While preparing to interview the Tamimi family in their home during the Nabi Saleh’s weekly protest, a teargas grenade came flying through the window, breaking the glass, and landing in the middle of the living room.
The IDF then sprayed Skunk water on the outside of the house, including the exits, and we were all trapped inside. There were about a dozen small children in the home at the time.
We all choked on the tear gas, the children were terrified and in shock, the parents couldn’t do anything to protect their kids.
Eventually, a Palestinian ambulance arrived and put a ladder up to the second-storey window – at which point the terrified kids had to climb out.
It was not the first time the IDF had shot tear gas into the Tamimi home – they were known organizers of the weekly protests against the Israeli settlers who were illegally annexing Nabi Saleh village land.
December 2017 Update: Since then, Ahed Tamimi, a relative, has made international headlines for fighting back against Israeli soldiers invading her village, Nabi Saleh. A day after a video of Ahed slapping a soldier after her cousin was shot in the face by the army went viral, Ahed was arrested by the Israeli army. It’s not known how long she will be in jail. She is 16 years old.
This apparently is the sort of thing the young Ahed Tamimi grew up with. A little bit about the history of the Tamimi family is included in a post published today at Truthout :
In 2011, Ahed Tamimi was 10-years-old when Israeli soldiers arrested her father and charged him with the crime of organizing weekly demonstrations in their village to oppose the theft of its land for the benefit of a neighboring Israeli settlement. It would be 13 months before he was released and she would see her father again.
That same year, Israeli soldiers shot Mustafa Tamimi, Ahed’s 28-year-old cousin, in the face with a high velocity tear gas canister. Half of Mustafa’s face was destroyed. He passed away the next morning at the hospital.
The following year, when Ahed was 11 years old, Israeli soldiers shot her uncle, Rushdi Tamimi, in his lower back with live ammunition. The bullet lodged in his stomach and he died the next morning in the hospital.
Ahed was 13 when Israeli soldiers shot her mother, Nariman Tamimi, in the leg with a 22-caliber bullet. Ahed stood by, crying in the arms of her father, as her mother was placed in the back of an ambulance. Her mother had to rely on crutches for a number of years until she regained use of her legs.
None of this history, however, is mentioned in a commentary published January 5 by the supposedly liberal Haaretz. Instead, the writer of that piece, one Petra Marquardt-Bigman, accuses the Tamimi family of “fanatacism” as well as “Jew-hatred and enthusiastic support for terrorism.” A subheading above the article even reads, somewhat disturbingly:
Promote the blood libel? Check. Glorify terrorism? Check. Celebrate Israeli deaths? Check. Ahed Tamimi and her family aren’t fighting for peace, and they’re not just fighting the occupation: They’re fighting to destroy Israel, and their fight is seasoned with Jew-hatred
The Tamimis, including 16-year-old Ahed, are being accused of “blood libel” now–and outside of the one brief reference to the occupation contained in the subhead, Marquardt-Bigman makes no mention whatsoever of Israel’s 50-year-old occupation of Nabi Saleh and the rest of the West Bank until the very last paragraph of her commentary–where she writes:
Even if the Tamimis were only fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, their fanaticism wouldn’t bode well for any peace agreement. But the Tamimis never wanted a peace agreement. They have always wanted the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state.
Update:
Tamimi family member was Israel’s first victim of 2018:
Just hours after 21 simultaneous raids on the home of Argentine Indigenous leader Milagro Sala, a provincial court ordered Friday a one-year extraordinary extension of her pre-trial detention. Sala is 21 days short of serving two years in prison.
The political leader is being investigated for alleged illicit association, fraud and extortion, crimes she was charged with days after being detained for allegedly instigating violence during a protest she didn’t attend.
Sala was initially arrested on Jan. 16, 2016 for an “escrache”, a form of protest that seeks to publicly shame someone by congregating around their homes, against the province governor of Jujuy, an ally of President Mauricio Macri. Shortly after on Jan. 29 of that same year Sala was cleared of the instigation charges, but the judge determined that she would remain in detention over new charges of illicit association, fraud and extortion, which she is currently facing.
According to Sala’s lawyer the main reason for the extension is that her defense presented “innumerable” appeals and nullities. “This lacks sense,” her lawyers contended because “everything presented is within the framework of the right to legal defence.”
The one-year extension is not the first arbitrary decision made by Jujuy’s judiciary. In October 2016, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention qualified her detention as arbitrary, a decision backed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which urged Argentina’s government to release her.
