Category: Anger
Israeli interrogator sexually assaults Palestinian child detainee
https://www.dci-palestine.org/israeli_interrogator_sexually_assaults_palestinian_child_detainee
This one is on the first boy I posted about, but from a different source and with a lot more detail of his abuse. At one point the boy was blindfolded and every time someone would walk by the would slap or hit him. I know that terror, that fear, of not knowing when those around you would explode in anger or casually take a shot at you to constantly show their authority and dislike of you. I 3 more of these to post today and then I am done with this subject for a while. The genocide and abuse over there I can not stop, but I can let people know what is happening. But even I need a break from it. Hugs. Scottie
Ramallah, February 10, 2021—An Israeli interrogator allegedly physically and sexually assaulted a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in Israeli custody during interrogation in mid-January at a Jerusalem detention facility.
The 15-year-old boy* was detained by Israeli paramilitary border police forces from his home around 5 a.m. on January 13, 2021, in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya. Israeli forces transferred him to Al-Mascobiyya interrogation and detention center in West Jerusalem where he was bound and blindfolded and detained in an interrogation room. An individual accused him of throwing stones and Molotov cocktails and then allegedly subjected the boy to physical and sexual violence amounting to torture, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International – Palestine.
“Israeli forces routinely subject Palestinian child detainees to systematic ill-treatment and torture following arrest,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, Accountability Program Director at DCIP. “These latest allegations are a particularly disturbing reminder that Palestinian children in Israeli custody are vulnerable to all forms of violence. Israeli authorities must immediately investigate these allegations that amount to torture.”
DCIP maintains that all children must be entitled to have a parent present at all times during interrogation, as well as have access to a lawyer of their choice prior to interrogation and throughout the interrogation process. DCIP demands that all interrogations of children must be audio-visually recorded.
When he was detained on January 13, the boy was already subject to house arrest following a previous arrest in November 2020 and was scheduled to appear in court that day.
Upon arrival at Al-Mascobiyya interrogation and detention center, the boy was forced to sit in a hallway bound and blindfolded where he was subject to physical violence by those passing by, according to documentation collected by DCIP.
“Every two to three minutes, someone would come by and slap, push, punch, or kick me,” the boy told DCIP. “I kept silent and never said anything. I did not know what was going on, but it was painful and tiring.”
He was eventually brought into an interrogation room. “A man came to the room and told me his name was Captain Kamel,” the boy told DCIP. “He kicked me and punched me while shouting and saying I should tell him what I did. Whenever I told him I did not do anything, he would beat me harder. He threatened to shock me with electricity, but I told him I did not do anything.”
The boy alleges the individual then knocked him to the floor while blindfolded and raped him with an object, according to documentation collected by DCIP. The individual threatened that the sexual violence would continue unless he confessed to the allegations against him.
The boy was then made to stand against a wall, where the individual inflicted extreme pain on his genitals. “There are no words to describe that moment,” the boy told DCIP. The Captain subsequently threatened the boy, telling him that the physical and sexual violence would continue if he told his lawyer what had occurred.
Around 15 minutes after the incident, Israeli forces transferred the boy to another room where he met with a lawyer for about five minutes. Then, he was taken to a room where a man in civilian clothing introduced himself as an Israeli interrogator. The boy was interrogated for almost four hours, during which he experienced verbal abuse and was forced to sign papers written in Hebrew, the content of which he did not understand, according to information collected by DCIP.
With his court session adjourned for four days, the boy was detained in a room with four other children for three days. After that time, he was again taken to an interrogation room. He was interrogated for approximately four hours, at the end of which he was again forced to sign papers in Hebrew. The following day, January 17, he was released under the terms of house arrest pending another court session at a later date, according to information collected by DCIP.
“What he did to me was very oppressive and humiliating,” the boy told DCIP. “I want this house arrest to end because it is exhausting. I want my life back. I want to leave the house and see my friends.”
Palestinian children in East Jerusalem are prosecuted in Israel’s civilian criminal legal system, not the Israeli military court system, due to Israeli authorities’ unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem, a move unrecognized by the international community. Palestinian children living in East Jerusalem are generally subject to the Israeli Youth Law, which theoretically applies equally to Palestinian and Israeli children in Jerusalem. However, evidence collected by DCIP clearly demonstrates that Israeli authorities implement the law in a discriminatory manner, denying Palestinian children in East Jerusalem of their rights from the moment of arrest to the end of legal proceedings.
Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system are overwhelmingly subjected to widespread and systematic violence and ill-treatment, according to documentation by DCIP. Between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2019, DCIP collected sworn affidavits from 752 child detainees, describing their arrest, interrogation, and detention experiences. Of these, 72 percent were subjected to physical violence and 61 percent to verbal abuse. Less than one percent were threatened with sexual violence; however, sexual violence amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are known to be underreported by child detainee survivors.
