Category Archives: Viva!

NHS cancels surgery for tens of thousands to avoid winter crisis

Tories are bad for your health!

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Hospital chiefs are told by NHS England to take drastic action, including setting up makeshift wards

Tens of thousands of patients are having their surgery cancelled and hospitals will set up makeshift wards in a dramatic escalation of the NHS’s efforts to avoid the service going into meltdown this winter.

In an unprecedented edict, NHS England has told hospitals to delay operations such as cataract removals and hip and knee replacements until mid-January. The only exceptions to the new policy are cancer operations and also what the NHS called “time-critical procedures” where the surgery has to go ahead to avoid the patient’s condition deteriorating further.

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How to Tell a Shattered Story

Cover image: Penguin.

For the past two months, the thousand-year-old city of Delhi has been under a shroud of toxic smog. About ten times more polluted than Beijing, Delhi’s air is so poisonous that schools are often shut down. On the roads, car headlights twinkle behind the smoke like distant stars. If you step out wearing an air filter mask (“Useless,” the doctors say) you will glimpse—piecemeal—the facades of Delhi’s age-old tombs levitating in the haze.

Like Delhi mausoleums appearing like pieces of a jigsaw in the haze, graves form the framework of Arundhati Roy’s latest novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an elegy to graveyards and the disenfranchised they have been home to for millennia; to the unknown dead, the dying alive, and those so dispossessed that they might as well be nonexistent. The book is a dirge. Once this becomes apparent, burials show their faces everywhere in its pages.

It’s not a surprise, then, that a large part of the novel is set in Delhi. A seat of power for almost a thousand years, the city is riddled with mausoleums, some over eight hundred years old. In Delhi, the past and the present encroach upon each other, and one can see centuries coexisting in the ancient tombs towering over crowded red lights or wedged between shiny malls. The face of death is always public.

These tombs—grand tombs, with poetry inscribed on their faces—are obviously of the ancient elite. The Archeological Survey of India has a list of one hundred and seventy-six “officially recognized” Delhi tombs. But the city’s old gullies are home to innumerable unmarked graves and tiny tombs, often built over with homes and shops. It’s this sedimented, unrecorded history of the city—that of the forgotten, of outcasts—that Roy is interested in.

We find Anjum in one such graveyard at the beginning of the book. Anjum was born with both a penis and a vagina in the labyrinths of Chandni Chowk. Her family names her Aftab (Urdu for “sun”) and raises her as a boy.  Later, she runs away to the Khwabgah to live with the hallowed eunuchs of Old Delhi, whose traditions are as old as the crypts littered throughout the city. She changes her name to Anjum (Urdu for “star”), pierces her nose, and starts wearing “disco saris” with bangles and anklets, enchanting filmmakers, foreign journalists, and businessmen.

Anjum’s binary star is Tilo, a Malayali who came to Delhi to study architecture. If Anjum is from the Khwabgah—The House of Dreams—Tilo belongs to the Duniya, the real world. What the book makes clear from the beginning is how political tragedy in Duniya causes devastating personal anguish in all parallel worlds. And that, if disaster is political, then so are death and its discontents, locked inside the burial chambers that are invoked again and again in the story.

As Tilo and her college boyfriend Musa rekindle their romance on a boathouse on the Dal Lake, the tales of Kashmiri people’s abduction, torture and extrajudicial killings smolder like the kangri firepots they carried under their clothes in winter. As if in premonition, before Musa becomes a militant, he draws watercolors of the ruins of Delhi. These paintings, too, are evocations of graves—dead cities, preserved like fossils.

Describing the Kashmiri freedom movement, Roy writes, “Graveyards sprang up in parks and meadows… Tombstones grew out of the ground like young children’s teeth.” These days, Kashmir’s valleys are funerary grounds, their famed apple orchards soaked with blood. Livelihoods and tourism have dried up because of the violence, but “for gravediggers there was no rest. It was just workworkwork.”

