Saudi Arabia Brutality and Trump's Love of Autocrats

Last week I wrote about the latest Saudi Arabia brutality and that autocratic theocracy's latest spat with Canada because of Canadian condemnation of Saudi human rights abuses.  In his weekly column, Andrew Sullivan expands on coverage and notes distressingly how Saudi brutality and human rights abuses has not disturbed the Trump/Pence regime and Trump has remained silent on Saudi misdeeds.  Indeed, Sullivan suggests - correctly in my view - that Trump admires autocratic regimes and, in my view, longs to rule America in a similar manner.  Frighteningly, I suspect such brutal authoritarian rule would be applauded by much of Trump's base so long as the brutality was targeted at blacks, Hispanics, gays and non-right wing Christians. Despite its ugly history - genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, etc. - America had achieved moral authority in the world.  Now, that moral authority has been thrown away by Trump/Pence and that regime's evangelical Christian and white supremacist base.  Here are column highlights:

It wasn’t so long ago that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman o[“MBS”] of Saudi Arabia was doing the rounds of various American muckety-mucks in business, politics, and pop culture. On his world tour, the fawning was extraordinary. He met Oprah and the Rock, Bloomberg and the Clintons, Bush after Bush, Gates and Bezos, Hollywood moguls and Wall Street machers, as well as his plutocratic wing man, Jared Kushner. . . . . the general tenor of the public-relations campaign was that of a Saudi spring, especially for women, and a thawing of some of the most repressive theocratic tendencies of the regime.

So it must come as a surprise to all of MBS’s friends in the American elite that this youthful reformer returned from his Western tour and soon launched a new campaign against the very women who had most fervently resisted the theocracy’s misogyny. On May 19, “the Saudi Arabian authorities and government-aligned media launched a public smear campaign to try to discredit six prominent detained women’s rights defenders as ‘traitors’ following their arrest. 

This campaign was completed last week with the detention of the last two prominent women’s rights activists, Nassima al-Sada and Samar Badawi. Badawi is the sister of a Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who set up an open forum website and was therefore lashed a thousand times in public and is currently serving a prison term of ten years. Both women have been persecuted for years.  In response to the latest crackdown, the Canadian government tweeted its concern: “Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights advocates in #SaudiArabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful human rights activists.” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, spoke out in part because Raif Badawi’s wife and three kids now live in Canada, and have been citizens since July.

In response, MBS has thrown a hissy fit of Trumpian proportions. The Canadian ambassador was given 24 hours to leave; 15,000 Saudi students in Canada were recalled home; trade with Canada was suspended; an order to sell all Saudi central bank and state pension fund shares in Canadian interests was proclaimed, according to the Financial Times. Saudi subjects receiving medical treatment in Canada are being transferred out of care, and about 800 Saudi medical residents and fellows in Canada have been ordered home.

As a kind of coda to the entire affair, the Saudis decided to, yes, crucify a criminal this week, a rare but gruesome spectacle, in which someone’s executed corpse is hung out in the open as a warning to others. You may remember such scenes from Game of Thrones. But this kind of barbarism still exists — and the regime that behaves this way has [Trump's] our president’s full support, and billions in arms sales.

Then, of course, there is the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The crown prince has been waging a brutal war on the Shi’a of Yemen, the Houthis, in coalition with the U.S. and the U.K. The relentless bombing campaigns — including indiscriminate attacks on civilians — have killed thousands, uprooted more, and generated famine and disease. This week in the horror show saw the Saudi coalition forces bomb a bus of schoolkids, many under the age of 10. A little under 30 children were killed, . . . And this record of regional mayhem doesn’t even count the time when MBS decided it would be a great idea to invade Qatar, another U.S. ally.

It’s at this point that you begin to absorb quite how indifferent the Trump administration is to any concept of human rights. Trump’s initial response to the Saudi attacks on Qatar was to endorse them enthusiastically (even as what was left of the State Department tried to keep the peace). And his administration’s response to the Saudi assault on Canada is to take no side in the dispute. Between a barbaric absolute monarchy that jails and tortures dissidents, obliterates women’s opportunity, and crucifies criminals in the streets … and Canada, for Pete’s sake, Trump cannot pick a side. 

