Monday, July 03, 2006
Executed for ...hitch-hiking
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Reporting Asheri's 'execution'
Embedding with Jihad: Part II
Who was Eliyahu Asheri? In the photograph, he looks so …innocent.
How came he to be a brief, flickering, shooting star across the headlines?
Well, rhetoric would be good place to start.
Whom to quote? Whom to quote? Why not Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili?
“Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.”
– from a speech in April, 1923
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
– Attributed
Noble statements from no less than Joseph Stalin, supreme killer, demagogue for the proletariat mobs, various peoples’ brigades, liberation committees. And, though dead for 53 years, a 21st Century media humanist, democrat and editorial linguist.
Asheri, buried a few days ago in the Mount of Olives cemetery after he was shot in the head by kidnappers in the West Bank, was 18-years-old.
“Palestinian militants from the Popular Resistance Committees said they executed the teenager,” according to one report. Asheri’s crime? Without citing evidence, the “committees” voted him an accomplice in the present “incursion in the Gaza Strip.” They likewise have no “evidence” of being “popular” among Palestinians or anyone else. Recounts are in order.
Who, then, is Noah Moskowitz? Authorities acknowledge that associates of Asheri’s killers may have seen on the Internet that Moskowitz, said to be about the same age as Asheri, has been mssing since Monday and may be kidnapped in name only. “Psychological warfare” is suspected. Psychological warfare or not, rest assured Moskowitz will add to the Asheri tragedy.
Remember that it is not “truth” but “print (that) is the sharpest and strongest weapon of our party.” Add television, and the arsenal has its re-usable atomic bomb.
From the outsider’s perspective – and this is the audience being played to outside the Middle East – much is asked.
Why, there hasn’t been any decent reporting coming out of Iraq or Where’s-it-stan in days.
So, How Did Shabaat ‘Vote’?
Enters the Popular Resistance Committee “spokesman” – none other than the Washington Post’s (June 30, 2006) Scott Wilson with his latest in the growing marathon of Palestinian/muslim victimologies:
Headline: In Gaza, Seeking Shelter From Israeli Fire
Missile Strikes Set Interior Ministry Ablaze
“BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip, June 29 -- Fatin Shabaat left home here Thursday with her three hip-high children, looking for safety from a slow-moving Israeli military assault launched to free a 19-year-old soldier being held by Palestinian gunmen.
“Israeli artillery batteries lobbed shells around this farming community in the Gaza Strip's northeastern corner throughout the day, after leaflets dropped from the sky warned residents to remain clear of Israeli military operations. Shells whistled overhead, slamming into the fields and dunes where Palestinian gunmen regularly fire crude rockets at the Israeli city of Sderot, a white smudge along a ridgeline three miles away.
“Although she never received one of the written warnings, Shabaat clutched her children, ages 2, 3 and 4, and headed to her father's home in the town center, far from the dirt paths that have served in the past as routes for Israeli tanks. An Israeli air strike had already left her without electricity, along with about 700,000 other residents of the strip, and artillery shells were falling close to her back yard.
" ‘This is only going to get worse,’ " said Shabaat, 25, who despite the impending clash favors keeping the Israeli soldier captive until at least some Palestinian prisoners are released from Israeli jails. "We will not get anything otherwise. And they are going to invade anyway. This soldier is just an excuse."
“Shabaat's grim prognosis regarding the crisis over the captured Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, was echoed in the West Bank, where the Israeli military arrested more than 60 officials from the governing Hamas movement in a pre-dawn sweep. The detainees included two dozen members of parliament and nine cabinet ministers, more than a third of the Hamas cabinet...”
This is classical “advocacy journalism” – a term that has become admittedly acceptable among Western correspondents. Wilson and others also cite demands for “the release of 421 Palestinian women and minors in Israeli prisons in exchange for information about Shalit’s welfare.”
The recitation, lacking any information about why the “women and minors” are incarcerated in the first place, assumes credibility for the demands which is ludicrous.
Asheri ‘Executed’ …For What?
Apologist Wilson reported the previous day from Gaza City under the approving eyes of his hosts that Asheri was “found executed” outside of Ramallah. Executed?!
The IDF’s arrest of 80 or so “political officials from Hamas” was entirely appropriate for the murder conspiracy.
The laments for 700,000 people without electricity in Gaza after an air strike and the looming disappearance of gasoline is, as Mr. Dzhugashvili would agree, “a statistic.”
And Wilson’s predictable lapse for color:
“…Meanwhile, Gaza residents gathered at two crumpled bridges struck by Israeli missiles that left two key north-south highways impassable. Children scavenged broken guardrails and steel bars from the sites, piling them on the back of donkey carts as traffic backed up…”
After all it is the same propagandistic backdrop, as with all muslim terrorism, a war against their children. The qassams keep flying, but Shabaat and her children keep “fleeing” and youngsters keep scavenging for salvage and loading it on the backs of donkeys. The innocent denied their pastoral villages and peace.
Funny thing. Shabaat was old enough to vote in the recent election where the majority backed the Hamas package of its political AND military wings. It would have been interesting had Wilson asked her who she voted for.
Welcome to “democracy” where the majority rules – and bears the responsibilities AND the consequences.
How came he to be a brief, flickering, shooting star across the headlines?
Well, rhetoric would be good place to start.
Whom to quote? Whom to quote? Why not Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili?
“Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.”
– from a speech in April, 1923
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
– Attributed
Noble statements from no less than Joseph Stalin, supreme killer, demagogue for the proletariat mobs, various peoples’ brigades, liberation committees. And, though dead for 53 years, a 21st Century media humanist, democrat and editorial linguist.
Asheri, buried a few days ago in the Mount of Olives cemetery after he was shot in the head by kidnappers in the West Bank, was 18-years-old.
“Palestinian militants from the Popular Resistance Committees said they executed the teenager,” according to one report. Asheri’s crime? Without citing evidence, the “committees” voted him an accomplice in the present “incursion in the Gaza Strip.” They likewise have no “evidence” of being “popular” among Palestinians or anyone else. Recounts are in order.
Who, then, is Noah Moskowitz? Authorities acknowledge that associates of Asheri’s killers may have seen on the Internet that Moskowitz, said to be about the same age as Asheri, has been mssing since Monday and may be kidnapped in name only. “Psychological warfare” is suspected. Psychological warfare or not, rest assured Moskowitz will add to the Asheri tragedy.
Remember that it is not “truth” but “print (that) is the sharpest and strongest weapon of our party.” Add television, and the arsenal has its re-usable atomic bomb.
From the outsider’s perspective – and this is the audience being played to outside the Middle East – much is asked.
Why, there hasn’t been any decent reporting coming out of Iraq or Where’s-it-stan in days.
So, How Did Shabaat ‘Vote’?
Enters the Popular Resistance Committee “spokesman” – none other than the Washington Post’s (June 30, 2006) Scott Wilson with his latest in the growing marathon of Palestinian/muslim victimologies:
Headline: In Gaza, Seeking Shelter From Israeli Fire
Missile Strikes Set Interior Ministry Ablaze
“BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip, June 29 -- Fatin Shabaat left home here Thursday with her three hip-high children, looking for safety from a slow-moving Israeli military assault launched to free a 19-year-old soldier being held by Palestinian gunmen.
“Israeli artillery batteries lobbed shells around this farming community in the Gaza Strip's northeastern corner throughout the day, after leaflets dropped from the sky warned residents to remain clear of Israeli military operations. Shells whistled overhead, slamming into the fields and dunes where Palestinian gunmen regularly fire crude rockets at the Israeli city of Sderot, a white smudge along a ridgeline three miles away.
“Although she never received one of the written warnings, Shabaat clutched her children, ages 2, 3 and 4, and headed to her father's home in the town center, far from the dirt paths that have served in the past as routes for Israeli tanks. An Israeli air strike had already left her without electricity, along with about 700,000 other residents of the strip, and artillery shells were falling close to her back yard.
" ‘This is only going to get worse,’ " said Shabaat, 25, who despite the impending clash favors keeping the Israeli soldier captive until at least some Palestinian prisoners are released from Israeli jails. "We will not get anything otherwise. And they are going to invade anyway. This soldier is just an excuse."
“Shabaat's grim prognosis regarding the crisis over the captured Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, was echoed in the West Bank, where the Israeli military arrested more than 60 officials from the governing Hamas movement in a pre-dawn sweep. The detainees included two dozen members of parliament and nine cabinet ministers, more than a third of the Hamas cabinet...”
This is classical “advocacy journalism” – a term that has become admittedly acceptable among Western correspondents. Wilson and others also cite demands for “the release of 421 Palestinian women and minors in Israeli prisons in exchange for information about Shalit’s welfare.”
The recitation, lacking any information about why the “women and minors” are incarcerated in the first place, assumes credibility for the demands which is ludicrous.
Asheri ‘Executed’ …For What?
Apologist Wilson reported the previous day from Gaza City under the approving eyes of his hosts that Asheri was “found executed” outside of Ramallah. Executed?!
The IDF’s arrest of 80 or so “political officials from Hamas” was entirely appropriate for the murder conspiracy.
The laments for 700,000 people without electricity in Gaza after an air strike and the looming disappearance of gasoline is, as Mr. Dzhugashvili would agree, “a statistic.”
And Wilson’s predictable lapse for color:
“…Meanwhile, Gaza residents gathered at two crumpled bridges struck by Israeli missiles that left two key north-south highways impassable. Children scavenged broken guardrails and steel bars from the sites, piling them on the back of donkey carts as traffic backed up…”
After all it is the same propagandistic backdrop, as with all muslim terrorism, a war against their children. The qassams keep flying, but Shabaat and her children keep “fleeing” and youngsters keep scavenging for salvage and loading it on the backs of donkeys. The innocent denied their pastoral villages and peace.
Funny thing. Shabaat was old enough to vote in the recent election where the majority backed the Hamas package of its political AND military wings. It would have been interesting had Wilson asked her who she voted for.