The Organization of American States and human rights’ groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also demanded her immediate release to no avail.
Milagro Sala is a renowned activist who is seen as President Macri’s first political prisoner. She created the Organization Tupac Amaru, which provides housing and other services to informal workers and popular sectors, she served as an Argentine legislator between 2013 and 2015, and was later elected by the Front for Victory Party, led by former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, to Mercosur’s Parliament.
News of the one-year extension to Sala’s illegitimate imprisonment were accompanied by news of thousands of Argentines protesting the federal ruling that granted house arrest for convicted murderer and torturer Miguel Etchecolatz, who was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity when he worked as a top police officer under the brutal military dictatorship of the 1970s.
He is not the only one. According to Argentina’s Office of Crimes Against Humanity, 549 of people convicted for crimes against humanity in Argentina are currently under house arrest.
Social leaders and opponents of the current right wing government argue that in Macri’s Argentina social and political activists are repressed, prosecuted, and disappeared while those who repress and abuse their power are granted favors.
The Israeli Knesset approved on Wednesday a first reading of the death penalty bill which would allow the authorities to execute Palestinian prisoners accused of taking part in “operations against Israeli targets,” Anadolu has reported. The bill was proposed by the right-wing leader of the Jewish Home party Naftali Bennet; it was approved by a vote of 52 to 49 but needs a second and third reading before it becomes law.
Extremist Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Moldovan-born Defence Minister, endorsed the bill, which he said would increase Israel’s deterrence effect. In televised comments last week, Lieberman said that the law would specifically target Palestinians convicted of attacking Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Last year, at a rally following the death of three Israeli police officers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his support for the death penalty for Palestinians, whom he described as “terrorists with blood on their hands.”
Israel applies civilian law to illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians, however, face military courts and military law. The proposed death penalty would only be applicable in military courts. In the already unlikely event of an Israeli being convicted for killing a Palestinian, the accused would never face the death penalty.
“The fact that Israel lacks a constitution allows its prime ministers to enact legislation that serves the interests of their respective racist governments,” explained Mohammed Dahleh, a Palestinian expert on Israeli affairs. “Israel refuses to adopt a constitution. This also allows it to create laws — or modify them — to suit its expansionist tendencies.”
According to international lawyer Yasser Al-Amouri, the proposed Israeli law violates basic international legal tenets. “The conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis is not criminal in nature but nationalist,” he pointed out. “This means Israel cannot sentence Palestinian prisoners to death under the provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the treatment of prisoners of war.”
One commentator in London suggested that this legal nicety wouldn’t make any difference. “Israel already treats international laws and conventions with contempt,” said MEMO’s senior editor Ibrahim Hewitt, “so why would it sit up and take notice of this point? The state is guilty of the crime of apartheid, and this bill demonstrates that fact.”
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” ― Nelson Mandela
This is the tale of two Americas, where the rich get richer and the poor go to jail.
Aided and abetted by the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a man who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it smacked him in the face—the American dream has become the American scheme: the rich are getting richer and more powerful, while anyone who doesn’t belong to the power elite gets poorer and more powerless to do anything about the nation’s steady slide towards fascism, authoritarianism and a profit-driven police state.
Not content to merely pander to law enforcement and add to its military largesse with weaponry and equipment designed for war, Sessions has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.
In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the practice to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.
“Despite prior attempts on the federal level and across the country to prevent the profound injustice of locking people in cages because they are too poor to pay a debt,” concludesThe Atlantic, “the practice persists every day.”
Where things began to change, according to The Marshall Project, was with the rise of “mass incarceration.” As attorney Alec Karakatsanis stated, “In the 1970s and 1980s, we started to imprison more people for lesser crimes. In the process, we were lowering our standards for what constituted an offense deserving of imprisonment, and, more broadly, we were losing our sense of how serious, how truly serious, it is to incarcerate. If we can imprison for possession of marijuana, why can’t we imprison for not paying back a loan?”
By the late 1980s and early 90s, “there was a dramatic increase in the number of statutes listing a prison term as a possible sentence for failure to repay criminal-justice debt.” During the 2000s, the courts started cashing in big-time “by using the threat of jail time – established in those statutes – to squeeze cash out of small-time debtors.”
