Wednesday, December 22, 2010
El Funeral de Saddam
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German, Finnish, Russian and Tagalog. Email me if you are interested.
Italian translation (traduzione in Italiano). French translation (en Français ).
This is the Spanish translation of the Video of Saddam's Funeral post.
Aquí hay otro vídeo filtrado, este es del funeral y el entierro de Saddam en Al Awja, cerca de Tikrit. Al Awja es el pequeño pueblo donde nació Saddam. El vídeo dura más de 10 minutos, así que si eres impaciente será mejor que lo olvides. La calidad de gran parte de este vídeo es bastante buena, aunque sospecho que fue tomado con un telefono móvil.
El funeral y el entierro tuvieron lugar durante la noche, y no había ni una sola mujer. Aunque no entiendas una palabra de árabe, es imposible no oír los gritos contínuos, "Allahu Akbar", atravesando el aire del desierto.
La escena, como la de la ejecución, refleja alboroto, caos, rabia, peligro y venganza. Pero la venganza que se avencia es algo diferente.
Mientras que, por una parte, la ejecución de Saddam fue una venganza victoriosa y jubilosa por parte del partido de venganza sectario iraquí Shia y el Partido Dawa (y en menor medida, por parte el partido SCIRI y el ejército Mahdi), su funeral fue una sesión de rabia y profunda tristeza para los suníes iraquíes. La amenaza que se respira en el aire (por no mencionar los insurgentes enmascarados) es lo suficientemente palpable como para hacer que se te pongan los pelos de punta.
El problema principal de Iraq ahora mismo es cómo reducir el frenesí de sectarios locos que se está comiento vivo a Iraq. Los vídeos de la ejecución y ahora el del funeral son prueba de que la ejecución de Saddam sólo avivará la hoguera de los asesinos, y por lo tanto no fue algo positivo.
Realmente no sé quién son estos suníes iraquíes. Seguramente sean suníes del área de Tikrit, desde hace mucho el caldo de cultivo del soporte a Saddam Hussein. ¿Son miembros del partido Baath? ¿Son los que apoyan a los integristas suníes trastornados y inhumanos que están despedazando Iraq como harían las hienas con un cadáver? No puedo responder esas preguntas; tal vez alguien pueda.
Yo sólo sé que este es un vídeo de un montón de hombres iraquíes que buscan la revancha y sangre. Y en el contexto actual de Iraq, eso es algo terrible.
Los Lingüistas Saben Muchos Idiomas
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.
French translation (en Français).
This is the Spanish translation of the Linguists Know Lots of Different Languages post.
Esta es una confusión muy común. Una de sus variantes es que los cursos para ser lingüista no te aceptarán a no ser que seas políglota, y que está clarísimo que no lo harán si eres monolingüe.
Mucha gente mayor incluso piensa que la palabra "lingüista" es sinónimo de "políglota".
Yo tengo un máster en lingüística y sólo hablo, leo y escribo bien en un idioma: inglés. Mi español es normal, pero realmente no es fluido o se acerca siquiera a ser nativo. Sé algo de italiano, francés, portugués y chukchansi yokuts*, pero mi español es bastante mejor que cualquiera de estos.
No necesitas saber más de un idioma para ser lingüista. Por ejemplo, yo me leí la mitad de un diccionario y un diccionario fraseológico de Chukchansi Yokuts, pero para nada podría hablar en ese idioma. Simplemente recogí los datos, los organicé, los analicé y los dispuse en un glosario y algunos materiales de aprendizaje.
Mi carrera no requiere que seas bilingüe para entrar. Había muchos monolingües en nuestro curso. También es cierto que había muchos estudiantes extranjeros, pero todos tenían la intención de conseguir el grado ESL para enseñar inglés como segunda lengua en el extranjero.
Todo lo que hacemos es estudiar lenguas. No necesitas aprender lenguas para estudiarlas. Parece que, por alguna razón, mucha gente no entiende esto.
Aunque es cierto, eso sí, que muchos lingüistas hablan, leen, escriben o conocen más de un idioma.
Un chiste de lingüistas, a ver si lo pilláis (quizá tengáis que pensar un poco):
Dicen que Roman Jacobsen, el famoso lingüista, hablaba ruso en 17 idiomas distintos.
*Un idioma de los indions de California.
French translation (en Français).
This is the Spanish translation of the Linguists Know Lots of Different Languages post.
Esta es una confusión muy común. Una de sus variantes es que los cursos para ser lingüista no te aceptarán a no ser que seas políglota, y que está clarísimo que no lo harán si eres monolingüe.
Mucha gente mayor incluso piensa que la palabra "lingüista" es sinónimo de "políglota".
Yo tengo un máster en lingüística y sólo hablo, leo y escribo bien en un idioma: inglés. Mi español es normal, pero realmente no es fluido o se acerca siquiera a ser nativo. Sé algo de italiano, francés, portugués y chukchansi yokuts*, pero mi español es bastante mejor que cualquiera de estos.
No necesitas saber más de un idioma para ser lingüista. Por ejemplo, yo me leí la mitad de un diccionario y un diccionario fraseológico de Chukchansi Yokuts, pero para nada podría hablar en ese idioma. Simplemente recogí los datos, los organicé, los analicé y los dispuse en un glosario y algunos materiales de aprendizaje.
Mi carrera no requiere que seas bilingüe para entrar. Había muchos monolingües en nuestro curso. También es cierto que había muchos estudiantes extranjeros, pero todos tenían la intención de conseguir el grado ESL para enseñar inglés como segunda lengua en el extranjero.
Todo lo que hacemos es estudiar lenguas. No necesitas aprender lenguas para estudiarlas. Parece que, por alguna razón, mucha gente no entiende esto.
Aunque es cierto, eso sí, que muchos lingüistas hablan, leen, escriben o conocen más de un idioma.
Un chiste de lingüistas, a ver si lo pilláis (quizá tengáis que pensar un poco):
Dicen que Roman Jacobsen, el famoso lingüista, hablaba ruso en 17 idiomas distintos.
*Un idioma de los indions de California.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Ukrainsk flyshow-tragedie
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Tagalog. Email me if you are interested.
Spanish translation (en Español ). Italian translation (traduzione in Italiano). French translation (en Français).
This is the Norwegian translation of the Ukraine Air Show Disaster 2002 post.
Denne videoen er utrolig! Det viser dette opptaket av den ukrainske flyshow-tragedien i 2002 der 82 mennesker ble drept og over 100 andre ble skadd i den verste flyshowkatastrofen på jorda hittill. En stor folkemengde var samlet i Sknyliv (Скнилів) Lufthavn nær Lviv, Ukraina den 27. juli 2002 for å se det ukrainske luftforsvaret vise frem forskjellige flytriks og akrobatikk.
En Sukhoi SU-27, en av verdens mest avanserte fly, gjorde akrobatikk da en fatal manøver begynte. De foretok en rullende manøver på en nedadgående bane mens de fløy for lavt og nærme bakken.
De forsøkte å fly oppover en siste gang da flyet begynte å stupe mot bakken. Så slutt falt den venstre vingen og flyet traff deretter bakken. På dette tidspunktet tok pilotene, som begge var gode piloter, å skjøt seg ut fra flyet. Begge slapp unna med mindre skader.
Det nå førerløse flyet flatet ut og skle langs bakken mot en gruppe av stasjonære fly. Det slo tuppen av et transportfly før det braste inn i mengden av tilskuere og eksploderte.
Du kan se flyet når det går mot et krasj, kameraet går vaklende, så hører du kræsjet sammen med skrikene fra mengden. Kameramannen fortsetter mot kaotiske scener, og vi ser to av pilotene roter seg ut av sine fallskjermer.
Så filmes det mot vraket, og man begynner å se skadde og døde mennesker komme til syne mens kameramannen febrilsk fortsetter gjennom. Kameramannen fortsetter å filme masse rot, og vi ser politi, soldater og sivile som kjører inn og ut av området. Noen stopper for å hjelpe de skadde og for å sjekke om de fortsatt er i live.
En rekke mennesker synes å ha blitt drept umiddelbart. Vi ser også hva som ser ut til å være en lemlestet overkropp av døde ofre, og det ser ut som kroppsdeler, ofte lemmer eller biter av organer. Det er vanskelig å få frem detaljene, men det er nesten det beste.
Han fortsetter å filme rundt i ca fem minutter, og verken politiet eller soldatene prøver å stoppe ham. På slutten av videoen ser vi at flyet krasjet igjen.
Et alle-tiders klassisk opptak. I lang tid var denne videoen veldig vanskelig å finne, men det ser ut til at den har blitt mer tilgjengelig nå.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Le Couloir de la Mort des Vaches
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German and Bulgarian. Email me if you are interested.
This is the French version of the Cow Death Row post.
Cette vidéo montre des vaches attendant en file pour être abattues à l’abattoir, avec une musique angoissante en fond. Elle se concentre sur une vache. A la fin, elle est finalement poussée jusqu’à la porte et la porte claque derrière elle. Ensuite, la vache est au sol. Ensuite, on entend un énorme gémissement, apparemment au moment où elle est tuée.
Il y a quelque chose de vraiment dérangeant avec cette vidéo. Si je n’étais pas aussi insensible, je ne mangerais plus jamais de steak ou de hamburger.
Je me demande à quoi ces vaches peuvent bien penser.
Qu’elle est cette chose brune au sol ? De la merde ? Beurk !
La Video d’Albert Derrion Battu à Mort
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German and Polish. Email me if you are interested.
Korean translation (한국). Spanish translation (en Español). Dutch translation (in het Nederlands).
This is the French translation of the Derrion Albert Beating Death Video post.
Cette vidéo montre une bagarre à Chicago Sud entre des « jeunes » Noirs de deux écoles différentes, tous futurs joueurs en NFL (la ligue nationale de football américain aux Etats-Unis), se battant dans la rue, conduisant à la mort d’Albert Derrion, un adolescent de 16 ans reconnu comme étant un étudiant modèle.
La bagarre s’est déroulée le 24 septembre 2009. La vidéo n’est pas si violente que ça, elle montre juste une bagarre. Une fois qu’Albert Derrion est au sol, son corps est flouté.
Ce genre de chose arrive fréquemment à Chicago, mais le fait qu’un étudiant modèle en ait été la victime cette fois a amené la presse à en faire une série d’articles.
Albert a été dépeint comme une victime innocente se trouvant au mauvais endroit au mauvais moment. C’est probablement vrai. La bagarre a eu lieu alors que les élèves sortaient de l’école et les rues étaient remplies d’élèves. Quand une bagarre a lieu dans une telle situation, il est évident qu’un simple passant peut être pris dans la bagarre.
Cependant, j’ai regardé attentivement cette vidéo, et je ne pense pas qu’Albert Derrion ait été si innocent que ça. Bien que la vidéo prise par un téléphone portable ne soit pas de la meilleure qualité possible et que je n’ai pas les outils nécessaires pour ralentir la vidéo ou la découper image par image, après plusieurs vues, il apparaît qu’Albert court délibérément au cœur de la bagarre et y participe.
Les membres de l’autre groupe semblent s’être pris à lui pour ça. Un d’eux le frappe à la tête avec une grande planche en bois.
Après ça, il tombe au sol mais se relève rapidement. Dès qu’il se lève, il se prend immédiatement un poing au visage et est de nouveau frappé avec la planche et chute lourdement. Cette fois, il reste au sol. Au moins une personne revient à la charge et lui donne un coup de pied à la tête quand il est au sol.
Dans cette pluie de coups, il a été assez blessé pour être tué. Les passants l’entourent rapidement, empêchent les gens de s’approcher et recouvrent son corps avec une sorte de couverture blanche.
Je ne pense pas que ce gosse méritait d’être tué, et il se peut bien qu’il soit un étudiant modèle. Mais je ne suis pas certain, en regardant la vidéo, qu’il soit innocent. Juste avant de se faire frapper avec la planche, on dirait qu’il essaie de donner un coup de poing à un des membres de l’autre groupe.
La bagarre a eu lieu dans le sud-ouest de Chicago, au bloc 300 du 111 West Street. Ma mère a grandi autour de la 65e rue dans les années 30-40. A l’époque, le quartier où la bagarre a eu lieu était blanche et sûre, mais ce n’est plus le cas.
C’est maintenant un ghetto noir difficile, mais il y a apparemment pas mal de blancs et d’hispaniques dans le quartier également. La bagarre a eu lieu autour du lycée Fenger. C’est un établissement difficile avec beaucoup de problèmes et beaucoup de violence.