Welcome to “democracy” where the majority rules – and bears the responsibilities AND the consequences.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Street carnival, after all
I’m glad I forgot his name.
After all, it was forty-two years ago. He was the first and probably the only Iranian I’ve known.
“Known”?
We worked together for about two years at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania – the HUP. He was an anesthesia resident, and I was an aspiring pre-med student with an elite job as the only “anesthesia technician” at the hospital or, as far as I knew, the entire city of Philadelphia.
But, for the past couple of days I’ve wanted to call him up. And, if he still lived here, I’d …well, I don’t know what I would do.
I should have known better, living on the southwest border across from Juarez, Mexico, where young men and boys still perform on street corners, taking deep breaths before swigging gasoline, swishing it around in their mouths, then spitting it out and igniting their breath and whooshing it out.
Human flame-throwers! If they hiccup during the stunt …well, use your logic.
Anyway, it turns out that the infamous set of six photos appearing to show a small boy in Iran, who is having the front wheel of a car roll over his outstretched arm as punishment for stealing bread, is not what it is. The photos were passed on to me from a friend who, like me and others, were instantly angered in harmony with the following incitements:
“Another great example of Islamic justice.”
“Sent to me by a friend. The pictures depict a little boy in Iran having his arm broken because he committed a theft. I seriously doubt the pics are enhanced.”
“Subject: ‘Islamic Justice in Iran’”
“Warning you may not want to see this.”
“An 8 year old child
caught stealing bread in a market of Iran
is punished in a public place,
in the name of Islam!!!
“His arm will be crushed and will lose its use permanently.
A religion of peace and love, they say?
How can anyone believe them when they commit such
inhuman acts?
“Spread this example of peace
and love of Islam to your friends!!”
Misreading Tehran?
The six photos, it turns out, were accompanied by a seventh (not included in the distribution), showing the youngster working the crowd afterward with a bucket for audience donations, his arm apparently uninjured. It was crude carnival, and the kid worked for the guy with the small PA system.
The photos have been making the rounds since last November. (If you’re still skeptical, go to “Punishment for a bread thief [Archive] - JREF Forum – http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-46870.html)
Obviously, the folks on the Forum did the necessary back-track. Otherwise, I’d be shrieking for the incineration of Iran and blasting the inept “Western media” for kissing up to dhimmitude. Pro-muslim apologetics for Islam’s oil. Again.
Back to forty-two years ago and Dr. A. (I think his last name began with an “A”). His English was good. He was quiet in demeanor, and he liked to explain/teach when given the opportunity. The Shah would be in office for another decade, and I wonder if, like Ammanpour, he was part of the privileged class.
Somehow I have the feeling he went back to Iran. As for her, I wish she would just GO.
Not wanting to waste a good “rage” over the kid and the stunt, I decided to check around to find something pro-Iranian in the Sunday news novella.
Didn’t take long. The Washington Post (June 25) served up a 2,000-word …I don’t know what to call it except “apologetic” under the appropriate (predictable?) headline: “Misreading Tehran” Yes, it would take that many words to do the job.
The WP’s Istanbul bureau chief, Karl Vick, was making his tenth trip to Iran in three-and-a-half years.
His opening lines:
“TEHRAN – The mullah asked the Korean: ‘What's your idea about Iranians?’ The question was rhetorical, a greeting between veterans of a shattering week. The mullah was among a small army of clerics overseeing the burial of perhaps 40,000 people in three days, victims of a catastrophic earthquake in southern Iran during the final week of 2003. The Korean was a rescuer packing for home after finding no survivors.
‘You are closer than us to the United States,’ the mullah said in a voice a half-measure louder than necessary. ‘So do whatever you can to them on our behalf.’
“The Korean’s smile remained in place.
“‘Tell the Americans that you saw the clergy burying the bodies in Bam. We are very expert at this. Tell them: “We will bury you, too.”’
“‘If graves are required,’ he said, ‘we have one for Bush.’
“If the destruction of Bam was like a ghoulish cartoon – a mud-brick city reduced to uniform brown heaps that no earthquake expert recalled ever seeing before – here was a cartoon within a cartoon. The mad mullah kept grinning and glancing toward me, the intended beneficiary of his diatribe. A second cleric cleared his throat in embarrassment. ‘This is a good situation,’ said a third, ‘for everybody to understand that human beings really need each other.’
“What’s your idea about Iranians? Almost everyone I encountered in my 10 visits to the Islamic republic over the past 3 1/2 years resembled the mortified colleagues of the mad mullah: gracious, hospitable, apparently genuine in their regard for ordinary Americans and reasoned in their criticism of Washington. Years before the Bush administration’s recent and surprising agreement to Tehran’s request for negotiations, Iranian officials were likely as not to close an interview with a sidelong bid for some contact, any contact, between the two governments…”
“…(A)lmost everyone … gracious, hospitable, apparently genuine in their regard for ordinary Americans and reasoned in their criticism of Washington”?
Sounds like Vick was there to cover the earthquake. But, his sidebar …well, read it for yourself ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/23/AR2006062301373.html ).
Affirming the rage
While casting around to affirm rage for the “bread thief” episode, I came across this incident from two years ago. It was pretty well noised around by other media, but hard to know if the Istanbul bureau chief wrote anything.
From the Iran Focus website: “Violence, poverty and abuse led girl, 16, to gallows” (August 31, 2005; http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=137 )
“Neka (northern Iran), Aug 31 – The orphaned 16-year-old girl hanged in front of residents in this town close to the Caspian Sea on August 15 suffered years of brutal violence, exploitation and torture in the hands of relatives, local officials and plain strangers, and in a country where girls are the most vulnerable members of society, she had no one to go to for help.
“The tragic picture emerges from dozens of interviews conducted by an Iran Focus correspondent with Atefeh Rajabi’s classmates, friends, relatives and neighbors in this humid, overcrowded industrial town that sits on a busy highway linking Tehran with the north of the country.
“The hanging of Atefeh Rajabi has shocked the residents of Neka, who still differ widely in their assessment of the girl, but none voices support for the punishment that she has received. An air of tension and eerie silence hangs over the town’s smoke-filled tea-houses, or chaikhanehs, where men spend hours chatting quietly in clusters of three or four over tea. In a summer month like August, business should be booming in this town as thousands of Tehran residents flock to the sandy beaches of the Caspian. But right now, the visitors are for the most part not holidaymakers.
“‘There are lots of strangers who come and we are used to them,’” says Askar, a young shopkeeper who sells a variety of citrus fruit jams. “‘But right now, all of them are asking about the girl. They want to know who she was and how she died.’”
“The shock of Atefeh’s execution has gone far beyond this town. Even in a country that has the highest number of executions in the world and routinely executes minors, Iranians across the nation have been bewildered by accounts of the hanging of a 16-year-old girl. The fact that the religious judge himself put the rope around her neck and the letters of ‘congratulations’ from the town’s governor to the judge, commending him for his ‘firm approach’ have only added to the torment and pain many say they have felt…
“‘Atefeh was not a well-behaved girl, that’s for sure. But do you hang a girl for having sex with an unmarried man?’” asked Fariba, a girl in Atefeh’s neighborhood, who like many others did not want to be identified.
“According to judicial records, by the time Atefeh was 16, she had been convicted five times of having sex with unmarried men. Each time she spent some time in jail and was given 100 lashes (Under Iran’s law, punishment for having sex with a married man would have been far heavier.) “Atefeh’s father is an unemployed drug addict whose whereabouts are not known. Her mother died when Atefeh was still a child and she was left in the care of her octogenarian grandparents, which meant no care at all.
“‘She was abused by a close relative,’” says Mina, one of the few girls in Neka who identify themselves as Atefeh’s friends. “‘But she never dared even to talk about it to anyone. Tell your teachers? They’ll call you a whore. Tell the police? They lock you up and rape you. Better keep your mouth shut.’”…
Supposedly, during her trial, according to another report, the girl stripped off her clothes in protest.
“…A pharmacist, whose shop is not far away from the Railway Square, where Atefeh was hanged, recalls her final, painful hour. “‘When agents of the State Security Forces brought her to the gallows, I felt cold sweat running down my back. She looked so young and innocent, standing there in the middle of all these bearded men in military fatigues. Judge Reza’i must have felt a personal grudge against her. He put the rope around her neck and left her dangling on the gallows for 45 minutes. I looked around and everyone in the crowd was sobbing and damning the mullahs for doing this to our young people.’
“Atefeh had no access to a lawyer at any stage and her death sentence was upheld by a Supreme Court that is dominated by fundamentalist mullahs. Haji Rezaii, the religious judge, was reportedly so incensed with Atefeh’s “sharp tongue” during the trial that he traveled to Tehran to convince the mullahs of the Supreme Court to uphold the death sentence…”
Amnesty International added tepidly:
“IRAN (Aug. 3, 2004): …The execution of Ateqeh Rajabi is the tenth execution of a child offender in Iran recorded by Amnesty International since 1990. Amnesty International has urged Iran's judicial authorities to halt further executions of child offenders - people who were under 18 years old at the time of the offence. This is to bring Iran's law and practice in line with requirements of international human rights law.
“A bill to raise the minimum age for execution to 18 was reportedly under consideration by parliament in December 2003. However, the bill is not believed to have been ratified by the Guardian Council, Iran's highest legislative body.
“Amnesty International believes that the execution of Ateqeh Rajabi underlines the urgent necessity that Iran pass legislation removing provision for the execution of child offenders, thereby preventing further execution of child offenders, and bringing Iran into line with its obligations under international law…
“On the same night that she was buried, Ateqeh Rajabi's corpse was reportedly removed from the grave by unknown individuals…”
I must have missed the Ateqeh story, which was lightly published in the U.S.
The Guns of August?
