Carrying forward from the previous If HAMAS had wanted Israel to back off, it would have offered to release all its hostages post, an amazing?, baffling?, otherworldly?, Alice in wonderlandly”, Wizard of Oddly? back and forth with someone using a fake name, which tends to give me the willies in important matters.
Feral Finster
Lord, Biden could end this with a phone call.If he wanted to.
Sloan BashinskyHe could try to end it with a phone call, but do you really think Israel would fold?Feral FinsterThey would have no choice. The US not only provides material support but also strongarms any criticism of Israel.
That said, the point is academicBecause Biden doesn't even try.
Sloan BashinskyI wish he would try, and I think the fellow leading Israel might tell Biden to chill, if he wanted to keep breathing :-)
Feral FinsterBull.Sloan BashinskyI don’t think you have had much, if any, dealing with religious fanatics. Can you, instead, imagine the fellow leading Israel telling Biden to chill, or risk forcing Israel to use its nukes to insure its survival against Islam? I wager that threat already has been made behind the scenes. The fellow leading Israel already made the threat publicly.Feral FinsterSo Israel is going to murder the leader of their main base of support. Boy, good thing there's no Secret Service, no religious fanatics who want Biden dead already.Sloan BashinskyYou still demonstrate that you know nothing about religious fanatics. If Biden told his counterpart in Israel to stand down, and Trump told his MAGAS that Biden was betraying God, Israel, Christendom, The Holy Land, how do you think that might go for Biden?Feral FinsterSo there never have been religious fanatics threatening the life of a president before?Sloan BashinskyThere has never been anything like Donald Trump and his MAGAs since the North defeated the South. How’d that go for Abe Lincoln?Feral FinsterThat assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. Booth wasn't a religious fanatic and there was no Secret Service to speak of in 1865.Sloan BashinskyThe Confederacy was a religion of slavery fanatics.How do you think the Kennedy family even today feels about the Secret Service? What happened to John F. Kennedy and Robert F .Kennedy, surrounded by Secret Service agents, and to President Ronald Regan, surrounded by Secret Service agents, is paled by what can happen to people Donald Trump fingers. A New York state judge and his law clerk know all about that. As do the Capitol police and every person in the US Congress on January 6, 2021, and that threat has only gotten much larger. Meanwhile, Israel is pounding Gaza again, and HAMAS is not offering to release all the remaining hostages in exchange for Israel standing down.Feral FinsterSo basically anything you don't like is a "religious fanatic". And what stopped all manner of Muslim fanatics from assassinating every US president since Bush 1.0?For that matter, if MAGA is this violent cult of Trump automatons ready to do anything their master's behest, what's stopping him from giving the order now?Sloan BashinskyAt the core, any kind of fanaticism is a religion. Blaming everything on Israel is a religion. Blaming everything on islam, or HAMAS, is a religion.
Trump gives his lemmings orders ongoing, and they listen carefully to what he is telling them. Look at how they responded on January 6, 2021.
Look how they responded to Trump's condemnations of the New York judge and his law clerk.
Imagine what it will be like for the judges in the other court cases where Trump stands trial. And for the prosecutors, witnesses for the prosecution and jurors. Imagine what it will be like if Trump is convicted. Imagine what it will be like if he is not elected president, again.Feral FinsterSo pretty much everything is a religion,.LO, so by that logic, religious fanatics will never go away, so how can any president do anything? I mean, by your logic, there are millions of "religious fanatics" who don't like Biden's Israel policy and yet Biden isn't cowering in fear of *them*. Nor are the judges who stand over Trump apparently swayed.And you still don't answer what's stopping Trump from ordering his mindless zombies to attack.*right now*. Why wait?Sloan BashinskyI have to give you credit for persistence, Feral Finster is a great fake name for you :-).
If Biden isn’t concerned for his own safety, and the safety of his family, over how he has dealt with Israel lately, then he truly is sleepy and unwoke, :-)
Yes, just about every movement that persists becomes a religion. That’s why it’s so important not to get tangled up and trapped in any herd. Visiting herds, mingling with herds for a while, is one thing. Becoming trapped in a herd is something else altogether.
