Just imagine an American journalist doing this:
Category: The Regime
‘Reaping what we have sown in Gaza’
It’s our responsibility, as moral human beings, to bear witness to these shameless atrocities. To remember, and to speak out. Here’s Amira Hass writing in Haaretz:
I’m fed up with lying to myself – as if I could remotely, by phone, gather the information necessary to report on what the journalists located there are reporting on. Regardless, it’s information that is important to a small group of the Hebrew-speaking population. They’re looking for it on foreign news channels or websites. They do not depend on what is written here in order to hear, for example, about the short lives of Jihad (11) and Wasim (8) Shuhaibar, or their cousin Afnan (8) from the Sabra neighborhood in Gaza. Like me, they could read the reporting of Canadian journalist Jesse Rosenfeld on The Daily Beast.
“Issam Shuhaibar, the father of Jihad and Wasim, leaned on a grave next to where his children were buried, his eyes hollow, staring nowhere. His arm bore a hospital bandage applied after he gave blood to try to help save his family. His children’s blood still covered his shirt,” writes Rosenfeld. “‘They were just feeding chickens when the shell hit,’ he said. ‘I heard a big noise on the roof and I went to find them. They were just meat,’ he gasped, before breaking down in tears,” continued Rosenfeld’s article. We murdered them about two and a half hours after the humanitarian cease-fire ended last Thursday. Two other brothers, Oudeh (16) and Bassel (8) were wounded, Bassel seriously.
The father told Rosenfeld that there was a warning missile. Before the attack, they heard the humming of the UAVs, the kind that “knock on the roof.” So I asked Rosenfeld, “If the missile was one of our merciful ones, those that come along as a warning, was the house bombed afterward?” By chance, I found my answer in a CNN report. The network’s camera managed to catch the explosion that came after the warning: knock, fire, smoke and dust. But it was a different house that was bombed, not the Shuhaibar house. I rechecked with Rosenfeld and others. What killed the three children was not a Palestinian rocket that went astray. It was an Israeli warning missile. And Issam Shuhaibar himself is a Palestinian policeman on the payroll of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
I’ve also given up on trying to get a direct answer from the Israel Defense Forces. Did you mistakenly warn the wrong home, thus murdering another three children? (Of the 84 that have been killed as of Sunday morning.)
I’m fed up with the failed efforts at competing with the abundance of orchestrated commentaries on Hamas’ goals and actions, from people who write as if they’ve sat down with Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, and not just some IDF or Shin Bet security service source. Those who rejected Fatah and Yasser Arafat’s peace proposal for two states have now been given Haniyeh, Hamas and BDS. Those who turned Gaza into an internment and punishment camp for 1.8 million human beings should not be surprised that they tunnel underneath the earth. Those who sow strangling, siege and isolation reap rocket fire. Those who have, for 47 years, indiscriminately crossed the Green Line, expropriating land and constantly harming civilians in raids, shootings and settlements – what right do they have to roll their eyes and speak of Palestinian terror against civilians?
Hamas is cruelly and frighteningly destroying the traditional double standards mentality that Israel is a master at. All of those brilliant intelligence and Shin Bet brains really don’t understand that we ourselves have created the perfect recipe for our very own version of Somalia? You want to prevent escalation? Now is the time: Open up the Gaza Strip, let the people return to the world, the West Bank, and to their families and families in Israel. Let them breathe, and they will find out that life is more beautiful than death.
Now I’m starting to read that Israel is destroying Gaza because they want control of their natural gas fields. If true, they really are just like us.
The good news
Is that Tariq Abu Khdeir, Tampa teenager beaten by Israeli cops, left Israel without incident on the morning of the 17th.
The bad news is, that night, Israeli police then raided his relatives’ house where he was staying and ransacked it. Remember, these are the parents of the Palestinian teenager who was just kidnapped, tortured and killed by Jewish extremists:
At 1 AM, however, a squadron of Israeli police burst into the Abu Khdeir family home in Shufat and ransacked the place, smashing furniture and emptying cabinets with reckless abandon.
The police left with Tariq Abu Khdeir’s 59-year-old uncle, Iesa, in handcuffs, along with his cousins Musaa and Anen.
Musaa Abu Khdeir’s mother told Shibly she was informed by a magistrate judge that her son and Iesa Abu Khdeir would be released but they remain in custody.
According to Shibly, the family is “terrified.”
Your librul media covers Gaza
Just yesterday, I was reading and watching this guy’s heartbreaking coverage of the Israeli missile attack on a Gaza beach that killed four little kids playing soccer, and thought, “Now, there’s a real reporter.” Because I’ve had to cover tragedies, and let me tell you, it’s not easy. Ayman Mohyeldin did a remarkable job under difficult circumstances. Today, Glenn Greenwald reports he’s been pulled by NBC. I could pretend to wonder why, but I don’t. Because as always, our media moguls decide what we’re allowed to see:
Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday’s killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately.
According to an NBC source upset at his treatment, the executives claimed the decision was motivated by “security concerns” as Israel prepares a ground invasion, a claim repeated to me by an NBC executive. But late yesterday, NBC sent another correspondent, Richard Engel, along with an American producer who has never been to Gaza and speaks no Arabic, into Gaza to cover the ongoing Israeli assault (both Mohyeldin and Engel speak Arabic).
Mohyeldin is an Egyptian-American with extensive experience reporting on that region. He has covered dozens of major Middle East events in the last decade for CNN, NBC and Al Jazeera English, where his reporting on the 2008 Israeli assault on Gaza made him a star of the network. NBC aggressively pursued him to leave Al Jazeera, paying him far more than the standard salary for its on-air correspondents.