Despite no official relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, MBS and Netanyahu are now joined at the hip with Trump because they all want a war against Iran (and are having considerable success laying the groundwork). The Saudis are also useful to the Israelis as a way to delegitimize any genuine form of Palestinian self-determination — because the Saudis have been prepared to throw their Arab neighbors under the bus in order to fight a regime in Tehran that MBS has said “makes Hitler look good.” Trump’s hatred of Iran and Kushner’s hopes for Israel’s expansion keep this unholy trinity together. The idea that either Trump or his mute dauphin give a hoot about human rights is preposterous. The more brutal a regime’s human rights abuses are, the more likely it is that Trump admires it.

Canada will survive, of course, despite the intense international bullying from the Saudis, and America’s and Britain’s abandonment of their ally. Canada will even survive Trump (though whether America does is another matter). But to watch the West disintegrate as a moral force, even on a purely rhetorical level, is beyond depressing. And yet it appears to be our future. It’s also a much darker one for every dissident in every political prison across the planet.

Be very afraid.

400 Children from Catholic Orphanage Believed Buried in Mass Grave

The every exploding sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church continues around the world, especially in Australia and now Guam (India is also seeing more exposes of abuse).  It seems that literally, wherever the Church went and proselytized, sexual abuse by clergy followed.  Now reports out of Scotland - once a Catholic bastion - are rivaling some of the most horrific stories out of Ireland where Catholic religious orders that were supposed to care for children inflicted untold suffering. Like many of the nuns from my childhood, these Scottish nuns seemed to take coldness and  cruelty to terrible levels.  The Church says a "full investigation" will be made - most likely in an effort to cover up the truth.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at these revelations.  Here are highlights:

The children taken to the notorious Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanarkshire, Scotland came from poor, working-class families and broken homes. About 11,600 children passed through the institution from its opening in 1864 through its closure in 1981, left in the care of an order of Catholic nuns.

Former residents have detailed allegations of being brutally beaten, kicked in the head, neglected and publicly humiliated by the orphanage’s staff, and being forced to take freezing cold showers, according to British and Scottish news outlets. One former resident’s physical and psychological abuse was described in the Scotsman newspaper as “hideous treatment at the hands of nuns.”

For many years, an unknown number of children were believed to have died in the home, but exactly how they perished — and where they were laid to rest — remained a mystery.

Then, in 2003, two former residents uncovered a troubling discovery: an overgrown, unmarked burial plot at a nearby cemetery, which they believed might be filled with the bodies of children. The religious organization that ran the home, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent DePaul, confirmed that Smyllum residents were indeed buried there, according to the BBC and Scottish newspapers. In 2004, the group said records suggested that 120 children had died at the orphanage.
 But the two former residents who found the unmarked graves believed the number of children buried was much higher. It turns out, they may have been correct. According to a lengthy joint investigation by the BBC and Scotland’s Sunday Postpublished Sunday, up to 400 children are believed to be buried in the mass grave.

By sifting through archived death certificates, the BBC and Sunday Post found 402 certificates listing Smyllum as the place of death or normal residence. After checking with surrounding cemeteries and local authorities, the reporters found only 2 two of those 402 were buried elsewhere, according to the BBC.

Based on the death records the reports cited, an average of one child died every three months at Smyllum. In some periods, the recorded death rate was about three times the average for children in Scotland, . . . About a third of those who perished were age 5 or under, the BBC reported.

The revelations evoked comparisons to a home for mothers and children in Tuam, Ireland, where a forensic examinationrevealed 17 underground chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains,” the remnants of young children of “unwed mothers” dating from 1925 to 1961. Estimates have put the number of bodies at Tuam at 700 to 800.

“The true scale of the horrors of Smyllum long hidden by the Roman Catholic church are only being now revealed,” the organization White Flowers Alba, which advocates for survivors of the orphanage, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

In an interview with The Post, the group’s founder, Andi Lavery, said the residents at Smyllum were given a stipend from the Scottish government for food and proper medical treatment. Lavery said he read the death certificates cited by the BBC and Sunday Post, and said many causes of death included malnutrition and blunt trauma to the head.

“Why should they be dying from starvation? Why should they be dying from treatable infections? Why should they be dying from beatings?” Lavery said. He said he is currently working with about 20 of the home’s remaining former residents, but has heard from more than 100 survivors over the years.

“The kids were put in sacks and thrown in the ground in the hole,” Lavery said. “They were harshly beaten and quite a large number were sexually abused.”

The Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent DePaul, which ran the home, refused to comment on the findings, according to both reports.

Following the BBC and Sunday Post reports, a spokesperson for the Catholic Church in Scotland told Scottish newspaper the National that a “full investigation” should be made into the allegations.

Horrific accounts from survivors of the orphanage have been detailed in Scottish press over the years.

