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Gaza Beach Carnage Video

There is only one word for the actions of the Israeli government and military towards the Palestinian people - slow and steady Genocide.

Ordinary Jews are not to blame for this. The responsibility lies with the small number of psychopathic Israeli right-wing "Zionist" leaders who, we can only assume, actually enjoy the sight of dismembered Palestinian children.

Gaza picnic ends in carnage

09/06/2006 News24.com

Al-Sudania - Broken camping tables, childrens' sandals and lumps of flesh lay on the sands of Gaza's Sudania beach on Friday, after the Israeli shelling of a picnic party left seven people dead.

Stunned witnesses recounted how the calm of a day out at the seaside turned into a scene of carnage.

The Israeli military said it would investigate the circumstances behind the tragedy, but survivors insisted there was no reason why the army had chosen to target the area.

The shelling wiped out a family.

The five members of the Ghali family, who were enjoying a picnic on the beach, were killed when Israeli shells landed on the beach in the late afternoon.

Husband Ali, wife Raisa, and their three children - aged one, three and ten - died instantly.

Picnic hampers and red plastic sandals lay scattered on the beach, where crimson blood spattered the yellow sand.

Witnesses shocked

Fragments of chairs had been thrown dozens of metres from the scene.

A teenaged girl writhed and wailed in anguish next to the body of a man who had been killed in the strike.

"Father! Father!" she screamed.

Ahmed Abu Amrene, who had been at the beach at the time, was still in a state of shock several hours later.

"I was swimming in the sea when we heard the sound of a shell," said the 20-year-old.

"We rushed over and saw the five members of the family dead on the sand."

Pointing towards the debris, he said: "The family was sitting right here. They were just having a meal."

A fleet of ambulances was dispatched to the scene. In less than an hour, the seven dead and 35 injured had been transferred to hospitals in Gaza City and the nearby Jabaliya refugee camp.

'This is a long way from anywhere'

Ahmed el-Douch, 25, said he could not understand why the Israeli military had fired at people picnicking at the seaside.

"Why did they target a family on the beach? This is a long way from anywhere used by the resistance to fire rockets against Israel. They are not being launched from here," he said.

"The Israelis just fire indiscriminately."

His sense of fury and bewilderment was matched by another bather, Jaber Mughani, who said picnickers had "just come to have a drink and something to eat at the beach" on one of the hottest days of the year so far.

The Israeli military said it had launched an investigation into the incident.

The shellings cap an upsurge of bloodshed in Gaza, where seven other Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes in less than 24 hours.

Gaza civilian man falls as he rushes to carry his son, the top of his head blown open, to an ambulance after an IDF airstrike on innocent civilians.

Once again, the Boston Globe feeds us a line of hooey:

The administration has acknowledged eavesdropping on Americans' international communications without seeking court approval. President Bush has said the eavesdropping is legal because of a congressional resolution passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that authorized him to use force against terrorism.

In fact, the neocons-it is no longer relevant to talk about Bush, as he is little more than a wind-up doll, albeit a damaged wind-up doll-are snooping domestically and it is disingenuous for the corporate media to go on and on about "international communications," as if the government is only snooping calls going out of the country.

Snooping is so widespread both domestically and internationally, the European Parliament produced a report some time ago recommending that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy.

In 1999, well before everything changed-that is before the globalists decided to ramp up their fascist efforts in the wake of the nine eleven false flag operation-Patrick S. Poole wrote: "ECHELON is ... being used for purposes well outside its original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance targeted at American civilians for reasons of 'unpopular' political affiliation or for no probable cause at all in violation of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution-are consistently impeded by very elaborate and complex legal arguments and privilege claims by the intelligence agencies and the US government. The guardians and caretakers of our liberties, our duly elected political representatives, give scarce attention to these activities, let alone the abuses that occur under their watch."

In U.S. District Court, the American Civil Liberties Union squared off against the Justice Department. "Making its case in court for the first time, the government argued that the president needs as much power as necessary to secure the country, especially as Al Qaeda continues to threaten the United States with terrorist attacks," reports the Detroit Free Press.