A 2015 study on sexual torture by Israeli authorities found that the sexual torture of adult Palestinian male detainees by Israeli authorities is systematic, and includes verbal sexual harassment, forced nudity, and physical sexual assault.
*The boy’s name is known to DCIP but is not disclosed here due to privacy concerns.
MSNBC & Fox News Join Forces To Smear Pramila Jayapal Following CNN Interview
I was going to do a video but maybe tomorrow.
Ron is still struggling with his leg, and today I needed to order my morphine. Florida is so regressive that you can not use any pharmacy computer system to refill morphine, which is a drug so old it is one of the most researched drugs of all time, but you must personally call in the refill on the right day and then pick it up on that day.
I called it in and from the fact that I got sent right away to the over fill call line instead of the actual pharmacy, which happens a lot because Walgreens is so understaffing and over whelming their store staff. They take the information and then transfer me to the pharmacy of the store I go to, which is just down the road. I wish they would just let the phone call go through to the store I use, as I then have to repeat every thing again.
So several hours later I get the notice the drug is ready, so I go in to get it. Then the first of many things happened that will stay with me. I am waiting in line as a woman is complaining that batteries for her blood pressure cuff wear out too soon and are far more expensive than she can afford. I understand that. But the person behind the counter while understanding can not change the price for her.
So I take the time to explain to her about lower cost rechargeable batteries and recharges that are reasonably priced. She keeps complaining while putting back five different packages of large numbers of batteries. I explained she needed to make sure the rechargeable batteries and the charger were the ones she needed for her blood pressure machine.
Then I step up to the counter, the person behind the counter who was a single mother who I am friendly with as I am almost all the pharmacy staff, simply because I am patient and care about them. She already had my morphine package ready, so I asked if she had a good day off yesterday and how her son had enjoyed the holiday. She rolled up her sleeve and her entire upper arm was bruised and swollen. I immediately became concern and asked her about it and if she was OK. Remember, I worked in an ICU and our concern was always if a patient felt safe at home.
She started to tear up, her lips trembling as she struggled not to cry. Now my entire focus was on her, fuck my morphine. She said it was her son. Now I was totally focused and concerned. I asked her if she was OK, if she felt comfortable talking, or if she would rather not tell me. She replied that her son has mental illness. I told her is she wanted to talk about it, I was here and would listen. Sadly, as she was thanking me, other people stepped up in the line behind me. She sadly shifted to her duty.
I talked to her as she processed my payment. Gave her my thanks and told her she was wonderful, and again if she needed something she had my contact information and “I gave her permission to contact me with it”! The last was important and with in hearing of her coworkers. I am serious, she could contact me and I did not want her in trouble for doing that. So after she thanked me, I left.
I went to the grocery story next door to get a few things. I won’t bore you with the stresses in there. But the most important thing is not the people I talked to in the store, but what happened after I put my stuff in my car, put my cart away, (I am disabled and some days need a walker to walk, but it pisses me off the people who just leave carts in parking spaces or in such a way they hit or will be hit by other cars. Several weeks ago I got so pissed at a woman who was clearly able-bodied who after putting her groceries in her car, left her cart next to my car almost touching it. I had been about to back out, but instead got out, walked around to the passenger side, walked up to her door looked in at her, then took the handle of her cart she left there, and put it in the space for them nearby. All while showing her I was walking with a cane. I then returned, looked into to her car, made an exaggerated shrug motion, and got back into my car. She backed out and left, never even acknowledging the event)
As I was about to open my car door when an elderly woman pushing a cart with a few things stopped almost behind my car. She and I were in direct sight. She was very elderly, had very white hair, had very white pale skin, with bright red pouches under her eyes. She had her left hand up to her brow and was moving it back and forth. By my dogs that love gravy, I was immediately concerned.
Mam’m, are you OK, I asked as I turned fully to her. She stood there a moment wiping at her brow and then turned to me and in a shaky voice said “Oh I am so tired, I am just very tired”! Oh crap, alarm bells are going off in my head. She then went on to say she was going home to rest.
Long story short, which my conversation with her was not. She rambled on about how she lived along but her brother was with her now. Oh, visiting I asked as I said I understood how having other in your home could be disruptive? Nope, and then came 20 minutes of the brother being a long haul truck driver and every part of the rest of her life for the last few years. I went over to her, again trying to assess if she needed assistance or not. She seemed in her senses, she knew what was going on, what year it was, the president, and she just wanted to talk it seemed. But she kept repeating she was very tired. I kept asking if she needed help, was there someone I could call for her. Nope she was not far from home she just wanted to tell me she was very tired, about her brother staying at her home right now, his job, her home, her other stuff.
