Winter Patriot Community Blog

April 18, 2012 - On Monday, Israeli teenager, Noam Gur, began an initial ten-day prison sentence because she publicly refused to serve in the Israeli army. A second teen, Alon Gurman, presented himself at the military base in order to refuse service, along with Gur, but according to a tweet from Gur was sent home without being jailed. In a short video produced by Jillian Kestler d'Amours for the Alternative Information Center, Gur explained - at the gate of the military camp where she is serving her sentence - why she has chosen to resist conscription ...

April 18, 2012 - A newly released document acquired by Wired Magazine exposes the United States Defense Department's torture techniques. In the 37 page report, former CIA official John Kiriakou warns the George W. Bush administration about the techniques that were being used on detainees and explains how they are against US law. His warnings went unheard of, until Kiriakou was indicted for leaking the information to the media. David Swanson, campaigner for Roots Action, joins us with more...

April 18, 2012 - As Palestinian political prisoners held captive in Israeli dungeons start a general open hunger strike, stand in solidarity with them, support their just struggle and demand their freedom. The indigenous people of occupied Palestine have been held hostage by a brutal military occupation, and confined to ghettos build in their own land. The Palestinians are held captives in their own homes, towns and villages, with military checkpoints locking them up, controlling and limiting their movement, and surrounded by Zionist colonies built on the ruins of Palestinian villages and on the bones of the Palestinians. They are held captives in their in their own homeland, in their homes and in Israeli dungeons. Every week, tens of Palestinians are kidnapped from their homes, workplace, schools and at checkpoints...

April 18, 2012 - ...History affords few if any examples of a free people -- in such a powerful country, under no existential threat, undergoing no invasion, no armed insurrection, no natural disaster or epidemic or societal collapse -- giving up their own freedoms so meekly, so mutely. Most Americans like to boast of their love of freedom, their rock-ribbed independence and their fiercely-held moral principles: yet they are happy to see the government claim -- and use -- the power to murder innocent people whenever it pleases while imposing an ever-spreading police state regimen on their lives and liberties. Sheep doped with Rohypnol would put up a stronger fight than these doughty patriots...

April 18, 2012 - The PA Ministry of Detainee Affairs said Wednesday that Israel has tightened procedures against prisoners on a mass hunger-strike launched a day earlier. The ministry said in a statement that Israel's prison administration put detainees in solitary confinement without electricity. Prisoners in Ashkelon jail said detainees were threatened with transfer to a new section, and banned family visits.... The Palestinian Authority ministry says 1,600 prisoners joined the hunger-strike on Tuesday, Palestinian Prisoners Day. International rights group Amnesty International said Tuesday it was troubled by reported punitive measures against the hunger-strikers...

April 18, 2012 - The paratroopers had their assignment: Check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. Try to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification. The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan's Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held - and others squatted beside - the corpse's severed legs....

April 17, 2012 - Iraqi leaders from across the political spectrum are accusing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of seeking to rig the country's electoral system after he arrested the official in charge of administering elections. Maliki, increasingly denounced by Iraqi voices of all stripes as a ruthless dictator, seems to have taken to arresting anybody he disagrees with, including his own vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi....

On March 20th, I interviewed Dr. Mustafa Barghouti about the plans for a new international initiative for Land Day, March 30th: a Global March to Jerusalem, to bring together in one nonviolent action all of the Palestinian political parties and civil society organizations in historic Palestine as well as in the diaspora, with supporting actions around the world. Then on March 27, Mustafa's distant cousin, Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, issued a letter from the Israeli prison where he has so far served ten years of five life sentences. In it, Marwan Barghouti called on the Palestinian Authority to end peace negotiations and all coordination with Israel, to institute a total boycott against Israel, and to turn to the UN General Assembly to advance the bid for statehood. He also called on the Palestinian people to begin a new a popular nonviolent uprising in the spirit of the Arab Spring: a third intifada. As punishment, the Israelis put him in solitary confinement. Both Barghoutis are calling for increased Palestinian popular resistance, which is an implicit criticism of the old-guard Fatah leadership...

April 17, 2012 - The number of martyrs in Syria has risen to 74 thus far today, they are distributed as follows: 40 martyrs in Idlib including 8 who were executed and several martyrs who fell yesterday during the shelling whose bodies were recovered and identified today, 22 martyrs in Homs including 7 martyrs who were killed in the shelling of Kasrah neighborhood and a player on the Syrian Karate Team, 6 martyrs in Daraa, and 1 martyrs in each of Damascus, Yabroud and Damascus Suburbs.Idlib: The number of martyrs who were documented rose to 38 as the primary toll which is expected to increase because there are of bodies that people couldnt pull because of heavy security deployment in the area. It has been figured out that some of the martyrs were executed and that elements of the forces of the regime urinated on some of the bodies. Also, the shelling and siege of the city is continued along with water and electricity cut off...Homs: A new massacre commited by the regime in the Kassara neighborhood in Deir Baalba and discovered by the local residents. Seven civilians including a child were slaughtered and thrown in a home...

