Yedioth Ahronot cover page, June 18th, 2012
This article was originally published on June 18, 2012 on Abir Kopty’s website.
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot published a story today (June 18th, 2012) about a tourist activity offered by Gush Etzion settlements, where visitors can practice how to shoot “terrorists”.
Stories about such tours both in settlements and army bases are always published, but no serious attention given to such scary culture of hatred and violence. (see here one example in Hebrew from 2003)
Shay, extreme tourism instructor:”Your mommy won’t be here to protect you, so stand up like a man,” continuing, “Are you ready to take out a terrorist?”. (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)
Tourists from across the globe visit Gush Etzion settlements, where they are offered by settlers “enjoyable” package under the name “Hebrew Extreme Tourism” with range of activities that include: story telling about battles, view live shooting performance and an activity where visitors can practice shooting at “terrorists-mechablim” cardboard pictures hung on the wall.
The word used for terrorist in Hebrew is “Mechabel” (mechablim for terrorists). In Israeli discourse this is a synonym for Palestinian.
This is absolutely disgusting. Illegal and immoral settlers/terrorist teaching tourist how to kill.
American companies organize this stuff. Here is one.
http://www.ultimatectmission.com/index.htm
the photos of this beautiful child being taught how to hate just break my heart.
Hateful and immoral Zio-supremacist citizens of an oppressive, colonialist, expansionist and supremacist state – living on stolen, cleansed and/or occupied land – teach budding oppressors how to shoot “terrorists”. How wonderfully ironic.
From the ynet article:
>> Michel Brown, 40, a Miami banker, chose to take his wife and three children to the range with the purpose of “teaching them values.” Upon entering the range, his five-year-old daughter, Tamara, bursts into tears. A half hour later, she is holding a gun and shooting clay bullets like a pro. “This is part of their education,” Michel says as he proudly watches his daughter. “They should know where they come from and also feel some action.”
Michel Brown is one sick f*ck.
This sort of thing is only possible from a society that has been dehumanised to the point that it has completed the process of niggerising its neighbors.
http://www.lesley.edu/journals/jppp/10/whaley.html
In his writing about how the exhibition affected him as a Black male spectator, Als reveals that in the photographs and postcards he re-viewed an existential reincarnation of himself: “I am not dead” as the bodies in the photographs, explains Als, “but I have been looked at, watched, and it’s the experience of being watched, and seeing the harm in people’s eyes—that prelude to becoming a dead nigger.” “What is the relationship,” he asks as a Black male intellectual and writer, “of the white people in these pictures to the white people who ask me and sometimes pay me to be [their] Negro?” [10]
Similar to Litwack and other historians of lynching in the U.S., Als reveals that the idea behind the lynch mob mentality is to deny the inhumanity of the act by dehumanizing the victim, exacerbating and manufacturing their guilt, and legitimating and affirming their right to use extra-legal means as a tool to silence dissent and assert social control. Lynching is a dialectic between not only the lynchers, lynched, and the whites that stand by and watch then, but lynching is also a dialectic between the lynched and the members of the group who identify with the mutilated body racially, culturally, or ideologically. Because lynching is a means of social control, essential to the act is to intimidate others who might cross and transgress similar boundaries. Als uses the example of lynching to suggest that in our current racial milieu, this leads historically marginalized groups to “exercise a similar sensitivity where white people are concerned, [in order] to avoid being lynched by their tongues or eyes.” [11] On this form of intimidation, Als asks the reader/viewer to consider the trauma that the families of the lynched throughout history incurred, too. He writes: “Did the families in these pictures stand at the periphery and wait for it all to be over, when someone, maybe the youngest among them, could climb the tree and cut Cousin or Mother or Father down?” [12]