In Delhi, woods that were once emperors’ summer retreats are now home to luxury boutiques selling high-end designer clothing. Tellingly, Tilo calls one such mall, complete with multi-tiered parking lots, “the world’s mazar [mausoleum]. Maybe the mannequin-shoppers are ghosts trying to buy what no longer exists.” Compare this with the goings-on far north in Kashmir: “As the war progressed, graveyards became as common as the multi-story parking lots that were springing up in the burgeoning cities in the plains.”

While Tilo bears witness to the graveyards of Kashmir, Anjum gets embroiled in the Gujarat riots of 2002, a genocide in which over a thousand Muslims were murdered by Hindu mobs, “infants impaled on their saffron tridents.” Although the group Anjum is traveling with is slaughtered, she is spared because the murderers believe killing a eunuch brings bad luck. In the thick of this violence, the mob’s chants about graveyards are especially dire: “Mussalman ka ek hi stan! Qabaristan ya Pakistan!” (“Muslims belong either in Pakistan or in a graveyard.”)

Anjum is a changed person when she returns to the Khwabgah, haunted by her murdered companions. She leaves the House of Dreams, “unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard” next to a hospital morgue, and starts constructing a home where, slowly, people who live on the fringes of society—the poor, the homeless, Dalits and Muslims, eunuchs and prostitutes, illegitimate children—come to gather. Unwanted animals find shelter here, too, and the graveyard becomes “a Noah’s ark of injured animals.” Anjum christens the graveyard Jannat Guest House. Jannat means paradise, and by locating it in Delhi, Roy turns the necropolis into a parallel government, “the graveyard Politburo.” The utopia is complete with biryani and kebab feasts, English and science lessons at subsidized fees, and a vegetable garden thriving on the nutrients of long-festering bodies.

Against the backdrop of countless national tragedies, Roy writes, “for ordinary people the consolidation of their dead became, in itself, an act of defiance.” In Jannat, in the absence of bodies, letters and shirts are buried as symbolic acts. For the residents, life becomes “a little easier to bear.” Roy tries to resuscitate these buried ghosts—to give them a voice, a face, some agency.

Those who tend to categorize literatures from the third world in specific boxes might explain the analogy with those dreaded words: magical realism. But in India, people who have nowhere to go make real homes in unreal places. Living in a graveyard is not a metaphor but a fact of life in that country. In Roy’s graveyard, the dispossessed find un-loneliness, bonhomie, even solace.

In Hindi, the word for “ghost” and “past” is the same: bhoot. Jannat Guesthouse is not only the perfect analogy for Delhi, a city littered with crypts, but for all of India—a young postcolonial nation with a long history and one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Like in Jannat Guesthouse, in India, too, “the souls of the present and the departed mingle, like guests at the same party.” One only has to peek inside the perfumed closets to find a cache of skeletons hiding behind the sequined shararas.

It seems fitting that in a novel bubbling with religious strife, the most lovingly described places of worship are the mausoleums of Delhi where Muslims and Hindus offer supplications together. Graves pervade not only prayers but daily pleasures. Before smoking hashish on a mosquito-ridden Delhi rooftop under the moon, Tilo and Dasgupta hang out at the mausoleum of Mirza Ghalib, a beloved Urdu poet who died three centuries ago. They listen to qawwalis at the burial quarters of the thirteenth century Sufi sage Nizamuddin.

Despite the pall of death, the book is frequently funny, interspersed with Urdu shers that are more bawdy than beautiful. While the oddball residents of Jannat are from different castes, classes, religions, and genders, and speak distinct languages, they have their unorthodoxy in common. Together, they are situated at the fringes of society: outside of the Duniya, inside Anjum’s graveyard. Roy breathes life into them by providing the microscopic, eccentric details of their personalities.

A few kinks in the narrative emerge when the numerous characters start coming together. The meeting of The Valley of Death with Delhi’s graveyards—while ideologically and spiritually in sync—sometimes feels labored in terms of the story. Skimming the detailed descriptions of Kejriwal, Modi and Anna Hazare, I uncharitably wondered whether Roy’s editors had been too star-struck to suggest a tighter edit. But as the story progressed, I remembered that the root of the word “grave” yields cognates that mean both “to dig” as well as “to bury.” In invoking India’s recent history, from the Emergency to the 2014 national election, Roy shows how the grand cartography of political history has had profoundly tragic personal repercussions for people like Jannat’s residents. She not only excavates but also enshrines India’s marginalized and their unheard stories.

