KABOBfest » Mohammad

U of Michigan students walkout on IDF

Mohammad — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 17:12:53 +0000

As part of its constant propaganda efforts that aim to sterilize and justify Israeli atrocities, especially on Gaza, Stand With Us [As We Perpetrate Apartheid] sent two Israeli soldiers to speak at the University of Michigan. There, the war criminals began justifying the murder of Gaza’s besieged refugees, and were subject to this:

Now I see where Fadi and Will’s crazed love for UM comes from.

3 minute recap: Obama’s UN speech

Mohammad — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:03:03 +0000

Barack Obama, the US president, has urged countries in the United Nations to get behind Middle East peace efforts in an address at the UN General Assembly.

But Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American journalist and co-founder of Electronic Intifada, an independent web site about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, said Obama’s speech did not represent anything new.

“That bodes very ill for the peace process that he’s so invested in,” Abunimah told Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi, speaking from the US state of Indiana.

“Let’s judge him not by what he says, but what he does.”

My mother, the infiltrator

Mohammad — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:13:01 +0000

My mother is an illegal infiltrator. She has infiltrated her hometown, where her parents were born and where she was raised. Her activities as an infiltrator are as varied as they are nefarious: She takes my sister to school, with the neighbor’s kids. She cooks and cleans her home. We actually purchased that home so that she would have a base to operate from once she had infiltrated. She goes to the gym (I suspect infiltrators probably do need to stay in shape). She visits her sisters; I can’t say for sure if they assist her illegal activities. I’m sure they provide moral support at least. She helps care for her brother’s young children. You see my uncle might have been an infiltrator. They kicked him out of his homeland too, said he didn’t have the right permit to live there. He actually did, but they didn’t want to renew it. He was kept away from his kids for years. Eventually, he was given permission to infiltrate again, but he died a few months later, before this ruling came into effect. So maybe he became an infiltrator posthumously. I don’t know.
I’m not sure when my mother stopped being a member of the community she grew up in, or a resident of the town where she was raised. Maybe it was when she fell in love with a dangerous inmate. It wasn’t a maximum security prison back in those days-he’d actually been allowed to leave Gaza to study. They met in university: she the future infiltrator, he the future prisoner. They were in love, with each other and with Palestine. And love is what screwed them up.
They decided to get married, and you just can’t do that if you’re a Palestinian. It’s not up to you to decide who you marry and where you live and where your kids will be raised or if you can even live together in your own country. That’s all up to the Zionists to decide. So they went ahead and decided that my dad can’t live in the West Bank, because he escaped from that coastal prison. The same rule applies to me, because I was born in Gaza. I tried telling them I didn’t want to be born there, that I’d wanted to be born in Fallujah like my grandfather, but it didn’t matter to them. We were both born in Gaza, so Zionism had bestowed upon us Gaza IDs to prove it. They are in Hebrew. I don’t read Hebrew.
So my mother went back to where she grew up with her eight siblings and countless cousins and neighbors and friends and memories and all that. She went back and tried to live her life again there in the West Bank. But history always catches up with criminals; an unseen clerk in the vast monstrosity that is the Israeli occupation authority had found her guilty of marrying the inmate a couple of decades back. Her (Hebrew) West Bank ID disappeared. She got the Gaza ID instead. And suddenly, one night as she lay asleep in her bed, she became an infiltrator in her own home, her own town, her own country.
Now she is a criminal, but it only seems fitting that a Palestinian would be a criminal for living in their own home. It happened in the lands occupied in 1948, so why shouldn’t it happen in the West Bank? I haven’t seen her for a year, because I’m not allowed in and she can’t get out. And now a mother might get torn away from her kids and sisters and nephews and nieces and sent away, or maybe even thrown in jail for seven years.
This is life under the boot of Zionist population control. Going back to live in your hometown is now infiltrating. Marrying a Palestinian with the wrong ID gives the army the right to split up your family. You don’t decide where to live, or with whom. You can’t see your spouse or your children at will. And when someone in the occupation army decides to change the rules overnight, you know another aspect of normal living will have become criminalized.

We used rubber coated steel bullets!

Mohammad — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:05:32 +0000

The killing of unarmed civilians is commonly referred to as murder, and the Israeli Occupation Forces have gotten so used to doing it with impunity that they now longer bother disputing the charges-only the method of killing.

As demonstrations broke out across the West Bank in the last ten days or so in response to continuous Israeli colonization and more restrictions on Palestinian movement, dozens have been arrested (including pre-teen children), kidnapped by undercover thugs, or wounded by live ammunition. Yesterday, the first two fatalities occurred when Zionist troops shot dead Mohammad Qadus, 20, and Usaid Qadus, 16, both from the village of Iraq Burin near Nablus.