Finally, from the June 25th Haaretz (Tel Aviv) by the AP:
“Iran urged the United States and its European allies on Sunday to be patient for its response to a package of incentives aimed at persuading Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.
“President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Iran will take until mid-August to
respond to the incentives package, prompting U.S. President George W. Bush to accuse Tehran of dragging its feet.
“The package, drawn up by the Big Five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany was presented to Iran on June 6 by the European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana while he visited Tehran.
“‘The package contains legal, political and economic dimensions. All its
dimensions have to be studied,’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters Sunday. ‘We recommend to Europeans that accuracy should not be sacrificed for the sake of speed,’ he said…
“Meanwhile, Iran's Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh warned Sunday that Iran would use oil as a weapon if its interests are attacked, state television reported. ‘If the country's interests are attacked, we will use oil as a weapon,’ the television quoted Hamaneh as saying… ‘If sanctions are imposed against Iran, it won't be easy to fill Iran's gap with 2.4 million barrels (per day). Oil prices will surpass US$100 per barrel.’”
Makes it easier to believe they run over eight-year-olds’ arms, doesn’t it?
I think Dr. A would understand why I find it more difficult lately to stare into my pickup’s tank spout. The “Western media” wouldn’t like that.
“Islamic justice”? Oxymoron.
After all, it was forty-two years ago. He was the first and probably the only Iranian I’ve known.
“Known”?
We worked together for about two years at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania – the HUP. He was an anesthesia resident, and I was an aspiring pre-med student with an elite job as the only “anesthesia technician” at the hospital or, as far as I knew, the entire city of Philadelphia.
But, for the past couple of days I’ve wanted to call him up. And, if he still lived here, I’d …well, I don’t know what I would do.
I should have known better, living on the southwest border across from Juarez, Mexico, where young men and boys still perform on street corners, taking deep breaths before swigging gasoline, swishing it around in their mouths, then spitting it out and igniting their breath and whooshing it out.
Human flame-throwers! If they hiccup during the stunt …well, use your logic.
Anyway, it turns out that the infamous set of six photos appearing to show a small boy in Iran, who is having the front wheel of a car roll over his outstretched arm as punishment for stealing bread, is not what it is. The photos were passed on to me from a friend who, like me and others, were instantly angered in harmony with the following incitements:
“Another great example of Islamic justice.”
“Sent to me by a friend. The pictures depict a little boy in Iran having his arm broken because he committed a theft. I seriously doubt the pics are enhanced.”
“Subject: ‘Islamic Justice in Iran’”
“Warning you may not want to see this.”
“An 8 year old child
caught stealing bread in a market of Iran
is punished in a public place,
in the name of Islam!!!
“His arm will be crushed and will lose its use permanently.
A religion of peace and love, they say?
How can anyone believe them when they commit such
inhuman acts?
“Spread this example of peace
and love of Islam to your friends!!”
Misreading Tehran?
The six photos, it turns out, were accompanied by a seventh (not included in the distribution), showing the youngster working the crowd afterward with a bucket for audience donations, his arm apparently uninjured. It was crude carnival, and the kid worked for the guy with the small PA system.
The photos have been making the rounds since last November. (If you’re still skeptical, go to “Punishment for a bread thief [Archive] - JREF Forum – http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-46870.html)
Obviously, the folks on the Forum did the necessary back-track. Otherwise, I’d be shrieking for the incineration of Iran and blasting the inept “Western media” for kissing up to dhimmitude. Pro-muslim apologetics for Islam’s oil. Again.
Back to forty-two years ago and Dr. A. (I think his last name began with an “A”). His English was good. He was quiet in demeanor, and he liked to explain/teach when given the opportunity. The Shah would be in office for another decade, and I wonder if, like Ammanpour, he was part of the privileged class.
Somehow I have the feeling he went back to Iran. As for her, I wish she would just GO.
Not wanting to waste a good “rage” over the kid and the stunt, I decided to check around to find something pro-Iranian in the Sunday news novella.
Didn’t take long. The Washington Post (June 25) served up a 2,000-word …I don’t know what to call it except “apologetic” under the appropriate (predictable?) headline: “Misreading Tehran” Yes, it would take that many words to do the job.
The WP’s Istanbul bureau chief, Karl Vick, was making his tenth trip to Iran in three-and-a-half years.
His opening lines:
“TEHRAN – The mullah asked the Korean: ‘What's your idea about Iranians?’ The question was rhetorical, a greeting between veterans of a shattering week. The mullah was among a small army of clerics overseeing the burial of perhaps 40,000 people in three days, victims of a catastrophic earthquake in southern Iran during the final week of 2003. The Korean was a rescuer packing for home after finding no survivors.
‘You are closer than us to the United States,’ the mullah said in a voice a half-measure louder than necessary. ‘So do whatever you can to them on our behalf.’
“The Korean’s smile remained in place.
“‘Tell the Americans that you saw the clergy burying the bodies in Bam. We are very expert at this. Tell them: “We will bury you, too.”’
“‘If graves are required,’ he said, ‘we have one for Bush.’
“If the destruction of Bam was like a ghoulish cartoon – a mud-brick city reduced to uniform brown heaps that no earthquake expert recalled ever seeing before – here was a cartoon within a cartoon. The mad mullah kept grinning and glancing toward me, the intended beneficiary of his diatribe. A second cleric cleared his throat in embarrassment. ‘This is a good situation,’ said a third, ‘for everybody to understand that human beings really need each other.’
“What’s your idea about Iranians? Almost everyone I encountered in my 10 visits to the Islamic republic over the past 3 1/2 years resembled the mortified colleagues of the mad mullah: gracious, hospitable, apparently genuine in their regard for ordinary Americans and reasoned in their criticism of Washington. Years before the Bush administration’s recent and surprising agreement to Tehran’s request for negotiations, Iranian officials were likely as not to close an interview with a sidelong bid for some contact, any contact, between the two governments…”
“…(A)lmost everyone … gracious, hospitable, apparently genuine in their regard for ordinary Americans and reasoned in their criticism of Washington”?
Sounds like Vick was there to cover the earthquake. But, his sidebar …well, read it for yourself ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/23/AR2006062301373.html ).
Affirming the rage
While casting around to affirm rage for the “bread thief” episode, I came across this incident from two years ago. It was pretty well noised around by other media, but hard to know if the Istanbul bureau chief wrote anything.
From the Iran Focus website: “Violence, poverty and abuse led girl, 16, to gallows” (August 31, 2005; http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=137 )
“Neka (northern Iran), Aug 31 – The orphaned 16-year-old girl hanged in front of residents in this town close to the Caspian Sea on August 15 suffered years of brutal violence, exploitation and torture in the hands of relatives, local officials and plain strangers, and in a country where girls are the most vulnerable members of society, she had no one to go to for help.
“The tragic picture emerges from dozens of interviews conducted by an Iran Focus correspondent with Atefeh Rajabi’s classmates, friends, relatives and neighbors in this humid, overcrowded industrial town that sits on a busy highway linking Tehran with the north of the country.
“The hanging of Atefeh Rajabi has shocked the residents of Neka, who still differ widely in their assessment of the girl, but none voices support for the punishment that she has received. An air of tension and eerie silence hangs over the town’s smoke-filled tea-houses, or chaikhanehs, where men spend hours chatting quietly in clusters of three or four over tea. In a summer month like August, business should be booming in this town as thousands of Tehran residents flock to the sandy beaches of the Caspian. But right now, the visitors are for the most part not holidaymakers.
“‘There are lots of strangers who come and we are used to them,’” says Askar, a young shopkeeper who sells a variety of citrus fruit jams. “‘But right now, all of them are asking about the girl. They want to know who she was and how she died.’”
“The shock of Atefeh’s execution has gone far beyond this town. Even in a country that has the highest number of executions in the world and routinely executes minors, Iranians across the nation have been bewildered by accounts of the hanging of a 16-year-old girl. The fact that the religious judge himself put the rope around her neck and the letters of ‘congratulations’ from the town’s governor to the judge, commending him for his ‘firm approach’ have only added to the torment and pain many say they have felt…
“‘Atefeh was not a well-behaved girl, that’s for sure. But do you hang a girl for having sex with an unmarried man?’” asked Fariba, a girl in Atefeh’s neighborhood, who like many others did not want to be identified.
“According to judicial records, by the time Atefeh was 16, she had been convicted five times of having sex with unmarried men. Each time she spent some time in jail and was given 100 lashes (Under Iran’s law, punishment for having sex with a married man would have been far heavier.) “Atefeh’s father is an unemployed drug addict whose whereabouts are not known. Her mother died when Atefeh was still a child and she was left in the care of her octogenarian grandparents, which meant no care at all.
“‘She was abused by a close relative,’” says Mina, one of the few girls in Neka who identify themselves as Atefeh’s friends. “‘But she never dared even to talk about it to anyone. Tell your teachers? They’ll call you a whore. Tell the police? They lock you up and rape you. Better keep your mouth shut.’”…
Supposedly, during her trial, according to another report, the girl stripped off her clothes in protest.
“…A pharmacist, whose shop is not far away from the Railway Square, where Atefeh was hanged, recalls her final, painful hour. “‘When agents of the State Security Forces brought her to the gallows, I felt cold sweat running down my back. She looked so young and innocent, standing there in the middle of all these bearded men in military fatigues. Judge Reza’i must have felt a personal grudge against her. He put the rope around her neck and left her dangling on the gallows for 45 minutes. I looked around and everyone in the crowd was sobbing and damning the mullahs for doing this to our young people.’
“Atefeh had no access to a lawyer at any stage and her death sentence was upheld by a Supreme Court that is dominated by fundamentalist mullahs. Haji Rezaii, the religious judge, was reportedly so incensed with Atefeh’s “sharp tongue” during the trial that he traveled to Tehran to convince the mullahs of the Supreme Court to uphold the death sentence…”
Amnesty International added tepidly:
“IRAN (Aug. 3, 2004): …The execution of Ateqeh Rajabi is the tenth execution of a child offender in Iran recorded by Amnesty International since 1990. Amnesty International has urged Iran's judicial authorities to halt further executions of child offenders - people who were under 18 years old at the time of the offence. This is to bring Iran's law and practice in line with requirements of international human rights law.
