loosing fear?

> http://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/democrats-losing-their/

zero tolerance -- yemen

THE ABSURD TIMES

TRUMP THE VILE

Even calling him something like that will be no problem for his as long as his hell's angle's gang of supporters keep suppporting him and they will. Whenever an issue become too hot for him, he manages to change the subject and the media is more than happy to oblige him on that. He has taken the attention away from Jerusalem, Russia and his complicity, and a variety of other issues, this time by creating baby prisons on the Texas borders, a move so vile that even Ted Cruz, the leach-infested Senator from Texas is trying to distance himself from it.

This is an easy task to this love lorn attention hound. Even his ghost writer has pointed out that he has the attention span of, well, an attention span no greater that 15 minutes. Once he read a state of the union speech and someone asked me what did it prove? My answer was simple, it proved that he was able to read, just so long as he was allowed to say the words as he spoke and knew that it was going out on national television. Otherwise, they know not to give him anything longer than about one paragraph to read and even then to be careful to put his name in it somewhere.

The media has absolutely no interest in pointing this out or even calling him on it except to point it out, but then they go along with the new topic and abandon whatever it was that was giving him trouble in the first place. He is just too good for ratings, sort of the Hell's Angels of politics. https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-predicted-the-rise-of-trumpism-his-name-was-hunter-s-thompson/ You can see from that, if you can get through all the adds and warnings and permissions, that it was predicted and that it came true. Fortunately, for him, he shot himself in the head when he was 69 and thus never lived to see it. We have to live through it.

He will continue if we let him, and have to let him at least until midterms. If we try to take him out before that, it will be used to get of his voters who normally are a sluggish sort. Still, he was forced to cancell the congressional picnic (Ivanka will miss that, but she doesn't care) and soon issued an executive order to stop separating children from their parents. Probably the biggest incentive to do this was first the sight on about 10 9 and 10 year old girls being led to a detention center in East Harlem and televised by TV ! In New York followed by nagging from Melania and Ivanka (presumably) and outrage from Republican members who were afraid of what the photos showed back home. (Things look different in Louisville than in Washington, D.C.)

So, he changes his mind. Of course. He will find something else. Perhaps as Cohen says he may flip, finds an attprney that specializes in flipping, and asks Trump to pay his legal fees, we may have something going on there.

So, there may be a change after this order, but now we have a few court challenges. Do not worry, Jeffrey Beaugragrd Session is read for that. He will fuck it up, for sure, but not right away.

Still, it keeps attention away from the Russia investigation, Mike Cohen seeming ready to turn and spill the beans for Mueller rather than spend the next 30 years in a prison cell with a guy named Bubba who will like his ass. He knows where he is headed. Seems nobody is insisting on proof of the 3 million illegal votes cast in the last election and nobody is mentioning the lack of at least a down payment for the wall. Meanwhile, he is praising North Korea because they all sit up straight and listen with rapture at whatever word their ruler says. He even suggests that quasi Geisha who is the lead anchor on North Korean TV wee the lead anchor on Fox news. No bull shit, he actually said that. Of course, he probably forgot.

Anyway, perhaps it's time for the Cohen show? We heard a lot about MS-!3 as being the gang that is the cause of this and I wondered about them. A friend I knew who grew up in Loa Angeles (I don't admit to know anyone who grew up in Southern California, BTW) says that they actually started out in LA. They formed in Korea Town off 18^th Street near a 7/11 and started to rip off the locals. The Koreans had enough and the cops were not much help as neither culprits were black, so they fought back and the Korean War started up again, and there was no General MacArthur to intervene. Things were getting ugly and the sanitation workers threatened to go on strike as they didn't like sweeping up body parts so Bill Clinton moved in and deported all of them to South American somewhere. ENOUGH OF THIS, I'M GETTING SICK.

I was about to go back to organizing the first SDS Chapter in a small university town directly north of Chicago, but that means it's time to finish this and be done with it. Speaking of blood and torture, this is what our beloved friends are doing in Yemen:

A new investigation has uncovered rampant sexual violence against Yemeni prisoners held in prisons run by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen. The Associated Press reports that in March, 15 officers lined up the prisoners in the southern city of Aden and ordered them to undress before searching their anal cavities, claiming they were looking for contraband cell phones. The prisoners screamed and cried and those who resisted were beaten and threatened by dogs.
Hundreds of prisoners reportedly suffered similar abuse. A Pentagon spokesman quoted in the piece said the allegations were not substantiated. The UAE is a key ally of the United States and has partnered with Saudi Arabia in its military assault on Yemen. We speak with Maggie Michael, the reporter who broke these stories. She is the Associated Press based in Cairo. Her latest exposé is headlined "Detainees held without charges decry Emiratis' sexual abuses." Last year, she reported on prisons in a piece headlined, "In Yemen's secret prisons, UAE tortures and US interrogates."