The Democratic Party is a religion. The Republican Party is a religion. Trump started his own religion - MAGA - and he is its Pope, or Führer, if you wish.
The so-called American Founding Fathers very well understood religions, having come from the British Isles, where the King was the Pope. Many early colonists had fled religious oppression. Amendment 1 was passed, among other reasons, to protect freedom of religious worship and also to protect against any religion taking over the new nation.
However, religion, or the Devil, if you wish, is very clever and tricky, and has ways of working its way into anything and taking it over and making a mess of things with it, as the American government and its political parties have demonstrated since the end of the Revolutionary War.
Yes, religious fanatics will never go away, because their religions are their reasons for being. That’s what I’ve tried to explain many times in this and other online forums. What’s going on in Gaza and Israel and that region of the world is the result of religious fanaticism. Meaning, there is nothing that will fix it, just as there is nothing that will change the way MAGAS think about Donald Trump, or what Trump thinks about himself. I deal with Democrats who are just as dug in about their religion and Biden.
I think Trump is criminally insane, or, if you wish, demonically possessed. However, that does not mean he is an idiot. Like Hitler did with most Germans, Trump figured out how to mesmerize almost half of the people in America. He figured out how to speak to them in code, what he very well knew would get him in a great deal of trouble if he spoke to them in plain English. Yet, he didn’t really speak to them in code leading up to and on January 6, 2021.
Now that Trump is not in office, and is being prosecuted civilly and criminally in courts over which he has no control, he has reverted to very clever guerrilla warfare. If he gets elected president again, he will be far more obvious in what he says.
Every Judge presiding over a court case against Trump knows his/her life is at risk. I know this, because I practiced law a good while in Alabama, and I tried my share of cases before judges and juries, and before that, I clerked for a United States District Judge in Birmingham. I knew that federal judges, who handed down civil rights decisions not pleasing to the KKK, put their lives at risk. A U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, who lived in B/irmingham, was killed by a letter bomb mailed to his home. His wife barely survived. Letter bombs were sent to other people involved in that appellate judge's civil rights decisions.
That said, if I were a judge presiding over Tump's court cases, I would appoint a panel of forensic psychiatrists to determine and advise me whether or not Trump is criminally insane. If they advised me he is criminally insane, I would order him locked up for the public’s protection in a place that houses the criminally insane.
If the panel of forensic psychiatrists did not so advise me, either because they were sincere, or because they were terrified for their own safety, I would tell Trump and his lawyers that only his lawyers speak in the courtroom, unless Trump is on the witness stand, testifying, or I ask him a question. That’s how court cases operate when a party is represented by legal counsel.
I would tell Trump and his lawyers, when Trump is on the witness stand, he answers questions in plain English, and if he goes off topic, he gets to go to jail for being in contempt of court, and he stays there until he agrees to conduct himself the way a party to a court proceeding is supposed to contact him or her self.
If I let Trump out of jail and he ignores my order, I put him back in jail and have a one-way Zoom-like video beamed into his cell, so he can see and hear what is going on.
If at anytime, in court, on social media, or talking with the news media away from court, Trump says anything that I think threatens me, any court employee, the prosecution team, a witness, the jury, I hold him in criminal contempt of court, which is very different from civil contempt, and I leave him in jail until hell freeze over, or a higher court overrules me, and if that happens, I resign and invite the appellate judges to preside over the case.
Along the way, I fully expect to be killed.Feral FinsterLol, by your meandering logic, any politician anywhere is unable to act at all. Because "religious fanatics", itself a term so broad as to be meaninglAnd the only thing your insistence on beclowning yourself over and over is is to tell us about your prejudices.Sloan BashinskyPoliticians act all the time, for better and for worse. Hedges is running an Inquisition against Israel and giving HAMAS a pass. I agree with prosecuting Israel, but don’t agree with giving HAMAS a pass. That’s where I seem to have split off from Hedges, you, and everyone else I have interacted with under Hedges's newsletters, and other other newsletters which take the same approach as Hedges.The Israel button in America is red hot. It has been red hot for a long time. The American religious right are fanatical to support Israel. Trump knows that, and he uses it to keep them loyal. President Biden is a pussy, in my opinion. He should have told Israel to lay low after October 7, or lose his support. Biden didn’t do that. Had he done it, he would have put his life and his family members’ lives at risk, even without Trump egging on the pro-Israel fanatics in America. I think you need to talk with someone else about all of that. Godspeed.