“A bill to raise the minimum age for execution to 18 was reportedly under consideration by parliament in December 2003. However, the bill is not believed to have been ratified by the Guardian Council, Iran's highest legislative body.
“Amnesty International believes that the execution of Ateqeh Rajabi underlines the urgent necessity that Iran pass legislation removing provision for the execution of child offenders, thereby preventing further execution of child offenders, and bringing Iran into line with its obligations under international law…
“On the same night that she was buried, Ateqeh Rajabi's corpse was reportedly removed from the grave by unknown individuals…”
I must have missed the Ateqeh story, which was lightly published in the U.S.
The Guns of August?
Finally, from the June 25th Haaretz (Tel Aviv) by the AP:
“Iran urged the United States and its European allies on Sunday to be patient for its response to a package of incentives aimed at persuading Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.
“President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Iran will take until mid-August to
respond to the incentives package, prompting U.S. President George W. Bush to accuse Tehran of dragging its feet.
“The package, drawn up by the Big Five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany was presented to Iran on June 6 by the European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana while he visited Tehran.
“‘The package contains legal, political and economic dimensions. All its
dimensions have to be studied,’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters Sunday. ‘We recommend to Europeans that accuracy should not be sacrificed for the sake of speed,’ he said…
“Meanwhile, Iran's Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh warned Sunday that Iran would use oil as a weapon if its interests are attacked, state television reported. ‘If the country's interests are attacked, we will use oil as a weapon,’ the television quoted Hamaneh as saying… ‘If sanctions are imposed against Iran, it won't be easy to fill Iran's gap with 2.4 million barrels (per day). Oil prices will surpass US$100 per barrel.’”
Makes it easier to believe they run over eight-year-olds’ arms, doesn’t it?
I think Dr. A would understand why I find it more difficult lately to stare into my pickup’s tank spout. The “Western media” wouldn’t like that.
“Islamic justice”? Oxymoron.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
Embedding with jihad
The picture, as the saying goes, is worth a thousand words.
A 10-year-old Palestinian girl crumpled in the sand on a Gaza beach sitting next to her dead father and a spilled deck of playing cards, shrieking in agony. Houda Ghalia also lost five of her 11 brothers and sisters, and her mother and step-mother on June 9, 2006, due to a supposedly errant round from an Israeli tank or other artillery, firing in reprisal for recent qassam rockets launched at Israel.
Altogether, eight people at the popular picnic site were killed. All were from Houda’s family.
The story was broadsided around the world about Houda, now orphaned, who pounded her fists into the sand, screaming “Father! Father!”
“Atrocity! Genocide! War crime!” echoed Palestinian leadership within hours.
“What have I done wrong that I should have to live without my parents?” she cried out in apparently perfect English that Friday afternoon to Sarah El Deeb of the Associated Press.
El Deeb’s report blanketed U.S. television and weekend newspapers, including the major networks and cable news programs, the National Examiner, the Kansas City Star, the Houston Chronicle, the Jamaica Observer, the Tacoma News Tribune, the Dayton Daily News, Wired, and New York Times, Washington Post and Knight Ridder news services, dailies in Boston, Chicago, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Canada, Europe, South America, and everywhere else. Even the Voice of America weighed in on the unutterable tragedy. Curiously, almost all the headlines read the same: “Girl Becomes Sign of Palestinian Mourning,” “Girl’s Grief Shared by Palestinians,” “Survivor in Palestinian Family Tells of the Devastation Wrought by Israeli Artillery,” “Israeli Artillery Shell Tears Into Weekend Picnic, Instantly Destroying Palestinian Family,” “Girl is Symbol of Palestinian Grief.”
It is easier to list the news outlets that didn’t run the story – OR especially the photo.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas paid tribute to Houda in a speech the next day, posing lovingly and caressing the child’s hair at an overflow photo op in his Gaza office.
“What is the crime that she committed while she was watching her family being killed on the beach and screaming?” Abbas asked in uncharacteristic outrage. “Who is responsible for such acts and why are such acts being committed against innocent people?”
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, of the Hamas Party, was equally torn and said he planned to adopt Houda. But, Abbas beat him to it, issuing a presidential order for adoption.
“Who is responsible…?” Indeed.
Answering the alleged beach blast, at least 50 qassam rockets roared off toward Israel over the weekend, causing negligible damage.
But, there was an odd credit line beneath the photo taken June 9 of the distraught child next to her dead father at the Gaza seaside. “Ramattan Studios / Associated Press”
Why purple?
Topping one newspaper’s “World” news section four days later was Knight Ridder’s follow-up report by Dion Nissenbaum under the alarming headline: “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Threatens to Explode.” Nissenbaum’s lede: “Israel and the Palestinians edged closer to open warfare Tuesday after an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City killed at least eight innocent bystanders…”
Nissenbaum’s story quoted the Middle East director of the International Crisis Group. Rob Malley, a former mid-East peace negotiator under the Clinton Administration. “Palestinians are inching towards civil war, Israelis and Palestinians are perilously close to resuming all-out hostilities, and the international community is depriving the Palestinian Authority of vital assistance,” said a report by the group. One paper using the Knight Ridder story played only a slashed-down anemic 300-word version of Nissenbaum’s emasculated 900-word story.
Nissenbaum wrote that Israeli officials, who had at first cautiously awaited investigation results from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and other officials, were now adamant that the fatal explosion did not originate from IDF tanks or artillery. The only alternative, they suggested, was a landmine or perhaps an undetonated 155-mm artillery shell had been rigged to explode. Further, shrapnel removed from two of the victims at a Tel Aviv hospital was quickly examined at Technion University in Haifa where it was determined that it was not from Israeli ordnance. The conclusion was reached using data partly provided by Palestinian authorities.
The AP’s Jerusalem bureau filed a follow-up report two days after the fatal explosion on the IDF’s findings, using correspondent Laurie Copans, not El Deeb. At most, Copans wrote, the IDF conceded only that it had fired toward qassam launchers in the area “seven minutes before the blast and (the last Israeli shell fired) …was seven minutes before the blast and landed 250 yards from the scene.”
That Sunday, another rushed-into-distribution photo of Houda, grieving at the funeral of her family members attended by thousands, perked the unsigned ire of the Little Green Fascists blog under “Cynical Palestinian Girl Manipulates Media”: “…(W)hy would she be wearing purple if she really was mourning for her family?”
Unsavory source; good question.
Twenty-four hours later, LGF clucked its tongue: “Aha! Hamas Killed That Kid’s Family!” linking to The American Thinker website and Ethel C. Fenig along with blogger Israpundit: “Who could not be moved by the picture of a little girl hysterically crying near her father’s body; killed in an explosion, along with others, as the family was enjoying a picnic on the Gaza beach? Now she will forever mourn as it turns out the deadly rockets came from Hamas not the evil Israelis. Israpundit explains: ‘An Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer has confirmed that the explosion that killed eight Palestinians on Friday, was caused by a stockpile of Hamas explosives.
“‘Shortly after we stopped defensive firing at Hamas rocket launch pads which were deployed behind Palestinian human shields, members of Hamas scrambled to fire more rockets at our positions,’ said Col. M. ‘We have eyes on every meter of Gaza, from the sky, from the ground and from the sea. One of their rocket tripods collapsed inadvertently setting off an explosion of a stockpile of Qassam rockets. The Palestinians killed their own children. And this was not the first time.’”
“Let’s repeat that,” Fenig stressed. “In addition to killing other innocent Jewish children in schools and buses and shopping malls ‘The Palestinians killed their own children. And this was not the first time.’
“Meanwhile, the Palestinians, refusing to co-operate with the Israelis, are being observed quickly removing the evidence and clearing the beaches of the bombs and grenades they placed there in anticipation of an Israeli raid to remove the rockets the Arabs are daily pouring down on Israeli homes and schools.”
Ripples from Afar
Eager to placate Islamic sympathies for terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, newly eliminated in Iraq when two 500-pound bombs obliterated his hideout, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan told the London-based Arabic language daily Al-Hayat that he considered the IDF’s findings almost a week after the fatal beach explosion “strange.”
But Annan’s spokesman was quick to point out that Annan had no plans to mobilize an international investigation urged by Human Rights Watch.
Annan, who took over the UN in 1997 at the height of hysteria about alleged Serb atrocities against Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, was well-experienced in practicing patience before condemning perpetrators of high-profile crimes that eventually proved to be orchestrated by Muslims against Muslim victims, strategizing for gullible media during crucial military or diplomatic maneuvers.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch hastily quoted their “battle damage expert” Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst during the pro-Muslim Clinton administration who by coincidence happened to be nearby, said Nissenbaum’s Knight Ridder piece. He blamed the IDF after studying “all the evidence he had gathered in Gaza…” This after rushing to the scene, giving it a quick once-over, and without the aid of a ballistics examination?!
“Based on what I have seen, I’d be shocked if it was anything other than (an Israeli shell),” Nissenbaum quoted Garlasco, although adding the latter’s qualification that it was “impossible to rule out the possibility that militants had rigged an Israeli shell into an improvised bomb…” Not to mention that Gaza’s northern beaches are littered with shell fragments from a year’s worth of retaliations from qassam attacks.
“Garlasco was the first independent expert to examine the scene, though Israel has doubts about his conclusions and about Human Rights Watch. He was in Gaza doing research for the human rights group when the explosion killed eight people on Friday afternoon…” said the AP’s Copans, declining to say how long and under what pretences he was there. But, she did tack onto the end of her June 14 report that Garlasco “said more work needs to be done before a solid conclusion can be drawn” – so much for Garlasco’s conclusiveness – and that “Israeli analyst Gerald Steinberg, who heads a watchdog group called NGO Monitor, charged that Garlasco is not a credible expert, and Human Rights Watch officials have ‘a long and carefully documented history of exploiting human rights claims to promote a clear anti-Israel political and ideological bias.’”
