Sabbah Report » Murder

American Hate; Military “Death Squad” Arrested

Gordon Duff — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:27:49 +0000

By Gordon Duff* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Politics, Religion And The Military, A Recipe For Disaster

A Trophy For The Mighty Victors

A dozen American soldiers are under arrest, five for murder, in crimes that we may never know the full extent of. The accusations, killing for sport, collecting fingers as trophies, is "meat" for the media. It will sell papers, it will bring TV viewers and, combined with the threatened Koran burning and the "hatefest" over the Manhattan Islamic Center, everything imaginable is being done to make certain that terrorism is alive and well and aimed at the United States.

The Koran burning is cancelled but we can't undo the murders, not this set, not the last nor the decade long nightmare beginning, not with 9/11 but the election of George W. Bush, or more honestly, Dick Cheney.

Today's killers, accused killers, alleged killers, are they serial killers, criminal psychopaths, or "boys out for a good time and things got a bit out of hand?" Do we blame them or the America's failed attempt to build a permanent wartime standing army, replacing traditions with cheap politics and "revival tent" religion?

A normal argument that "liberals" make is that it wasn't them but their environment that was responsible. That's just an excuse and we all know it. We also know that this isn't the first time this has happened. The stories, all verified, of kidnapping and rape as with Dr. Aafia or dragging detainees behind vehicles, torturing them with power tools or flying them to the ends of the earth, Egypt, Bulgaria, Poland, "one way trips" that no "detainee" has ever returned from or has ever survived, are no different than these new crimes.

We also can no longer ignore the fact that, thus far, over 75% of our "terrorist detainees" are the wrong people, simply "mistaken identity." The remaining 25% are waiting for court dates for release. Estimates that as low as 5% of those captured, detained, really kidnapped, during the Bush administration were ever involved in anything.

These are the facts, not published but real, the results of court records open to every American.

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued opinions that kidnapping, torture and indefinite detention of anyone, American citizen or not was, in his opinion "legal" he knew where this would go.

Were Nuremberg type trials to begin today, they could go on for years, the defendants filling the dock making up a "who's who" of America's political, economic, religious and media elite. Oh, and more than a few from our military would be there too. It would almost be as though we had "flushed" the Pentagon. At one point, we could claim that, even where there were parallels between the "War on Terror" and Hitler's "Blitzkreig" and "Final Solution," we could always claim our scale was so much smaller.

We aren't so certain of even that anymore, how could we be when nothing can be trusted, nothing from any source under control by the corporations that tell us what they want us to believe. How many secret prisons is America running? Where are they? How many have been held there for how long? How many have been killed?

The people of Nazi Germany, when asked these same questions didn't know.

How many are we killing each day in Afghanistan? Hitler sent special military groups, a Nazi "Special Forces" into the Ukraine and Belarus, to wipe out the local population. Are our Predator unmanned aircraft doing the same thing, randomly wiping out Afghanistan and sections of Pakistan, village by village? Much of the world thinks so and nobody has been able to prove them wrong.

Five or ten years from now, how many countries will be exhuming mass graves, sites of victims of America's psychopaths?

There is no difference between these five recently arrested and the Special Forces squads doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is using known unreliable intelligence, let me correct that, known "gossip" as a basis for executing civilians or doing it for entertainment.

What we have seen is that, inside our military, the pride of our nation, where our sons and daughters risk their lives in what they have been told is honorable service of mankind, we are harboring criminal psychopaths who murder the innocent at the orders of the Pentagon's "grocery clerks." From the 1979 film by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now:

Marlin Brando As Colonel Kurtz, Apolcalypse Now (1979)

Colonel Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Captain Willard: I'm a soldier.
Colonel Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

I am supposed to say these men are not guilty. I don't believe it for an instant, nobody does. They are only doing what they were taught. Murder and hate became "policy" for the military when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, an ignorant extremist bigot, was chosen by President Bush to head our armed forces.

He and Vice President Dick Cheney, retreads from the disastrous Nixon years, petty political functionaries, saw the opportunity to recreate the military as a political and religious organization modeled on Himmler's infamous SS. It isn't just forcing religious instruction on the troops or the selective screening at the service academies with special preference given to Evangelical, read "Christian Zionist" applicants, giving us the "dumbed down" officer corps that has overseen the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Will the last real warrior resigning in disgust please turn out the lights

It wasn't just in the training, constant talk about "the conflict of civilization," Christianity versus Islam. The normal "pep talks" about military tradition were replaced by political vitriolic, partisanship and playing on racial and ethnic fears, class envy and cheap propaganda. They Nazi's never tried anything like this, the educational level of their military was much higher than that of typical American recruits. Their professional officer corps, taken from the Junker class, sons of the noble houses, were replaced by political hacks from the Nazi party. Some, like Erwin Rommel, were great commanders.

