Tag: murder

Why do we have government agencies if they don’t work?


DHSThe Department of Homeland Security warned of extremists elements in our country with the potential to wreck havoc in our society; the right was up in arms and cried foul and someone from some hate group walked into the Holocaust Museum in the backyard of DHS and killed a guard!!  What good is Homeland Security?

Oh sure, they are one of the biggest government agencies, outspending the Justice and State departments, and during the Bush years we were told they were essential to the safety and well being of America.  During their lifetime they have expanded a terrorist watch list which numbers into the hundreds of thousands, many who are innocent and probably don’t even know their names are there; elevated risk levels and the blood pressures of scores of Americans with faulty terror level alerts that usually panned out to be nothing at all or based on tortured confessions from rendered suspects we’ve never heard nor seen, and all this at a considerable expense to the taxpayer.  Yet, an 88 year old man can walk down a city street in Washington, DC with a rifle, and into a government building and shoot and kill someone employed there.

The guy is a former felon, 88 years old, used a rifle in this attack, had an internet history of making incendiary comments and lived in the greater metropolitan Washington, DC area and all that the federal government has to offer couldn’t save that police officer from this guy’s dementia.  I could understand the federal government not being able to follow all 12 or 14 911 hijackers……you could argue there were just too many for the government to keep up, but one guy with a history in the heart of the government……  Basically this means the government is not the instrument we should trust or turn to in order to protect us in our daily lives.  It cannot do this, despite the promises it makes to the contrary; and all those right leaning individuals who are now slamming Obama with claims that he’s made the country unsafe for us, ask them what did their Department of Homeland Security do for Stephen Johns, the guard killed by that pathetic gunman on Wednesday, June 10?

America and immigrants


Why is it that a country of immigrants, and lets face it we are all immigrants to this country whether recent or from a very long time ago, some of us willing and others of us unwilling conscripts,  have such a disdain for today’s immigrants?  The deaths of immigrants while under federal government custody is a stain upon the tradition of America and its rule of law.  It is unconscionable that people are left to die in federal immigration detention facilities yet there seems to be a pattern of such abuse taking place on our shores.

Israeli justice. Coming to an American near you


In an earlier post I spoke of how Israelis have the view they can kill anyone they consider a terrorist.   Ever since the Bush administration’s ascendancy, the public announcement of the Israeli government has been they will go anywhere to kill terrorists they think are a threat.  Well, it seems this has been policy of the government long before it was stated back at the beginning of Bush’s first term, and it also seems the Israelis include Americans as possible targets of their murder.  No, I don’t mean Americans who stand in front of bulldozers and get plowed under or Americans who are standing on land owned by Palestinians and get shot by IDF goons, I mean Americans employed as civil servants to project American interests.

(John Gunther) Dean, whose memoir is titled Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests, was American ambassador in Lebanon in August 1980 when a three-car convoy carrying him and his family was attacked near Beirut.

“I was the target of an assassination attempt by terrorists using automatic rifles and antitank weapons that had been made in the United States and shipped to Israel,” he wrote. “Weapons financed and given by the United States to Israel were used in an attempt to kill an American diplomat!” After the event, conspiracy theories abounded in the Middle East about who could have planned the attack, and why. Lebanon was a dangerously factionalized country.

The State Department investigated, Dean said, but he was never told what the conclusion was. He wrote that he “worked the telephone for three weeks” and met only official silence in Washington. By then Dean had learned from weapons experts in the United States and Lebanon that the guns and ammunition used in the attack had been given by Israelis to a Christian militia allied with them.

“I know as surely as I know anything that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was somehow involved in the attack,” Dean wrote, describing how he had been under sharp criticism from Israeli politicians and media for his contacts with Palestinians. “Undoubtedly using a proxy, our ally Israel had tried to kill me.”

Why America continues to be assaulted, threatened and intimidated by a petulant friend is an example of the decline of an empire at the expense of an ally.  Inevitably, we get what we deserve; if we allow ourselves to be owned by the Israelis and whimper and cry at what they’ve done to us as a nation, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.  With the economy in near collapse, and a world war looming on the horizon, it won’t take much for America to become a second rate power following the lead of lesser nations and we’ll have no one but ourselves to thank for that.  It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

No comment


“This is an action that sowed massive destruction among civilians. It is not certain that it was possible do have done it differently, but ultimately we have emerged from this operation and are not facing real paralysis from the Qassams. It is very possible that we will repeat such an operation on a larger scale in the years to come, because the problem in the Gaza Strip is not simple and it is not at all certain that it has been solved. What we want this evening is to hear from the fighters.”