Fast-forward to the present day which finds us saddled with not only profit-driven private prisons and a prison-industrial complex but also, as investigative reporter Eli Hager notes, “the birth of a new brand of ‘offender-funded’ justice [which] has created a market for private probation companies. Purporting to save taxpayer dollars, these outfits force the offenders themselves to foot the bill for parole, reentry, drug rehab, electronic monitoring, and other services (some of which are not even assigned by a judge). When the offenders can’t pay for all of this, they may be jailed – even if they have already served their time for the offense.”
Follow the money trail. It always points the way.
Whether you’re talking about the government’s war on terrorism, the war on drugs, or some other phantom danger dreamed up by enterprising bureaucrats, there is always a profit-incentive involved.
The same goes for the war on crime.
At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.
Sessions’ latest gambit plays right into the hands of those who make a profit by jailing Americans.
Sharnalle Mitchell was one such victim of a system for whom the plight of the average American is measured in dollars and cents. As the Harvard Law Reviewrecounts:
On January 26, 2014, Sharnalle Mitchell was with her children in Montgomery, Alabama when police showed up at her home to arrest her. Mitchell was not accused of a crime. Instead, the police came to her home because she had not fully paid a traffic ticket from 2010. The single mother was handcuffed in front of her children (aged one and four) and taken to jail. She was ordered to either pay $2,800 or sit her debt out in jail at a rate of fifty dollars a day for fifty-nine days. Unable to pay, Mitchell wrote out the numbers one to fifty-eight on the back of her court documents and began counting days.
This is not justice.
This is yet another example of how greed and profit-incentives have not only perverted policing in America but have corrupted the entire criminal justice system.
As the Harvard Law Review concludes:
[A]s policing becomes a way to generate revenue, police start to “see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught.” This approach creates a fugitive underclass on the run from police not to hide illicit activity but to avoid arrest for debt or seizure of their purportedly suspicious assets… In turn, communities … begin to see police not as trusted partners but as an occupying army constantly harassing them to raise money to pay their salaries and buy new weapons. This needs to end.
Unfortunately, the criminal justice system has been operating as a for-profit enterprise for years now, covertly padding its pockets through penalty-riddled programs aimed at maximizing revenue rather than ensuring public safety.
All of those seemingly hard-working police officers and code-enforcement officers and truancy officers and traffic cops handing out ticket after ticket after ticket: they’re not working to make your communities safer—they’ve got quotas to fill.
Same goes for the courts, which have come to rely on fines, fees and exorbitant late penalties as a means of increased revenue. The power of these courts, magnified in recent years through the introduction of specialty courts beyond your run-of-the-mill traffic court (drug court, homeless court, veterans court, mental health court, criminal court, teen court, gambling court, prostitution court, community court, domestic violence court, truancy court), is “reshaping the American legal system—with little oversight,” concludes the Boston Globe.
“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” stated former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk — only because they are poor. They don’t have money to get out of jail, and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere. Other people who do have the means can avoid the system, setting inequality in place from the beginning.”
In “Policing and Profit,” the Harvard Law Reviewdocuments in chilling detail the criminal justice system’s efforts to turn a profit at the expense of those who can least afford to pay, thereby entrapping them in a cycle of debt that starts with one minor infraction:
In the late 1980s, Missouri became one of the first states to let private companies purchase the probation systems of local governments. In these arrangements, municipalities impose debt on individuals through criminal proceedings and then sell this debt to private businesses, which pad the debt with fees and interest. This debt can stem from fines for offenses as minor as rolling through a stop sign or failing to enroll in the right trash collection service. In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail. If an arrestee owes fines in more than one of St. Louis County’s eighty-one municipal courts, they are passed from one jail to another to await hearings in each town.
Ask yourself this: at a time when crime rates across the country remain at historic lows (despite Sessions’ inaccurate claims to the contrary), why does the prison population continue to grow?
As Time reports, “The companies that build and run private prisons have a financial interest in the continued growth of mass incarceration. That is why the two major players in this game—the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group—invest heavily in lobbying for punitive criminal justice policies and make hefty contributions to political campaigns that will increase reliance on prisons.”
It’s a vicious cycle that grows more vicious by the day.
The Center for Public Integrity found that “prison bankers collect tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. To make payments, some forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives… Inmates earn as little as 12 cents per hour in many places, wages that have not increased for decades. The prices they pay for goods to meet their basic needs continue to increase.”