April 17, 2012- Bassem Tamimi has been sitting in an Israeli prison for over a year. Tamimi is a prominent Palestinian activist from the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, where he has led the small village's popular unarmed struggle against Israeli occupation and takeover of land since its beginnings at the end of 2009. Tamimi was arrested in his home on March 24, 2011 for organizing protests and inciting against Israel, based on testimony by Islam Dar Ayyoub, a 14-year old resident of Nabi Saleh who was taken from him home in the middle of the night by Israeli forces for interrogation. His military trial is still ongoing...

April 17, 2012 - Democracy has become a minefield peppered with nasty surprises for Egyptian voters. The acrimony swirling around most candidates amid rumours that at least one is married to a belly dancer and another's mother was a Jewish spy for Israel is so thick it makes the run-up to the US presidential election look like a love-fest. As someone who's been based in Egypt for more than eight years, I would love to be able to outline the current state-of-play but it's almost a daily shape-shifter... So who's left? Former Arab League chief Amr Mousa who's leading the race according to an Al Ahram poll is still very much in the running and so is the moderate Islamist Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a physician who was ejected from the Muslim Brotherhood for independently throwing his hat in the ring...

April 17, 2012 - Israeli settlers chopped down 250 Palestinian owned olive trees on Tuesday, belonging to residents of Betello village northwest of the central West Bank city of Ramallah. Orchard owner Fawzi Dar Bazar discovered that his olive trees had been chopped down and destroyed when he and his family went to their orchard on Tuesday. He added that this was not the first time his orchard and several others belonging to other residents of his village had been attacked....

April 17, 2012 - On April 17, about 1,600 Palestinian prisoners began open-ended hunger strikes. More on that below. Palestinians face hellish conditions in Israeli prisons. They endure torture, deprivation, isolation, intimidation, and denial of basic rights. Administrative detainees are held indefinitely without charge or trial. Children young as 10 are treated like adults. So-called security prisoners are isolated punitively for extended periods. All Palestinian prisoners suffer overcrowding, poor ventilation and sanitation, lack of proper clothing, inadequate food in terms of quality, quantity, and conformity to dietary requirements, and poor medical care....

April 17, 2012 - Dear Herr Hansen, I write, to coin a phrase, more in sorrow than in anger, that your airline caved in to pressure from Israel and joined Air France, Alitalia, Turkish and Brussels Airlines, Jet2 and Easy Jet (mission statement: " ... to effect and offer a consistent and reliable product ...") in refusing "flytilla" passengers en route to Bethlehem in Palestine, with fully paid tickets, on to your flights to Israel's Ben Gurion Airport....

April 17, 2012 - Around 100 Tunisian workers have been kidnapped by armed men in western Libya, a rights group said Tuesday, but Libyan officials denied the claim, calling the incident a trivial dispute. The Tunisian League for Human Rights said roughly 100 people working near the western town of Zaouia were seized by armed men who were demanding the release of four Libyans held in Tunisia. The workers were taken hostage late Monday, Lassad Jamoussi, a league official, told AFP...

April 17, 2012 - Ben Gurion Airport was thrown into chaos for the third annual Flytilla on Sunday. As starry-eyed tourists arrived to visit the Holy sites and beady-eyed new Israelis arrived to kick more Palesinians off their land in the name of the Jewish State, thousands of Westerners with a sense of conscience presented their air tickets to suspicious officials in Europe and -- if they were lucky -- their passports in Tel Aviv, and held their breath. Their intent was quite innocent -- to visit beleaguered Palestinians in the West Bank; in one case, to help locals build a school....

April 17, 2012 - At the start of The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini later adapted for film, a brave and selflessly loyal Afghan boy runs to help his much wealthier friend, singing out his love for him "For you, a thousand times over ..." They have been flying a fighting kite, (these are kites with edges sharp enough to cut the strings of another kite), and the singing boy has gone to fetch an enemy kite they have won. A dreadful betrayal ensues, its effects exacerbated horribly by the start of the U.S.-Soviet proxy war. Several decades pass before any small sort of atonement can be achieved by the book's protagonist. We sang that song this weekend. I was privileged to attend several actions organized by Kansas and Missouri activists, beginning at Fort Leavenworth prison, to which Bradley Manning will likely return after his current ordeal in a New Jersey military courtroom....

April 17, 2012 - Israel's Knesset (parliament) is due to hold a special session on Wednesday to discuss a bill which would authorise Jewish settlers to build on private Palestinian land, especially in the Migron settlement outpost and other such places. All Jewish settlements, "outposts" or not, are illegal under international law. That the Israeli parliament even gives time to debate such a law is a strong indication of the contempt in which it holds international laws and conventions, and the international community at large...

April 17, 2012 - While southern Ethiopia and the Ogaden continues to suffer from the worst drought and famine in 60 years the UN's World Food Program (WFP) has been turning over all its food aid for the region to the Ethiopian military which uses it to feed the paramilitary death squads conducting a counterinsurgency in the region. The crimes committed by the UN in the Horn of Africa are legion and the WFP is not new to using its aid as a weapon against the people of our region. Over the past decade this writer has interviewed several UN workers who described how the UN through the WFP has been secretly turning over thousands of tons of food aid directly to the Ethiopian military instead of distributing it to the millions of starving Ethiopians and Ogadenis it was meant for...