Posted: 24 Aug 2011 01:41 AM PDT
Islam was the second two-year-old to be killed by Israeli
drone strikes in two days.
by Alison Weir
He looks at the camera with bright eyes and the beginning of
a smile, wearing a miniature dark blue zipper sweatshirt, the cuffs folded up a
bit to make it fit.
I can imagine his mother dressing him that morning, making
sure he would be warm enough. I wonder if she’s the one who took the picture.
Someone has written on the photo “kisses.”
It’s not a
formal picture. He’s outside on a sunny day. It looks like he was probably
moving when the picture was snapped; his arms seem to be swinging a little. As
with most almost two-year-olds, I suspect it was hard to get him to stay still
long enough for a photo.
It’s a happy picture, the kind that makes you smile; perhaps
it reminds you of funny, energetic little children you know or remember.
2 year old
Islam’s Death from an Israeli drone strike
Until you see the next picture. It was taken on his second
birthday. His name was Islam Quraiqe’.
Death from a drone strike is not pretty. The small body is
charred, ripped apart; internal organs are pouring
out.
He had been riding with his father and uncle on a motorcycle
in Gaza when the missile hit them. His 29-year-old father, a member of
the Palestinian resistance, and 32-year-old uncle physician were also killed.
Five bystanders, including a woman, were injured.
The missile was fired remotely by an Israeli sitting in
front of a video screen and operating one of the many drones that periodically
fly over Gaza
and shoot Palestinians like fish in a fishbowl. The operators are usually female, the preferred group for this kind of desk
job.
The drones, which look like small, pilotless jets, are
equipped with precision-guided missiles.
Those operating them receive real-time video feeds from
sensors located on the drone: a color nose camera, a TV lens, an infrared
camera for low light and night, and a synthetic radar for looking through
smoke, clouds or haze. The cameras produce full motion video
as well as still frame radar images.
Numerous articles extol the virtues of Israeli drones. An August 17th article by David Rodman reports: “The Israel Air
Force (IAF) has a rich history of employing unmanned aerial vehicles in battle
with excellent results.” Rodman crows that with the possible exception of the United States, “Israel is the country most closely
identified with [drone] operations in the post-World War II period.”
Islam was the second two-year-old to be killed by Israeli
forces in two days.
The first was killed by an Israeli “precision” rocket the day
before. The boy’s name was Malek Sha’at. His father was also killed. The only
picture available online is of a small shrouded body.
An article
by reporter Aaron Klein proclaims that Israeli weapons are “capable of taking
out stationary and moving targets with minimal collateral damage.”
Perhaps Klein is right. Two years of life is decidedly
minimal. Intolerably so.
Context
During this period (August 18-20, 2011) Israeli forces killed 14 Palestinians including at least one other child,
a 13-year-old, and injured at least 50, nine of them children. Gazan resistance
forces killed one Israeli and injured about 20 . Gazan hospitals,
hard hit by the years-long Israeli siege, report that they have run out of 150
medicines and 160 types of medical equipment z9http://www.israel-palestinenews.org/2011/08/gaza-out-of-150-medicines-and-160-types.html
).
The Israeli assaults were allegedly triggered by attacks on
Thursday, August 18th, by unknown gunmen on the Egyptian border with Israel that
killed eight Israelis. Israeli forces killed the attackers in
Eilat, also shooting dead, according to the BBC, five Egyptian policemen. The
Israeli Defense Minister told Egypt
afterwards that “Israel
regrets the deaths.”
There is no evidence connecting Gazan resistance groups to
the attack, and they have denied responsibility for it. Hamas itself had maintained
a unilateral de facto ceasefire since 2009(some
independent resistance groups, however, refused to take part in this truce and
continued to launch rockets in response to Israeli actions). Groups in Egypt have periodically taken actions opposing Israel. Egyptian authorities say
they have identified three of the attackers, who appear to have been based in
the Sinai, there are reports that Israeli intelligence warned of the attack
ahead of time, and there is mounting information suggesting that the attackers
may have been Egyptian, not Gazan.
While many reports describe the Israeli actions as
retaliatory, Israeli attacks on Gaza
occur regularly and were already ongoing before the Eilat attack. Two days earlier, on
Tuesday, an Israeli air strike killed a 29-year-old Palestinian man in
the morning, and Israeli ground soldiers killed a disabled
teenager later in the day. The youth was shot more than 10 times, mostly in
the head. On Wednesday night there were more Israeli air attacks throughout Gaza. (The LA Times
called this a period of “relative calm.”) Some analysts suggest that the recent Israeli escalation
against Gaza may have been prompted, at least in
part, by a Netanyahu desire to deflect energy from the massive social protests
that have been enveloping Israel
recently.
The death toll among Gazans and Israelis has been notably
disproportionate. In Israel’s
Dec-Jan 2008-09 “Cast Lead” assault, Israeli forces killed approximately 1,387 Gazans , while resistance forces killed
nine Israelis. In the preceding year Israeli forces killed 713 Gazans;
Gazan resistance fighters killed
eight Israelis. Since “Cast Lead” through the end of July of this year,
Israeli forces killed approximately 200 Gazans; Palestinian resistance groups
killed approximately five Israelis.
Most of Gaza’s residents are
refugee families who were forcibly pushed out by Israel in its 1947-49 founding war,
in which non-Jews, who originally made up over 70 percent of the inhabitants,
were expelled.
In violation of international law, they have been prohibited
from returning to their homes and have lived under crippling Israeli occupation
for decades. Palestinian land is continually confiscated by Israel for Jewish-only
use. A popular uprising against Israeli occupation began in the fall of 2000.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said yesterday:
“Those who operate against us will be decapitated.” That night at least 100
Israeli military vehicles stormed into the West Bank city of Hebron, closing the city off for hours and
rounding up more than 50 Palestinians, including several academics and members
of charitable associations.
On Saturday, August 20th, Israeli Aerospace Industries
proudly unveiled its latest drone, known as the “GHOST,” which the company announced, “is at the forefront
of technology thanks to years of experience and knowledge acquired in the field
of unmanned aerial vehicles.”
Israel partisan and author David Rodman reports that Israeli drones “played a
substantial part” in Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war (in which Israeli forces killed
at least 17,825 Lebanese, compared to 344
Israelis killed by the Lebanese resistance) and that their use in what he
acknowledges in profound understatement were “asymmetric conflicts” – the 2006
Second Lebanon war (Israeli forces killed at least 1,125
Lebanese , almost all civilians, a third of them children; Lebanese resistance forces killed
164 Israelis, about three-quarters of them soldiers and the 2008–2009 Cast
Lead operation – “sparked renewed global interest in Israeli drone operations.”
Rodman states: “In terms of the technological sophistication of
its UAV force, Israel
is unquestionably well ahead of the pack. Only the United States is in the same
league.”
Source: Counterpunch
Images: Veterans Today
*******************************
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alison Weir is president of the Council for
the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew. She
can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org.
_______________________
BY WAY OF DECEPTION WE MAKE WAR -- MOSSAD
Posted: 24 Aug 2011 02:09 AM PDT
Of course the hijackers knew nothing about any plan to fly
into buildings like kamikaze pilots on a suicide mission
Let’s say Mossad,
Israel’s
intelligence deceivers, speaking perfect Arabic and pretending to be Arabs,
infiltrated an Al Qaeda cell and hatched a plan to highjack four planes; and
that would show everyone how clever Al Qaeda was.
The biggest political mistake I’ve ever made was to vote for
Barack Obama. I should have known that a really great campaign speaker and organizer
would probably make an inept president.
All of Obama’s emphatic talk about change sounded appealing;
even though Washington
has proven so often that it’s incapable of changing. There are just too many
self-interests needing trade-offs with other self-interests, none of which has
public needs in mind.
The fact that Obama opposed the Iraq
War carried a lot of weight with those who don’t believe America should
mind everybody else’s business.
Many had enough of Bush-Cheney war-mongering for the
neo-cons (aka American Zionists who desperately wanted America to take out Iraq
before Saddam Hussein could wage the mother of all WMDs against Israel).
So the Zioncons made up stories, pretended that fiction was
fact and lied about non-existent WMDs.
Some argue they even went so far as to arrange for the
slaughter of 3000 plus people on 9/11 with Israel’s help.
Let’s say Mossad,
Israel’s
intelligence deceivers, speaking perfect Arabic and pretending to be Arabs,
infiltrated an Al Qaeda cell and hatched a plan to highjack four planes; and
that would show everyone how clever Al Qaeda was.
Of course the hijackers knew nothing about any plan to fly
into buildings like kamikaze pilots on a suicide mission.
Once they got into the air and managed to get control of the
planes, there would be nothing else the hijackers had to do. Thank you very
much; everything would now be on remote control, with planes being flown like
drones and directed by the Pentagon.
All the Israeli-firsters needed to do now was trigger the
already placed thermal devices in the Trade Centre buildings just before the
time the flying drones were guided into the top of the twin towers.
Another plane was droned into a largely unoccupied wing of
the Pentagon, and the last–not allowed to fly into the White House–was shot
down over Pennsylvania.
The whole story is perfect enough to allow Bush to continue
reading to school children in Florida
and for Cheney to pretend fear of terror while hiding in a bunker under the
White House.
Of course the dots had to be connected between hijackers and
Al Qaeda who at first knew nothing about the operation, and later -Bin Laden
hearing they were blamed for 9/11- ignorantly accepted credit. (Editor’s
note: We have no records of Osama bin Laden ever taking credit for 9/11,
quite the opposite. The last statement made by bin Laden blamed Israel and others inside the US)
Is there any better rationale for assassinating Bin Laden,
once he was allowed to be found, than to keep him from eventually testifying
that he had nothing to do with 9/11?
Once Bin Laden claimed credit for bombing America, the
Taliban refused to turn him over to US authorities without evidence that Bin
Laden was indeed guilty.
That provided enough reason for America
to gather a coalition of 9/11 sympathizers to agree to invade Afghanistan.
Does anyone seriously believe it took 10 years to find Bin Laden? Certainly
Obama must know better!
Before locating and capturing the Al Qaeda mastermind, it
was necessary to go to war with Iraq.
In order to do that, Iraq
had to be associated with the reign of terror connecting the triumvirate of
evil: Iraq,
Iran and North Korea.
North Korea
was simply thrown into Bush’s Axis of Evil to send a message to China while pretending that the US wasn’t focusing only on Middle Eastern
threats to Israel.
Now here’s Barack Obama, foster child of Bush-Cheney, trying
to prove to the Zioncons (who have already jumped ship) that he’s as much a
warrior for Israel
as his predecessors were.
Shame on me for ignoring the lessons of history: a great
campaigner can make an inept leader!
Source of Article Paul J Balles
Images: Veterans Today
****************
Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and
freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East
for many years. He’s a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the GULF DAILY NEWS . Dr.
Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular
contributor to Bahrain
This Month.
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