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to a shocking new investigation of rampant sexual violence against Yemeni detainees held in prisons run by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen.

The Associated Press reports that in March, 15 officers lined up the prisoners in the southern city of Aden and ordered them to undress before searching their anal cavities, claiming they were looking for contraband cell phones. The men screamed and cried and those who resisted were beaten and threatened by dogs. Hundreds of detainees reportedly suffered similar abuse. Witnesses told the AP that detainees were raped while other guards filmed the assaults. AP also reports that Yemeni guards working under Emirati officers electrocuted prisoners' genitals and sexually violated others with wooden and steel poles.

A Pentagon spokesman quoted in the piece said the allegations were not substantiated.

AMY GOODMAN: The UAE is a key ally of the United States and has partnered with Saudi Arabia in its military assault on Yemen. Last year, AP exposed the existence of secret prisons run by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen where torture was widespread. For more, we are going to Cairo to speak with Maggie Michael, the AP journalist who wrote the exposé, the headline Detainees held without charges decry Emiratis' sexual abuses. Welcome to Democracy Now! Maggie, talk about what you found.

MAGGIE MICHAEL: Our investigation started in 2016, and since that time we have been speaking to witnesses, to security officials, families, and finally, in this investigation, we managed to speak to prisoners inside the prisons. They are talking about how sexual abuse is being used as a way to extract confessions, and sometimes to turn them into informants to the Emiratis who are supervising and running prisons, directly or indirectly, through their own allies of security forces they set up in southern Yemen.

Our investigation last year exposed a network of 18 prisons in cities of Aden and Mukalla.

Our investigation this year found that of these prisons, at least five, there's a lot of sexual abuse happening to detainees. What is different this time is that we also spoke to officials who were at one point allied with the Emiratis. They were working for them, and then they defected. Their testimonies were very important to confirm what the prisoners and what the families have been saying all the time—hat they are being held without charges, no trials. Even those who were granted prosecutors like orders to be released, they still kept in detention. The officials—one of them, at least—was was involved in the torture. He confirmed that they were filming detainees while being raped in order to press them, in order to turn them into informants.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Can you say, Maggie, the drawings, some of which our television viewers can now see–the drawings that you received from the prisoners, how you got access to those drawings?

MAGGIE MICHAEL: The thing is, we communicated with the prisoners inside Beir Ahmed in Aden, southern Yemen, and one of them is a really good artist who in order to answer my questions about what exactly is happening, he decided to show it to me by drawing positions of torture, abuse, and then took pictures and then by phones and then sent them by WhatsApp, and this is how we got them. And lately, they have been finding it hard to use the same way, and we relied more on text messages from inside the prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Maggie, you were told by some prisoners that the American personnel in the prisons were there in uniform and must be aware of the torture. One senior security official at the prison in the city of Mukalla said in your piece, "Americans use Emiratis as gloves to do their dirty work." Explain what U.S. involvement is.

MAGGIE MICHAEL: Based on what we had last year and this year, Americans are in main base of Emiratis in Yemen. So this is including Mukalla, Balhaf in Shabwa, and there's a place called Buriqa—these have American interrogators. They are American personnel in uniform.
There are also mercenaries, including Americans. The main mission is interrogation. What we were told also that torture does not happen in front of the Americans, but they are aware of it, either by hearing people being tortured or by seeing marks of torture on their bodies. What this official in Riyan, in Mukalla told me is that Americans are aware of what is happening, and they're not only aware, they are actually part of it. And instead of doing the torture themselves in order to get confessions, they're using the Emiratis to do their dirty work.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Maggie, can you talk about the role of the United Arab Emirates? Now it has taken a leading role in the Saudi assault on Yemen, in particular its assault on Hodeida—the crucial port of Hodeida.

MAGGIE MICHAEL: This is the dilemma of the Yemeni government. On one side, it needs the Emiratis because it is leading the forces that are fighting the Houthi rebels who occupied northern Yemen since 2015 in order to liberate and take over Hodeida port from the Houthis. Hodeida is known as the mouth of Yemen. This is where most of the humanitarian aid and imports get through northern Yemen, where the strong majority of the population is concentrated. So the port is very important for the two sides—for the government and for the Houthis. So the government needs and relies on the Emiratis in taking over Hodeida.

At the same time, in southern Yemen, where the government should be having the upper hand, instead the Emiratis have taken the lead. They set up their own militias in every single city. Each of these militias have their own tribal and regional agenda. They set up prisons. They took control. It undermined to a great extent the Yemeni government. And until just last week, the president of Yemen was barred from returning to the government for nearly a year. We was in Saudi Arabia. And we reported that based on his own aides and commanders, he couldn't get back to Yemen because the Emiratis did not want him to return. Only with the start of the Hodeida assault…

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, and I just wanted to quickly ask, is the U.S. involved with giving lists of names of Yemenis to the Emiratis to jail?