Worse, as human rights attorney Jessica Jackson points out, “the fines and fees system has turned local governments into the equivalent of predatory lenders.” For instance, Jackson cites:
Washington state charges a 12% interest rate on all its criminal debt. Florida adds a 40% fee that goes into the pockets of a private collections agency. In California, penalties can raise a $100 fine to $490, or $815 if the initial deadline is missed. A $500 traffic ticket can actually cost $1,953, even if it is paid on time. And so we are left with countless tales of lives ruined—people living paycheck to paycheck who cannot afford a minor fine, and so face ballooning penalties, increasing amounts owed, a suspended license, jail time, and being fired from their jobs or unable to find work.
This isn’t the American Dream I grew up believing in.
This certainly isn’t the American Dream my parents and grandparents and those before them worked and fought and sacrificed to achieve.
This is a cold, calculated system of profit and losses.
Now you can shrug all of this away as a consequence of committing a crime, but that just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when average Americans are being jailed for such so-called crimes as eating SpaghettiOs (police mistook them for methamphetamine), not wearing a seatbelt, littering, jaywalking, having homemade soap (police mistook the soap for cocaine), profanity, spitting on the ground, farting, loitering and twerking.
There is no room in the American police state for self-righteousness. Not when we are all guilty until proven innocent.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a debtors’ prison guarded by a phalanx of politicians, bureaucrats and militarized police with no hope of parole and no chance for escape.
The Israeli army arrested a Palestinian parliamentarian in the West Bank city of Salfit this morning, according to a report by Anadolu Agency.
According to eyewitnesses, the Israeli forces raided Nasser Abdel Gawad’s residence and arrested him.
Palestinian MP Fathi al-Qaraawi of the Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform bloc said continuous arrests of deputies of the Palestinian Legislative Council who are entitled to parliamentary immunity is a flagrant violation of international law.
“Israel rejected the results of the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and arrested all Hamas deputies (in the West Bank including Jerusalem) and continues to punish the Palestinian people for this by arresting the group’s deputies,” al-Qaraawi said.
The Change and Reform bloc won the 2006 Palestinian elections with an overwhelming majority.
Al-Qaraawi added the arrest is an attempt to block opposition to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The latest arrest raises the number of jailed Palestinian parliamentarians to 11.
The Israeli Police Investigations Division (PID) has decided to close its probe into the January police killing of Palestinian math teacher Yaqoub Abu al-Qian, and to not hold any officers responsible for his death, Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said in a statement on Thursday.
Abu al-Qian, a 50-year-old math teacher from the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in southern Israel’s Negev desert, was shot dead by Israeli police in January while he was driving at night, causing him to spin out of control and crash into Israeli officers, killing one policeman.
Abu al-Qian was driving through the village as dozens of Israeli forces were preparing for a large-scale home demolition in Umm al-Hiran. Israeli forces at the time claimed he was attempted to carry out a vehicular attack, though witness testimonies and video footage of the incident proved contradictory to police accusations.
Israeli police footage appeared to show police officers shooting at al-Qian as he was driving at a very slow pace, and only several seconds after the gunfire does his car appear to speed up, eventfully plowing through police officers.
The killing of Abu al-Qian sparked widespread outrage amongst Palestinian civilians and politicians, who claimed he was “extrajudicially executed.
After demands from his family and the community for police to conduct a probe into his killing, Adalah filed a request demanding the PID open an investigation into the death of Abu al-Qian.
“The closure of this investigation means the PID continues to grant legitimacy to deadly police violence against Arab citizens of Israel,” Adalah said in it’s statement.
“Though it was clear from day one that officers opened fire on a civilian without justification and in contravention of the police’s own open-fire regulations, it appears as if the PID is again whitewashing the most serious incidents. Just as the PID failed to hold any officers responsible for the October 2000 killings and the subsequent police killings of more than 50 Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, this latest decision is further indication of the systemic failure of the PID.”
“The Israeli police and public security minister continue to propagate the same lie they initially promoted the day of the killing, according to which the incident was an intentional vehicular ramming attack against Israeli police officers. This lie was repeatedly refuted by multiple sources and video documentation of the incident,” Adalah added.
Abu al-Qian’s hometown of Umm al-Hiran is one of 35 Bedouin villages considered “unrecognized” by the Israeli state, and more than half of the approximately 160,000 Negev Bedouins reside in unrecognized villages.
The unrecognized Bedouin villages were established in the Negev soon after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war following the creation of the state of Israel.