The cover of the book shows a photograph of an anonymous Delhi tomb. On the marble tomb lie a red rose and a dead fly. In writing The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy has given life to smoggy subcontinental grief that doesn’t want to be edited or have its dead flies Photoshopped away. The back cover has these lines: “How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By solely becoming everything.” For a book so bounteous with graves, let these lines serve as an epitaph and the shattered stories will fall into place.

The post How to Tell a Shattered Story appeared first on Guernica.

Bullies Of A Feather Play Together

From UN: “Today’s resolution demanded that “all States comply with Security Council resolutions regarding the Holy City of Jerusalem, and not recognize any actions or measures contrary to those resolutions.”

The General Assembly further affirmed that “any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council.”

In that regard the Assembly also called upon all States to refrain from the establishment of diplomatic missions in the Holy City of Jerusalem, pursuant to Security Council resolution 478 adopted in 1980.

Reiterating its call for the reversal of the negative trends that endanger the two-State solution, the Assembly urged greater international and regional efforts and support aimed at achieving, without delay, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East. ”

I see that our clueless ambassador to the UN has taken a page from the bullying manual written by her ruler, Trump.

Recently the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on the the situation of Jerusalem…..Amb. Haley has threatened the world…..

Consider it a not-so-veiled threat. The UN General Assembly votes Thursday on whether to reject President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and US Ambassador Nikki Haley is warning that the US will be paying very close attention. “When we make a decision, at the will of the American ppl, abt where to locate OUR embassy, we don’t expect those we’ve helped to target us,” she tweeted. “On Thurs there’ll be a vote criticizing our choice. The US will be taking names.” In a letter circulated to other countries, Haley reiterates the point, reports the Guardian. “As you consider your vote, I encourage you to know the president and the US take this vote personally,” she writes, adding that she’ll be reporting back to Trump on the nay votes.

It’s unclear whether the US pressure will work. When the Security Council voted on a similar measure Monday, the other 14 members of the council voted against the US. However, because the US has veto power on the council, the measure failed anyway. No such vetoes are in play during the General Assembly vote, which is being held at the request of Arab and Muslim states, reports the BBC. A draft of the non-binding resolution asks the General Assembly to declare the American move “null and void,” and Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour predicts victory: “The General Assembly will say, without the fear of the veto, that the international community is refusing to accept the unilateral position of the United States.”

The American Conservative has touched on this attempt at a Trumpian bully……

Haley’s petty, threatening remarks compound the embarrassment of the U.S. veto she cast earlier this week. Having lost the Security Council vote 14-1, an effective diplomat would at least be seeking to conciliate and appeal to governments that might be willing to abstain instead of voting against the U.S. position. A smart one would be recommending that the president rethink his position. Instead, Haley directly challenges every member of the U.N. and makes an implicit threat that they will pay a penalty if they don’t vote as the U.S. wants. That will make it very easy for Haley to keep track of the names of all governments that vote against the administration’s position, since it will be almost every single member state.

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This person, Haley, is a clueless diplomat, if you can use that term to describe her, this arrogance will do NOTHING but make her look foolish and a dumb-ass like her employer.

If she makes good on these threats then she will open the door for China and Russia to step into the void where the US use to occupy to gain more influence around the world.

None of this will “Make America Great Again”…another promise broke but who’s counting?

No, Sen. Collins, You Don’t Get To Cry Sexism After Destroying So Many Women’s Lives

This week, the Senate succeeded on partisan lines in passing a bill known widely as the “Republican Tax Scam,” a widely and unanimously decried piece of legislation that exploits the working class to expand the wealth of the top 5%, strips millions of people’s healthcare, and tanks the country’s economy while it’s at it, all at the service of the party’s wealthy donors.