MAGGIE MICHAEL: The Americans have a list of most wanted men, but not every single man arrested by the Emiratis are on the list. The Emiratis are trying to get information about the men on the list through mass arrests.

AMY GOODMAN: Maggie Michael, we want to thank you for being with us. We're going to link to your piece. Maggie is a reporter for Associated Press, her latest piece Detainees held without charges decry Emiratis' sexual abuses. We'll also link to her last year's piece, In Yemen's secret prisons, UAE tortures and US interrogates. That is all for the show.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Yemen, God, and Orange

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration:  Our work in Yemen.  Brits helped.

Here I was, quietly thinking about a piece on Yemen, when I got a frantic call, a conference call, from England (Kent) and Berlin.  It was all in English, of course, as almost all Germans who can speak and write English and more fluent than I am in Germany.  In fact, I imagine my own German is more understandable to a 19^th Century German philosopher or early 20^th Century poet than anyone else.  I imagine I sound much like one of those Brits who visited Germany in Thomas Mann's Masterpiece Dr. Faustus and was mimicked by one of Adrian's friends.

Anyway, the call was frantic and somehow came across as a mixture of depression and anger, asking about tariffs, who was Dennis Rodman, are all Republicans insane, and so on, although I have cleaned up the language a bit.  So I tried to explain, reminding them that my own views were somewhat morbid as well.  Still, not everyone here gets Dennis Rodman.  He was not one of the greats, but he was richly appreciated by the fans of any team he played for, and hated by the rest.  This show he had some good qualities.  

What happened was this: Trump insulted Canada and Trudeau remarked back that Canadians were polite and reasonable, but would not be pushed around.  I played a bit of hockey (left-wing) and can verify this.  Right afterwards, Trump's economics advisor was on network television accusing him of stabbing Trump in the back, went apoplectic, and eventually was hospitalized with a "minor" heart attack.  This was before his fixer Cohen let slip that he was going to "spill the beans".  The German had a bit of trouble with that, but I explained the colloquialism. 

Bob Corker, a Republican who quit, started ranting about the cult of Trump, but I personally think this insults Bob Jones and David Koresh.  The so-called "branch Davidians, btw, had only 2 guns per person whereas the state of Texas averages four.  It seems that Trump's approval rating in the Republican party in around 90 %.  At least, that is among those who admit to being Republicans.

During the negotiations over Korea, Kim was seen parading down the streets of Singapore enjoying himself, but The Orange man was nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, the United States seems to be on fire, especially in Durango (which anyone with a background is old westerns will remember as an epicenter of anything vile) Utah, Nevada, Las Vegas, and parts of California.  California seems to have had enough of this and voted to divide itself into three states, north, south, and east. 

At the same time, at the order of Jeff Sessions, children are even being ripped from their mothers while being breast-fed down on the border.   MAKE AMERICAN GREAT AGAIN!. 

The crys on the phone were weird: "Gott in Himmel, der Schwein!" and "Bloody Beastlike," and so on.  I tried to explain, but realized that there was no explanation other than stupidity.  Sure, I could talk about the Foreign Minister who is also Orange and gives Oxford much to explain, but such things seemed to trifle compared to how we sounded. 

So I said "How about Yemen?"

That really cut it.  I can't remember all they said, but they were not compliments to our electorate.  Even the mention of Lafarge or whatever seemed weak ammunition.  Even the 51% turnover rate in the White House and the fact that they have to throw a job fair to recruit people to work at the White house just seemed to prove their points. 

        Beware of false prophets. Which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are wolves.  Matthew vii, 15.

So, I again started on Yemen when I got a call from a catholic friend of mine screaming "Did you hear Jeff Sessions quoting the fucking Bible for God's sake?"

        For whose sake?

        "You know what I mean and then Sarah Sanders continues with it?  Hell, I hate these buggers!" And then he slammed down the phone. 

        Well, I put up the quotation from Matthew just for context's sake, and for, damn it, I'm going to get on with Yemen.  (BTW: The quote he used was a favorate of slave owners on the old south.)