With its second press release in 48 hours, Human Rights Watch breathlessly announced “More Evidence on Beach Killings Implicates IDF”:
“A digitally dated and time-stamped blood test report of a victim treated at a Palestinian hospital that admitted wounded from the June 9 killings on a Gaza beach suggests that the attack took place during the time period of an Israeli artillery attack. …Altering the records would require se-setting the computer’s clock and re-writing pages of the hospital’s admissions log. …(Human Rights Watch) researchers saw no evidence that the times might have been altered.” Depending, that is, on how hard they looked or on how ambitiously such a fraud could be concocted.
Involved a decade ago in the one-sided collecting of war-crimes “evidence” in the Bosnian civil war, Garlasco again diagnosed that “(t)he likelihood that the Ghalya (sic) family was killed by an explosive other than one of the shells fired by the IDF is remote.”
IDF officials shrugged and pointed out again that the stretch of Gaza beach, popular with picnickers was “a battleground. This area is used for terror groups to launch (rockets) on Israel,” and that a rocket was fired earlier from a site close to the Ghalia family picnic.
But, the doomsday pall over Nissenbaum’s June 13 story-line that renewed Israeli-Palestinian confrontations were leading to the brink of a “catastrophic breakdown” took less than 24 hours to dissipate when Hamas officially announced it was “prepared to offer a 50- to 60- year cease-fire if Israel withdraws to the 1967 lines, and is leaving open the possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement in the distant future…” An impossible proposal, but the rhetoric was helpful for the moment.
Reported by Haaretz, the gesture was offered by no less than Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s political advisor Ahmed Yusef.
In fact, relations were warming precipitously between Israelis and Palestinians.
Vice Premier Shimon Peres would announce in a few days that Israel and the Palestinians were “closer than ever” to begin permanent peace negotiations with Abbas – in fact, closer than anytime during “the last 50 years,” Peres said.
Simultaneously, a pair of Palestinian diplomats had arrived with suitcases full of $24 million they said would be funneled to Gaza and the cash-strapped West Bank – with more on the way.
Abbas, and numerous other moderates, were actually attempting to quell hotheads among Palestinian terror brigades who advocated stepped-up qassam launches as well as other forms of reprisal against Israel in the aftermath of the fatal beach explosion.
Memories of Sarajevo
It should be remembered that the notorious May 1992 “breadline massacre” in the Bosnian capital along with the back-to-back Sarajevo marketplace slaughters in 1994 and 1994 were all confirmed nearly instantly to have been remotely triggered by Bosnian troops and which were not, as fed to the media, Serbian mortars fired from distant hills. USA Today and National Public Radio (NPR) still wince when recalling their heydays as champions of one-sided war-reporting in the recent Yugoslav civil wars. The Gannett flagship’s golden boy, Jack Kelley, ended up walking the plank in 2004 for writing phony Kosovo stories five years earlier, dragging several of his bosses over the side in disgrace. And, the news industry still blushes when reminded how NPR was nicknamed Radio Free Sarajevo for its blatant pro-Muslim broadcasts.
Not surprisingly then that both showed remarkable restraint about the June 9 Gaza beach blast.
USA Today ran an AP story on June 13 in full acceptance that the IDF was accurate:
“…(A)fter the blast, Israeli military viewed Hamas militants collecting the shrapnel from the area, in an apparent effort to prevent authorities from revealing that the explosion was caused by explosives it had laid. …The results of the (IDF) investigation are also based on threats by Hamas to stop Israeli naval commandos from landing on the beach after a group of militants were killed in the area in an ambush by Israeli navy divers last month…”
Eric Westervelt’s unusually terse report for NPR on June 10 repeated the pack-journalism’s 24-hour-old assumption that “…apparently an Israeli artillery round went astray” – a belief reluctantly held out as possible by the IDF itself until completion of its own investigation’s outcome that eventually declared the bombing was a self-kill by Palestinians.
But, Westervelt’s brief commentary was punctuated by the piercing audio backdrop of a young girl, presumably Houda Ghalia, screaming hysterically and ambulance sirens, Westervelt: “…a young girl screamed as her dead mother was taken away in an ambulance.”
Contacted via e-mail on June 16, Westervelt was asked if he would respond to “…whether you got (the recording at the scene) fresh or through a second party, such as Ramattan News Agency in Ramallah.”
When presented with a list of questions about the blast, NPR clammed up.
The credit line – “Ramattan Studio / Associated Press” – under the dramatic photo of Houda on the sand next to her dead father remained intriguing.
A more detailed inquiry was sent to the AP on June 14, including that “Ramattan Studios is part of the Ramattan News Agency in Ramallah (West Bank) that is an organization that offers the following introduction to its ‘vision’ on its website:
“Ramattan Studios was founded at the beginning of 1999 by a group of journalists and television professionals who share a vision, in addition to their extensive experience in media production. The Studio's stakeholders include women's groups, human rights organizations and other Palestinians NGOs with an interest in influencing social development.
“Locally, Ramattan produces promotional and awareness-building documentaries commissioned by local and international businesses, development and governmental organizations, and covers events and news in the region. “Internationally, Ramattan works with foreign media to promote a more profound understanding of the Palestinian society beyond its borders...” (Itallics added)
Further, the AP was asked about the disturbing “use of such a photo provided/sold (which?) to the AP for targeted reader consumption in the U.S.” and to explain “what arrangements – contractual or otherwise – exist between this organization and the AP, as (Ramattan is) obviously and admittedly a propaganda mill.”
The RNA distributed its own attempt of a press statement in English about the beach-bombing, including how Israeli gunboats had raked the beach and even fired “torpedos” at the shore.
But, their sensational photo of Houda, flooded into the Western media by the AP, is Ramattan’s most incendiary propaganda success to date, rivaling the media exploitation in 1993 of five-year-old Irma Hadzimuratovic who became a world-wide sensation in what U.N. doctors in Sarajevo described as “meat market” media fanfare over injured Muslim children. Irma was critically injured in another suspiciously timed, single “mortar shell” explosion that killed her mother. Irma, airlifted to London, eventually died in 1995.
Now a celebrity, Houda may conceivably pen her memoirs of Intifada in the PR style of the precocious 11-year-old Sarajevan, Zlata Filipovic, who “wrote” Zlata’s Diary, the blatantly-marketed imitation of The Diary of Anne Frank. Zlata’s Diary was published first in France and until eventually picked up by Penguin and was all the propaganda splash the wartime government of Bosnia hoped it would be.
Filipovic went on to live in Paris and Ireland.
‘As If According to Script’
NPR bought their audio of the Gaza seaside tragedy from Ramattan. In both cases, questions were kicked upstairs to be buried by corporate public affairs.
But, NPR’s and the AP’s refusal to talk about the journalism used for the incident is understandable when connected to the 92-second video shot at the scene by Ramattan, whose logo appears at the upper left of the production. The audio of Houda and the sirens is identical to the video that appeared on the menu of “Uncovering Reality” at www.ogrish .com.
It was CNN’s story of the weekend but was jerked probably when realizing it was filled with holes.
Certainly, unofficial examinations of the video have set off an undercurrent of controversy about whether the video was staged.
The characters appear to be all Palestinian men but no women except the pale body of either Houda’s mother or stepmother being lugged off to a pair of waiting ambulances. Although parked in the sand they ran their sirens throughout the entire video, making it almost impossible to hear the excited words being shouted by over-acting “rescuers.” No identifiable medical personnel or any police are at the scene. One of the smaller children appears to be fatally burned, arms dangling loosely as it is carried off, attesting to the recentness of some kind of fatal explosion.
The Ramattan cameraman peculiarly delays shooting the scene until running up to begin filming just a few feet away from the scattered bodies and other scattered items. One man gestures for him to get closer. Houda appears to be behind and to one side of the men, standing motionless, perhaps in shock. She is seen lifting her arms once, but otherwise seems still and only watching. A muffled scream is barely and briefly audible but cannot be identified as coming from her. Other men rush around, fumbling with stretchers; one of them who is not as excited as the others runs back and forth self-consciously, trying to get out of the way of the camera. The men holding the stretchers freeze and are more intent on displaying the bodies which appear aligned beside each other.
Finally, when the bodies in the scene are in the ambulances, the camera turns to focus on the waiting Houda who abruptly turns and runs, shrieking and clutching her throat, and throwing herself down on a dune near the ashen-faced body of her father. She writhes in the sand for a few moments, still screaming, and attempts to crawl closer to her father as another man begins to cover the body’s upper torso with a gray blanket. The man with the blanket is wearing bathing trunks, but all of the people in the video are dry, as is Houda’s hair while she runs. The photo used by AP shows the man’s head but is otherwise completely covered as Houda screams.
In the video, no one appears interested in Houda who is left alone through most of the film. Nobody approaches to comfort her. The AP’s El Deeb, or other reporters are apparently not there yet.
And, just as strangely, the cameraman does not pan across the scene for a wider view or beyond the surf for a shot of the supposed Israeli gunboat that was alternately blamed for the incident. However, official Palestinian and Human Rights Watch insistence that the explosion came from a 155 mm projectile eliminates blaming the gunboat as no such large-caliber deck gun exists aboard Israeli naval vessels. And, despite mention in Ramattan’s original report on its website that “torpedos” were launched toward the beach, there is nothing in the video to show where explosions occurred.
Most curious is that the beach, which is supposedly popular for numbers of bathers and picnickers when there is no shooting, appears deserted. Only a pair of overturned plastic chairs are visible several yards away and are not near any of the bodies. Also, the cameraman does not show any shell crater.