I ask again a question I pose often: how and why can decent, moral people continue to support the morally bankrupt and hypocrisy filled Catholic Church?

Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Attack in Nice

The fruits of fundamentalist religion

Once again religion, and fundamentalist Islam in particular, is proving that it is a scourge on humanity, as the ISIS claims responsibility for the mass murders in Nice, France on the night of July 14, 2016.   The Washington Post looks at the claim and also the Tunisian citizen who murdered so many, including 10 children.  Like the shooter in Orlando, he seems to have been a loser with a failed marriage and even a petty criminal record but without known ties to ISIS or extremists.  If the facts play out, it will be another example of religion preying on losers and promising them rewards in an afterlife with a mythical, magical friend in the sky.  It's pitiful.  Yet over the centuries religion, including Christianity,  has made such promises over and over again.  Also note that in the body of the piece ISIS references the crusaders who slaughtered Muslims nearly a thousand years ago.  The toxicity of religion simply never ends. Here are highlights from the Post story:

NICE, France — The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 84 in this coastal French city, the organization’s news agency said Saturday, as French prosecutors took three more people into custody in connection with the attack.

It remained unclear whether the Islamic State had directed the attack, whether they were taking responsibility for an attack that they may have inspired, or whether they were simply seeking publicity from an attack entirely disconnected from them. The Islamic-State-connected Amaq news agency cited an “insider source” saying that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “was a soldier of the Islamic State.” The Islamic-State-connected Amaq news agency cited an “insider source” saying that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “was a soldier of the Islamic State.”  “He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State,” the news agency wrote.

But the oblique claim of responsibility left open the question of whether Bouhlel had acted alone or had any prior communication with the group, which has also claimed ties to the attacks that struck Paris twice last year and Brussels in March. French authorities have been scrambling to determine whether Bouhlel had a support network in Nice, where he appears to have been living for at least six years. 

Investigators on Saturday detained three additional people in connection with the attack, including one person who is believed to have spoken to Bouhlel by phone minutes before he started his deadly journey down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais,  and an additional man was detained late Friday, according to the office of Paris prosecutor François Molins. Authorities also detained Bouhlel’s ex-wife Friday and were questioning her.

The scale of the carnage wrought by a Bouhlel came into grim focus Friday, with 10 children among the dead and 202 people injured. Among the wounded, 50 were “between life and death,” according to French President François Hollande. 

The attack with a 19-ton rented Renault truck — the third mass casualty assault to hit to France in 18 months — shocked the nation and sparked questions about whether authorities had done enough to safeguard a country that is an obvious target of terrorist groups.

The identities of the victims testified to France’s diverse society and to the international appeal of the tony French Riviera. A vacationing father and his 11-year-old son from Lakeway, Tex. A headscarf-wearing Muslim woman who came to celebrate Bastille Day with her nieces and nephews. A French high school teacher, his wife, daughter and grandson. Others from Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Australia. 

Bouhlel was a Tunisian citizen who had lived in Nice since at least 2010, when he first ran afoul of authorities by engaging in petty theft, according to Molins, the prosecutor. Most recently, he had been given a suspended six-month prison sentence related to a January assault, Molins said. In that case, Bouhlel’s former attorney told the local Nice-Matin newspaper, a motorist complained the truck driver was blocking the road during a delivery. Bouhlel took a swing at the motorist with a wooden beam, causing a deep wound, according to the lawyer’s account. Bouhlel is divorced and has three children, neighbors said. The prosecutor said the suspect’s ex-wife was taken in for questioning. 

Historically Illiterate Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech

As the right wing noise machine and Christofascists who would like to impose their own version of Sharia law on all Americans continue to hyperventilate and engage in spittle flecked rants over Barack Obama's accurate description of religion's evil force throughout history, thankfully some media outlets are documenting the evil of religion and supporting Obama's words with historical fact.  Those literate in history are less likely to fall prey to Christianist propaganda which is precisely why Christianist efforts to rewrite history in school text books must be strenuously opposed.  One should also be mindful that ancient Rome was tolerant of numerous religions - it was the Christians who sought to wipe out all differing religious beliefs and traditions.  And the Christians began this process long before the Koran and Islam appeared.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at some true history of what has been done in the name of religion right here in America that the "godly folk" would prefer the public not know or remember.  Here are excerpts:

People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one:

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification. On the cusp of plunging his country into a war that would cost some 750,000 lives, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens paused to offer some explanation. His justification was not secular. The Confederacy was to be:

[T]he first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society ... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. . . .

Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."

The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.

Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire discussion as a kind of religious one-upmanship, in which the goal is to prove that Christianity is "the awesomest."

If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink.

As I noted in a post last October about religion's ugly history beyond America's borders throughout history:

Throughout history religion has unleashed untold hate, misery and bloodshed.   Yes, some religious groups engage in charitable works, but even then many engage in proselytizing at the same time.  It's always about winning others over to their belief systems and often punishing those who don't yield - e.g., the Salvation Army's anti-gay policies and past rejection of gays needing shelter.  Meanwhile, we see ISIS demonstrating just how evil fundamentalist religion can be even as anti-Muslim Christians forget Christianity's own ugly past that has included the Inquisition, the extermination of the Cathars in France and many other acts of genocide against those deemed to hold heretical beliefs.  Yet despite this horrible track record we still see apologist defending religion . . .

For those unfamiliar with the Cathars, here how the Catholic Church dealth with them: between 15,000 and 20,000 were slaughters in the French city of Béziers alone and 140 burned at the stake in city of Minerve; and here's a contemporary account of a massacre carried out  in 1219 at Marmonde, a town of some 7000 people:

…terror and massacre began. Noblemen, ladies and their little children, men and women stripped naked, all were slashed and cut to ribbons by keen edged swords. Flesh, blood, brains, torsos, limbs and faces hacked in two; lungs, livers and guts torn out and thrown away - laying on the open ground as if they had rained down from the heavens. Marshland and firm ground, all was red with blood. Not a man or woman was left alive, neither young nor old, no living creature, except perhaps some well-hidden infant. Marmond was razed and set alight…

To this death toll - which some estimated totaled 500,000 in France - one must add the "old believers" in Russia, and those across the Mediterranean region who were labeled heretics.  A lengthy compilation of the atrocities can be viewed here.  This is a sample of the fate these individuals suffered in the name of God:

Anyone in Villaro who declined to go to a Roman Catholic mass was liable to be crucified upside down, but there was some variation in the manner of killing in other towns. Some were maimed and left to die of starvation, some had strips of flesh cut off their bodies until they bled to death, some were stoned, some impaled alive upon stakes or hooks. Some were dragged along the ground until there flesh was scraped away. One at least was literally minced. Daniel Rambaut had his toes and fingers cut off in sections: one joint being amputated each day in an attempt to make him recant and accept the Roman faith. Some had their mouths stuffed with gun-powder which was then ignited. Paolo Garnier of Roras was castrated, then skinned alive. Children were killed in various ways before the eyes of their parents. Those few who escaped to the mountains were mostly killed by exposure, starvation or disease.

 ISIS and Islam have nothing on Christianity!

Taliban Storm a School in Pakistan, 126 Dead

Fundamentalist religion continues to prove that it is among the foulest forces in the world.   Taliban forces have stormed a school in Pakistan and reports are that 126 have died in the ensuing carnage.  Like ISIS, the Taliban claims allegiance to a ultra far right and brutal version of Islam that justifies, if not revels in brutality against others who fail to subscribe to such toxic beliefs.  And where are the "good Muslims" in all of this?  Like the "good Christians" who allow evil to be done by Christofascists, they sit on their hands.  The Washington Post looks at the horrors done in Pakistan.  Here are highlights:

Taliban militants stormed an elite army high school in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 126 students and teachers, and holding others hostage, in one of the worst school shootings in modern times, according to Pakistani security and hospital officials.

More than three hours after the siege began at mid-day at an army-run high school on a Pakistan military installation in Peshawar, explosions and gunfire continued to be heard coming coming from the school.

A spokesman for the provincial government said 126 dead bodies had been recovered so far and 120 students and teachers have been wounded. Most of the dead were teenagers, he said. 

[E]ight to ten terrorists wearing military uniforms carried out the mid-day attack. He said they started “indiscriminate firing” after entering the school through a back door.

 “They started firing at students participating in a function at the auditorium,” Ghani told local journalists gathered at the scene. “The terrorists wanted to kill as many people as they could and they seemed to be not interested in hostage taking.”

In a statement, the Pakistani Taliban took credit for the attack, saying it was to avenge the Pakistan military operation in North Waziristan. The Taliban said six militants, including three suicide bombers, carried out the assault. 

Why a school as a target?  One reason is that modern knowledge and education are among the biggest enemies of fundamentalist religions.  It's no coincidence that while the the Taliban attacked a school. here at home the Christofascists want to dumb down public education and erode curriculum that show the lie of their 12th century beliefs.