        It has been awhile since we taked about Yemen as Palestine is much more serious and helpless.  AIPAC has this county's political system by the balls and it won't ever let go.  Even mentioning BDS is now illegal in some states.  But anyway, here is the systematic starvation and intentional disease of Yemen (which Obama one called his "model" for dealing with terrorism) that Trump is intensifying because the Saudi's have lots of money:

In Yemen, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has launched an all-out offensive against the key port city of Hodeidah. The offensive is expected to be the biggest battle in the ongoing 3-year war between the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels. The war has already killed 15,000 civilians, sparked the world's worst cholera epidemic and pushed the country to the brink of famine. Humanitarian organizations have warned the offensive could be a catastrophe for a quarter of a million civilians living in the port city, and for the rest of the Yemen, which is highly dependent on aid that travels through this port. For more, we speak with Congressmember Ro Khanna in Washington, D.C. He recently co-authored a bipartisan letter calling for Defense Secretary James Mattis to help prevent an attack on Hodeidah.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today's show in Yemen, where a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has launched an all-out offensive against the key port city of Hodeidah. The offensive is expected to be the biggest battle in the ongoing 3-year war between the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels. The war has already killed 15,000 civilians, sparked the world's worst cholera epidemic and pushed the country to the brink of famine. Humanitarian groups have warned the offensive could be a catastrophe for a quarter of a million civilians living in Hodeidah, and for the rest of the Yemen, which is highly dependent on aid that travels through the port. The World Health Organization estimates 8.4 million people in Yemen already face pre-famine conditions. The offensive comes just days after the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition bombed a new Doctors Without Borders cholera clinic in Yemen's northwest Abs region.

On Tuesday, I spoke with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna. He represents Silicon Valley in California. He recently co-authored a bipartisan letter calling for Defense Secretary James Mattis to help prevent an attack on Hodeidah. I asked Congressman Khanna to lay out his concerns.

REP. RO KHANNA: It would just be a catastrophe of civilian casualties. An attack on Hodeidah would mean thousands and thousands of women and children and civilians would die. Second, the port of Hodeidah is the only place right now, for practical purposes, that food and medicine can get into Yemeni civilians. So, this is—one would think it just should be common sense that the United States and the international community would be doing everything in our power to keep that port open. In the past, even Ambassador Nikki Haley has talked about the importance of that port for civilians. And it would be really a dereliction of our own values to not do everything in our power to stop that attack, and do everything in our power to stop refueling the Saudis from their bombing campaign in Yemen.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you know about this Doctors Without Borders cholera clinic that the Saudi regime just bombed? They said they gave their coordinates to the Saudis. We have heard this so many times before in other places, for example, in Afghanistan.

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, it's really shocking and unconscionable. And this is not the only incident. We've had reports over the last year, year and a half, about the Saudis indiscriminately bombing civilian sites, bombing relief workers. And that's not something that the United States should in any way participate in. Our refueling of the Saudi planes is something the Saudis desperately rely on. We started doing that as a sop to Saudi Arabia when we did the Iran deal. We thought, "OK, we're going to do this Iran, and the Saudis are insistent on this. So, let's provide some assistance." It was a mistake. I don't think anyone would have anticipated the level of humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen.

It's important to understand that this is not a counterterrorism operation in Yemen against al-Qaeda. This is an active interference in the Saudi effort to bomb the Houthis and engage in a civil war. So the United States needs to stop our role in furthering the Saudi effort. And we certainly need to do everything in our power to stop the Saudis from attacking the port of Hodeidah.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Khanna, The Wall Street Journal is reporting the Trump administration is weighing a request by the United Arab Emirates to expand the U.S. role in the war in Yemen by providing direct assistance to the impending offensive against the port city of Hodeidah. So you're talking about, oh, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates. These are the countries also that particularly Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, senior adviser to President Trump, is very close to. What does this direct assistance mean? And how is this happening without congressional approval?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, there's been, candidly, a lack of transparency by the Trump administration. In the past, when Secretary Mattis has testified to the Armed Services Committee, on which I sit, he has been very clear that our efforts in Yemen are largely limited to counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and that he has said that the United States does not have an active role in assisting the Saudis in their fight against the Houthis. But then we are hearing reports that that is not true and that they're considering expanding our aid to the Saudis, not because of counterterrorism interests, but really because of the civil war, which is a proxy war with Iran. And so, that is what prompted several of us to write Secretary Mattis a letter.

