Yesterday, on the 6th day of Hanukkah, Israel began airstrikes against Gaza, killing 225 and wounding 600. Today, the bombings continue and Hamas is calling for a 3rd Intifada and a return to suicide bombings.
Read a bystander’s written account of the bombings, or look at some photographs or video of the aftermath.
The Nativity of Jesus story is no where to be found in Mark, which scholars agree is the earliest of the canonical gospels. The story is found in Matthew, whose author was some 1st Century Jew who wanted to make it seem like the dead figurehead of his cult had fulfilled ancient Hebrew Bible prophecies.
The historical truth is closer to this: Jesus was a backwoods nobody who became a popular critic of fellow Jews who collaborated with Rome’s occupation of his homeland, and the related commercialization of the Temple. During the politically charged Passover festival, he knocked over some money tables (or something) and was crucified for it by the Roman Prefect of Judea Province, Pontius Pilate.
Jesus’ confused and disappointed followers began applying local fables to his biography so they could revise their demonstrably misguided faith in an executed man who had promised them a new kingdom. Thus he was born by a virgin under a special star and visited by three kings, etc, and his execution took on a deeper, more symbolic meaning. Many contradictory biographies were written in the centuries following Jesus’ death, each one more fantastic than the last, all of which directed to the concerns of the diverse communities for which they were written. By the 4th Century, the movement had become so popular that the Roman General Constantine found it useful to identify with it in his quest to become Emperor of Rome. Since then, the Christ mythology has been used to justify the same kind of Imperial violence by which the cult’s original founder was executed.
Oh, and Hanukkah was a very minor festival until the Zionists, whose movement was formed in the racist atmosphere of 19th Century European Nationalism, began to mine their book for stories of warrior Jews in order to combat the popular perception of diaspora Jews as oppressed weaklings. They fixed on the story of the 2nd Century BCE Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, and Hanukkah became a major holiday. And then, with the help of their own Imperial allies, the Zionists occupied Palestine, where the warrior spirit of their xenocidal god lives on in the apartheid state of Israel.
And don’t get me started on that fat fuck Santa. Odin wants his 8-legged sky horse back.
Simply by waving a bidder’s paddle, Tim DeChristopher disrupted the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s auction of scenic public land to private oil companies.
Although he had no money to pay for it, DeCristopher won 13 parcels totaling 22,500 acres and drove up prices for others. The land he won bids for will not be able to be re-auctioned until the next administration is in power.
Amy Goodman interviews Tim DeChristopher, who now faces federal charges, here.
“Thisis the farewell kiss, you DOG! This is from the widows, the orphans andthose killed in Iraq. You are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis.”Watch it with subtitles here.
Farooz confronted Condoleeza Rice with bloody hands as she was about to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committe in October 2007. Video here.
On November 8, 2001, 16-year-old Alina Lebedeva slapped Prince Charles’ face with a red carnation while he was visiting Riga following the US/British bombing of Afghanistan. “I’m against the Afghan war,” she told reporters.
Although Lebedeva originally faced a maximum sentence of 15 years for endangering the life of a senior official, she was eventually let off the hook. Here is an update page.
On Saturday, May 10, 2008, at Prairie Chapel Ranch near Crawford, George W. Bush gave his daughter away to Henry Hager in a lovely ceremony. The celebration was not bombed, and no one was killed.
Six other wedding ceremonies were not so fortunate:
From Time Magazine:
At 10:30 p.m., the first bombs struck the party; the assault lasted six hours. The next day, a team of special forces arrived in Qila-Niazi to inspect what was thought to have been a triumphant blow against Osama bin Laden’s network. Instead it found the remains of the party. Out of 112 people, two women had survived. “When the U.S. soldiers saw the destruction, they were very sad,” says Assaullah Falah, a tribal elder, as he leads a reporter through the wreckage.
From The Guardian:
The charred meat sticking to rubble in black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden’s henchmen but survivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives and children, and wedding guests.
From Agence France Press:
From The Guardian:
From The Guardian:
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western Iraq.
Dr Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. “I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village,” he said by telephone. “These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?”
The story was also covered by MSNBC and The New York Times.
From The Guardian:
From Canada’s The Globe and Mail:
Survivors of the attacks, which occurred in the village of Wech Baghtuin the district of Shah Wali Kowt on Monday evening, said the majorityof the dead and injured were women – the bombs struck while male and female wedding guests were segregated, as is customary in Kandahar province.
Also covered by the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times, the Toronto Star. Click the image to see more hospital photos by independent journalist Alex Strick van Linschoten:
Al-Jazeera English has posted a video of the incident here.
Alternet tries to piece together the story here, linking to other writers who suggest responsibility lay with either Kashmir separatists, or Al-Qaida, or the gangster Ibrahim Dawood, or disaffected Indian youth.
BUT… politically timed attacks on Mumbai have been going on since 1993.
Friend of the blog MTK digs a little deeper over at Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press, and presents an original analysis that seeks the hands behind the hands that pulled the triggers:
It could be, for example, Hindu Nationalists seeking a harder-line policyregarding Kashmir and Pakistan, and against Muslims more generally.Such groups have been involved in false flag operations in the recent past, and they were under investigation by the Anti-Terrorism Squad Chief Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the attack. There is also the possibility, perhaps less likely, of an alliance between such Hindu extremists and Mossad.
There are also “unseen hands” in Pakistan who could be responsible. China, Russia and the United States all have competing interests in Pakistan, and may be exploiting the chaos resulting from the collapse of Musharraf and the murder Bhutto.
The possibility of U.S involvement is buttressed by the reporting Seymour Hersh has done regarding U.S. covert operations in Iran. Is something analogous happening in India and Pakistan?