Those more like the neo-con underclass that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has overseen the torture and rendition programs and political buffoonery and continual prayer sessions, products of the service academies and ROTC programs, were killed by their own men.

The problem isn't just the training or the wars or PTSD or "bad recruits" or even incompetent leadership. When General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff assessed the officer corps in 1941, just after the Pearl Harbor attack, he was shocked. Over 10,000 officers in what was a relatively small military force were removed as unfit for command.

President George W. Bush went the other direction entirely. Our first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was General Omar Bradley, possibly America's finest military leader. On October 1, 2001, while the rubble of the World Trade Center was till smouldering after 9/11, Bush appointed General Richard B. Myers, a "neo-con" dandy, tasked with building a force better suited for a 3rd world dictatorship than a modern democracy. Myers turned to religious extremists, political hacks and any officer willing to trade honor for a career.

This is how America conquered Iraq, won a war, accomplished a mission and destroyed itself at the same time. It was always Cheney and Rumsfeld, it had been for years, in one administration after another. Myers was just "small potatoes," a small man for a small job working for grocery clerks, collecting a bill.

Bush friend and ally, Saddam Hussein paid with his life. Was Osama bin Laden a Bush friend and ally also? History says yes.

When it came time for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to explain to the 9/11 Commission why the United States Air Force was on a "stand down" under his personal command on 9/11, it was General Myers holding his hand. Bad as these moments were, humiliating or worse, they may have been the high point of General Myers career.

Four years later, we had been beaten in two wars by forces one tenth our number, had worn our military down to a shadow of our most basic security requirements but one thing for sure, they would all vote Republican. It became a military of bloated waistlines, berets, dickeys, and medals for any and all. The American military became the most "thanked" and "congratulated" force in history.

With all the medals and fancy uniforms and 6000 calorie a day meals, or so the Pentagon loves telling journalists, something seemed to be very wrong.

Volunteers from the "all volunteer army" began "unvolunteering" in droves with 400,000, nearly a third of America's entire military pool, active duty, reserve and National Guard, filing for service connected disability from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The majority submitted documentation, medical findings, indicating severe lifelong disabilities. The majority of filings support the fact that soldiers leaving the military after repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq will never be able to work, support a family or, in many cases, manage their own affairs.

25% of those who remain in the military are on anti-psychotic medications with thousands of those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a medical problem that precludes, not just combat deployment but any active duty.

Battalions of "disinformation" specialists spewed press releases by the dozen while military broadcasting parroted the neo-con and extremist Christian right, read "extremist-white supremist" Christian Zionist right message 24 hours a day to any member of the armed forces unfortunate to have access to a television. You couldn't watch a rerun of Gomer Pyle without the inane blithering of Vice President Cheney, real leader of "Bush America," another of a long list of American military experts without, not only one second of combat experience, but in Cheney's case, as with so many, not a minute in uniform of any kind.

Yesterday, America was panicked because two minor religious leaders have publicly planned to desecrate a Koran. Similar leaders had been burning American flags at the funerals of soldiers fallen in battle. Were Bush still in office, these two manics would be having lunch at the White House.

Secretary Rumsfeld would have named them honorary military chaplains.

Today, five Americans are under arrest as serial killers in uniform. They and their friends and who knows how many others have been hunting the people of Afghanistan for sport, killing them like animals and taking trophies, or so the representatives of the military justice system allege.

Anyone paying attention for the past decade should know. All these five Americans, five or a hundred and five or a thousand and five have done is exactly what they were told to do. If you can torture, you can kill. If you can kidnap, you can kill. If rape is "interrogation" can murder be wrong?

Who do we blame? We blame the Commander in Chief. He knew what he had inherited, a sick and dysfunctional institution of bottom-feeders, fanatics and fools, morally bankrupt cowards and bullies hiding behind a uniform and a bible.

We all knew it, every one of us.

* Gordon Duff is senior editor of Veterans Today.

Greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

Haitham Sabbah — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:24:57 +0000

NOTE: The following piece was published by Yedioth Ahronot on 21.12.2006 online.

Stalin's Jews

By Sever Plocker

We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.

Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.

