BEIRUT, LEBANON (12:40 P.M.) – The death toll from the Saudi airstrike on the Yemeni wedding, yesterday, has risen exponentially, the Yemen-based Saba News Agency reported this morning.
According to the Saba report, at least 88 civilians have been found dead as a result of this Saudi airstrike on the wedding in the Al-Raqa area of Hajjah.
“The Republican Hospital declared a state of emergency yesterday evening because of the continued flow of casualties to it.. Calling citizens to donate blood,” The Saba report added.
Initially, the death toll was placed by local monitors at 20, but it quickly rose to 33 overnight after more bodies were found under the rubble.
Fatima cannot forget the sight of the blood covering her father’s body nor her mother’s groaning. Her mother had to leave her little brother Hamza because she was hit by a deadly bullet.
Even the night could not hide the horror of the bloody scene on the road between Duma and the safe corridor created by the Syrian Arab Army for civilians to cross from the terrorist-controlled areas in Eastern Ghouta to the points under its control. Ten-year old Fatima was unable to do anything. She held her brother Hamza’s hand firmly and crawled in the orchards towards the nearest Syrian army checkpoint. Seeing the two children, one of the officers rushed to carry them to safety under the cover of friendly fire.
* The Dangerous Decision
Fatima tells Al-Ahed how her father made the dangerous decision to flee with the rest of the family to the safe area set up by the Syrian army for civilians to cross. The man knew that the armed groups in Douma would forcefully dissuade him from leaving as they did with many others who were shot and put in jail. He chose nightfall to be the zero hour to embark on the most dangerous task of his life. The man carried his daughter Fatima and his wife carried Hamzah and set off for freedom that was only a short walk through the orchards.
But the militants were able to spot him with his family and rained a barrage of bullets on them, punishing them for daring to flee. At this moment, Fatima had to grow up quickly and become the father, mother and sister to her little brother who was stunned at what he saw. As her mother groaned and her dying father repeated the Shahada, Fatima held her brother’s hand and crawled between the orchards and under fire towards the nearest Syrian army checkpoint.
One of the soldiers was alerted to a suspicious movement before shouting: “They are two children. Cover me so I can get to them.”
Thus, the night gave rise to two beautiful children trembling in fear and appealing to the army, whose soldiers and officers rushed to extend them a desperately needed lifeline and help them cross the line between slavery and freedom.
* The Mother of the Martyrs Embraces the Two Orphans
The Syrian army took Fatima and her brother Hamza to one of the shelters. Hamza appeared to be in shock. His sister Fatima was aware of this, so she hoped that we would not press him with questions. The scene of their parents’ death had not left the two children who were crying continuously. A Syrian army soldier took on the responsibility of comforting them, petting them and buying them the chocolate they desired. Grandma Um Muhammad, then, appeared to take on the daunting task of relieving Fatima and Hamza. Um Muhammad is a lady hailing from Diyabiya in Eastern Ghouta. Her husband and three children were killed fighting alongside the Syrian Arab Army.
She told Al-Ahed website, “I embraced Fatima and Hamza. I took them to a room in the shelter and gave them new clothes after showering. Then I initiated conversation with them to avoid silence in order for them not to slip into painful memories.”
Another lady from Douma waited for a long time at the safe corridor. She waited for her four married daughters, but to no avail. The embracing of Fatima and Hamza became her outlet for the longing that she felt for her daughters.
“I fear that a lot for my daughters are at home suffering from hunger in the first place. The terrorists are denying civilians food and only giving it to those who carry arms against the Syrian army,” she said.
“I hope my daughters succeed in getting out but not in the way that Fatima and her brother Hamza survived,” she added.
* All of Them Are Children With Woes
The shelter was full of children who made an effort to comfort Fatima and Hamza. Ahlam gets closer to Fatima, embraces her and holds her hands saying, “She is like my sister.” Fatima smiles at this love but her eyes never stop chasing her brother Hamza, who was taken by the other children to distract him. We ask Fatima about the people’s situation inside and if they wanted to get out. She immediately and without hesitation replies, “Yes, many before us tried to get out but were prevented by gunfire. There is injustice inside and hunger. Although the militants have a lot of food, yet they only give it to families whose children carry arms. They have raised the barricades to prevent people from going out and put some of them in prisons.”
The distraught smiles that Fatima timidly gave us were soon interrupted by Hamza’s cries, who was calling out to his mother. His sister Fatima rushes towards him, hugging him tightly and comforting him as much as she could. “Do not be sad my love, she is in heaven.”
With tears shed for their parents, who were unjustly slain by the gunmen at the passage to freedom, Fatima holds her brother’s hand leading him on to life’s mysterious ways after she led him through the night on the journey of death.
RAMALLAH, March 3, 2018 (WAFA) – Israeli soldiers were caught on tape on Friday firing a stun grenade at a Palestinian couple carrying an infant in the village of Burin, in the north of the West Bank, forcing them to run away, according to a tweet by the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din.
“Soldiers and border police arrived to Burin today and according to residents threw tear gas and stun grenades at youths who gathered after noticing 2 Israelis approaching from the direction of (the settlement of) Givat Ronen. A tear gas grenade landed in one of the houses where a large family lives,” it said.
“They continued to fire the tear gas and stun grenades even when the occupants were evacuated to the ambulance.”
In a video taken by a Yesh Din field researcher, a couple with a baby is seen fleeing to their home while a border police officer throws a stun grenade at them, it said.
Frankfort, KY — A bill that would have banned adults from marrying children in Kentucky was struck down this week prompting outrage from politicians and activists alike.
Senate Bill 48, known as the “child bride” bill, was yanked from the agenda this week, just hours before a scheduled vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is the second time in only two weeks that lawmakers have protected the depraved act of adults taking children as their spouses.
“SO disappointed! My SB 48 (outlaw child marriage) won’t be called for a vote,” sponsor Julie Raque Adams, a Louisville Republican, said in a Tweet. “It is disgusting that lobbying organizations would embrace kids marrying adults. We see evidence of parents who are addicted, abusive, neglectful pushing their children into predatory arms. Appalling.”
SO disappointed! My SB 48 (outlaw child marriage) won’t be called for a vote. It is disgusting that lobbying organizations would embrace kids marrying adults. We see evidence of parents who are addicted, abusive, neglectful pushing their children into predatory arms. Appalling.
Other people reacting to the bill were a little more outspoken in their response.
“This is legalized rape of children,” Eileen Recktenwald, the executive director of the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs said. “We cannot allow that to continue in Kentucky, and I cannot believe we are even debating this is the year 2018 in the United States.”
Adams did not say who was lobbying against the bill, however, she noted that the opposition is allegedly concerned about parents’ rights.
As it stands, currently in Kentucky, teens under 18 can marry adults at ages 16 and 17 with the permission of their parents. However, according to the current law, it is up to a judge to decide if a child under the age of 16 can marry an adult—and the girl must be pregnant. For obvious reasons, critics of the current law claim that a pregnant 13, 14, or 15-year-old girl—impregnated by the adult they are to marry—is evidence of a sex crime as a child cannot consent to sex. But it is the law nonetheless.
As the Courier-Journal reports,
The bill would establish 18 as the legal age for marriage. Those who are 17 could marry with permission of a district judge, if the age difference between the 17-year-old and the other party is fewer than four years.
But in cases of a minor marrying an adult, the judge would have to review material including any child abuse records involving the teen and check for any sex-offender records of the adult. The judge also would have to consider factors including the maturity and independence of the teen, determine that the teen has completed high school or obtained a GED and review any domestic violence records of either party.
The judge is to deny the request in cases including if the adult is in a position of authority over the minor, has a conviction for child abuse or a sexual offense, or if there is a pregnancy or child in common that established that the intended spouse was the perpetrator of a sex crime against a girl too young to consent.
“I had some problems with the bill,” Sen. John Schickel, a Boone County Republican said Thursday in defiance of the bill. “Decisions involving a minor child should be made by a parent, not the court.”
However, other Republican lawmakers disagree.
