Reporter Asks White House if U.S. Airstrikes That Kill Afghan Civilians Qualify as ‘Terrorism’

Yes, please. 

Omid Safi: These Are All Our Children

These are all our children.   
Trayvon Martin, the African-American 17-year old shut down by a white American racist is our son.

The Jewish children shot down by a French jihadist are our children.

The Afghani children shot down by an American soldier are our children.

Tragedy brings out the best and most beautiful in some, connecting their own suffering to that of others.  
And in others, it brings out a vicious desire not for justice, but for revenge.   
It’s always like this, and it is like this right now. 

In this country, we are seeing a rapidly expanding movement of people—starting with the African American community, and expanding beyond
—who see in the senseless and unjust murder of this sweet boy the dangers that faces many of our own children—particularly among people of color.  

And we have seen the pundits on Fox News blame Trayvon’s murder not where it belongs (the racist action of a wannabe neighborhood vigilante), but rather on the hoodie this 17-year was wearing.

Tragedy brings out the most beautiful, and the most hideous, in us.   
Where are we standing now?  And where are we heading?

Trayvon is our son.   Sometimes they literally look like our children.  
It is true for the most powerful people in the world, as President Obama said:  “If I Had A Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon.”

 

These children have names, all of them have names. 
We see in the faces of these children our own hopes, our own highest aspirations, and yes, our own worst fears.    
We see in their faces the worst fears, particularly of the mothers and fathers of black and brown children all over this country.
All these children have mothers who love them, who have nurtured them, and have raised them.   
Their loves and our loves are always tinged with the fears of what might happen to our children by racists who project onto our children their own venom.  

***

Our children have names, and we will name them.

We mourn Trayvon Martin, the young man who was chased down, stared down, and shut down by a white Hispanic racist in Florida who was threatened by a 17-year old holding a can of iced-tea and a box of skittles. 

We mourn the Jewish children in France, shut down by the French Jihadist.
The Jewish children in France shot by the French Jihadist are our children.
These children have names:
Miriam Monsonegro,
Rabbi Yonatan Sandler, the visiting teacher
Aryeh Sandler, son of Rabbi Sandler.
Gavriel Sandler, son of Rabbi Sandler.

The image on the right is of Miriam’s burial in Jerusalem.

The Afghani children shot by the American soldier are our children.
These children have names, and they too are our children.

Mohamed Dawood son of Abdullah

Khudaydad son of Mohamed Juma

Nazar Mohamed 

Payendo

Robeena

Shatarina daughter of Sultan Mohamed

Zahra daughter of Abdul Hamid

Nazia daughter of Dost Mohamed

Masooma daughter of Mohamed Wazir 

Farida daughter of Mohamed Wazir

Palwasha daughter of Mohamed Wazir

Nabia daughter of Mohamed Wazir

Esmatullah daughter of Mohamed Wazir

Faizullah son of Mohamed Wazir

Essa Mohamed son of Mohamed
Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

We mourn with all of these victims, with all of their families and loved ones.
And our heart goes out to Mohamed Wazir who in one unimaginable day lost virtually his entire family, his sons, his daughters, his wife, his mother: 

“As a parent, you hate to see even your child’s little finger hurt. Imagine losing 11 members of your family at once?” he says.  “All my dreams are buried under a pile of dust now…
.I loved them all like they were parts of my body,” Wazir says. “I miss all of them terribly.”

Our lives are connected, the sanctity of our lives is connected, and our suffering is connected.
God-willing, our solidarity and uprising against all forms of injustice will also be connected.

***

This is the response of the Martin family, reflecting on the death of their sweet son:

It is humbling that President Obama took time from his busy schedule to talk about Trayvon and offer the support of the Department of Justice and other federal organizations.

The President’s personal comments touched us deeply and made us wonder: If his son looked liked Trayvon and wore a hoodie, would he be suspicious too?

We’d like to thank the President and the millions of people from around the world who have shown their support for Trayvon by participating in hoodie marches, rallies or through social media. We are all working together to not only get justice for Trayvon, but also to ensure that this kind of senseless tragedy doesn’t happen to another child.

