Inter Press is reporting that its correspondent in Gaza, Mohammed Omer, who is also working for the Washington Report, was stripsearched and assaulted at the border crossing from Jordan on Thursday. Omer, pictured here in London, where he lately won a Martha Gellhorn prize for his journalism, says he was forced to undress, then battered and kicked, dragged around, head banged. Every cavity of his body was probed, and he vomited and lost consciousness, woke up in a Palestinian hospital. The soldiers seemed angered by his having won a prize. You can see him accepting his prize in London here, describing how hard it was to get out of Gaza, and dedicating his prize “to the voiceless people of the Gaza Strip.”
The incident is sickeningly reminiscent of a strip-search story told by Hedy Epstein, an 80-plus-year-old Holocaust survivor from St. Louis, who has made it a mission in her 80s to visit Palestine. Here is Hedy telling about her 2004 humiliation, on youtube. They called her a terrorist.
(I learned about Hedy in in this open letter to Cong. Barney Frank saying that he has “lost his mind” because of Israel, as his sister has).
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad informed me about the Mohammed Omer story. I told him that Israel is beginning to sound more like the old Soviet Union than South Africa in some of these stories. I was thinking of Juliano Mer Khamis’s comment a week or so back at the New York Theatre Workshop, that Israel’s indifference to its international image strikes him as fascist. Ahmad said, “You are right, but what is worse is that one incident like [Omer's assault] in the
Soviet era used to be the subject of whole films, whereas now its the
daily reality of a whole people yet reports like these disappear as
soon as they appear and would make it into public consciousness if they
weren’t being crowded out by more sensational stories such as Lindsey
Lohan’s latest nipple slip etc…”
Again it is worth remembering Jerome Slater’s point about “muting the alarms”: that the American leadership and public, even those who love Israel, are being deprived of a true picture of the state. And when they wake up it may be too late.
Here is Hedy Epstein’s website. She is a “Holocaust survivor and speaker.” Hedy explains her repeat visits to Palestine, to Counterpunch: “I thought a checkpoint was
something like a stop light on a highway here in the United-States.
It’s not like that at all. And it’s gotten worse every
time I return. The way they are now, they remind me of when animals
are rounded up and taken to slaughter, it’s just so humiliating.” I urge synagogues and churches and mosques to call her up now and book her. Hedy: I love you.
Thanks too to Anne Silver for tipping me off.
Related posts:
- Latest Reports on Palestinian Persecutions Remind Me How Jewish Persecution in the Soviet Union Mobilized Our Nation
- Big Change in Media: Arabs Are Suddenly Human Beings. Israel Is Becoming South Africa
- Barring 2-State Solution, Israel Becomes South Africa–Without South Africa’s ‘Solution’, Israeli Minister Warns
- In boycotting J Street, Oren’s role model is Soviet Union
- World writers urge American writers to admit, Israel is South Africa Redux
{ 16 comments }
On the Soviet vibe, no surprise there, given that many Jewish immigrants into Israel are former Communists and Communist sympathizers with huge amounts of blood on their hands, just as are Jewish American Zionist supporters of Israel.
They've merely switched out one anti-Christian ideology of another. Hate is the common denominator.
We so want these accounts to be untrue, particularly as now there is a détente of sorts and a thin sliver of hope.
my … god…
quick, someone find a news story about it on American TV… pick one: nbc, abc, cbs, cnbc, msnbc, cnn, fox, fox news…
i won't hold my breath.
meanwhile, i ran an article on my blog where i basically put myself on trial, entitled
is americangoy an anti-semite?
http://americangoy.blogspot.com/2008/06/is-americangoy-anti-semite.html
after submitting it to DIGG, a plague of pro israel shills descended and made a mockery of the discussion.
not that any of them read my piece, say…
so, expect business as usual…
USA gives israel more and more money and more and more political cover as the rest of the world looks on with undisguised disgust.
it is hard to reconcile european liberalism and socialism, with it's emphasis on multi-culturalism with a support of israel and its policies.
lets see what develops – this CANNOT continue.
"it is hard to reconcile european liberalism and socialism, with it's emphasis on multi-culturalism with a support of israel and its policies."
I disagree. Let me respond with the same response I made to a question on another site vis-à-vis the big push for war against Iran asking: "Where are the protests?"
—–
All over the internet, and that’s about it.
Most others are pursuing the liberal, “if it feels good, do it” ethos, or cowardly holding their tongues for fear of being politically incorrect. (Political incorrectness these days includes opposition to warmongering.)
It looks like the anti-Christian proposition/creedal nation formulation built upon materialism and mass third world immigration formulated by the Neocons has successfully demoralized the population into nihilism and feeble compliance a lot sooner than anyone thought possible.
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Socialism is also a form of materialism, and Europe is on the same track as America. Europeans will soon also be dumbed down by the Statists to the same extent that Americans are.
The internationalist materialist secular elites (including the pseudo-Christian Bushcons) are basically doing to Europe and America what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians and Mideast Muslims: cut them off and break them down into competing tribal entities (think Hamas vs Fatah, Sunnis vs Shiites, La Raza vs the Minutemen, and in Europe Muslims vs socialists, socialists vs Christians).
The common denominator in all this is an evil, anti-Christian elite seeking to replace Western (Christian) civilization with itself using competing groups pit against one another that it can manipulate and control, and Zionism as its cause celebre. Not coincidentally, Judaism seems to be the one religion they all will tolerate.
Ed, I told you before we don't hate Christians. just you Ed, just you. And I fail to see how kicking around one of the 500 million Mohammeds of the world translates into some sort of anti Christian theology. And lets not talk about this guy like he's Edward R Murrow.