Continue reading “Your librul media covers Gaza”
Life at Rikers
This is a really long interview, but worth it. It’s Cecily McMillan, the Occupy activist who was charged with assault after a cop grabbed her breast, describing the insanity of life inside Rikers prison:
It is actually mind-boggling to me how we keep up the facade of prisons. The grand waste of taxpayer money, if you just look at it from a capitalistic self-interested standpoint. One of the women in there is writing a book called “Rosie’s Babies” where she talks about the dozens of women that she’s met in Rikers who had been born in Rikers and then were sent back again and again and again. I myself met four of these women.
There’s no sense in prison. There’s no rehabilitation; there’s no citizenship; it is completely at odds with everything that we call democracy. It doesn’t make any sense. People have called me a political prisoner; that’s weird for me. But if I have to really think about that title and really come up with a definition of what a political prisoner is, it’s someone who goes against the law or goes against the social rules or norms in order to stand up for the things that they believe in or the people that they care for, to do what is right by their communities. There’s not a single woman in Rikers who isn’t a political prisoner by that standard.
Just give these women, give these inmates, give our citizens the things that they need, the rights that they deserve. The resources they want to lead happy, fulfilling, contributing lives. That to me is so obvious.
H/t Thomas Soldan.
Fun for the whole family!
It’s interesting to me that the people with the least in-depth knowledge and weakest powers of discernment are always the ones with the most fervent stance. It’s always that way:
Seven times in eight years, Israel has assaulted the Gaza Strip. For many in southern Israel, the massive airstrikes shattering the cities of their Palestinian neighbors in the latest attack make for a gratifying show and a nice day out for a picnic, writes Nissim Behar in France’s Liberation.
“Wait, who threw their egg sandwich in the fruit salad?” someone asks.
Less than a kilometer from the border with the Gaza strip, the Hazan family is watching the spectacle of war while enjoying a nice picnic lunch in the shade of a hundred-year-old-tree. Ezra, the father, Shoshana, the mother, and their three children, have set up here on the outskirts of Sderot, on a landscaped bluff with perfect views of the Palestinian enclave. In the distance: muffled explosions followed by giant columns of black smoke rising into the sky. In between helicopter raids, Israeli F-16 jets regularly rip apart the sky, flying toward southern Gaza to release their loads of bombs.
“I have been waiting for this operation for a long time,” says Ezra, “because those people have been making our lives miserable with their rockets. My kids are all between 7 and 12 years old, and they have never known a single week without an alert or a rush to the family shelter. For them, sirens are almost part of the landscape. That’s no way to live. Sometimes the alerts are so frequent that the youngest one pees the bed and gets eczema. Do you think the people in Gaza are the only ones suffering here? You’d be wrong; you have no idea how many people in the towns and villages surrounding Gaza are on anxiety medications or in therapy. If you were a pharmacist or psychologist around here, you’d be rich!”
During the conversation, Ezra’s children fight over the family’s pair of binoculars to view the explosions. At each strike by the Israeli warplanes, the oldest cuts loose a “Wow!” or a “Boul!” (‘Right on target!’ in Hebrew).
“Of course, what is going on over there is sad for the Palestinians, since there are undoubtedly plenty of fine people there,” says Shoshana. “But oh well, they voted for Hamas, right? So they have to pay the price!” Adding that she “doesn’t get involved in politics,” she goes back to making sandwiches.
Maybe if you didn’t build on someone else’s land, destroy their livelihood and push them into a ghetto, you wouldn’t have those stressful problems? But to figure that out would require “getting involved in politics” and you can’t be bothered.
Ten ways the U.S. is the most corrupt country in the world
While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $16 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.
1. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. House Majority leader John Boehner has actually just handed out cash on the floor of the House from the tobacco industry to other representatives.
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L’Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven’t been anywhere near his house.
American politicians don’t represent “the people.” With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.
I’m really shocked
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has decided not to pursue accusations that the CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee and allegations that committee staff slipped classified documents from a secure agency facility, McClatchy has confirmed.
“The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation,” said Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr.
The news marks an apparent end to an extraordinary feud that spilled into the public forum in early March over the committee’s report on the agency’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program. The dispute included competing Justice Department referrals, with both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee accusing the other side of criminal conduct throughout the course of the interrogation study.
Your librul media covers Palestine
David Swanson at War is A Crime on how the media is covering Israel’s war on Gaza:
In this latest assault on Gaza, Israel had by Thursday already killed 69 Palestinians including 22 children and 13 women, plus 469 wounded including 166 children and 85 women, and 70 houses destroyed. These numbers have since increased significantly.
In this video from Thursday on CNN, Jake Tapper interviews Diana Buttu, a former advisor to the PLO. After failing to persuade her of Israel’s complete innocence, he tells her that Hamas is instructing women and children to remain in their homes to die as Israel bombs them. She responds by expressing doubt that people want to die. Oh no, says Tapper, Palestinians live in a culture of martyrdom; they want to die.
William Westmoreland once remarked on Vietnam, where the United States killed 4 million men, women, children, and infants: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
Banastre Tarleton stood up in Parliament and defended the slave trade on the grounds that Africans did not object to being slaves.
President William McKinley said little brown Filipinos appreciated being conquered and dominated.
The view that the people you are abusing don’t mind it has a long history of being employed to distract from the evil being done.
Just as powerful, if not more so, is the view that no evil is being done at all.
ABC News’ Diane Sawyer told her viewers that scenes of destruction in Gaza were actually in Israel, and was later forced to apologize, but did not note that scenes like those she’d shown do not exist in Israel, rather leaving the impression that a simple mistake had swapped out similar scenes from one country for the other.
This shit needs to stop
Throwing cancer patients in jail? Bullshit. There’s a simple way to solve this: Declassify marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug.