generalspeaking

Friday, September 06, 2024

Palestinian Terrorism Carnage

"Following my urgent request, the UN Security Council will finally convene on Wednesday for the first time since the October 7 massacre to hold an official discussion on the hostages."
"The Security Council must condemn the terrorist organization Hamas and demand the immediate release of the [Israeli] abductees."
Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon

"These murderers executed six of our hostages, they shot them in the back of the head."
"And now, after this, we're asked to show seriousness? We're asked to make concessions [in a ceasefire agreement geared to the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas]."
"No one is more committed to freeing the hostages than me."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

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Murdered Israeli hostages Carmel Gat and Alexander Lobanov were shown in a Hamas video published on their Telegram channel on Wednesday evening. (Photo: Screenshot)

After shooting six young Israeli men and women whom Hamas terrorist operatives captured on October 7 from the grounds that hosted the Nova Music Festival, killing them at point blank range by shooting them in the back of their heads, Hamas followed up by the threat it would release videos of the "last messages" of all six of the murdered hostages. Recordings produced shortly before their deaths. This is the psychopathic savagery of Palestinian terrorism, follow up sadistic violence with equally sadistic psychological torture.

The more anguish and grief caused to Jews by Palestinians the more glee and satisfaction in their cause of destroying the Jewish state and its Jewish inhabitants. Each of the six hostages -- Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Ori Danino, 25, Almog Sarusi, 27, Alexander Lobanov,32, Carmel Gat, 40, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, were shown introducing themselves to a camera in a video shown on Telegram, while a line on the screen in Hebrew, English and Arabic reads: "Hours and we will show their last messages".

Palestinians are masters of malevolence, using their creative sadistic streak to indulge in the pleasure of striking terror in the hearts of their targets while creating narratives and scenarios of stark lethal horrors to cause the greatest pain conceivable, in the order of mutilating girls and women while raping them before murdering them. And in the instance of the six murdered Israelis, torturing them for over 300 days of abysmal confinement, starvation, abuse, then forcing them to enact a death-facing tableau before they're murdered.

All of which represents the psychological warfare they excel at while nursing their imagined state of 'victimhood' at the hands of the Jewish state. The Hamas 'armed wing' put the government of Israel on notice that they are operating under new instructions in the hostage situation; that the hostage-keepers, should they become aware that Israeli forces are approaching their location in Gaza, are to take lethal action to prevent Israeli troops from managing to rescue any of the hostages. The message to Israel is that only Hamas can control the live release of the hostages.

https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/dba53e9f-9d37-4ffa-8bd5-eb20f7db97b3/israel-gaza-1-rt-gmh-240902_1725279482693_hpMain_16x9.jpg?w=992

A combination picture shows hostages Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, and Almog Sarusi, who were kidnapped by Hamas during the October 7 attacks, and whose bodies have been found underground in the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip. Bring Them Home Now via Reuters

These new instructions, revealed a spokesperson for the al-Qassam Brigades which claims control of the hostages, dictate the instructions, while stating it is not they who are responsible for the deaths of the hostages, but Israel itself which has demonstrated the effrontery of rescues such as that in June when Israeli forces freed four hostages through a raid that in turn saw the death of dozens of Palestinians. Hamas leaders clearly feel they have the upper hand, earned with their abduction of Israelis of all ages. Knowing how dear their lives are to Israel, in contrast to the Hamas condition of expendibility of Palestinian lives for their 'cause'.

Israel's commitment to its goal of destroying the Hamas capability of mounting attacks on Israel and Israelis is non-negotiable; a recent strike dispatched a Hamas operative who had appeared in a widely viewed video from the October 7 attack, the terrorist shown drinking cola in front of two children wounded in a grenade strike that killed their father. He was identified by the IDF as Ahmed Fozi Wadia, commander of a commando battalion, member of a paragliding unit.

He had flown into the community of Netiv HaAsara on a paraglider prior to launching the attack on Israeli civilians in the targeted farming community. IAF aircraft struck a compound in Gaza City where Hamas operatives were engaged, and where eight met their deaths, Wadia included.

