Women in Jordan mourn Shireen Abu Akleh photo source: Haaretz
With sadness I awoke to the news that Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the head by Israeli forces (IDF) in the West Bank region of occupied Palestine.
The journalist was wearing body armor with PRESS in bold letters on her flak vest; presumably a sniper aimed for her head?
Here’s the last known photo of Abu Akleh, doing her job:
Israel has been violently evicting families in the West Bank while bombing Gaza and Damascus in recent days. Abu Akleh was covering an IDF raid on the Jenin refugee camp when she was murdered.
Rapper Lowkey took the Associated Press to task in a tweet about their reporting of the incident.
She was killed by the same army that bombed your offices in Gaza. Say it. https://t.co/EKjLME5iRH
All the terror is not on one side. For the second Ramadan in a row the IDF targetted worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, wounding some and arresting others, while Palestinians repelled IDF soldiers by throwing rocks and petrol bombs. And an unusual event inside Israel this week resulted in three deaths by stabbing in a knife and ax attack near Tel Aviv. The two assailants were believed to be Palestinian young men from Jenin.
Also hard to see as coincidental was an act of terrorism (i.e. instilling fear) on a flight from Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport where passengers were sent photos of various airline crashes while waiting to fly to Turkey. Twitter eerily reported these two news events consecutively in their “What’s Happening” section this morning.
A search of the Committee to Protect Journalists database revealed 17 other journalists killed by the IDF in either occupied Palestine or Israel itself:
War on journalists is not new but has ramped up in recent years especially as the poster boy for press freedom, Julian Assange, languishes in Belmarsh Prison awaiting word of his possible extradition to the U.S. to be charged as a spy. Assange is an Australian citizen whose wikileaks website published evidence of U.S. and Israeli war crimes, and he has been publicly tortured for practicing journalism in the years since.
RIP Shireen Abu Akleh and all who dare to report truth amid the fog of wars.
In the 90’s I was a public school teacher in central Maine who was told that, to keep my job, I needed to give up my fingerprints to the FBI’s database to prove that I wasn’t a child molester. No one had accused me of being a child molester, and I knew that most suspected child molesters are encouraged to resign and move far away to spare superintendents the pain of an ugly public relations fiasco. Thus their fingerprints were not in any database of convicted child molesters.
I had been a busy working mom with little time for political action. Then my 9 year old was fingerprinted at school even after I expressly forbid the school to do that. These experiences radicalized me and I began working against the educator fingerprinting law in Maine. Twice we managed to have the law overturned, and twice the governor vetoed it. I resigned over the issue and moved to California to earn more money while I had two kids in college at the same time.
After hearing news from his chief of staff that the second tower of the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane, the president seemed pensive but went on reading to students in a Florida classroom. Screenshot via YouTube
Then Joe Biden’s Patriot Act passed with breathtaking speed, curtailing our civil liberties and giving sweeping surveillance powers to the federal government because “terror” had frightened us. Then the never ending “war on terror” began for control of energy resources and shipping lanes, and we still go without universal health care to pay for it.
Then I moved back to Maine and got fingerprinted because I needed the health care for my family.
Now comes the January 6 MAGA attack on the Capitol. Why was it allowed to happen do you suppose?
It wasn’t a surprise attack at all but was well-publicized in advance.
Whether Capitol and DC municipal police opened the fencing to allow the MAGA mob in to the Capitol grounds, or simply failed to defend the line when the mob pushed into them, seems like a moot point. (Remember when the National Guard teargassed peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Lafayette Park so the occupant of the White House could walk to a nearby church and pose with a Bible? Remember how the Guard were directing traffic Jan. 6 while legislators were under attack?) Via AP
Cue the new even more repressive laws the public has been led to believe are needed because “domestic terror” has frightened us.
My prediction: we will continue to go without universal health care to pay for more policing and spying on ourselves.
The narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from “Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and #MeToo to “Tara Reid is a lying grifter”.
My family member points out the danger to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color:
We have a long history of institutional racism. So when you talk about expanding anti domestic terrorism powers it’s a pretty safe prediction that it’s going to carried out in a racist way and in service of capital.
Also, say a Biden admin handles it as well as possible, what does the next republican administration do with those expanded powers? It’s Pandora’s box. You don’t open it and then see what happens, once you’re there it’s too late.
Also, I’m guessing another purpose of allowing violent intruders with handcuffs at the ready to break into the Capitol was to discourage Medicare for All candidates like me from running for Congress.
And about that man dressed all in black with the bouquet of plastic zip-ties whose photograph is being circulated widely? Perfect set up for right wing propagandists to make the false claim that Antifa was behind the MAGA crowd.
It looks like another event is being planned for January 17.
Impeaching the current occupant of Camp David will not solve our problems, and many argue it’s a waste of time at this point, but it should be done anyway to keep the grifter off the public dole and unable to issue any more pardons.
People who think the Biden administration is going to save us from any of this are not paying attention. Or, possibly, they are too young to remember what Senator Obama did directly after receiving the nomination of the Democratic Party.
He voted to grant immunity to the big telecom corporations for spying on all of us after 9/11.
