Slowly I turn … or … I’m fucking fed up

After about 5 years of looking the corporate war machine we call society straight in the eye on a daily basis, I believe that I may have reached my saturation point.

Between the corporate commoditization of every-fucking-thing imaginable, BP’s government assisted apocalypse, the continued deterioration of civil liberties, the multiple wars and rumors of wars, the global financial collapse, the Zionist’s and Christian Zionist’s (neocons) apparent determination to bring about Armageddon, and a host of other completely mind-numbing, environment-destroying, soul-crushing, and baby-maiming hijinks, I’m really having trouble just making it through the day without stapling my own eyes shut, let alone absorbing more evidence of our ongoing self-destruction and bringing it to your attention.

Especially since it seems as if the only people who care enough to be enlightened are the ones who are already enlightened to begin with, and unfortunately, that group of people is only large enough, world-wide, to fill Rhode Island, which, in case you’re not up on your U.S. demographics, means that there aren’t very many of us.

I know that I don’t win many new followers by denigrating the intellect of the masses, but at this point, I’m so fucking flabbergasted by people’s brazen unwillingness to understand our situation that I don’t know what to do any more.  It’s impossible to communicate with people who still believe that either side of our two-party coprporotocracy has their best interests at heart, and that our marauding military has been in a state of constant war for the past 100 or so years because we’re protecting democracy,™ and that the corporate media is anything other than a state propaganda ministry, and that our intelligence apparatus is there to keep us safe, and that Wal-Mart is a good thing because their prices are low, and that fluoride in drinking water is for healthy teeth, and that Zbigniew Brzezinski‘s daughter is a perfectly acceptable news anchor for MSNBC, while a former AIPAC attack dog performs the same function for CNN, while reporting on the vile terrorists who so viciously attacked the poor Israeli do-gooding soldiers as they attempted to throw a surprise welcome party on the Mavi Marmara (sarcasm), and that mercury in vaccines is safe, and that swapping freedom for security is just an unfortunate sign of the times, and on, and on, and on.

The American way of life, at the most fundamental level, is based on a mountain of lies so goddamned high that any hope of having an honest, intelligent  discussion about anything, in any real way, is absolutely hopeless, unless you happen to be talking to one of the few Rhode Islanders I mentioned above, in which case, you’ll simply be preaching to the choir.

Yesterday, I said this on a Facebook thread that I started about the Obama administration’s latest corporate love letter:

“I spend almost all day, every day, so angry I could fucking spit, but most people can’t be bothered to care even a little.  Give them a big mac, a pair of Nikes, and a savings account with an interest rate well below the rate of inflation and they’re happier than pigs in fucking shit.”

Which, reading it now, reminds me that inflation is a hidden fucking tax, people!  It’s the product of a completely unnecessary and totally unethical financial system that was foisted upon the American people in 1913, in the dead of the night, by the under-handed machinations of the Rockefellers and the Rothschild’s, who had been trying to get their filthy hands around the throat of the American economy for around 100 years, because they knew that if they could get the government to borrow all of its money, at interest, from their privately owned cartel of banks (the Federal Reserve), that they would essentially control the government.

Learn all about it here and here but whatever you do, don’t just continue walking around in an iPhone induced fever haze, believing the state-sanctioned nonsense that keeps insisting that markets are mysterious things that can’t be directed or predicted, because, as Amschel Mayer Rothschild once said, if one controls a nation’s currency, then that person need not care who makes the laws.

It really is THAT simple.

Our economy has been directed and controlled by a small group of assholes, sometimes referred to as the corporate banking elite, since 1913.

The great depression was engineered by these people.  So was the dot-com bubble, and the housing bubble, and the derivatives bubble, and every other fucking bubble that’s ever bubbled.  These events, or cycles, actually, are simply vehicles by which the already rich and powerful become even more rich and powerful, at the expense of the rubes (that’s you and me).  The bubbles are one of the main tenets of the never-talked-about-above-a-whisper economic policy called trickle-UP economics.  It’s a system that more and more has been socializing the risk while privatizing the profits for rich, powerful fuckers, making them more rich and more powerful, even as you use your college degree to run a fucking cash register at Starbucks.  All while you scream and wave your arms about “socialist” policies that would use your tax dollars for a reasonable fucking health care system as opposed to blowing the limbs off of Muslims who had the unfortunate luck of being born on land that has stuff that the corporate banking mother fuckers want.

I’m sorry, I realize that this has turned into a bit of a slowly I turn moment.  I really didn’t mean to write anything more than a short explanation for why I haven’t been writing much lately, but well, here we are 800 words later, and I’m really not sure if I should even post this, but I suppose that a bit of unadulterated anger is ok every once in a while, and if you’re here, reading this, then chances are you’re as angry as I am.