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Ahmed Fozi Wadia was seen drinking cola while standing over wounded children during the October 7 attack. Photo by Israel Defence Forces via X

Labels: Hamas October 7 Carnage, Israeli Hostages, Murder, Privation, Starvation, Torture

Thursday, October 07, 2021

Descending Deniability

"[We -- military colleagues would] kick them, beat them [until they're] bruised and swollen [and] until they kneel on the floor, crying."
"If you want people to confess, you use the electric baton with two sharp tips on top."
"We would tie two electrical wires on the tips and set the wires on their genitals while the person is tied up."
"Some people see this as a job, some are just psychopaths."
"They were pretending to serve the people, but they were a bunch of people who wanted to achieve a dictatorship."
"[I can never return to China] -- they'll beat me half to death. I'd be arrested. There would be a lot of problems. Defection, treason, leaking government secrets, subversion. [I'd get] them all."
"The fact that I speak for Uyghurs [means I] could be charged for participating in a terrorist group. I could be charged for everything imaginable."
Self-exiled Chinese Han former policeman 'Jiang'

"The prison guards, they asked me to take off my underwear [before telling him to bend over] Don't do this, I cried. Please don't do this. [He passed out during the attack and woke up surrounded by his own vomit and urine]."
"I saw the flies, just like flying around me. I found that the flies are better than me. Because no one can torture them, and no one can rape them."
"I saw that those guys [were] laughing at me, and [saying] he's so weak. I heard those words."
"[The next day, the prison guards asked him] Did you have a good time?"
"It's the scar in my heart, I will never forget."
Abduweli Ayup, Uyghur from Xinjing Province

"The agony and the suffering we had [in the camp] will never vanish, will never leave our mind."
"They put me in a tiger chair. They hung us up and beat us on the thigh, on the hips with wooden torches, with iron whips."
"When they put the chains on my legs the first time, I understood immediately I am coming to hell [heavy chains were attached to prisoners' hands and feet, forcing them to stay bent over, even when they were sleeping]."
"I survived from this psychological torture because I am a religious person. I would never have survived this without my faith. My faith for life, my passion for freedom kept me alive."
Omir Bekali, former Xinjiang detainee

Jiang

Perhaps the world gives pause, hearing the accounts of former Uyghur detainees of the torture they endured in Xinjiang Province throughout China's re-education program for Muslim Uyghurs whom Beijing believes poses a terrorist and separatist threat to the country. Former victims telling their stories, so unbelievably cruel, intolerable that a government, that of China's Communist Party would induce imprisoned, helpless people to 'confess' to the crime of being an ethnic, a Muslim and a conspirator in a plan to destabilize China.

But a Han Chinese, a former police detective who had been assigned like a hundred-thousand other police to travel from the mainland center to remote Xinjiang with its majority Muslim population, to restore 'harmony' by imprisoning and exacting confessions from demoralized, frightened, tortured people for whom the experience was so devastating he fled his native country to self-exile, feeling compelled to tell the world of the cultural-religious genocide taking place there.

Details of cruelty and devastation visited upon millions of people through 'opportunities' to rewire their value system, influence the rejection of their religion, disperse them elsewhere, dividing families, sterilizing women, shaming and brutalizing men. From the lips of someone who had lent himself on orders to the process. And who recoiled at the human damage he witnessed, beatings he himself took part in out of fear of survival; can his testimony be disbelieved?

He spoke of Uyghur Muslims hanged from cell ceilings, tortured with electric batons, ordered to submit to rape by fellow prisoners. The interview with CNN took place remotely, the former policeman giving his testimony from his haven in Europe, under an assumed name. Presumably protecting his identification in fear of reprisals against himself, against family members remaining in China. Jiang worked in one of the many internment camps in Xinjiang.

When he first arrived he felt a sense of patriotism among the other police recruits to staff detention centres. That lasted as long as his first encounters with reality, witness to rampant abuse. Some detainees as young as 14 subjected to human rights atrocities. Every new detainee was inducted into a beating during an initial interrogation meant to extract a confession. Many of whom became intimately introduced to the infamous 'tiger chair' where a prisoner's hands and feet are strapped to a chair for days. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation and hanging from ceilings other devices of 'interrogation'.

