The Obama administration threw a bone to gays today. Unfortunately, it was one with no meatwhatsoever on it. It offers benefits to gay couples like, get this, “relocation insurance!” Health insurance is off the table because of the Defense of Marriage Act that the Obama Justice Department defended so vigorously last week by comparing gay marriages to incestuous relationships. Apparently, Obama, as the first African-American President, is determined to prove that he loves discrimination like the best of the “bipartisan” reactionaries he loves to court.
Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children – a report
RAMALLAH, 11 June 2009] – Today, DCI-Palestine is releasing a report which documents the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force – Palestinian Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalised ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities.
The release of the report comes just days after an article was published in The Independent newspaper reporting the testimonies of two Israeli soldiers which detail the deliberate abuse of Palestinian children. One soldier is reported as saying that in an incident that occurred in a Palestinian village in March, he saw a lot of soldiers ‘just knee (Palestinians) because it’s boring, because you stand there for 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up.’
The report published today contains the testimonies of 33 children, one as young as 10 years old, who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation.
Most of these children were arrested from villages near the Wall and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There is evidence that many children are painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand.
A soldier [...] pointed his rifle at me. The rifle barrel was a few centimetres away from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me and said: ‘shivering? Tell me where the pistol is before I shoot you.’
(Ezzat, 10 years old)
Disturbingly, the report finds that these illegally obtained confessions are routinely used as evidence in the military courts to convict around 700 Palestinian children every year. And the most common charge against these children is for throwing stones. Once sentenced, the children who gave these testimonies were mostly imprisoned inside Israel in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention where they receive few family visits, and little or no education.
The report concludes that this widespread and systematic abuse is occurring within a general culture of impunity where in 600 complaints made against Israeli Security Agency interrogators for alleged ill-treatment and torture, not a single criminal investigation was ever conducted.
The report also contains recent recommendations made by the UN Committee Against Torture which expressed ‘deep concern’ at reports of the abuse of Palestinian children when it reviewed Israel’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture in May 2009.
Iran is definitely in a revolutionary situation now. Of course that doesn’t mean that the protesters will win. But it means that there is a definite contest for power and the rebels must try to win. Things have gone far enough that loss means a bloodbath, thousands or tens of thousands arrested, possible mass executions etc. Defeat of the fascist regime is necessary for survival.
Robert Fisk, who is defying the ban on foreign reporters reporting — “I rather think an awful lot of journalists take it too seriously. If you get in a car and go out and see things, no-one’s going to stop you, frankly.” — tells of the military protecting protesters and of policemen smiling at them:
I’ve just been witnessing a confrontation, in dusk and into the night, between about 15,000 supporters of Ahmadinejad – supposedly the president of Iran – who are desperate to down the supporters of Mr Mousavi, who thinks he should be the president of Iran.
There were about 10,000 Mousavi men and women on the streets, with approximately 500 Iranian special forces, trying to keep them apart.
It was interesting that the special forces – who normally take the side of Ahmadinejad’s Basij militia – were there with clubs and sticks in their camouflage trousers and their purity white shirts and on this occasion the Iranian military kept them away from Mousavi’s men and women.
In fact at one point, Mousavi’s supporters were shouting ‘thank you, thank you’ to the soldiers.
One woman went up to the special forces men, who normally are very brutal with Mr Mousavi’s supporters, and said ‘can you protect us from the Basij?’ He said ‘with God’s help’.
It was quite extraordinary because it looked as if the military authorities in Tehran have either taken a decision not to go on supporting the very brutal militia – which is always associated with the presidency here – or individual soldiers have made up their own mind that they’re tired of being associated with the kind of brutality that left seven dead yesterday – buried, by the way secretly by the police – and indeed the seven or eight students who were killed on the university campus 24 hours earlier.
Quite a lot of policeman are beginning to smile towards the demonstrators of Mr Mousavi, who are insisting there must be a new election because Mr Ahmadinejad wasn’t really elected. Quite an extraordinary scene.
There were a lot of stones thrown and quite a lot of bitter fighting, hand-to-hand but at the end of the day the special forces did keep them apart.
Fisk also reports that some official institutions seem to be trying to build bridges to the opposition at the same as the militias are trying to crush them:
You’ve got to realise that what’s happening at the moment is that the actual authorities are losing control of what’s happening on the streets and that’s very dangerous and damaging to them.
It’s interesting that the actual government newspapers reported at one point that Sunday’s march was not provocative by the marchers. They carried a very powerful statement by the Chancellor of the Tehran University, condemning the police and Basij, who broke into university dormitories on Sunday night and killed seven students.
They’ve even carried reports of the seven dead after the march on Sunday … almost as if, not to compromise but they’re trying to get a little bit closer to the other side.