At the very least, we need transparency from the administration about our objectives in Yemen. They are relying on the 2001 AUMF, authorization of force, which allows us to go after al-Qaeda or its affiliates anywhere in the world. That was overly broad, but even under that authorization of force, there is no authority to go after the Houthis. And the administration just needs to be far more transparent. And we're going to demand transparent answers from Secretary Mattis and others.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the United Arab Emirates? It's United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. What is the U.S. interests in both of these places?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, we see them both as allies, candidly, to contain Iran. And this type of balance-of-power politics has gotten us into a lot of problems in the Middle East. And, unfortunately, we're continuing the same type of thinking, saying that we need to ally with countries that may be a check on Iranian expansion. Unfortunately, the administration has continued down that path of thinking, without any authority from the United States Congress. But the first step is to really understand what our involvement and role is in Yemen. The administration has been very coy about admitting that we're actually aiding the Saudis in a proxy civil war, aiding the United Arab Emirates in a proxy war in Yemen against Iran, because they know that has absolutely no authorization under congressional—by Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk more about this, for people who are not familiar with the U.S. role, why the U.S. is at all involved in this on the side of Saudi Arabia. Under Obama, for a period, they were directly assisting. Then, as you pointed out, they put some limitations on that assistance. If you could explain what that was and what caused that, and then how Trump himself is responding? Do you think he has any understanding of what's happening in Yemen, with—I mean, not even to mention the deaths, something like 15,000, but talking about just people afflicted with cholera, the worst situation in the world? Over a million Yemenis are suffering from cholera. The Doctors Without Borders clinic was a cholera clinic.

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, you're right to point out the humanitarian catastrophe. I mean, this is the single worst humanitarian crisis in the world. And, unfortunately, in this case, unlike in Rwanda in the past or in Bosnia, the United States has had a role, because we initially provided aid to the Saudis, and we continue to refuel their planes.

The reason for our aid to the Saudis was as a balance to our supporting Iran with the Iran deal. We were negotiating with Iran to have the Iran deal. The Saudis complained to the Obama administration at the time, saying, "We feel insecure with the normalization of the relationship with Iran." And the administration made a decision that they would provide some assistance to the Saudis, partly to make sure that the Saudis still felt secure in their relationship with the United States. Now, when you talk to most of the former Obama administration officials, they will say that was a mistake, that they could never have fathomed the level of brutality of the Saudi regime in Yemen. They couldn't have fathomed the civilian casualties.

They tried to wind it down. Well, then they realized that the Trump administration was coming in, but it was too late for them to wind down the efforts and the support to the Saudis. And then the Trump administration comes in, and they redouble their support of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates as a check on Iran. The Trump administration is singularly focused on containing Iran, on supporting allies of ours that may help us box Iran in. And so, the administration has doubled down on aiding the Saudis in this catastrophe and with a huge civilian loss of life.

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California. To hear him weighing in on the North Korea-U.S. summit, you can go to democracynow.org.

This is Democracy Now! 

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Gaza, the Weird, and the Orange

THE ABSURD TIMES

This is a volunteer 21 year old nurse from Gaza, or was.  She wanted to go on the further her studies, but she decided to try to help those who were wounded in Gaza.  Israel called her a "human shield used by Hamas."  She was killed by Israeli snipers in order to prevent another holocost.

Our interview today has to do with Gaza and Israel's treatment of the people.  One thing that the death of Anthony Bourdain reminded of was his visit to Gaza.  He has asked why the fish were so tiny and found out that it was because Israel had moved the outer sea boundary to 3 miles instead of the 6.  He was attacked for this.  Imagine.

Things have been difficult lately.  I've seen the fat, orange man blather away and been told that blacks are now supporting him.  He claims to have won the battle over the flag by un-inviting the pro-football team from the White House, but now the news people finally realized that only maybe ten were going to show up anyway.  This does show the difference between newscasters and sportscasters.  The sportscasters get used to relating facts, more or less, and it does them no good to say that the baseball was not caught when the player actually caught it.  There is no way of disputing it.  So they get in the dangerous habit of reporting what is actually happening even though it is politically inexpedient not to do so.  Anyone who listens to a sports station knew already that almost none of the Philadelphia Eagles were going to show up for the grand reception sometime ago.  It is only recently that this news got onto the "news" networks.  

Have you heard that the Argentine Football Team decided not to play in Israel?  Not is you live in the USA, you haven't heard.  You may have heard that Trump did not invite Moslem Leaders for THE dinner, but not that they knew damn well that none of them were coming and many sent refusals ahead of time.  In case you wonder, it was about ten days early.  Just imagine pending a month of all day no eating, ddrinking of any kind, no smoking, tec.  And at the end, dinner with Trump?  No way.  Already the Caps, the D.C. Hockey team has guys announcing they will not show up and the finals are not even over.  Both Basketball teams in the playoffs have made the announcement as well.  Just to focus on sports for a bit, the reason given for this boycott by the Eagles is that those sports are mainly black.  Ok, maybe.  But then how do you explain the Hockey players?  We can not remember the name of a single pro hockey player who is black, although there have been a few.  I can quote you the late, great Richard Pryor on why: "Are you kidding?  We ain't that stupid.  Imagine one of us getting on ice skates in the middle of an ice pond with a buch of angry looking white guys and they all got sticks.  No way, brother."  Now it is possible that Sheldon Adelson wil try to force the Las Vegas hockey team to go because he has a lot of money and Trump moved the embassy to Israel, but he doesn't understand the mind of a pro hockey player.  Even if a few of them go, I have fun imagining what they will do in the white house.  (In Russia they disconnected a chandelier in the room below while looking for bugs.  There weren't any, but the people in the room below were certainly surprised.)