He now understands fully that none of the detainees was guilty of anything, arrested to meet government quotas. Once a confession was extracted inmates would be forwarded on to one of the hundreds of internment camps coloquially referred to as "vocational training" centres, where the work of freeing Uyghurs from the burden of their traditions, culture and religion would continue apace, to make good Chinese citizens of them.

A guard patrols Number 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

Labels: 'Re-education", Chinese Communist Party, Majoriity Muslim Population, Torture, Uyghur imprisonment, Xinjiang Province

Thursday, October 25, 2018

“Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent”

"Palestinian authorities have gained only limited power in the West Bank and Gaza, but yet, where they have autonomy, they have developed parallel police states."
"Calls by Palestinian officials to safeguard Palestinian rights ring hollow as they crush dissent."
Tom Porteous, deputy program director, Human Rights Watch

"A PA civil servant, arrested after a friend tagged him in a Facebook post calling for protests on the electricity crisis, spent most of his days in the Internal Security’s Gaza City detention center subjected to positional abuse… causing him to feel ‘severe pain in my kidneys and spine’ and as if his neck would ‘break’ and his ‘body is tearing up inside'."
"Palestinian forces in both the West Bank and Gaza regularly use threats of violence, taunts, solitary confinement, and beatings, including lashing and whipping of the feet of detainees, to elicit confessions, punish, and intimidate activists."
"Systematic arbitrary arrests and torture violate major human rights treaties to which Palestine recently acceded. [The] systematic practice of torture by Palestinian authorities may amount to a crime against humanity prosecutable at the International Criminal Court."
Human Rights Watch report

Palestinian security troops in Hebron, (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

The routine use of torture and arbitrary arrests used by both of the rival Palestinian governments, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza, has long been noted by the Israeli press, and by Palestinian Arab writers in detailing the behind-the-scenes activities in both governments. The world has taken little interest, considering the sources no doubt, biased. Now, Human Rights Watch has issued a report of their own highlighting the corruption and abuse suffered by Palestinians, condemning both governments for committing what the rights group equate with war crimes.

Illustrative: The hands of a young man tied with rope (nito100; iStock by Getty Images)

This, the result of a two-year investigation part of which information was elicited by interviews with close to 150 people, among them a cadre of Palestinians who had suffered detention and experienced the "machineries of repression" meant to stifle dissent. The systematic use of torture, emphasized the report, could be characterized with good reason as a crime against humanity under the United Nations' Convention Against Torture. Human Rights Watch went so far as to recommend that countries providing funding to Palestinian law enforcement suspend such financial assistance.

The government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas itself had formally joined the Convention Against Torture following the acceptance of 'Palestine' as a non-member state at the United Nations. This is typical of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas as well, portraying themselves as legitimately subscribed to upholding human rights, for their human rights as Palestinians were upended with the creation of the State of Israel, a formula accepted without question by their supporters abroad fully sympathetic to the 'cause' of the 'Palestinian homeland'.

Whipping the feet of those apprehended for questioning their government's actions and administration; forcing detainees into painful stress positions; hoisting people's arms up behind their backs with rope, and coercing suspected critics into giving access to their mobile phones and social media accounts are all detailed as methods of torturing those whom each government suspects of attempting to undermine their authority.

Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch's group director for Israel and the Palestinian territories informed a news conference that the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank had detained 220 Palestinians without charge or trial as consequences of their having posted issues on social media. Included among the detained were 65 university students and two journalists. In Gaza, Hamas detained over 45 people for their activity on social media. "These numbers do not speak to the scale which both authorities have gone to in order to shut down dissent", he added.

But he must certainly be in error, for both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority led by Fatah, factions viewing one another as enemies for whom only Israel surmounts the venom they hold for one another, both deny those accusations of less than stellar administrations.

Hamas security forces in Gaza City. (Wissam Nassar/FLASH90)

Labels: Crimes Against Humanity, Gaza, Hamas, Human Rights Watch, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians, Torture, West Bank