Now more than 60 years later, the villages have yet to be recognized by Israel and live under constant threats of demolition and forcible removal.
NABLUS – A Palestinian school student suffered a rubber bullet injury on Thursday morning after Israeli soldiers stormed Burin town in Nablus to provide protection for extremist Jewish settlers, who infiltrated into the town and clashed with local residents.
Eyewitnesses explained the Palestinian Information Center that at first, a horde of violent settlers entered the town and encircled the school of Burin before attempting to storm it to attack students and teachers, who were busy doing semester exams.
The settlers also caused damage to three parked cars outside the school, and brutalized and detained several teachers on the main road of the town.
Soon later, local residents rushed to the school to fend off the settlers and clashed with them before soldiers showed up and started to fire volleys of tear gas as well as rubber and live bullets randomly to protect the settlers.
Consequently, one student was injured and several others inside and outside the school suffered from their exposure to teargas fumes.
The administration of the school also had to postpone the exams and dismiss the students following the events.
In a separate incident, a large number of Israeli soldiers stormed Rujeib town, southeast of Nablus, amid intensive shooting of tear gas and stun grenades near homes.
Eyewitnesses reported that the soldiers detained some students on the streets of the town for a while and searched them before letting them go.
The soldiers also clashed with local young men during their campaign in the town and withdrew without making arrests.
Mental health experts have called on the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy’s to reconsider its decision to hold its 2019 international meeting in Israel because of the latter’s aggression towards Palestinians.
A letter addressed to the IARPP, signed by renown Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr and a number of American therapists, calls on the body to consider
the grave crisis posed by the Israeli occupation and its currently escalating attacks on the Palestinian people – attacks reflective of an overarching policy of ethnic cleansing and consequent seizure of land, restriction of freedom of movement, and control over natural resources.
They said they have “an added responsibility to make our voices heard … as mental health workers familiar with the impact of violence on both individual health and collective well-being.”
The doctors went on to highlight Israel’s reliance “upon intimidation, extrajudicial assassination, and torture of Palestinians – including the torture of children, often involving sexual assault.”
“To locate international conferences related to any professional domain in Israel, in our view, represents a tacit acceptance of the behaviour of the state of Israel,” they wrote, adding: “To hold such conferences cannot help but advance the interests of the state of Israel through the implication that Israel welcomes a free exchange of ideas.”
“It is particularly ironic and painful to see Israel chosen as the site of an international conference when the central theme of the particular organisation is the in-depth understanding of human relationships.”
Though there have previously been calls to allow Palestinian doctors to attend the meeting if it is held in Israel, the mental health experts said this is not a valid solution, not least because they “may find merely showing up at the conference to be impossible due to checkpoints, movement restrictions, blacklisting of activists, and other everyday experiences familiar to Palestinians”.
In 2017, Irish Republicans continue to be jailed by the British state. Internment is used, operations against Republicans are led by MI5, prisoners are tortured and are subject to repressive measures upon leaving prison.
“In the case of the girls the price must exacted at another time, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras.” Wote Israeli journalist Ben Caspit about Ahed Tamimi who kicked and slapped an IDF officer who invaded her home. In his piece he congratulates the officer who didn’t respond to the slapping and kicking and he continues to say that the Tamimi family must learn the hard way that provoking IDF fighters will cost them dearly. “The IDF has creative abilities” Caspit asserts, abilities with which to exact a price in ways that will not damage its image.
Reading the Israeli press, one is reminded of the story where an evil Jinn came in to a city one day and poured a drug into all the wells of that city. The drug made all who drank the water from the wells mad and it wasn’t long before all the citizens of the city became mad. But the king who also resided in the city had his own water well on the grounds of his palace and so his water remained pure. One day while walking through the city the citizens looked at the king and exclaimed: “Look the king is mad, we must detain him!” When the king heard this, he realized what the evil Jinn had done, he rushed to nearest well and drank from the city’s water.