Aviv: “I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn’t really like they say it is. It’s more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.

“Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn’t get hurt and they wouldn’t fire on us.

“At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then … I call this murder … in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified – we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?

“From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand: On the one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault … This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: ‘Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn’t get out gets killed.’

“I went to our soldiers and said, ‘The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out … This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What isn’t clear? We don’t want to kill innocent civilians.’ He goes, ‘Yeah? Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist, that’s a known fact.’ I said, ‘Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.’ He says, ‘That’s clear,’ and then his buddies join in: ‘We need to murder any person who’s in there. Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist,’ and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

“And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we’ll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor – something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn’t really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it’s cool.

“You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.”

“One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious – I don’t know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.”

Zamir: “I don’t understand. Why did he shoot her?”

Aviv: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”

Zvi: “Aviv’s descriptions are accurate, but it’s possible to understand where this is coming from. And that woman, you don’t know whether she’s … She wasn’t supposed to be there, because there were announcements and there were bombings. Logic says she shouldn’t be there. The way you describe it, as murder in cold blood, that isn’t right. It’s known that they have lookouts and that sort of thing.”

Gilad: “Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the Second Lebanon War was the way the IDF goes in – with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers’ lives by means of firepower. In the operation the IDF’s losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed.”

Ram: “I serve in an operations company in the Givati Brigade. After we’d gone into the first houses, there was a house with a family inside. Entry was relatively calm. We didn’t open fire, we just yelled at everyone to come down. We put them in a room and then left the house and entered it from a different lot. A few days after we went in, there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sharpshooters’ position on the roof. The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go, and it was was okay and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”

Question from the audience: “At what range was this?”

Ram: “Between 100 and 200 meters, something like that. They had also came out of the house that he was on the roof of, they had advanced a bit and suddenly he saw then, people moving around in an area where they were forbidden to move around. I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way.”

Yuval Friedman (chief instructor at the Rabin program): “Wasn’t there a standing order to request permission to open fire?”

Ram: “No. It exists, beyond a certain line. The idea is that you are afraid that they are going to escape from you. If a terrorist is approaching and he is too close, he could blow up the house or something like that.”

Zamir: “After a killing like that, by mistake, do they do some sort of investigation in the IDF? Do they look into how they could have corrected it?”

Ram: “They haven’t come from the Military Police’s investigative unit yet. There hasn’t been any … For all incidents, there are individual investigations and general examinations, of all of the conduct of the war. But they haven’t focused on this specifically.”

Moshe: “The attitude is very simple: It isn’t pleasant to say so, but no one cares at all. We aren’t investigating this. This is what happens during fighting and this is what happens during routine security.”

Ram: “What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that.

“There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders – something about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and … their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and ‘explainer,’ I attempted to talk about the politics – the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams.”

Hat tip.

A ‘we told you so’ moment


First off let me give props to the blogger(s) who deserves it and Mondoweiss has been the leader in exposing this story to the English reading blogspere.  One can’t say what the outcome of the news that Isreali soldiers purposefully shot and killed innocent civilians will be, but it’s now been said by those who did just that and it’s something that if not apparent by how the Gazan conflict was conducted was certainly pointed out by many people in the blogsphere.

Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered.

The squad leader said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader’s soldiers complained that “we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist.”

The squad leader said: “You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.”

There is no rhymn nor reason for this murder spree committed in the name of “fighting terrorism” which has also been glossed over with “fear” and the threat, as Rupert Murdoch said just the other night that the fate of the entire western world hinges on the existence of Israel. Of course, nothing could be further than the truth; the world existed before the state of Israel, and did rather well it might be argued, just as it will exist well after Israel has become an historic relic just as it once was, but the intent of the leaders of Israel to tie their fate with that of their western sponsors has been a constant thread allowing for the West’s acquiescence towards Israeli atrocities. It is interesting to note, already spin is being generated to calm the furor about the published (read that “leaked“) accounts.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio that he believed such incidents to be exceptions, adding, “The Israeli Army is the most moral in the world, and I know what I’m talking about because I know what took place in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq.”

