As Israeli police arrest two settlers charged with assaulting a Palestinian family, Inside Story asks if this is a sign of a more serious investigation into settler violence by the Israeli police.
A resident of the West Bank settlement outpost Shvut Rachel was arrested last month for suspected murder and for his alleged role in a string of attempted murder plots, according to details of an investigation revealed on Sunday after a gag order on the case was lifted.
According to the Shin Bet and Israel Police, Teitel has confessed to most of the allegations against him. …
Teitel, a resident of the northern West Bank outpost, was born in Florida and has moved back and forth between the United States and Israel over the last two decades. In 2000, he returned to Israel to live permanently.
During a search of his home, police discovered rifles, handguns and explosive materials; they were unable, however, to find the gun which he allegedly used to kill the Palestinians.
Teitel was arrested on October 7 in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Har Nof, in Jerusalem, after posting signs around town praising the attack on the Tel Aviv gay club.
His posters were signed with the name ‘Shleisel,’ referring to the ultra-Orthodox man who stabbed and wounded a number of marchers during the Jerusalem pride parade a couple of years ago.
Police also found posters in his neighbourhood offering a one million shekel reward to anyone killing a member of Israel’s Peace Now movement, that opposes West Bank settlement activity. …
Teitel has confessed to murdering a Palestinian shepherd near Mount Hebron in 1997 and to killing an Arab taxi driver in East Jerusalem some two months later. He said that he came to Israel precisely to carry out attacks against Palestinians as revenge for suicide bombings.
The National Union of Journalists has called for “tough and urgent” police action in response to the physical violence, intimidation and death threats members covering far-right demonstrations endure: here.
German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk defends racist remarks by central banker
26 October 2009
The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has waded into the controversy surrounding German Central Bank executive member Thilo Sarrazin with an open defence of racist remarks made by Sarrazin in an interview published in a prominent European cultural magazine.
Thilo Sarrazin is a long-time member of the Social Democratic Party and was for a number of years finance senator in the SPD-Left Party Senate coalition in Berlin. Just a few months after his appointment this past summer to the executive committee of the German Central Bank, Sarrazin unleashed a tirade against the poor, the socially deprived and, in particular, immigrant communities in Germany. His interview appears in the latest edition of the cultural magazine Lettre International. (See: “The racist outburst of German Federal Bank executive member Thilo Sarrazin”).
According to Wikipedia, Sloterdijk is an ex devotee of Indian fraudulent guru Osho aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. So, this is not the first time that he does stupid things.
This is a video about Osho aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s commune Rajneeshpuram in the USA.
List of thousands of names of BNP members, along with addresses and phone numbers, published on Wikileaks
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A detailed membership list of the British National party containing names, addresses and telephone numbers was published on the internet this morning.
The list, which contains thousands of names, was published on Wikileaks, a website that purports to be a clearing house allowing leaks for information to be published anonymously.
A Guardian analysis of the data suggests the BNP had 11,560 members as of April this year, including one peer and several doctors and military personnel. The party appears to have benefited from a surge in female recruits, with one in eight party members now women.
Three of the men put on the UK Border Agency’s (Ukba) first flight to the Iraqi capital last week have told the Guardian they were beaten by British security guards and that no Arabic translator accompanied them.
The commander of Baghdad airport was reportedly so infuriated by the unexpected arrival of the chartered plane on Thursday that he threatened to set fire to the aircraft if it did not leave within two hours. Details of the operation – involving as many as 100 private guards and about 40 failed Iraqi asylum seekers – suggest the secret expulsions degenerated into a humiliating retreat. …
News of the planned removals leaked out last Monday but the Home Office would not confirm the departure until four days later. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees has condemned the decision to return Iraqis to the central provinces of the country because of the risk of suicide bombings, kidnappings and sectarian violence. Until the policy switch last week the UK had only repatriated failed Iraqi asylum seekers to the Kurdish region on the grounds that north-eastern Iraq was relatively safe. Thousands of Iraqis are facing deportation from Britain but the Iraqi government appears to be hardening its line against enforced returns.
Kawa Ali Azad, 33, is back in Colnbrook immigration detention centre near Heathrow after an enforced 6,000-mile round flight and a detour to Italy. Speaking by telephone to the Guardian, he said he had been put on a bus and driven to Stansted airport. “It was like a kidnapping. We had no food for 12 hours. We were kept out of sight at the airport then put on an Italian charter flight. When we arrived in Baghdad, there was an Iraqi officer with sunglasses and eagle decorations on his shoulders. [The British immigration official] started to talk to him but his English was not good so I went to help translate. The British officials didn’t have an Arabic translator.
“[The airport commander] said he had received a message from his boss there was an Italian flight but was never told it was transporting deported Iraqis – otherwise he would not have let it land.
“He said to the immigration official he had two hours to refuel the plane and leave or he would take further action. He would not take responsibility for the Iraqis because of the danger of kidnapping and bombs. The immigration officer asked what ‘further action’ meant and he said would burn the plane with all the people on board if it didn’t leave. ”
When most of the Iraqis were put back on the plane – only 10 were let into Baghdad – relations with the security guards, who had remained on the plane, deteriorated. “The security guards were white English. I was called all sorts of words … I started crying and said I hadn’t done anything,” said Azad, who arrived in the UK in 2002.
“They slapped me on the mouth and handcuffed me. I still have the bruise. I was also spat at. When the plane stopped in Italy, we had to swap aircraft. I heard them talking to Italian security and they said we were a group of terrorists being transported. They put a jacket over my head and I received kicks.”
The second plane eventually carried them back to Stansted.
The security firm, G4S, said it had not received any complaints about the behaviour of its staff.