We just could not keep up.  Just as the D.C. Hockey team won its championship, Donald of Orange left the country to meet the honorable "rocker man".  Intelligence experts questioned about the health and processes of the Leader of North Korea say "Well, we really do not know much.  So far, the only American who has spent much personal time with him is Dennis Rodman.  He was then asked if they debriefed him, and he said "Well, after rehab, we had him over, he insisted on a black robe and hoodie and that we call him Darth Vader.  After that, it kinda went downhill"  OK, so much for diplomacy.

With characteristic hype, the networks tried to make the primaries look in doubt, especially in California.  Well, the guy running for governor as a Republican got 9% of the vote.  It was a clean sweep.  Lots of women won as well across the country as the orange man has really pissed many of them off.  I think only one of them was, pardon the expression, a Republican, but I wouldn't swear to it.  I can't take this nonsense any longer.  Hunter Thompson once said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."  Well, he had a valid point as only someone with a sense of the weird could even tolerate much less make any sense of this, but it is tiring.  Here is the interview:

n Gaza, thousands of Palestinians have resumed protests against the Israeli blockade. Israeli soldiers have killed at least 119 Palestinians and wounded more than 13,000 more since the Palestinians' nonviolent Great March of Return protests began on March 30. A week ago today, Israeli forces shot dead Palestinian medic Razan al-Najjar as she was helping evacuate wounded Palestinians at a protest near the separation fence between Israel and Gaza. At the time of her killing, she was wearing a white medical coat and a medical ID card. The following day, thousands of people poured into the streets of Gaza to attend her funeral. Her killing has also sparked international outrage. Earlier this week, the Israeli military said Israeli snipers had not intentionally shot at Razan. But the Israeli military is now facing widespread criticism after it released a short video Thursday, that was heavily edited, in efforts to claim the slain medic was acting as a "human shield" for Hamas when she was shot dead by an Israeli sniper exactly one week ago. We speak to Muhammad Shehada, writer and activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of development studies at Lund University in Sweden.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we turn to Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians have resumed protests against the Israeli blockade. Israeli soldiers have killed at least 119 Palestinians and wounded more than [13,000] others since the Palestinians' nonviolent Great March of Return protests began on March 30th.

A week ago today, Israeli forces shot dead [Palestinian] medic Razan al-Najjar as she was helping evacuate wounded Palestinians at a protest near the separation fence between Israel and Gaza. At the time of her killing, she was wearing a white medical coat and a medical ID card. The following day, thousands of people poured into the streets of Gaza to attend her funeral. The Palestinian medic's killing has also sparked international outrage. Earlier this week, the Israeli military said Israeli snipers had not intentionally shot at Razan. But now the Israeli military is facing widespread criticism after it released a short video Thursday, that was heavily edited, in efforts to claim that the slain Palestinian medic was acting as a "human shield" for Hamas when she was shot dead by an Israeli sniper. The video, posted by the Israeli Defense Forces, appears to show Razan throwing a smoke grenade into an empty field. The words on the video read, "This medic was incited by Hamas to give up her life for their goals." It's then followed by a short clip of the Palestinian medic Razan al-Najjar speaking.

RAZAN AL-NAJJAR: [translated] I'm the paramedic Razan al-Najjar. I'm here at the front lines as a rescuing human shield.

AMY GOODMAN: After Razan speaks, the words on the video read, "Hamas uses paramedics as human shields." After the video was released, the Israeli military spokesman Avichay Edraee tweeted, "Razan al-Najjar is not the angel of mercy that Hamas propaganda attempts to portray," unquote. But the video has sparked immediate criticism for taking Razan's words from a previous interview out of context in order to distort their meaning. This is a clip from the original interview, in which Razan is being interviewed by a journalist with Al Mayadeen News.

REPORTER: [translated] Razan, the idea of becoming a paramedic, how did that idea start for you? Tell us. Was it your own idea only? Did it cross through your mind? Tell us, if you may, please.

RAZAN AL-NAJJAR: [translated] I'm the paramedic Razan al-Najjar. I'm here at the front lines as a rescuing human shield to protect and save the wounded at the front lines. Indeed, this idea was not suggested to me by anybody. I did it for my own self, because I opted to go through this adventure and try rescuing the wounded at the front lines. I have enough strength, courage and daring to go through this experience, to join the field and be prepared to go to ground zero to save the souls of our martyrs and some of our wounded. They are our brothers, of course. And praise to God, I managed, with all my determination, persistence and strength, to continue on this course that I started and I will end. And I've been persistent for 45 days.

