril.

If they thought they were in danger of losing life or limb they would not be so casual.

2)
the NYT's Isabel Kershner's first article on that demonstrators death dated Jan. 1 placed the woman at the protest itself: "A Palestinian woman died Saturday after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli forces a day earlier at a protest against Israel’s separation barrier in a West Bank village." In her Jan. 4 follow-up article, she placed the woman at "a distance": "Her mother said she and her daughter, Jawaher Abu Rahmah, were watching the protest from a distance when a cloud of tear gas wafted their way, causing her daughter to collapse." So she was either there or she wasn't there according to the NYT. If she wasn't there, she was at "a distance" from the event. Does that mean she was 50 feet away, 50 yards away, 1000 yards, half a mile away? We simply do not know. Kershner does not know either since she was physically not there so is totally dependent on the family of the dead woman for information- a family who is not exactly neutral in all of this. How far can a tear gas "cloud" travel anyway before it is dispersed in the air?"

3)
According to Haaretz, she was 150-180 meters away from the tear gas - still a very long distance for tear gas to have any toxic effect.

4)
There is a FB page for Bi'lin, A Village in Palestine, which has photos from the 12/31/10 demonstration. Picture #13 has a guy in an ambulance with blood all over his front, and holding a handkerchief to his nose. Have we heard anything about this?

5)
Her ambulance treatment form.

The report says she was collected from 'home/residential'. Note how long it took the ambulance to get there. She was on a nearby hill, next to her house.

Wrong age.

6)
The Facebook report from the anarchists stated that her death was the result of inhaling CS gas mixed with Phosphorus. But there is no such thing.

Note:
CN, CS and CR cause almost instant pain in the eyes, excessive flow of tears and closure of the eyelids, and incapacitation of exposed individuals. Apart from the effects on the eyes, these agents also cause irritation in the nose and mouth, throat and airways and sometimes to the skin, particularly in moist and warm areas. In situations of massive exposure, tear gas, which is swallowed, may cause vomiting. Serious systemic toxicity is rare and occurs most frequently with CN; it is most likely to occur when these agents are used in very high concentrations within confined non-ventilated spaces. Based on the available toxicological and medical evidence, CS and CR have a large safety margin for life-threatening or irreversible toxic effects. There is no evidence that a healthy individual will experience long-term health effects from open-air exposures to CS or CR, although contamination with CR is less easy to remove.

Remember, Israel uses CS.

7)
Another thing related to her health is that I remember seeing reports that she had a CT scan (10 days?) before her death. She was suffering from an ear infection (her family confirmed this). But from my experience I know that a CT scan is only performed when there are indications that there could be a more severe illness (CT Scans are very expensive). In this case I also remember reading a report that she had spots on her skin and was suffering from disturbances of equilibrium at the time. I think that the reason why she had this scan was that the physician thought of the possiblity of a brain tumor.

8)
Joel Greenberg reports on Abu Rahmah

Note he doesn't use the word "cloud" to describe the tear gas. He doesn't treat the anonymity as a reason to doubt the IDF. Finally in the last paragraph he notes that Israel isn't getting cooperation.

9)
it is not at all clear that tear gas had anything to do with her death. Recall that a cousin reported on Facebook that she was at home 500 meters from the riot location. Another version has her watching the riot at a distance with her mother. Could tear gas have any significant effect "at a distance", in particular at a distance of 500 meters? Maybe she just had a terminal condition of some kind.

The tear gas must have set off a preexisting condition because she alone died and because she wasn't even among those who faced the highest concentration of the tear gas. Yes, this does mean that tear gas may have helped to cause her death, but it negates any attempt to argue that there was any intent to do her or anyone else harm. The truth is that the Israelis used a non-lethal crowd control agent and only because of a particular medical problem, the exact nature of which is unknown because the Palestinians did not perform an autopsy, her respiratory system reacted after she inhaled some tear gas that had reached her position several hundred feet away from the demonstration. Hundreds of protesters amid the highest concentrations of the gas did not react to it as Jawaher Abu Rahma did. Her death was an accident.

But if she were "several hundred feet away from the demonstration" the tear gas would have dissipated before it got to her. In my view, if she were that far away, then she would not have been affected by tear gas. We cannot be sure that her death had anything to do with tear gas at all.

10)
There is no way to know, with confirmation, where she was or what caused her death - and that this is what lays bare the hideous nature of what Abbas and the others are doing: they are making definitive libels against Israel and Jews without having the facts in front of them. Then, point out how many times in the past the Palestinians have done exactly this, and far worse, when the facts were known, and they turned them on their heads.

To be updated...

And see The Lede.