Children Murdered After Deportation by United States

As sadly seems to always be the case with today's GOP and even more so its Christofascists/white supremacist base, objective facts, the truth and often basic decency do not matter.  Their entire agenda lies based on greed, a desire to force their sick religious beliefs on all, and a hatred of anyone who doesn't have lily white skin.  Thus, the GOP base and its elected whores deny that children flocking to America's southern borders are doing so often literally fear for their lives.  To these Republicans and the "godly Christians" the lives of these children simply do not matter why?  Because they aren't white.  Think Progress looks at the fate of some of the children deported by the United States.  Here are highlights:

Between five and ten migrant children have been killed since February after the United States deported them back to Honduras, a morgue director told the Los Angeles Times. Lawmakers have yet to come up with best practices to deal with the waves of unaccompanied children apprehended by Border Patrol agents, but some politicians refute claims that children are fleeing violence and are opting instead to fund legislation that would fast-track their deportations. 

San Pedro Sula morgue director Hector Hernandez told the Los Angeles Times that his morgue has taken in 42 dead children since February. According to an interview with relatives by the LA Times, one teenager was shot dead hours after getting deported. Last year, San Pedro Sula saw 187 killings for every 100,000 residents, a statistic that has given the city the gruesome distinction as the murder capital of the world. That distinction has also been backed up by an U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency infographic, which found that many Honduran children are on the run from extremely violent regions “where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the U.S. preferable to remaining at home.” Hugo Ramon Maldonado of the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights in Honduras believes that about 80 percent of Hondurans making the exodus are fleeing crime or violence. 

Politicians like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) have been keen on expediting the legal process by demanding that immigration judges make a court decision within seven days. But that move could undermine children’s rights by denying due process to children who already don’t understand the courtroom procedures. As Vox found out, one teenage girl told a border agent that she was afraid of being forced into prostitution only after her paperwork had been filed.

According to a United Nations report, at least 58 percent of the children cited “international protection needs” as in they were seeking protection from the international community because their home governments could no longer protect them.

What is fueling the violence in Central America?  Mostly the drug trade which is fueled by America's failed "war on drugs" that makes drug trafficking so lucrative and in the process encourages lawless gangs and drug lords. Add to that corrupt and incompetent governments and the poisonous mix is complete. 

The Fruits of Religion: 500 Yazidis Killed, Some Victims Buried Alive

The fruits of religion

I try not to write about religion all the time, but the pestilence that religion is to humanity is hard to avoid.  From the Israel's murder of children in Gaza, to religious discrimination against gays, to the atrocities and genocide being committed by Sunni Muslims in Iraq, the common root of the hate division and death is religion.  Religion that justifies a mindset that anyone different or who subscribes to differing beliefs is subhuman and even worthy of death. Yet insanely, religion still is afforded special deference and privileges even in modern nations which by now ought to realize that religion outside of one's home or house of worship is not a positive good.  Oh yes, we hear of religious based charities, but in some total those good works pale in comparison to the evils done under the guise of sincerely held religious belief.  The ongoing horrors in Iraq underscore this reality (in the past, Christianity has caused similar horrors and widespread murder such as the Cathars in France and "old believers in Russia).  Here are highlights from the Huffington Post on the horrific fruits of religion in Iraq:

Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority, burying some alive and taking hundreds of women as slaves, an Iraqi government minister told Reuters on Sunday.

Human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani accused the Sunni Muslim insurgents - who have ordered the community they regard as "devil worshippers" to convert to Islam or die - of celebrating a "a vicious atrocity" with cheers and weapons waved in the air. No independent confirmation was available.

Sudani said in a telephone interview that news of the killings had come from people who had escaped town of Sinjar, an ancient home of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking community whose religion has set them apart from Muslims and other faiths.

"We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar," he said

"Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar."

Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani urged his allies to send arms to help his forces hold off the militants, who have bases across the Syrian border. During a visit by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Barzani said: "We are not fighting a terrorist organization, we are fighting a terrorist state."

"In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses," he added. "This is a vicious atrocity."

A deadline passed at midday on Sunday for 300 families from the Yazidi community - followers of a religion influenced by the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia - to convert to Islam or die. It was not immediately clear if the victims to whom the minister referred were from that group of families.

Obama said it would take more than bombs to restore stability, and criticized Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government for failing to share power with Iraq's Sunni minority, which dominated before the U.S. invasion.

France joined the calls for Iraq's feuding leaders to form an inclusive government capable of countering the militants. "Iraq is in need of a broad unity government, and all Iraqis should feel that they are represented in this government," Foreign Minister Fabius said.

