Why is this comment up?

It’s a bot – mods’ll yank it.
on edit: happening all over yahoo sites. Ignore.

Where are the lurking mods on this?

Ok gang … mods as usual take good care of us.

Siun, I have nothing to add to what you have put forth here. I just want to thank you for staying on top of this for us. If it were not for you and the others here that follow these events, they would probably be lost to me.

The children are the obvious reason why warhawk rationalizations are stupid and wrong. I got into an argument with a right wing co-worker several years ago who was stridently advocating for war with Iran. Of course none of the usual arguments were working because he has this illusion of the indefatigable American military and so forth. The rationalizations were the usual ones: Those people chose their leaders, they chose to ally themselves with terrorists and etc, you know the ones.
So I asked him if his 11 year old daughter chose where she lives. I asked him to think about the 11 year old girls in Tehran and to realize that they didn’t choose their leadership, they didn’t choose to live where they were living, they had no choice in what their parents believed or didn’t believe. After about three or four hours, my co-worker came up to me looking distraught and asked “Why did you have to bring up my daughter?” I replied that I did it because bombs and missiles and especially the nuclear strikes he was lobbying for don’t discriminate. Whatever their age, gender, ideology, strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, loves, hobbies or whatever, they are innocent and they will be annihilated along with the most “guilty” adults. The ones who live through it will suffer the most and much more than the most “guilty” adults. I told him that I brought up his daughter because he needed someone to put a face on what he was calling out for.
I didn’t change his fundamental belief structure but he never again advocated for a war of aggression.

But Siun, they are not children any more..they are collateral damage. See how that works? Takes the humanity right out of it completely. Much easier for the MIC to stuff down the throats of the stupid that really don’t care. Sorry you have the thankless task of keeping track of this sort of stuff.

Guess I missed it. Was it an ugly comment from a chickenhawk?

Nope … just boring everyday spam.

The Orwellian “collateral damage” really has taken over, hasn’t it.

Even with the amount of time I spend reading and writing about civilian casualties and all, the videos tonight were ones that hit me hard … the Children of Gaza just must watch and share with folks.

Spam?

Thanks for this sad and depressing story. It needs to be told. I don’t think alot of folks in this country think about how our actions effect the people in other countries. Innocent people who aren’t terrorists and are just trying to get on with it.

If I were a parent, and my child were killed or maimed by an invading country, I don’t know that I could ever forgive or forget. I don’t think I’m made like that….I also don’t think I’m alone on that point. We have got to be making more enemies than we are taking out. I don’t see how it’s avoidable.

What the heck happened to Peace on Earth and Goodwill to
All Men. Isn’t that some sort of a Christian saying?????? I’m surprised the good religious folks of this country are going absolutely ape-shit about all these wars. Hummmm……

I don’t think alot of folks in this country think about how our actions effect the people in other countries. Innocent people who aren’t terrorists and are just trying to get on with it.

That’s just it. We have a nation of armchair generals who see everybody and everything as a threat. They sit comfortably in their living rooms, behind their keyboards or at their jobs and hold forth about the “Arabs” and “Muslims” and “terrorists” and have absolutely no thought that these are flesh and blood people with hopes and dreams and families, many of whom have suffered brutally over decades. They justify it by saying that “they deserve what they get” because they “hide behind women and children” but they never address why the innocents deserve “what they get” even in the cases where actual bad people are hiding among the population. They don’t ever say how unarmed villagers are supposed to drive out trained militia who have automatic weapons. In short, they have zero clue what they are talking about and would be the first to beg for mercy if the tables were turned.

I agree and think that we have become a nation of moral cowards. I haven’t had a hero since the 60s. I want very much for someone, just anyone, to step forward and be a hero. crickets.

Lucy,

One of the saddest parts of the Children of Gaza documentary is seeing how much violence has invaded these kids’ psyches.

For the little boy in the top video, luckily someone got the video to Dr Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative and the PNI has contacted a mental health ngo to help him right away.

By the way, Barghouthi leads an effort for nonviolent change on behalf of Palestinians and has been persistently arrested and harmed by Israeli forces … including yesterday. You can read more about him here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Barghouti

The video above is a short clip, showing a small boy in the Occupied West Bank watch his father seized by Israeli soldiers. His father’s crime? He’s charged with “stealing water.” The boy’s name is Khaled Jabari and he is five years old. The Israelis have decided that the local water system, sanctioned by the Palestinian Authority and supplying water which Jabari’s father pays for – is illegal and so Israeli police rip out the community’s water pipes and arrest the local men.