AMY GOODMAN: So that was Razan al-Najjar speaking, in her own words, about her efforts to rescue wounded Palestinian protesters, wounded by the Israeli military. Earlier this week, we spoke with Razan's cousin, Dalia al-Najjar.

DALIA AL-NAJJAR: Razan was a very strong-minded girl, since she was very young. She always had dreams. She loved life. She was a source of positivity all the time. And being a nurse was one of her dreams. She worked hard to be one. She couldn't get a degree in nursing, unfortunately, because of the financial situations her family were living under. And then she went and got training in nursing for two years, and she worked as a volunteer for two years without being paid. And then she felt it's her duty to be a first responder, because it's everyone's duty. Everyone has a role in what's going on. And she felt that she can do what she's best at by being a first responder. She was one of the first female first responders.

And she inspired many people. I heard stories from her colleagues saying that other first responders used to motivate each other by mentioning her and talking about her. If anyone is sitting, they would tell him, "Come on, Razan broke her wrist, and yet she completed her shift." So, she's a source of inspiration for everyone.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Razan al-Najjar's cousin, Dalia al-Najjar. We reached her in Istanbul, Turkey, where she's co-founder of Xyla Water, an organization dedicated to making clean water accessible around the world.

Well, for more, we go to Sweden, via Democracy Now! video stream, to speak with Muhammad Shehada, writer and activist from the Gaza Strip, student of development studies at Lund University in Sweden. He writes for Haaretz, The Forward and other publications.

Muhammad, talk about this video that the Israeli military has released a week after Razan was gunned down by an Israeli sniper.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, this incident shows how the IDFevidently feels able to, first of all, lie so blatantly, in a way that can be checked so easily, because it knows that the Western media and the Western reporters would catch the bait and convey its lies as unquestioned facts, or at least come as credible narratives. For instance, The New York Times reported about this specific incident or this specific controversy as opposing narratives, between the real video and what the IDF claims. Any reporter could simply just go on YouTube and check the full interview for her or himself. But the problem is that, again, they won't do that. It's a betrayal not only of heroism, not only of the courage and sacrifice of the Palestinian people; it's just a betrayal of basic journalistic values.

As you have seen in the footage, the IDF footage, according to the shamelessly fabricated and doctored video, Razan was saying, very ironically, that she's standing as a human shield. Her specific use of that word "human shield" was obviously intended to take a dehumanizing term, that is widely deployed by the IDF to justify the killing of innocent civilians, and she used it to make it into something so powerful and touching, that couldn't be ignored. It is decisive and conclusive that there is no chance the IDF did edit and doctor that video in good faith or by accident. It was purposeful, to cut this interview after two seconds of what she says, in order to falsify her own words. If the IDF—or had they just lengthened the clip by one second, one more word, the whole story would have been unraveled.

But the problem is that, instead, they first murder an unarmed, clearly marked paramedic with precision weaponry, then they claim that it was an accident, and finally they claim that even accidents are directed by God to occur only to bad people, so the victim's death is justified. It appears that under no circumstance whatsoever would Israel acknowledge the Palestinians' suffering. We are never allowed to be seen as victims. It is as if Israel cannot tolerate another story of dispossession and misery to exist alongside it, so intolerance is constantly reinforced through the Israeli forces' hostilities toward the Gazan civilian population and now the deliberate desecration of their sacred memories. The least the IDF could have done in that incident is to show remorse, to say that "We were wrong for the execution of an innocent female paramedic." But sometimes there is enough honor in losing a battle than snatching a defeating and false victory. Instead, from the first moment, as you have seen, the IDF invested disproportionate time and effort to contextualize and find a pretext for this horrendous war crime than to hold the perpetrators accountable.

The problem is that, as always, the calamities visited upon the Palestinians are either denied, ridiculed or sometimes even cheered and applauded. There is always an internal investigation to be opened, a relief from blame. And this investigation is either never concluded, as in the case of the young martyr, 14-year-old protester Mohammed Ayoub, who died through the protest, or the findings of these reports are rather more appalling than the incident itself. One of the findings is that it never happened, just plain and simple, some IDF reports say, as in the case of Ahed Tamimi's cousin Mohammed. His medical record, his X-ray, eyewitnesses, everybody confirms that his head was shattered by Israeli live bullets directed towards him. But according to the IDF, he fell off his bike, it never happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad, I want to turn to that story for a moment, on Wednesday the Palestinian Information Ministry saying Israeli forces shot dead the 21-year-old Palestinian Ezz El-Deen al-Tamimi in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. He was a member of the prominent Tamimi family, which is well known for its resistance to the Israeli occupation. This is Mahmoud al-Tamami, a relative of the young man who was killed, Ezz El-Deen.