The bill cleared the Senate floor after it was given the go-ahead by so-called “moderate” Republicans, one of whom was Senator Susan Collins, considered a ‘hero‘ by centrist Democrats after her vote to block Republican Obamacare repeal legislation. Senator Collins apparently ‘blasted’ coverage of her approach to the bill on Tuesday, decrying it as ‘unbelievably sexist‘ for a variety of reasons, including newspapers alleging the fact that she was ‘duped’ despite her experience in politics and negotiating, and noting that she ‘didn’t cry’ when confronted by protestors. She claimed that by contrast Jeff Flake, another allegedly ‘moderate’ Republican had received no such coverage.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: every woman, in every situation, is a victim of sexism. That’s because sexism is embedded in systems and institutions, and doesn’t pick and choose who it affects or when it comes in to play. Conservative women aren’t excluded from the impact of sexism, and their coverage in the media will fall into sexist tropes, just like the coverage of all women falls into sexist tropes. And it isn’t excused or okay or any better when it’s directed at conservative women because it comes from the same place and encourages the same behaviors that end up affecting women on all parts of the political spectrum. It’s no doubt that the fact that Collins is a woman affects how she’s treated, and that Flake is covered very differently by the press.

But that doesn’t mean Collins can get to deflect attention on the fact that it was her vote that helped pass a monstrous piece of legislation that plunders poor and working-class women and their families by pointing to that sexism. Here’s the thing about the systemic nature of sexism: this means that it isn’t individual actions that together constitute the patriarchy, but material conditions that put women at a disadvantage structurally to men. The bill that Collins’s support has helped come closer to becoming law will hit working-class women hard, possibly the hardest, and thereby exacerbate institutional sexism. It is disingenuous and hypocritical for Collins to call out sexism without examining how her behavior, and the behavior of the party she represents, are committed to making life worse off for a significant majority of women. Collins is trying to use feminism — like Kellyanne Conway before her, and Ivanka Trump, and like countless other women in positions of power — in a selfish and self-serving way, and ignore that feminism is a social movement aimed at lifting women as a collective, and not as individuals. If Collins really cared about sexism — as opposed to using it as a cheap political tool to score brownie points with liberals for the devastating impact her vote will have on the American working and middle class — then she would work to dismantle patriarchal structures, not uphold them by servicing the Republican party’s rich white male donors.

In 2018, we cannot let rich, powerful white women working to uphold structures of our oppression co-opt our social movements and act as wolves in sheep’s clothing. We must refuse to let powerful white women use cries of sexism to absolve themselves of responsibility from the terrible impacts of their actions. We must have the courage and conviction to stand by our criticisms of women in power while still recognizing that sexism is ubiquitous and we must always work around patriarchal discourses. In 2018, we cannot let Susan Collins use cries of ‘sexism’ to get away with destroying the lives of millions of poor women.

This post was written by a young person on our team. Help us pay them what they deserve and sign up to become a monthly Feministing member for as little as $5.

The Israeli government is paying for anti-BDS journalism

The Israeli ministry tasked with fighting the BDS Movement is spending millions of shekels to place propaganda that looks like news in Israel’s most prominent media outlets.

By Itamar Benzaquen

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Chief of Police Roni Alsheikh attend a ceremony for Israeli police at the Police National College, Bet Shemesh, September 22, 2016. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Chief of Police Roni Alsheikh attend a ceremony for Israeli police at the Police National College, Bet Shemesh, September 22, 2016. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

The Israeli government paid the Yedioth Group, publisher of Israel’s best-selling daily newspaper, hundreds of thousands of shekels to publish articles and interviews meant to influence readers to support a campaign Israel is waging against its critics. The Strategic Affairs Ministry, headed by Minister Gilad Erdan, purchased positive coverage and the distribution of that content on the Internet.

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According to information provided to “The Seventh Eye” and “Hatzlacha,” as part of a freedom of information request, the Yedioth Ahronoth Group received NIS 350,000 ($100,000) to publish journalistic articles, which were then distributed by member organizations of the “Pro-Israel Network” in Israel and around the world. The articles, according to the information furnished, were meant to motivate or enlist Israelis into the struggle.

The paid-for articles were published starting in June 2017 in the news section of Yedioth Ahronoth‘s weekend magazine, and on its website, Ynet. Like other campaigns that included purchasing articles from the newspaper, this one also included promotions in the widely-distributed weekend edition.