Of course, there is absolutely no "al-Qaeda" threat anywhere in the country, regardless of a steady stream of lurid fantasies and campfire stories released by the corporate media, and for anybody with two brain cells to rub together it is obvious nine eleven, the terrorist event sans pareil, is an inside job, although millions of people prefer to be conditioned by the corporate media, maidservant of the fascist state. Like folks who believe in alien abductions and the visage of Jesus appearing on grilled cheese sandwiches, millions of Americans believe a handful of cave-dwelling Arabs were able to suspend the law of physics on September 11, 2001.

In order to scare us into submission, and have us accept massive violations of our constitutional rights, at one time a birthright in this country, Justice Department lawyer-factotum, Tony Coppolino, droned on for 50 minutes about "al-Qaeda" in a Detroit courtroom, declaring the terrorist group, a well-known CIA operation, "attacked and killed thousands" and "threatens to attack us again," although he did not bother to offer a shred of evidence, as the fairy tale is taken as gospel truth now, thanks to a relentless, half decade long drumbeat of propaganda dispensed by the corporate media, making sure to follow their government script closely. "For that reason, the U.S. government must be allowed to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of Americans in some cases.... He stressed that any surveillance is 'narrowly and specifically focused on Al Qaeda,'" the Freep would have us believe.

Meanwhile, as a reminder America is now a fascist police state, two "software vendors have made their IP wiretapping tools for carriers and law-enforcement agencies work together," reports Network World in a news article that comes off more like a glowing press release. "The transition on carrier networks from circuit-switched phone calls to IP packet data services has turned the world of wiretapping upside down. With new laws requiring carriers to hand over information about subscribers' e-mail and Web surfing, carriers and legal agencies need new tools that work with each other."

In other words, technology made it more difficult for the government to "wiretap" phone calls over the internet, and so in "August 2004, the FCC ruled that interconnected VoIP service providers will have to allow law enforcement wiretapping under Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) by May 14, 2007. A federal court upheld that ruling" last week.

Rest assured, the feds will only monitor calls made to the hundreds of thousands of "al-Qaeda" members abroad.

Not to worry, since the Constitution is simply a "goddamn piece of paper," according to our cardboard cut-out president, a front man for the "universal fascism" neocons, and besides, they are simply trying to protect you from terrorists who "hate our way of life" and "our freedom," for instance the freedom to watch American Idol and consume worthless, ephemeral crap.

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Massacre is an acquired taste. The United States is arguably the only country on the planet whose national personality and self-image is rooted in centuries of unremitting expansion through race war punctuated by massacre. There have always been "free-fire zones" all along the coveted, ever moving peripheries of white American power, from the "Indian country" surrounding the settler beachheads of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown to the "Sunni Triangle" of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. Whole peoples - millions - have been erased in the glorious march of American Manifest Destiny.

It is true that the globe-ravaging European colonial powers certainly killed more human beings in the course of their imperial careers than their settler sons in North America. However, the national characters of Britain, Spain, France, Holland and Belgium were already formed when the Great European Breakout and Worldwide Pillage commenced. Although their wealth was later built on the blood and bones of faraway "natives" and slaves, European civil societies were already shaped by long histories of conflict among themselves, between classes and nations on their small sub-continent. Britain and France stretched forth their naval and army tentacles to ensure that wealth arrived in Liverpool and Marseilles, but the colonized peoples did not effectively intrude on the evolution of European society.

Nobody had to invent the historical personalities of the Frenchman in France, the Englishman in England. Their civil societies were deeply impacted - and some sectors greatly enriched - by the existence of the colonies, but not (until very recently) by the foreign peoples who died for European prosperity.

The English settler colonies in North America were different - unique. Masses of armed migrants came to steal, and stay, and keep stealing. Theirs was an enterprise of aggrandizement at the native's expense, and unlimited expansion. Less than a century and a half after the massacre and near-erasure of the Pequots - in celebration of which the Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the first day of Pilgrim Thanksgiving - the white colonists decided that they were a distinct people, no longer Europeans.