11)
There's something else about Kershner's article. Every time she refers to the IDF's response, she points out that the IDF sources are (for now) anonymous, as if that somehow makes them less credible. Since when is a reporter, a reporter for the NYT no less, squeamish about using anonymous sources? She writes about the potency of symbols. Of course that's how she'd frame the narrative. Exactly as the Palestinians would. Israel would frame it that this is one more incident where Israel is being falsely charged with being careless or malicious in causing the death of an innocent. (al-Dura, Jenin, Cast Lead, Mavi Marmara)

A report dated Jan. 2 from the hospital and signed by two doctors and the director, Dr. Muhammad Aideh, said her death was caused by “unknown gas inhalation” after an “attack by Israeli soldiers as the family said.” Dr. Aideh also said the patient “died from lung failure that was caused by tear gas inhalation, leading to a heart attack.” - "As the family said," is not a medical observation. Here's a Palestinian doctor filling a death certificate and he finds it obligatory to stress that everything happened "as the family said." The official Palestinian narrative already was in full sway and this doctor felt obliged to fall in line. Yet, this doesn't register with Kershner that the doctor might have been coached in what he was supposed to write. After all, what reputable medical examiner would go out of his way to signal that his conclusions were based on what "the family said"? Kershner, however, swallows this Palestinian doctor's report hook, line and sinker.

Note: Eye symptoms are treated by rinsing the eyes with water until the stinging starts to go away. Treatment for breathing difficulties involves helping the affected person get more oxygen in his or her blood. Medications that are used to treat asthma (such as bronchodilators and steroids) may be used to help the person breathe. Burn injuries to the skin are treated with standard burn management techniques, such as medicated bandages. IIf Abu Rahma suffered breathing difficulties due to tear gas, why wasn't she given oxygen or albuteral (or similar medication)? Foaming at the mouth is not a symptom associated with tear gas.

12)
There IS something very screwy going on with this woman's medical history. If the family started out by claiming that she had no medical issues - and if documentation trotted out in the early news cycles seemed to collaborate this - why are they now handing out normal CT scans?

If the point is going to be systematic lying, Palestinian obfuscation about the woman's actual medical history is the place to start.

13)
Does Israel kill Arabs with teargas? Response to Lisa Goldman and Joseph Dana.

And here.


And over at The Lede, found this:

Michael
Ohio
January 7th, 2011
12:51 amI would like some real background on this issue, instead of opinions: (1) In other places where this tear gas is used in the open, has it been found to be deadly? (2) is the use of this tear gas standard for other country's security forces? (3) what are the standard procedures recommended for and used for the tear gas? (4) were these procedures followed by the IDF? (5) what are the standard procedures of other forces that use these chemicals? (6) what does the manufacturer claim about toxicity and usage of the product - do they admit the possibility of complications? (6) statistically speaking, given the fact the IDF has to use tear gas every week, is the individual's death considered within the risk level of product usage by the manufacturer? (7) Does the level of violence or activity at the demonstrations merit the use of tear gas and (8) if not what alternatives could be used to tear gas and (9) does the use of tear gas in these instances conform to usage by other countries (e.g. to suppress demonstrators at G8 conference etc.)?

Nice point here.


^

Another Blood Libel

Israel shelled Gaza house crowded with civilians: UN

The United Nations on Friday cited witnesses saying Israeli forces evacuated about 110 Palestinians into a house which they then repeatedly shelled 24 hours later, killing about 30 people.

It said that "according to several testimonies, [testimonies? from whom?] on 4 January Israeli foot soldiers evacuated approximately 110 Palestinians into a single-residence house in Zeitun (half of whom were children) warning them to stay indoors. [now if they wanted to kill them, why do that? why not just shoot or immediately shell them then?] Twenty-four hours later, Israeli forces shelled the home repeatedly, killing approximately 30." [a whole day later? could something have happened in the meantime? like Hamasniks shooting from the house and our sldiers presuming that everybody left?]

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called it "one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations" by Israeli forces in Gaza on December 27.

"Those who survived and were able walked two kilometres to Salah Ed Din road before being transported to hospital in civilian vehicles. Three children, the youngest of whom was five months old, died upon arrival at the hospital," OCHA said in a report on the situation in the battered Gaza Strip.

Asked for comment an Israeli military spokesman said the allegation was being investigated.. [why not say, in addition, 'since most of these claims have been proven to be either false or grossly exaggerated, we ask that you suspend judgment until the facts are clarified'?]

That Red Cross Blood Libel? How Many Days Led to "Emaciation"?

A Red Cross spokeswoman, Anne-Sophie Bonefeld, said that when the children and others were rescued in Gaza on Wednesday, workers had to leave behind a number of bodies. On Thursday, she said, 100 civilians were rescued from the same Gaza City neighborhood. They were not wounded, but they were weakened because of being without food or water for two days.

