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The ultimate Israel - Palestine Thread (it's all here) (pg. 24)
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| dj_ilan_yosef |
And this is cruelty because.... they beat him? they beheaded him?
you say, they humiliated him?
how - by making him play a violin - while they give him a 2-3 minute backround check? If he actually plays the violin, he himself plays the instrument for much longer than that! he knew very weel, as does anyone crossing such high risk roadblocks - anything you bring will be scrutinized... and his violin was no exception.
JFK airport in New York made me play my CD player to make sure it works and wasn't just a CD player case with explosives inside. They made my my unkle take a bite out of each of his 7 apples he brought with him.
Back to the terror in Israel. As someone who has been at these roadblocks, i know if the soilders actually believed him to be carrying explosives in the violin they would have kept him MUCH farther away from the checkpoint. they would have NEVER asked him to test a potentialy fatel instrument in front of them.
perhaps the soldiers we're trying to lighten up the atmosphere by asking him to play a peice. this could have very well been a matter of the soldier being sensitive to the arabs, as the israeli army has commited to doing through a varies programme initiatives they've started. out of all the armies of the world... how many have as many programmes geared towards helping the otherside they're fighting?
Lets talk about Arafats (PLO's) Military wing for just a second.
Fatahs al aksa.... - i dont even need to continue this agruement. the fact that almost ever member of the PLO, fatah, and al aksa are on security watchlists throughout the world might tell you a little something of Israels enemy.
Yet you expect better relations on the part of the IDF.
In regards to the soldiers laughing... if you heard a grown man of any race play a violin poorly - i'm sure you'd laugh just as hard as those soldiers did.
These soldiers are ordinary men and women ... they DIDN'T "CHOOSE" to play "ROADBLOCK" with these people.... they have been forced to by the terrorist mother******s who have killed scores of Israelis passing such geographical areas to accomplish their missions.
I hate the fact that your goal here is to dehumanize the image of the israeli military.
do some research... and not only from your anti-semetic, anti-israel european and muslim sources... but perhaps some from the other side of the conflict. you'll find tons of points of which the israeli army goes out of its way to fight a war served to her by blood-thirsty neighbours, as morally as possible during war.
And don't bother correcting me with regards to which side europe is on. their political agenda has been open book for years now. i hate to generalize here as there are many europeans who hate the direction in which their countries are heading - AGAIN! |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Electrotek
Let me give you my position on this issue, from a Muslim:
I am neither for the Palestinians or against them. I am for the innocent, the poor, the oppressed and the persecuted. And I'm afraid that it is not only Israel which is persecuting the Palestinian people. The Palestinians have themselves to blame aswell. Why you may ask?
Suicide bombers in the name of Allah (But Allah has condemned surprise attacks, Allah has condemned the killing of women and children, Allah has condemned the killing of the innocent, Allah has condemned the destruction of houses and crops).
And I'm afraid Palestinians are responsible for committing all these crimes.
Furthermore, when peace is offered, as a Muslim, we have no choice but to ACCEPT that peace treaty. Muslims are not about war, but about peace and equality.
The Palestinians have a lot to answer in the eyes of Allah.
Now please note that I am not condemning anyone as a Palestinian, but in general what has been happening.
The Israelis have as much blame as the Palestinians. They provoke the Palestinians into attacking them, and honestly the Palestinians have to be so thick in the head.
Israel has the superior technology and war machine. Israel has foreign backing. Every attack that the Palestinians commit plays into the hands of the Israelis.
They need to raise their white flags, and yell out "peace!". Then, certainly so, the international community will not stand for a slaughter of people who will not fight.
Or better yet, just arm both the orthodox Jews and the orthodox Muslims and let them slaughter each other. They won't satisfy their lust for violence until they makes orphans out of their kids. |
+1
I applaud your courageous statement.
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
Mark Twain
| quote: | Originally posted by dj_ilan_yosef
...JFK airport in New York made me play my CD player to make sure it works and wasn't just a CD player case with explosives inside. They made my my unkle take a bite out of each of his 7 apples he brought with him.... |
| quote: | Originally quoted by The Communist Manifesto
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. |
Go figure that out and get back to me before you ask "WTF?". |
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| Palestinian |
Ilan, the following articles are just for you.
Palestinian Violinist Slams Claim Troops Didn't Force Him to Play
By Akiva Eldar
Haaretz
A Palestinian man photographed playing his violin at the Beit Iba checkpoint near Nablus in the West Bank earlier this month on Tuesday rejected the Israel Defense Forces' claims that he played of his own accord.