La bagarre s’est tenue entre deux groupes de jeunes de quartiers différents, un du projet de logement public Altglen et un d’un quartier nommé « ville ». Altglen est un projet très connu. C’est là qu’Obama a fait une partie de son travail d’« organisateur de communauté ».
Son fait d’arme marquant est le désamiantage du projet. Le quartier n’est pas loin de l’endroit où la ville de Chicago veut accueillir les jeux olympiques de 2016. A ce compte là, ils feraient mieux de les appeler les jeux des gladiateurs.
Des Soldats Indonésiens Torturent des Papous
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Spanish translation (en Español). Italian translation (traduzione in Italiano). Norwegian translation (på norsk).
This is the French version of the Indonesian Soldiers Torture Papuan Men post.
Ce sont les images extrêmement choquantes de soldats indonésiens torturant un Papou et son père en Nouvelle-Guinée occidentale.
L’Indonésie a volé la Nouvelle-Guinée occidentale aux Papous en 1965 et a mené une guerre génocidaire et raciste contre les Papous depuis. Les soldats sont extrêmement racistes et considèrent les Papous à peine mieux que des animaux.
Les Papous essaient de se battre en utilisant des armes primitives mais ils ne font pas le poids face à une armée moderne. L’impérialisme américain a soutenu les Indonésiens dans cette guerre car les sociétés américaines veulent exploiter les ressources naturelles de Papouasie.
La scène a été prise à l’aide d’un téléphone portable par un des soldats engagés dans une opération militaire dans la région du Puncak Jaya dans les hauts plateaux de Nouvelle-Guinée occidentale.
Les opérations ont été lancées après que le Mouvement de Libération Papoue, un groupe armé cherchant à s’affranchir du colonialisme indonésien, mais l’activité des troupes indonésiennes consiste principalement en des actes de torture, des viols et des meurtres de civils comme cela a toujours été le cas.
Il s’agit apparemment d’« images trophée ». La vidéo n’est qu’un extrait d’une plus longue vidéo montrant les deux hommes torturés. Dans la version complète, le vieil homme est dévêtu, un sac sur la tête et un bâton incandescent est mis sur ses testicules tandis qu’il hurle à la mort. Le jeune homme a un couteau sur son visage.
Les renseignements sur l’identité des victimes sont difficiles à obtenir puisque l’on se trouve dans une zone militaire interdite d’accès dans laquelle les journalistes ne peuvent pas pénétrer. Toutefois, le vieil homme a été porté disparu et est probablement mort, tandis que le jeune homme a été relâché.
Les troupes indonésiennes ont tué, torturé et violé des Papous en toute impunité depuis 1963. Les victimes les plus jeunes n’avaient que 3 ans.
Pendant des années, les soldats indonésiens ont pris des photos - maintenant des films - comme trophée pour leurs exactions sur des Papous tués et violés. Ils montrent ces photos et vidéos aux Papous pour les humilier.
Le film est apparu très récemment, le 20 octobre 2010, et a provoqué quelques remous médiatiques.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Truppe Indonesiane Torturano due Papuani
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Spanish translation (en Español). French translation (en Français). Norwegian translation (på norsk).
This is the Italian translation of the Indonesian Soldiers Torture Papuan Men post. Translator: Paolo from Trieste.
Queste immagini sono solo un breve estratto di un filmato sconvolgente: la tortura di due papuani, padre e figlio, vittime delle truppe indonesiane.
Ci troviamo nella Papuasia dell'ovest, teatro dal 1963 di inaudite, infami atrocità. Gli indonesiani si sono accaniti su quella povera popolazione con una ferocia degna degli antichi conquistadores.
I papuani sono trattati alla stregua di bestie: vengono uccisi, torturati e stuprati persino i bambini (...anche se di solo 3 anni...).
I carnefici hanno la certezza di non essere puniti. Occupata definitivamente nel 1965, a tutt'oggi si contano più di 100.000 morti. E' un genocidio.
Come può resistere una popolazione dotata solo di armi primitive contro un esercito moderno che gode pure del supporto delle multinazionali USA interessate al controllo delle materie prime della zona? Ancora una volta, complimenti all'imperialismo americano, eh ?
Il video in questione è stato realizzato nel mese di maggio 2010 nella regione del Punkak Jaya, nella catena centrale della Papua Nuova Guinea dell'ovest, durante un'operazione militare contro il 'Movimento di Liberazione Papuano' (flebile resistenza al colonialismo indonesiano).
Nell'ottica della propaganda di guerra, un soldato filma le torture a due prigionieri.
L'anziano viene denudato, una borsa premuto sulla faccia, gli arrostiscono le palle con un ferro rovente: le sue urla d'agonia fanno accapponare la pelle! Il giovane viene schiaffeggiato ripetutamente mentre un soldato 'gioca' sadisticamente sulla sua faccia con un coltellaccio.
Malgrado la stretta censura governativa, si è venuti a conoscenza che il giovane è stato successivamente liberato (e forse bisognoso di plastica facciale...) mentre del padre si è persa ogni traccia.
L'uso dei media per intimidire ed umiliare una popolazione da sottomettere è un classico : se nel passato gli indonesiani non hanno esitato a diffondere bieche immagini fotografiche di stupri e morte, nell'era di internet sono d'obbligo i video, nuovi trofei di guerra da esibire a tutto il mondo.
Diffuso poco tempo fa, il 20 ottobre scorso, questo video ha fatto immediatamente scalpore.
El Cuerpo de Saddam Luego de la Ejecución
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.
This is the Spanish translation of the Video of Saddam's Body After the Hanging post by super-translator Fabián Aguilar, a crazy guy from Bogotá, Colombia who likes Saturdays.
He aquí otro video de la serie de la ejecución de Saddam Hussein. En primer lugar el video famoso de su ahorcamiento fue publicado, luego el que muestra su cadáver en un ataúd el cual fue posiblemente filmado por dos trabajadores de la morgue, y por último un video de su funeral en Tikrit. Todos los videos están disponibles en este sitio.
En este video, lo que parece ser de dos trabajadores de la morgue chiitas (podemos decir que son chiitas por el nombre de uno de ellos - Abu Ali es un nombre chiíes - y el hecho de que son amigos) están filmando clandestinamente el cuerpo en una camilla a toda prisa, como si tuvieran miedo de ser atrapados.
Tiran de la cubierta a un lado y rápidamente filman la cabeza de Saddam, a continuación, lo cubren de nuevo y salen corriendo.
Saddam tiene contusiones en la cara, la cabeza grotescamente hacia un lado y el cuello rasgado y expuesto, con una herida desagradable roja brillante, causada por el corte de la cuerda.
Existen falsos rumores que flotan alrededor de Internet que el vídeo es una falsificación. Los pro-suníes, anti-chiitas, anti-iraníes racistas afirman que las contusiones en la cara de Saddam son evidencia de que su cuerpo fue violado después de su muerte.
Esto no puede ser cierto, los moretones pueden ser de la misma horca. Otro rumor es que la garganta de Saddam fue cortada después de su muerte - por garganta cortada se refiere a lo que se presencia en este vídeo.
De hecho, la herida en su garganta, sin duda alguna fue causada por la propia horca. Él pudo haber caído de 6 pies y 7 pulgadas, cuando bajó de la horca. Probablemente sólo se necesita una caída de 5 pies con el fin de matarlo, de acuerdo con las "Drop Tables", publicadas en 1913.
La alta caída es la causa de la herida del cuello y como otro ejemplo, es lo que le sucedió al medio hermano de Saddam, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, que fue decapitado, debido a una ejecución fallida. Tikriti cayó 8 pies, demasiado lejos para caer, y la alta caída fue lo que hizo rodar su cabeza.
En una alta caída el cuello se corta el cuello o se decapita, y con una caída que es demasiado corta, se obtiene lenta estrangulación. Obviamente, los verdugos del gobierno iraquí no saben lo que están haciendo.
Este video fue publicado originalmente en Google Video, pero se ajó luego del sitio, posiblemente por contenido inapropiados. La versión que ven aquí es una copia que apareció más tarde en YouTube. Fox News tradujo el video en un reportaje sobre éste:
Abu Ali!
- ¡Date prisa! ¡Date prisa!
¡Date prisa!
Vamos amigo...Vamos hombre!
- Te lo recompensaré.
Ya voy. Ya voy.
- Un momento, un momento
Ya voy. Ya voy.
- Abu Ali, Abu Ali...Cuida esto.
Ok vamos, vamos
- Vamos, amigo mío! Ven amigo!
Ok, ya voy. Ya voy.
Este video, que muestra a los asistentes chiitas de la morgue irrespetando el maltratado cuerpo de Saddam sólo por filmarlo, junto con la herida en el cuello causada por la cuerda, es probable que tenga como propósito enojar más a los sunitas y empeorar ya la horrible guerra de sectas en Irak.
Originalmente apareció en un sitio web baasista con la obvia intención de irritar aún más a los sunitas de Irak. La fallida ejecución de Saddam continúa.
Mucho se ha hablado de la ejecución de Saddam, pero no mucho sustancialmente de su juicio. Para mí, estaba claro que Saddam es culpable de la matanza de Dujail pero aún así, los juicios justos son importantes. Una de las características de una dictadura cruel es que ataca a los abogados de los sospechosos de desagrado popular.
En el Perú, la terrible dictadura de Fujimori (instalado en un golpe de 1992 apoyado por los EE.UU.) detuvieron, golpearon y torturaron, a veces hasta la muerte, a los abogados de Sendero Luminoso. Nunca hubo acusaciones de que los abogados fueran miembros de la organización, sino que bastaba con que se representa a la organización.
En los EE.UU, hoy en día, el gobierno se niega a ascender un grupo de abogados militares que representaron a los detenidos en Guantánamo. ¿Su crimen? Cumplir con su deber - es decir, defender a sus clientes con fuerza vigorosa. No hay tal cosa como un abogado demasiado fuerte defendiendo a un cliente.
Esa decisión de Bush fue uno de las muchas que añade peso a la acusación de que esta es una de las administraciones más anti-democráticas en la historia de la nación. Esta administración ha convertido sin duda el país a que esté más cercano a la dictadura más que en otro gobierno de los EE.UU., y no estoy exagerando en absoluto.
¿Y lo del juicio de Saddam? Tres de los abogados de Saddam fueron asesinados - dos de ellos, al parecer, por el gobierno iraquí en sí. Vean el post de mi amigo Postman Patel para más detalles - tengan en cuenta que uno fue asesinado después de ser secuestrado por 10 hombres con uniformes de policía y otro fue asesinado por sicarios que llegaron a la escena en un vehículo del gobierno.
Seguramente nunca habrá ninguna justicia para los asesinos de los abogados de Saddam. ¿Sobre qué base fueron los abogados asesinados? ¿Seguramente Saddam tenía derecho a ser representado por un abogado? ¿Representar a Saddam en la corte es una razón para matar a alguien?
Video of Saddam's Funeral
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German, Finnish, Russian and Tagalog. Email me if you are interested.
Spanish translation (en Español ). Italian translation (traduzione in Italiano). French translation (en Français ).
Here is another leaked video, this one of Saddam's funeral and burial in Al Awja, near Tikrit. Al Awja is the small town near Tikrit where Saddam was born. It's over 10 minutes long, so if you are impatient, you may wish to forgo it. The quality of most of this video is actually quite good, although I suspect it was also shot with a cellphone.
The funeral and burial took place in the dead of night, and there was not a woman to be seen. Even if you can't understand a word of Arabic, it's impossible to not hear the continuous cries of "Allahu Akbar" punching the desert air.
The scene, like the one at the execution, was one of pandemonium, chaos, rage, menace and vengeance. But this is a different kind of revenge gathering.
While Saddam's execution was a victorious, joyful, sectarian Iraqi Shia revenge party for the Dawa Party (and to a lesser extent the SCIRI Party and Mahdi Army) his funeral was a mournful rage-session for Iraq's Sunnis. The menace in the air here, not to mention the masked insurgents or insurgent supporters, is palpable enough to send shivers down your spine.
The main question in Iraq right now is how to tamp down the mad sectarian frenzy that is eating Iraq alive. The videos of the execution and now of the funeral are evidence that Saddam's execution will only feed the murderous bonfire, and therefore it was not a positive thing.
I really don't know who these Iraqi Sunnis in the video are. They are probably Sunnis from the Tikrit area, long a hotbed of support for Saddam Hussein. Are they Baath Party members? Are they supporters of the sick, deranged Sunni fundamentalists now ripping Iraq apart like hyenas on a corpse? I can't answer those questions; maybe someone else can.