Source

More:

The statement said a team of four Palestine Red Crescent ambulances accompanied by Red Cross representatives made its way to Zeitoun Wednesday where it “found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.”

In another house, the statement said, the rescue team “found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israeli Defense Forces nearby as well as two tanks.”

Because of berms built by Israeli forces, the ambulances could not enter the area so “the children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart,” the statement said.

Half of Gaza moves on donkey carts.

Half of Hamas arms moves in ambulances.

More than half of Hamas bases are in UNRWA facilities.

Only Begrudgingly, Eh?

Bettina Bildhauer, lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews who published "Medieval Blood" last year, reviewed this book this week:-

Caroline Walker Bynum
WONDERFUL BLOOD
Theology and practice in late medieval Northern Germany and beyond
448pp. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

and notes:

Caroline Walker Bynum’s Wonderful Blood in turn makes us see Christ’s blood, and see it everywhere in late-medieval Christianity: it streams from his wound on the Cross; it gushes into the waiting mouth of believers meditating on the Eucharist; it cakes on his forehead in the Passion; it soaks the earth of Golgotha; it miraculously appears when Eucharistic hosts are stolen or abused; it imprints the heart of devoted Christians; it saves, washes and nourishes all; in short, it emerges as the central object of Northern European spirituality in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

...Bynum begins by describing the debates and practices of the famous controversial pilgrimage to “the blood” at Wilsnack, Brandenburg, to three abused Eucharistic hosts on which drops of blood had allegedly appeared. Bynum then links the Wilsnack cult with several other Northern German pilgrimages to various kinds of Christ’s blood, and contextualizes these cults further in the surprisingly numerous, and partly forgotten, theological debates about it. Briefly sketching the discussions of Christ’s blood in the Eucharist (well explored since Bynum’s seminal Holy Feast and Holy Fast), she gives welcome accounts of the lesser-known controversies on whether the blood, as it appeared in host miracles or in relics of the Crucifixion, could indeed have been left behind on earth after the Resurrection; whether it decomposed or remained fresh after Jesus’s death; and what happened to it during the three days between his dying and rising. According to Bynum, these were important issues for theologians as well as for laypeople, who venerated Christ’s blood in the Passion, in relics and in the Eucharist, because they encapsulated their hopes for eternal life and access to the supernatural realm. The recurrent core of the theological and devotional beliefs about Christ’s blood, according to Bynum, was that it remained on earth, independently of his body, even beyond his death and Resurrection.

Well, you by now know what's been bothering me and sure enough here it comes:-

While she has done plenty to revalue the much-maligned medieval theology and piety, she now perhaps paints too rosy a picture of the spiritual comfort it offers, only grudgingly acknowledging the horrendous anti-Semitism intermingled with much devotion to Christ’s blood even before the Reformation, and blending out all misogyny.

Ah, so that's where the blood libel comes from.

Blood-Libel Discussion

David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge, published an article on Toaff's toady foray into history - PASQUE DI SANGUE
Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali. 366pp. Bologna: Il Mulino

Blood libels are back

First, an outline:-

...The Israeli historian Ariel Toaff argues, in Pasque di sangue, that the story of Simon, and, pari passu, other stories of ritual murder around the time of Passover, reflect practices in what he calls an extreme, “fundamentalist”, group within medieval German Judaism.

His sensationalist title, “Passovers of Blood”, is not calculated to comfort those who reject these stories as fantasies, calumnies, or tragic misunderstandings. For Professor Toaff, the Jews of Trent were typical of a new and alien Judaism which was laying down roots in northern Italy...In fact, Toaff’s profoundly negative image of Ashkenazi Jews who lived in an almost sealed world is belied by the evidence that there were Christians, even priests, on good terms with these Jews and anxious, as far as possible, to help them in their time of trial. For Toaff, rulers who befriended the Jews were mainly interested in the profitability of the Jewish loan banks.

...Therapeutic use of various types of blood was, Toaff argues, matched by magical uses: during circumcisions small quantities of blood might be gathered from the wound, mixed with wine, and even consumed; while barren women in some areas competed to seize and swallow the foreskin. Perhaps there is an analogy in the modern fashion for consuming placentas. Toaff is anxious to prove that Ashkenazi Jews did occasionally consume blood; still, there is a great gap between its therapeutic use and the killing of Christian children for their blood.

Toaff wants to take all this much further. Blood, not liberation, was, he asserts, the great theme of the Passover festival, particularly the night-time meal at the start of the festival: “a true and proper river of blood ran at Passover across the Seder table and through the pages of the Haggadah”, the order of service telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Here the author exploits the controversial research of Israel Yuval, who has presented many themes in the Jewish liturgy as a response to the challenge of Christianity; and there is no doubt that certain elements in the Passover ritual, such as the invocation, “Pour out your wrath upon the nations . . .”, were directed at Christian persecutors. But Toaff is carried away by his theme. Everything in the Passover Seder becomes infused with blood: the blood of the first plague, when the River Nile turned red; the blood of the Paschal lamb (even if represented by a charred bone); the haroset, a paste made to represent the mortar used by the Israelites as slaves in the land of Egypt; the wine which came to life, as it were, during the listing of the ten plagues in Egypt, when (in the German custom) a drop of wine was spilled for each plague.