They were right. American colonial society was shaped by constant depredations against non-whites, close up and brutal. By 1776, one out of five non-Native American residents of the colonies were Black slaves, the control and dehumanization of which had become a daily collective duty of much of the white population. Across the Alleghenies lay unconquered Native American lands that, once cleansed, could usher into being a white empire that would dwarf Europe. The English King and his treaties with the Native Americans stood in the way; he had to go.

The "American" mission was clear, manifest: to endlessly expand through the elimination of impediments posed by the External Other ("savage" Native Americans), while keeping white society safe and separate from the "debauchery" of the valuable, Internal Other (Black slaves). This is the foundation on which the American iconography and celebration is based. Lacking any other, it is the template of white American identity and purported "civilization."

From Outright Theft to Glorious Empire

By the turn of the 20th Century, with the Native Americans dead or subjugated and African Americans forced into the long nightmare of Jim Crow, soon-to-be president Teddy Roosevelt - who called Blacks "a perfectly stupid race" - summed up the great American adventure with the guilelessness of a pure psychopath. In our March 16, 2004 issue, BC contributing writer Paul Street described Roosevelt's "massive, four-volume 1899 study Winning of the West" as "a white-supremacist paean to Anglo-America's near-eradication of North America's original civilizations."

"During the past three centuries," Roosevelt opined, "the spread of English-speaking people over the world's waste spaces" (meaning spaces not occupied by "progressive" capitalist-developmental Caucasians) was a great and welcome "feat of power," for which the "English-speaking race" could justly feel proud. No such "feat" of "race power" was more laudable, however, than "the vast movement by which this continent [North America] was conquered and peopled" - the "crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements."

This is still the song that is sung, the imperative to supremacy that cannot but lead to endless war and massacre. Paul Street presents a long but necessarily incomplete chronicle of the mass murder exclamation points in U.S. history that polite white society now shakes its head in regret about, but which remain the operative events and premises on which U.S. behavior in the world is justified - celebrated! - today.

Roosevelt became a "hero" in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a pushover conflict in which a decrepit Spain was ejected from Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The U.S. was now a full-fledged imperial power with tens of millions of "natives" under its boot - and proud of it. American Manifest Destiny had gone truly global, as white as ever.

But the Filipinos, who had surrounded and almost run out the Spanish before the Americans arrived, insisted on claiming their independence. The U.S. embarked on a scorched earth and bodies strategy - as usual.

The American soldiers were confused, however. What would they call these people who lived in the thousand-island archipelago "free-fire" zone? With the Native American wars (massacres) still fresh in their minds, and the lynching of thousands of American Blacks the favorite pastime for many back home, U.S. soldiers wrote to family and friends of the fun they were having killing the "niggers" and "injuns" of the Philippines.

"Gooks," "chinks," and "hajis" would come later, once the Americans got their feet wet in the blood of the world.

Mark Twain, an anti-war activist, wrote of how 30,000 U.S. troops caused the deaths of a half-million Filipinos. One episode of many in the imperial butchery occurred in 1906 when a whole village sought refuge from the invaders in a dormant volcanic crater on the southern island of Jolo. Sixteen-hundred were massacred by American artillery, rifles and machine guns. U.S. officials reported:

"This action was absolutely necessary to the welfare of the people of Jolo. The position was first shelled by a naval gunboat and then assaulted by the troops and constabulary. The Moro women fought alongside the men and held their children before them, having sworn to die rather than yield. In this way a number of women and children were among the killed - an unfortunate but necessary evil."

The same script we hear today had been written, even then, just as the U.S. was stepping fully onto the global stage. We will not list the atrocities that U.S. soldiers have committed against (almost always) non-white peoples in the 100 years since the Jolo Crater Massacre, the Philippines. They are legion, as were the massacres that occurred in the previous centuries of the evolution of American Manifest Destiny.

