© Abdul-Khaliq Burnat
Prisoner advocacy groups
say female Palestinians face a wide range of human rights violations in Israeli jails.
Earlier in December, three female Palestinian prisoners - Shorooq Douyat, Marah Bakir, and Muna Kaadan - were brutalized and thrown into solitary confinement,
according to Palestinian Prisoners' Club, an organization representing political prisoners.
Charlotte Kates, a coordinator for
Samidoun Prisoners Solidarity Network told me that "most Palestinian female prisoners are held in Damon Jail, a notoriously ill maintained prison,
formally a stable for animals."
In her words,
Israeli guards in Damon Prison near the city of Haifa had been raiding women's cells for several days and "physically abused women."
"One woman had the Hijab pulled from her head and some women lost consciousness, they are also demanding the transfer of women in the middle of the night to other cells," she said.
Kates says the Israeli guards adopted these methods in response to protests by the women against the oppressive measures of the prison authorities.
"For the past three months, they've not been allowed any family visits, they were promised phone calls but instead endured vicious attacks by Israeli guards," she stated. Kates explained that "Under the Geneva Convention, they are not allowed to be transferred into other territories and they've all been taken into Israel,
and what that means is that in order for them to have family visits (many of the women are mothers) they need special permits... which are often denied by the Israeli occupation."
To find out more about the abuses suffered by Palestinian political prisoners, I spoke to a young man named Abdul-Khaliq, who has himself endured Israeli "torture techniques." He strongly condemned the measures taken against female prisoners now and opened up for the first time about his story.
'Nobody cares what's happening to us'Abdul-Khaliq Burnat is a 21-year-old Palestinian from the West Bank village of Bil'in.
He was first imprisoned as a minor for 13 months in 2017, six months of which he was held in administrative detention without a charge. He says that in May,
during the 11-day war between Gaza and Israel's military, he was "kidnapped" by Israeli forces late at night from his family home and held in the notorious interrogation facility known as Al-Moskobiya Detention Center.Abdul-Khaliq says he has never practiced violence against the Israeli occupiers, yet
he has been shot three times by Israeli forces during non-violent demonstrations. He suffered a head and back injury after being shot from behind, and was also shot in the arm. His younger brother, Mohammed, was also detained in May and has spent the past eight months in administrative detention. Two of those months, Mohammed was also in Moskobiya prison, and was hospitalized three times, according to his lawyers.
Mohammed was only 17 when they arrested him."You cannot imagine this life, for two months I was held and it was constant questioning followed by isolation and physical, as well as psychological torture. For what? What was the reason they took me?
I didn't do a thing and they didn't even charge me at all, they eventually just let me go," Abdul Khaliq told me.
I asked what torture methods he personally experienced at the Moskobiya detention centre.
"They shouted at me, beat me with their fists, slapped me and used tools. I was restricted with a plastic zip tie which cut into my wrists, whilst I was strapped to a chair in a stress position for 20 hours of the day," he said.
"For three days straight, they had me in a smelly, tiny cell; it was so cold in there and there wasn't any light, I was stripped of all my clothes for the whole time and tied up naked, they didn't give me any food and I couldn't even use the bathroom," he said.In Abdul-Khaliq's view, the guards did this to humiliate him, forcing him to defecate all over himself if he couldn't hold it."For the whole time in there I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone except the Israeli intelligence interrogators. They would just leave me in stress positions whilst freezing me and returning to beat me and ask more questions. I wasn't allowed to speak to my family or friends at all. I had nothing in the dirty cell, just a toilet and bed.
The food they fed us was animal food, not even human food. But you know what? You are the only one that has asked to tell my story, nobody even cares what is happening to us," he said.
The 11-day fighting in May resulted in the deaths of 256 Palestinians, including 66 children and 40 women, according to the UN.
The Israeli side lost 12 people, including two children, who were killed by rockets coming from Gaza.Abdul-Khaliq says that he and his brother were arrested and taken to the detention facility amid the conflict, when "Gaza was being bombed and the children and women were being killed." In his words, Israeli interrogators "were constantly talking to me about this and laughing about it."
"They would update me on who was killed, innocent civilians, and they would laugh in my face telling me that they didn't care who was killed," he said. Abdul-Khaliq quoted one of the interrogators as saying
"we can kill anyone in Gaza and if we want. We can kill you too, this isn't a problem for us, nobody cares about you dirty Arabs."Abdul-Khaliq believes that "people need to know what they are doing to us." In his opinion, "what they are doing now to the women prisoners is a crime."
"
How can this be justified and why are people still silent? Innocent women and men are taken and abused, but nobody wants to ask anything about it, it's like we don't exist to them."
Last week, in what was believed to be a response to the violent measures against female inmates, a "prisoner from Gaza" allegedly used a makeshift knife to
stab and lightly injure an Israeli guard in the Nafkah prison. According the Palestinian media,
in response, the Israeli prison authorities carried out collective punishment against prisoners in the jail's 'Section 12', restraining them in iron chains outside, after stripping them of their clothes and leaving them in the cold.Palestinian political groups,
such as Hamas, have called the measures taken against female prisoners, and then the male prison population, a red line that has been crossed, and have threatened to retaliate.