As far as I could tell she was OK, but yes tired. But really only wanted to talk to someone, even a stranger in a parking lot of a grocery store. I must have talked to her for 20 minutes. My own legs had gone numb and I was leaning hard on the car. I really was stumped what to do, I had nothing I felt would raise red flags for the store if I asked them to help her, and I really felt she was just really lonely. So lonely she was willing to tell her story to a stranger who asked her if she was OK in a store parking lot. I was torn, but my own needs were screaming at me. So I said OK then, if you are sure you’re OK and don’t want me to call anyone or get the store to help, I need to go home. She said her goodbyes, happy weekend and pushed her cart forward.
When I got home, I talked to Ron. He really is the medical person, he spent nearly 20 years in ICU’s giving medical care. He told me I did everything right, I assessed her as best I could. He asked more detailed questions on her skin, her stance and other things I really couldn’t answer. He told me that as she seemed in her right mind, competent and did not ask for help, I really couldn’t have done more. Still I worried. Then I got angry. This old woman lived alone for a long time, she told me, that is why the brother visiting caused her issues. Why is the US so damn hard on older people who are alone? The wealthiest country on earth, number 1 In the GNP and military might, and a little old lady is standing in a parking lot telling a stranger how very tired she is. Hugs. Scottie. And now I am going to bed!
Democrats who swept Moms For Liberty off school board fight superintendent’s $700,000 exit deal
The haters seen the writing on the wall and wanted to give a lot of money to one of them that helped them foment hate and harm to the LGBTQIA kids in schools. Because protecting kids was never the goal, doing the best for schools was never the goal. It has always been to promote and enforce their religious fundamentalist right wing views on students. And they will be back, that was the point of such a huge payout. To make others see the profit in harming the LGBTQIA kids. Hugs. Scottie
This image taken from video shows Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh and Board President Dana Hunter preside over a Central Bucks School District meeting in Doylestown Pa., Nov. 15, 2022. Democrats who swept out a Moms for Liberty majority on the board are challenging Lucabaugh’s last-minute $700,000 exit package. (AP Photo)
Updated 12:26 PM EST, November 22, 2023PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A Pennsylvania school board that banned books, Pride flags and transgender athletes slipped a last-minute item into their final meeting before leaving office, hastily awarding a $700,000 exit package to the superintendent who supported their agenda.
But the Democratic majority that swept the conservative Moms For Liberty slate out of office hopes to block the unusual — they say illegal — payout and bring calm to the Central Bucks School District, whose affluent suburbs and bucolic farms near Philadelphia have been roiled by infighting since the 2020 pandemic.
“People are really sick of the embarrassing meetings, the vitriol, they’re tired of our district being in the news for all the wrong reasons. And … the students are aware of what’s been going on, particularly our LGBTQ students and their friends and allies,” said Karen Smith, a Democrat who won a third term on the board.
The district, with about 17,000 students in 23 schools, has spent $1.5 million on legal and public relations fees amid competing lawsuits, discrimination complaints and investigations in the past two years, including a pending suit over its suspension of a middle school teacher who supported LGBTQ and other marginalized students.
The jostling — and spending — look likely to continue as Democrats who won a 6-3 majority in the Nov. 7 election prepare to challenge the severance package for superintendent Abram Lucabaugh, which was added to the Nov. 14 agenda only the night before.
Meanwhile, several voters in the quaint town of Chalfont filed a court petition Monday challenging the school board election tallies, alleging unspecified “fraud or error.”
Student Lily Freeman, a vocal critic of board policies on LGBTQ issues, decried the district’s spending priorities. She called the severance package a bad deal for both students and taxpayers.
“It’s kind of like a slap in the face,” said the senior at Central Bucks East High School. “Teachers are struggling, and there’s a lot of students that are struggling.”
“There are so many resources out there that we could be putting that money to,” she said, noting her school desperately needs better WiFi.
Neither Lucabaugh, who skipped the final meeting, nor outgoing board president Dana Hunter returned calls for comment. School board solicitor Jeffrey P. Garton said he was not involved in the severance agreement.
“I didn’t prepare it and gave no legal advice concerning its content,” Garton said in an email.
Some of the incoming Democrats tried to warn the outgoing board that the payout violates a 2012 state law designed to curtail golden parachutes bestowed on school superintendents, including one that topped $900,000. The law now caps severance pay at a year’s salary, along with limited payments for unused sick time and other benefits.
“The particular circumstances in this case are even more egregious. The board gave Dr. Lucabaugh a 40 percent salary increase (to $315,000) in late July of this year, making him the second-highest paid school district superintendent in Pennsylvania, and is now using that increase less than four months later to calculate a severance payment,” lawyer Brendan Flynn, who represents them, wrote in a letter distributed to the board before the vote.