In a June 17 follow-up posting on The American Thinker, a former artillery-wise U.S. Marine judged that “a careful viewing of the media video of the after effects of the Gaza explosion showed NO artillery round craters. Israel’s IDF uses 155 mm artillery shells. These are quite powerful and leave a crater, some as deep as four feet in soft soil like sand. Virtually none were visible in the film. Particularly in the area immediately adjacent to the family’s alleged picnic site.”
The video also shows that the event and all the excitement and sirens produced no spontaneous, jostling crowd of gawkers.
Incredibly, there are no on-camera interviews with bystanders, medical personnel, police or anyone else – let alone eye-witnesses! And, given the importance and news value of the incident, the cameraman appears to have shot only 92 seconds of video!
It is all about Houda – as if according to script.
Not al-Jazeera chic …yet
The June 9 incident and on-the-scene “reporting” by Ramattan put the self-styled “news agency” on the map. The hysterical grieving of young Houda beside her dead father was such a success that the footage was being pirated everywhere.
Ramattan hastily posted a “warning” on its website to “editors”:
“We would like to confirm that the TV Footage of the Israeli shelling to Gaza Beach which show a screaming girl, whose family was killed in the shelling on June 9th 2006, were taken by Ramattan News Agency RNA cameraman. Nobody else apart from Ramattan News Agency has the right to use these pictures without a prior written permission from Ramattan News Agency. Ramattan News Agency reserves full copyright of these Footage and will take full legal action against any violators.” (sic)
Among Ramattan’s paying customers, according to the English-language Egypt Today in 2005 (posted online), is CNN, which pays a $40,000 monthly fee for “daily feeds and breaking news via Eutelsat” according to Ramattan’s general manager, Qassem Ali, said in a flattering profile. Others paying for Ramattan’s advocacy news are the AP, NPR, the BBC and other “clients around the globe” he said in the flattering profile.
Ali’s and Ramattan’s connections are extensive.
“Born in the small Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun, Ali studied political science at Birzeit University,” said Egypt Today. “He supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was arrested by the Israelis, who detained him for three years. After his release, he began working as a reporter for the Associated Press and then started a private company providing services for WTN (now APTN) and Visnews (later renamed Reuters Television). After a short stint with ABC, Ali left for New York. Armed with a recommendation letter from now-deceased ABC Nightly News anchor Peter Jennings, he was accepted into the master’s of journalism program at New York University and later obtained a PhD in television production at Oxford University.”
“We started with one camera and trained the guy to edit and use it for work,” said Ali, boasting a year ago that Ramattan had grown to “25 cameras and 100 producers, reporters, cameramen, soundmen, satellite technicians and drivers” with offices “in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Khan Younis and Cairo.” Ali said his equipment inventory was smuggled “sometimes” into the country. As of 2005, Ramattan was operating 11 satellite uplinks.
Ramattan and Ali did not respond to a forwarded list of questions concerning the Gaza beach explosion.
As of 2005, Ali claimed Ramattan was “independent” of both Fatah and Hamas, operating as a private organization that enjoys a “10-percent profit” with “costs ranging from $150,000 to $400,000 a month.” But, he said, Ramattan “makes most of its profit from providing services on the ground to networks and journalists.”
Copyright 2006
All Rights Reserved
A 10-year-old Palestinian girl crumpled in the sand on a Gaza beach sitting next to her dead father and a spilled deck of playing cards, shrieking in agony. Houda Ghalia also lost five of her 11 brothers and sisters, and her mother and step-mother on June 9, 2006, due to a supposedly errant round from an Israeli tank or other artillery, firing in reprisal for recent qassam rockets launched at Israel.
Altogether, eight people at the popular picnic site were killed. All were from Houda’s family.
The story was broadsided around the world about Houda, now orphaned, who pounded her fists into the sand, screaming “Father! Father!”
“Atrocity! Genocide! War crime!” echoed Palestinian leadership within hours.
“What have I done wrong that I should have to live without my parents?” she cried out in apparently perfect English that Friday afternoon to Sarah El Deeb of the Associated Press.
El Deeb’s report blanketed U.S. television and weekend newspapers, including the major networks and cable news programs, the National Examiner, the Kansas City Star, the Houston Chronicle, the Jamaica Observer, the Tacoma News Tribune, the Dayton Daily News, Wired, and New York Times, Washington Post and Knight Ridder news services, dailies in Boston, Chicago, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Canada, Europe, South America, and everywhere else. Even the Voice of America weighed in on the unutterable tragedy. Curiously, almost all the headlines read the same: “Girl Becomes Sign of Palestinian Mourning,” “Girl’s Grief Shared by Palestinians,” “Survivor in Palestinian Family Tells of the Devastation Wrought by Israeli Artillery,” “Israeli Artillery Shell Tears Into Weekend Picnic, Instantly Destroying Palestinian Family,” “Girl is Symbol of Palestinian Grief.”
It is easier to list the news outlets that didn’t run the story – OR especially the photo.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas paid tribute to Houda in a speech the next day, posing lovingly and caressing the child’s hair at an overflow photo op in his Gaza office.
“What is the crime that she committed while she was watching her family being killed on the beach and screaming?” Abbas asked in uncharacteristic outrage. “Who is responsible for such acts and why are such acts being committed against innocent people?”
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, of the Hamas Party, was equally torn and said he planned to adopt Houda. But, Abbas beat him to it, issuing a presidential order for adoption.
“Who is responsible…?” Indeed.
Answering the alleged beach blast, at least 50 qassam rockets roared off toward Israel over the weekend, causing negligible damage.
But, there was an odd credit line beneath the photo taken June 9 of the distraught child next to her dead father at the Gaza seaside. “Ramattan Studios / Associated Press”
Why purple?
Topping one newspaper’s “World” news section four days later was Knight Ridder’s follow-up report by Dion Nissenbaum under the alarming headline: “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Threatens to Explode.” Nissenbaum’s lede: “Israel and the Palestinians edged closer to open warfare Tuesday after an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City killed at least eight innocent bystanders…”
Nissenbaum’s story quoted the Middle East director of the International Crisis Group. Rob Malley, a former mid-East peace negotiator under the Clinton Administration. “Palestinians are inching towards civil war, Israelis and Palestinians are perilously close to resuming all-out hostilities, and the international community is depriving the Palestinian Authority of vital assistance,” said a report by the group. One paper using the Knight Ridder story played only a slashed-down anemic 300-word version of Nissenbaum’s emasculated 900-word story.
Nissenbaum wrote that Israeli officials, who had at first cautiously awaited investigation results from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and other officials, were now adamant that the fatal explosion did not originate from IDF tanks or artillery. The only alternative, they suggested, was a landmine or perhaps an undetonated 155-mm artillery shell had been rigged to explode. Further, shrapnel removed from two of the victims at a Tel Aviv hospital was quickly examined at Technion University in Haifa where it was determined that it was not from Israeli ordnance. The conclusion was reached using data partly provided by Palestinian authorities.
The AP’s Jerusalem bureau filed a follow-up report two days after the fatal explosion on the IDF’s findings, using correspondent Laurie Copans, not El Deeb. At most, Copans wrote, the IDF conceded only that it had fired toward qassam launchers in the area “seven minutes before the blast and (the last Israeli shell fired) …was seven minutes before the blast and landed 250 yards from the scene.”
That Sunday, another rushed-into-distribution photo of Houda, grieving at the funeral of her family members attended by thousands, perked the unsigned ire of the Little Green Fascists blog under “Cynical Palestinian Girl Manipulates Media”: “…(W)hy would she be wearing purple if she really was mourning for her family?”
Unsavory source; good question.
Twenty-four hours later, LGF clucked its tongue: “Aha! Hamas Killed That Kid’s Family!” linking to The American Thinker website and Ethel C. Fenig along with blogger Israpundit: “Who could not be moved by the picture of a little girl hysterically crying near her father’s body; killed in an explosion, along with others, as the family was enjoying a picnic on the Gaza beach? Now she will forever mourn as it turns out the deadly rockets came from Hamas not the evil Israelis. Israpundit explains: ‘An Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer has confirmed that the explosion that killed eight Palestinians on Friday, was caused by a stockpile of Hamas explosives.
“‘Shortly after we stopped defensive firing at Hamas rocket launch pads which were deployed behind Palestinian human shields, members of Hamas scrambled to fire more rockets at our positions,’ said Col. M. ‘We have eyes on every meter of Gaza, from the sky, from the ground and from the sea. One of their rocket tripods collapsed inadvertently setting off an explosion of a stockpile of Qassam rockets. The Palestinians killed their own children. And this was not the first time.’”
“Let’s repeat that,” Fenig stressed. “In addition to killing other innocent Jewish children in schools and buses and shopping malls ‘The Palestinians killed their own children. And this was not the first time.’
“Meanwhile, the Palestinians, refusing to co-operate with the Israelis, are being observed quickly removing the evidence and clearing the beaches of the bombs and grenades they placed there in anticipation of an Israeli raid to remove the rockets the Arabs are daily pouring down on Israeli homes and schools.”
Ripples from Afar
Eager to placate Islamic sympathies for terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, newly eliminated in Iraq when two 500-pound bombs obliterated his hideout, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan told the London-based Arabic language daily Al-Hayat that he considered the IDF’s findings almost a week after the fatal beach explosion “strange.”
But Annan’s spokesman was quick to point out that Annan had no plans to mobilize an international investigation urged by Human Rights Watch.
Annan, who took over the UN in 1997 at the height of hysteria about alleged Serb atrocities against Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, was well-experienced in practicing patience before condemning perpetrators of high-profile crimes that eventually proved to be orchestrated by Muslims against Muslim victims, strategizing for gullible media during crucial military or diplomatic maneuvers.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch hastily quoted their “battle damage expert” Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst during the pro-Muslim Clinton administration who by coincidence happened to be nearby, said Nissenbaum’s Knight Ridder piece. He blamed the IDF after studying “all the evidence he had gathered in Gaza…” This after rushing to the scene, giving it a quick once-over, and without the aid of a ballistics examination?!