The murders occurred as Israeli soldiers invaded the village, whose residents were resisting the weekly attacks by settlers from the illegal colonies surrounding Iraq Burin. The occupation army didn’t bother pretending it hadn’t killed the two young men, but contended the type of ammunition used. Rather than apologizing for ending two innocent lives (which in the context of occupation and dispossession wouldn’t mean much anyway), the Israeli military claimed that it had only used rubber-coated steal bullets against the people of Iraq Burn, and not live fire. The x-ray above is of Useid Qadus’ skull, showing the live bullet lodged in his head. As Israeli human rights activist Jonathan Pollack told Maan News:

“The IDF uses two types of rubber bullets; one is shaped like a ball and the other is cylindrical .The object lodged in Useid’s skull is shaped like a prism, pointed at the end. It’s a bullet.”

The wounds on Mohammad’s body included an entry wound and exit wound-further disputing the argument that the Israeli army was only using crowd control measures and not shooting to kill.

“Rubber-coated steel bullets will not enter and exit the body in that way. It’s very clear these injuries would not have been caused by any kind of crowd-control measure,” said B’Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli.

Of course, what type of ammunition occupation forces use to kill natives protesting the theft of their land and subjugation of their rights is not important, and making such a distinction is insulting. But what gets me is the audacity of Zionism, where the murder of innocents is so inconsequential only the method of murder is discussed. It’s a self-propagating cycle of impunity for the killers, and they are at it again; two more unarmed Palestinians-Mohammad and Salah Qawaqre, both 19 years old, were shot dead today in Owarta, another village near Nablus.

Babies under siege

Mohammad — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:41:46 +0000

The latest round of false US indignation over continued Jewish-only settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank masks another criminal Israeli policy that has the full support of the Obama administration: the illegal siege and mass imprisonment of Gaza’s 1.5 million people,half of whom are refugees. The siege is around 1,000 days old now and of those who care, many have become numb to the reality of life in the Gaza ghetto. I came across this report by Aljazeera’s Casey Kauffman last year, a heart-wrenching reminder of the cruel game Israel plays with the lives of Palestinian men, women and children. The report is about 3 minutes long, but is well worth your time:

A racist who wants to stop Palestinian reproduction, and an ad so bad it might just do it

Mohammad — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:23:43 +0000

Martin Kramer, a (pretty racist) fellow at Harvard, has outlined measures to curb the Palestinian birth rate.

What century do these fuckers live in? And what kind of institution gives a platform for people who openly call for genocide? This is the danger of an ideology as illogical and as far removed from reality as Zionism; rather than understand the obvious effects its policies of displacement, subjugation, ethnic cleansing and continuous, traumatizing violence have on its victims, Israel and its supporters will use insane rationalizations for the anger it breeds. This time it’s ‘overpopulation’, and the answer to that is to cut off any humanitarian aid from the Palestinians until they starve.

Anyway, I think this ad promoting the shitty little Zionist entity will do a lot more to curb our sex lives: http://sizedoesntmatter.ca/media/videos/

BDS must target Israeli academia

Mohammad — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:18:56 +0000

The movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions called for by Palestinian civil society in 2005 against Israel continues to slowly but surely gain traction around the world as many begin to understand the importance of making Israel pay a price for its expansionism and apartheid policies.

However, one aspect of BDS that seems to make many uncomfortable is the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, with many saying that academia should never be a political target. The counterargument to this point has been made many times over, here and elsewhere, not least because Israeli academia in general contributes directly to Israel’s military research, has a leading role in formulating and developing apartheid policy and fails to stand up against the Israeli government’s frequent denial of the Palestinian right to education.

But another, even clearer reason developed two days ago when Ehud Barak ordered a college in the illegal Jewish colony of Ariel in the occupied West Bank to be officially recognized as an Israeli university, thereby giving further internal legitimacy to the illegal theft of Palestinian land and resources. This recognition sheds yet more light on the determination of Israel to permanently hold on to major areas in the West Bank and exposes the lie that the settler project is an extremist movement separate from the rest of Israeli society. Indeed, when the idea of converting the college’s status was floated in 2005, Ariel Sharon’s cabinet passed a resolution saying that it saw ‘national importance’ in transforming the college into a university-in other words, the primary motivation here is political, not academic.

While it is true that Israel’s Council of Higher Education opposes this move, I believe this university is no different than the Israeli colleges and universities built inside the Green Line on land stolen from the ethnically cleansed population of Palestine. Zionism is one movement with one goal, whether it is on land occupied in 1948 or 1967, and we must stand up to it everywhere.