After all of that happened, I “accidentally" stumbled across a December 2, 2023 London Times article, which reports sexual and other atrocities committed by HAMAS against women during the October 7 attack. The Times article should, but probably won’t, obliterate any notion that HAMAS is not an Islamic terrorist organization, which hoped Israel would respond as it has in Gaza.
Here’s the text of the article.
First Hamas fighters raped her. Then they shot her in the head
The terrorists were ‘on a mission’ to carry out sexual attacks on October 7. Campaigners have asked why the UN stayed silent
December 2 2023, The Sunday Times
She had, he says, the face of an angel. Night after night Yoni Saadon, 39, wakes in anguish to the faces of women.
First, that of the young woman hiding next to him under the stage of the Supernova festival where he had been dancing to electronic music as the sun rose on October 7 and Hamas militants opened fire.
“She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,” he said. “I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”
After an hour, he peeked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.
“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters,” added the father of four. “Or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”
The horror did not end there. Hiding in bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters. “They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.
Saadon, a shift manager in a foundry, told his story to The Sunday Times in a support area set up in Sitria, southeast of Tel Aviv, for survivors of the festival.
Three times a week survivors from around Israel get together with parents whose children were among those slaughtered. On Wednesday evening they gathered on sofas as people brought them beers and steaming bowls of vegetable soup, then went outside to sit round a firepit as the singer Rona Kenan strummed her guitar and sang ballads.
Volunteer therapists on hand included Bar Yuval-Shani, 58, who lost her only sister, Deborah, and brother-in-law, Shlomi Matias, both musicians and peace activists, killed on Holit kibbutz by militants who broke into their safe room. “She was eight years younger but [it was] as if we were twins,” she said tearfully. “I held all her secrets and I miss her terribly.”
Deborah died shielding her son Rotem, 16, who was shot in the abdomen then hid for nine hours as fighters returned again and again, and Yuval-Shani guided him over the phone in how to treat himself.
Yoni Saadon’s account is one of several witness accounts of rape Yuval-Shani has heard from festival survivors, all of whom, she says, are “deeply traumatised”.
Eight weeks after the attack in which 1,200 were killed and 240 taken hostage, there is mounting evidence of widespread rape on October 7. Israeli police have begun their biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women. “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people,” says Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the investigation.
They have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips, which she says “as a Jewish mother the mind and soul cannot bear”, including “girls whose pelvises were broken they had been raped so much”.
The first indications came on the day itself when Hamas livestreamed some of the horrors it was perpetrating. Footage showed several women stripped of their clothing. One video showed a young woman with bloodstains on the crotch of her underwear.
“We didn’t understand at first,” says Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an expert on international law who heads a civilian commission into Hamas crimes against women on October 7. Survivors arriving at hospitals were not asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits for evidence.
However, those tasked with collecting the bodies began reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals.
Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, a voluntary religious organisation that collects the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they can be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition, has no doubt about what they saw.
“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said. “No one saw more than us. “It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”
He describes finding two girls’ bodies in a field, both shot in the head, legs apart, one with shorts ripped and shot in the vagina and other with jeans pulled down and bruises on her legs. A father of six, he finds it hard to talk about. “One of my girls is 24, around the same age,” he says. His team are all receiving therapy.
Once the bodies were collected they were taken to the main morgue at the Shura military base to be identified and prepared for burial. Among volunteers in an all-female team to prepare female corpses was Shari, 60, an architect who lives in Jerusalem.
