'Hamas' war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity' - Canadian jurist, Hon. Irwin Cotler

There is "almost no comparable example" anywhere in today's world of a group that so systematically violates international agreements related to armed conflict, delineates Irwin Cotler - a former Canadian Justice Minister, MP and law professor at Montreal's McGill University.

Hamas is committing at least six violations of international law, Cotler explained in this exclusive, video interview filmed live in Jerusalem.


"First, the deliberate targeting of civilians is, in and of itself, a war crime," he noted, referring to the Hamas rockets fired at southern towns for eight years.

"A second war crime is when Hamas attacks [from within] civilian areas and civilian structures, whether it be an apartment building, a mosque or a hospital, in order to be immune from a response from Israel," he went on. "Civilians are protected persons, and civilian areas are protected areas. Any use of a civilian infrastructure to launch bombs is itself a war crime."

Third, he explained, "the misuse and abuse of humanitarian symbols for purposes of launching attacks is called the perfidy principle. For example, using an ambulance to transport fighters or weapons or disguising oneself as a doctor in a hospital, or using a UN logo or flag, are war crimes."

The fourth violation, "of which little has been made, is the prohibition in the Fourth Geneva Convention and international jurisprudence against the direct and public incitement to genocide. The Hamas covenant itself is a standing incitement to genocide. [Similarly,] just before this fighting started, I saw Hamas leaders on television referring to Israel and Jews as the sons of apes and pigs."

The fifth crime relates to the scope of the attack on civilians, which upgrades the violation to a crime against humanity. According to Cotler, "when you deliberately hit civilians not infrequently but in a systematic, widespread attack, that's defined in the treaty of the International Criminal Court and international humanitarian law as a crime against humanity."

The sixth war crime for which Hamas is responsible is the recruitment of children into armed conflict.

"Hamas is a case-study of each of these six categories of war crime," said Cotler. "There has to be moral and legal clarity as to responsibility. When Israel responds and civilians are killed because Israel is targeting an area from which rockets were launched, then it is Hamas which bears responsibility for the deaths, and not Israel, according to international law." (Print article written by Haviv Rettig Gur published in The Jerusalem Post

To read about the six violations, please click Read More below.

Has Britain's own anti-Zionism / pro-Palestinianism neutered the bulldog against Islamism?

“Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher would never have put up with this nonsense. The SAS would already have been dispatched to free Gillian Gibbons,” noted one commentator. “The British today are doing precisely nothing.” "Many in the British press are aghast at the almost complete lack of reaction by the British Foreign Office over the outrageous jailing of British schoolteacher..."
Angry Khartoum protestors burn newspaper article on the penalization of British schoolteacher Gillian for allowing students to name a teddy bear Mohammed.

Meanwhile, Britain’s most popular newspaper, The Sun, notes on its website at the present time that “ten thousand people, some carrying knives and sticks, have marched on the capital of Sudan calling for the teacher jailed for naming a teddy bear Mohammed to be shot.” The Sun is also urging people to “put a teddy in their window to show their support for Gillian.”

Some commentators, noting that the inaction over the teddy bear incident follows similar inaction after Iran kidnapped 15 British sailors several months ago, said “great” should now be dropped from the name Great Britain.

(Sources: Tom Gross in the National Review Online and The Daily Sun)