The rabid expansionism at the core of the American national personality has never been bound by fixed borders, international law, or any other constraints. Steeped in racism, it places no value whatsoever on non-white lives. That's why the Bush administration gets away with not counting the civilian casualties in Iraq - only the American dead matter. And that's why contemporary Americans feel perfectly normal speaking of "exporting American values" and other nonsense to cloak the atrocities of nation-stealing that are but a "necessary evil" in the fulfillment of some God-given mission - wherever it leads.

Continuity of Crimes

The Haditha, Balad, Ramadi, and Makr al-Deeb massacres of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops are mere whiffs from the inferno that has consumed up to a quarter million Iraqis since the Americans set upon their mission to accomplish - as in 1906 Jolo, the Philippines - what was "absolutely necessary to the welfare of the people."

In a post-Haditha column that Cindy Sheehan, anti-war mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, called "the most difficult article that I have ever had to write," she decried "the fact that our troops are being turned into war criminals." Sheehan recognizes that the U.S. is in violation of international law - that the Iraq war is a criminal enterprise.

"War turns our mostly normal American youth into wanton murderers who have lost their own humanity and love of others. Haditha in this war and My Lai in another disgusting war were unfortunately not aberrations. War is the abominable aberration."

We commend Sheehan's courage in describing the U.S. government as criminal. In doing so, she is beginning to confront the national mythology - at the core of the national identity - that Americans are always seeking some "greater good" and commit crimes only by mistake or through the "aberrations" that are inevitably unleashed once wars are started.

But even the brave Ms. Sheehan cannot face the truth. The (white) American public still cannot discuss why the U.S. glories in having become the ultimate imperial power of all time, to the acclaim of the overwhelming majority of its citizens whose whole history and culture has prepared them to accept this "burden." Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors. American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others.

Societies willingly go to war when they have been primed to do so by an already existing mass internal dynamic that is easily manipulated by scheming rulers. White America has been constantly at war with Others, internal and external, since long before the founding of the Republic. George Bush just played the right chords, in Iraq. Now the music is sounding way off key, which causes majorities of Americans great concern and confusion. Yet these same citizens react just like their pre-Iraq selves when the Bush regime choreographs a near-identical run-up to war with neighboring Iran - another country they know nothing about except that it's not "white" in the American sense. Are white Americans stupid, or have they been conditioned by a national ethos born of habitual aggression, fundamental expectations of impunity, and an idiotic assumption of innocence.

Cindy Sheehan tries to find the soft spot in America by blaming the crimes in Iraq and Vietnam on something called "war," but sadly winds up in the same place as apologists for slavery and genocide, who claim these systematic crimes were "aberrations" not fundamental to the American national character and worldview.

Slavery was not an aberration; it created the wealth that allowed the United States to emerge as a world power only a century-and-a-quarter after the Declaration of Independence, and to become a magnet for successive waves of European immigrants. Genocide of Native Americans was not an aberration; it was the logical outcome of the original European hemispheric-theft project, and became the national project with the triumph of the settlers over the British. The ever-expanding United States was born. Was it an aberration?

At the very least, we must hope the planet survives the United States. In a world that is becoming inter-dependent at breath-taking speed, there is no room for a superpower nation born in and nurtured by centuries of massacre and endless war, always with the majority support of its white citizenry.

A Change of Values

Most Black Americans understand that the U.S. has never been up to any good in the non-white vastness of the world, because we realize that most American whites have been steeped in either blood or lies about our own Black corner of the society. African Americans react with learned cynicism when white anti-warriors call for a "return" to "American values" - for obvious historical and contemporary reasons. What values? "American" values are the problem.

The American-instigated crisis that threatens to widen the arenas of war is not just an "aberration" that can be corrected by getting the Bush men out of office - although that would be welcome. In truth, most Americans care little about the world, unless they have a privileged position in it, imposing their will on everyone else. They are collectively hostile to their own fellow citizens who are Black, and many are rousing themselves for a fierce confrontation with yet another Other: Latino immigrants. It's the same historical dynamic, that can only lead to more massacres and endless wars - foreign and domestic.

Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a book to be titled, Barack Obama and the Crisis in Black Leadership.

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