Families of service personnel killed in Iraq have demanded they be brought “face-to-face” with former prime minister Tony Blair when he appears before an inquiry into the conflict: here.
Two weeks after an Australian customs ship rescued 78 Tamil asylum seekers, the unresolved standoff over their future has focussed attention on the Labor government’s inhumane and illegal treatment of refugees: here.
Emory Douglas, former “Minister for Culture” in the US Black Panther Party, spoke at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art on October 1. Douglas is now a part of the Artist Rights Society, and remains a committed activist artist and campaigner for social justice and empowerment.
Indigenous activist Sam Watson, a founder of the Australian chapter of the Black Panthers, introduced Douglas. Watson described how the writings of Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and other Panther leaders helped Aboriginal activists also fighting racism.
“My art is in your face, without apology”, Douglas told the 50 people gathered at the gallery, as he displayed 170 images of his work.
For each image, Douglas recounted a political struggle that the Panthers were engaged in — from the struggle against the brutal police (always portrayed as pigs in his art) and for community control of police, through to campaigning against the Vietnam War.
Much of Douglas’ art was featured in the newspaper The Black Panther, which had a circulation up to 250,000 a week in 1971.
Crucially, Douglas used his images to incite the disenfranchised to action. He portrayed the oppressed with real empathy, not as victimised but as angry, unapologetic and ready to fight.
His art played two roles — illustrating the conditions that made revolution necessary, and visually showing the potential power of the people that were victimised.
Douglas paraphrased Muhammad Ali to describe the Panther’s opposition to the Vietnam War: “We were opposed to the war, the Vietnamese didn’t call us nigger, didn’t provide substandard education, didn’t make us live in poor housing.”
Douglas also spoke of the community programs the Panthers had run. “The free breakfast meals for children [provided by the Panthers] were crucial to empowerment. How can they learn if they are hungry?”
Other community programs included a Panther ambulance, Panther health clinics, and Panther buses to prisons so families could visit imprisoned loved ones.
Much of Douglas’ art still resonates as true today as when it was created.
Douglas still paints and recently created a work entitled “as much as things change they stay the same“, showing a handcuffed young black man shot in the back. It was inspired by the point-blank police shooting of a handcuffed, black man in Oakland in January.
[The “All Power to the People” exhibition is at Milani Gallery until October 17. Visit www.milanigallery.com.au.]
Southern GOP Senator David Vitter refuses to comment on justice of the peace who won’t marry inter-racial couples: here.
The former mayor of a small Alabama town boasted about attending Ku Klux Klan meetings and threatened to burn a cross in a councilwoman’s front yard, according to a discrimination lawsuit filed in federal court by two African-American city employees: here.
Hitler had fillings made from gold torn from mouths of Jews
Adolf Hitler had dental fillings made from gold torn from the mouths of Jews in concentration camps, a new book on the Führer claims.
By David Wroe in Berlin
Published: 5:41PM BST 08 Oct 2009
The theory is based on a newly discovered document that shows Hitler’s dentist had about 11lbs of dental gold from the concentration camps at his disposal for the treatment of senior Nazis.
Co-author Henrik Eberle, a historian who has written several successful books on the Nazi leader, said dentist Hugo Blaschke had put 10 fillings in Hitler’s mouth in 1944.
“The most likely place the gold came from is from the supply Blaschke had from the concentration camps,” Dr Eberle told the Daily Telegraph.
“Most of this came from Jews. Gold from other sources was very hard to find in Germany and that is why I believe that Hitler’s fillings came from Jewish victims of the Nazis.”
It is well established that the Nazis removed gold teeth and fillings from their concentration camp victims.
The new document is a 1941 letter from one of Blaschke’s underlings to the office of SS commander Heinrich Himmler. It states that Blaschke had 50 kilograms of dental gold enough to last for years.
Blaschke was also the personal dentist to Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring and other senior Nazis.
The new book, titled Was Hitler Ill?, and coauthored by Hans-Joachim Neumann, a professor of medicine at Berlin’s Charité University, also dismisses popular rumours about Hitler: that he may have had Jewish ancestry, that he was beaten by his father, and that he had a long term drug addiction.
Influential Jewish groups in the US urged Clinton to raise with Hague the [British] Conservatives’ decision to enter a European parliament coalition with a Latvian party, some of whose members participate in an annual service commemorating Latvian units of Hitler’s Waffen-SS, and a Polish politician who has questioned the need to apologise for an anti-Jewish pogrom during the second world war: here.
On October 3, 2009, Fundashon Rehabilitashon Tula hosted a symposium with a dual purpose. The first objective was to establish a resolution to rehabilitate Tula. The second aim was to declare Tula a national hero of the Curaçao community.
Tula was a slave who on the Monday morning of August 17, 1795 organized a group of fellow slaves at the Kenepa plantation who resolved not to work as slaves anymore. The rebellion lasted for more than a month, but in the end the colonial forces crushed the revolt. Tula was interrogated and tortured, convicted and executed all for demanding freedom for himself and his people.
“In recent years, it has increasingly become clear that Dutch activities in this Atlantic world [of trans-Atlantic slave trade etc.] were of far greater [economic] significance [for the Dutch Republic in 1680-1795] than historians hitherto assumed”: here.
Miep Gies (now 100 years of age) helped the Frank family to hide during the Second World War. After the inhabitants of the Secret Annexe had been arrested, she found the diary and hid it.
According to the Daily Mail, the only known film footage of Anne Frank has been released for the first time to a worldwide audience. This is not entirely true. I watched this video a few years ago when it was included in a documentary about the tragic diarist. Nonetheless, it is touching.
