Our blogs about
America's Wars
War on Iraq
War on Drugs
War on Afghanistan
War on Columbia
War on Philippines
War on Venezuela

More
Matrix Masters
Blogs
World Events
US News
Science & Health
Earth News
Free Speech
News from Africa
News from Palestine
Bill of Rights Under Attack

Matrix Masters'
SUPPORTERS

Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

5 prisoners of Concience
The High School Draft Resistance Parents Forum is composed of parents, and family members of the high school senior (shministim) conscientious objectors who are in military prison. . . . The parents’ forum is comprised of people from different parts of the Israeli Peace Camp. All parents are intent on defending the civil and human rights of their children. There are parents who support draft resistance in principal for philosophical or political consideration and others who see the forum as mainly a personal support group for their children and for themselves. . . . The group is bound together by virtue that all have a son who is refusing to serve in the IDF for moral reasons. . . . According to the Military Prosecutor (Captain Kostelitz) the defendants in this court martial, are dangerous precisely because they are idealistic. He is, of course, correct: on trial are the ideals embodied in the five defendants not five malingerers evading military service. . . . Testing these ideals within the legal context is threatening, the results are unpredictable - societies that permit this to happen may emerge changed by the experience. It has been argued that the defendants intended this to happen when they rejected the devious "escape routes" offered them by high ranking Army officers, and instead sacrificed their liberty in order to bring the discussion into the open. Curiously enough the presiding judge of the Court Martial, Colonel Avi Levy, considered this good grounds for finding them Guilty - recognizing their "moral revulsion" as a motivation for their refusal, but condemning them because they also intended to influence other conscripts by that refusal. . . . The danger that the convictions of the five may spread among conscripts to the army was implied by the army prosecutor when he called for harsh sentences "to deter others". His comment that : 'What they don't do out of love, they will be made to do out of fear' was described by defence Advoc. Dr. Dov Khenin, "as an Orwellian solution true to the spirit of '1984' ".

posted by LoZo 3:37 PM