In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World, "Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.

Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.

All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.

And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."

Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.

Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not move Kaganovich.

Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.

Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

Chris Hedges – Party to Murder

SR Editor — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:23:33 +0000

Sabbah's note: As of now, 400 killed and more than 2000 injured.

TruthDig.com editor's note: In light of the recent fighting in Gaza, Truthdig asked Chris Hedges, who covered the Mideast for The New York Times for seven years, to update a previous column on Gaza.

Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza-the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot treat the wounded, and our studied, callous indifference to this widespread human suffering-wonder why we are hated?

Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. "Expose thyself to what wretches feel," King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, "and show the heavens more just."

Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods. Over 350 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, and over 1,000 have been wounded since the air attacks began on Saturday. Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, said Israel is engaged in a "war to the bitter end" against Hamas in Gaza. A war? Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder.

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, has labeled what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza "a crime against humanity." Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as "a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention." He has asked for "the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law."

Falk's unflinching honesty has enraged Israel. He was banned from entering the country on Dec. 14 during his attempt to visit Gaza and the West Bank.

"After being denied entry I was put in a holding room with about 20 others experiencing entry problems," he said. "At this point I was treated not as a U.N. representative, but as some sort of security threat, subjected to an inch-by-inch body search, and the most meticulous luggage inspection I have ever witnessed. I was separated from my two U.N. companions, who were allowed to enter Israel. At this point I was taken to the airport detention facility a mile or so away, required to put all my bags and cell phone in a room, taken to a locked, tiny room that had five other detainees, smelled of urine and filth, and was an unwelcome invitation to claustrophobia. I spent the next 15 hours so confined, which amounted to a cram course on the miseries of prison life, including dirty sheets, inedible food, and either lights that were too bright or darkness controlled from the guard office."

The foreign press has been, like Falk, barred by Israel from entering Gaza to report on the destruction.

Israel's stated aim of halting homemade rockets fired from Gaza into Israel remains unfulfilled. Gaza militants have fired more than 100 rockets and mortars into Israel, killing four people and wounding nearly two dozen more, since Israel unleashed its air assault. Israel has threatened to launch a ground assault and has called up 6,500 army reservists. It has massed tanks on the Gaza border and declared the area a closed military zone.

The rocket attacks by Hamas are, as Falk points out, also criminal violations of international law. But as Falk notes, "... such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel's imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or international society from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people."

"It is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each day poses the entire 1.5 million Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive in terms of their health," Falk has said of the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza. "This is an increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live."

Before the air assaults, Gaza spent 12 hours a day without power, which can be a death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. Most of Gaza is now without power. There are few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis medication. Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza's three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas, meaning some of those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care, several spent their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel. The statistics gathered on children-half of Gaza's population is under the age of 17-are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18 percent have stunted growth.

"It is macabre," Falk said of the blockade. "I don't know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times."

"There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances," the rapporteur added. "The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable."

The point of the Israeli attack, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel.

"This is a crime of survival," Falk said of the rocket attacks by Palestinians. "Israel has put the Gazans in a set of circumstances where they either have to accept whatever is imposed on them or resist in any way available to them. That is a horrible dilemma to impose upon a people. This does not alleviate the Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, for accountability for doing these acts involving rocket fire, but it also imposes some responsibility on Israel for creating these circumstances."

Israel seeks to break the will of the Palestinians to resist. The Israeli government has demonstrated little interest in diplomacy or a peaceful solution. The rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank is an effort to thwart the possibility of a two-state solution by gobbling up vast tracts of Palestinian real estate. Israel also appears to want to thrust the impoverished Gaza Strip onto Egypt. Dozens of tunnels had been the principal means for food and goods, connecting Gaza to Egypt. Israel had permitted the tunnels to operate, most likely as part of an effort to further cut Gaza off from Israel. This ended, however, on Sunday when Israeli fighter jets bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza's border with Egypt. The Israeli military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza side of the border, were used for smuggling weapons, explosives and fugitives. Egypt has sealed its border and refused to let distraught Palestinians enter its territory.

"Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into diplomatic process that gives the Palestinians a viable state," Falk said. "They [the Israelis] feel time is on their side. They feel they can create enough facts on the ground so people will come to the conclusion a viable state cannot emerge."

The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the oldest forms of warfare. I watched the Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic in Sarajevo. Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel checkpoint does not forget. A family that loses a child in an airstrike does not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of family members do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who, eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a "martyr"?