“I know there are some concerns, but it’s 2018 and it’s definitely a problem,” Sen. Wil Schroder, a Wilder Republican and a co-sponsor of SB 48, said.
“Unfortunately, parents make bad decisions sometimes and sometimes judges make bad decisions.”
As TFTP has previously reported, this problem is not isolated to Kentucky. Laws across America have legalized pedophilia with children as young as 10-years-old and no one appears to be stopping it.
Girls as young as ten are among more than 200,000 children wed to adults in the United States in just the past 15 years, as — despite minimum requirements that a person reach the age of 18, or legal adulthood, nationally — a smattering of locations have preserved loopholes legally permitting child marriage.
Alarmingly, the number of children married away to fully mature adults could be much higher than the already-startling number — ten states provide only fragmentary statistics or none at all.
And the loopholes don’t exist solely in theory — adults across the U.S. have actively jumped at the opportunity to marry kids — even amid a decline in the number of marriages, overall.
To wit, three 10-year-old girls and an 11-year-old boy were among the hundreds of thousands of children and minors the system somehow permitted adults to lock into marriage — despite their bodies and minds not yet being fully developed.
“At least 207,468 minors married in the US between 2000 and 2015, according to data compiled by Unchained At Last, a group campaigning to abolish child marriage, and investigative documentary series Frontline,” The Independent reports.
Indeed, exemptions from the national marriage minimum age of 18 exist for circumstances like pregnancy and parental consent — in every state in the country.
Most states allowing adults to take a child spouse require the consent of one or both parents, permission from a judge, or some combination thereof — however, there is a rather astonishing footnote to this underbelly of marriage and child love in the United States.
As Frontline noted in a special report,
“In 26 states, there’s no minimum marriage age, according to the Tahirih Justice Center. Children in those states can get married at any age if certain conditions are met.”
The Yemeni rocketry force fired on Monday a ballistic missile on Saudi and UAE mercenaries in Taiz in southwestern Yemen.
Military source at Yemen rocket unit told Yemen Press they had fired a ballistic missile branded Qaher M2 onto the gatherings of the Saudi and UAE mercenaries in Taiz.
Yemen has been since March 2015 under a brutal aggression by Saudi-led coalition, in a bid to restore power to fugitive former president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
Tens of thousands of Yemenis have been injured and martyred in Saudi-led strikes, with the vast majority of them are civilians.
However, the allied forces of the Yemeni Army and popular committees established by Ansarullah revolutionaries have been heroically confronting the aggression with all means, inflicting huge losses upon Saudi-led forces.
The Saudi-led coalition – which also includes UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan and Kuwait – has been also imposing a blockade on the impoverished country’s ports and airports as a part of the aggression.
The move came as Israel extended detention of 16-year-old girl Ahed al-Tamimi
World Bulletin / News Desk
The Palestinian Authority has submitted a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) over Israeli violations against Palestinian children.
The move came as Israeli authorities extended the detention of 16-year-old girl Ahed al-Tamimi for the fifth time on charges of attacking Israeli soldiers.
In a statement on Saturday, Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki called on ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to “exercise her legal authority without delay to prevent the continuation of crimes being committed against the Palestinian people.”
He cited the case of al-Tamimi, who was first detained by Israeli forces on Dec. 19 as “another proof on Israeli policies and crimes” against the Palestinians.
“This complaint against Israeli criminals is a proof on the necessity to accelerate the opening of a criminal investigation to guarantee fair justice to Palestinian children and victims,” he said.
Last week, the Palestinian Central Council announced the referral of the issues of Israeli settlement building and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails to the ICC.
According to Palestinian figures, over 6,400 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons, including 300 children.
[ Ed. note – Yesterday I posted an article from Sputnik about a report suggesting that the US is now pursuing a new strategy, one aimed at establishing a 28,000-square-kilometer Kurdish enclave in eastern Syria. The area is said to be three times the size of Lebanon.
The report, according to Sputnik, is based on an article that appeared in Asharq al-Awsat. The latter is an international newspaper based in London but which reportedly has ties to the Saudi government–so the story may be fictitious, or at least questionable. But Sputnik, at any rate, gave it enough credence to post an article about it, and indeed what the report says–regarding US moves toward “diplomatically recognizing” a Kurdish-controlled area east of the Euphrates–seems entirely consistent with past US behavior…and Sputnik’s report on the matter included the map you see below:
The yellow area shows territory which, as of late 2017, was de facto controlled by Kurdish forces and their allies. The red outlines the part of the country remaining under Syrian government control. As you can see, the yellow area comprises roughly a third of the country, perhaps a little more. The news that the US is moving to “diplomatically recognize” the Kurdish area–if in fact the report is true–suggests that it is planning on setting up a Kurdish state. The establishment of a “Kurdistan” in the Middle East, as Sarah Abed has reported, would be seen by some as the establishment of a “second Israel.”
In my post of yesterday I commented that the partitioning of the country in this manner would be “an affront to the sacrifices made by the brave Syrians who fought and died for their country.” I got up early this morning and decided to see if I could find anything about the report on SANA, the Syrian Arab News Agency. I didn’t find anything on it. But what I did find was an article about a group of Syrian children competing on “Voice Kids,“–apparently a reality-type talent show showcasing children that appears on TV in a number of countries (I don’t watch TV, so I tend not to keep up with these things).
Below is the article from SANA about the talented Syrian kids who have been selected to appear on the show–and beneath that a video of a Voice Kids segment that I found on YouTube and which in fact features one of the Syrian children singing. The song she sings is a plea for peace. “My land is small. Small like me. Give us peace,” she sings. The words, the entire performance really, is/are incredibly powerful. The song is entitled, “Give Us Our Childhood.”
These are talented children quite obviously–children who, we can presume, have had their entire childhoods stolen from them by the US with its evil, nefarious regime-change designs. Setting up a Kurdish state in eastern Syria serves no US interest. The only interest is serves is Israel’s.
US: Get Out of Syria!
***
13 Syrian Children Take Center Stage in Voice Kids Season 2
Damascus, SANA – 13 Syrian children have made their way to the second stage of the Voice Kids show in its second edition after they stunned the audience, viewers and judges with their adorable and talented performance in the blind auditions.
The Syrian children have been chosen among other 45 children from several Arab countries to move to the next round (battle stage).
The show’s panel consists of three Arab stars: Kazem al-Saher, Nancy Ajram and Tamer Hosny.
Ajram took the biggest share of Syrian talents, as her team included the 9-year old kids: Jessica Gharbi, Yaeel al-Qasem and Obai al-Fares, Komay Gharz Eddin (13 years old), Zain Ammar (10 years old), the twin Khaled & Abed al-Merhi (11 years old) and Taha Mohsen (12 years old).
The US has already stolen their childhood. If it pursues this devious quest at setting up a Kurdish state in eastern Syria, it will effectively also be stealing one-third of their homeland. That in a nutshell is what it comes down to.
From the video description: “Syrian child brings judges and audience to tears singing ‘Give Us Our Childhood’”
The US-backed Saudi monarchy and its allied Gulf oil sheikdoms have dramatically escalated their bombing campaign against Yemen, the poorest nation in the Middle East, killing scores of civilians within the last few days.
In the bloodiest of the airstrikes, Saudi warplanes targeted a crowded marketplace in Yemen’s southwestern Taiz province on Tuesday, killing 54 civilians.
While coverage of the bloodbath by the US and Western media has been scarce, Yemen’s Al Masirah television network published photos on its website showing the market’s bombed-out shops and the dismembered remains of slaughtered civilians. It reported that body parts had been thrown hundreds of yards from the blast sites.
Among the dead were at least eight children. Another 32 people were wounded in the bombing, including six children.
On the same day, warplanes attacked a farm in the al-Tuhayta district of Yemen’s western Hodeida province killing an entire family of 14, including women and children.
Yemeni sources reported that Saudi and allied warplanes carried out more than 45 airstrikes on Wednesday targeting several Yemeni cities and killing at least another six civilians, including a family of five whose house was targeted in the port city of Hodeida.
According to the Al Masirah television network the number of Yemenis killed and wounded in Saudi airstrikes since the beginning of December had risen to 600 before the latest round of casualties beginning on Tuesday.