“Based on what I have seen, I’d be shocked if it was anything other than (an Israeli shell),” Nissenbaum quoted Garlasco, although adding the latter’s qualification that it was “impossible to rule out the possibility that militants had rigged an Israeli shell into an improvised bomb…” Not to mention that Gaza’s northern beaches are littered with shell fragments from a year’s worth of retaliations from qassam attacks.
“Garlasco was the first independent expert to examine the scene, though Israel has doubts about his conclusions and about Human Rights Watch. He was in Gaza doing research for the human rights group when the explosion killed eight people on Friday afternoon…” said the AP’s Copans, declining to say how long and under what pretences he was there. But, she did tack onto the end of her June 14 report that Garlasco “said more work needs to be done before a solid conclusion can be drawn” – so much for Garlasco’s conclusiveness – and that “Israeli analyst Gerald Steinberg, who heads a watchdog group called NGO Monitor, charged that Garlasco is not a credible expert, and Human Rights Watch officials have ‘a long and carefully documented history of exploiting human rights claims to promote a clear anti-Israel political and ideological bias.’”
With its second press release in 48 hours, Human Rights Watch breathlessly announced “More Evidence on Beach Killings Implicates IDF”:
“A digitally dated and time-stamped blood test report of a victim treated at a Palestinian hospital that admitted wounded from the June 9 killings on a Gaza beach suggests that the attack took place during the time period of an Israeli artillery attack. …Altering the records would require se-setting the computer’s clock and re-writing pages of the hospital’s admissions log. …(Human Rights Watch) researchers saw no evidence that the times might have been altered.” Depending, that is, on how hard they looked or on how ambitiously such a fraud could be concocted.
Involved a decade ago in the one-sided collecting of war-crimes “evidence” in the Bosnian civil war, Garlasco again diagnosed that “(t)he likelihood that the Ghalya (sic) family was killed by an explosive other than one of the shells fired by the IDF is remote.”
IDF officials shrugged and pointed out again that the stretch of Gaza beach, popular with picnickers was “a battleground. This area is used for terror groups to launch (rockets) on Israel,” and that a rocket was fired earlier from a site close to the Ghalia family picnic.
But, the doomsday pall over Nissenbaum’s June 13 story-line that renewed Israeli-Palestinian confrontations were leading to the brink of a “catastrophic breakdown” took less than 24 hours to dissipate when Hamas officially announced it was “prepared to offer a 50- to 60- year cease-fire if Israel withdraws to the 1967 lines, and is leaving open the possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement in the distant future…” An impossible proposal, but the rhetoric was helpful for the moment.
Reported by Haaretz, the gesture was offered by no less than Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s political advisor Ahmed Yusef.
In fact, relations were warming precipitously between Israelis and Palestinians.
Vice Premier Shimon Peres would announce in a few days that Israel and the Palestinians were “closer than ever” to begin permanent peace negotiations with Abbas – in fact, closer than anytime during “the last 50 years,” Peres said.
Simultaneously, a pair of Palestinian diplomats had arrived with suitcases full of $24 million they said would be funneled to Gaza and the cash-strapped West Bank – with more on the way.
Abbas, and numerous other moderates, were actually attempting to quell hotheads among Palestinian terror brigades who advocated stepped-up qassam launches as well as other forms of reprisal against Israel in the aftermath of the fatal beach explosion.
Memories of Sarajevo
It should be remembered that the notorious May 1992 “breadline massacre” in the Bosnian capital along with the back-to-back Sarajevo marketplace slaughters in 1994 and 1994 were all confirmed nearly instantly to have been remotely triggered by Bosnian troops and which were not, as fed to the media, Serbian mortars fired from distant hills. USA Today and National Public Radio (NPR) still wince when recalling their heydays as champions of one-sided war-reporting in the recent Yugoslav civil wars. The Gannett flagship’s golden boy, Jack Kelley, ended up walking the plank in 2004 for writing phony Kosovo stories five years earlier, dragging several of his bosses over the side in disgrace. And, the news industry still blushes when reminded how NPR was nicknamed Radio Free Sarajevo for its blatant pro-Muslim broadcasts.
Not surprisingly then that both showed remarkable restraint about the June 9 Gaza beach blast.
USA Today ran an AP story on June 13 in full acceptance that the IDF was accurate:
“…(A)fter the blast, Israeli military viewed Hamas militants collecting the shrapnel from the area, in an apparent effort to prevent authorities from revealing that the explosion was caused by explosives it had laid. …The results of the (IDF) investigation are also based on threats by Hamas to stop Israeli naval commandos from landing on the beach after a group of militants were killed in the area in an ambush by Israeli navy divers last month…”
Eric Westervelt’s unusually terse report for NPR on June 10 repeated the pack-journalism’s 24-hour-old assumption that “…apparently an Israeli artillery round went astray” – a belief reluctantly held out as possible by the IDF itself until completion of its own investigation’s outcome that eventually declared the bombing was a self-kill by Palestinians.
But, Westervelt’s brief commentary was punctuated by the piercing audio backdrop of a young girl, presumably Houda Ghalia, screaming hysterically and ambulance sirens, Westervelt: “…a young girl screamed as her dead mother was taken away in an ambulance.”
Contacted via e-mail on June 16, Westervelt was asked if he would respond to “…whether you got (the recording at the scene) fresh or through a second party, such as Ramattan News Agency in Ramallah.”
When presented with a list of questions about the blast, NPR clammed up.
The credit line – “Ramattan Studio / Associated Press” – under the dramatic photo of Houda on the sand next to her dead father remained intriguing.
A more detailed inquiry was sent to the AP on June 14, including that “Ramattan Studios is part of the Ramattan News Agency in Ramallah (West Bank) that is an organization that offers the following introduction to its ‘vision’ on its website:
“Ramattan Studios was founded at the beginning of 1999 by a group of journalists and television professionals who share a vision, in addition to their extensive experience in media production. The Studio's stakeholders include women's groups, human rights organizations and other Palestinians NGOs with an interest in influencing social development.
“Locally, Ramattan produces promotional and awareness-building documentaries commissioned by local and international businesses, development and governmental organizations, and covers events and news in the region. “Internationally, Ramattan works with foreign media to promote a more profound understanding of the Palestinian society beyond its borders...” (Itallics added)
Further, the AP was asked about the disturbing “use of such a photo provided/sold (which?) to the AP for targeted reader consumption in the U.S.” and to explain “what arrangements – contractual or otherwise – exist between this organization and the AP, as (Ramattan is) obviously and admittedly a propaganda mill.”
The RNA distributed its own attempt of a press statement in English about the beach-bombing, including how Israeli gunboats had raked the beach and even fired “torpedos” at the shore.
But, their sensational photo of Houda, flooded into the Western media by the AP, is Ramattan’s most incendiary propaganda success to date, rivaling the media exploitation in 1993 of five-year-old Irma Hadzimuratovic who became a world-wide sensation in what U.N. doctors in Sarajevo described as “meat market” media fanfare over injured Muslim children. Irma was critically injured in another suspiciously timed, single “mortar shell” explosion that killed her mother. Irma, airlifted to London, eventually died in 1995.
Now a celebrity, Houda may conceivably pen her memoirs of Intifada in the PR style of the precocious 11-year-old Sarajevan, Zlata Filipovic, who “wrote” Zlata’s Diary, the blatantly-marketed imitation of The Diary of Anne Frank. Zlata’s Diary was published first in France and until eventually picked up by Penguin and was all the propaganda splash the wartime government of Bosnia hoped it would be.
Filipovic went on to live in Paris and Ireland.
‘As If According to Script’
NPR bought their audio of the Gaza seaside tragedy from Ramattan. In both cases, questions were kicked upstairs to be buried by corporate public affairs.
But, NPR’s and the AP’s refusal to talk about the journalism used for the incident is understandable when connected to the 92-second video shot at the scene by Ramattan, whose logo appears at the upper left of the production. The audio of Houda and the sirens is identical to the video that appeared on the menu of “Uncovering Reality” at www.ogrish .com.
It was CNN’s story of the weekend but was jerked probably when realizing it was filled with holes.
Certainly, unofficial examinations of the video have set off an undercurrent of controversy about whether the video was staged.
The characters appear to be all Palestinian men but no women except the pale body of either Houda’s mother or stepmother being lugged off to a pair of waiting ambulances. Although parked in the sand they ran their sirens throughout the entire video, making it almost impossible to hear the excited words being shouted by over-acting “rescuers.” No identifiable medical personnel or any police are at the scene. One of the smaller children appears to be fatally burned, arms dangling loosely as it is carried off, attesting to the recentness of some kind of fatal explosion.
The Ramattan cameraman peculiarly delays shooting the scene until running up to begin filming just a few feet away from the scattered bodies and other scattered items. One man gestures for him to get closer. Houda appears to be behind and to one side of the men, standing motionless, perhaps in shock. She is seen lifting her arms once, but otherwise seems still and only watching. A muffled scream is barely and briefly audible but cannot be identified as coming from her. Other men rush around, fumbling with stretchers; one of them who is not as excited as the others runs back and forth self-consciously, trying to get out of the way of the camera. The men holding the stretchers freeze and are more intent on displaying the bodies which appear aligned beside each other.
Finally, when the bodies in the scene are in the ambulances, the camera turns to focus on the waiting Houda who abruptly turns and runs, shrieking and clutching her throat, and throwing herself down on a dune near the ashen-faced body of her father. She writhes in the sand for a few moments, still screaming, and attempts to crawl closer to her father as another man begins to cover the body’s upper torso with a gray blanket. The man with the blanket is wearing bathing trunks, but all of the people in the video are dry, as is Houda’s hair while she runs. The photo used by AP shows the man’s head but is otherwise completely covered as Houda screams.