Witness to the Israeli assault on humanitarian aid ship

Last week, I posted excerpts from Iara Lee’s footage of Israel’s attack on the humanitarian aid ship that was attempting to break the illegal blockade of Gaza.  Today, I’m posting all of the raw footage.

The following text is the video description as posted on the Cultures of Resistance Youtube page:

On the night of Sunday, May 30, showing a terrifying disregard for human life, Israeli naval forces surrounded and boarded ships sailing to bring humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip. On the largest ship, the Mavi Marmara, Israeli commandos opened fire on civilian passengers, killing at least 9 passengers and wounding dozens more. Others are still missing. The final death toll is yet to be determined. Cultures of Resistance director Iara Lee was aboard the besieged ship and has since returned home safely.

Despite the Israeli government’s thorough efforts to confiscate all footage taken during the attack, Iara Lee was able to retain some of her recordings. Above is raw footage from the moments leading up to and during the Israeli commandos’ assault on the Mavi Marmara.

In addition, here is a terrific Dave Lindorff piece based on the testimony of Mavi Marmara eyewitness, Kevin Neish.

What Kevin Neish Saw
Eyewitness to the Israeli Assault on the Mavi Marmara
DAVE LINDORFF

Kevin Neish of Victoria, British Columbia, didn’t know he was a celebrity until he was about to board a flight from Istanbul to Ottawa. “This Arab woman wearing a beautiful outfit suddenly ran up to me crying, ‘It’s you! From Arab TV! You’re famous!’” he recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she told me, ‘I saw you flipping through the Israeli commando’s book! It’s being aired over and over!’”

A soft-spoken teacher and former civilian engineer with the Canadian Department of Defense, Neish realized then that a video taken by an Arab TV cameraman in the midst of the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza of him flipping through a booklet had been transmitted before the Israelis blocked all electronic signals from the flotilla. The booklet had pictures and profiles of all the passengers, and he’d found it in the backpack of an Israeli Defense Force commando.

Neish, 53, was on the second deck of the flotilla’s lead ship, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, with a good view of the stern, when the IDF, in the early morning darkness of May 31, began its assault with percussion grenades, tear gas and a hail of bullets. He then moved to the fourth deck in an enclosed stairwell, from which he watched took photographs as casualties were carried down past him to a makeshift medical station. Several IDF commandos, captured by the passengers and crew, were also brought past him.

“I saw them carrying this one IDF guy down,” he recalls. “He looked terrified, like he thought he was going to be killed. But when a big Turkish guy, who had seen seriously injured passengers who had been shot by the IDF, charged over and tried to hit the commando, the Turkish aid workers pushed him off and pinned him to the wall. They protected this Israeli soldier.”

That was when he found the backpack which the soldier had dropped. “I figured I’d look inside and see what he was carrying,” Neish says. “And inside was this kind of flip-book. It was full of photos and names in English and Hebrew of who was on all the ships. The booklet also had a detailed diagram of the decks of the Mavi Marmara.”

Meanwhile, he says, more and more people were being carried down the stairs from the mayhem above—people who’d been shot, and people who were dying or people already dead. “I took detailed photos of the dead and wounded with my camera,” he says, adding, “There were several guys who had two neat bullet holes side by side on the side of their head–clearly they were executed.”

Neish smuggled his photos out of Israel to Turkey despite his arrest on the ship and imprisonment in Israel for several days. “I pulled out the memory card, tossed my camera and anything I had on me that had anything to do with electronics, and then kept moving the chip around so it wouldn’t be found,” he says. “The Israelis took all the cameras and computers. They were smashing some and keeping others. I put the chip in my mouth under my tongue, between my butt cheeks, in my sock, everywhere, to keep them from finding it,” he says. He finally handed it to a Turk who was leaving for a flight home on a Turkish airline. He says the card ended up in the hands of an organization called Free Gaza, and he has seen some of his pictures published, so he knows they made it out successfully.

Neish says that claims that the Israeli commandos were just armed with paint guns and 9 mm pistols are “Bullshit–at one point when I was in the stairwell, a commando opened a hatch above, stuck in a machine gun, and started firing. Bullets were bouncing all over the place. If the guy had gotten to look in and see where he was shooting, I’d have been dead, but two Turkish guys in the stairwell, who had short lengths of chain with them that they had taken from the access points to the lifeboats, stood to the side of the hatch and whipped them up at the barrell. I don’t know if they were trying to hit the commando or to use them to snatch away the gun, but the Israeli backed off, and they slammed and locked the hatch.”