This bloody new phase in the more than 1,000-day-old war by the wealthy and reactionary Arab monarchies against impoverished Yemen is driven by the House of Saud’s frustration over its inability to shift the military stalemate and made possible by the unrestrained support from Riyadh’s Western allies, principally the US and Britain.
The stepped up bombing campaign has come partly in response to the failure of a Saudi-backed coup by the former Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh against his erstwhile allies, the Houthi rebel movement. The abortive effort ended in Saleh’s death and the routing of his supporters earlier this month.
Riyadh has also been shaken by the firing of missiles from Yemen targeting both the international airport and the House of Saud’s royal palace. Both missiles were brought down without causing any casualties.
Washington has long relied upon the Saudi monarchy as a pillar of reaction in the Arab world, arming it to the teeth and in the process reaping vast profits for US arms corporations.
During his trip to Saudi Arabia in May, US President Donald Trump signed a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudi regime. While the agreement represented the single largest arms deal in US history, it represented a continuity with the policy pursued by the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, which had struck a $29 billion agreement to sell F-15s the Saudis—representing the previous largest single US arms deal—and had a total of $100 billion worth of weaponry slated for sale to the kingdom.
In addition to providing the warplanes, bombs and missiles being used to slaughter Yemeni civilians, Washington is a direct accomplice and participant in the assault on Yemen, a flagrant war crime that has produced the greatest humanitarian catastrophe on the face of the planet. US Air Force planes are flying refueling missions that keep Saudi fighter bombers in the air, while US intelligence officers are assisting in the targeting of airstrikes and US warships are backing a Saudi sea blockade that is part of a barbaric siege of the country aimed at starving its population into submission.
While an estimated 13,600 civilians have lost their lives to the US-backed Saudi military campaign launched in March of 2015, that death toll has been massively eclipsed by the number of lives lost to hunger and disease resulting from the destruction of basic water and sanitary infrastructure, along with factories, farms, medical facilities and other vital resources, and the blockading of food, medicine and humanitarian supplies.
Almost three years into the war, 21.2 million people, 82 percent of the population, are in need of humanitarian assistance, lacking access to food, fuel and clean water,. An estimated 8 million people are on the brink of starvation, while soaring food prices have placed essential commodities out of reach for all but the wealthiest layers of Yemeni society.
The International Committee of the Red Cross announced last week that the number of cholera cases had topped 1 million, the worst epidemic in modern history, while the country has also been hit by an outbreak of diphtheria, a disease that has been almost entirely eradicated in the rest of the world.
The apocalyptic scale of the human suffering in Yemen has moved some in the West to make timid criticisms of the Saudi regime. Thus, French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly called Saudi King Salman on December 24 to advocate a “complete lifting’ of the blockade of Yemen. Macron made no move, however, to amend the 455 million euro arms deal struck with Riyadh by his predecessor, François Hollande, providing weapons being used to murder Yemeni civilians.
Similarly, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator Jamie McGoldrick pointed to the latest mass casualties resulting from Saudi bombings to condemn the “complete disregard for human life that all parties, including the Saudi-led coalition, continue to show in this absurd war.”
The reality is that the overwhelming majority of deaths have been caused by illegal Saudi aggression. The war, from the standpoint of both Riyadh and Washington, moreover, is not “absurd,” but rather part of a broader regional strategy being pursued by US imperialism to prepare for a military confrontation with Iran, which has emerged as an obstacle to the drive to assert American hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East.
Finally, the New York Times published an editorial Thursday saturated with hypocrisy and deceit. Titled “The Yemen Crucible,” it accuses the Trump administration of applying “a double standard” to the catastrophe in Yemen by denouncing alleged Iranian arms support for the Houthi rebels, while “having nothing bad to say” about the Saudi bombing campaign.
The Times, a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party establishment, raises the possibility that Iran “could be in violation” of a UN Security Council resolution barring it from the export of missiles and other weapons, and guilty of “escalating a crisis” that could lead to war with Saudi Arabia.
Referring to the recent performance of the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who appeared at a US military hangar in Washington with what was claimed to be debris from an Iranian-supplied missile fire by the Houthi rebels at Riyadh, the newspaper acknowledged that the presentation recalled the “weapons of mass destruction” speech delivered by then US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council in preparation for the US invasion of Iraq.
Of course the Times supported that war of aggression in 2003 and became one of the main propagandists of the “weapons of mass destruction” lie used to justify it.
The editorial utters not a word of criticism of US arms sales to the Saudi regime—much less about the Obama administration’s initiation of Washington’s support for the war on Yemen—and concludes with claims of seeing signs that the Trump administration is exerting “constructive influence on the Saudis.”
These lies and omissions make clear that if and when Washington embarks on a potentially world catastrophic war against Iran, the “newspaper of record” will once again provide its services as a propaganda organ for American militarism.
A time of mounting excitement in Moscow as the city gets set for the holidays–in Russia, New Year is celebrated before Christmas, rather than after it. The Russian Orthdox Christmas will be observed on January 6-7, 2018. What I find most striking about the video is the extent to which the Russian children seem to idolize Putin–almost as if he’s a rock star or something. I would find it hard to imagine any group of American children displaying such frenzy and adoration upon the appearance of a US president.
You’ll note also that some of the children in the video are from Sevastopol. The city is located in Crimea, and for many of them it’s their first trip to Moscow. Obviously they are quite impressed!
A little bit about Russian Orthodox Christmas:
People in Russia celebrate Christmas Day with activities such as having a family dinner, attending a Christmas liturgy and visiting relatives and friends. There is a 40-day Lent preceding Christmas Day, when practicing Christians do not eat any meat. The Lent period ends with the first star in the night sky on January 6 – a symbol of Jesus Christ’s birth. Many Orthodox Christians go to the church to attend a Christmas liturgy that evening. (Source).
Children in Yemen could not have a worse year than 2017, according to a senior official from the UN Children’s Fund [UNICEF].
“2017 was a horrible year for the children of Yemen,” UNICEF Representative in the country, Meritxell Relaño, told UN News by telephone from the capital, Sanaa.
More than 80 children had been martyred or injured in December alone, while millions face a cholera epidemic, looming famine, a disruption in health services and a blockade hampering delivery of much-needed supplies.
She urged a political solution for what she said was a man-made conflict and warned that without a political solution many more children would die.
Relaño recounted meeting a woman and her dying 7-year-old son Ali in a hospital in Aden.
“He was like skin on bones. I asked why they had not come sooner and the mother told me that she could not afford to ride the bus to the hospital. The levels of poverty in the families [have] now reached levels that are unsustainable,” she said.
To offset some of this type of need, Relaño noted that some 1.3 million families, or about 8 million people, are being reached with emergency cash as part of a transfer project between UNICEF and the World Bank.
She also praised successful efforts to deliver vaccines and implement a polio immunization campaign this year to benefit some 5 million children and provide treatment for 200,000 children with acute malnutrition.
“Yemenis who work on the ground to support the Yemenis are the true heroes,” she said, noting the efforts of local authorities, doctors, nurses and teachers in the country.
[ Ed. note – Ahed Tamimi, the famous blonde-haired Palestinian girl who has been seen in so many videos she probably merits the status of “superstar,” has been arrested–apparently for slapping an Israeli soldier.
The arrest took place before dawn this morning when soldiers raided her family’s home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.
“A large Israeli force raided our house at dawn and arrested Ahed while she was sleeping in her bed,” Basem Tamimi, Ahed’s father, told the Anadolu Agency. “My daughter was handcuffed and taken into an unknown destination.”
Here is a video that has been posted and which appears to show Ahed (in the light blue sweater) slapping the soldier.
The entire Tamimi family has been at the forefront of ongoing protests in Nabi Saleh, and some family members have also been active in documenting clashes that have occurred at these protests–so it perhaps comes as no surprise that in raiding the Tamimi home this morning, the soldiers also made off with computers, cameras, and mobile phones, or at least this is what is reported in the Ma’an article below.
Apparently the Israelis didn’t get quite every single recording device, though.