Toaff wants us to believe that a small group of fanatics took these ideas about the salvific nature of blood and the necessity of vengeance so far that they conspired secretly to kill Christian children, whose murder was supposedly a re-enactment of the killing of Christ; that their leaders secretly took small quantities of powdered blood and mixed it with the special flour used for baking the three slabs of unleavened bread used at the Passover meal (despite extremely strict laws about their ingredients – exclusively flour and water); moreover, that they sprinkled powdered human blood on the wine which they spilled (but did not drink) as they enumerated the ten plagues of Egypt. Toaff uses the statements gathered from witnesses under torture in 1475 to argue this case. This is the sort of evidence he is using (drawn here from Ronald Po-Chia Hsia’s authoritative Trent 1475, 1992): “He was asked whether he saw the murdered boy. Joaff: ‘In the ditch.’ Podestà: ‘Think again.’ Joaff: ‘In the antechamber of the synagogue’”. This was under threat of torture. Then, during torture: “‘Let me down because I will say the truth.’ He was let down and asked where he saw the child in the synagogue. He said, ‘On a bench”’. According to most of these witnesses the child was killed in the synagogue antechamber, and then laid on the reading-desk, before the ark containing the scrolls of the Law (thus flouting the laws concerning ritual purity). The Jews in Trent were supposed to have cawed over the body of Simon: “Go and say to Jesus, your God, and Mary, that he will help you, pray that he will free you and take you from our hands”. Though one would expect the draining of blood to be a very messy business, no forensic evidence was provided from the synagogue; after all, Umberto Eco’s Baskerville was long dead and Sherlock Holmes unborn.

and now, the criticism:-

Ariel Toaff’s handling of the evidence is deeply flawed; he takes extorted statements at face value, and he assumes that his disparate pieces of “evidence” from Jewish sources fit together. Evidence that Jews committed acts of violence against one another or against Christians, the trade in blood, rituals of circumcision, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, images of Pharaoh’s massacre of the innocents, early medieval parodies of Christianity, rowdy celebrations of Esther’s victory over Haman at the festival of Purim, are all woven loosely together; meanwhile, highly relevant Christian material, notably the surge in accusations of host desecration, and the friars’ campaigns against the Jews, is hardly addressed. It is there that we can identify the reasons for the repeated accusation of ritual murder, there that we see the assumption that Jews constantly recrucify Christ in countless ways, of which this is the most horrible. It was taken as proof that all Jews, ancient and contemporary, were indeed Christ-killers.


The biggest mystery about Pasque di sangue is what Toaff is trying to say about accusations of ritual murder before 1475. He takes us back to the first clear accusation of child crucifixion, in Norwich in 1144. What is disconcerting is how here and elsewhere he tells these stories in the past-indicative mood without the usual qualifications one would expect from a historian writing in Italian – a liberal use of the conditional mood, a good sprinkling of subjunctives, some sign of suspension of belief. Children did turn up dead in medieval towns; fingers were pointed at those who were seen as outsiders. Jews were terrified of the accusation of child murder, and were perfectly aware that any rumour of violence against Christians could bring destruction upon the entire community. Nor was it just Jews who were accused of child murder: heretics and witches who made bread out of the ashes of sacrificial children were an equally familiar trope. So we have to conclude that Toaff sees the Christian accusation as in some sense the source of a Jewish practice, in the following sequence: Jews are accused of doing this; some Jews begin to believe that they do this; some Jews do this. And yet at other times he is clearly arguing that these ideas emerged within the Jewish community, and that they had a life of their own there. Meanwhile the significance of blood in Christian culture, and in particular the significance of the Eucharistic sacrifice, is largely ignored as an explanation of the fantasies, for such they were, about Passover rituals, fantasies in which the unleavened bread and wine became explicit negations of the body and blood of Christ.

The blood libel has played a particularly nefarious role in the history of anti-Semitism. Similar accusations resurfaced in Damascus in 1840, and a century later in Hitler’s Germany; the persistence of the blood libel makes it all the more important that it is examined responsibly and not credulously. Ariel Toaff’s book has caused a predictable outcry in Italy, and the publishers, in Bologna, have now withdrawn this edition of Pasque di sangue – though a new one is promised. A historian who finds it so difficult to distinguish truth from fiction, however, is best advised to lay down his pen.