Breaking the Silence creates an uproar

Mohammad — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:35:52 +0000

Israel’s war on Gaza earlier this year was one of the most gruesome and destructive chapters in the decades-old Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and dispossession. For 22 days, the Israeli army, navy and air force pounded the coastal strip, destroying tens of thousands of homes as well as schools, mosques, food depots and hospitals. Over 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of whom only about 250 were combatants.

Palestinians contended that from the very beginning of the assault, Israeli forces were operating under extremely lax rules of engagement and that the lives of Palestinian civilians were completely disregarded. Human rights organizations, investigating the war and its aftermath, concluded that Israeli soldiers were reckless and committed acts of deliberate destruction. Amnesty International found that Israeli troops had used Palestinian civilians as human shields – a war crime and tactic which Israel had continuously accused Hamas of using during the war although Amnesty found no evidence of that.

Today, Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence, has released testimony from soldiers who served in Gaza that corroborates Amnesty’s claims and vindicate Palestinian accusations of criminal conduct by Israeli soldiers.

Others spoke of the destruction of homes and mosques for no military purpose and the general attitude drummed into the soldiers by their officers that nobody in Gaza was innocent. Still others commented on the permissive use of white phosphorous in populated areas and instructions to fire if the soldiers felt any danger without verifying the threat.

The revelations will not be received with shock in many parts of the world. The total destruction, gruesome civilian death toll and heavy bombardment of the most densely populated area on earth had by themselves elicited the disgust of many around the globe. Such testimonies will simply confirm what many already knew: the Israeli army committed war crimes in Gaza.

As for the impact they will have within Israeli society, it will take a lot for the testimonies to permeate the culture of denial surrounding the war on Gaza. During the assault the war had almost universal support in Israel and across the entire political spectrum. Most Israelis are still convinced that they actually fought a defensive war; but two years after the 2006 Lebanon war, the military leadership was well aware of the Israeli public’s aversion to deaths amongst their own soldiers. At the same time, sure of the public’s indifference to the total destruction of Gaza, the soldiers operated under the guise that they were to minimize the danger to their lives at any cost. As one soldier says in his testimony, “The soldiers were made to understand that their lives were most important. There was no war our soldiers would get killed for leaving civilians the benefit of the doubt.”

Bigotry on the checkout aisle

Mohammad — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:25:12 +0000

I know the general discourse in the US over the past few years towards Muslims has tended to be harsh and disparaging, but perhaps the biggest instance of culture shock to hit me here was this image and heading, prominently displayed in a supermarket checkout line.

Now I understand the Examiner is a piece-of-shit rag that nobody reads (it’s still somehow making enough money to be in business though) but there would have been rightful outrage had blacks, Jews, Christians, Asians, whatever been generalized as ‘the enemy’ on the front page of a newspaper or magazine prominently displayed on a national supermarket chain’s checkout aisle.

Still, can’t help but feel that it would have made for amusing reading. I need to stop being so dismissive of bigoted shit.

Israel imposing low-hummus diet on Palestinian laborers

Mohammad — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:32:46 +0000

Obesity is an increasingly WIDEspread phenomenon in the Western world, but Israel, fulfilling its promise as a light unto nations, is making sure Palestinians remain healthy enough to imprison for a long time by imposing a strict diet on them.

At the Sha’ar Efraim checkpoint in Tulkarem, the private Israeli security firm that runs the checkpoint (privatizing the occupation) imposes strict limits on the food Palestinians can carry with them when crossing through. The company’s policy bans the following items:

Large bottles of frozen water and large bottles of soft drinks (they could be used in mentos rockets),
home-cooked food (the hell?),
coffee and tea (payback for any Starbucks boycotting)
zaatar. That shit is indistinguishable from marijuana after all.

The security company also dictates the quantity of items allowed:

Five pitas,
one container of hummus and canned tuna,
one small bottle or can of beverage,
one or two slices of cheese,
a few spoonfuls of sugar,
and 5 to 10 olives. The exact amount depends on the mood of the Israeli guard, but its important that the Palestinian not try to cross with less than 5 olives.
Workers are also not allowed to carry cooking utensils and work tools.This is just cultural sensitivity, because Arabs like to eat with their hands.

Of course, there is an excellent reason for such exclusively Israeli assholishness. According to the company, these insane restrictions are imposed due to ‘security and health risks’. Now who on earth saw that coming?

Honestly though, such policies might be good for Palestinians in the long run. Now those in the West Bank can understand some of what their brethren in Gaza have been going through with the Israeli-imposed limits on their food intake. Perhaps such empathy will make national conciliation easier. In the meantime, its definitely making it easier to prove how much of a prick Israel is.