In the video, no one appears interested in Houda who is left alone through most of the film. Nobody approaches to comfort her. The AP’s El Deeb, or other reporters are apparently not there yet.
And, just as strangely, the cameraman does not pan across the scene for a wider view or beyond the surf for a shot of the supposed Israeli gunboat that was alternately blamed for the incident. However, official Palestinian and Human Rights Watch insistence that the explosion came from a 155 mm projectile eliminates blaming the gunboat as no such large-caliber deck gun exists aboard Israeli naval vessels. And, despite mention in Ramattan’s original report on its website that “torpedos” were launched toward the beach, there is nothing in the video to show where explosions occurred.
Most curious is that the beach, which is supposedly popular for numbers of bathers and picnickers when there is no shooting, appears deserted. Only a pair of overturned plastic chairs are visible several yards away and are not near any of the bodies. Also, the cameraman does not show any shell crater.
In a June 17 follow-up posting on The American Thinker, a former artillery-wise U.S. Marine judged that “a careful viewing of the media video of the after effects of the Gaza explosion showed NO artillery round craters. Israel’s IDF uses 155 mm artillery shells. These are quite powerful and leave a crater, some as deep as four feet in soft soil like sand. Virtually none were visible in the film. Particularly in the area immediately adjacent to the family’s alleged picnic site.”
The video also shows that the event and all the excitement and sirens produced no spontaneous, jostling crowd of gawkers.
Incredibly, there are no on-camera interviews with bystanders, medical personnel, police or anyone else – let alone eye-witnesses! And, given the importance and news value of the incident, the cameraman appears to have shot only 92 seconds of video!
It is all about Houda – as if according to script.
Not al-Jazeera chic …yet
The June 9 incident and on-the-scene “reporting” by Ramattan put the self-styled “news agency” on the map. The hysterical grieving of young Houda beside her dead father was such a success that the footage was being pirated everywhere.
Ramattan hastily posted a “warning” on its website to “editors”:
“We would like to confirm that the TV Footage of the Israeli shelling to Gaza Beach which show a screaming girl, whose family was killed in the shelling on June 9th 2006, were taken by Ramattan News Agency RNA cameraman. Nobody else apart from Ramattan News Agency has the right to use these pictures without a prior written permission from Ramattan News Agency. Ramattan News Agency reserves full copyright of these Footage and will take full legal action against any violators.” (sic)
Among Ramattan’s paying customers, according to the English-language Egypt Today in 2005 (posted online), is CNN, which pays a $40,000 monthly fee for “daily feeds and breaking news via Eutelsat” according to Ramattan’s general manager, Qassem Ali, said in a flattering profile. Others paying for Ramattan’s advocacy news are the AP, NPR, the BBC and other “clients around the globe” he said in the flattering profile.
Ali’s and Ramattan’s connections are extensive.
“Born in the small Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun, Ali studied political science at Birzeit University,” said Egypt Today. “He supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was arrested by the Israelis, who detained him for three years. After his release, he began working as a reporter for the Associated Press and then started a private company providing services for WTN (now APTN) and Visnews (later renamed Reuters Television). After a short stint with ABC, Ali left for New York. Armed with a recommendation letter from now-deceased ABC Nightly News anchor Peter Jennings, he was accepted into the master’s of journalism program at New York University and later obtained a PhD in television production at Oxford University.”
“We started with one camera and trained the guy to edit and use it for work,” said Ali, boasting a year ago that Ramattan had grown to “25 cameras and 100 producers, reporters, cameramen, soundmen, satellite technicians and drivers” with offices “in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Khan Younis and Cairo.” Ali said his equipment inventory was smuggled “sometimes” into the country. As of 2005, Ramattan was operating 11 satellite uplinks.
Ramattan and Ali did not respond to a forwarded list of questions concerning the Gaza beach explosion.
As of 2005, Ali claimed Ramattan was “independent” of both Fatah and Hamas, operating as a private organization that enjoys a “10-percent profit” with “costs ranging from $150,000 to $400,000 a month.” But, he said, Ramattan “makes most of its profit from providing services on the ground to networks and journalists.”
Copyright 2006
All Rights Reserved
Monday, June 12, 2006
A Wall Too Far
(NOTE: After reading a thoughtful column by Shmuel Rosner in Ha'aretz, I shared the below view which he picked up and included in his sequel the other day.)
Build, and they will climb.
Israel is building its own wall, many in the U.S. may not know.
As a non-Hispanic resident of El Paso, Texas, since the 1940s, I can attest that the only "wall" that will "work" along the U.S./Mexico border is one that will span the entire swath from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.
That's 2,000 miles! Of course, it will never work, for several reasons.
First, the sporadic experimentation of partial "fences" that already dot the border in more populous areas, only divert the flow of illegals - yes, they are illegals and not undocumenteds - around the edges. No one stops to think that to a determined immigrant who's already endured payment of hundreds or thousands of dollars on a northward trek of hundreds or thousands of miles, going a few miles further to skirt an extension or two is no problem.
Second, the White House wish-dream to reestablish "sovereignty" -- divined, therefore, as one vote over 50-percent to save the House and Senate next November -- has resorted to the crazed Plan B by sending the military to the border to "observe" while promising a pittance of new officers for the Border Patrol... someday. It's a great photo-op, for now. The National Guard and the reserves will have no arrest assignments. In fact, they will be ordered the opposite. Merely, they will cruise the fenceless vistas in their Humvees and diligently, at first, radio in to Border Patrol when they spot the mojados and tell them where to pick them up. Duh! The Border Patrol will not have enough personnel nor vehicles to dispatch as several thousand cammy-clad, reflex-sharpened GIs begin to, er, attempt "apprehensions." Picture it. Fair-haired non-Spanish speakers from Utah or South Dakota or Tennessee confronting Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, Costa Ricans? Total frustration. At best, the "observers" will cease their ignored transmissions and look the other way or, at worst, out of boredom start pinging away at the distant specks stumbling through the cactus. Catastrophe. Double catastrophe when the troops are rotated to Iraq and are re-conditioned to NOT shoot first and ask questions later. They'll need larger refrigerated warehouses at Dover AFB.
Third, the current misadventure, i.e. headlines, fences, walls, troops, etc., will drive the immigrants into the arms of the coyotes and smugglers, hyper-criminalizing the situation. So, how many tunnels CAN be digged in 2,000 miles? And, they will be. Imprisonment? No option; no space.
The only fence or wall that will "work" is the one that encircles employers. Sanctions will send the message all the way to Honduras that there are no jobs anymore. Problem solved. These people come to pocholandia not to carry bombs into shopping malls to kill gringos. They come to work. Legal immigration is the best "wall" of all. But, sanctions will rankle the pro-business GOP voters who are perceived as wanting no changes in the prevailing less-than-minimum-wages paid to muck out the sculleries or trash dumpsters on blazing hot afternoons.
Somehow, there is reasonable doubt whether walls in Israel will "work" either. Does every Palestinian who climbs over or digs under tote along a cake of H.E.? Even with security cameras, the IDF will be hard pressed to answer every tripped sensor.
So, what advice to offer? No choice; build anyway.
Build, and they will climb.
Israel is building its own wall, many in the U.S. may not know.
As a non-Hispanic resident of El Paso, Texas, since the 1940s, I can attest that the only "wall" that will "work" along the U.S./Mexico border is one that will span the entire swath from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.
That's 2,000 miles! Of course, it will never work, for several reasons.
First, the sporadic experimentation of partial "fences" that already dot the border in more populous areas, only divert the flow of illegals - yes, they are illegals and not undocumenteds - around the edges. No one stops to think that to a determined immigrant who's already endured payment of hundreds or thousands of dollars on a northward trek of hundreds or thousands of miles, going a few miles further to skirt an extension or two is no problem.
Second, the White House wish-dream to reestablish "sovereignty" -- divined, therefore, as one vote over 50-percent to save the House and Senate next November -- has resorted to the crazed Plan B by sending the military to the border to "observe" while promising a pittance of new officers for the Border Patrol... someday. It's a great photo-op, for now. The National Guard and the reserves will have no arrest assignments. In fact, they will be ordered the opposite. Merely, they will cruise the fenceless vistas in their Humvees and diligently, at first, radio in to Border Patrol when they spot the mojados and tell them where to pick them up. Duh! The Border Patrol will not have enough personnel nor vehicles to dispatch as several thousand cammy-clad, reflex-sharpened GIs begin to, er, attempt "apprehensions." Picture it. Fair-haired non-Spanish speakers from Utah or South Dakota or Tennessee confronting Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, Costa Ricans? Total frustration. At best, the "observers" will cease their ignored transmissions and look the other way or, at worst, out of boredom start pinging away at the distant specks stumbling through the cactus. Catastrophe. Double catastrophe when the troops are rotated to Iraq and are re-conditioned to NOT shoot first and ask questions later. They'll need larger refrigerated warehouses at Dover AFB.
Third, the current misadventure, i.e. headlines, fences, walls, troops, etc., will drive the immigrants into the arms of the coyotes and smugglers, hyper-criminalizing the situation. So, how many tunnels CAN be digged in 2,000 miles? And, they will be. Imprisonment? No option; no space.
The only fence or wall that will "work" is the one that encircles employers. Sanctions will send the message all the way to Honduras that there are no jobs anymore. Problem solved. These people come to pocholandia not to carry bombs into shopping malls to kill gringos. They come to work. Legal immigration is the best "wall" of all. But, sanctions will rankle the pro-business GOP voters who are perceived as wanting no changes in the prevailing less-than-minimum-wages paid to muck out the sculleries or trash dumpsters on blazing hot afternoons.
Somehow, there is reasonable doubt whether walls in Israel will "work" either. Does every Palestinian who climbs over or digs under tote along a cake of H.E.? Even with security cameras, the IDF will be hard pressed to answer every tripped sensor.
So, what advice to offer? No choice; build anyway.
