MASSACRE CARE 2 ACT ?

The Chosen People of Israel

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are to possess and casts out the many peoples living there, you shall then slaughter them all and utterly destroy them…You shall make no agreements with them nor show them any mercy…You shall destroy their altars, break down their images, cut down their groves and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people unto the LORD thy God and He has chosen you to be a special people above all others upon the face of the earth…”

–Book of Deuteronomy, 7:1-8

• Reuters

Ten-year-old Afnan Shuheiber was playing on a Gaza City rooftop with her cousins when she became one of at least 149 children killed as of July 23, according to the United Nations, by Israeli fire in the Gaza Strip.

The spiralling number of children killed in the latest conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza has raised international concern. 

On Saturday, July 19, a group of international and Palestinian rights groups and aid agencies urged an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, noting the high number of children killed. "So far, more children have been killed by Israeli fire than Palestinian militants," said a statement from the groups, including War Child and Defence for Children International.

On Saturday, the UN children's agency, UNICEF, said children made up one third of civilian casualties in the conflict so far. "From July 8th, until 4:00am on July 19, at least 73 Palestinian children have been reported killed as a result of airstrikes and shelling Israel aerial, naval and ground forces," UNICEF's Catherine Weibel told AFP. 

She said the children included 53 boys and 20 girls under the age of 18. "The youngest was reportedly three months old," she said. More than half of the children killed are under the age of 12.

Afnan, known as Fulla by her family, was among them, killed on Thursday afternoon along with her cousins, Jihad and Wissam, in Gaza City's Sabra district. Neighbours said the children were taking advantage of the relative lull in the violence that afternoon, going to the roof to relax after days of being cooped up at home.

'Tragic victims'

At the Shifa hospital, the cousins were lined up side-by-side in front of relatives overwhelmed by grief. Seven-year-old Wissam's eyes were still open – he looked to be staring into the distance.

Their deaths came after those of another four children, killed as they played on the beach in Gaza City in strikes witnessed by journalists staying at a beachfront hotel. 

Ahed Atef Bakr, aged 10, Zakaria Ahed Bakr, also 10, Mohamed Ramez Bakr, nine, and Ismail Mohamed Bakr, 11, were also cousins. Relatives said they too had sought to escape the stifling confines of their homes in Shati refugee camp. Two strikes hit the areas where they were playing.

The first scattered the crowd of adults and children who were next to straw beach huts. A second followed as they ran along the sand in fear.

The Israeli army later said that a preliminary investigation showed the children were the "tragic" victims of a strike targeting "Hamas terrorist operatives". 

A senior army official said on Saturday that the military was "sorry" about the deaths of women and children. "When you fight there are mistakes," he said.

Gaza is home to 1.8 million people, one of the most densely populated places on earth.

Israel alleges that Hamas uses the population as a human shield and fires rockets from civilian areas and infrastructure.

Weibel said the number of children among the dead in Gaza was of "deep concern" to UNICEF. "Children should be protected from the violence, and they should not be the victims of a conflict for which they have no responsibility," she told AFP.

'Scarred for life'

She also raised concerns about the long-term effects of the violence on Gaza's children, many of whom are now living through their third war in less than six years.

Israel and Hamas fought similar conflicts in Gaza in both 2012 and over the New Year in 2009.

"You have children who are going to be scarred for life because of what they are seeing," said Weibel. Even before the war, some 60,000 children in Gaza were in need of psychosocial support, she said, and the number is expected to soar after this conflict.

The potential for such problems is evident every day in Gaza – wide-eyed children seeing their relatives and friends buried after shelling. One boy among the crowd hit by Israeli fire on the beach escaped unhurt, but was hysterical and inconsolable. "They're dead, they're dead," he cried over and over.

Miko Peled was born in Jersusalem into a famous and influential Israeli Zionist family. His father was a famous General in the Israeli Army, of which Miko also served his time. When Miko's niece was killed by Palestinian suicide bombers, you may have expected the family to put Palestinians at fault, but surprisingly they blamed the state of Israel, and their violent torturing and persecution for driving people to such sadness that they would take their own lives.

Through his father's deep knowledge of the Israeli war of terror, together with his own research, Miko Peled ruins the myths surrounding the Israel and Palestine situation, and delivers a truth so damning that many Jews and Israel supporters will not be able to bear it. He reveals facts such as the original expelled Jews are not the ones returning, and they are not their descendants either, covers the double standards regarding the right of return, which doesn't apply to Palestinians, and dispels the myth that there has been a conflict for ages by producing proof that it was peaceful up until 1947 when Israel launched their illegal attacks.

Miko is just one of the many modern day Jews against Zionism and the state of Israel, and with the information he delivers in this astounding talk, it is not difficult to see why more and more Jews are rejecting Zionism and calling for the dismantling of Israel. It is a true eye-opener for anyone who has for too long been blinded by the fake misinformation given by the mainstream media, and the truths come straight from the heartland where he has spent many years documenting the real story. 

