Make a video, shoot some people. You made the front page of the BBC’s website, guess it worked. No idea what led to it, 22 is awfully young to come to the conclusion that going on a suicidal killing spree is a good idea – or any idea at all.
This is a fantastic piece that I highly recommend watching…
To label the following revolting and a gross miscarriage of justice is too slight. It is simply utterly inhuman. From the BBC…
“An Israeli soldier has been removed from duty and jailed for two weeks for refusing to allow a Palestinian woman in labour to pass through a checkpoint.
The soldier was in command at the checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Nablus. The woman was trying to reach a hospital in the city.
She was forced to give birth at the checkpoint. Her baby was stillborn.
The Israeli army said the woman and her husband did not have the permit to allow the car to enter Nablus.
But the army said the incident, which occurred a week ago, could have been prevented.
It took an ambulance from Nablus 50 minutes to get to the checkpoint. At which point the baby was dead.”
Two whole weeks. Well that should certainly teach them a lesson.
A permit? You have to be kidding me. What about human decency? And spare me the IDF’s claim that the incident could have been prevented. You’re damn right it could have been prevented – by allowing the couple to get to the bloody hospital.
Was this an issue of security? Did the IDF commander at the checkpoint think that the child was going to be born with C4 strapped to it?
As disgusting as this is, you just know that there are people out there right now that actually believe it’s a good thing that the world was deprived of ‘another terrorist’.
My God, what have we become?
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre or horrific, police shot, injured, and arrested a man today on the Greek isle of Santorini after he decapitated his girlfriend and walked through the streets with her head.
After the police responded to calls from residents, the man threw the head into a police car, stole a police jeep, and tried to flee. A chase ensued, ending with the jeep crashing into a motorcycle on which two female doctors were riding. Both were badly hurt.
The man’s name, nor that of his victims, has yet been released.
Mark Twain once opined - “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t”. Man did he hit the nail on the head.
Authorities have identified the man responsible for stabbing Tim McLean to death on a Greyhound bus yesterday as 40-year-old Vince Weiguang Li of Edmonton. The CBC offers details on Li’s background here.
There is absolutely no question that this story is horrific and tragic. That said; some of the commentary flying around the web because of it is truly frightening. Everything from the reintroduction of capital punishment to the easing of gun laws is being promoted. And then there is the truly ugly side, the hidden racism that only seems to present itself when non-whites are responsible for such horrific undertakings - the attacks on multiculturalism, the belief that if this country sealed its borders things of this nature wouldn’t occur.
We live in a free country and every Canadian is entitled to their opinion. But when such ugliness rears its head one seriously has to wonder how such deep seeded racism is still so prevalent? It’s as if hidden remnants of the Jim Crow South lay dormant in the souls of those that require events such as this to let loose their true selves.
A man killed a man in cold blood. That is where it begins and ends. It was a terrible crime and laws exist to ensure that the man responsible will be held accountable. No matter the crime, what should not be on trial is his race. And the fact that some are making it an issue sickens me almost as much as the crime itself.
This is horrid, grotesque, and truly bizarre. From the BCC…
“A man on a Greyhound bus travelling across the Canadian Prairies has killed and decapitated a fellow passenger.”
[…]
“When we came back on the bus… he was cutting the guy’s head off and pretty much gutting him up,” Mr Caton said.
The attacker ran at them, Mr Caton said, and they ran out of the bus, holding the door shut to prevent him getting out.
“He calmly walks up to the front [of the bus] with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us,” Mr Caton said.
“There was no rage in him … It was just like he was a robot or something,” he added.”
There go Conservative theories that decapitation is the sole province of Muslim extremists.
What is truly scary is the fact that authorities believe the man did not know the victim, that it was a completely random act.
Now. Who’s doling out that extra cash to fly?
- More from the CBC.
It’s as if it were simply publication errata, not the admission that innocent people had been killed – never mind the blatant lies involved…
“The U.S. military said Sunday that the three people killed last month after U.S. soldiers shot at their car in one of the most secured areas of Iraq were civilians, not criminals as the military initially reported.
The correction came more than a month after a bank manager at a branch inside the airport, Hafeth Aboud Mahdi, and two female bank employees were shot at by U.S. soldiers as they sped to work on a road within the secured airport compound. The road is used only by people with high-level security clearance badges. The car veered off the road, hit a concrete blast wall and burst into flames.