Here is a brief video that was shot as Ahed was being led away and later posted on Twitter:
I have put up posts about Ahed in the past, including one I posted in December of last year after she was denied a visa to go on a speaking tour in the US. That post got more than 2,000 shares on Facebook. Below is the article from Ma’an News about Ahmed’s arrest. ]
***
RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — Israeli forces detained a 17-year-old Palestinian girl from the Nabi Saleh village in northwestern Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank on Tuesday morning before dawn.
Israeli forces raided the home of the al-Tamimi family, well-known internationally for their activism against the Israeli occupation, and detained Ahed al-Tamimi, 17.
Israeli forces also confiscated computers, mobile phones and cameras from the house during the raid.
According to locals, Ahed was arrested over a video went viral on social media of her slapping an armed Israeli officer during a raid on Nabi Saleh.
Ahed Tamimi is well-known across Palestine and the Arab world for videos of her, since her childhood, defiantly resisting Israeli soldiers who clash with Palestinians in her village nearly every week.
Two years ago, her family made headlines when an Israeli soldier violently attempted to arrest her younger brother , who had one arm in a cast at the time. Ahed and her mother manager to pull the soldier of her brother and free him.
Israeli military raids into Palestinian cities, towns, and refugee camps are a near daily occurrence.
According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), since US President Donald Trump’s announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Israeli forces have detained 450 Palestinians, including 138 minors, and nine women.
Prisoners rights group Addameer recorded 6,198 Palestinians were detained by Israel as of October. The group has estimated that some 40 percent of Palestinian men will be detained by Israel at some point in their lives.
[ Additional ed. note – A #Free_Ahed_Tamimi hashtag has been created on Twitter. Here is a tweet posted on it a bit earlier this evening. The video contains something of a compilation of some of Ahed’s previous confrontations with Israeli soldiers:
And here is another tweet with the same hashtag. I don’t know if Ahed could qualify as the Palestinian Joan of Arc or not ( I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that, since Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at the age of 19 ) but she does seem to cut quite the heroic figure:
As I mentioned above, Ahed was to have participated in a speaking tour of America, but was denied a visa to enter the US. The speaking tour was to have been entitled “Living Resistance,” and was to have been sponsored by Friends of Sabeel of North America. The tour was to have taken place in January of this year. Here is a video that was posted by FOSNA after Ahed was turned down for a visa:
“We should extend our struggles to one another in order to end all of the world’s injustices.”
Ahmed Tamimi from Anna Surinyach on Vimeo. [ Ed. note – Ahmed Tamimi is a young Palestinian girl who has featured prominently in a number of videos, cutting a rather striking figure at least as much for her blondish hair as her courage in the face of the occupation forces…
An Afghan boy looks on he stands at the site of a landslide that killed at least 350 people and leaving thousands of others feared dead at the Argo district in Badakhshan,inputted on May 4th, 2014. Farshad Usyan/AFP/Getty Images.
US Troops Taught For Years Child Sex Abuse Is ‘Culturally Accepted’ In Afghanistan
Jonah Bennett and Saagar Enjeti
U.S. troops deploying to Afghanistan were taught for years that child sex abuse is a “culturally accepted practice” in the country, and were provided no guidance that it constituted a violation of the law and human rights until late 2015.
A new Pentagon inspector general report reveals that although troops weren’t explicitly discouraged from reporting cases of child sex abuse, the issue was not discussed until numerous media outlets reported that troops were encouraged to ignore local Afghan officials abusing little boys.
Interviews of troops from the report suggest that military officials didn’t really care much about stopping child sex abuse.
“In some cases, the interviewees explained that they, or someone whom they knew, were told that nothing could be done about child sexual abuse because of Afghanistan’s status as a sovereign nation, that it was not a priority for the command, or that it was best to ignore the situation and to let the local police handle it,” the report noted.
One interviewee said after he reported an Afghan commander who abused little boys to his chain of command, he was told: “It was out of our control” and “There’s nothing we can do about it” and “It’s their country.”
“Soldiers [were] told to ignore it and drive on,” another interviewee stated.
The cultural presentation sailors had to undergo stated that pedophilia is an issue in Afghanistan, but added that readers should “control and overcome any frustration caused by cultural differences that they may experience during their deployments.”
Additionally, the presentation advised sailors that they should ask their chains of command what to do in specific circumstances.
Marine Corps cultural training told Marines that they “need to understand the culture, accept it without making judgments, and figure out how to work with it or around it to accomplish your mission.”
The training also said that sometimes Afghan men joke about pedophilia, but Marines should just ignore it and “move on.”
Marines were not given any guidance about what they should do if they ever encounter instances of pedophilia.
The inspector general’s finding was damning. Effectively, the military only started to care about the problem of pedophilia and abuse after media outlets started reporting on the issue.
“We determined that the DoD did not conduct training for personnel on identifying, responding to, or reporting instances of child sexual abuse involving ANDSF personnel before 2015,” the report noted.
While troops have been told to report human rights violations since 2011, child sex abuse was not declared as a violation until September 2016. Between 2010 and 2016, 16 cases of child sex abuse were reported to the Pentagon, but because no proper reporting mechanisms existed, the exact number of cases is unknown.
The first explicit guidance to report child sex abuse only came about in September 2015, following a report from The New York Times, which interviewed former soldiers. They stated they were told to ignore child sex abuse, despite hearing the screams of boys being sexually abused by high-level Afghan officials on U.S. military installations.
Ten members of Congress are cosponsoring a bill to bar the US from financially supporting human rights abuses of Palestinian children by the “Israeli” military.
The Promoting Human Rights by Ending Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, introduced on Tuesday, is the first ever bill to prioritize the human rights of Palestinian children as a condition for US support, according to campaigners.
The bill requires the Secretary of State to annually certify that no US funds allocated to the “Israeli” entity will have been used to “support military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”
The legislation would block funds used by the entity to inflict “torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment,” “physical violence, including restraint in stress positions,” “hooding, sensory deprivation, death threats or other forms of psychological abuse.”
It would also target solitary confinement, administrative detention, denial of access to parents or lawyers during interrogations and “confessions obtained by force or coercion.”
It add that while “children under the age of 12 cannot be persecuted in ‘Israeli’ military courts,” the “Israeli” military has in the past detained children under that age for interrogations lasting hours. The sponsors rely on information from Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, as well as on the State Department’s annual human rights report.
They note that the State Department’s 2016 report mentioned “a significant increase in detentions of minors” and accused the “Israeli” authorities of having Palestinian minors sign confessions written in Hebrew, which most of them could not read.
The bill sends a clear message to “Israeli” officials “that widespread ill-treatment of Palestinian child detainees must end and is a direct challenge to the systemic impunity enjoyed by ‘Israeli’ forces” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Parker told The Electronic Intifada.
The legislation was proposed by Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat from Minnesota, who in 2015 wrote a letter asking the previous secretary of state, John Kerry, to take action on the detention of Palestinian minors.
“‘Israel’s’ military detention of Palestinian children is an indefensible abuse of human rights. I hope this letter results in State Department pressure on the Government of ‘Israel’ to end this systemic abuse immediately,” McCollum wrote.
A number of members of Congress who signed that letter in 2015 have now joined as co-sponsors to McCollum’s legislation. They include House Democrats Earl Blumenauer (Oregon), Peter DeFazio (Oregon), Danny Davis (Illinois), John Conyers (Michigan) and Raul Grijalva (Arizona).
The fact that the legislation drew support from 10 Democrats overall, before being formally introduced in the House, is seen as a sign of success for pro-Palestinian activists in the United States, even if the legislation does not pass in the end.
In a hospital room in Yemen, well-wishers sing songs and play the guitar for five-year-old Buthaina. She smiles and tears begin to drop from her eyes. She then picks up her crayons and draws a sketch of her family.
Buthaina Muhammad Mansour al-Raimi is the sole survivor in her immediate family after an airstrike destroyed an apartment building in Yemen’s capital on August 25, according to Yemen’s human rights ministry and information ministry. The group also says the attack killed 16 people, including Buthaina’s parents and five siblings.