Working there day and night for two weeks starting the morning after, she describes scenes of unimaginable horror. “This is a huge building but there were literally body bags filling every room and lining corridors floor to ceiling, all oozing liquids.
“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see. They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.
“Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”
Her team had to wait while doctors, dentists and DNA experts worked to identify the bodies before they could then gently put them in white linen burial shrouds. “We are just normal women not doctors, we never expected to see such horrors,” she said. Yet what really made them cry was the occasional flash of colour. “Some bodies we took out had pretty pink or bright purple nails — and we would all pause and at that point many of us broke down.”
As more and more reports emerged, Elkayam-Levy was shocked at the lack of international reaction from bodies such as UN Women. On the eighth day she gathered a group of international law and women’s rights experts, including 160 law professors, and drafted letters to UN agencies sharing everything.
The initial response, she says, was silence. “It was absurd that it was so documented yet accompanied by so much silence. One of the UN’s own values is ‘believe women’ as crimes against women are always denied but they failed to believe us — the very organisations meant to protect us failed us.”
The women established a civilian commission to collect videos, photos, and witness statements into a database, both as an archive but also to raise international awareness.
Elkayam-Levy says these make clear what Hamas was trying to achieve. “They wanted to terrorise us for generations to come and instil in us insecurity in the most basic way, and that’s why they targeted women in this way.
“I’m a feminist,” she adds, “I teach and fight for women’s rights, yet after October 7 I told my husband to get a gun. For me to want a weapon and put it in my house — against everything I believe in and ever believed in — shows what they did to us.”
Israel Defence Forces (IDF) sources claim that Hamas fighters captured in Gaza have told them in interrogations that they were instructed to “dirty” or “whore” the women. They also showed The Sunday Times photographs and footage not previously seen and too graphic to publish.
Some have questioned the accounts because of the IDF use of propaganda and the fact no victims have come forward. But Dr Dvora Baumann, director of the Bat Ami Centre for Victims of Sexual Abuse at Hadassah hospital, points out: “Usually people who are sexually abused don’t report it for a long time because it is so hard to talk about and they worry they will be judged. We have plenty of other evidence. I’ve been in this field over 20 years and I have never heard such horrific things.”
Most of the women are believed to have been killed or taken hostage. There are reports some survivors of the festival survivors have taken their own lives, while 18 are receiving treatment in mental institutions.
Some fear that those remaining are being held as sex slaves by Hamas commanders in the same way as Islamic State (Isis) did with Yazidis in 2014.
Paradoxically, in a world where rape is being used as a weapon of war everywhere from Ethiopia to Ukraine, this had been cited as one conflict where it did not happen.
Hamas denies that its fighters rape women. One official, Basem Naim, told The Washington Post that the group considers “any sexual relationship or activity outside of marriage to be completely haram” — forbidden by Islam.
Palestinian women say they too have suffered sexual violence in Israeli jails, a claim denied by Israeli officials.
The International Criminal Court has announced it will investigate the October 7 attacks and the situation in Gaza where about 15,000 people have been killed and fighting resumed on Friday. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor, has spent the last two days in Israel meeting survivors and hostage families in Tel Aviv and visiting the West Bank. “We will investigate crimes within our jurisdiction … depending on the information we have and evidence potentially available,” he said. This is expected to include sexual violence.
For the past week, a delegation of Israeli feminists and human rights experts have been in Geneva and New York lobbying to be heard. Tomorrow they will protest outside the UN headquarters, and Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, will speak.
On Friday night UN Women finally issued a statement condemning the October 7 attacks. “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during these attacks,” it said.
Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who spent 12 years as a committee member on the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (Cedaw), said: “This is the statement they should have issued two months ago.
“It’s mindblowing. We were there for our sisters when terrible things happened across the ocean, when they took away abortion rights in US, the killing of women in Iran, the abduction of Yazidis … but with us they looked away and I can’t think of a reasonable answer.”
Ayelet Razin Bet Or, the former director of Israel’s authority for the advancement of the status of women, does have an answer. “Israeli women have been betrayed,” she said. “What they are saying is MeToo except if you’re a Jew.”
slooanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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