The original statement said that Mahdi and the two women were “criminals” and that an American convoy on the side of the secured road came under small-arms fire from the vehicle. Soldiers said they shot back. A weapon was found in the debris and two U.S. military vehicles were struck by bullets from the attack, the statement on June 25 said.
“When we are attacked, we will defend ourselves and will use deadly force if necessary,” Maj. Joey Sullinger, a spokesman for 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, said in a statement at the time. “Such attacks endanger not only U.S. soldiers but also innocent civilians, including women and children, traveling the roadways of Baghdad.”
On Sunday the story changed and the tone was apologetic. A military statement said that neither the civilians who were killed nor the soldiers were at fault for the deaths. An investigation found that “the driver and passengers were law-abiding citizens of Iraq.”
Soldiers had pulled off the road because one of the vehicles in the convoy was having maintenance problems. As they worked on the vehicle they saw Mahdi’s car and thought it was moving too quickly toward them, the statement said. Believing they might be in danger, the soldiers warned the car. When the driver ignored the signals they shot at the vehicle, the statement said.
The alleged attack and the weapon that was said to have been recovered from the burned vehicle were misunderstandings, the statement said.”
So the individuals in the car did not fire on the US convoy and, according to new versions of the event, the ‘weapon’ recovered was a ‘misunderstanding’.
Translated for the layman: No shots were fired by those in the car, those that fired on the car, after discovering their mistake, probably plugged a few rounds from an AK into one of their vehicles and then threw the weapon into the wreckage to make it appear as though they had come under fire to cover their asses.
Sound about right?
I’m going to go on a bit of a tirade, so prepare yourself.
Let’s cut the shit and be honest - Muslims blow people up, right? Since September the 11th, and even preceding it, that has been much of the Western world’s perception. Since 9/11, Islam has been attacked by right-wing hacks the world over as being a faith that is steeped in intolerance and hatred. Of course, those same people, even if they’ve read the Qu’ran, usually have zero experience with regards to Muslim cultures. Their intolerance of Islam is steeped in a perspective that lumps an entire faith into a single category – that being one represented by extremists.
That said; how many of you Catholics out there appreciate being branded child molesters simply because there are those within the church that have been guilty of it? What if I were to say that you’re all child molesters – every last despicable, Papist one of you?
Let’s get off our high horse and, for once, smell the bullshit. The current tensions in the Middle East have roots. One of them is the creation of Israel without the involvement of the Arab League. The other is that much of the region was exploited by imperial powers for centuries.
The latter of those two was reason enough for the people of the American Colonies to rise up against the British and employ both conventional military force and the use of militias to oppose them. Of course, some of those same freedom loving people, now historically glorified, were also responsible for genocidal practices with regards to various Native American peoples. But we needn’t dwell on that.
A very long time ago, numerous Popes - that would be God’s chosen representative on earth - proclaimed that killing Muslims was the path to heaven. In fact, that belief held water for two entire centuries. During that time, Christian nations in Europe sent armies into Palestine, among other places, to retake what they deemed rightfully theirs and to wipe out whomever happened to disagree with their views. And the Jews? Well, they were demonized as well.
Interestingly, if you open a history book, you’ll discover that during the 4th Century Jews were banned from Jerusalem altogether by a Christian Roman Emperor, lasting until 638. And what happened in 638? Well, Arabs captured the city and, believe it or not, allowed Jews access to it again. In fact, up until the first Crusade, Jews and Muslims both worshipped openly in Jerusalem. And then, in 1099, Christian Crusaders murdered the majority of its population, Jews and Muslims alike, during and after their siege of the city.
In the centuries that followed, Jerusalem was ruled by a variety of others – Muslims again, Christians again, the Turks, the Mamelukes, the Ottomans and the British. Ultimately, thousands of years after last controlling it, the creation of Israel established much of Palestine as a Jewish state, including parts of Jerusalem.
But I digress.
One of the highest crimes during the Inquisition was being labeled a ‘Jewdite’. The punishment? Death. If you were suspected of being Jewish in Spain during that time you faced ‘The Question,’ were imprisoned, and then put to death. Of course, conversion was always an option, but that didn’t automatically mean that your life would be spared. The same went for Protestants, though they would employ their own special brand of intolerance in those parts of Europe that were under their control, doing the same to Catholics.
In any event, you’ve got well in excess of a thousand years of Christian brutality, extremism and murder to reflect on. And that’s not even taking into account those conquests of the new world sanctioned by Rome that inevitably led to the eradication of entire peoples.