I only know that this is a video of a bunch of really pissed-off Iraqi men out for payback and blood. And in the context of today's Iraq, that is a terrifying thing.
Unedited Video of Saddam Hussein's Hanging
Video is no longer working, but the write-up should be interesting anyway.
Hat tip to the blog The Reaction for a link to the video, which I then embedded.
This is a video of the actual hanging of Saddam Hussein at a two-story building the Shia Khadamiya District in Baghdad at 6:10 AM on December 30, 2006, as shot surreptitiously by a cellphone camera held by one of those in attendance.
This is not the more tame video that is being shown on US TV but is instead the more gruesome video being shown on Arabic websites and now spreading virally around the web and the world.
In the video, Saddam was taunting and being taunted by some of those who were getting ready to hang him. As he was getting ready to be hung, he recited the Muslim prayer a couple of times. Saddam refused to wear a hood over his head and carried a Koran in his hand. His team of three black-hooded executioners (called a mashmawi) had noticeable Shia Southern Iraqi accents.
All of his executioners were members of the SCIRI political party, and they and his guards tormented Saddam in the six hours before his execution, refusing to let him sleep much by waking him up every half an hour to taunt him. One of the taunting executioners had the Shia sectarian name of "Ali The Butcher". Saddam reportedly refused a last meal of chicken the night before and asked only for a Koran.
At 5 AM, he was offered breakfast, but he refused and asked for a cigarette instead. The request for a cigarette was refused and he was taken to an execution cell where a judge read the details of the sentence to him and asked Saddam if he wanted to make a last statement.
While the judge was reading the verdict, Saddam periodically shouted out slogans, at one point yelling, "Long live Iraq! Long live the people! Long live the Palestinians!" He declined to make a final statement and was taken to the execution chamber.
The building where he was killed in Khadamiya was formerly used as a torture chamber by a special branch of Saddam's security forces that focused on the Shia fundamentalist Dawa political party. Indeed, some of the men present had been tortured by Saddam's thugs in this very building.
Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, was a prominent member of Dawa and was himself sentenced to death in absentia by Saddam's regime in 1980 before he fled the country to Iran. Presently, Maliki is the head of the Dawa Party. Ibrahim Al-Jaafari is number 2 man in the party.
Dawa was even involved in the case for which Saddam was sentenced to death - the assassination attempt on Saddam in Dujail was carried out by Dawa. There are suggestions that Jaafari made the relatively minor Dujail case the focus of Saddam's trial as part of the Dawa versus Baath feud.
As you can see, this execution had strong elements of a revenge party attack on the Baath Party by the Dawa Party. Adding weight to this theory, the first tape showing Saddam's dead body in a coffin was leaked to the Dawa Party TV station.
Just before Saddam was killed, a Shia observer in attendance shouted, "Praise to Mohammad Baqir Al-Sadr!" The uncle of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Al-Sadr was tortured to death by Saddam along with his sister in 1980.
One version says that Baqir was executed by first having a nail hammered into his head and then being set on fire. Another version, in Robert Pelton Young's World's Most Dangerous Places, has Saddam's henchman Chemical Ali personally strangling Baqir to death.
When you read the gruesome accounts of how Saddam's men killed Baqir, you can begin to see how the execution of Saddam was a nasty act of revenge by Baqir's followers for the gory killing of Baqir.
Baqir founded the Dawa Party and is revered by all the main Shia factions in Iraq - the SCIRI and Dawa political parties and the Mahdi Army. Baqir's son-in-law, Muqtada al-Sadr, is the young radical cleric whose forces, called the Mahdi Army, have repeatedly battled the US in Iraq. Moqtada al-Sadr's father and two of his brothers were assassinated by Saddam in 1999.
One of the Shia executioners shouted, "You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution." Saddam said, "I saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Americans and the Persians." The guard then said, "God damn you." Saddam responded, "God damn you."
According to Munir Haddad, the judge at his trial who was witnessing the execution, "[Saddam] said we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians."
As they put the noose around his neck, Saddam yelled out, "Ya Allah!", or "Hear me God!".
Those in the audience then started chanting, "Those who pray for God and the family of Mohammad have won", and "God bless Mohammad and his family".
These are both Shia sayings, because the Shia revere Ali and Hussein, the actual members of Mohammad's family, as opposed to the unrelated Umayyads, rivals in the early succession struggle for the leadership of Islam. The first saying is highly sectarian, meaning, "In the battle between the Shia and the Sunnis, the Shia have won."
Then Sadr's supporters chanted, "And may the Mahdi return soon! And the Hell with his enemies! And victory to his son! Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!" Saddam looked down dimly at the hecklers and smiled caustically, mocking their taunts by asking, "Moqtada al-Sadr? Is this how you act like a man?"
This is probably a reference to rumors that Muqtada's wife left him, saying that he was gay. So what Saddam is asking here is, "This is how you show you're a man - by chanting the name of this fag Muqtada al-Sadr?"
Then, in a barely audible retort, Saddam muttered, "Gallows of shame..." but he was drowned out by voices yelling, "Go to Hell!"
Saddam responded, implying that his Shia executioners and their US allies had ruined Iraq, "The Hell that is Iraq?" As the rope was put around Saddam's neck somebody shouted, "Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr!" Onlookers then yelled more insults at Saddam.
Some of his last words before reciting the Shahada were "Down with the traitors, the spies, the Americans and the Persians." Traitors means everyone who supports the pro-US regime. Persians refers to anti-Baathist Shia Iraqis. One onlooker, Haddad, then tried to stop those shouting insults at Saddam, yelling, "I beg you, I beg you - the man is being executed!"
Saddam then said the Muslim shahada prayer, "There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his witness", that all Muslims are required to say before they die. He said it once, then said it again, but they didn't let him finish.
When he got to the "Mohammad", the trap door fell in the gallows, and immediately he was swinging. It took him a full minute to die, and the scarf around his neck (placed there to keep his neck from being cut open) had not prevented the rope from cutting a gash in his neck.
As Saddam fell through the door, an onlooker shouted, "The tyrant has fallen! God damn him!" Others yelled triumphant Shia slogans. An onlooker tried to remove the rope from Saddam's neck, but a voice said, "No, wait for three minutes." They let him swing for 10 minutes, chanting Muslim slogans praising Mohammad the whole time, and then they cut him down.
I would like to point out that at least some of the sectarian Shia chanting at this execution is not dignified or acceptable in this setting. To some extent, it is like a crowd of Whites hanging a Black man while dancing around, grinning and yelling, "Hang, nigger, hang!" The analogy with a US Southern lynching is intentional.
The Arab nationalist and Sunni chauvinist Internet publication Islam Online reported that the "Safavids", meaning the Iraqi Shia, burned Saddam's Koran after he was hung. Safavids is a very insulting term for Arab Shia.
It refers to the Persians that conquered and ruled part of Iraq from 1508-1534 and again from 1623-1638, periods that Sunni Arabs in the region still smart over. The purple bars on this map show the part of Iraq that was conquered.
The Safavids were also the dynasty that first cemented Shiism as the state religion of Persia in the early 1500's. By the mid-1600's, majority-Sunni Iran was now majority-Shia.
This was accomplished by aggressive proselytism of Shiism, in part by converting huge numbers of Persian Sunnis by the sword. Those who would not convert were put to death. Doubtless this is another source of Sunni anger at the Safavids.
Calling the Arab Shia "Safavids" is common amongst Sunni Arab Muslims in places like Iraq and Lebanon and is the equivalent of calling Jews "kikes".
The site also said that Saddam was denied a Sunni imam's last rites; that Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Sistani blessed the execution (this is true); that Saddam's body was abused after death; that Saddam shouted, "Palestine is Arab" before reciting the shahada; and that Saddam exchanged insults with audience members and said, "God damn you, you Persian midget!" to one of them.
All of these claims except for the body being abused (evidence shows it was not - the bruises on his face were just from the hanging) and the shout about Palestine (he shouted about Palestine in the judge's chambers next door, not in the execution chamber, and there is no evidence of him shouting this on the tape) are possibly true.
Saddam was hung on the first morning of the Muslim holiday Eid, which is the equivalent of a Christian being hung on Easter morning. That is likely to outrage many Muslims, and could at least be considered poor taste. What is worse is that he was hung on the first day of the Sunni Muslim Eid, December 30. The Shia Muslim Eid did not start until the next day, December 31.
That is a direct slap in the face to Sunnis everywhere. As an analogy, try this: It would be as if Protestants and Catholics were fighting, and celebrated Easter one day apart. Catholics captured one of the Protestants' top leaders and deliberately hung him on the Protestant Easter, and then made a party of his hanging.
According to the Iraqi Constitution, you cannot kill someone on Eid. The Shia government simply avoided that by declaring that December 31, not December 30, was the first day of Eid. This declaration effectively made Iraq a de facto Shia country.
The Saudi regime, no friend of Saddam's, called the timing of the execution an affront to Islam. The Libyan regime, no friend of Saddam's either, called for three days of mourning. Furthermore, the fact that he was dropped through the chamber midway through the Shahada is considered by Sunnis to be another sectarian insult.
Although in many ways he was a terrible person, Saddam's behavior prior to being hanged was dignified and proper. No matter how he would have behaved, his enemies would have spun it to make Saddam look malevolent, humiliated or weak.
Despite propaganda from Iraq's National Security Adviser Muwafaq al-Rubaie that Saddam was "weak and frightened", he did not appear that way in the video at all (check for yourself). Nor did he seem especially defiant, except when taunted. At any rate, to those gloating that Saddam seemed a wee bit frightened, I would like to see how they hold up to being hung by a rope.
This execution could have been conducted with solemnity and professionalism, in which case you could argue that it was an act of justice. Instead it was turned into a squalid act of sectarian revenge. Saddam, a mass murderer, took the moral high ground and went to his death with class, composure and pride, while his hooded Shia executioners looked like little more than street thugs.
Saddam surely deserved this fate but I cannot see any good come of this. Surely this will only fan the flames of sectarianism in Iraq (and there are already signs that it is doing just that), in which case, what good did it do but sink the Iraqis deeper into this flaming Hell?
The fact that praise for Sadr was being shouted implies that some of those in attendance were supporters of the Mahdi Army, who are rightly referred to as sectarian militiamen.
When you hear about X number of bodies, tortured, blindfolded and handcuffed, found in Baghdad on a given day, it is the Shia Mahdi Army, not the Sunni guerrillas, who are generally responsible for all, or almost all, of those killings. This fact is conveniently almost never explained by the US media. The media simply says that X bodies were discovered, describes their state, and says "militias" killed them.
The Mahdi Army is supported by the US-supported Iraqi government. At first, most of those killed by the Mahdi Army were at least Salafist Sunni religious radicals. It could be argued that many were either guerrillas or sympathized with them.
Now, outrageously, the Mahdi Army is targeting any and all Sunnis Arabs, especially the men, and in particular the young men, merely because they are Sunni Arabs! They are also killing middle aged and old Sunni Arab men and even some of the women.
These death squads were set up by the US Government, specifically by US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, who set up and ran similar death squads in Honduras in the 1980's when he was ambassador there. More on that theory here, here, here and here.
This is a case of the Frankenstein monster created by the US coming back to bite the US on the ass, as has happened so many times in the past.
All the talk of Iran and Syria "interfering in Iraq" is dubious.
Let us deal with Iran first.
First, Iran does not support the Mahdi Army; they do not even like it. Iran doesn't give Sadr any money; probably the only thing Iran wants to give Sadr is a bullet in the head. It's true that Iran used to support Sadr a bit, but that was a while ago.
Instead, the Mahdi Army is supported almost totally by funds gathered inside of Iraq. For their part, the Mahdi Army is well-known for being an anti-Iranian, Iraqi nationalist or even Arab nationalist group.
For a long time, I could not understand why the Mahdi Army was behind so many death squad killing in Iraq these days. A ready explanation is now at hand but first an understanding of Shiism is in order.
The Shia of Iraq and 80% of the Shia in the world are Twelvers, since they follow what they see as the first 12 imams after Mohammad. Sunnis believe in a different path of succession, the Umayyads, who were not related to Mohammad but instead were just leaders of various parts of the Arab World who assumed the role of caliph.
There are other schools of Shiism called Seveners or Fivers, who split after either five or seven imams in who they consider to be the correct fifth or seventh imam. The 12th imam is said to be Muhammad al-Mahdi.
After his father, the 11th imam, died, his 5-year-old son was said to lead the prayers after his death. At that time, the boy disappeared and went into a state called occultation.
The Askariya Mosque that was blown up by Iraqi Al Qaeda in February, 2006, is said to be where the boy disappeared. A shrine was then built on the scene of his disappearance. Twelvers believe that he is coming back some day and that is he going to bring absolute justice to the world (like the belief in the return of Jesus).