Like most other Israeli analogies the Yugoslavia one is a faulty one.  That conflict which plagued Europe went on for several years, whereas the Gaza invasion was a month long intrusion.  Nevertheless the reality that civilians were targetted has been made clear.  Note the word “lead” in the reference above; this was not something that was to be made known to the public, but rather kept secret in the halls of Israeli government.  I wonder whether it was to be used to build upon or improve what was accomplished/committed in Gaza, the policy of the Israeli government has become just that dastard.  I salute those within Israeli society who exposed this story to the international public; no doubt at great risk to their position in that society.  I wish American politicians were equally courageous, because it will take that kind of courage to stop the madness known as the Israeli government from its murderous rampages.

In Israel American life is cheap


tristanThe Israelis are in such a hurry to kill people who are not Israeli that they even break their own laws to do so.  The latest victim is Tristan Anderson, an American from California who joined in solidarity with Palestinians in the village of Ni’lin and was  shot in the head, for his trouble,  with a nasty piece of  munition  at quite some distance.  I don’t know what made Mr. Anderson think that Israelis live by the same laws as America, where peaceful assembly is NOT met with fatal fire from the authorities.  A brief history of the village where he was would have convinced him that Ni’lin is a target practice area for the IDF; upwards of 20 people have already been shot there.  Of course we’re hearing the same lame excuses for his near death, if he isn’t dead already of his  injuries, from Israeli apologists: ‘he shouldn’t have been there’, ‘he got what he deserved’, ‘that’s what you get for taking up the Palestinian cause’, etc.,  and I would sort of agree with the first one above.  He shouldn’t have been there, and neither should the billions of dollars of aid we have given to our rather petulant ally who thanks us by shooting in cold blood American citizens who want to see for themselves how their tax  money is being spent.  Americans should steer as clear from Israel as humanly possible, and convince their lawmakers, under threat of expulsion from the seat of government,  to do the same with our federal largess.  Anything else dishonors the memory of those brave souls who were sacrificed at the altar of Israeli appeasement by cowardly American congressmen and women.

A Horrific crime of domestic abuse-That’s All!


muzzammil-hassanI am always amazed at people who see signs in everything when there’s nothing much to see. In today’s age, every act of any Muslim is examined for signs of association or affiliation with al-Qaida or any other such organization deemed by the Western press as terrorist. The recent crime of Muzzammil Hassan, who murdered his wife in the most brutal way in upstate New York is another example of the divining of random acts of humanity with Islam. Aasiyah Zubair Hassan was killed by Muzzammil Hassan, after filing for divorce from him yet the Islamopundits the likes of Daniel Pipes who claims her death was an “honor killing” for her attempts at escape from a torturous marriage and opines Muzzammil was a secret Wahhabi insurgent in collusion with other Wahhabis to do destroy the American way of life have turned this tragedy into their hatefilled lust.

Yet the reality is Hassan was no more than an abuser, a predator against women, and not just this last victim he killed.  Most news accounts allude to his marriage with Aasiya as his third but not many tell of his previous marriages and how his former wives suffered at his hands as well.  Check out this description from a former in-law of what Hassan’s marriages were like

It’s been five days now that my family along with the whole American Muslim community has been in shock. The fact that Muzzammil was married to my first cousin before marrying the victim still horrifies us. Ms. Zubair was his third wife. Both of his earlier wives filed divorce on the same grounds of severe domestic violence and abuses.

My cousin lived with him for only a year. Yet, it took her several years to get rid of the fear of living with a man in marriage. He was known as violent and abusive in the community. He had nothing to do with Islam. He had changed his name from Syed Muzzammil Hassan to Mo Steve Hassan. He had no background of community service or involvement in the Mosque or in any other organization. Neither his character and nor his faith were sound. In addition, he had no background or expertise in TV production or media.

But it did not matter. Even with this bad reputation, horrible background and lack of experience in media market, he still got the stage at the most reputable American Muslim conventions. Our leaders and established organizations did not bother to vet him. No questions or flags were raised about him. He was introduced at these conventions with huge respect and the Muslim community was told to give him generous funds for Bridges TV.