So do you honestly believe that when it comes to religious extremism we possess the moral high ground? If you do, you’re one of two things – either on crack or looking for some.
If you scan the headlines right now, you’ll be confronted by the news that militants killed eight Israelis today in Jerusalem. In Gaza, news of the murders was met with celebratory gunfire. Given what’s happened in Gaza over the last two weeks, it doesn’t surprise me that sympathetic morons would shoot bullets into the air to celebrate the cold blooded murder of innocent people. But that’s to be expected, just as Western bias regarding what transpired over the last two weeks in Gaza is to be expected. As for the Israeli government, what happened today shouldn’t come as a surprise. I mean, after the events of last two weeks, what did they expect? In the words of Forrest Gump – stupid is as stupid does.
They’re extremists, the lot of them. They just conduct their wars of piety and revenge, of ideology and intolerance, in ways that can be spun to suit the rage required to sustain dedication to such moronic behaviour on both sides.
Killing’s, killing’s, killing’s kids. 54 people were blown to bits in Baghdad today, with another 100 more injured. But it’s just another day in Iraq. Iraqi extremists, or foreign extremists that have ventured to Iraq to play their little role in a game as ignorantly old as the sun and the moon, killed innocent Iraqis. It’s to be expected. Muslims blow people up, right?
Old news, or not white people, or not steadfast allies. Eight dead Israelis, on the other hand, is news – and certainly vastly more important than the deaths of innocent Palestinians. Because Muslims blow people up, right? Theirs is a faith steeped in violence and hatred and intolerance and that’s proven to be the case since its inception, right? Ours, on the other hand, is a belief steeped in love and glorious instant noodle salvation.
In God we trust. I’ll tell you this, flat out – God, in his many forms, is an untrustworthy fucker. Because if you’re going to buy into the belief that it’s best to put your faith in placing all of your eggs in one basket, then if you drop it you lose everything. And that, at its core, is nothing but the roots of extremism.
Religion is as old as man. So is stupidity. Coincidence?
While the Israeli government looks into the legality of targeting civilian areas from which rockets have been fired into Israel, the Israeli Defense Force has claimed that of the 100 plus Palestinians killed in their recent incursion into Gaza, 90 of them were Hamas militants.
During operations in Gaza’s suburbs, the IDF have been guilty of employing snipers that have taken the lives of civilians. In one instance, a 12-year-old girl was shot in the stomach as she stood several feet from a window after it was blown in following an explosion. The ambulance called to attend the little girl was also fired upon, and unable to reach the home. When the girl’s father attempted to step outside with a white flag and his daughter in his arms, IDF troops in a nearby tank fired warning shots over his head forcing him back inside. The little girl died shortly after.
I don’t care who you are – but shooting 12-year-old girls is flat out murder and makes you no less a monster than the terrorists that you are supposedly combating. Unless, that is, you believe that a 12-year-old girl is one.
In other, similar instances, a 16-year-old boy and 17-year-old girl were shot while in a sitting room. Both were killed by sniper fire that targeted them through a window.
The Egyptians, who have sent 27 ambulances to the Rafah crossing, have collected between 150 and 200 injured people.
Thus far, one Israeli civilian and two members of the IDF have been killed in the same period of time. Others have also been wounded in rocket attacks, and like those affected in Gaza, are represented by the young and old alike.
My friend Susie from London forwarded me this unbelievable story of a premeditated murder by three young men in Sunderland. See if you can even begin to wrap your head around this…
“A man and two youths who kicked a disabled man to death over a £5 bet have been jailed for life.
Brent Martin, 23, who had learning difficulties, died in hospital after he was found in a pool of blood on Sunderland’s Town End Farm estate.William Hughes, 22, and Marcus Miller, 16, had admitted the murder but Stephen Bonallie, 17, had denied the charge.
The judge at Newcastle Crown Court ruled they must serve minimum terms of between 15 and 22 years.
The three, all trained boxers from Sunderland, repeatedly punched, kicked, stamped on and head-butted their victim over a £5 bet to see who could knock him out first.
They chased him around the Town End Farm estate just three months after he was released from a psychiatric hospital where he had been staying due to his learning difficulties, the court heard.
Finally he was stripped of his trousers and pants and left dying next to a parked car in Baxter Road, Town End Farm, as his attackers posed for photographs.
A post-mortem examination revealed Mr Martin died from a massive head injury and had suffered at least 18 separate blows to the head and neck.”
To say that I am speechless would be an understatement.