Alongside the paid-for articles, Ynet also published promotional videos produced by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, as well as three interviews with a ranking official at the ministry, Tzahi Gabrieli. Two of those paid-for interviews were conducted by Ynet’s senior political correspondent, Attila Somfalvi, who asked soft-ball questions that allowed him to present his talking points.

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In addition to the interviews with Gabrieli, Yedioth also interviewed a string of people from various Jewish organizations that do not have direct ties to the state. The role of those organizations in the government efforts against de-legitimization and their ties to the government are unclear.

Two of those organizations, the “World Jewish Congress” and “Stand With Us,” were sponsors of Yedioth’s anti-BDS conference last year, in which senior politicians and officials from the Strategic Affairs Ministry took part. “Over the last year,” wrote journalist Reuven Weiss in one of the paid-for articles, “the boycott movement’s main base of operations in their campaign to delegitimize Israel has moved to social media, and new tools are required.”

The aim of at least some of those state-sponsored articles was to enlist the public to help some of those civil society organizations in spreading government messaging on the internet and to combat unflattering content. In other words, to get the public to execute the Ministry of Strategic Affairs’ strategy.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett speaks at Yedioth Ahronoth's Stop BDS conference, March 28, 2016. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Education Minister Naftali Bennett speaks at Yedioth Ahronoth’s Stop BDS conference, March 28, 2016. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

“Are you sick of hearing the lies about Israel spread in the international media and on social networks?” read an accompanying box in one of the Hebrew-language state-sponsored articles. Readers were then encouraged to Google the campaign’s name, “4il,” go to the site, and start sharing “videos, caricatures, and articles that expose the lies of BDS.” In addition, Yedioth suggested that readers download an app called Act.il, which enables them to take part in “daily missions” to advance pro-Israel messaging on social media.

As has become customary at Yedioth Ahronoth in recent years, readers are told only that the article they are reading was published “in cooperation with” an Israeli government ministry, without explaining that “in cooperation with” actually means “paid for by.” In recent months, the list of articles featuring that disclosure has grown to include articles written by the news organization’s diplomatic correspondent Itamar Eichner.

The relationship between the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Yedioth Ahronoth is only part of a much broader, well-funded campaign: in June and July of 2017 the ministry spent nearly NIS 7 million ($2 million) on spreading its messaging to the public in Israel and abroad. That is larger than any of the other campaigns that have been exposed by The Seventh Eye in recent years. The second-largest such campaign documented previously was NIS 11 million, and that was over the course of more than a year.

In addition to the journalistic content that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs purchased in Yedioth, it also spent over half a million shekels on placing content on Israel’s highest-rated television news channel, Channel 2 and its website, Mako. And in addition to Hebrew-language articles, the ministry also purchased journalistic content targeting a more global audience, enlisting it in the fight against delegitimization.

The state-sponsored articles aimed overseas audiences were published in The Jerusalem Post, which was paid NIS 120,000 ($34,000); in the Times of Israel, which was paid NIS 95,000 ($27,000); and the J Media Group, an American publishing group, which was paid NIS 115,000 ($33,000). The J Media Group, which operates a television station called ILTV, also received money from the Strategic Affairs Ministry, along with Hebrew-language newspaper Makor Rishon. The ministry refused to release data on its relationship with Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, Israel Hayom.

Israeli BDS activists take part in an anti-corruption demonstration in Tel Aviv's Habima Square, December 9th, 2017. (Hagar Shezaf)

Israeli BDS activists take part in an anti-corruption demonstration in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, December 9th, 2017. (Hagar Shezaf)

According to the data that was released, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs’ biggest expenditure of the campaign — over NIS 2.6 million ($740,000) — was budgeted to promote content on social media and search engines, including Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Another large sum, around NIS 2 million ($570,000), was budgeted for building the Act.il website and producing multi-media content for it. Another roughly NIS 490,000 ($140,000) was budgeted for “strategy,” “creative,” and “branding.”