“I never saw a single paint gun, or a sign of a fired paint ball!” he says.
He also didn’t see any guns in the hands of people who were on the ship. “In the whole time I was there on the ship, I never saw a single weapon in the hands of the crew or the aid workers,” he says. Indeed, Neish, who originally had been on a smaller 70-foot yacht called the Challenger II, had transferred to the Mavi Marmara after a stop in Cyprus, because his boat had been sabotaged by Israeli agents (a claim verified by the Israeli government), making it impossible to steer. “When we came aboard the big boat, I was frisked and my bag was inspected for weapons,” he says. “Being an engineer, I of course had a pocket knife, but they took that and tossed it into the ocean. Nobody was allowed to have any weapons on this voyage. They were very careful about that.”

What he did see during the IDF assault was severe bullet wounds. “In addition to several people I saw who were killed, I saw several dozen wounded people. There was one older guy who was just propped up against the wall with a huge hole in his chest. He died as I was taking his picture.”

Neish says he saw many of the 9 who were known to have been killed, and of the 40 who were wounded, and adds, “There were many more who were wounded, too, but less seriously. In the Israeli prison, I saw people with knife wounds and broken bones. Some were hiding their injuries so they wouldn’t be taken away from the others.” He also says, “Initially there were reports that 16 on the boat had been killed. The medical station said 16. There was a suspicion that some bodies may have been thrown overboard. But what people think now is that other seven who are missing, since we’re not hearing from families, may have been Israeli spies.”

Once the Israeli commandos had secured control of the Mavi Marmara, Neish says the ship’s passengers and crew were rounded up, with the men put in one area on deck, and the women put below in another area. The men were told to squat, and had their hands bound with plastic cuffs, which Neish says were pulled so tight that his wrists were cut and his hands swelled up and turned purple (he is still suffering nerve damage from the experience, which his doctor in Canada says he hopes will gradually repair on its own).

“They told us to be quiet,” he says. “But at one point this Turkish imam stood up and started singing a call to prayer. Everybody was dead quiet–even the Israelis. But after about ten seconds, this Israeli officer stomped over through the squatting people, pulled out his pistol and pointed at the guy’s head, yelling ‘Shut up!’ in English. The imam looked at him directly and just kept singing! I thought, Jesus Christ, he’s gonna kill him! Then I thought, well, this is what I’m here for, I guess, so I stood up. The officer wheeled around and pointed his gun at my head. The imam finished his song and sat down, and then I sat down.”

While the commandeered vessels were sailed to the Israeli port of Ashdot, the captives were left without food or water. “All we were given were some chocolate bars that the Israelis pilfered from the ship’s stores,” says Neish. “You had to grovel to get to go to the bathroom, and many people had to just go in their pants.”

Things didn’t get much better once the passengers were transferred to an Israeli prison. He and the other prisoners with him, who hadn’t eaten for more than half a day, were tossed a frozen block of bread and some cucumbers.

On the second day, someone from the Canadian embassy came around, calling out his name. “It turned out he’d been going to every cell looking for me,” says Neish. “My daughter had been frantically telling the Canadian government I was in the flotilla. Even though the Israelis had my name and knew where I was, they weren’t telling the Canadian embassy people. In fact the Canadians–and my daughter–thought I was dead, because people had said I’d been near the initial assault. The good thing is that as they went around calling out for me, they discovered two Arab-born Canadians that they hadn’t known were there.”

“Eventually they got to my cell and I answered them. The embassy official said, ‘You’re Kevin? You’re supposed to be dead.’”

After being held for a few days, there was a rush to move everyone to the Ben Gurion airport for a flight to Turkey. “It turned out that Israeli lawyers had brought our case to the Supreme Court, challenging the legality of our capture on international waters. There was a chance that the court would order the IDF to put us back on our ships and let us go, so the government wanted to get us out of Israel and moot the case. But two guys were hauled off, probably by Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency). So we all said, ‘No. We don’t go unless you bring them back.’”

The two men were returned and were allowed to leave with the rest of the group.

“I honestly never thought the Israelis would board the ship,” says Neish. “I thought we’d get into Gaza. I mean, I went as part of the Free Gaza Movement, and they had made prior attempts, with some getting in, and some getting boarded or rammed, but this time it was a big flotilla. I figured we’d be stopped, and maybe searched. My boat, the Challenger II, only had dignitaries on board including three German MPs, and then Lt. Col. Ann Wright and myself.

At one point in the Israeli prison, all the violence finally got to this man who had witnessed more death and mayhem than many active duty US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. “I broke down and started crying,” he admits. “This big Turkish guy came over and asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Sixteen people died.’”

“He said to me, ‘No, they died for a wonderful cause. They’re happy. You just go out and tell your story.’”