Category Archives: Gun-violence

Palestinian who filmed Hebron shooting faces threats to his life | +972 Magazine

Last week B’Tselem filed a complaint with Israeli police, claiming that Hebron police prevented Abu Shamsiya from submitting his own request following threats he received on the internet.Abu Shamsiya describes how last Sunday he arrived at the police station in Hebron to file a complaint about the threats, which included comments such as “I will kill you, you disabled asshole,” “your time will come,” and threatening videos. After a lengthy wait he was told that the station was too busy and that he should return the following day. The next day, after another long wait, he was told that he could not file a complaint, since the only officer who could deal with issue was not present. Abu Shamsiya returned for a third day, waiting a number of hours to be helped. When he approached one of there investigators, he was told to go home and threatened with arrest should he refuse to do so.

Source: Palestinian who filmed Hebron shooting faces threats to his life | +972 Magazine

A Deep, Shady Dive Into Trump’s Alleged Mob Ties: Gothamist

Trump’s connection to Shapiro was scrutinized again in 1984. Shapiro told a grand jury that he funneled thousands of dollars in contributions from Trump to Atlantic City mayor Michael J. Matthews, who Trump was barred from contributing to on his own because of his casino ownership. While Trump denied the charge, telling the Journal “I’m not interested in giving cash, OK?”, Shapiro’s brother Barry said that Trump never reimbursed Kenneth for his illegal contributions on Trump’s behalf. Trump refusing to pay a bill is of course, more believable than Trump not being interested in donating money to politicians.There was also the case of Robert LiButti, a major horse race gambler who talked about John Gotti as his “boss” and was a major gambler at Trump Plaza in the late 80s. Trump denied having anything to do with LiButti in an interview with the paper, but LiButti’s daughter told Yahoo that she rode on Trump’s helicopter and yacht, and that Trump came to her 35th birthday party. “I like Trump, but it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father. That hurts me,” she told the site earlier this year.And while most of Trump’s mob connections happened back in the 1980s, the Journal also brought up the case of Felix Sater, who worked with Bayrock Group, a real estate company that leased space in Trump Tower. Bayrock helped Trump brand his name on properties like the Trump SoHo condos and a Florida hotel, and the Journal reports Sater described himself as the number two person in the company. Sater also had been convicted in 1998 as part of a Mafia-linked boiler room scheme.Added up, it doesn’t suggest that Trump knows where the bodies are buried. On the other hand, for a man who’s been making his case that as a businessman and political neophyte he’ll just hire the right people to help him make decisions, it’s part of a pattern of a startling lack of vetting by the man. But hey, I’m sure that when he needs contractors and cheap labor for his big beautiful wall he’ll do the the most fabulous vetting we’ve ever seen.

Source: A Deep, Shady Dive Into Trump’s Alleged Mob Ties: Gothamist

Kurds Fear the U.S. Will Again Betray Them, in Syria – The New York Times AKA: TIK, TOK – trust in Kurds, trust only Kurds.

So, many Kurds shuddered when Turkish tanks and soldiers recently rolled into northern Syria, with American support, to push back against Kurdish gains. They saw it, perhaps prematurely, as a replay of a century of betrayal by world powers, going back to the end of World War I, when they were promised, then denied, their own state in the postwar settlement.“The Kurds are going to scream betrayal at every turn when they think things are not going to go their way, because they’ve had a century of it,” said Joost Hiltermann, the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, and a longtime expert on the Kurds.The Syrian Kurds say their aim is to establish an autonomous region, not their own state, where their rights are protected, in whatever settlement comes from the long Syrian civil war. And they say they hope that the United States will support them in that desire.To accomplish that, though, they need to connect two of their territories: Afrin, in the west, and Kobani, in the east, an effort that Turkey sees as a national security threat to be thwarted at virtually any cost.

Source: Kurds Fear the U.S. Will Again Betray Them, in Syria – The New York Times

Wednesday Open Thread | #VeteransForKaepernick Exploded On Twitter | 3CHICSPOLITICO

Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the national anthem has taken over the news cycle. It seems almost everyone has weighed in on the issue except one, extremely important group: American co…

Source: Wednesday Open Thread | #VeteransForKaepernick Exploded On Twitter | 3CHICSPOLITICO

Israeli soldiers routinely shoot heads of injured Palestinians, court told | The Electronic Intifada

 

“In terrorist incidents I witnessed, I saw with my own eyes that in every instance in which a terrorist attacked, soldiers shot him in the center of mass until he was neutralized … and [shot] a bullet to the head to ensure that the terrorist could not set off a suicide belt or continue the attack. These soldiers never went to court,” Liebman, the longtime civilian security chief for Jewish settlers in Hebron, told the court.“A ‘neutralized terrorist’ means: either he attempted to carry out an attack and was shot in the chest and killed and then shot in the head to make sure – as is taught in the IDF [Israeli army] according to the rules of opening fire – or it means that the terrorist was checked by a sapper and was cuffed by the hands and feet,” Liebman added.