Israeli media is a world of fantasy. But it’s not a pretty fantasy it is a freighting one where Israeli treatment of Palestinians is characterized as “restrained.” In the summer of 2015 a video that went viral, we saw how an Israeli soldier armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle and wearing a ski mask was chasing a young Palestinian boy with a broken arm down a rocky hillside. This took place in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank. The soldier managed to catch up with the boy, choked him, lifted him up and then threw him on a rock, then he tried to bend or perhaps break the boy’s other arm. Eventually the boy’s sister, Ahed Tamimi, his mother and other women from the village came to the boy’s aid and after a long struggle managed to save the boy from the soldier’s hold. In the process, they also managed to remove the ski mask and expose the soldier’s face. If there is one thing clear it is that the soldier was anything but restrained. In the end another soldier shows up, hits one of the women and rescues the solider at which point out of pure revenge the soldier takes out a tear gas grenade and throws it at the boy and the group that rescued him. In an interview to the Israeli press the soldier’s father said he was proud of his son’s restraint.
Like everything else in life, it’s all a question of relativity. Israelis are used to seeing their enemies pay a hefty price when they dare to raise their heads. It just so happened that once again in the village of Nabi Saleh, in a case that involved the Tamimi family in a case involving an officer this time, the Israeli army showed “restraint” which was mostly met with disapproval. Israelis are used to images of young Palestinians with bullet holes in them bleeding by a checkpoint as Israeli soldiers and sometimes settlers stand by looking at them die slowly and are unmoved. Executed efficiently because, as MK Dr. Ahmad Tibi said during a speech on the floor of the Knesset, they were suspected of carrying scissors or a small knife, or something that resembles a small knife. The Israeli society is used to this being the standard. But in the case of Ahed Tamimi, the army, the press and the politicians are up in arms – because this was abnormal.
Ben Caspit in his piece repeats one claim that is repeated all over the Israeli media – that every Israeli felt the pain when the officer was slapped by the girl and did nothing. Ben Caspit says this officer did the right thing and that at another place and another time Israel must exact a price from the “Tamimi girls” as he calls them. Another Israeli journalist, Israel Eldad, a veteran journalist touches on another very sensitive point. He says he hopes that the prosecution will act decisively and demand a lengthy prison sentence for Ahed Tamimi, and that she will spend many long years in prison. He explains that this will teach the Arabs that the land belongs to Israel and they cannot just slap us around and get away with it. That this sort of “chivalrous behavior” displayed by the officer, may have been proper a long time ago but not in this case. Here it is about making sure that the Arabs know there is no doubt we have a right to that land, including Ahed Tamimi’s house, out of which she kicked the officers.
There are so many layers to this story that one can write pages upon pages and it will never end. A young girl slapping a man who has invaded her home, her space and even though not in this case, but many, many times her privacy. Night raids by the Israeli military into civilian homes when people are asleep in their beds, are very common and Ahed has experienced this countless times. Then, the image of an Arab girl slapping an Israeli, a woman slapping a man, and while images of dead Palestinians, even children, do not create such a public outcry, the reactions to this one were guttural. By the way, no such reactions were seen when a week before Ahed’s case her 15-year-old cousin Mohammad Tamimi was shot in the head. “We gave up hope” his father Bilal told me, but then, by the grace of God after six hours in surgery doctors were eventually able to take the bullet out of his head and Mohammad is recovering at home.
To add to the claims that Israelis are restrained in their reactions, Knesset Member Oren Hazan, who has been accused of a variety of charges from sexual abuse of women working with him to violent assaults and even reckless driving, had recently boarded a bus with families of Palestinian prisoners. The bus was on its way to a military prison when MK Hazan boarded it and began insulting the families. If anyone was showing restraint here it was the families. And as we look at Palestinian reactions to Israeli oppression, intimidation, and abuse for over seven decades it is clear that the Palestinians are those who are restrained. Israel does not need to exercise restraint because having the support of the US, the European governments and even some Arab and Muslim governments, it is able to get away with murder.
*(16-year-old Ahed Tamimi in Israeli military court. Image credit: Tali Shapiro/ Twitter)
In accordance with the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 (CAA) the Office of Compliance (OC) compiled and published shocking statistics listing (1) the number of settlements paid to its employees and interns after allegations of abuse by legislators; (2) the total amount of dollars paid by US Treasury to the victims of Congressional workplace abuse.
The US taxpayers were made to pay millions of dollars in financial settlements for hundreds of incidents of Congressperson abuse, including gross sexual harassment, against interns, staff and office employees, of both sexes. This ‘slush and shush’ fund was hidden from the American people. Many abused victims were paid-off and intimidated into silently watching the elected officials parade themselves as paragons of virtue and champions of their voters.