The funds the government is using to purchase state-sponsored journalistic articles come from the public, and therefore most government ministries have agreed to release information on those types of relationships. It will soon be far more difficult to obtain information about the purchase of journalistic content by Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The ministry has in recent months been advancing legislation that would exempt it from Israel’s Freedom of Information Law. According to the draft legislation, “successfully waging this battle requires keeping it as ambiguous as possible.”

The Strategic Affairs Ministry claimed that the law would not apply to the types of relationships like that with the Yedioth Ahronot Group, but the bill itself, which passed a preliminary vote over the summer and is now waiting for its second and final votes, is written in a way that will apply to all of the ministry’s activities. In response to past freedom of information requests by The Seventh Eye and Hatzlacha, the ministry claimed that some of the requested documents were “classified.” It redacted other documents, claiming that they were liable to harm Israel’s foreign relations, and even state security.

Attila Somfalvi declined to respond to interview requests. Ron Yaron, the editor of Yedioth Ahronoth, sent the following response:

We are proud of the broad and comprehensive coverage Yedioth Ahronoth has been leading against the boycott of Israel. When, in that framework, there has been cooperation with [government] officials or bodies in articles that were published, there have been prominent disclosures of it, similar to what is done in other media outlets when they cooperate with various bodies

This article was first published in Hebrew on The Seventh Eye.

Israeli army court orders Ahed Tamimi imprisoned for five more days

The Palestinian teenager from Nabi Saleh was arrested after being filmed confronting Israeli soldiers outside her home. Israeli forces have since arrested her mother and an another relative; her father Bassem received a summons while in court.

By Oren Ziv and Yael Marom

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Ahed Tamimi in the Ofer prison military court. December 20, 2017. (Oren Ziv/Activestills)

The Israeli army’s Ofer Military Court extended by five days the detention of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teen who was arrested for confronting Israeli soldiers outside her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. Video of the confrontation made headlines around the world. Police had asked the court to extend Ahed’s detention by 10 days.

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Attorney Gaby Lasky, who is representing Ahed Tamimi, argued that even if the police intend to continue their investigation against her client, it is unnecessary to keep Ahed in prison.

“The police claim this is a unique incident carried out shamelessly and spitefully. But obviously neither shamelessness nor spite justify imprisonment,” Lasky said. “Israeli hilltop youth (settlers) have engaged in similar behavior and the police and the army chose not to arrest them or to consider their behavior such that requires keeping a minor under arrest.”

Lasky also criticized the manner in which Tamimi was arrested, as well as the request by the police to carry out the hearing behind closed doors. “Given that the incident in question occurred during the day, it would have been possible to carry out the arrest during the time of the incident or a few hours later. Instead, the army and the police chose to carry out an illegal, offensive, nighttime raid.”

“It is unacceptable that the military authorities decided to video-tape the arrest of a minor and send the clip to media outlets as punishment,” Lasky said of the state’s request to hold the hearing behind closed doors. “Now the police are suddenly worried about protecting the rights of a minor […] It seems that this is all to prevent anyone from seeing what happens inside the courtroom.”

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Israeli Border Police officers arrested Ahed in a night-time raid on the Tamimi family home in the early  hours of Tuesday. Her mother, Nariman, was arrested while accompanying Ahed to an Israeli police station.

Tuesday night, Nur Tamimi, a relative of Ahed’s who appeared alongside her in the now-famous video, was arrested as well.

Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Tamimi, also a relative of Ahed’s, remains hospitalized after Israeli troops shot him in the head with a rubber-coated steel bullet during a protest in Nabi Saleh on Friday. He has been unconscious for a number of days.

During the military court hearing on Wednesday, a police representative said that Ahed’s father, Bassem Tamimi, will also be called in for an investigation Thursday morning.

Bassem Tamimi said on Wednesday that he is proud of his daughter and worried about her. “I don’t trust this court because it is a component of the occupation — it helps the occupation and the occupier,” Tamimi said. “It is used to give legitimacy to the arrest of Ahed, the child.”

Nothing that in addition to his wife and daughter both having been arrested, he also received a summons to be interrogated, Bassem added: “I ask that they keep us all together, so that we can remain together as a family in jail.”