The crackdown on female prisoners has struck a chord in the wider Palestinian society. It is
estimated that up to 700,000 Palestinians - 10,000 of them women - have been detained by Israel since 1967.
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It is commanded in the Talmud’s Kiddushin 66c: “The best of the gentiles: kill him; the best of snakes: smash its skull; the best of women: is filled with witchcraft.” (The uncensored version of this text appears in Tractate Soferim [New York, M. Higer, 1937], 15:7, p. 282). The Talmud decrees in Sanhedrin 81b-82a: “All gentile women without exception are: ‘ Niddah, Shifchah, Goyyah and Zonah ’ (menstrual filth, slaves, heathens and prostitutes).
Moreover, a declaration by the supreme arbiter of rabbinic law in the Ashkenazic world, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, created a justification for white slave-holders and slave-traders (both Judaic and Christian) to enslave black people for life and treat them as chattel (animals). Maimonides performed this service for the slave trade in his seminal text, The Guide of the Perplexed, which is celebrated throughout the western world (his image hangs in a place of honor in the halls of Congress and numerous buildings in the United States are named for him). In The Guide of the Perplexed, this “illustrious” rabbi taught that black people are “irrational animals” who are situated midway between the ape and the human (cf. University of Chicago Press, Shlomo Pines translation, vol. II, [1963], p. 618).
The founding sacred book of the theologically influential and, in the United States, politically powerful, Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch Judaism, is the Tanya, which was written by Chabad’s founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyady. This foundational Chabad volume decrees that: “Gentile souls are of a completely different and inferior order. They are totally evil, with no redeeming qualifies whatsoever. Their material abundance derives from supernal refuse. Indeed, they themselves derive from refuse, which is why they are more numerous than the Jews.”
Shneur Zalman: “The souls of the goyim emanate from the unclean kelipot (husks) which contain no good whatsoever.” (Cf. Opening the Tanya , p. 43). The Kabbalah in the volume “Book of Splendor” (Zohar ), defines kelipot as “husks of evil…waste matter…bad blood…dross…dregs…the root of evil” (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, pp. 125, 139, 156-157).
Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh (born in 1944 in St. Louis, Missouri), is considered one of Chabad-Lubavitch’s leading experts on the Kabbalah. He is a celebrated educator and influencer in the USA and the Israeli state. Like Rabbi Grama, Ginsburgh also teaches the dogma that Jews possess a genetically-based superiority over non-Jews. “If you have two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” Rabbi Ginsburgh asserts. He teaches: “If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.” Rabbi Ginsburgh stated further, “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.” Rabbi Ginsburgh is the author of Baruch Hagever , a book praising the example of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 40 Palestinians as they prayed in a mosque in Hebron on Purim, February 1994. In Baruch Hagever the rabbi termed the slaughter, “…an act of bravery whose source was divine grace.”
“The sanctification of the name of God…The life of Israel is worth more than the life of the goy and even if the goy does not intend to hurt Israel, it is permissible to hurt him in order to save Israel.” “Legally,” Ginsburg asserts, “if a Jew kills a non-Jew, he’s not called a murderer. He didn’t transgress the Sixth Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ This applies only to Jews killing Jews.” (This is a nearly verbatim reference to BT Sanhedrin 57a).
This homicidal rabbinic theology is imparted in a book co-authored in 2009 by the Rosh yeshiva (Dean) of Ginsburgh’s seminary, Od Yosef Chai in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. It is titled Torat Ha-Melekh: Berure Halakha Be’-inyene Malkhut U-Milhamot (“The King’s Torah: Halakhic Clarifications Regarding Matters of Kingdom and Wars”). The title has been abbreviated as Torat Hamelech. It was written by the Rosh yeshiva , Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, in collaboration with Rabbi Yosef Elitzur. It explicitly claims that the life of a Jew is worth more than the life of a non-Jew, and permits the killing of innocent non-Jews, including children. One section of the volume teaches that it is permitted to kill non-Jewish infants on the enemy side during warfare “if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents.” Other reasons the rabbis furnish for the permission to kill non-Jewish children include if they “block the rescue of Jews…Little children are often situated in this way…it is permitted to kill them because their very presence facilitates the killing (of Jews)…(p. 215).
On p. 185 the rabbinic authors state that whoever uses freedom of speech to weaken the Jews is considered to be a rodef and can be killed. They base this on the ruling by the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew, who determined that whoever causes Jews to be reluctant to kill (“faint-hearted while at war”) deserves death (cf. Gur Aryeh on Parashat Mattot). In chapter four of Torat Hamelech, Rabbis Shapira and Elitzur state that because the life of the Jew is superior to that of the non-Jew, “…there is a consensus among the halakhic sources that it is permitted to kill non-Jews to save the lives of Jews…It is permitted as well in cases in which we exploit the presence of innocent young children (and harm them) in order to harm their parents” (p. 199).