Lucabaugh’s package includes more than $300,000 for unused sick, vacation, administrative and personal time during his 18 years in various roles with the district; $50,000 for signing the deal; and health insurance for his family through June.
The package also includes a puzzling ban on any district investigations of his tenure and an agreement that he can keep his district-issued laptop as long as he wipes it of school records.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage nixed that last provision on Friday when he ordered Lucabaugh, a defendant in middle school teacher Andrew Burgess’s retaliation suit against the district, to preserve documents that may become evidence in the case.
“It’s hard to imagine a lawyer drafted that contract,” said Witold “Vic” Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, who represents Burgess. “No lawyer would think that a school board could insulate an employee from any kind of of court action or criminal investigation.”
Freeman, the high school senior, declined to revisit the threats and sense of danger she said she and her family have endured as she took on the board the past two years. However, her forceful public remarks at last week’s meeting, posted to TikTok, have drawn thousands of views and comments.
“It was never about protecting kids. It was about erasing people like me from Central Bucks,” she told the board last week as it voted to make students play on sports teams based on their gender assignment at birth. “You continue to make policy after policy preventing people like me from just living our lives.”
On Monday, Freeman said she’s hopeful the tensions will ease under the new board: “I feel as if we shouldn’t have to worry about a lot of these things if our needs are being met.”
Jonothan Michael Dewey
I wish I had a way on your blog to express both my sympathy and my anger at what happened. I wish so much you would allow comments. But if this is the only way to show sympathy and anger at what happened, then so be it.
I want so much to give each of you peace and justice. But what I want is not going to happen any more than I can imagine what you wanted to happen, did. In truth, I really wish, with no documentation, you could have your wish. I know I would hate to know of the result, but something inside me says you are owed that. Hugs. Scottie
Biden Defends Israel’s Raid On Al-Shifa Hospital
The important thing to note is that Israel built the complex under the hospital when they controlled the area decades ago. Yes they knew the tunnels were there because they built them. If Hamas is guilty of working from a hospital, then why is Israel also not guilty of the same damn thing. Even if there was an entire battalion of Hamas fighters there, it doesn’t give Israeli military / government permission to do wholesale slaughter of civilians. Israel wants to keep being the aggrieved person who lost less than 1,400 people to violence when they have committed war crimes against 11,000 people, a third of them children. You can not wipe out an idea and feeling with military aggression. Israel is simply fostering the next generations of people angry at them for killing their families. How does any of this help peace? Hugs. Scottie
Meanwhile, Human Rights activist Huwaida Arraf posted on Twitter screenshots from a report in Tablet about how Israel is so certain about the bunker and tunnel under Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza because they contributed to building it 40 years ago in 1983.
Let’s talk about Teamsters, Sanders, Oklahoma, and images….
Devastating Realities Of Gaza’s Growing Casualties
The Majority Report.
I love the Majority Report with Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland. Here are some clips. People might wonder why so many at once. Because I have two monitors / computers. One I normally blog with and the other I constantly stream videos. Mostly news. If I am not in my Pink Palace I have my apple earbuds in listening to podcasts. I rarely do music. Those that follow me and know my history know that I have to constantly have that stream of new data, of idea and sound in to my head to stop the thoughts I don’t want. Granted, it has gotten less urgent over the last few years as I am getting better at coping, but I can not stand longish periods of only my own memories. The first thing I do when I leave my bed to get up is pull my hair back and put in my ear buds. At night when I go to bed I fill my mind with my own stories written based on the characters of books, movies, TV shows that I can fill my mind with writing my self into those stories, keeping the memories from coming up to the front of my mind or having a say. I had these videos ready to post for a while, but never found the time. Today is the time. I don’t expect everyone to watch all of them, but maybe bits or sections, or just the ones that interest you. Thank you for understanding. Hugs. Scottie
/ omarsshakir
https://www.hrw.org/
After briefly touching on the international politics around the 2007 blockade and election of Hamas in Gaza, Shakir explores how the Israeli government has supported and maintained Hamas’ rule as a part of their “policy of separation” between Gaza and the West Bank, and a central tool against the establishment of a Palestinian state. Wrapping up, Omar explores the obvious parallels between the current assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the 1948 Nakba that began the occupation, the recent discovery of Israel’s use of white phosphorus, and what a push for a ceasefire and an end to apartheid could look like.
/ omarsshakir
https://www.hrw.org/
Omar Shakir then joins as he jumps right into the history of the Gaza Strip, from the beginning of its occupation by Israel in 1967, through the establishment of their full blockade on people, goods, and aid in the wake of their military withdrawal in 2005, which launched the current era of strict apartheid and de facto Hamas rule.
Scottie's Playtime 