The data, published by Congressional Office of Compliance, covered a period starting in 1997 to November 2017. In that period, 264 victims of abuse, some by a number of Congresspersons, came forward with their complaints. The US Treasury secretly paid over $17 million dollars to the victims while the identities of the abusing Congresspersons are not identified and are protected under the 1995 statute.
In other words, the members of the US Congress, including serial sexual abusers and uncontrolled bullies, have shielded themselves from public exposure, so they could continue preying on their employees with impunity and without any personal material loss or humiliating exposure to their families. Thus protected, they could expect to be re-elected to abuse again and the taxpayers would pay their secret ‘pay-offs’!
Political Party Leadership in Congress and the Protected Abusers
An examination of the political party affiliation of the Congressional leaders and the Presidents during this 20-year period of abuse reveals that both parties were engaged in shielding offenders and perverts among their ranks.
During the first 10 years (1997-2007), Congress was controlled by the Republican Party. Under their leadership, the Treasury secretly paid over $11 million in compensation to the victims.
Democrats controlled the ‘House’ during the next three years (2008-2011) when the Treasury paid over $2.5 million dollars. As a result of this perverse form of ‘bipartisan cooperation’, abusive officials from both parties were free to abuse, humiliate and exploit their employees and young interns with impunity.
In the last five years (2012-2017), Republicans, once again, controlled the House and oversaw the secret payout of over $3.5 million for ‘bipartisan’ abuse.
Moving from monetary payment to the number of abused employees, we find 133 were subjected to abuse under the Republicans (1997-2007), 48 under the Democrats between (2008-2011) and another 73 victims under the latest period of Republican control (2012-2017). All victims, who came forward with their complaints, faced a gauntlet of procedural intimidation, ‘counseling’, ‘cooling off’ periods and legal restraint to remain silent.
If we examine Congressional abuse on a per capita basis, Republicans abused on an average, 13 victims a year while the Democrats harassed 12 victims a year. There is a comforting level of uniformity and continuity of abuse in the US political system under both Republican and Democratic control of Congress. This indicates a shared political culture and practice among America’s ‘Solons’. Whatever wild-eyed rhetorical ideological differences, both parties cooperate with great civility in the abuse of their employees.
Indeed, the sense of feudal privilege over employees, viewing workers and interns as peasants, invoking the once outlawed ‘droit de seigneur’, pervades the Halls of Congress. This culture of feudal abuse, so common in the private sector, in giant corporations, Hollywood and the media, has metastasized to the centers of US political power, leaving untold thousands of brutalized victims and their helpless loved ones to deal with the long-term effects of humiliation, bitterness and injustice. For every abused young employee, treated like a serf by an all powerful legislator, there are dozens of helpless family members, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters and spouses, who must deal with decades of silent resentment against these abusers.
None of this is surprising given how both parties have been financed and controlled by corporate leaders, Hollywood moguls and Wall Street speculators, who have exploited and abused their employees with impunity until the recent ‘Me-Too’ movement erupted spontaneously. Given the transformation of the workplace into a kind of neo-feudal estate, the ‘Me-Too’ movement may be seen as a latter-day ‘Peasant Revolt’ against the overlords.
Presidential Leadership and Abuse in the Workplace
Several Presidents have been accused of gross sexual abuse and humiliation of office staff and interns, most ignobly William Jefferson Clinton. However, the Congressional Office of Compliance, in accord with the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 does not collect statistics on presidential abuses and financial settlements. Nevertheless, we can examine the number of Congressional victims and payments during the tenures of the various Presidents during the past 20 years. This can tell us if the Presidents chose to issue any directives or exercise any leadership with regard to stopping the abuses occurring during their administrations.
Under Presidents William Clinton and Barack Obama we have data for 12 years 1997-2000, and 2009-2016. Under President George W Bush and Donald Trump we have data for 9 years 2001-2008 and 2017.
Under the two Democratic Presidents, 148 legislative employees were abused and the Treasury paid out approximately $5 million dollars and under the Republican Presidents, 116 were abused and Treasury and over $12 million dollars was paid out.
Under the Democratic Presidents, the average number of abuse victims was 12 per year; under the Republicans the average number was 13 per year. As in the case of Congressional leadership, US Presidents of both parties showed remarkable bipartisan consistency in tolerating Congressional abuse.
Congressional Abuse: The Larger Meaning
Workplace abuse by elected leaders in Washington is encouraged by Party cronyism, loyalties and shameless bootlicking. It is reinforced by the structure of power pervasive in the ruling class. Congress people exercise near total power over their employees because they are not accountable to their peers or their voters. They are protected by their financial donors, the special Congressional ‘judicial’ system and by the mass media with a complicity of silence.