Buthaina, now in the care of her aunt and uncle, her new guardians, doesn’t know that yet. None of her relatives or doctors have told her.Dramatic photographs published after the strike showed Buthaina being pulled from the rubble, her eyes sealed shut by bruises.
Shortly after, local media tried to interview her while she was on her hospital bed. Buthaina tried to force one of her eyes open to see who was speaking to her.
Little did Buthaina know that the tiny gesture would turn into a symbol of Yemen’s plight.
The photograph capturing the moment prompted a powerful social-media campaign, highlighting the country’s humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of tweets showed pictures of people mimicking Buthaina’s gesture around multiple hashtags.
A fractured skull
At her hospital room this week, Buthaina is surrounded by relatives and well-wishers. The walls are decorated with children’s drawings and balloons cover the ground.
Doctors say Buthaina has a fractured skull and many bruises to her body. Her uncle says they don’t know when she will be discharged from the hospital.
The young girl’s cousins try to entertain her with dolls. Buthaina, her rumpled curly hair tied in a ponytail, sits at the center of the gathering.
“She lost her entire family. It’s been 10 days since they died and she still asks her uncle when her parents will visit her,” Yasser al-Ghori, head of the emergency department of the hospital treating Buthaina, told CNN.
“I can never replace Buthaina’s father but she is my daughter now and will be forever. We hope our loss will lead to the end of the nearly three-year war that devastated Yemen and killed thousands of innocent children,” Ali al-Raimi, Buthaina’s uncle and guardian, told CNN.
Since March 2015, the UN Human Rights Office has documented some 13,829 civilian casualties, including more than 5,000 people killed.
Late at night, Buthaina wakes up screaming and crying, said her aunt Samah al-Raimi, who has been sleeping next to her. The woman added that she has trouble knowing whether the source of Buthaina’s anguish is physical pains or bad dreams about the deadly night.
“Buthaina is a priority to me and I give her double personal time, compared to my daughter Sumayya. That is still not enough because the tragedy she went through cannot be forgotten, not now, not forever,” Samah al-Raimi told CNN.
The ongoing Saudi-led military campaign against Yemen has prompted a string of humanitarian crises. According to UNICEF, a child dies every 10 minutes in the war-torn country from preventable causes like diarrhea, breathing infections and malnutrition.
UNICEF has also dubbed Yemen home to “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis,” as well as the world’s biggest cholera outbreak, with over 600,000 cases of suspected cholera recorded by the World Health Organization in just four months.
‘Technical mistake’
But the bombings are also taking a horrific toll. During the same week of the airstrike that killed Buthaina’s family, the United Nations estimates that 58 civilians were killed in airstrikes, including 42 in bombings by the Saudi-led coalition. That death toll is higher than in the entire month of July, which saw 57 civilian deaths.
Saudi Arabia has acknowledged the deadly airstrike and said it resulted from a “technical mistake,” according to a statement from the state-run Saudi Press Agency on August 25.
The attack flattened two buildings in Sanaa’s southern district of Faj Attan, amid escalating violence in the war-torn country.
A Saudi-led coalition spokesman expressed “deep sorrow for this unintentional accident and for the collateral damage among civilians.”
Buthaina’s supporters in Yemen say they hope that the girl’s pain will open the eyes of the rest of the world to a war that has gone unnoticed by far too many for far too long.
CNN’s Sarah El Sirgany contributed to this report.
After two and a half years of war, little is functioning in Yemen.
Repeated bombings crippled bridges, hospitals and factories. Many doctors and civil servants have gone unpaid for more than a year. Malnutrition and poor sanitation have made the Middle Eastern country vulnerable to diseases that most of the world has confined to the history books.
In just three months, cholera has killed nearly 2,000 people and infected more than a half million, one of the world’s largest outbreaks in the past 50 years.
“It’s a slow death,” said Yakoub al-Jayefi, a Yemeni soldier who has not collected a salary in eight months, and whose 6-year-old daughter, Shaima, was being treated for malnutrition at a clinic in the Yemeni capital, Sana.
Since the family’s savings ran out, they had lived mostly off milk and yogurt from neighbors. But that was not enough to keep his daughter healthy, and her skin went pale as she grew thin.
Like more than half of Yemenis, the family did not have immediate access to a working medical center, so Mr. Jayefi borrowed money from friends and relatives to take his daughter to the capital.
“We’re just waiting for doom or for a breakthrough from heaven,” he said.
How did a country in a region with such great wealth fall so far and so fast into crisis?
A Collapsed State
Many coalition airstrikes have killed and wounded civilians, including strikes on Wednesday around the capital. The bombings have also heavily damaged Yemen’s infrastructure, including a crucial seaport and important bridges as well as hospitals, sewage facilities and civilian factories.
Services that Yemenis have depended on are gone, and the destruction has undermined the country’s already weak economy. It has also made it harder for humanitarian organizations to bring in and distribute aid.
The Saudi-led coalition has also kept Sana’s international airport closed to civilian air traffic for more than a year, meaning that merchants cannot fly goods in, and sick and wounded Yemenis cannot fly abroad for treatment. Many of them have died.
Neither of Yemen’s two competing administrations has paid regular salaries to many civil servants in over a year, impoverishing their families as there is little other work to be found. Among those affected are professionals whose work is essential to dealing with the crisis, like doctors, nurses and sewage system technicians, leading to the near collapse of their sectors.
The Devastation of Cholera
Damage from the war has turned Yemen into a fertile environment for cholera, a bacterial infection spread by water contaminated with feces. As garbage has piled up and sewage systems have failed, more Yemenis are relying on easily polluted wells for drinking water. Heavy rains since April accelerated the wells’ contamination.
In developed countries, cholera is not life-threatening and can be easily treated, with antibiotics if severe. But in Yemen, rampant malnutrition has made many people, particularly children, especially vulnerable to the disease.
“With the malnutrition we have among children, if they get diarrhea, they are not going to get better,” said Meritxell Relano, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Yemen.
Outside a cholera clinic in Sana, Muhammad Nasir was waiting for news about his 6-month-old son, Waleed, who had the disease. A poor agricultural laborer, Mr. Nasir had borrowed money to take his son to the hospital but did not have enough to return home even if the baby recovered. “My situation is bad,” he said.
Five tents had been erected in the backyard of the cholera ward to cope with the sudden increase in patients. All day, families brought sick relatives. Most were elderly, or children carried on their parents’ backs.
If infection numbers continue to rise, researchers fear that the cases could ultimately rival the largest outbreak, in Haiti, which infected at least 750,000 people after a devastating earthquake in 2010.
Aid organizations say they cannot replace the services that the government is supposed to provide. That means there is little chance for significant improvements unless the war ends.
“We are almost in the third year of the war and nothing is getting better,” said Ms. Relano of UNICEF. “There are limits to what we can do in such a collapsed state.”
The United Nations has called the situation the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with more than 10 million people who require immediate assistance. And the situation could become even worse.
Peter Salama, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, warned that as the state fails, “the manifestation of that now is cholera, but there could be in the future other epidemics that Yemen could be at the center of.”
Source: The New York Times, Edited by website team
Still image from a video being filmed in Egypt, purporting to be in Aleppo, Syria.
In December 2016, filmmakers in Egypt were arrested in the process of staging an Aleppo video with two children: the girl was meant to look injured, and the boy was to vilify both Russia and Syria.
Even the corporate media reported on it, including: “The girl’s dress, covered in red paint, was what caught the attention of a police officer driving by, the ministry said.”
The incidences of fakery and hoaxes, however, does not end there.
Also in December, the scene of a ‘Girl running to survive after her family had been killed’ was said to be in Aleppo. In reality, it was a scene from a Lebanese music video, which someone at some point clearly chose to depict as in Aleppo, for the same anti-Russian, anti-Assad vilification purposes.
In November 2014, a clip dubbed ‘Syrian hero boy’ went viral, viewed over 5 million times already by mid-November. The clip showed what appeared to be a little boy saving his sister from sniper gunfire, and was assumed to have been in Syria.