Maliki's critics say his sectarian agenda has prompted heavily armed Sunni tribes to join the insurgency. 

Personally, I believe Iraq needs to be divided - as it should have been at the end of World War I.  It has always been an artificially created country and  it is time to recognize the reality that maintaining Iraq as a unified country will likely never succeed.

Israeli Official/Leaders Call for Concentration Camps and Ethnic Clensing in Gaza

9-year-old Dina wounded when shrapnel pieces hit her eyes in an Israeli strike in Gaza, is treated at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza city on August 5, 2014.

I continue to be utterly shocked and dismayed by the horrible actions being undertaken by Israel in Gaza.  Worse yet are the calls for concentration camps and/or ethnic cleansing - a sanitized term for genocide - coming from Israeli figures who are not easily relegated to the category of the lunatic fringe.  What is all the more shocking is that if any ethnic/religious group ought to be sensitive to the dangers of such horrors it should be Jews who suffered so much under the Nazi "Final Solution."  Yet some like Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, are calling for actions all too reminiscent of Nazi actions against the Jews.  Equally disturbing is the fact that individuals like Feiglin seemingly do not care or grasp that Israeli is alienating those who formerly supported Israel.  A piece in the Daily Mail looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are excerpts:

An Israeli official has called for concentration camps in Gaza and ‘the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters’.

Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, posted the inflammatory message on his Facebook page at the weekend.  

He lays out a detailed plan for the destruction of Gaza -  which includes shipping its residents across the world - in a letter he addressed to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He says another important part of his plan is the 'conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.' 

In the letter he expresses his desire for the IDF to find areas on the Sinai border to establish 'tent encampments...until relevant emigration destinations are determined.'

He says that the supply of electricity and water to the Gaza would be disconnected before being 'shelled with maximum fire power.'

Understandably, Andrew Sullivan is appalled as well.  Especially because Feiglin is not an isolated fringe case.  Andrew explains and vents:

What is one to make of the fact that the deputy speaker of the Knesset has called for ethnic cleansing in Gaza?

He’s not an obscure blogger for the Times of Israel. He is a luminary of the Likud – a man who got 23 percent of the vote in a contest for the Likud Party leadership. He was appointed to his current high position by Benjamin Netanyahu.

You read that right. There will be temporary “camps” where the Gaza population will be “concentrated”; they will be expelled with subsidies; basic supplies of water and electricity will be cut off for those who remain. The war-time ethics he recommends are: “Woe to the evildoer, and woe to his neighbor.” He backs the “annihiliation” of Hamas and all their supporters. His strategic goal is to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.” (Modern Jaffa, of course, was built on the ethnic cleansing of most of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948.)

The usual response to this kind of thing among the lockstep pro-Israel community is that it is a tiny fringe opinion. And I can only hope they’re right. But what concerns me is that this racist, genocidal bigot was appointed deputy speaker of the Knesset by the current prime minister. What concerns me are the statements of Ayelet Shaked, the telegenic young protege of Naftali Bennett, who is touted as a future prime minister. This is from a Facebook post she wrote the day before the gruesome lynching of an Arab teen who was forced to drink gasoline and then burned to death by Jewish extremists. Note that her call for war came before any Hamas rocket was fired:

Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

Again, she and Feiglin dispense with the distinction between civilians and militants in Gaza. So too did the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, David-Seth Kirshner, at a recent 10,000 strong rally for Israel in New York.

I suppose someone will claim that the deputy speaker of the Knesset, and the former head of the National Security Council or the former chief rabbi in Israel or the head of the largest Jewish youth group in the world are fringe figures. But I note that, so far as I have been able to find, there have been no consequences for their statements for any of them. And I have to ask a simple question: which leader of another American ally has appointed a man who favors genocide and ethnic cleansing as the deputy speaker of the legislature? Which other democracy has legitimate political parties in the governing coalition calling for permanent occupation of a neighboring state – and deliberate social engineering to create a new demographic ethnic reality in that conquered land? Putin’s Russia has not sunk that low.

And we are not merely talking about a hypothetical situation. The grotesque death toll from Gaza is a distillation of this mindset – revealing at best a chilling contempt for Arab life and at worst, with the shelling of schools and shelters, a policy of indiscriminate hatred and revenge.

I concur with Andrew.  ALL American aid to Israel needs to be halted until the barbaric murder of children and civilians in obscene numbers ceases permanently.  To Senator Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, I say, grow a spine and call for cuts to aid immediately.