The village of Nabi Saleh began weekly demonstrations against the occupation in 2009 following a takeover of the village’s natural spring by settlers from the adjacent settlement of Halamish. The army has since to deployed troops on a weekly basis to prevent the demonstrators from reaching the spring or the road used by the settlers.

Every protest by the residents of Nabi Saleh, and any Palestinian in the West Bank, is illegal under Israeli military law in the occupied territory. The army regularly suppresses Palestinian nonviolent and unarmed protests with tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, live fire, and other means of crowd dispersal.

In December 2011, Mustafa Tamimi was killed during a protest in the village when he an Israeli soldier shot him in the face with a tear gas canister at close range. One year later, Israeli soldiers shot and killed Rashadi Tamimi in the village.

Oren Ziv is a photojournalist with Activestills. Yael Marom is Just Vision’s public engagement manager in Israel and a co-editor of Local Call, where this article also appears in Hebrew. Read it here.

British Intelligence Report Confirms Russian Military Origin of MH17 Murder Weapon

Today, December 20, the British Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament published its 122-page annual report. This report covers a wide range of topics, including cyber security, the status of the UK’s international relationships, the threat of foreign fighters, and so on. However, one almost anecdotal detail in the Russian objectives and activity against UK and allied interests section states a key fact in absolute terms: the Russian military bears direct responsibility for the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17).

On page 52 of the report, when discussing Russian disinformation activities, a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) source described how “we know beyond any reasonable doubt that the Russian military supplied and subsequently recovered the missile launcher” after “the shooting down of MH-17.”

Western governments and the Dutch-led criminal investigation into the tragedy, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), have been reluctant to outright name the Russian military as the responsible party for providing the murder weapon for the downing, and even more reluctant to name the Russian military as the actors who carried out the shoot down. While the latter concern is understandable, as there is still no direct evidence placing specific active Russian servicemen with the Buk at the time of the downing, there is no reason to avoid naming the Russian military as the guilty party in providing and retrieving the Buk missile launcher

It is widely acknowledged by official bodies that the Buk that downed MH17 came from Russia and was returned there after the shoot down, but the language describing these events has been deliberately obfuscated to avoid a direct accusation at the Russian military. For example, the U.S. State Department’s press statement on the third anniversary of the tragedy mentioned that the Buk was brought “from Russia” and fired by “Russian-led forces,” but avoided direct accusations of the Russian military.

The reticence to directly name the Russian military can be seen clearly in the JIT’s 28 September 2016 press conference, where the investigators did all they could to avoid directly naming the actors who facilitated the transfer of Buk 332 across the Ukrainian border. For example, in one segment of the press conference, the Buk is described as crossing from the Russian Federation into Ukraine, with a map clearing showing the crossing point near Donetsk (Russia).

Later, the JIT showed a number of intercepted phone conversations from the morning after the downing. Some of the people in these conversations are unidentified, but at least one is the Russian Sergey Dubinsky, who worked as Igor “Strelkov” Girkin’s intelligence head in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR). In the conversations, Dubinsky and others describe how the Buk was transported back to Russia and left with some “guys” (парни).

By following the statement in the British intelligence report, we can confirm that these “guys” who retrieved the Buk after it crossed the border were indeed Russian soldiers.

Previous Bellingcat Research

Since late 2014, Bellingcat has published a series of detailed reports outlining exactly which Russian military unit (53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, based in Kursk, Russia) supplied the Buk 332, the Buk-M1 missile launcher that downed the passenger plane, along with the potential suspects and witnesses from this military unit who either participated in the transfer/use of the missile launcher or have direct knowledge of it. Additionally, we have published reports on the Russian soldier-drivers who were involved in the transport of the eventual MH17 murder weapon through Russia towards the Ukrainian border, along with two specific Russian suspects — one of which is a Colonel General in the Russian Armed Forces — who were key actors in the procurement and transfer of Buk 332. A summary of all of Bellingcat’s research into MH17 up to the the third anniversary of the tragedy can be found here.

The post British Intelligence Report Confirms Russian Military Origin of MH17 Murder Weapon appeared first on bellingcat.