IAF sacks highest-ranking pilot to sign refusal letter

Sardinia · Oct 8, 2003

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=347923

Reserve IAF Brigadier General Yiftah Spector, the highest ranking of the 27 air force pilots who signed a letter declaring their refusal to fly missions in the territories on grounds of
conscience, said Wednesday that he had been
stripped of his position as an instructor in the
air force flight training academy.

Spector spoke after a meeting Wednesday with IAF commander Major General Dan Halutz.

Immediately after the pilots' letter was made public last month, Halutz announced that airmen who had signed would be grounded, unless they recanted by the time Halutz held a personal meeting with them.

On Friday, Halutz dismissed two other pilots who
had signed the letter. The two helicopter pilots were called in to meet with the IAF commander Friday and when they refused to recant the positions laid out in the letter, they were dismissed.
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http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=347523&contrassID=

Listen to the pilots
By David Grossman

(...)

The bottom line of the pilots' message is that if the Palestinians are currently capable of carrying out painful attacks on Israel and Israeli citizens, the war that is raging is still, ultimately, a war between a military power and a civilian population. And in a war of this sort, Israel must impose limitations on itself of both a practical and a moral nature.

The pilots are reminding the Israelis that even
if the aim of the military action is to hit a
murderer who is to die, when a state orders its
pilots to drop a 1-ton bomb into a residential
neighborhood in the most densely populated
place in the world, and with the clear
knowledge that hundreds of innocent civilians
are likely to get hurt, its action, to a
significant extent, employs the methods of a
terror organization. And when a state orders
its pilots to use powerful missiles to hit a
car that is driving in the midst of passersby,
even if it does not want to harm them
intentionally, the nature of the deed, as well
as its results, are like those of a terror
organization.

(...)
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BenReilly · Oct 8, 2003

"One has to consider Africa's main agricultural society," Dr. Thomas Quinn, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said at a recent meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. "Seven million farmers have died due to AIDS. One has to ask who is farming the land?"

Not only farming -- teaching. "One also has to look at the educational process as well as the working process," Quinn said, explaining that 85 percent of teacher deaths in South Africa over the last 20 years have been due to AIDS.

"In fact, AIDS is the leading cause of death within the continent," Quinn said. "Because it affects many people in their young, reproductive ages and the loss of life among those young individuals who are parents, we are left with a very large number of orphans who are children who are not necessarily infected with HIV but are left behind due to the premature death of their parents due to AIDS."
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http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030815-060309-9847r

In other news, an Israeli flight instructor has been fired.