A water system is a real threat to Israeli security, that is. I wonder if it was secretly a cyanide production network or the circulatory system of a giant border smashing robot? I wonder why I don’t see any apologists defending what the IDF did?

Siun, parallel universe — Baghdad. Watch the faces in the bumper video Amy Goodman uses between segments here at 23:30 (just click in the scroll bar about 1/3 of the way through). Roomful of Iraqis watching Collateral Murder on a laptop. That kid.

Does that new resolution about clean water being declared a human right (what was that?) make a difference?

Michael Moore, Julian Assange. Off the top of my head. My heroes.

visionthing – thank you for the link and timing.

The eyes of so many Iraqi children really do tell the whole story …

Control of water in the occupied territories is critical … and an area where the Israelis seem to be stepping up their harassment of palestinians.

Well done. It’s easy to propose bombing others back to the stone age when you don’t have any skin in the game. War is not some sanitary video game that has no consequence, it is as William Tecumseh Sherman said, all hell.

PS – here’s the story about Barghouthi yesterday:

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=306470

Siun,

Thank you. Just wanted to let you know that I think you do excellent work. Heartbreaking stuff.

I see the future.

Apparently not. Either that or Israel doesn’t consider Palestinians human beings. I know one or two otherwise very reasonable people who without blushing say how they wish every Palestinian man woman and yes, even child would be “driven into the sea” or “purged”. I guess it’s okay to envision driving an entire people into the sea. Makes you think of a day at the beach! Needless to say, I don’t care how these people are otherwise. Advocating genocide and especially cruelty to children is a deal breaker for me. If someone is that f*cked up, I don’t want anything to do with them.

Barghouthi is a very interesting figure … and he keeps trying. He also keeps being jailed and beaten by the Israelis.

I think the motto is “kill half and starve the rest.”

One of the stories from the Hedges piece:

Fahdi Abu Ammouna, thirteen, lies on a bed in the al-Amal Hospital, his feet propped up on a pillow. Dried blood covers the sheets. He says that some of his rocks hit the army jeep, though I doubt he or any of his friends could throw that far past the electric fence.

“The soldier said over the loudspeaker that those who wanted to live should run,” he says, “and those who wanted to die should stay. Then they swore at us. They said everyone who lives in Khan Younis is a dog. I started to run. I was shot. I never heard any shots. The bullet went through both of my legs. I crawled to the ambulance. It was the first time I went.”

His mother, seated next to him and wearing a black head scarf, slowly shakes her head. “He goes every day,” she says softly. “I sent my older son to bring him home. And he was not home five minutes before he went back. I tell the boys it is useless, throwing stones and becoming a martyr will not make the Israelis leave. My sister has lost a son. My brother has lost a son. One of my uncles was killed and a cousin is dead. I tell them to look at the history of our struggle. All these deaths achieve nothing.”

She begins to talk about the first uprising, which led to the Oslo peace agreement. Her husband, Samir, stands in a blue shirt, white pants, and sandals at the end of the bed. He was a prisoner then in Israel. One morning Israeli soldiers burst into her two-room house in the refugee camp while she was baking bread. Her son was six months old. They turned the place upside down and threw the boy on the stove. He was severely burned. As she speaks she gently places her fingers on his small arm, now hooked up to an intravenous tube.

Sounds like an outlaw nation to me.

NOT, I can’t help but think, what God’s message to humanity was if you believe in any of the Bible based superstitions….

Exactly. I’ve thought about the very thing many times. These folks that espouse war for all sorts of reasons in countries all over the world. How would they feel if we were invaded and in an effort to shake-out our “bad guys” they had to kill 10′s or 100′s of thousands of the rest of us!!!!! Would those same folks be willing to run that risk here at home. I think not.

We desperately need a real media in this country. One that is independently owned of the stock market. One that has as it’s priority reporting real news in a factual manner with no-bias to the American public. It’s unrealistic to expect people to think this sort of thing thru when they are watching crap like FOX or reading Townhall.com, etc. I peruse these places ocassionally to check out the latest nuttiness. It’s brutal and vicious what they are throwing out to folks. It’s 24/7 hatred, fear, anger………..

Since they only believe in the Old Testament, there’s a lot of “smiting” going on. Those folks took what they wanted.

Thank you.

Water rights were a key part of the Taba talks – this posting does not relate the West bank tearing up of pipe lines to the agreements in those talks.