Most Twelvers probably believe in this to some extent but do not make a virtual cult out of it (sort of like the way that many Christians only halfheartedly believe in Jesus' return and others become passionate about it.
The Mahdi Army has almost made a cult out of belief in the Mahdi, to the point where some of them may think that Muqtada al-Sadr himself is the either the son of the Mahdi or perhaps even the Mahdi himself. Sadr himself has made illusive comments that added weight to these beliefs. At any rate, the Mahdi Army is a millenarian movement that believes that the Mahdi will reveal himself at any time.
While the destruction of the the Askariya Mosque was no doubt painful to most Twelvers, it simply drove the Mahdi Army insane due to their cult-like belief in the Mahdi. It is after that attack that the Mahdi Army went on their wild mass murdering spree against Sunnis in general.
Iran supports SCIRI, which has an armed wing called the Badr Brigades. Lately SCIRI is hardly involved in sectarian killings at all, although that is controversial. SCIRI is also part of the Iraqi government. You certainly could argue that the Iraqi government, dominated by SCIRI and Dawa, could be doing more to stop the killings.
For some time now, SCIRI and apparently also Iranian intelligence has taken advantage of the chaos in Iraq to carry out sporadic assassinations of former high-ranking members of Saddam's regime. For SCIRI, this is vengeance, as SCIRI was formerly fighting an insurgency against the Baathist regime.
For Iran, similarly, it is a case of revenge - revenge for the Iraq-Iran War that Saddam started with considerable encouragement from the US. At any rate, SCIRI are simply Shia Iraqis, fired by the history of the Shia in Iraq - they are no Iranian puppets.
When they kill former top Baathists, they are doing it for their own reasons, not in service to the Iranian regime. The sporadic assassinations of former top Baathists in Iraq form a very small part of the Civil War and insurgency in the country. Hence, any suggestion that Iran or Iran-allied movements are tearing Iraq apart is nonsense.
For a long time, the Sunni guerrillas agenda, aside from attacking US forces, has been "kill the Shia". The Sunnis who did not actually kill the Shia themselves were disgustingly silent when the racists did.
For years, the Shia were shockingly quiescent in the face of this regular terror. Iran was supporting SCIRI and Dawa while they were refusing to retaliate against the Sunni killers. Now that SCIRI and Dawa are not doing much to protect Sunnis against Shia killers of the Mahdi Army, Iran still supports them.
Iran will support SCIRI and Dawa practically whatever they do, just as the US supports Israel no matter what it does. But neither party is an agent of Iran anymore than Israel is an agent of the US. The Iraqi Shia have their own reasons for doing whatever they do. The notion that they are operating under orders from Tehran all this time is preposterous.
Fact is, it is not in Iran's interest at all to have an insane Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq, a war that threatens to spread sectarian horror across the whole region, including their own country.
What Iran wants is simple: they want a peaceful, stable situation in Iraq, hopefully with a friendly, pro-Iranian regime in charge. Iran receives no benefit at all from the Inferno raging in Iraq, and the mess causes a lot of problems for Iran.
Iran also wants the US military out of Iraq, since by our presence there, we are threatening both Syria and Iran (this is one of the reasons the neocons plotted to have a large US troop presence in Iraq - to menace those two countries).
Second, isn't the one country "interfering in Iraq" more than any other called the US?
Talk of Iran interfering in Iraq is coming from three different sources.
The first is US imperialism, which hates Iran for a variety of reasons.
These reasons date back to Khomeini's revolution, the seizure of the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran immediately afterward, and then the attacks on US targets in Lebanon in the 1980's and Saudi Arabia in the 1990's by Shia radicals.
These attacks in Lebanon included a car bomb attack on the US embassy, a suicide truck bomb attack on a Marine barracks that killed 100's of Marines, kidnappings of various Americans and the capture and execution of a US CIA agent.
The kidnappings and killing of the CIA agent were done by Hezbollah, but it is not clear at all that Hezbollah attacked the barracks or bombed the embassy. For one thing, Hezbollah may not even have been formed yet when those attacks occurred. The barracks attack was claimed by a separate group that is not Hezbollah. However, it seems clear that Iran was involved in all of the above attacks.
The attacks in Saudi Arabia included the car bombing of the US military barracks at the Khobar Towers which killed two dozen US soldiers and wounded hundreds more. That attack is being pinned on an obscure organization called Saudi Hezbollah, not on the Lebanese Hezbollah as the US press often ignorantly states.
Saudi Hezbollah is one of maybe 50 small, shadowy armed Shia groups in Arabia, where the Shia are fired up about the outrageous racism they experience at the hand of Wahhabi Sunnis, who contemptuously regard them as infidels. The suggestion is that Iran was behind that bombing too.
The second source of anti-Iranian talk is coming from the KKK-Jews (Zionists) in Israel, who also have it in for Iran right now. They got rid of Iraq; now Syria and Iran are next on their list as they go for broke trying to wipe out all resistance in the region to their racist regime.
As Israel is now virtually a state of the US, Israel's interests are US interests. The fact that the US media is dominated by Zionists (both Jewish and Gentile) helps matters. Congress is completely controlled by a heavily Jewish Israeli Lobby, which also includes fundamentalist Christian elements.
The third source of anti-Iran sentiment is coming from Sunni Arabs, and Sunnis in general, who often hate Iran for various reasons, none of which are reasonable, and all of which are simply based on virulent racism.
An essential introduction to the tragic legacy of vicious anti-Iranian racism via Arab nationalism is Kaveh Farrokh's Arab Nationalism's Legacy of Confrontation With Iran.
The fact that US imperialism and World Jewry is in alliance with these ferocious, Nazi-like Sunni Muslim ultraracists is sickening and revolting.
The Jews of all people.
Yet Zionism has turned the Jews into a nation of killers, liars and thieves; those who cheer them on from the sidelines; and those who hide the criminals from justice or acquit them in court. Astute readers will note the analogy with the Jim Crow South. That is intentional.
As anti-Semitism hates Jews for what they are, not for what they do, there is nothing anti-Semitic in that statement. As the racists in the Antebellum South could cut it out any time they like, so can the KKK-Jews. Just say no to racism. It's not hard at all.
Along similar lines, neither is Syria supporting the Sunni guerrillas much. The Syrian regime is run by Alawi Shia, who are not even considered Muslims by many or most Sunni Muslims, due to the extreme heterodox nature of their sect.
To the fundamentalist Sunni guerrillas in Iraq, the Alawi are hated first for being Shia, and second and even worse for not even being real Shia. To too many Sunnis, Alawis are simply infidels.
The Alawi regime is threatened by the majority-Sunnis of Syria, many of whom support the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez Assad waged war on these fundies in 1982, when they took over the city of Hama and declared an Islamic state in Syria.
The Syrian army invaded, destroyed the city and killed 10,000 people, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was effectively destroyed. It remains in ruins in Syria to this day, where membership in the group is punishable by death.
The membership scattered to the far winds, especially to Saudi Arabia, where they joined the exiled Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt (exiled in another crackdown, this time by Gamel Nasser, President of Egypt). Both exiled Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) groups became religious teachers in Saudi Arabia around the time a number of religious schools were being set up there.
Wahhabi Islam in Arabia has not always been vicious, deranged and terroristic. Prior to the 1970's, it was largely quietist (a Muslim religious term for Muslims who are not active in politics, especially in armed politics).
The infusion of radicalized Ikhwan exiles with Saudi Wahhabi Islam (still ultra-radical, even if quietist) metastasized to create a savage, militant fundamentalist Islam in Saudi Arabia by the 1980's.
With the added boost of the Iranian revolution (which radicalized both Sunni and Shia Muslims around the world) of 1979 and the ensuing radical turmoil in Arabia (armed radicals captured the Kaaba, took hostages, and were routed in an armed counterattack that left hundreds dead) and the injection of the Afghan jihad of the 1980's, the result was we call the Al Qaeda type groupings of today.
To this day, all Al Qaeda groupings are still significantly associated with the Ikhwan. One could even say that when it comes to Al Qaeda-like groups, "All roads lead to the Ikhwan".
Based on that history, the notion that the super-secular Alawis of Syria would be supporting their most murderous enemies, the Sunni ultra-radical Salafist guerrillas in Iraq, is comical and pitiful.
Instead, my understanding is that Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and even more so, wealthy Saudis, and probably wealthy Arabs from other Gulf States, are supplying the Sunni Iraqi guerrillas. The dominant Arabian Sunnis are as frightened of Shia political power as White racists in the US South were mortified by the threat of Black political enfranchisement.
The dominant theme here is, "Shia is the nigger of (Muslim) World".
As you can see by the blatantly bigoted and murderously racist behavior of the Iraqi Shia militias described above, the Iraqi Shia are becoming "Niggaz with an attitude." Which only proves that, barring intervention, the abused will become abusers as surely as day follows night.
The accusations against Syria are coming from US imperialism and the KKK-Jews. Imperialism hates Syria, probably just because it is not an ally. Syria is not an ally because it is an Arab nationalist regime still locked in conflict with Israel. As the US wildly supports Israel, Syria is not happy with the US.
But Syria really has no interest in the US per se. Their main problem is with Israel, which is still illegally occupying Syrian land, in violation of all international law, and in defiance of 98% of the nations on Earth.
Due to this Occupation, Syria and Israel are legally still at war. Syria's interest is not to wipe out Israel, or kill all Jews or any of the crap that Zionists will tell you. Syrians just want the Golan back. To get it back, I am sure they will sell out Arab nationalism, the Palestinians, and the whole nine yards.
As a consequence of Israel's theft of the Syrian Golan Heights, Syria retaliates by funding and supporting various Palestinian armed groups. Due to this ongoing conflict, Syria is on Israel's list for regime change, along with Iran. The US simply has no real beneficial national interest in supporting Israel in this fight, other than that Israel is the 51st state of America.
Whenever you hear a US neoconservative commentator ranting about "Iran and Syria", the ghost of Ariel Sharon may as well be pulling the puppet strings in back of them while they speak.
In my opinion, the KKK-Jews, who were part of the plot to get us into this insane Iraq War, also hoped to drag Syria and possibly Iran in too. With US troops in Iraq, hardline Zionism worked to use US forces to taunt Syria. Only the Iraqi resistance stopped US forces from attacking Syria, and probably also Iran. Terrible as the Sunni guerrillas are, the world does owe them something.
A huge US army in Iraq de facto menacing Syria is a taunt to the Syrians, in order to provoke them into supporting the Iraqi resistance to keep the US at bay. But once they start supporting Iraqi guerrillas, the US has cause to attack Syria.
Yet if Syria cooperates in crushing the Sunni guerrillas and pacifying Iraq, the US will then be free to evacuate most troops from Iraq and invade Syria. Yet the mad civil war in Iraq tears the region asunder and actually threatens Syria in many ways, mostly that the jihad of their radical Sunni Islamist enemies can spread to Syria.
What does Syria want? Same as Iran. A peaceful and stable Iraq that is friendly to Syria. Like Iran, they also want all US troops out of Iraq, since those troops are threatening Syria by their very presence.
Syria is in a poignant spider's web; damned if she does; damned if she doesn't. This is the trap Zionism-imperialism has set for her, with the only way out being abject surrender to imperialism-Zionism in the region, as almost all of the other Arab states have already done.
Yes, Zionism actually wants to provoke Syria into conflict with the US. Incredible, no? As if the world did not have enough problems as it is, the cancer of World Zionism adds another huge dollop of instability to the quivering mess as it pumps the black poison of its influence, menace and power through the veins of a cringing and suffering world.
Truth is that Syria has cracked down ferociously on those who have gone to fight in Iraq. Many jihadis have been imprisoned, beaten and tortured. Their relatives have also been harassed. Supporters of the jihadis inside Syria have actually set up organizations to protest this crackdown. The blog Syria Comment has been covering this story for some time now.
The Sunni guerrillas are being supplied mostly from inside Iraq itself but also by neighboring Sunnis, as noted above. The Sunni guerrillas' external support is from US allies. The Shia militias are being funded from inside Iraq and are part of the US-allied Iraqi government.
Both sides of the Iraqi civil war are being funded and supported by US allies, not Syria and Iran. This is the lugubrious truth.
Many have wondered about the controversial study showing that 655,000 Iraqis had been killed by the US invasion of Iraq. Though the media has predictably poo-pooed the study, I studied it in depth and it is apparently a valid study. The same authors previously conducted a study in 2004 that found 100,000 deaths. That study was also very controversial.
