Israeli Soldiers’ Brutality at Prison Camp for Palestinians | RO: Ramallah Online Juan Cole, 22 April 2011 Israeli television has shown shocking cellphone video of the October, 2007, actions at Ketziot Prison, against unarmed Palestinian prisoners, by Israeli security forces. The thousand or so prisoners there revolted at a provocative search abruptly conducted by “Control and Restraint” units or Metzada. Far from being menacing, the Palestinian prisoners are shown cringing and obeying orders to come out of their tents with a promise that the shooting would stop. It did not. An interview with an inmate was broadcast by The Real News in 2007 soon after the Israeli attack: B’Tselem was already charging in 2007 that abuse and even torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons was all too common. The Israeli excuse for the killing and injuring of the prisoners was that they were menacing, but the video does not bear out this charge. Ketziot was the prison camp for Palestinians at which Cpl. Citizenship is the right to have rights. Juan Cole Juan R.
The Folly of World War IV: Wars Are Never Quick, Cheap or Easy This post first appeared at TomDispatch. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, left, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey speak to the press about the ongoing bombing campaign against militants in Iraq and Syria during a news conference at the Pentagon on September 26, 2014 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images) Assume that the hawks get their way — that the United States does whatever it takes militarily to confront and destroy ISIS. Answering that question requires taking seriously the outcomes of other recent US interventions in the Greater Middle East. In the wake of the recent attacks in Paris, the American mood is strongly trending in favor of this sort of escalation. In fact, subsequent events in each case mocked early claims of success or outright victory. The United States bears a profound moral responsibility for having made such a hash of things there. It’s an alluring prospect. Embracing Generational War Cue Professor Eliot A.
Watch: Former IDF soldiers reveal nature of occupation Breaking the Silence, the organization of former Israeli soldiers who literally “break their silence” by sharing experiences from their military service and exposing the IDF to criticism, launched a video campaign on YouTube this week in which soldiers are seen identifying themselves for the first time in front of the camera. A formal launch event took place Monday evening in Jaffa, at a highly fitting venue called “Na LaGa’at” (Please Touch) a theater/restaurant space operated by the deaf and blind. The release of the video campaign marks another achievement for BTS, which has demonstrated not only that the testimonies are genuine and cannot be disregarded, but that increasing numbers of Israeli citizens are willing to go on record and speak out, despite the harsh criticism and attacks the organization has experienced and the fact that many Israelis see them as traitors. Here is another video of a former border policewoman.
The Echoes of 1939 IN AUGUST 1939, two weeks before the start of World War II in Europe, I was admitted to England as an infant refugee. My parents and I got out of Germany, where I was born, at the last moment. Three months earlier, my older sister, then age 10, had been admitted to England along with about 10,000 other unaccompanied Jewish children in what became known as the Kindertransport. Some refugees who had fled Germany to other countries in Europe continued to arrive in England even after war broke out. The British dealt with this by sending late arriving adult males to the Isle of Man, in the sea between England and Ireland. President Obama has proposed to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States, a minuscule portion of about 4 million who have fled their country to escape President Assad’s barrel bombs and the fanatic cruelties of the Islamic State. Senator Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush say that only Christian Syrians should be admitted. In 1939, it was the Jews whose lives were threatened.
LRB · Yitzhak Laor · You are terrorists, we are virtuous As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. In the melodramatic barrage fired off by the press, the army is assigned the dual role of hero and victim. This time we must try harder to remember.
After Living in Norway, America Feels Backward. Here's Why. - BillMoyers.com This post originally appeared at TomDispatch and in print in slightly shortened form at The Nation. Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting true things about America’s disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family. It’s true that they didn’t work much, not by American standards anyway. In the US, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. Often I was invited to go along. Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. Ducking the Subject One night I tuned in to the Democrats’ presidential debate to see if they had any plans to restore the America I used to know. He believes, he added, in “a society where all people do well. I was dumbfounded. Why We’re Not Denmark
Rethinking Israel's David-and-Goliath past - Egyptian Protests At a little after 7 on the morning of June 5, 1967, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s commanders were finishing their breakfasts and driving to work, French-built Israeli fighter jets roared out of their bases and flew low, below radar, into Egyptian airspace. Within three hours, 500 Israeli sorties had destroyed Nasser’s entire air force. Just after midday, the air forces of Jordan and Syria also lay in smoking ruins, and Israel had essentially won the Six-Day War — in six hours. Israeli and U.S. historians and commentators describe the surprise attack as necessary, and the war as inevitable, the result of Nasser’s fearsome war machine that had closed the Straits of Tiran, evicted United Nations peacekeeping troops, taunted the traumatized Israeli public, and churned toward the Jewish state’s border with 100,000 troops. Or was it? “You will whip the hell out of them,” Lyndon Johnson told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban during a visit to the White House on May 26, 1967.
From UK: The phony in American politics Then I’ll get on my knees and prayWe don’t get fooled again.The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again For most of history we had an excuse. Emperors, pharaohs, czars, kings, queens, sultans, sheiks, they descended on us via peremptory power structures and the vagaries of genetics. If the king was a warmongering dolt or half-mad egomaniac, it wasn’t our, the people’s, fault. The best we could do was keep our heads down and suffer as God almighty seemed to want us to. American democracy was supposed to change all that. As Trump, Cruz, Clinton, Sanders, and the rest of the 2016 crew tackle the snows and insults of February in pursuit of votes, all the theatrics of authenticity are on display. Let the record reflect: the American people are a bunch of suckers. Flour sales boomed, and Pappy himself was a star, the biggest mass-media celebrity in the south-west and a man with his eye on the next big thing. The effect was electric.