The final chapter of this rabbinic law book urges the employment of merciless vengeance against the goyim (pp. 217-224). Torat Hamelech concludes with an indirect call for vigilante killings of Palestinians, many of which have occurred since the volume appeared, to little publicity in the West, such as the burning to death in 2015 of a Palestinian baby, Ali Dawabsheh, and his mother and father, by a youthful Talmudist, Amiram Ben Uliel. Two dozen Orthodox rabbis have signed an open letter calling on the government to free Amiram Ben Uliel.
Rabbi Shapira and Rabbi Elitzur declare that individual Jews can make the decision to kill goyim extra-judicially: “One does not need a decision by the nation to permit the spilling of blood…sometimes one must commit ruthless acts that are designed to create the correct element of fear.” (End quote from Torat Hamelech ). In addition to Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, prominent rabbis Dov Lior and Ya’acov Yosef gave Torat Hamelech their blessing. This book has been circulated among Israeli military and police forces.
According to Judaic scholars Norton Mezvinsky and Israel Shahak in their book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel , “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Kabbalah is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Kabalah the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.” The largest funeral for any Israeli dignitary in the history of the Israeli state was conducted in honor of the memory and teachings of an advocate of the genocide of Palestinians, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, in Jerusalem in October, 2013. His funeral was attended by an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 Israeli mourners. The New York Times described Rabbi Yosef as “the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party…”
Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that Rabbi Yosef was “one of the great halachic authorities of our generation. Rav Ovadia was a giant in Torah and halakha… He worked hard to glorify the heritage of Israel.” These are the teachings of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the object of media and Israeli veneration: Arab people should be exterminated : “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them. It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.” (2001 Passover sermon. Cf. Haaretz [Israeli newspaper] , April 12, 2001).
“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel…With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant… That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew. Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created.” Jerusalem Post , October 18, 2010.
The racism and bigotry toward Palestinians, Christians and goyim in general is a direct transmission from the Babylonian Talmud and the later rabbinic legal texts that are the heirs of its didactic hermeneutic . The Talmudic dictum to show no mercy to a non-Jew is taught at yeshivas in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, where settler institutes of higher education in places such as Petach Tikvah turn out recruits for service in “elite combat units” of the Israeli army and air force. Regiments and squadrons composed of these Talmudic-Zionist troops are among the most brutal in the Israeli military.
The Talmudic theology that produced Ovadia Yosef, also produced the prominent Israeli Rabbi Bentzi Gopstein, who advocates the burning of Christian churches on Israeli territory (cf. The Telelgraph [UK] Aug. 6, 2015). He has declared that Christian “Missionary work must not be given a foothold… Let’s throw the vampires out of our land before they drink our blood again.” ( Forward , [New York Judaic newspaper], Dec. 24, 2015). Gopstein is a leader in Lehav a (ץ הקודש LiMniat Hitbolelut B’eretz HaKodesh : “The Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land,” which attacks Palestinians who date or marry Judaic women. In 2010, “Multiple rebbetzins , (wives of rabbis), acting on behalf of Lehava , issued an open letter urging Israeli women not to associate with ‘non-Jews.” It advised, “Don’t date non-Jews, don’t work at places that non-Jews frequent, and don’t do national service with non-Jews.” The letter implied that if the women did so, they would be cut off from their ‘holy race.” (Cf. “Rabbis’ Wives Urge Israeli Women: Stay Away from Arab men” Haaretz December 28, 2010; also: Jerusalem Post, December 28, 2010).
The leading Israeli settler-Rabbi Shlomo Aviner declared that the devastating fire at Notre Dame cathedral in April, 2019 was God’s curse—divine retribution for medieval Catholics putting the Babylonian Talmud on trial: “Aviner said it was a result of the Paris trial, ‘In which Jewish sages in France of that generation were forced into confrontation with the Christian sages. The result was the burning of the Talmud. The Talmud books were brought to the Notre Dame square in 20 wagons…and were burned there, meaning, 1,200 Talmud books… Aviner, now the rabbi of the West Bank settlement Beit El, said it is a mitzvah — a deed done from religious duty — to set fire to churches in Israel…” (Cf. Yotam Berger, Haaretz , April 17, 2019).
“The great Christian Church in Paris is on fire. Should we feel sorry for that, or should we rejoice, as it [the cathedral] is idolatry, which it is a mitzvah to burn?…Several immensely important rabbinic rulers, most prominent among them Maimonides, ruled that churches are places of idolatry and ought to be destroyed. The rulings are very clear.”—Rabbi Shlomo Aviner.
ALL THIS AND MORE IS FOUND AT THIS LINK: [ Link ]
I marvel at the level of propaganda Israel exerts within America. I used to believe their stories and narratives before I red pilled. I wonder about Trump supporters. They appear to believe that the Arabs are threatening Israel's sovereignty and freedom when, in actuality, the opposite seems to occur with Palestine. Many actions by Trump woke me up but none better than his subservience and bootlicking toward Israel.
The Israeli tactics and mindset have not only roosted among our police forces, who train in Israel, but also roosted within our jails and prisons, for Jan. 6 prisoners are suffering much the same under identical DOJ/Washington, D.C. prison tactics.