Just my quick note on the Shirley Temper story: the soldier is real. How he came to separate form his unit and why it took them so long to get support back to him are as yet unknown. That shouldn’t have happened. The boy with the allegedly broken arm is Shirley’s brother and the father claims his arm was broken (of course) by the IDF the day before. But of course the kid was still encouraged to go out the next day and throw rocks at the IDF. This is the core of the Palestinian child abuse problem.
So the incident is a combination of reality and Pallywood with the requisite number of NGO foreigners on hand to film and document everything for the world. Clearly everybody there knows the soldier will never use his gun unless they pull out a weapon. So they use little girls and the tears of women.
Avigdor Liberman had this to say:
Yisrael Beytenu party leader Avigdor Liberman responded to the video by demanding an urgent meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
Liberman called on committee chair MK Tzahi Hanegbi (Likud) to convene a meeting as early as Sunday to discuss the IDF’s rules of engagement in the Nabi Salah area.
“We are talking about an incident which severely harms the deterrent capacity of the IDF,” Liberman said. “The pictures – which show an IDF soldier being hit by Palestinian women and children, and in the end giving up on (arresting) the rock-thrower who started the whole incident – broadcasts weakness and helplessness on the part of the IDF and Israel.”
“This is the end result of the feeble and stuttering conduct of the prime minister and defense minister, who also did not prevent the interrogation of the Binyamin Regional Commander Colonel Yisrael Shomer, and Lt. Colonel Neria Yeshurun,” he added, referring to two military commanders targeted by leftist NGOs who many feel were abandoned by the government.