The author of both studies, Les Roberts, wrote a piece in February 2006, prior to the latest study, in which he estimated 300,000 deaths. He lays out his reasons in the piece.
On July 12, 2005, an Iraqi group called Iraqiyun working with the Iraqi government counted 128,000 dead. These dead were lined up with actual names and records of the deceased based on door-to-door interviews throughout Iraq. Only dead confirmed by relatives were included, and the many who have vanished without a trace were not.
A study including infant mortality and looking at raw death rates has found an excess mortality of 900,000 deaths in Iraq since the US invasion, including 400,000 by infant mortality and 500,000 by other excess mortality. Note that the 500,000 figure includes excess deaths due to all causes related to the invasion - crime, stress, disease, dirty water, suicide, poor medical care, etc.
The same study, using raw death rate figures once again, found excess mortality of 2.9 million Iraqis from 1990-2003, almost all attributed to US and British sanctions, which were deliberately written to kill as many innocent Iraqis as possible. That figure includes 1.6 million via infant mortality and 1.3 million via other excess mortality, respectively. The study uses raw death rates, so the figures should be pretty good.
Those figures are from Gideon Polya, an Australian scientist who works, at least in part, in the field of excess mortality. He is the founder of the "Theory of Excess Mortality".
The US and Britain killed 2.9 million Iraqis via sanctions, then started a war that killed another 900,000 Iraqis. That adds up to 3.8 million dead Iraqis. Either way you cut the cake, the US and Britain killed far more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein, whose number of victims is estimated at 300,000 and who also started a war with Iran that killed another 875,000, for a total of 1.175 million dead.
In reality, the mad Iraqi racist war against completely innocent Iran was fully egged on by and coordinated by the US and later many other nations all over the world. We even gave Iraq detailed maps of Iranian front line military positions before he attacked. Later, with the war on, we supplied him with the chemical weapons he fired at Iranian troops.
So in reality, perhaps Saddam and the US should share the guilt for the Iran-Iraq war dead. Even granting (dubiously) Saddam full culpability for the Iran-Iraq war toll, the US and Britain still killed over three times as many Iraqis as Saddam Hussein.
In a just world, would any other leaders deserve to be swinging from the end of a rope, due to mass murder of Iraqis? Something to think about...
For those who are interested, I authored an 80+ page dossier on the state Iraqi guerrilla groups as of April 15, 2005. It was published in 3 parts, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. The report is now pretty much out of date but still holds historical interest on the state of the Iraqi resistance at a certain point in time. In that report, I believe I identified over 120 separate groups fighting the US Coalition.
This is a video of the actual hanging of Saddam Hussein at a two-story building the Shia Khadamiya District in Baghdad at 6:10 AM on December 30, 2006, as shot surreptitiously by a cellphone camera held by one of those in attendance.
This is not the more tame video that is being shown on US TV but is instead the more gruesome video being shown on Arabic websites and now spreading virally around the web and the world.
In the video, Saddam was taunting and being taunted by some of those who were getting ready to hang him. As he was getting ready to be hung, he recited the Muslim prayer a couple of times. Saddam refused to wear a hood over his head and carried a Koran in his hand. His team of three black-hooded executioners (called a mashmawi) had noticeable Shia Southern Iraqi accents.
All of his executioners were members of the SCIRI political party, and they and his guards tormented Saddam in the six hours before his execution, refusing to let him sleep much by waking him up every half an hour to taunt him. One of the taunting executioners had the Shia sectarian name of "Ali The Butcher". Saddam reportedly refused a last meal of chicken the night before and asked only for a Koran.
At 5 AM, he was offered breakfast, but he refused and asked for a cigarette instead. The request for a cigarette was refused and he was taken to an execution cell where a judge read the details of the sentence to him and asked Saddam if he wanted to make a last statement.
While the judge was reading the verdict, Saddam periodically shouted out slogans, at one point yelling, "Long live Iraq! Long live the people! Long live the Palestinians!" He declined to make a final statement and was taken to the execution chamber.
The building where he was killed in Khadamiya was formerly used as a torture chamber by a special branch of Saddam's security forces that focused on the Shia fundamentalist Dawa political party. Indeed, some of the men present had been tortured by Saddam's thugs in this very building.
Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, was a prominent member of Dawa and was himself sentenced to death in absentia by Saddam's regime in 1980 before he fled the country to Iran. Presently, Maliki is the head of the Dawa Party. Ibrahim Al-Jaafari is number 2 man in the party.
Dawa was even involved in the case for which Saddam was sentenced to death - the assassination attempt on Saddam in Dujail was carried out by Dawa. There are suggestions that Jaafari made the relatively minor Dujail case the focus of Saddam's trial as part of the Dawa versus Baath feud.
As you can see, this execution had strong elements of a revenge party attack on the Baath Party by the Dawa Party. Adding weight to this theory, the first tape showing Saddam's dead body in a coffin was leaked to the Dawa Party TV station.
Just before Saddam was killed, a Shia observer in attendance shouted, "Praise to Mohammad Baqir Al-Sadr!" The uncle of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Al-Sadr was tortured to death by Saddam along with his sister in 1980.
One version says that Baqir was executed by first having a nail hammered into his head and then being set on fire. Another version, in Robert Pelton Young's World's Most Dangerous Places, has Saddam's henchman Chemical Ali personally strangling Baqir to death.
When you read the gruesome accounts of how Saddam's men killed Baqir, you can begin to see how the execution of Saddam was a nasty act of revenge by Baqir's followers for the gory killing of Baqir.
Baqir founded the Dawa Party and is revered by all the main Shia factions in Iraq - the SCIRI and Dawa political parties and the Mahdi Army. Baqir's son-in-law, Muqtada al-Sadr, is the young radical cleric whose forces, called the Mahdi Army, have repeatedly battled the US in Iraq. Moqtada al-Sadr's father and two of his brothers were assassinated by Saddam in 1999.
One of the Shia executioners shouted, "You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution." Saddam said, "I saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Americans and the Persians." The guard then said, "God damn you." Saddam responded, "God damn you."
According to Munir Haddad, the judge at his trial who was witnessing the execution, "[Saddam] said we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians."
As they put the noose around his neck, Saddam yelled out, "Ya Allah!", or "Hear me God!".
Those in the audience then started chanting, "Those who pray for God and the family of Mohammad have won", and "God bless Mohammad and his family".
These are both Shia sayings, because the Shia revere Ali and Hussein, the actual members of Mohammad's family, as opposed to the unrelated Umayyads, rivals in the early succession struggle for the leadership of Islam. The first saying is highly sectarian, meaning, "In the battle between the Shia and the Sunnis, the Shia have won."
Then Sadr's supporters chanted, "And may the Mahdi return soon! And the Hell with his enemies! And victory to his son! Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!" Saddam looked down dimly at the hecklers and smiled caustically, mocking their taunts by asking, "Moqtada al-Sadr? Is this how you act like a man?"
This is probably a reference to rumors that Muqtada's wife left him, saying that he was gay. So what Saddam is asking here is, "This is how you show you're a man - by chanting the name of this fag Muqtada al-Sadr?"
Then, in a barely audible retort, Saddam muttered, "Gallows of shame..." but he was drowned out by voices yelling, "Go to Hell!"
Saddam responded, implying that his Shia executioners and their US allies had ruined Iraq, "The Hell that is Iraq?" As the rope was put around Saddam's neck somebody shouted, "Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr!" Onlookers then yelled more insults at Saddam.
Some of his last words before reciting the Shahada were "Down with the traitors, the spies, the Americans and the Persians." Traitors means everyone who supports the pro-US regime. Persians refers to anti-Baathist Shia Iraqis. One onlooker, Haddad, then tried to stop those shouting insults at Saddam, yelling, "I beg you, I beg you - the man is being executed!"
Saddam then said the Muslim shahada prayer, "There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his witness", that all Muslims are required to say before they die. He said it once, then said it again, but they didn't let him finish.
When he got to the "Mohammad", the trap door fell in the gallows, and immediately he was swinging. It took him a full minute to die, and the scarf around his neck (placed there to keep his neck from being cut open) had not prevented the rope from cutting a gash in his neck.
As Saddam fell through the door, an onlooker shouted, "The tyrant has fallen! God damn him!" Others yelled triumphant Shia slogans. An onlooker tried to remove the rope from Saddam's neck, but a voice said, "No, wait for three minutes." They let him swing for 10 minutes, chanting Muslim slogans praising Mohammad the whole time, and then they cut him down.
I would like to point out that at least some of the sectarian Shia chanting at this execution is not dignified or acceptable in this setting. To some extent, it is like a crowd of Whites hanging a Black man while dancing around, grinning and yelling, "Hang, nigger, hang!" The analogy with a US Southern lynching is intentional.
The Arab nationalist and Sunni chauvinist Internet publication Islam Online reported that the "Safavids", meaning the Iraqi Shia, burned Saddam's Koran after he was hung. Safavids is a very insulting term for Arab Shia.
It refers to the Persians that conquered and ruled part of Iraq from 1508-1534 and again from 1623-1638, periods that Sunni Arabs in the region still smart over. The purple bars on this map show the part of Iraq that was conquered.
The Safavids were also the dynasty that first cemented Shiism as the state religion of Persia in the early 1500's. By the mid-1600's, majority-Sunni Iran was now majority-Shia.
This was accomplished by aggressive proselytism of Shiism, in part by converting huge numbers of Persian Sunnis by the sword. Those who would not convert were put to death. Doubtless this is another source of Sunni anger at the Safavids.
Calling the Arab Shia "Safavids" is common amongst Sunni Arab Muslims in places like Iraq and Lebanon and is the equivalent of calling Jews "kikes".
The site also said that Saddam was denied a Sunni imam's last rites; that Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Sistani blessed the execution (this is true); that Saddam's body was abused after death; that Saddam shouted, "Palestine is Arab" before reciting the shahada; and that Saddam exchanged insults with audience members and said, "God damn you, you Persian midget!" to one of them.
All of these claims except for the body being abused (evidence shows it was not - the bruises on his face were just from the hanging) and the shout about Palestine (he shouted about Palestine in the judge's chambers next door, not in the execution chamber, and there is no evidence of him shouting this on the tape) are possibly true.
Saddam was hung on the first morning of the Muslim holiday Eid, which is the equivalent of a Christian being hung on Easter morning. That is likely to outrage many Muslims, and could at least be considered poor taste. What is worse is that he was hung on the first day of the Sunni Muslim Eid, December 30. The Shia Muslim Eid did not start until the next day, December 31.
That is a direct slap in the face to Sunnis everywhere. As an analogy, try this: It would be as if Protestants and Catholics were fighting, and celebrated Easter one day apart. Catholics captured one of the Protestants' top leaders and deliberately hung him on the Protestant Easter, and then made a party of his hanging.
According to the Iraqi Constitution, you cannot kill someone on Eid. The Shia government simply avoided that by declaring that December 31, not December 30, was the first day of Eid. This declaration effectively made Iraq a de facto Shia country.
The Saudi regime, no friend of Saddam's, called the timing of the execution an affront to Islam. The Libyan regime, no friend of Saddam's either, called for three days of mourning. Furthermore, the fact that he was dropped through the chamber midway through the Shahada is considered by Sunnis to be another sectarian insult.
Although in many ways he was a terrible person, Saddam's behavior prior to being hanged was dignified and proper. No matter how he would have behaved, his enemies would have spun it to make Saddam look malevolent, humiliated or weak.
Despite propaganda from Iraq's National Security Adviser Muwafaq al-Rubaie that Saddam was "weak and frightened", he did not appear that way in the video at all (check for yourself). Nor did he seem especially defiant, except when taunted. At any rate, to those gloating that Saddam seemed a wee bit frightened, I would like to see how they hold up to being hung by a rope.
This execution could have been conducted with solemnity and professionalism, in which case you could argue that it was an act of justice. Instead it was turned into a squalid act of sectarian revenge. Saddam, a mass murderer, took the moral high ground and went to his death with class, composure and pride, while his hooded Shia executioners looked like little more than street thugs.
Saddam surely deserved this fate but I cannot see any good come of this. Surely this will only fan the flames of sectarianism in Iraq (and there are already signs that it is doing just that), in which case, what good did it do but sink the Iraqis deeper into this flaming Hell?
The fact that praise for Sadr was being shouted implies that some of those in attendance were supporters of the Mahdi Army, who are rightly referred to as sectarian militiamen.
When you hear about X number of bodies, tortured, blindfolded and handcuffed, found in Baghdad on a given day, it is the Shia Mahdi Army, not the Sunni guerrillas, who are generally responsible for all, or almost all, of those killings. This fact is conveniently almost never explained by the US media. The media simply says that X bodies were discovered, describes their state, and says "militias" killed them.