It would be useful to know if – relative to that tenative agreement (nothing is agreed until all is agreed, of course) – the new pipes were a theft by Israel or a prevention of a theft by Abbas’s folks. Likewise the 40 or so homes destroyed were the result of the Bedouin invading the area (called ancestral grounds which did have a couple of buildings on it in 1948) in 1998, with a year 2000 court order handed down banning them from entering the area. But the tribe moved in and planted trees. The ILA offered to rent them the land at a price of NIS 2 per dunam, but they refused to pay. The ILA received a court order to evacuate the residents in 2003 and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. But I guess the above would make the story too long.

Of course in a world where Israel is always in the wrong, I guess it does not matter. Interesting the tie to children in Afghanistan via “Wikileaks” – although I admit I did not see the tie-in.

googling… Funny, I’m back to Democracy Now again — I should add Amy Goodman to my list of heroes:

In Historic Vote, UN Declares Water a Fundamental Human Right

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in practical terms, what will be the impact of this resolution on those efforts to continue to commodify or privatize water supplies in countries around the world, especially in the third world?

MAUDE BARLOW: It’s a fight we’re in. You know, I’m not going to say that suddenly everything is going to be fine tomorrow or today, today being the day after the vote, that anybody woke up in a different situation today, anybody had more water today than they did yesterday, or more access to sanitation.

What it is is a moral statement, a guiding principle, of the countries of the world—and basically the UN is the closest thing we have to a global parliament—that they have taken a step in a direction of saying that water is a human right and a public trust and that no one should be dying for lack of water, and they shouldn’t have to watch their children die a horrible death for lack of water because they cannot pay. And that was a statement that has taken us years and years to get the UN—they hadn’t even debated the water issue. They hadn’t even debated it in the past. They’ve done all this work on climate and absolutely no work on water. So it was a huge step forward to establishing some principles that we need if we are to avoid the crisis that I honestly see coming, that I think is going to be worse than anybody can imagine, in terms of the suffering.

(The vote’s at bottom here. U.S. and Israel abstained.) I’d still like to know how this can be worked to help that kid and his dad in your video.

From Max Blumenthal – who is linked in the post since I was presenting a series of resources for readers to check out:

AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL — On July 26, Israeli police demolished 45 buildings in the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib, razing the entire village to the ground to make way for a Jewish National Fund forest. The destruction was part of a larger project to force the Bedouin community of the Negev away from their ancestral lands and into seven Indian reservation-style communities the Israeli government has constructed for them. The land will then be open for Jewish settlers, including young couples in the army and those who may someday be evacuated from the West Bank after a peace treaty is signed. For now, the Israeli government intends to uproot as many villages as possible and erase them from the map by establishing “facts on the ground” in the form of JNF forests.

Not to mention all of the cluster bombs left over in Lebanon that are killing still.

Thank you … very helpful!

You might like to write a Seminal diary about that … water is such an important issue and deserves attention.

“Remove justice and what are states but gangs of bandits on a large scale? And what are bandit gangs but kingdoms in miniature?” – Augustine

Teddy Partridge is upstairs!
Sunday Late Night: “Conjecture, speculation and fears are not enough.”

If giving Israel all these advanced weapons isn’t ensuring peace,,,,, forget it, my smart ass retort somehow seems inappropriate considering the insanity of it all.

Too much personal angst… My village is an HOA planned development in the rural backcountry of Southern California… drought… vegetation changes… apparently the desert is moving north from Mexico, and this part of the US is supposed to be in for 100 years of extreme heat and drought. We are high and dry. It’s a permitted community, which means there were Dept. of Planning and Land Use major use permit rules to follow, which included drought tolerant landscaping and buffers to protect the native oaks. No matter, everyone has required lawns and one lady’s house is built on top of an ancient oak tree. This was permitted. Lawns can kill oak trees, it gives them a root fungus, so that lady refuses to maintain a lawn. No matter, she gets fined $100 a month for not maintaining the lawn that could kill the tree that could fall on the house that was illegally built on top of the tree and legally requires an illegal lawn. Legal, illegal? Well, the DPLU won’t step back in to correct their permit violations and the Board of Supervisors won’t make them. Believe me, she’s tried: youtube. So, the reality is that the tree legally does not exist. Tree, what tree? I’m coming to a point here… on the other side of the tree is a lawn freak. We’re actually a community of lawn freaks, because, well, for one thing, we’re required to be, but this guy comes from Florida and he knows that you just go deeper when old wells fail and you water all the time. Oh yeah, we’re on wells. So is the surrounding community outside our gates, who watches us with horror. So sprinklers are going off several times a day, and the Florida lawn ranger’s on the other side of the oak goes off for 20 minutes at a time some nights. Water runs down the streets. Nice and green around that oak.