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

Kawther Salam – A Word to the Israeli “Intelligence” System

Kawther Salam — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:35:33 +0000

By Kawther Salam

The IDF criminal soldiers harassing me on my way to the old city near the entrance of my house in Hebron H2

Without further introduction, for what do you send me your death squads, you criminal morons? Exactly for what did you send me your fumbling, wannabe "agents" to follow me for hours like thieves, trying to provoke me, calling my friends? What do you want from a Journalist you have already kicked out of her country, you criminal terrorists? Are all the journalists you murdered in Palestine not enough, so that you now expand your terrorism into Europe? It would be easier if you kept these criminals at home instead of sending them to this quiet country, where decency exists and the law is respected.

Your fumblers call my colleagues in Palestine and my friends in Austria in the deep of the night, like bats, giving false names or none at all, hiding their phone numbers, asking stupid questions and telling inane lies to get answers. In Palestine your thugs pressure my colleagues with typical mafia methods: by denying work permits, ransacking their property or arresting and murdering them or their family members when they donâ€™t "cooperate". Here in Austria, you send people who think that they can get any kind of results by using the same criminal methods.

What did your super-agent "Diego", the one who called my friend here in Austria, expect? Did this character think that identifying himself as "a jew" would make anybody tremble in awe? "Diego the super-agent" was scared to leave his phone number and his name. My friend told me that "Diego" came across as a petulant nincompoop who grew more angry the more it became clear to him that he was going nowhere with his bald lies, bad manners and arrogance.

All what you are doing, in Palestine or here, are crimes, and all what you are getting are lies and people who laugh about you behind your back. Of course your intimidation tactics get my acquaintances in Palestine to call me and ask questions on your behalf, but together we tell you lies and laugh about your stupidity behind your back. Is that what you like, you pitiful people?

You kicked me out of my homeland Hebron because the moral degenerates and terrorists from Kach and Jewish Underground, those who squat in the heart of my homeland Hebron donâ€™t like my work as a journalist, and as a result I live in Austria as a refugee. I continue writing the truth, and what I write does not meet the taste of you criminals. So you send me death threats, try to hack my website several times, and since all of that does not make me shut up, you now send a team to intimidate, to harass me, and possibly to murder me. What results do you expect to get from committing such crimes?

In my homeland Palestine you called and threatened me constantly, you harassed me physically, psychologically, and sexually. You denied me the basic right to practice my work as a journalist. You stole my home, my ID, my work, my family, my friends; just like what you did to uncountable other Palestinians. Your crimes against me were so numerous and your threats came so often that I stopped fearing you, because all of your crimes against me blurred into one big picture of ridiculous insanity.

I still wonder why you are calling my friends in Palestine and Europe to ask about me. Why do you send your murderers to Austria to walk behind me? What dirty mission are your criminals planning here? Do you really think that you will get anything favorable at all by sending people to commit acts of state sponsored terrorism in a country where the law is respected? Do you really think that transferring your methods of state terrorism to Austria will bring you advantages? Do you think that murdering one of your victims, a journalist in good standing, will help make Israel look better? I think not. The image of Israel is already as bad as can be in many parts of the world, your so-called "state" is seen by increasingly more people as a bad joke and a disgrace to humanity. Sponsoring acts of international terrorism in a state of law will be a disaster for your failed "state" in every sense. One thing is clear: the incompetent people who you sent have been caught, but not captured, and Israel will be guilty for whatever happens to me from now. If the leaves of autumn fall on my head, Israel will be guilty.

Do yourself a favor and stop sending these cowards. For now your "super agents" have been exposed as laughing stock, but what will happen if next time around one of them is caught? It was enough to shout to have your "super-agents" run away like rabbits. I felt victorious to see you like that because that was your real face: coward, criminally insane petty thieves.

Murder at Huwara checkpoint

Haitham Sabbah — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:03:28 +0000

Note: Checkpoints are under 100% Israeli surveillance. After you read the story ask yourself: Why aren't the surveillance camera tapes being shown to the public? I guess it's obvious.

May the killers never sleep a full night again as they see Fahmi in their nightmares!

***

Murder at huwara checkpoint
By Aya Kaniuk, Vivi Sury, Tamar Goldschmidt. Huwara Checkpoint, Saturday, 24.5.08 Translated by Tal Haran.

This time we came to the checkpoint especially in order to gather testimony about the murder of 15.5-year old Fahmi Abd alJawaad alDarduk (ÙÙ‡Ù…ÙŠ Ø¹Ø¨Ø¯ Ø§Ù„Ø¬ÙˆØ§Ø¯ Ø§Ù„Ø¯Ø±Ø¯ÙˆÙƒ), who was shot by the soldiers at this checkpoint on Monday, May 19th 2008.