The Telegraph’s Josie Ensor didn’t wait for any sort of verification of the video which she cited as having been uploaded on November 10, the next day writing: “…it is thought the incident took place in Yabroud – a town near the Lebanese border which was the last stronghold of the moderate Free Syrian Army. Experts tell the paper they have no reason to doubt its authenticity. The UN has previously accused the Syrian regime of ‘crimes against humanity’ – including the use of snipers against small children.”
On November 14, the BBC brought on ‘Middle East specialist’ Amira Galal to give her expert opinion on the clip. She asserted: “We can definitely say that it is Syria, and we can definitely say that it’s probably on the regime frontlines. We see in the footage that there is a barrel, it’s painted on it the Syrian army flag.”
Still from the “Hero boy” video.
Photo I took on Castello road, Aleppo, Nov 2016.
Once again, the so-called ‘experts’ got it wrong. The barrel which Galal referred to had a poor imitation of the flag of Syria painted on it, the flag’s color sequence out of order. The clip she was so certain had been filmed in government areas of Syria was actually produced in Malta by Norwegian filmmakers.
From Video to Twitter Hoaxes
In the propaganda war on Syria, there are convincing lies, and then there are the blindingly clear hoaxes. In the latter realm, the Bana al-Abed Twitter persona takes first prize. The child is being abused by her own family who have seemingly forced her to pretend she can speak English (she cannot).
We were meant to believe that sophisticated and nuanced tweets, often calling for Western intervention, are coming from an English-illiterate seven-year-old girl or her mother — whose husband was a militant in Aleppo.
In a detailed article, Barbara McKenzie looks at the campaign which uses the brand Bana for war propaganda. An excerpt includes:
“Bana, the little girl supposedly tweeting from Aleppo, but actually the front for an account run from London, was selected to be the empathetic face of the campaign for a no-fly zone in Syria. Her account was tailored to create the impression of perpetual bombing, perpetual war crimes, on the part of Russia and the Syrian government.”
Bana not only tweeted with impossible frequency from eastern Aleppo, defying any internet lapses those of us who have gone to Aleppo have experienced. Whatever the actual explanation for her alleged preciousness and high-tech abilities, the child was clearly exploited, and continues to be.
Her twitter account continues its advocacy for Western intervention in Syria. Not at all suspicious.
Real Poster Children Brutally Beheaded, Sniped, Starved, Maimed
Effective war propaganda tugs at the heart strings, using many tactics, including adorable children in threatening situations, or dead, and comes hand in hand with condemnations for crimes committed, allegedly, by the villain(s) being caricatured. In the following instances, children being injured or murdered did occur, but the condemnations were muted or not at all.
A few weeks prior to the photo of Omran Daqneesh going viral as the poster child for suffering in Syria, terrorists of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki faction beheaded a boy said to be around 12 years old.
Although the decapitators filmed the entire savage act, posing for gleeful selfies as they tortured the boy prior to murdering him, leaders and media in the US took little notice of the horrific slaughter. Ten days after the questionable events which led to the light injury of Omran, two young boys in the Idlib villages of Foua and Kafraya were shot in their head and neck respectively by a sniper from Jaysh al-Fateh terrorists in the village of Binnish close by. The injuries were serious. They were rendered even more serious given that the villages had been completely surrounded and fully under siege by terrorists since March 2015.
In April 2017, a convoy of children, women, elderly and ill being evacuated from Foua were attacked by a terrorist explosion, with reports over 200 murdered, including 116 children. The attack included luring with potato chips and filming children in the convoy before later blowing them up and claiming to be rescuing them. Not only did these terrorists murder civilians and children, but they staged the scene to then look like heroes.
Indeed, in the West this massacre was called a “hiccup” and little denunciation was made about the vast numbers of dead, let alone the injured.
In October, 2016, Press TV was one of the few outlets to report on another adorable Aleppo boy, Mahmoud, “a six-year-old Syrian boy who was born without arms, and recently lost both of his legs after stepping on a mine planted by militants in Syria’s Aleppo.” The report includes scenes of Mahmoud showing his resilience, adjusting to life without any limbs. But for corporate media, Mahmoud’s were the wrong villains.
Terrorist bombings and snipings have killed children in schools and homes throughout Syria over the years, including the October 2014 terrorist car and suicide bombing of the Akrama Al-Makhzoumi School in Homs, killing at least 41 children by conservative estimates, or up to 48 children by other reports, along with women and other civilians, as well as attacks on Aleppo schools, as I detailed earlier.
In Aleppo and in Damascus, I have visited numerous hospitals and seen endless poster children of suffering in Syria. The differences between these children and those which Western and Gulf media present us, is that these children were murdered, rendered critically-injured, or maimed by the bombs, mortars and snipings of terrorists which the West presents as “moderate rebels”, so their stories will never be front page, much less heard.
The Bitter Truth
The Western and Gulf media work in lockstep with the narratives emanating from Washington on Syria. It is not coincidental that certain photos and stories of Syrian children go viral, while other more damning photos and sordid realities get no notice period.
Regarding the Omran case, we now know that he was not gravely hurt as media tried to imply, that his family have gone back to their lives in Aleppo, and the exploitation and lies around Omran cannot continue.
When I met them on June 6th, they showed no signs of the duress which terrorists and their backers—which include Western corporate media—claim. Instead, some neighbors were over, discussing media fabrications around Omran.
However, the children who are believed to have been exploited and used in the 2013 Ghouta chemical weapons fabrications remain missing and have not gone back to their lives, nor have their families in the Latakia countryside.
In March 2017, physicians with Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, after examining a White Helmet’s video, wrote:
“…Swedish medical doctors, specialists in various fields, including pediatrics, have revealed that the life-saving procedures seen in the film are incorrect – in fact life-threatening – or seemingly fake, including simulated resuscitation techniques being used on already lifeless children.”
The article noted that Dr Lena Oske, a Swedish medical doctor and general practitioner, said of an adrenaline injection shown in the video, “If not already dead, this injection would have killed the child!”
While in al-Waer, Homs, on June 9, 2017, speaking with a woman who had returned not long after the last terrorist had been bused out in the government’s reconciliation agreement, she told me a story of her friend from the area. Bearing in mind that this is second hand information (and that I didn’t have time to stay another day to meet the friend in question), I’ll leave her words and this 2012 link as food for thought regarding the use of children, alive or day, for war propaganda against Syria:
“In 2014, my friend’s son, Louay was leaving his school. A mortar fell on the street nearby and he was hit with shrapnel. The Red Crescent took him in an ambulance to al-Bour, a nearby aid association, which couldn’t treat him, so he was taken to a government hospital in al-Zahra’a. They tried to save him, but he died.
They took him back to al-Bour where they cleaned him for burial. While my friend was waiting, people from al-Bour carried him onto the street yelling the regime killed him, look what the regime does to children.’”
Later, she saw on both al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya footage of her son, with men blaming the “regime” for killing children in Syria.
But she didn’t agree. The government helped her son and tried to save his life. He was 7 years old.
RELATED:
Meet Aylan & Omran: Child victims used for Syrian war propaganda, Jun 12, 2017, RT Op-Edge
MintPress Meets The Father Of Iconic Aleppo Boy, Who Says Media Lied About His Son, Jun 9, 2017, MintPress News
CNN #FakeNews Amanpour Challenged to Interview Aleppo Boy’s Father – #NewWorldNextWeek, Jun 15, 2017, The Corbett Report
Batool Ali is six years old, though you would never guess that from her huge, haunted eyes and emaciated frame. Ribs jutting out over her distended belly, Batool weighs less than 16 kilograms (35 pounds). She is one of nearly half a million children in Yemen suffering from severe malnutrition.
Posted June 24, 2017
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
A display of Israeli-style community policing before an audience of hundreds of young schoolchildren was captured on video last week. Were the 10-year-olds offered road safety tips, advice on what to do if they got lost, or how to report someone suspicion hanging around the school?
No. In Israel, they do things differently. The video shows four officers staging a mock anti-terror operation in a park close to Tel Aviv. The team roar in on motorbikes, firing their rifles at the “terrorist”.