The findings of an IDF probe into the November 9 incident was presented Tuesday to the head of the IDF's Central Command, Moshe Kaplinksy and showed that the man, Wissam Tayam, was asked by soldiers at the checkpoint to open the violin case for inspection, and began playing, even though he was not asked to do so. After a few seconds, the Civil Administration's officer at the checkpoint asked Tayam to stop playing, the report states.
Kaplinsky said Tuesday in response to the findings of the report that the soldiers had shown a lack of sensitivity, but not a lack of respect toward the Palestinian, nor did they intend to ridicule him.
The incident was filmed by Horit Herman-Peled, a volunteer for the women's human rights organization Machsom Watch, and reported by Haaretz for the first time last week.
The 28-year-old resident of the Farah refugee camp in the northern West Bank studies music at Al Najath University. "I did not offer them to play," he told Haaretz on Tuesday. "They asked me to open the case and show them the instrument, which was fine by me. But then they asked me to play; I did not offer to play. That does not sound logical. They asked me to play something sad, to match their mood.
"I felt humiliated," Tayam said Tuesday. "I always identified with the Jews who suffered in Europe [at the time of the Nazis] and after that they come and do the same thing to us."
When asked if perhaps the soldiers wanted him to play to ensure that the violin was not booby-trapped or contained explosives, Tayam said, "it doesn't make sense that they thought there were explosives in the violin. If they thought that, they would have made me move some distance from them [before playing], fearing I might blow up. I do not understand why they forced me to play. Most of the soldiers at the checkpoint know me, as I work there twice a week. The problems arise when new soldiers come."
The IDF's probe was based partly on testimony given by another Machsom Watch volunteer, Rachel Bar-Or, who witnessed the incident. She told Haaretz on Tuesday that she gave the IDF her testimony before she learned that Tayam vigorously denies playing voluntarily for the soldiers.
She said that until she read the violinist's account of the incident in the press, she was more than prepared to believe the soldiers' version of events at the checkpoint. "When I found out that the Palestinian was denying [their story], I had no reason to prefer the IDF's version of events over his."
She said that she and the other volunteers at the checkpoint did not hear the exchange between the soldiers and the violinist, and in addition, the conversation was held in Arabic, which none of the volunteers understand.
Another volunteer, Neta Efroni, also claims that the volunteers did not hear the exchange between the Palestinian and the soldiers.
Source: www.haaretzdaily.com |
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| Palestinian |
Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint: 'The Pianist' of Palestine
By Omar Barghouti
When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film’s depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.
In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: “that’s one thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians.” I spoke too soon, it seems. Israel’s leading newspaper Ha’aretz reported last week that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem.
In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as little more that “insensitivity,” with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra about soldiers having to “contend with a complex and dangerous reality” was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940’s.
Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual “punishment” meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing: “The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto.”
Even Tommy Lapid, Israel’s justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army’s wanton and indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying: “[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague.”
Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers, who could no longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their complicity in the daily humiliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as acceptable, even necessary, acts of “disciplining” the untamed natives, as a measure to maintain “security.”
According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an army commander was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence presented against him was a videotape filmed by the army’s education branch. In that particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that an army film crew was located nearby, and without any provocation, beat a Palestinian “flanked by his wife and children,” punching him in the face, and “even kicked[him] in the lower part of his body,” the report said.
A recent exhibit titled “Breaking the Silence,” organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence towards defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers’ graffiti that included: “Arabs to the gas chambers”; “Arabs = an inferior race”; “Spill Arab blood”; and, of course, the ever so popular “Death to the Arabs,” soldiers used a myriad of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of such abuse: “Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs.” The exhibit’s main curator described a particularly shocking policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods, like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.
The Hebron horrors pale, however, in comparison to what Israeli army units have done in Gaza. In an unnerving interview with Ha’aretz in November last year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant (res.) in the Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described the gradual transformation of every soldier to an “animal” when staffing a roadblock, irrespective of whatever values he may bring with him from home. From his perspective, those soldiers get infected with what he calls “checkpoint syndrome,” a glaring symptom of which is acting violently towards Palestinians in “the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment ….” “At the checkpoint,” he explains, “young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate … .”
Furer cites how his colleagues degraded and mercilessly beat a Palestinian dwarf just for fun; how they had a “souvenir picture” taken with bloodied, bound civilians whom they’d thrashed; how one soldier pissed on the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had “the nerve to smile” at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier asked Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused “broke someone’s hand” and “slashed their tires.”
The most chilling of all the incidents was his own personal confession. “I ran toward [a group of Palestinians] and punched an Arab right in the face,” he admitted. “Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside.” He then goes on to describe in gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the tightly handcuffed captive, dubbed “the Arab;” how they hit him until “he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva;” how he “grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side,” until he cried aloud, and how the soldiers then “stepped harder and harder on his back,” to make him stop crying.
Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered them on: “Good work, tigers.” And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse continued in different forms. “All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly.” One of the soldiers, Furer said, “went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted … and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy.”
As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity and respect that full humans deserve. At the height of Israel’s massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives to engrave the star of David on the arms of a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage boys. The haunting pictures of the victims were first shown on Arab satellite TV channels and eventually exposed on the internet.
In the same year, at al-Amari refugee camp, during a mass roundup of Palestinian males, teenagers and elderly included, Israeli troops inscribed identification numbers “on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation.” The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat compared the act to well known Nazi practices at concentration camps. Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable.” Nonetheless, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, was worried only about Israel’s image being tarnished: “clearly it conflicts with the desire to convey a public relations message,” he told Israel Army Radio. Parroting that line, the mainstream media in Israel, too, were far too concerned about the “public relations disaster” to express any abhorrence or protestation at the immorality of the act and the irony of it all.
Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and media at Tel Aviv University, sees PR as “a fundamental issue in Israeli life.” “We do not think we do anything wrong,” he clarifies in an interview with the Guardian, “but we think we explain ourselves badly and that the international media is anti-Semitic.” Obsessed with how Israel is seen rather than with what it actually does, Israelis, according to Peri, are mostly worried that “we do not explain ourselves well. When we discuss the horrible things that happen in the West Bank, we don't talk about the issue but about how it will be seen.”
Recognizing this prevailing cynicism, apathy and acquiescence among the majority of Israelis in the criminal oppression of the Palestinians, former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a recent interview with the Irish publication the Handstand that “gross insensitivity” was threatening a moral disintegration of Israeli society. Referring to the Germans during the Nazi rule, she added, “I am beginning to understand why a whole nation was able to say: ‘We did not know.’”
I wonder when the time will come when a glamorous, award-winning director braves predictable intellectual terror and intimidation tactics to expose the venomous Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity by making a Palestinian version of “The Pianist.”
-Omar Barghouti is an independent political analyst based in Palestine.
Source: www.zmag.org, November 29, 2004. |
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| BadBadNeil |
| Anyone else notice that when the Palestinian terrorists stop attacking Israelis (with the relative calm lately), the Israeli forces have no need to attack Palestinians or raid their camps and progress can be made (pulling out of Gaza, parts of the WB, and Palestinian elections)? I'm waiting for the next bus bombing that is going to ruin it all again as happened the last time there was calm. |
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| Palestinian |
| The last "relative calm" saw over 300 Palestinians killed. What relative calm? There is only "relative calm" when Israelis aren't being killed. |
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| BadBadNeil |
| quote: | Originally posted by Palestinian
The last "relative calm" saw over 300 Palestinians killed. What relative calm? There is only "relative calm" when Israelis aren't being killed. |
I'm referring to the two cease fires, the one in 2001 broken by the Tel Aviv bombing and the one in 2003 that was broken by the Bus bombing. Now there is relative calm on both sides and the Israeli's agreeing to meet many points. I am just waiting for some terrorist to do something foolish to stop the whole peace process. |
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| Palestinian |
| Both cease fires were broken by Israel but the media only showed the bombings that took place afterwards. Israel has already killed many Palestinians after Arafat died, but you don't know about it so you think there is relative calm on both sides. |
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| Cyrus King |
| quote: | Originally posted by Palestinian
Both cease fires were broken by Israel but the media only showed the bombings that took place afterwards. Israel has already killed many Palestinians after Arafat died, but you don't know about it so you think there is relative calm on both sides. |
Thanks for taking the words out of my mouth.:) |
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| BadBadNeil |
| quote: | Originally posted by Palestinian
Both cease fires were broken by Israel but the media only showed the bombings that took place afterwards. Israel has already killed many Palestinians after Arafat died, but you don't know about it so you think there is relative calm on both sides. |
Do you have a link for that one about the cease fires being broken by the Israelis, I couldn't find one on the internet. |
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| Dunya |
A suicide bomb blah blah blah, it is called self defence. When you hit me on my cheek. I will blow your face.
They are all justified you know why?
There is just one simple answer.
The ground where you are standing , isn't yours. :D |
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| BadBadNeil |
| quote: | Originally posted by Dunya
A suicide bomb blah blah blah, it is called self defence. When you hit me on my cheek. I will blow your face.
They are all justified you know why?
There is just one simple answer.
The ground where you are standing , isn't yours. :D |
You are the just the reason there is no peace by what you stated there. Proved my point exactly. |
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