So that’s my village, and it looks pretty pathetic compared to the Palestinian boy and his father’s in your top video.

And then there’s this village, described by the lady addressing the UN @36:

“…every day 24,000 children die in developing countries due to causes that can be prevented, such as diarrhea, which is caused by contaminated water. This means that a child dies every three-and-a-half seconds. One, two, three. As they say in my village, the time is now.”

(How long did it take me to write this?)

Gotta say, if that was a diary on Daily Kos (I do post diaries there occasionally), I’d add a poll:

__ Suicide by HOA
__ Murder by HOA
__ Ecocide by HOA
__ Genocide by HOA

I wonder if that UN resolution can do anything for California.

Visionthing – thank you for sharing your tale as well!

So many ways of thinking we need to change eh? to adapt to the world we now have and the one we’re making.

Wishing for the oak.

I don’t have health insurance, just a card I carry around in my wallet that I got, what, must be 30 years ago from a Devo fan site. It says:

BIOLOGY IS DESTINY

That tree… I can’t even begin to say. It’s like the key to the world if we could only… but we won’t.

o/t but only just a little — there’s a diary on Daily Kos tonight about the fires in Russia and the lack of US msm coverage — it has this video embedded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4

Mad world.

All wars are wars against children. – Howard Zinn

That saying hangs in my office in a 2 x 6 foot poster.

americans are imperialists.

what more needs to be stated.

we all support our wars for profits with our taxes and those we vote into office that support these wars for profits including those liberals and progressives.

until we americans look into that mirror and see ourselves as imperialists instead of thinking we are saving the world nothing much will change.

we will continue to blame blame blame others than ourselves.

the capitalists which includes the media dont want you to think of changing the system, just keep on the blame train.

it suits them fine while they create a society of have mores meaning them and almost all have nots.

it will not happen fast it will come up slow and be called a recession without end.

thank the universe that greed, wars for profits, profits over people, corp fascism will self destruct a nation.

it wont be pretty with much hardship for most but the most beautiful display of karma one could ever ask for.

now the hardships are not beautiful but this perfect feedback system is a site to behold.

it is when we try to apply our own karma and speed the process up that creates more karma with hardships.

karma works on its own time frame not ours. few understand that very few.

I’m late to the “party” here, but good for you Margaret.

i saw the documentary, “jenin, jenin” about the jenin refugee camp many years ago. i can remember the look of resolve in one maybe 12 year old girl’s eyes and remember wondering if she’d be a leader in the resistance when she became a young woman.

One more story, old, from 60 Minutes:

‘60 Minutes:’ U.S. Military as Bad as Taliban
By Kyle Drennen
October 29, 2007 – 18:10 ET

PELLEY: Garlasco says, that before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets: Iraqi officials. How many high-value targets were taken out in those strikes?

GARLASCO: None of the targets on our target list were actually killed.

PELLEY: How many civilians were killed in those strikes?

GARLASCO: We’re looking at…a couple of hundred civilians, at least.

PELLEY: A couple of hundred civilians?

GARLASCO: Uh-huh.

PELLEY: And not a single bad guy killed?

GARLASCO: That’s right.

And

Our journey took us through Afghanistan up the Shomali plain, north of the capital, Kabul. The Taliban are active here, so we hired Panjshiri mercenaries to cover our trip. The scene of the air strike is a village in the hills above Kapisa Province. We found the dead buried in a cornfield. There were no enemy combatants. It was four generations of one family, all killed in the air strike: An 85-year-old man, four women and four children, ranging in age from five years to seven months. One boy survived. The night of the bombing, seven-year-old Mujib happened to be staying with his uncle, Gulamn Nabi.

GULAMN NABI ( translated ): Some of the bodies were missing a hand or a leg or half a head. We recognized one of them only by the clothes she was wearing.

PELLEY: And who was the person you recognized?

NABI: It was Mujib’s mother.

MUJIB ( translated ): I saw my mom, my sisters, and my brother and my grandfather were dead. And our house was destroyed.

And

PELLEY: There is one young boy who is the sole survivor from that house, a seven-year- old boy named Mujib. We asked him what he thought of the Americans. And as you might expect, he said, I hate them.

I remember this one, “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” by Lorraine Schneider, 1966.