The Mahdi Army is supported by the US-supported Iraqi government. At first, most of those killed by the Mahdi Army were at least Salafist Sunni religious radicals. It could be argued that many were either guerrillas or sympathized with them.
Now, outrageously, the Mahdi Army is targeting any and all Sunnis Arabs, especially the men, and in particular the young men, merely because they are Sunni Arabs! They are also killing middle aged and old Sunni Arab men and even some of the women.
These death squads were set up by the US Government, specifically by US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, who set up and ran similar death squads in Honduras in the 1980's when he was ambassador there. More on that theory here, here, here and here.
This is a case of the Frankenstein monster created by the US coming back to bite the US on the ass, as has happened so many times in the past.
All the talk of Iran and Syria "interfering in Iraq" is dubious.
Let us deal with Iran first.
First, Iran does not support the Mahdi Army; they do not even like it. Iran doesn't give Sadr any money; probably the only thing Iran wants to give Sadr is a bullet in the head. It's true that Iran used to support Sadr a bit, but that was a while ago.
Instead, the Mahdi Army is supported almost totally by funds gathered inside of Iraq. For their part, the Mahdi Army is well-known for being an anti-Iranian, Iraqi nationalist or even Arab nationalist group.
For a long time, I could not understand why the Mahdi Army was behind so many death squad killing in Iraq these days. A ready explanation is now at hand but first an understanding of Shiism is in order.
The Shia of Iraq and 80% of the Shia in the world are Twelvers, since they follow what they see as the first 12 imams after Mohammad. Sunnis believe in a different path of succession, the Umayyads, who were not related to Mohammad but instead were just leaders of various parts of the Arab World who assumed the role of caliph.
There are other schools of Shiism called Seveners or Fivers, who split after either five or seven imams in who they consider to be the correct fifth or seventh imam. The 12th imam is said to be Muhammad al-Mahdi.
After his father, the 11th imam, died, his 5-year-old son was said to lead the prayers after his death. At that time, the boy disappeared and went into a state called occultation.
The Askariya Mosque that was blown up by Iraqi Al Qaeda in February, 2006, is said to be where the boy disappeared. A shrine was then built on the scene of his disappearance. Twelvers believe that he is coming back some day and that is he going to bring absolute justice to the world (like the belief in the return of Jesus).
Most Twelvers probably believe in this to some extent but do not make a virtual cult out of it (sort of like the way that many Christians only halfheartedly believe in Jesus' return and others become passionate about it.
The Mahdi Army has almost made a cult out of belief in the Mahdi, to the point where some of them may think that Muqtada al-Sadr himself is the either the son of the Mahdi or perhaps even the Mahdi himself. Sadr himself has made illusive comments that added weight to these beliefs. At any rate, the Mahdi Army is a millenarian movement that believes that the Mahdi will reveal himself at any time.
While the destruction of the the Askariya Mosque was no doubt painful to most Twelvers, it simply drove the Mahdi Army insane due to their cult-like belief in the Mahdi. It is after that attack that the Mahdi Army went on their wild mass murdering spree against Sunnis in general.
Iran supports SCIRI, which has an armed wing called the Badr Brigades. Lately SCIRI is hardly involved in sectarian killings at all, although that is controversial. SCIRI is also part of the Iraqi government. You certainly could argue that the Iraqi government, dominated by SCIRI and Dawa, could be doing more to stop the killings.
For some time now, SCIRI and apparently also Iranian intelligence has taken advantage of the chaos in Iraq to carry out sporadic assassinations of former high-ranking members of Saddam's regime. For SCIRI, this is vengeance, as SCIRI was formerly fighting an insurgency against the Baathist regime.
For Iran, similarly, it is a case of revenge - revenge for the Iraq-Iran War that Saddam started with considerable encouragement from the US. At any rate, SCIRI are simply Shia Iraqis, fired by the history of the Shia in Iraq - they are no Iranian puppets.
When they kill former top Baathists, they are doing it for their own reasons, not in service to the Iranian regime. The sporadic assassinations of former top Baathists in Iraq form a very small part of the Civil War and insurgency in the country. Hence, any suggestion that Iran or Iran-allied movements are tearing Iraq apart is nonsense.
For a long time, the Sunni guerrillas agenda, aside from attacking US forces, has been "kill the Shia". The Sunnis who did not actually kill the Shia themselves were disgustingly silent when the racists did.
For years, the Shia were shockingly quiescent in the face of this regular terror. Iran was supporting SCIRI and Dawa while they were refusing to retaliate against the Sunni killers. Now that SCIRI and Dawa are not doing much to protect Sunnis against Shia killers of the Mahdi Army, Iran still supports them.
Iran will support SCIRI and Dawa practically whatever they do, just as the US supports Israel no matter what it does. But neither party is an agent of Iran anymore than Israel is an agent of the US. The Iraqi Shia have their own reasons for doing whatever they do. The notion that they are operating under orders from Tehran all this time is preposterous.
Fact is, it is not in Iran's interest at all to have an insane Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq, a war that threatens to spread sectarian horror across the whole region, including their own country.
What Iran wants is simple: they want a peaceful, stable situation in Iraq, hopefully with a friendly, pro-Iranian regime in charge. Iran receives no benefit at all from the Inferno raging in Iraq, and the mess causes a lot of problems for Iran.
Iran also wants the US military out of Iraq, since by our presence there, we are threatening both Syria and Iran (this is one of the reasons the neocons plotted to have a large US troop presence in Iraq - to menace those two countries).
Second, isn't the one country "interfering in Iraq" more than any other called the US?
Talk of Iran interfering in Iraq is coming from three different sources.
The first is US imperialism, which hates Iran for a variety of reasons.
These reasons date back to Khomeini's revolution, the seizure of the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran immediately afterward, and then the attacks on US targets in Lebanon in the 1980's and Saudi Arabia in the 1990's by Shia radicals.
These attacks in Lebanon included a car bomb attack on the US embassy, a suicide truck bomb attack on a Marine barracks that killed 100's of Marines, kidnappings of various Americans and the capture and execution of a US CIA agent.
The kidnappings and killing of the CIA agent were done by Hezbollah, but it is not clear at all that Hezbollah attacked the barracks or bombed the embassy. For one thing, Hezbollah may not even have been formed yet when those attacks occurred. The barracks attack was claimed by a separate group that is not Hezbollah. However, it seems clear that Iran was involved in all of the above attacks.
The attacks in Saudi Arabia included the car bombing of the US military barracks at the Khobar Towers which killed two dozen US soldiers and wounded hundreds more. That attack is being pinned on an obscure organization called Saudi Hezbollah, not on the Lebanese Hezbollah as the US press often ignorantly states.
Saudi Hezbollah is one of maybe 50 small, shadowy armed Shia groups in Arabia, where the Shia are fired up about the outrageous racism they experience at the hand of Wahhabi Sunnis, who contemptuously regard them as infidels. The suggestion is that Iran was behind that bombing too.
The second source of anti-Iranian talk is coming from the KKK-Jews (Zionists) in Israel, who also have it in for Iran right now. They got rid of Iraq; now Syria and Iran are next on their list as they go for broke trying to wipe out all resistance in the region to their racist regime.
As Israel is now virtually a state of the US, Israel's interests are US interests. The fact that the US media is dominated by Zionists (both Jewish and Gentile) helps matters. Congress is completely controlled by a heavily Jewish Israeli Lobby, which also includes fundamentalist Christian elements.
The third source of anti-Iran sentiment is coming from Sunni Arabs, and Sunnis in general, who often hate Iran for various reasons, none of which are reasonable, and all of which are simply based on virulent racism.
An essential introduction to the tragic legacy of vicious anti-Iranian racism via Arab nationalism is Kaveh Farrokh's Arab Nationalism's Legacy of Confrontation With Iran.
The fact that US imperialism and World Jewry is in alliance with these ferocious, Nazi-like Sunni Muslim ultraracists is sickening and revolting.
The Jews of all people.
Yet Zionism has turned the Jews into a nation of killers, liars and thieves; those who cheer them on from the sidelines; and those who hide the criminals from justice or acquit them in court. Astute readers will note the analogy with the Jim Crow South. That is intentional.
As anti-Semitism hates Jews for what they are, not for what they do, there is nothing anti-Semitic in that statement. As the racists in the Antebellum South could cut it out any time they like, so can the KKK-Jews. Just say no to racism. It's not hard at all.
Along similar lines, neither is Syria supporting the Sunni guerrillas much. The Syrian regime is run by Alawi Shia, who are not even considered Muslims by many or most Sunni Muslims, due to the extreme heterodox nature of their sect.
To the fundamentalist Sunni guerrillas in Iraq, the Alawi are hated first for being Shia, and second and even worse for not even being real Shia. To too many Sunnis, Alawis are simply infidels.
The Alawi regime is threatened by the majority-Sunnis of Syria, many of whom support the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez Assad waged war on these fundies in 1982, when they took over the city of Hama and declared an Islamic state in Syria.
The Syrian army invaded, destroyed the city and killed 10,000 people, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was effectively destroyed. It remains in ruins in Syria to this day, where membership in the group is punishable by death.
The membership scattered to the far winds, especially to Saudi Arabia, where they joined the exiled Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt (exiled in another crackdown, this time by Gamel Nasser, President of Egypt). Both exiled Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) groups became religious teachers in Saudi Arabia around the time a number of religious schools were being set up there.
Wahhabi Islam in Arabia has not always been vicious, deranged and terroristic. Prior to the 1970's, it was largely quietist (a Muslim religious term for Muslims who are not active in politics, especially in armed politics).
The infusion of radicalized Ikhwan exiles with Saudi Wahhabi Islam (still ultra-radical, even if quietist) metastasized to create a savage, militant fundamentalist Islam in Saudi Arabia by the 1980's.
With the added boost of the Iranian revolution (which radicalized both Sunni and Shia Muslims around the world) of 1979 and the ensuing radical turmoil in Arabia (armed radicals captured the Kaaba, took hostages, and were routed in an armed counterattack that left hundreds dead) and the injection of the Afghan jihad of the 1980's, the result was we call the Al Qaeda type groupings of today.
To this day, all Al Qaeda groupings are still significantly associated with the Ikhwan. One could even say that when it comes to Al Qaeda-like groups, "All roads lead to the Ikhwan".
Based on that history, the notion that the super-secular Alawis of Syria would be supporting their most murderous enemies, the Sunni ultra-radical Salafist guerrillas in Iraq, is comical and pitiful.
Instead, my understanding is that Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and even more so, wealthy Saudis, and probably wealthy Arabs from other Gulf States, are supplying the Sunni Iraqi guerrillas. The dominant Arabian Sunnis are as frightened of Shia political power as White racists in the US South were mortified by the threat of Black political enfranchisement.
The dominant theme here is, "Shia is the nigger of (Muslim) World".
As you can see by the blatantly bigoted and murderously racist behavior of the Iraqi Shia militias described above, the Iraqi Shia are becoming "Niggaz with an attitude." Which only proves that, barring intervention, the abused will become abusers as surely as day follows night.
The accusations against Syria are coming from US imperialism and the KKK-Jews. Imperialism hates Syria, probably just because it is not an ally. Syria is not an ally because it is an Arab nationalist regime still locked in conflict with Israel. As the US wildly supports Israel, Syria is not happy with the US.
But Syria really has no interest in the US per se. Their main problem is with Israel, which is still illegally occupying Syrian land, in violation of all international law, and in defiance of 98% of the nations on Earth.
Due to this Occupation, Syria and Israel are legally still at war. Syria's interest is not to wipe out Israel, or kill all Jews or any of the crap that Zionists will tell you. Syrians just want the Golan back. To get it back, I am sure they will sell out Arab nationalism, the Palestinians, and the whole nine yards.
As a consequence of Israel's theft of the Syrian Golan Heights, Syria retaliates by funding and supporting various Palestinian armed groups. Due to this ongoing conflict, Syria is on Israel's list for regime change, along with Iran. The US simply has no real beneficial national interest in supporting Israel in this fight, other than that Israel is the 51st state of America.
Whenever you hear a US neoconservative commentator ranting about "Iran and Syria", the ghost of Ariel Sharon may as well be pulling the puppet strings in back of them while they speak.
In my opinion, the KKK-Jews, who were part of the plot to get us into this insane Iraq War, also hoped to drag Syria and possibly Iran in too. With US troops in Iraq, hardline Zionism worked to use US forces to taunt Syria. Only the Iraqi resistance stopped US forces from attacking Syria, and probably also Iran. Terrible as the Sunni guerrillas are, the world does owe them something.