As he lies badly wounded, the officers empty their magazines into him from close range. In Israel it is known as “confirming the kill”. Everywhere else it is called an extrajudicial execution or murder. The children can be heard clapping.
It was an uncomfortable reminder of a near-identical execution captured on film last year. A young army medic, Elor Azaria, is seen shooting a bullet into the head of an incapacitated Palestinian in Hebron. A military court sentenced him to 18 months for manslaughter in February.
There has been little sign of soul-searching since. Most Israelis, including government officials, call Azaria a hero. In the recent religious festival of Purim, dressing up as Azaria was a favourite among children.
There is plenty of evidence that Israel’s security services are still regularly executing real Palestinians.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem denounced the killing last week of a 16-year-old Jerusalem schoolgirl, Fatima Hjeiji, in a hail of bullets. She had frozen to the spot after pulling out a knife some distance from a police checkpoint. She posed no threat, concluded B’Tselem, and did not need to be killed.
The police were unrepentant about their staged execution, calling it “a positive, empowering” demonstration for the youngsters. The event was hardly exceptional.
In communities across Israel this month, the army celebrated Israel’s Independence Day by bringing along its usual “attractions” – tanks, guns and grenades – for children to play with, while families watched army dogs sicking yet more “terrorists”.
In a West Bank settlement, meanwhile, the army painted youngsters’ arms and legs with shrapnel wounds. Blood-like liquid dripped convincingly from dummies with amputated limbs. The army said the event was a standard one that “many families enjoyed”.
The purpose of exposing children at an impressionable age to so much gore and killing is not hard to divine. It creates traumatised children, distrustful and fearful of anyone outside their tribe. That way they become more pliant soldiers, trigger-happy as they rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories.
A few educators have started to sense they are complicit in this emotional and mental abuse.
Holocaust Memorial Day, marked in Israeli schools last month, largely avoids universal messages, such as that we must recognise the humanity of others and stand up for the oppressed. Instead, pupils as young as three are told the Holocaust serves as a warning to be eternally vigilant – that Israel and its strong army are the only things preventing another genocide by non-Jews.
Last year Zeev Degani, principal of one Israel’s most prestigious schools, caused a furore when he announced his school would no longer send pupils on annual trips to Auschwitz. This is a rite of passage for Israeli pupils. He called the misuse of the Holocaust “pathological” and intended to “generate fear and hatred” to inculcate extreme nationalism.
It is not by accident that these trips – imparting the message that a strong army is vital to Israel’s survival – take place just before teenagers begin a three-year military draft.
Increasingly, they receive no alternative messages in school. Degani was among the few principals who had been inviting Breaking the Silence, a group of whistle-blowing soldiers, to discuss their part in committing war crimes.
In response, the education minister, Naftali Bennett, leader of the settlers’ party, has barred dissident groups like Breaking the Silence. He has also banned books and theatre trips that might encourage greater empathy with those outside the tribe.
Polls show this is paying off. Schoolchildren are even more ultra-nationalist than their parents. More than four-fifths think there is no hope of peace with the Palestinians.
But these cultivated attitudes don’t just sabotage peacemaking. They also damage any chance of Israeli Jews living peacefully with the large minority of Palestinian citizens in their midst.
Half of Jewish schoolchildren believe these Palestinians, one in five of the population, should not be allowed to vote in elections. This month the defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called the minority’s representatives in parliament “Nazis” and suggested they should share a similar fate.
This extreme chauvinism was translated last week into legislation that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people around the world, not its citizens. The Palestinian minority are effectively turned into little more than resident aliens in their own homeland.
Degani and others are losing the battle to educate for peace and reconciliation. If a society’s future lies with its children, the outlook for Israelis and Palestinians is bleak indeed.
21st Century Wire’s Vanessa Beeley speaks to Mike Robinson about the recent murder of children enticed off a bus with the promise of food. This was the most obscene war crime and brings the conflict in Syria to a new low.
At the centre of it all are Boris Johnson sponsored White Helmets. Please share this video, and with a general election in the UK, ask some hard questions of all prospective MPs.
On April 15th 2017, the people of Kafarya and Foua were attacked, their children mown down deliberately, by a suicide bomb or expolosive detonation, that targeted these innocent children who had been lured to their deaths by NATO and Gulf state terrorists, including Ahrar al Sham and Nusra Front (Al Qaeda). Mothers had to watch from behind the windows of the buses they had been imprisoned in for 48 hours, while strangers, terrorists, picked up their children, their wounded, bleeding, mutilated children, and piled them up in the backs of trucks and Turkish ambulances before driving them away from the horrific scene and stealing them from their distraught, powerless mothers.
“This is Zeinab, she was forced to watch the massacre of 116 children through the windows of a bus while the NATO and Gulf state terrorists, collected the dead, dying and mutilated bodies of her community’s children and flung them in the back of trucks and Turkish ambulances, before driving them to Turkey. She has 10 members of her family still missing. She has no idea where they are.
She gave her courageous and emotional testimony to us in Jebrin registration centre, where the survivors of the 15th April, suicide bomb attack, were taken for shelter after this horrific event, described by CNN as a “hiccup”.
I speak about part of her testimony with RT yesterday who also used my interviews in their news feed. Unlike corporate media, RT investigate these atrocities and honour the voices of the Syrian people.
The Telegraph edited out this appalling and callous phrasing immediately after the RT interview.
The Telegraphdescribed the dead Syrian babies as “Syrian Government supporters” in an attempt to whitewash the UK Regime terrorist crimes by proxy and to erase the existence of these innocent children from our consciousness..by the familiar dehumanization process that we have witnessed every time the various NATO and Gulf state extremist carry out mass murder of Syrian civilians.” ~ Vanessa Beeley
Bombed out remains of one of the buses that had been carrying evacuated civilians from Kafarya and Foua to Rashideen holding centre. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Vanessa Beeley, associate editor at 21st Century Wire, was present at the scene and provided video footage of the witness and survivor testimony to RT for use in the news section. She also spoke to RT about the heartbreaking accounts given to her by Zeinab, a mother, from these besieged Idlib villages of Kafarya and Foua, who had seen the carnage and who still has 10 missing relatives, who were taken to Turkey by the waiting ambulances. A full report, and subtitled video will follow shortly, when internet and time allows, but for now, here is the report from RT and the interview at the end of the report.
Eyewitnesses to the bomb attack on a refugee convoy near Aleppo that killed dozens of children said the militants lured people out of the vehicles with snacks before the explosion, and also stopped them from escaping the blast site.
A powerful explosion hit several buses full of people leaving militant-held towns and villages outside Aleppo last Saturday, killing over 100 people, including dozens of children, and injuring scores more.
Following the attack, Vanessa Beeley of the 21st Century Wire website gathered first-hand accounts from those who survived the assault. People told her that the militants did their utmost to increase the death toll. The exclusive videos she provided to RT shed more light on the incident.
“Just before the explosion, a strange car got from the militants’ checkpoint. They said they were bringing snacks for children,” the bus driver who was in the convoy said.
“Then they got out of the car and started shouting, ‘Who has children? Who has children?’”
The driver said the militants knew for sure that the children “haven’t seen biscuits and crisps for so long” as they were under siege. “People have been stuck in buses for 48 hours as the rebels didn’t let us out,” he noted. A woman said that she and other evacuees were held in the buses “like prisoners,” adding that they were only allowed to get out and stretch 10 minutes before the explosion.
Many people, including children, left the buses and approached the car when the blast hit the convoy.
One of evacuees said that the militants “were throwing potato chips on the site of the future blast. One of the terrorists said that it was food for the infidels.”
The driver recalled that “there were Ahrar ash-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra [Al-Nusra Front], and some factions of the Free Syrian Army [FSA]…”
According to another witness, “the Ahrar ash-Sham fighters didn’t hide their faces, while Jabhat al-Nusra were always wearing masks. One could only see their eyes,” one of the eyewitnesses said.
WARNING:Graphic and distressing footage from the attack ~
There were many foreigners among the terrorists – “Uzbeks, Turks, people from Chechnya, Saudis and Qataris. One could judge on their appearance; their language,” another evacuee added.