 

Millennials - And Others - Are Over Israel

Seemingly, I am not the only one who is over America's blind backing of Israel no matter what atrocities the IDF may commit (I got a letter from Senator Mark Warner in reply to my inquires that was just as mealy mouthed and unacceptable as Senator Tim Kaine's earlier in the week). A new Pew Research Center poll shows a huge generational shift in support of Israel so even though Congress has slavishly backed actions by Israel that seem aimed at genocide - several posts have appeared in the Times of Israel calling for out right genocide against Palestinians - , younger voters are not willing to close their eyes to the atrocities.  A piece in Salon looks at Israel's apparent effort to destroy long term American support for that nation.  Here are excepts:

It might seem counterintuitive to make the argument that Israel should no longer count on U.S. support for its policies as assuredly it has in the past.  After all, hasn’t the Senate just passed not one but now two resolutions by unanimous consent declaring its backing of Israel’s deadly attacks on and invasion of Gaza?

Yet even with these unambiguous resolutions emanating from the Senate, we find more and more evidence that support for Israel from the American public is slipping.  A recent report in the Washington Post noted that “A new Pew Research Center poll is the second in the past week to show a huge generational split on the current conflict in Gaza. While all age groups north of 30 years old clearly blame Hamas more than Israel for the current violence, young adults buck the trend in a big way. Among 18 to 29-year olds, 29 percent blame Israel more for the current wave of violence, while 21 percent blame Hamas.”

Clearly there are a number of possible explanations for this; here are three that come to mind.

First, . . . . As much as the world should strongly and unambiguously condemn such acts of anti-Semitism, to focus on a “second Holocaust” is to ignore the actual reason why anti-Semitism has today reared its ugly head again. It is not because of some essential, primordial racism against Jews. It is because of the actions of the state of Israel in staging a brutal, prolonged attack on the Palestinian people that is replete with violations of human rights and international law. That Hamas has also committed attacks on civilians does not erase the fact that Israel’s violence violates basic international humanitarian laws regarding proportionality.

International support for Israel is ebbing because the Holocaust narrative can no longer offer an omnipotent shield against a critique of the second narrative regarding the founding of the state of Israel.  Israel is in fact risking losing the narrative war altogether, as more and more of the global public is asking questions that probe into that history, prompted by the evidence of Israeli’s current efforts to continue and expand Israeli power and land, efforts that are now increasingly regarded not as survival tactics but as violent colonial ones.

More and more younger Americans, growing up well past the postwar era, find the Holocaust narrative to be less than absolutely and unquestionably a good reason to support the horrible killings in Gaza.  And as they learn more, their support will wane further.

Second, the massive attack on Gaza and its obscene civilian death toll is now delivered to a global audience via a variety of media forms that far exceed the mainstream media.  

Younger people are open to these modes of narrative, curious to know more, and morally puzzled and deeply concerned, and they in turn become conveyers of opinion and witnessing, as seen in the Tumblr site, TheWorldStandsWithPalestine which documents the demonstrations taking place around the world by means of uploaded photos from the participants themselves.

The Senate’s criticism of the U.N.’s findings on Gaza thus is immediately made questionable by stories like these and many others that create a cognitive dissonance in our minds between the claim of “equal violations” and the actual, not fabricated, figures that give quantitative weight to the visual images of disproportionate Palestinian death and destruction.

Finally, support for Israel is going to wane because unlike before, those who wish to criticize Israel today have already well-established and well-recognized modes of protest available to them. Most important of course is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which was established in 2005. 

The fact that more and more younger Americans are increasingly skeptical of supporting Israel’s military efforts is encouraging in the long run.  But we should not lose sight of the tremendous humanitarian crisis we are witnessing today. Change might be coming, but for now action is needed.

Israel may continue to plead and play the role of the victim, but the endless barrage of  photos and video clips that show what is really taking place will increasingly erode support for Israel.  Actions have consequences and the fact that Israel - and the U.S. military for that matter - may have gotten away with committing atrocities in the past no longer guarantees that such will be the case in the future.  Murdering hundreds of children is not what a victim does.  It's that simple. Netanyahu and his fellow henchmen hopefully will figure this out sooner as opposed to later.  Meanwhile, I personally support a 100% cessation of US military aid to Israel.  