The entire electoral system is based on a hierarchy of power, where those on the top can demand subordination and enforce their demands for sexual submission with threats of retaliation against the victim or the victim’s outraged family members. This mirrors a feudal plantation system.
However, like sporadic peasant uprisings in the Middle Ages, some employees rise up, resist and demand justice. It is common to see Congressional abusers turn to their office managers, often female, to act as ‘capos’ to first threaten and then buy off the accuser – using US taxpayer funds. This added abuse never touches the wallet of the abuser or the office enforcer. Compensation is paid by the US Treasury. The social and financial status of the abusers and the abusers’ families remain intact as they look forward to lucrative future employment as lobbyists.
This does not occur in isolation from the broader structure of class and power.
The sexual exploitation of workers in the Halls of the US Congress is part of the larger socio-economic system. Elected officials, who abuse their office employees and interns, share the same values with corporate and cultural bosses, who exploit their workers and subordinates. At an even larger level, they share the same values and culture with the Imperial State as it brutalizes and rapes independent nations and peoples.
The system of abuse and exploitation by the Congress and the corporate, cultural, academic, religious and political elite depends on complicit intermediaries who frequently come from upwardly mobile groups. The most abusive legislators will hire upwardly mobile women as public relations officers and office managers to recruit victims and, when necessary, arrange pay-offs. In the corporate sphere, CEOs frequently rely on former plant workers, trade union leaders, women and minorities to serve as ‘labor relations’ experts to provide a progressive façade in order to oust dissidents and enforce directives persecuting whistleblowers. On a global scale, the political warlords work hand in glove with the mass media and humanitarian interventionist NGO’s to demonize independent voices and to glorify the military as they slaughter resistance fighters, while claiming to champion gender and minority rights. Thus, the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was widely propagandized and celebrated as the ‘liberation of Afghan women’.
The Congressional perverts have their own private, secret mission: to abuse staff, to nurture the rich, enforce silence and approve legislation to make taxpayers pay the bill.
Let us hope that the current ‘Me Too!’ movement against workplace sexual abuse will grow to include a broader movement against the neo-feudalism within politics, business, and culture and lead to a political movement uniting workers in all fields.
Mohammad Nabil Moheisin, 29, was killed, Friday by Israeli soldiers when the soldiers, stationed across the border fence, resorted to the excessive use of force against Palestinian protesters, in several parts of the Gaza Strip.
During the day in which Mohammad was killed, another young Palestinian, Zakariya al-Kayarna, 24, was also killed, in a separate protest in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza. The Israeli troops injured at least 123 others, including three who suffered life-threatening wounds, and caused dozens to suffer the effects of teargas inhalation.
Medics also provided treatment to dozens of Palestinians, who suffered the effects of teargas inhalation.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has confirmed that 123 Palestinians were shot with live Israeli army fire, and dozens suffered the severe effects of teargas inhalation, in the northern and eastern parts of the besieged coastal region on this day.
It added that among the wounded were five medics, and four journalists.
In Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, the soldiers shot eight young Palestinian men, especially in the area close to Erez Terminal. The wounded were rushed to the Indonesian Hospital, suffering moderate wounds.
Furthermore, the soldiers shot 27 Palestinians in Jabalia, in northern Gaza; one of them suffered a serious injury, while most of the wounded residents suffered moderate wounds.
Ten Palestinians were also shot, east of the al-Boreij refugee camp, in Central Gaza; one of them suffered a serious injury, and was rushed to the Al-Aqsa Hospital, in nearby Deir al-Balah city.
In addition, the soldiers shot 22 Palestinians east of Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza strip, and six others in nearby Rafah, before they were all moved to Nasser Hospital and Abu Yousef an-Najjar Hospital, suffering moderate wounds.
Mohammad was shot by a soldier in a military tower, in Nahal Oz base, across the border fence, east of Gaza city. He was from Jabalia in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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NABLUS – A Palestinian school student suffered a rubber bullet injury on Thursday morning after Israeli soldiers stormed Burin town in Nablus to provide protection for extremist Jewish settlers, who infiltrated into the town and clashed with local residents.
Medics also provided treatment to dozens of Palestinians, who suffered the effects of teargas inhalation.
Aletho News 