After he was shot, the army claimed that pipe bombs had been detected in his belt. That wires had been seen hanging from under his clothing. That three pipe bombs had been observed. Later it was said there were five. One of the perpetrators of this crime was cited for excellence.

A Palestinian ambulance arriving from Nablus twenty minutes later at the most was not permitted access to the bleeding boy until 11:30 PM. For two and a half hours he lay on the concrete floor of the checkpoint and no one was allowed to approach him but the Occupation forces. During this time all Palestinians in the area were violently pushed away and the blood washed away with water jets.

In its habitual knee-jerk reaction, Israel immediately publicized the announcement of the Occupation Forces' PR office, aka the army spokesperson, that a twenty-year old had reached the Huwara checkpoint with three pipe bombs and was legally shot. After a while the reports spoke of a sixteen-year old carrying five pipe bombs. Then again just three. And lots of visible wires.

None of the four to six bullets hitting his body in various places and fired at a very short distance caused any kind of explosives to blow up.

We spoke with people there and they told us:

We were here around the stall (one of the several vendors' stalls in the taxi-park adjacent to the checkpoint), about twenty-thirty of us, I went to the stall closest to the checkpoint to get a cup of coffee. Just then I heard shouting inside the checkpoint. First, the soldiers yelling something like 'he's got explosives on him!' and people were yelling at the soldiers that this was not true, that he had a cell phone on him, and then there were shots. Six or seven shots.

I went up to get a look, me and some others, and the soldiers yelled at us to get back. But people did not go back. And people inside yelled "He's dead! He's dead! The boy is dead!". And they shouted that he must be taken to the hospital. Then the soldiers threw teargas at us. And they closed down the whole checkpoint. And made us leave the stalls and go to the Awarta checkpoint.
So we left the stalls open, just like that. Taxi drivers had to get out of their cars, everybody. Around 100-120 people. The whole crowd at the checkpoint. And the drivers. We were chased away.

They came to us running and ordered us to get out of there, quick. Lots of soldiers. They continued to chase us, running, and threw concussion grenades and teargas. Four-five grenades.

We ran off. They chased us away like goats. To Awarta CP, across from the army base nearby. And they held us there until 1:30 AM.
From there we could see everything going on at the Huwara checkpoint.

When we were being pushed off on the road towards Awarta, there were settlers standing by at the bus-stop there, and they started throwing stones at us.
The soldiers watched... The soldiers watched.

We were held at Awarta until 1:30 AM. And we lost all our goods at the unattended stalls. I had to spend 50 NIS just to take a taxi. How else would I get home in the middle of the night. Everything I had at my stall I had to throw away. Lost all the money.

Why did they not let the ambulance approach, save his life. The ambulance got there very quickly, within 10-20 minutes. One of ours, from Nablus. But they wouldn't let him through. A Jews' ambulance came too, and the medics were told he's dead.

The boy was inside the checkpoint, we didn't see him. People standing in line with him told us what the soldiers did. Someone who had stood right behind him told us how he was killed. How the soldiers killed him.

He had just left his home. It happened at about 19:30-19:40. He had just got to the checkpoint, stood waiting for the inspection, nothing special, and he has two cell phones. And an earphone. The earphone wire passing under his shirt, not over it. Inside, not out.
When he went through the turnstile he was ordered to "lift your shirt, show your belly." He lifted his shirt. When they saw the earphone wire, and the cell phone, they shot his head, immediately. Before he even passed through, he was shot in the head. The woman-soldier shot him. Yes, the woman-soldier. But she was not the only one. Not one shot. Six shots. That's what people said who saw it. The man who was waiting next in line.

Until 23:30, the boy lay on the ground. No one was allowed to get close. From where we stood in the Awarta CP, we could see the checkpoint. We saw that the ambulance from Nablus was not allowed to approach. Nor doctors, no one. Everything was shut down. Only around 11:30 PM. Perhaps around midnight, then their IDs were checked and they were allowed to get near him.

But before that, the blood was washed away. With water. They brought a fire-truck with water jets.
We know the driver of the fire-truck and he told us that the next morning they had to come there and wash the spot again. To wash away the blood.

They killed the boy and his family. The whole family burnt out.