“When the blast rocked the area, people rushed into the woods but militants surrounded them and forced back to the buses,” the bus driver said.
A female evacuee recalled that “the militants told us that terrorists from another group were shelling our buses and that we must flee towards the bushes… but then they said that the bushes were mined and found ourselves trapped.”
Another woman also told Beeley that even before the explosion, four yellow Turkish ambulances were present at the scene for some reason. After the blast, the ambulances started picking up the dead and injured, only to take them to an unknown location.
“We don’t know where they [the children] are. They’re gone. There are no bodies. We’ve searched for them, but with no result,” one of the witnesses said.
Many relatives of those missing still know nothing of their whereabouts, other witnesses said. Some people told Beeley that the controversial White Helmets were also seen at the blast site, retrieving bodies of Al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham militants, but apparently leaving injured civilians.
Beeley, who has consistently covered the Syrian war, also filmed people’s testimonies about their escape from the rebel-held areas. The evacuees boarded the buses on Friday in the Rashideen neighborhood of Aleppo, but were not allowed out of the vehicles for nearly three days.
Many of them, however, were happy to leave as “this place turned into a terrorists’ hotbed,” one woman said.
[Some] international organizations have already condemned the attack on the humanitarian convoy in the strongest terms.
“We must draw from this not only anger, but renewed determination to reach all the innocent children throughout Syria with help and comfort,” said UNICEF’s executive director, Anthony Lake.
“And draw from it also the hope that all those with the heart and the power to end this war will do so.”
However, Beeley told RT that not many in the West followed the UN’s example in decrying the attack.
“We’ve just witnessed one of the most heinous crimes of our lifetime, and yet corporate… there’s no international condemnation from governments, from NGOs, from the media,” she said.
On the contrary, the media is making an attempt to “whitewash this utterly abhorrent” incident, in which, according to Beeley’s information, 116 children lost their lives.
Damascus: In the cancer ward at Damascus Children’s Hospital, doctors are struggling with a critical shortage of specialist drugs to treat their young patients — and it’s not just due to the general chaos of the Syrian civil war.
Local and World Health Organisation (WHO) officials also blame Western sanctions for severely restricting pharmaceutical imports, even though medical supplies are largely exempt from measures imposed by the United States and European Union.
Six years of conflict have brought the Syrian health service, once one of the best in the Middle East, close to collapse. Fewer than half of the country’s hospitals are fully functioning and numbers of doctors have dived.
The result is tumbling life expectancy — even after accounting for the hundreds of thousands directly killed in the fighting — and soaring deaths in pregnancy and childbirth.
On top of this, cuts in health spending by the government that is fighting a hugely expensive war, a drastic fall in the Syrian currency and indirect effects of the sanctions are all deepening the misery of patients who need foreign-made drugs.
Children suffering from cancer at Damascus Children’s Hospital. Image credit: Reuters
For families with sick children, the situation is dire.
At the children’s hospital in government-held Damascus, the waiting room outside the cancer ward was crowded with relatives, many of whom had brought clothes, mattresses and blankets in case they had to spend long periods far from their homes outside the city.
One of them was Naim Der Moussa, 55, who has been living in Damascus for a year to secure regular treatment for his 10-year-old daughter Wa’ad. They left his wife and six other children behind in the eastern city of Deir Al Zor, where government forces are besieged by Daesh.
“My daughter was first diagnosed with kidney cancer and treated,” he said. “Now cancer has been found also in her lungs.”
Before the conflict, Syria produced 90 per cent of the medicines it needed but anti-cancer drugs were among those where it traditionally relied on imports.
Elizabeth Hoff, the WHO representative in Syria, said medicine imports have been hit by significant cuts in the government’s health budget since the war began in 2011 plus a 90 per cent drop in the value of the Syrian pound, which has made some pharmaceuticals prohibitively expensive.
However, a lack of cash is not the only reason why supplies of cancer drugs are falling far short of increasing demand.
“The impact of economic sanctions imposed on Syria heavily affected the procurement of some specific medicine including anti-cancer medicines,” said Hoff. The sanctions were preventing many international pharmaceutical companies from dealing with the Syrian authorities as well as hindering foreign banks in handling payments for imported drugs, she added.
The United States and EU have imposed a range of measures targeted both at the government and some of the many armed groups operating in the country.
Washington has banned the export or sale of goods and services to Syria from the United States or by US citizens.
The EU has imposed travel bans, asset freezes and an arms embargo, with sanctions also targeting financial ties with Syrian institutions, buying oil and gas from the country or investing in its energy industry.
President Bashar Al Assad has partly blamed the sanctions for turning many Syrians into refugees, often heading to Europe.
Both the US and EU regimes include exemptions for medicines and other humanitarian supplies. However, by clamping down on financial transactions and barring much business with the Syrian government, the sanctions are indirectly affecting trade in pharmaceuticals.
Many drugs companies have erred on the side of caution, avoiding any business with Syria for fear of inadvertently falling foul of the sanctions.
The US State Department said the Treasury had authorised services in support of humanitarian activities in Syria, adding that there were legal ways to bring medicine into the country.
The EU also rejected criticism of its sanctions.
“Such measures are not aimed at the civilian population,” an EU spokeswoman said. “EU sanctions do not apply to key sectors of the Syrian economy such as food and medicine.”
She acknowledged firms had increasingly pulled out of business with Syria but said this was also due to other reasons, including “security, reputation, commercial motivation, anti-money laundering measures” and the presence of militant groups.
The WHO brings essential medicines and medical supplies into Syria, procuring generic drugs from approved sources in Europe, North Africa and Asia. Branded US products cannot be imported due to the sanctions situation, Hoff said.
With funds from Kuwait, the WHO has delivered life-saving medicine to more than 16,000 cancer patients, of whom thousands are children with leukaemia.
Syrian girl Rahma sits on a bed as she receives treatment for cancer at Damascus Children’s Hospital. Image Credit:Reuters
But this does not meet demand. Besides cancer medication, there are critical shortages of insulin, anaesthetics, specific antibiotics needed for intensive care, serums, intravenous fluids and other blood products and vaccines, Hoff said.
The overall collapse in Syrian health care has contributed to a drop in life expectancy to 60 years for men and 70 for women in 2014, from 72 and 75 respectively in 2009. Only 44 per cent of hospitals are now fully functioning and more than a quarter aren’t working at all, the WHO said.
By 2014, the number of doctors in Syria had dropped to 1.3 per 1,000 people, less than half the level in neighbouring Jordan and Lebanon.
Against this deterioration, Damascus Children’s Hospital has also come under increasing pressure. Cancer units in the provincial cities of Aleppo and Latakia were both put out of service in fighting earlier in the war.
Now about 200 children visit the Damascus hospital every week, with more than 70 per cent from outside the capital, according to its head, Maher Haddad.
The weight of demand has delayed treatment for dozens of sick children by 15-20 days, affecting their prospects, overall health and response to medication, he added.
Haddad also singled out the sanctions. Pharmex, the state-owned company that buys drugs for government-funded hospitals across Syria, was able to provide only 5-10 per cent of the cancer medication that is required, he told Reuters.
“Most of the cancer medicines are imported. Pharmex used to import the stock of medicines that public hospitals need. But it has not been able to do so largely because of the economic sanctions, I believe,” he said.
His hospital has only 36 free beds, with 17 of those allocated to children with cancer.
In the waiting room, a woman who identified herself only by her first name Nawal, said she travels from the Qalamoun area north of Damascus every fortnight with her 14-year-old daughter who requires chemotherapy treatment for leukaemia.
“We don’t have hospitals or charities in Qalamoun. Free treatment is offered only at the Children’s Hospital in Damascus,” Nawal said.
One private charity, Basma, is trying to help out by funding cancer drugs for poor families. The proportion of patients who need assistance has risen from about 30 per cent to nearly 80 per cent since the war began, executive manager Rima Salem said.
Salem finds the delays in treatment worrying.
“A child with cancer might die waiting for his turn to get treatment,” she said.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 