MAHMOUD AL-TAMIMI: [transalted] Israeli occupation forces raided a site near the gas station. When he ran away, they identified him and shot him directly with live ammunition, three bullets in his neck and chest. Then they beat him, and he was bleeding, before they moved his body to a military vehicle, where he was left for a long time before being pronounced dead.

AMY GOODMAN: Another member of the Tamimi family, 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, remains imprisoned on charges of slapping an Israeli soldier in a video that went viral. Earlier this week, a parole board rejected her appeal for an early release. She has really become a global face of the resistance to occupation. Muhammad Shehada, if you'd continue with—I mean, we're not just talking about—I mean, what we're talking about here, over 120 Palestinians killed since March 30th, since the nonviolent March of Return. Razan, a female paramedic—paramedics and medical people have been hit so hard. I wanted to go back to an excerpt of an interview we did a few weeks ago. This was the day after the U.S. moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. And I think the Israeli military killed more than 60 Palestinians in Gaza that day. I want to turn to Tarek Loubani. He's a Canadian emergency room doctor who went to Gaza to help wounded Palestinians. This is an excerpt of what he had to say. He was shot by Israeli sniper in both legs.

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: I don't know the answer to that. I don't know what orders they received or what was in their heads, so I can't tell you if we were deliberately targeted. What I can tell you is the things that I do know. In the six weeks of the march, there were no paramedic casualties. And in one day, 19 paramedics—18 wounded plus one killed—and myself were all injured, so—or were all shot with live ammunition. We were all—Musa was actually in a rescue at the time, but everybody else I've talked to was like me. We were away during a lull, without smoke, without any chaos at all, and we were targeted—and we were, rather, hit by live ammunition, most of us in the lower limbs. So, it's very, very hard to believe that the Israelis who shot me and the Israelis who shot my other colleagues—just from our medical crew, four of us were shot, including Musa Abuhassanin, who passed away. It's very hard to believe that they didn't know who we were, they didn't know what we were doing, and that they were aiming at anything else.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Dr. Tarek Loubani. I mean, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, spoke out about this. He was shot in both legs. And the man he just mentioned, the paramedic, Musa, who went to save him, was shot dead an hour later. Muhammad Shehada, if you can continue to talk about the coverage of what has taken place in Gaza and also what is happening today as we speak? Thousands are protesting in Gaza.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, as I said, the coverage of the Gazan protest or actual particular incidents, like Razan, concludes three different dehumanizing and equally appalling indications. One is that it never happened. There is the unarguably racist, dehumanizing and hideous term "Pallywood," that is coined and going viral to imply that the entire Palestinian population are consistently conniving and contriving staged major lies to defame Israel and exert an understandable anger or hatred, as they call it, of its illegal occupation and criminal blockade. The absurdity of this horrendous term dishonors only its authors and advocates.

But the problem—the other conclusion is that it wasn't us. As you have seen in the case of the double amputee Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, the IDFconcluded that the bullet that landed in his forehead was not coming from their own ammunition. Another racist term is coined here to describe Ibrahim's death as "self-inflicted suffering." The entire population of Palestine are perceived as masochistics who find joy in getting killed, maimed or crippled by the IDF, and whose main goal is, of course, to make their wish come true, without a second thought. The Israeli intelligence apparently managed to dig into Ibrahim's heart and to conclude his intentions, that his death was entirely self-inflicted, it was his own fault, because he was, quote, "an agitator who wanted to die as a martyr." And they, indeed, purposely overlook the fact that even if Ibrahim for once in his life contemplated death as a relief from the insufferable misery that he endured, it was mainly because the IDF first shot his legs, both of them, stole his legs and stole his life, because Israel's blockade turned his life into unbearable hell. He spent his golden years crawling on the floors begging for bare-bones subsistence.

The third conclusion, which is what we are now seeing in Razan's case and in the case of the Palestinian journalist Yaser Murtaja, is that it was an accident. And it comes from a deep and evident wishful thinking that if you presume the IDF to be the most moral army in the world, you can never conclude that they did this on purpose. By no means, the most moral army in the world would do a such thing. The IDF stated, at the beginning of the protest, that it knows where every bullet shot at the protest landed, maybe except for the ones that—when it's convenient for them to claim otherwise, like in the particular case of Razan. You see that they say first that she was shot by accident: The bullet apparently was shot in the air and bounced back and accurately shattered her heart. And even incidents that happen by accident, according to the IDF definition, only happen to bad people, as they call them. So the IDF, instead of investigating the actual incident or the accident, seem to spend great time and effort trying to prove an alleged affiliation between the victims and dehumanizing categories that would justify their killing. And this ought to be—

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