Last but not least Heddy Epstein is a sicke broad who got out before the war. How does that make her a holocaust survivor. It just makes her lucky.. Just her, not the Jewish people.
Yeah I love that every idiot with an accent gets to be a Holocaust survivor for the purpose of attacking Israel. As to humilation-boy, I'll give 20-1 he's a fucking liar. They'll probably discover a video of his cousing Mounir beating him up for flirting with his donkey.
Yes, yes my take on the whole thing:
http://americangoy.blogspot.com/2008/06/israel-palestinian-reporter-beat-up-for.html
This can't be true. I just watched You Don't Mess with the Zohan and these Israelis were really nice and funny too.
Adam Sandler… I Could Pardon His Zohan Bulge…But Not His Real Life Racist Stupidity
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/06/adam-sandler-i-could-pardon-his-zohan.html
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A little off-topic, but worth watching:
Jews in Iran – Australian TV:
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Skmj8q0Wg
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbkmHf3jZUo
.
The Soviet vibe is getting louder in America, too. Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker that AIPAC's "harmless Congressional resolutions" (as AIPAC's suave apologists paint them) have translated into 400 million yankee dollahs secretly appropriated to destabilize Iran. And some of it is being paid out to LISTED TERRORIST GROUPS. You tell 'em, Sy:
————
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations.
The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.
The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.”
http://tinyurl.com/43bpf2
————
Isn't this just classic Soviet-style duplicity — fighting a "global war or terror," while simultaneously lining the pockets of its declared terrorist enemies with secret cash payments? That's exactly how the CIA created al Qaeda, back when the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan. Now we're tranferring cash, weapons and training to the "next generation al Qaedas." Wonderful; just wonderful.
In assessing the role of the Israel lobby in all this, Chris Floyd gets it right:
————
It is of course an article of faith for some people that the Israeli tails wags the big American dog. This rather ludicrous assertion is nothing more than the pernicious doctrine of "American exceptionalism" tricked out in "dissident" drag. For its underlying assumption is that good ole true-blue American elites would never commit war crimes or seek empire and geopolitical dominion unless they had somehow been tricked into it by those wily Jews. This is exactly backwards. If Israel was of no use to the American elite's domination agenda, then it would be discarded, or at least downgraded in terms of military, economic and diplomatic support.
When a nation serves the American elite's interests well, it is rewarded, and its various shortcomings are overlooked, however egregious they might be.
If Israel had, say, opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it would have found itself shorn of much of its American largess very quickly. Israel is in fact almost entirely dependent on the United States for its military and economic well-being; in return it gives unstinting support to the interests of the American elite. [ISRAEL] IS IN MANY WAYS ONE OF THE MOST ABJECT CLIENT STATES IN THE WORLD TODAY, OUTSIDE OF IRAQ OR AFGHANISTAN.
http://www.chris-floyd.com/
————
Whether the Israeli tail wags the American dog, or vice versa, ultimately is unimportant. Both are aggressive, destablizing forces which menace the world much as the former Soviet Union used to do. An AIPAC-sponsored attack on Iran would be a monstrous crime, not unlike Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939. But this time, WE'RE the bad guys.
"If Israel was of no use to the American elite's domination agenda, then it would be discarded, or at least downgraded in terms of military, economic and diplomatic support." –chris-floyd
What you say might well be true, however, the question is who, exactly, makes up the American elite, today. And, in that, you'll find a disproportionate number of Michael Steinhardts and Sheldon Adelsons.
"If Israel had, say, opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it would have found itself shorn of much of its American largess very quickly. Israel is in fact almost entirely dependent on the United States for its military and economic well-being; in return it gives unstinting support to the interests of the American elite. [ISRAEL] IS IN MANY WAYS ONE OF THE MOST ABJECT CLIENT STATES IN THE WORLD TODAY, OUTSIDE OF IRAQ OR AFGHANISTAN."
Not a particularly good hypothetical it must be said, Jim.
Apart from that, there is very little evidence to support your contentions.
Just off the top of my head, Israeli settlements have long been an impediment to U.S foreign policy, and successive POTUS(George HW, Clinton)have been frustrated at their inability to stop settlement construction even during major peace talks.
I do believe it started out with Israel being a client state. And over time the Lobby changed all that….
.
that SUCKS. what can we DO about it?
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stevieb, those are Chris Floyd's contentions about Israel as a client state which I was quoting.
Whoever's in charge, I see this morning that the CIA disinfo channel CNN is reporting the "covert war against Iran" story, with the standard official denials. Provocatively, they included a clip of 'Neocon Joe' Lieberman, whining threats against the perfidious Iranians.
The Powers That Be are amping up the war drums, and crude oil (by no coincidence) printed another record high today. Another disastrous War for Israel is going to push the American consumer past the boiling point. Jews understandably hate to be scapegoated. So why is Neocon Joe sticking his pointy beak into the camera lens, as Gary Ackerman whoops on the troops for H.Res. 362?
Overreaching will kill the golden goose, boys.
People who identify themselves first and primarily by their racr, etnicity, creed and/or nationality are losers who are many leagues below self actualization. Groupthink.
Guess what folk do this more than any other in the histroy of the world?
Chris Floyd gets it right? Hardly.
"For its underlying assumption is that good ole true-blue American elites would never commit war crimes or seek empire and geopolitical dominion unless they had somehow been tricked into it by those wily Jews. This is exactly backwards.
This is sophistry on its face.The "exact" reverse would be that the Anglo elites "tricked" the neocon Zionist faction of the elite into an interventionist, Arabophobic, Iraqophobic
war and Mideast policy.
Yeah, right.
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