His parents didn't know it was him, he was not carrying an ID. Perhaps the soldiers took it from him, or because he was too young to possess an ID. He was held, dead, at the hospital. Only the next day his parents found out it was him.

That day when it happened was absolutely horrific. Totally horrific.

The boy's father, interviewed on various Palestinian news channels, said Fahmi was a ninth-grade student at the Abd al Hamid al Saeh School, single brother to his seven sisters, and he had been on his way to pay a family visit in Ramallah. He never used to leave home without permission, and on his way to the checkpoint he was keeping in touch by telephone, because parents tend to worry, that's how it is. The father said, painfully that the boy told him he had already gone through the checkpoint even though this was not true, probably to calm his father. He said the boy had a cell phone with an earphone, like most of the youngsters these days. And that everything the army reported is false accusation.

On the morrow of the murder, the soldiers came to the vendors who had witnessed what had happened, and asked them things like "Are you missing anything from your stalls?" As if trying to do-good with people. "What have you found missing? A coke bottle? That's what the Occupations soldiers asked someone, caringly.
If anything had been stolen from you, just tell us, the officer said to someone else.

How unsurprising that the same policy that normally trashes their goods and scatters vendors' food on the ground and chases them away in order to deny them their livelihood again and again, following the same law and norms, suddenly sends emissaries to inquire 'caringly' whether they're missing some Coke.
And right on the day after they had witnessed the murder of a boy by the soldiers at the checkpoint.

I heard from people who heard on an Israeli channel that the shooting was accidental... That's what they say.

No, we corrected the speaker. That's not what they said. In Israel they said the boy was carrying explosives. And that's why they killed him.

Really, that's what they told? They didn't say it was a mistake?

Witness after witness tell us similar renditions of the shooting, the shouts, the Palestinians' pleas not to shoot, the ambulance prevented access, how the boy lay alone on the concrete for hours before anyone was allowed close, that he had merely been wearing a wired earphone, that this was just a boy, and that the family had been crushed.

You want to know what happened, but even if you knew, what can you do with these soldiers? You cannot do anything. They killed him. He's already dead. What could anyone do for his parents? Nothing can help them now. Nothing.
I mean... A human being is dead. A child.
Everyone says something about what happened, but that guy who was standing behind him, he told. We heard. He was shot and he died.
You cannot do a thing. I've seen you, poor women. Seen you being pushed once by the soldiers, and I said to you then I wonder what kind of garbage dump these soldiers came from, remember?
I'm telling you the truth.
And if a soldier will come, I'll tell him there was nothing on this boy.
Why? listen: They fired at him, right? Why didn't it blow up? I want to speak to television. If he had something on him, how come it didn't blow up?
And if he wants to kill soldiers, would he also want to kill all the Palestinian people standing there? If he had wanted to kill anyone, it would be just the soldiers, anyway if he had had anything on him, it would blast when he was shot.
We wouldn't want anyone to come kill anyone either. We want peace. We don't want guys coming and making trouble. But if he did have explosives and was fired at, why didn't the boy blow up? That's what I say.
We don't want blood, I want to repeat this. No blood. That's what I want to say. Neither Jewish nor Arab. We want peace. First the Jews and Arabs lived together. There is enough land. Why not live in peace together. That's what we want.
You know whose land this is here? The village of Burin. This guy who's a vendor here, it's his. Our land. But don't think we don't want to live together. We don't want anything happening to any soldier. And to no Arab here.
But I ask you, if I had arms on me and I would want to pass through this checkpoint, I mean I know I would be inspected. I know that. So this is where I wouldn't come. Who would come here like this?
I'm not afraid of anyone. I don't want Arabs to die nor Jews to die. I want your children and all the Arabs and all the Jews to be one.
And if missiles were fired at us, we'd stand together.

Fahmi's body, so it turned out, was hit in various places. No one knows if he expired on the spot or slowly bled to his death. If he was conscious before dying. And whether he asked for help or talked.
Only the soldiers who murdered him, and those who came to conceal what had happened - they know the answer.

The army spokesperson announcement, Monday May 19th, 2008, 21:58
"An attempted attack against the Huwara checkpoint was thwarted"

A short while ago, a suspect Palestinian reached the Huwara checkpoint south of Nablus. His pacing to and fro aroused the suspicions of IDF soldiers on the spot. They called to him and noticed he was fidgeting with a belt he carried on his body. The belt was suspected as am explosive device.
As he did not stop moving, and suddenly dropped his hands towards the belt, he was shot by the force. On the Palestinian's dead body three pipe bombs were found.