IsraelGazaGaza StripHamasIsrael-Palestine conflictIsrael-Palestinian conflictIsrael-Hamas conflictchildrencrimes against childrenvictimsconflictUnited Nations (UN)

VOMITORIUM VICEROYAL VILLIERS

Rule Britannia For Global Crimes

By Finian CunninghamMay 12, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - It’s an anthem that is usually sung with chest-thumping pride and misty eyes by British imperialists. “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves”. This jingoistic celebration of Britain’s former global conquest may yet degenerate into “Rue Britannia, Britannia rues the waves”.

This is because, as The Guardian newspaper reports this week, the London government has at long last been forced into recognizing compensation payments for as many as 50,000 Kenyan nationals who were victims of torture and other crimes against humanity during that country’s independence struggle in the 1950s. The eventual bill for compensation could run up to tens of millions of pounds.

But the bad news for financially bankrupt Britain does not end there. With this precedent established of compensation for past British imperialist crimes, that now leaves the way open for a global flood of similar claims.

Jingoistic British imperialists may therefore soon rue their often-made reference to Britain ruling the waves and so many countries the world over - at the height of the British Empire some 20 percent of the globe’s land mass was under colonial domination. That’s a lot of people who can claim recompense for past British horrors and deprivation.

If the bill for Britain’s crimes against humanity in Kenya alone runs into tens of millions of pounds, then we can easily multiply that sum manifold if the millions of other victims from across the world who suffered under the British jackboot come forward to claim justice.

The Guardian listed just a handful of additional class-action cases for compensation against the British government. They included the former colonies of Cyprus, Yemen, Swaziland and British Guiana. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when measuring Britain’s global legacy of crimes and human suffering. Many others would include Britain’s dirty wars and repressive colonial regimes in Bahrain, British Somaliland, Burma, Ghana, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Oman and Zimbabwe. Even that list is far from complete.

Iran presents a challenging case too. After the British-assisted coup in 1953 that led to the 26-year reign of terror under Shah Pahlavi, tens of thousands of Iranians were subjected to torture by the Western-trained and armed Savak secret police. Iranians therefore have a case for compensation against the British government.

Previously, the British House of Lords decreed arbitrarily that no cases for compensation stemming from before 1954 can be brought to an English court. Fortunately for the British establishment, that ruling excludes millions of more potential litigants from former British India, which gained independence in 1947.

Given the appalling suffering inflicted by the British overlords in India - from starvation, massacres, mass imprisonment and destruction of farming and textile livelihoods to give British exporters a competitive advantage - the resulting claims if filed to the Exchequer would definitely spell good night for Britain’s sputtering economy. Far from ruling the waves, Britannia would sink to a watery grave.

But the real point perhaps is more about principle than money - important though material redress is to victims of injustice. What the case of the Kenyans against the British government is really achieving is to strip bare the truth about Britain’s imperial legacy. British national conceit and history books are replete with double standards and moral relativism. It is too widely and fatuously assumed that Britain’s Empire represented somehow a benevolent contribution to history. British people, and unfortunately English-language academia and media across the world, tend to perceive Britain’s “decolonization” - its retreat from imperial territories - as a magnanimous gesture of granting independence. This delusional notion is best summed up in the Orwellian term “the British Commonwealth of nations”.

With conceited moral duplicity, Britain insists that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany must pay out compensation to victims of their conquests. But no such obligation pertains to Britain, according to the British rulers. Why not? Only imperial arrogance and a certain sense of victor’s justice stemming from the Second World War are invoked to subjectively justify that contradiction. In the world of objective facts and evidence, Britain is equally liable for redress to its global victims of crimes against humanity.

When Britain set out to destroy the Mau Mau struggle for Kenya’s political independence during the 1950s, the British were not interested in benign, passive “decolonization”. For the British rulers, it was a life-or-death challenge to the entire global system of British Empire and its exploitative excrescence on the world. The same British “siege mentality” manifested ruthlessly against the independence movements in all its colonies.

Up to 300,000 Kenyans were incarcerated in concentration camps during what the British euphemistically called “The Emergency”. That same quaint word - “Emergency” - was used by the British to dissemble their barbarism and brutality in Burma against pro-independence communist guerrilla. During Bahrain and Northern Ireland’s struggle for freedom from Britain’s unlawful dominance, the preferred euphemism for repression was “The Troubles”.

But these semantics aside, the nature of repression meted out by British rulers and their officers was systematically criminal and brutal and comparable to the worst genocidal regimes the world has known.

The Kenyan Mau Mau may have suffered the most, probably owing to a twist of racist depravity among the white British counterinsurgency practitioners. Kenyan prisoners were castrated and roasted over fires by British officers using methods of torture that even classified British records explicitly sanctioned as “Gestapo techniques”.

During the British suppression of the Cypriot insurgency during the 1950s, inmates were routinely tortured by water-boarding sessions in which Kerosene was added to the drowning water. Later, during the 1970s in Northern Ireland’s conflict, Irish prisoners were incarcerated without charge and tortured by hooding, prolonged wall-standing, sleep deprivation, white noise and intimidation with guard dogs, not to mention routine physical beatings.