Ann Coulter: Deal With Border the Way Israel Deals with Hamas

If one wants a good glimpse at the ugly racism that is now a pillar of Republican Party policy look no farther than the remarks of drag queen look-a-like Ann Coulter who would have America deal with the supposed "border crisis" by treating the undocumented children the way that "Netanyahu deals with Hamas."  With hundreds of Palestinian children being murdered by Israeli forces, the demand is horrifying.  But then again, to Coulter and much of the GOP base, if one isn't a white, heterosexual conservative Christian, one isn't really human and, therefore, murder or misery are one's due.  Perhaps the only good news is that people like Coulter are driving the younger generations not only from the GOP but from Christianity as well.  The Raw Story looks at Coulter's heinous statements:

Ann Coulter told host Sean Hannity that she wished Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “our president,” so he could deal with our border problems the way he deals with border issues in his own country.

Comparing tunnels found at the U.S./Mexican border with tunnels used by Hamas, Coulter asserted the U.S. is being invaded.

“We need a Netanyahu here. Can you imagine all these — yes, sometimes Palestinian kids get killed, ” she said as she began to laugh. “That’s because they are, they’re associated with a terrorist organization that is harming Israel, and Netanyahu doesn’t care what the religious leaders say, weeping about Palestinian children. He doesn’t care what the UN says. He doesn’t care what the media says.”

She concludes, “We are a country, we have borders, and Netanyahu enforces them. Why can’t we do that in America?”

 Laughing about the death of children - yep, that's today's GOP.  It is down right evil.  Just like the "godly Christians" in the GOP base.

Are We Turning our backs on Syrian Atrocities?

The answer to the question posed in the title of this post is a resounding "yes" - at least in some circles.  In others, the horrors being done in Syria are used to justify a stance of "see, what Israel is doing isn't so bad." Neither approach is right and moral.  Just because one group is committing atrocities doesn't make it OK for a different group to engage in evil.  Michael Gerson, a sometimes Israel apologist, brings needed focus on the murderous Assad regime in Syria through a column in the Washington Post.  While religion plays a role in the nightmare in Syria as in the Israel/Gaza atrocities, in Syria the difference is that Assad is a brutal dictator who seemingly wants to become the Hitler/Stalin of the Middle East.  Here are column highlights:

For every dissident and defector I’ve encountered, there is a moment when observation begins to feel like complicity, when remaining a bystander involves culpability. 

A photographer in the criminal and forensics department of the Syrian military police recently told a group at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “My job on a daily basis was just regular accidents, burnings, drownings, routine things.” In late 2011, as the Syrian uprising intensified, his routine changed. The photographer was sent to the morgue at a military hospital to document the bodies of prisoners arriving from 24 regime intelligence branches and military units. Soon 50 to 60 mutilated, emaciated corpses were coming each day — so many they were kept in storage rooms and parking lots. “Some victims were brought alive to the morgue and killed,” he recalled. 

He was involved in archiving the pictures of corpses taken by all the military photographers. “Pictures of children,” he said, “pictures of the elderly, pictures of women. I saw pictures of my own neighbors, from my own village.” They were images not of terrorists but of a broad, populist movement. 

The photographer decided he “could no longer take part.” But when he approached the opposition to defect, he was urged to stay, continue his work and smuggle out the archive on thumb drives. The result is 55,000 high-resolution photographs taken of more than 11,000 victims between September 2011 and August 2013. The corpses, variously, bear marks from being chained; their eyes have been gouged; there are dark spots left by electric shocks; most are gaunt from starvation.

Why would the Syrian regime keep such meticulous records? The photographer, who goes for security reasons by the name Caesar, describes it as part of a bureaucratic routine in which “the higher-ups got proof their orders were carried out.” It is also the type of practice — witness Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union — employed by a government completely unconcerned with eventual accountability, because it believes it will win. As the Syrian regime assaults Aleppo, the last major city contested by the rebels, this belief is not unreasonable. 

The Syrian conflict will be remembered as a strategic watershed for American foreign policy. When the rebellion was a broad, non-radical uprising — the dead in Caesar’s photos — President Obama did almost nothing to help. When radical groups gained momentum, it became an excuse for further inaction, because America didn’t want to create jihadists. We got the jihadists anyway, who are now causing regional havoc.

Obama embraced the narrowest possible definition of U.S. interests in Syria — the elimination of chemical weapons — which has nothing to do with civilian atrocities by other means. If Obama’s Syria policy is the model or norm for future presidents on atrocity prevention, no atrocity will ever be prevented. And the anti-genocide movement is relatively quiet about it all.

This is the problem with impunity for mass atrocities. It encourages future horrors, which create cycles of terror and revenge, which destabilize whole regions and generate new threats. Which is why atrocity prevention is a core national security interest.

Both Assad and Netanyahu need to be removed from power.