A huge US army in Iraq de facto menacing Syria is a taunt to the Syrians, in order to provoke them into supporting the Iraqi resistance to keep the US at bay. But once they start supporting Iraqi guerrillas, the US has cause to attack Syria.
Yet if Syria cooperates in crushing the Sunni guerrillas and pacifying Iraq, the US will then be free to evacuate most troops from Iraq and invade Syria. Yet the mad civil war in Iraq tears the region asunder and actually threatens Syria in many ways, mostly that the jihad of their radical Sunni Islamist enemies can spread to Syria.
What does Syria want? Same as Iran. A peaceful and stable Iraq that is friendly to Syria. Like Iran, they also want all US troops out of Iraq, since those troops are threatening Syria by their very presence.
Syria is in a poignant spider's web; damned if she does; damned if she doesn't. This is the trap Zionism-imperialism has set for her, with the only way out being abject surrender to imperialism-Zionism in the region, as almost all of the other Arab states have already done.
Yes, Zionism actually wants to provoke Syria into conflict with the US. Incredible, no? As if the world did not have enough problems as it is, the cancer of World Zionism adds another huge dollop of instability to the quivering mess as it pumps the black poison of its influence, menace and power through the veins of a cringing and suffering world.
Truth is that Syria has cracked down ferociously on those who have gone to fight in Iraq. Many jihadis have been imprisoned, beaten and tortured. Their relatives have also been harassed. Supporters of the jihadis inside Syria have actually set up organizations to protest this crackdown. The blog Syria Comment has been covering this story for some time now.
The Sunni guerrillas are being supplied mostly from inside Iraq itself but also by neighboring Sunnis, as noted above. The Sunni guerrillas' external support is from US allies. The Shia militias are being funded from inside Iraq and are part of the US-allied Iraqi government.
Both sides of the Iraqi civil war are being funded and supported by US allies, not Syria and Iran. This is the lugubrious truth.
Many have wondered about the controversial study showing that 655,000 Iraqis had been killed by the US invasion of Iraq. Though the media has predictably poo-pooed the study, I studied it in depth and it is apparently a valid study. The same authors previously conducted a study in 2004 that found 100,000 deaths. That study was also very controversial.
The author of both studies, Les Roberts, wrote a piece in February 2006, prior to the latest study, in which he estimated 300,000 deaths. He lays out his reasons in the piece.
On July 12, 2005, an Iraqi group called Iraqiyun working with the Iraqi government counted 128,000 dead. These dead were lined up with actual names and records of the deceased based on door-to-door interviews throughout Iraq. Only dead confirmed by relatives were included, and the many who have vanished without a trace were not.
A study including infant mortality and looking at raw death rates has found an excess mortality of 900,000 deaths in Iraq since the US invasion, including 400,000 by infant mortality and 500,000 by other excess mortality. Note that the 500,000 figure includes excess deaths due to all causes related to the invasion - crime, stress, disease, dirty water, suicide, poor medical care, etc.
The same study, using raw death rate figures once again, found excess mortality of 2.9 million Iraqis from 1990-2003, almost all attributed to US and British sanctions, which were deliberately written to kill as many innocent Iraqis as possible. That figure includes 1.6 million via infant mortality and 1.3 million via other excess mortality, respectively. The study uses raw death rates, so the figures should be pretty good.
Those figures are from Gideon Polya, an Australian scientist who works, at least in part, in the field of excess mortality. He is the founder of the "Theory of Excess Mortality".
The US and Britain killed 2.9 million Iraqis via sanctions, then started a war that killed another 900,000 Iraqis. That adds up to 3.8 million dead Iraqis. Either way you cut the cake, the US and Britain killed far more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein, whose number of victims is estimated at 300,000 and who also started a war with Iran that killed another 875,000, for a total of 1.175 million dead.
In reality, the mad Iraqi racist war against completely innocent Iran was fully egged on by and coordinated by the US and later many other nations all over the world. We even gave Iraq detailed maps of Iranian front line military positions before he attacked. Later, with the war on, we supplied him with the chemical weapons he fired at Iranian troops.
So in reality, perhaps Saddam and the US should share the guilt for the Iran-Iraq war dead. Even granting (dubiously) Saddam full culpability for the Iran-Iraq war toll, the US and Britain still killed over three times as many Iraqis as Saddam Hussein.
In a just world, would any other leaders deserve to be swinging from the end of a rope, due to mass murder of Iraqis? Something to think about...
For those who are interested, I authored an 80+ page dossier on the state Iraqi guerrilla groups as of April 15, 2005. It was published in 3 parts, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. The report is now pretty much out of date but still holds historical interest on the state of the Iraqi resistance at a certain point in time. In that report, I believe I identified over 120 separate groups fighting the US Coalition.
Monday, December 06, 2010
Un Congresista Colombiano tiene un Derrame Cerebral en Televisión
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German and Bulgarian. Email me if you are interested.
French translation (en Français). Tagalog translation (isinalin sa Tagalog).
This is the Spanish translation of the Colombian Congressman Has Stroke on Live TV post.
Y aquí tenemos otro vídeo increíble. En este vídeo (que se grabó en una fecha desconocida) un congresista de Colombia, José Fernando Castro Caycedo, está hablando sobre la reforma de la ley colombiana que permitiría que los ciudadanos obtuvieran permisos del gobierno para hacer determinadas cosas, cuando de repente sufre un derrame cerebral.
Él está en medio de su discurso cuando de improvisto dice "Lo siento... Es... es...". Entonces tiene el derrame cerebral. Murió como resultado de esta apoplejía. Por la manera en que empieza a temblar está claro que es un derrame.
La iluminación de este vídeo es algo extraña. Después de que José Fernando Castro sufre el derrame, la iluminación de repente se vuelve mucho más fuerte. Esto es probablemente debido a todos los hombres vestidos con trajes oscuros que se aparecen precipitadamente en la escena. Cuando esto ocurre, el iris de la cámara tiene que compensar debido al cambio en la iluminación, y de este modo obtener efectos interesantes.
DEP José Fernando Castro Caycedo.
Truppe Pachistane Fucilano Prigionieri di Guerra Nella Valle dello Swat
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German and Tagalog. Email me if you are interested.
Portuguese translation (em Português). Spanish translation (en Español). French translation (en Français).
Durante l'estate del 2009, le truppe regolari Pachistane hanno avuto duri scontri con i ribelli Talebani nella valle dello Swat. Per sedare la rivolta, i militari non sono andati per il sottile...ci sono stati diversi reportage su esecuzioni di massa di giovani mussulmani Pashtun.
Il primo di ottobre del 2010 l' utente 'drjack20061', evidente portavoce di una Associazione Internazionale Pashtun, ha diffuso su YouTube questi 5 stupefacenti minuti che ci mostrano la fucilazione di un gruppo di Talebani, prigionieri di guerra.
Sebbene l'esercito Pachistano abbia dichiarato che si tratta di un video farlocco usato solo per diffamazione (non ci sono prove concrete sulla veridicità del filmato), mi sembra che le immagini siano piuttosto eloquenti.
In effetti, l'esercito pachistano ha usato metodi salvadoregni : le torture e le esecuzioni sommarie erano all'ordine del giorno;
i cadaveri massacrati, legati ed imbavagliati dei Talebani venivano esposti ai bordi delle strade come ammonimento alla popolazione locale.
Tuttavia questa strategia del terrore ha avuto solamente un breve successo: come l'Araba Fenice la guerriglia Pashtun ha ripreso vita, la lotta è ripresa feroce. La 'ribellione Swat' assomiglia ad uno di quei zombi cinematografici...gli spari e pensi di averlo ucciso ed invece lui si alza e cammina...e viene per mangiarti...
Un'istantanea dal video, mentre gli uomini sono allineati per essere eseguito.Tecnicamente il video è di scarsissima qualità: qualcuno ha furtivamente filmato la scena con un cellulare, a momenti le immagini scompaiono. L'operatore (un civile, un soldato?) ha un'evidente paura di essere scoperto, questa esecuzione si svolge durante una battaglia, si sentono cantare le mitragliatrici e rimbombare dei colpi di cannone.
Il 'rito' della fucilazione è sempre lo stesso, è una pratica collaudata...dei soldati scortano dei condannati che si avviano lentamente verso il luogo prestabilito (di solito verso un muro, no?).
Sei giovani Pashtun, riconoscibili dai loro tradizionali vestiti, sono legati e bendati, non fanno resistenza. Diversi soldati ben armati, con le classiche divise dell'esercito pachistano, formano il plotone di esecuzione.
I condannati sono schierati di fronte al plotone ed ecco che arriva un barbuto ufficiale che si rivolge brevemente ad ognuno di loro:
non si sentono le parole ma di sicuro non sono frasi di pace e fraternità...
L'ufficiale schiera il suo plotone, adesso si possono udire le voci dei soldati che parlano in Urdu, la lingua ufficiale dell'esercito pachistano. Nella regione Swat è una lingua praticamente sconosciuta.
Il disordinato plotone si prepara all'ordine del comandante...mirate, fuoco ! Non mi sembra siano dei gran tiratori, 'sti pachistani...i pianti ed i gemiti dei condannati echeggiano forti, da giovani e forti combattenti sono tornati bambini indifesi, agnellini sacrificali...Il colpo di grazia è d'obbligo: in questo caso ne sono necessari molti; i mitragliatori scuotono i corpi, lo strazio è finito.
Ed anche il video è finito.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Video Al Qaede Obaranje Američkih Chinook Helikoptera u Karmu, Irak
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German and Bulgarian. Email me if you are interested.
Spanish translation (en Español).
This is the Serbo-Croatian version of the Video of Al Qaeda Shooting Down a US Chinook Helicopter in Karma, Iraq post. I am very happy with this first S-C translation in a very long time. Hopefully there will be more!
Ovdje je video od iračke Al Qaede razočaranost što je izvorno naširoko izvijestili da se helikopter Chinook SAD, ali je zapravo CH-46 Sea Knight helikoptera (usko povezane sjeckalica) u Karma 7. veljače, prije tri dana. Sedam vojnika poginulo je kada je helikopter bio oboren.
Sea Knight, kao što su CH-47 Chinook, koristi se uglavnom za prijevoz vojnika, žrtava i isporuke do i od bojištu. Zadnji put je bila proizvedena u 1971, ali je još uvijek široko korišten od strane američkih marinaca. CH-46 je zapravo prvi Chinook proizveden za vojsku, ali vojska ga je odbacio kao premalen. Marines je odlučio da je sasvim u redu. Nakon što je 1962, to je bio preimenovan u moru Knight.
Od 1971, Sea Knight je kroz niz nadogradnji. Crteži uspoređujući Chinook i Sea Knight su ovdje. Pentagon je odbio reći što oboren helikopterom implicira da mehaničkih problema uzeo ptica dolje. Ako tražite usko na video, oko 1:16 vidjet ćete ono što se čini SAM projektil leti i udaranje helikopterom. Ne mislim da je to mehanički kvar.
To je posebno creepy gledati umiranje helikopter mlatilice za minutu ili tako da u zraku prije nego pad. Jedan tresu zamisliti kako posada mislio da je jedan u posljednjoj minuti svog života ... Karma je sjeverozapadno od Bagdada i malo načina sjeveroistočno od Fallujah. Kad čujete "Karma", samo mislim Fallujah. To je ljepušan velik dio isti način razmišljanja, stanovništvo, teren, itd.
Karma je užasno nestabilan za mnogo mjeseci sada. Čuli smo izvještaje marinaca 1-2 godine sa sjedištem u tom gradu usred primitivnim uvjetima težak to stabilizirati. Izvješća ukazuju da je ovo jedan od najtoplijeg područja u svim Iraku, s neprijateljski stanovnika, nepouzdan iračke vojske s ugrađenim marinaca (irački vojnici su imali čudan običaj kreće na periferiji baze neposredno prije pobunjeničkim raketne napade.
Marines bavila kontinuirano ivičnjak bomba, raketni, malter, malog oružja i RPG napada gotovo. nijedna od lokalnog stanovništva može biti pouzdana.
Wedstrijd voor Negerinnen: Wie Kan het Meeste Gebraden Kippevlees Eten en de Meeste Liters Drinken
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Portuguese translation (em Português). Spanish translation (en Español). Italian translation (traduzione in Italiano). Norwegian translation (på norsk). French translation (en Français).
This is the Dutch translation of the Black Female Fried Chicken Eating and 40 Oz Drinking Contest post.