If such torture and generally repressive regimens sound similar to what has since been uncovered in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay it is because they are wholly consistent. These are the standard operating practices of British military doctrine and that of its close American ally.

The reason why such barbarity continues to be practiced is because of the moral duplicity and propagandized version of history that the Western media and academia instill. Barbarity is something that others perpetrate, not us.

The glacial pace of justice - as shown by the more than six decades’ delay for the Mau Mau victims of British crimes - is reflective of the massive public deception instilled by Western media on behalf of their criminal governments.

However, thanks to the courageous pursuit of justice by many people across the world, this edifice of deception will eventually be broken down. This is imperative as a matter of justice for the millions of victims of British crimes against humanity.

But, in addition, the exposure of British criminality is crucial to deleting the duplicity that serves to give contemporary British and other Western governments a veneer of legitimacy. Britain has no right to pontificate and brow beat Syria, Iran or any other nation about “international obligations”. With the full record of British criminality on display, this is a country that, far from lecturing others, should be made to hang its head in shame and remain silent.

Finian Cunningham, is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio

Comments (9 DrS· 11 hours ago Many now will seek compensation from the colonial powers. It will bankrupt many and will ensure there is no recovery. Could things be any more bleak than that? It is understandable why many non-Westerners want justice. Can you blame them!? Reply Basic James Rabbit· 11 hours ago The anthem continues: "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves." But it is obviously untrue. "Anyone will tell you it's a prison island, hidden in a cloud for 10,000 years." Jigsaw· 11 hours ago Good article The British Empire was monstrous in it's disregard for the living conditions of most of it's unwilling 'subjects' throughout the world. It was not unique in that as far as empires go but because they controlled the fate of more people so the number of casualties was much greater. One thing perhaps nearly unique about the Brit empire was it's love of settler colonialism, they wanted to eventually transform entirely - new landmasses they claimed... through eradicating the natives and importing white people to create a new nation on the old... They were the most successful in history at doing this - the scarce, marginalised populations of native peoples in N America and Australia are a testament to this. Be thankful they do not 'rule the waves' today as they used to, bad as the yanks are at least there are still Vietnamese people abundant in Vietnam and plenty of Iraqis living a (mostly) unchanged Iraqi way of life today... Although you see in some actions like Starvation sanctions (so beloved of 'liberals') a whiff of the old British Imperial indifference to mass civilian suffering. Reply 1 reply · a Ipse_Dixit· 1 hour ago The Spanish and Portuguese did similar things in Latin America. And in fairness it was the United States that committed genocide rather than Britain. Reply Fitzhenrymac· 11 hours ago Don't forget the indigenous peoples such a Australian Aborigines and Canadian Indians and Inuits. Overall more than 90% of the earth felt the lash of the British Empire including Britain itself. Read more at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32946.htm Reply voxpopbc· 10 hours ago The English ruling class today are the direct descendants of the Normans who conquered England in 1066. As Vikings (recently arrived in NW France from Scandinavia) they had no empathy with their newly defeated Germanic Anglo-Saxon peasants. Like other ethnic in-groups (Israel?) they emotionally distanced themselves from the majority of their fellows. This led them to readily extend this attitude to foreign lands when they created the British Empire. Sadly, some of their direct descendants also formed the US elite who have continued this imperial nightmare. Reply No JO Jo· 9 hours ago Nazi Germany must pay out --Wrong! England and gang brother France declared war on Germany 1938 and fire bombed several German cities. Why? Because Germany invaded Poland. Germany had a good right to do it--Polish Jews were being abused and Unlce USA Scam was funding the Nazi government to send Polish Jews into Palestine--record 175,000. And what was Eng's terror business to go after Germany? Same as USA--get control of all of Europe. It did work-NATO and millions more Jews to Palestine Reply ian· 9 hours ago then the people can after the french for their atrocities in northern africa and while they consider that go after the italians for their brutal treatment of the libyians but tell me how can you get anyone in the US to front any tribunal when they don't recognise any international laws Reply BP Storm· 8 hours ago The British have invaded all but 20 or so nations on Earth. That says something right there. Just ask a native Tasmainian what they think of Britain. That's a joke son, you can't ask a native Tasmainian what they think of Britain, because Britain killed them all. Marched women and children(not to mention the men) over cliffs into the Sea. The Brits will tell you that they are civilized though. Not really though, England is not Civilized. The English are just a bunch of Dandies. Like that Prime Minister they have now. The Irish called the Union Jack(and still do to this day) the Butcher's Apron. They have invaded Afghanistan at least 5 times since 1839. And they have gotten their butts kicked out everytime. They pulled out a few weeks ago leaving The Americans and NATO holding the bag, because they know what Afghanistan becomes when conquerers begin to loose power, as will happen as the US pulls out. Prince Harry in his brilliance called the Afghans a bunch of Towel Heads a few years ago, easy to see the racism involved. The only important thing to ever come out of Britain were some Rock'n'Roll bands. Everything else was crime laden.