Source: Israeli soldiers routinely shoot heads of injured Palestinians, court told | The Electronic Intifada

Monday Open Thread | The Protests At Standing Rock | 3CHICSPOLITICO

 

Lawrence O’Donnell: From the start of colonial intrusion, the free and original peoples of this hemisphere “have been treated as enemies and dealt with more harshly than any other enemy in any other war.”While this in itself is not news, the source of this statement is. This quote comes not from an activist, a historian or a researcher squirreled away in an obscure academic corner, but from a high-profile commentator speaking on MSNBC.“After all our other wars we signed treaties and lived by those treaties,” noted Lawrence O’Donnell at the segment at the end of the August 25 edition of his nightly news show The Last Word. “After World War 2 we then did everything we possibly could to help rebuild Germany.”In other words, “no Native American tribe has ever been treated as well as we treated Germans after World War 2.”

Source: Monday Open Thread | The Protests At Standing Rock | 3CHICSPOLITICO

Erdogan vows to ″destroy terrorists″ as force step up offensive against IS and Syrian Kurds | News | DW.COM | 29.08.2016 aka: Kurdish Genocide is still his only aim!

After months of deadly attacks across the country, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to “destroy terrorists.” In Syria, Turkish forces have ramped up their offensive against “IS” and Kurdish-led forces.

Source: Erdogan vows to ″destroy terrorists″ as force step up offensive against IS and Syrian Kurds | News | DW.COM | 29.08.2016

Pellet Guns Used in Kashmir Protests Cause ‘Dead Eyes’ Epidemic – The New York Times

The patient’s eyelids have been stretched back with a metal clamp, so his eyeball bulges out of glistening pink tissue. The surgeon sits with his back very straight, cutting with tiny movements of his fingers. Every now and then, a thread of blood appears in the patient’s eye socket. The patient is 8 years old.“Very bad,” murmurs the surgeon, Dr. S. Natarajan. But then, all 13 cases he will see today will be very bad.

Since mid-July, when the current wave of protests against the Indian military presence started, more than 570 patients have reported to Srinagar’s main government hospital, with eyes ruptured by lead pellets, sometimes known as birdshot, fired by security forces armed with pump-action shotguns to disperse crowds.

The patients have mutilated retinas, severed optic nerves, irises seeping out like puddles of ink. “Dead eyes,” the ophthalmology department’s chief calls them.Every season of popular revolt in Kashmir has its marker.

This summer’s protests in the part of Kashmir controlled by India, the most sustained and violent since 2010, caught the authorities in New Delhi unaware. The stone-throwing crowds have no political leaders, put forward no specific demands and metastasized with alarming speed. Around 60 civilians and two members of the security forces have been killed; on each side, thousands have been wounded.But 2016 will almost certainly be remembered as the year of dead eyes. The eye injuries have become such a focus of public anger that last week, in a conciliatory gesture, India’s home minister, Rajnath Singh, promised that the pellet guns, as they are known here, would be replaced by another type of nonlethal weapon in the coming days.

Source: Pellet Guns Used in Kashmir Protests Cause ‘Dead Eyes’ Epidemic – The New York Times

Donald Trump Cues Up Another Conspiracy – The New York Times

Mr. Trump did not invent paranoia; he did not create the Republican meme of fraudulent minority voting. He just took it — as he so often does — to an extreme. Senator John McCain made similar warnings in 2008, and murmurings of cheating go back at least to 2000, a close national election, botched in Florida, decided for George W. Bush by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. And long before Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, Republican legislators were busy passing voter ID laws based on the fallacy of widespread fraud.Mr. Trump’s brain is a pincushion for conspiracy theories, so maybe it’s no surprise that he thinks the Clinton campaign will be sending African-Americans and foreigners into booths across the country to fake their votes over and over, millions of times.Now, more than ever, the country needs responsible political leaders and the courts to defend and expand voting rights, rather than sitting silently while Mr. Trump further demolishes public confidence in the foundations of our government.

Source: Donald Trump Cues Up Another Conspiracy – The New York Times