The crime of negligence was committed by the greater society, American as well as Muslim and all who were silent are conspirators in the tragic death of Ms. Zubair, but Islam was as irrelevant  to this woman’s death as football was to the death of Nicole Simpson at the hands of her husband. Until we separate the evil that men do from the divinely inspired theology they may embrace that really has nothing at all to do with their evil, we show our prejudices  and bigotry which  gets us nowhere.

The Horror!


I’ve been watching and reading some pretty spectacularly horrific stories of how the Israelis treated the Palestinians of Gaza and ask myself we want to be allied with this kind of (in)human behavior?

The Israeli soldiers came to their house at about 5.30am, after the house had been shelled for 15 hours, and immediately opened fire on the family, killing Amer’s father with three shots. Then they told the family to leave. Amer had called an ambulance (which had to turn back after being shot at) and was refusing to leave his father’s body but the soldiers said they would shoot him if he stayed, so they fled 300 yards up the dirt track behind their house, at which point they were shot at again by another group of soldiers. This time Amer’s brother Abdullah was shot, Amer and Shireen’s 6 year old daughter Saja was shot in the arm, and their 1 year old daughter Farah was shot in the stomach. They spent the next 14 hours sheltering behind a small hill of dirt, while the wounded bled, and were not allowed to access help though the soldiers were aware of the injuries. Having no other way to comfort her small daughter, whose intestines were falling out, Shireen breastfed Farah as the little girl slowly bled to death.

After 14 hours, at about 8 in the evening, the soldiers sent dogs to chase them out of their shelter and dropped phosphorous bombs near them, but due to the wounded family members and having bare feet in an area of broken glass and rubble, escape was difficult. The army took the three wounded and put them behind the tanks, and captured Amer, but the rest of the family managed to get away and call the Red Crescent. The ambulance that eventually reached the injured people 7 hours later (driven by my medic friend S) took an hour to find them, and by this time Farah was dead.

(Hat tip to TellsToTale) But I was jolted back to reality upon reading this headline on one of the wire services. Rabbi told Israeli troops ‘to show no mercy’ in Gaza

Yesh Din said it had written to both Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, urging them to “take this incitement seriously and fire Chief Military Rabbi” Brigadier General Avi Ronzki.

It said a pamphlet distributed to soldiers taking part in Operation Cast Lead stressed that the troops should show no mercy to their enemies, and that the pamphlet borders “on incitement and racism against the Palestinian people.”

“When you show mercy to a cruel enemy you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. These are not games at the amusement park where sportsmanship teaches one to make concessions. This is a war on murderers,” Yesh Din quoted the pamphlet as saying.

It said the pamphlet quotes at length statements by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a spiritual leader of the Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank who opposes any compromise with Palestinians.

“The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country,” the pamphlet quoted Aviner as saying.

The rights group said the pamphlet contains “degrading and belittling messages that border on incitement and racism against the Palestinian people. These messages can be interpreted as a call to act outside of the confines of international laws of war.”

The Haaretz newspaper reported on Monday that far right-wing groups also gave out pamphlets bearing racist messages on military bases.

It said one urged soldiers to “spare your lives and the lives of your friends and not to show concern for a population that surrounds us and harms us…”

“Kill the one who comes to kill you. As for the population, it is not innocent,” the daily quoted the pamphlet as saying.

and it makes all the sense in the world why Israelis see their enemy as subhuman.  It is an indoctrination that allows them to commit all manner of war crimes against the Palestinians, an ideology far worse than communism or fascism, and it threatens the lives of all who are near it. I wish those in governments around the world had the strength and courage to say as much and to hold the Israeli government accountable. It doesn’t look like that will happen anytime soon however, despite the election of Obama to President.

Faces to go with the names


Please, go here to check out some of the civilian young killed or maim by the Israeli killing machine.  I’m glad someone has put a face to the names of the many people killed by the IDF, in an attempt to humanize their tragedy and that of their families.  Hat tip to Desertpeace.

Encourage KKK membership


With news like this the Klan can be eliminated just by asking people to join.  This goes way beyond bizarre.  Groups like this will be dogs barking at the heels of the Obama administration and their protestations will be carried by corporate media far and wide.  I’d like to see all those who clamored for the Patriot and Military Commission Act to call such groups terrorists and illegal enemy combatants, even though I still propose Guantanamo Bay be closed.  Of course that won’t happen but perhaps we’ll get lucky and get them to decimate their ranks by their own stupidity.