Deze video stelt zwarten in zo'n ongunstig licht dat men zou denken dat blanke racisten hem geproduceerd hadden met hulp van zwarte acteurs. Maar nee, het is een echte wedstrijd. Zwarten hebben deze wedstrijd georganiseerd en ze genieten ervan, dus is het helemaal niet racistisch, ondanks het feit dat reeds het idee van zo'n wedstrijd naar racistische stereotypen verwijst.
Ik moest bij het kijken naar deze video de hele tijd lachen. Zo belachelijk is het.
Die eetwedstrijden zijn altijd zo ordinair.
Het is beter dan naar een groep dikke blanke hufters te kijken terwijl ze hamburgers en hot dogs verslinden.
Die gettomeiden zijn ten minste goed gekleed.
De commentaarplaats is vol met met geėrgerde zwarten die erover jammeren hoe ongunstig deze video hen presenteert. Een man zei: "Deze video heeft ons 300 jaar achteruitgezet."
Ik zal dat niet zo serieus nemen, en ik dacht dat het een lolletje was, maar je moet je knijpen om te beseffen dat dit echt is en geen door de VNN of andere racisten gemaakte parodie.
Ik vind dat we binnenkort enkele video's over blanke lomperds erbij moeten doen in het belang van raciale billijkheid.
Idioot Springt van Gebouw af en Loopt Weg
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Spanish translation (en Español). Portuguese translation (em Português). French translation (en Français). Tagalog translation (isinalin sa Tagalog).
This is the Dutch translation of the Idiot Jumps Off Building and Walks Away post.
Deze video is knettergek. Ik heb hem op een Deense site gevonden, dus was het moeilijk er informatie over te krijgen. Ik neem aan dat de gebeurtenis zich in Denemarken afspeelt. Een tiener springt van een heel hoog gebouw af, belandt ogenschijnlijk op verharde grond, krijgt een bloedhoofd, en staat dan op en loopt met een versuft gezicht weg. We kunnen niet zien of hij gewond is of niet.
Ik vermoed dat dit onecht is, maar de video is zo eenvoudig opgenomen door jongeren van een andere jongen die van het gebouw afspringt dat ik niet begrijp hoe ze dit konden vervalsen. Om zoiets na te maken heeft men een filmstudio nodig. Aan de andere kant kan ik er niet bij hoe hij deze val overleeft heeft, laat staan weg kon lopen.
Ik begrijp deze video helemaal niet.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Video of Al Qaeda Shooting Down a US Chinook Helicopter in Karma, Iraq
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German and Bulgarian. Email me if you are interested.
Serbo-Croatian translation (u Srpsko-hrvatski). Spanish translation (en Español).
Here is the video of Iraqi Al Qaeda shooting down what was originally widely reported to be a US Chinook helicopter, but was actually a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter (a closely related chopper) in Karma on February 7, three days ago. Seven soldiers were killed when the helicopter was downed.
The Sea Knight, like the CH-47 Chinook, is used mostly for transporting soldiers, casualties and supplies to and from the battlefield. It was last produced in 1971 but is still widely used by the US Marines. The CH-46 was actually the first Chinook produced for the Army but the Army rejected it as too small. The Marines decided it was just fine. After 1962, it was renamed the Sea Knight.
Since 1971, the Sea Knight has undergone a series of upgrades. Drawings comparing the Chinook and the Sea Knight are here. The Pentagon is refusing to say what downed the copter, but is implying that mechanical problems took the bird down.
If you look closely at the video, around 1:16 you will see what appears to be a SAM missile flying and hitting the copter. I don't think this was mechanical failure. It is particularly creepy to watch the dying chopper flail for a minute or so in the air before crashing. One shudders to imagine what the crew was thinking during that one last minute of their lives...
Karma is northwest of Baghdad and a little ways northeast of Fallujah. When you hear "Karma",just think Fallujah. It's pretty much the same mindset, population, terrain, etc. Karma has been terribly unstable for many months now.
We heard reports 1-2 years of Marines based in this town amidst primitive conditions trying to stabilize it. The reports suggested that this was one of the hottest areas in all Iraq, with a hostile population, an untrustworthy Iraqi Army embedded with the Marines (the Iraqi soldiers had the odd habit of moving to the periphery of the base just before insurgent rocket attacks.
Marines dealt with continuous roadside bomb, rocket, mortar, small arms and RPG attacks. Virtually none of the local population could be trusted. No matter what one thought of the war, you had to feel sympathy and pride for our troops trying to stick it out amidst this mess.
How many Marines could write a 500-word essay on US imperialism anyway? How many Marines would not understand the question or deny that US imperialism even existed? Soldiers are soldiers everywhere. They are rarely the bad guys.
Karma has continued to be hot and efforts to stabilize the area, ongoing for possibly years now, appear to have failed. Much of the Fallujah population has displaced to Saqlawiyah and Karma, towns outside Fallujah, often in refugee camps or else staying with friends or relatives.
A US reporter who visited these camps after the first US offensive on Fallujah in April 2004 reported that 100% of the 150,000 population either supported the guerrillas or were part of the guerrillas in some way or other. That's 150,000 guerrillas or active guerrilla supporters right there.
Much has been written about the six US helicopters downed in the past 3 weeks. The guerrillas appear to be on a roll. The majority of these take downs appear to have been with very heavy machine gun fire. That's heavy machine gun fire - not AK-47 automatic weapons fire. Withering fire with a heavy machine gun, or better yet multiple guns, can indeed take down a helicopter.
Which is the reason that the copters try to avoid altitudes below 1,000-1,500 - the machine gun fire kill zone. Above 3,000-3,500 feet, the copters start getting vulnerable to shoulder-fired surface-to-air (SAM) missiles. That leaves a narrow envelope between 1,500-3,000 feet that is a safer zone.
But helicopters need to fly low to attack the enemy and to drop off and pick up troops, supplies and casualties. Furthermore, the US relies very heavily on helicopters in the ground war in Iraq.
Bottom line is that flying a helicopter in Iraq is not that much different from flying one in Vietnam, where many US copters were also shot down. Even lunatic $700 billion US defense budgets cannot cure some endemic problems. The Chinook is one of the better-defended US copters but no helicopter is invulnerable and the newer Russian-made SAM's are very good.
At the end of the day, it's more a contest of wits between the helicopter pilot and his enemies and may the best man win. Despite all the gloomy talk about doomed copters, the rate of US copters shot down in Iraq has been low compared to other wars.
Video of Saddam's Body After the Hanging
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Spanish translation (en Español).
Here is another in the series of videos of Saddam Hussein's hanging. First the notorious video of his hanging was released, then this surreptitious of his body in a casket shot by two apparently Shia morgue workers, and last a video of his funeral in Tikrit. All of the videos are now available on this site.
In this video, what appears to be two Shia morgue workers (we can tell they are Shia by the name of one of them - Abu Ali is a Shia name - and the fact that they are friends) are surreptitiously filming the body on a gurney hurriedly as if they are afraid of being caught. They pull the cover aside and quickly film the head of the dead Saddam, then cover it back up and rush away.
Saddam has bruises on his face, his head grotesquely to one side and his neck is ripped open and exposed, with a nasty bright-red gash from where the rope cut it. There are false rumors floating around the Net that the video is a fake. The pro-Sunni, anti-Shia, anti-Iranian racist website Islam Online alleged that the bruises on Saddam's face are evidence that his body was violated after his death.
This is may not be true; the bruises may be from the hanging itself. Another rumor is that Saddam's throat was slit after his death - the slit throat being what you see on this video. In fact, the gash on his throat was no doubt caused by the hanging itself. He may have fallen 6 feet and 7 inches when he dropped from the gallows. He probably only needed a 5-foot drop in order to kill him, according to the "Drop Tables" published in 1913.
The excessive drop is what caused the neck gash and is another example, as with the subsequent hanging of Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti that decapitated him, of a botched execution. Tikriti fell 8 feet, way too far to drop, and the excessive fall is what cut off his head.
With an excessive drop, you get a cut neck or decapitation, and with a drop that is too short, you get slow strangulation. Obviously, the Iraqi government's executioners do not know what they are doing.
This video originally appeared on Google Video but was then taken down, possibly due to inappropriate content. The version you see here is a copy that surfaced later on Youtube. Fox News translated the video in a story on the video:
Abu Ali!
- Hurry up! Hurry up!
Hurry up!
Let’s go my friend...come on man!
- I’ll fix it up for you.
I am coming. I am coming.
- Just a moment, one moment
I am coming. I am coming.
- Abu Ali, Abu Ali...You take care of this.
Ok let’s go, let’s go
- Come on my friend! Come on my friend!
Ok, I am coming. I am coming.
This video, showing obviously Shia morgue attendants disrespecting Saddam's battered body by filming it, along with the gash in his neck caused by the rope, is likely to further inflame Sunnis and worsen already horrid sectarian warfare in Iraq. It originally appeared on a Baathist website with the obvious intention of further inflaming the Sunnis of Iraq. The botching of Saddam's execution continues.
Much has been made of Saddam's execution but not a lot substantially of his trial. While it was surely more fair than Saddam's trials, a good case can be made that the trial process had serious problems. To me, it was clear that Saddam was guilty of the Dujail killings but still, fair trials are important. One characteristic of a vicious dictatorship is that it attacks the attorneys of unpopular trial suspects.
In Peru, the terrible Fujimori dictatorship (installed in a 1992 coup cheered on by the US) arrested, beat and tortured, sometimes to death, attorneys for Shining Path guerrillas. There were never any charges that the attorneys were members of the organization; it was enough that they were representing the organization.
In the US now, outrageously, the US government is refusing to promote a number of US military attorneys who represented Guantanamo detainees. Their crime? Doing their duty - that is, representing their clients too vigorously. There is no such thing as an attorney being too vigorous in defense of a client.
That Bush decision was one of many his Administration has made that adds weight to the charge that this is one of the most anti-democratic administration in the history of the nation. This administration has arguably moved the country closer to dictatorship than any prior US government, and that is no exaggeration at all.
And what of Saddam's trial? Three of Saddam's attorneys were murdered - two of them, apparently, by the Iraqi government itself. See my friend Postman Patel's post for the details - note that one was killed after being abducted by 10 men in police uniforms and another was killed by hitmen who arrived at the scene in a government vehicle.
Surely there will never be any justice for the killers of Saddam's attorneys. On what basis were those attorneys killed? Surely Saddam had a right to be represented by counsel? Surely representing Saddam in court is not a reason to kill someone?
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Famous Offensive Interracial Sears Ad Pulled Off the Air
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.
French translation (en Français).
Spanish translation (en Español).
This is a Sears Christmas ad that has been running on TV lately. It shows a group of happy young people kissing each other and giving each other presents for Christmas. Of course they bought all of the presents at Sears. In the middle of the segment, three different handsome Black men give presents to three different beautiful White blonds and kiss as they are doing it.
The video was uploaded to Youtube, where it got 33,000 views. It was flooded with negative racial comments from Whites. In many cases, anti-Black slurs and racist language were used by outraged White commenters. After the outpouring of rage at the ad on Youtube, Sears pulled the ad. Later the video disappeared on Youtube too.
The White nationalists are going nuts over this and saying that now corporations will have to listen to their complaints and boycotts too. Problem is that the WN's, like all such folks are reactionaries who are fighting a war against time. History moves forwards, not backwards, and the good old days were usually not so great.
In 1958, 96% of US Whites disapproved on romantic or sexual mingling between Blacks and Whites. By the early 1990's, that number had dropped to 49%. In 1998, only 25% of Whites disapproved of such things. Between 1992-2008, the % of Whites disapproving of miscegenation was dropping precipitously by 1.5 points per year. If this freefall continues at this rate, within 15 years or so, the anti-miscegenationist Whites will be all but gone.
This is why WN's are losers, and time is not on their side. Their agenda fades with each passing year.
My opinion of the video? I could care less, but then, I care nothing about interracial sexual behavior anyway. I'm not opposed to it, but I'm not going around cheerleading for it either. It's simply a freedom that folks should be allowed to have if they wish to indulge in such things.
Certainly Whites ought to be free to decline interracial dating with any race or ethnicity without being thought of as racist. Increasingly, Whites are losing even that freedom as White women who say they do not wish to date Blacks are pounded by their fellow Whites (and obviously by Black men, which figures) as "racists." That's simply PC run amok, and it's got to stop.
Sex is as intimate as human behavior gets. You have the right to do it or not do it, as much or as little as you like, with whichever consenting partners of either gender or whatever race or ethnicity you choose, and there's nothing abnormal or racist about any of the choices that result.