Humbling, isn’t it, to realize that in the midst of their own grief, Trayvon’s family can still reach out to others, and strive to create a better world?

What are we doing?
Where are we standing?
Are we reaching out to unite in grief and hope all over the world,
Or are we going to bow down in front of the alter of violence, revenge, and anger? 

Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre

This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly “deranged” in Kandahar province.

“Apparently deranged”, “probably deranged”, journalists announced, a soldier who “might have suffered some kind of breakdown” (The Guardian), a “rogue US soldier” (Financial Times) whose “rampage” (The New York Times) was “doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness” (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn’t kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn’t forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army’s top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen’s words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that “now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday’s riots”. They should, he said, “resist whatever urge they might have to strike back” after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. “There will be moments like this when you’re searching for the meaning of this loss,” Allen continued. “There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are.”

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to “take vengeance” on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I’ve met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Yet it was totally wiped from the memory box by the “experts” when they had to tell us about these killings. No suggestion that General Allen had said these words was allowed into their stories, not a single reference – because, of course, this would have taken our staff sergeant out of the “deranged” bracket and given him a possible motive for his killings. As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier. Poor chap. Off his head. Didn’t know what he was doing. No wonder he was whisked out of Afghanistan at such speed.

We’ve all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948. Of course, one can say that the French in Algeria were worse than the Americans in Afghanistan – one French artillery unit is said to have “disappeared” 2,000 Algerians in six months – but that is like saying that we are better than Saddam Hussein. True, but what a baseline for morality. And that’s what it’s about. Discipline. Morality. Courage. The courage not to kill in revenge. But when you are losing a war that you are pretending to win – I am, of course, talking about Afghanistan – I guess that’s too much to hope. General Allen seems to have been wasting his time.

What the Quran burnings tell us || Foreign Policy

Suppose the town or city where you live had a bunch of heavily-armed foreign soldiers living nearby. As part of their normal duties, they sent patrols down your street with some frequency, bristling with guns and other instruments of war. Imagine that these soldiers were from a very different culture and nearly all of them did not speak your native language, although they could occasionally use a local translator to order you around. You have been told repeatedly that they are there to protect you, but sometimes these protective activities involve entering your neighbors’ houses, arresting people, and even shooting up the place. Of course, these well-armed foreign troops have access to lots of sophisticated airpower, including helicopters, fighter-bombers, and drones, and these sophisticated gadgets fire missiles and drop bombs on suspected bad guys in your city, town, or village. Most of the time it appears that the foreign occupiers get who they were aiming at, but sometimes they make mistakes and kill your friends and neighbors. Maybe even one of your close relatives.

The question I’d ask you is this: If you had been living in such circumstances for five or ten years, do you think you and your neighbors might become resentful of those well-intentioned but heavy-handed foreigners? Do you think you might even begin to hate their intrusive interference, even if it were done with the best of intentions? If you then discovered that some of them were burning Bibles, Torahs, or the American flag, might you leave your house and join an angry demonstration, or may even try to do something worse?

If the answer to those questions is “yes,” then you can probably understand why the United States and its allies are in such deep water in Afghanistan.

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Why Would Afghani citizens be so angry? - Omid Safi || Religion News Service

Why would the Afghanis be angry?  Because since 2007, there have been 11,864 documented civilian casualties in their country.    The actual number is likely to be much, much higher, given all the challenges at documenting casualties in a war-torn, difficult to navigate country like Afghanistan.

Why wold the Afghanis be angry?  Because children routinely freeze to death in their country.    The New York Times has listed a series of images from children in danger of freezing:   and also a list of children who have already frozen to death in one camp.  These children have faces, they have names, they have moms and dads, and they were all under five years old:

Mirwais, son of Hayatullah Haideri. He was 1 ½ years old and had just started to learn how to walk, holding unsteadily to the poles of the family tent before flopping onto the frozen ridges of the muddy floor.
¶ Abdul Hadi, son of Abdul Ghani. He was not even a year old and was already trying to stand, although his father said that during those last few days he seemed more shaky than normal.
¶ Naghma and Nazia, the twin daughters of Musa Jan. They were only 3 months old and just starting to roll over.
¶ Ismail, the son of Juma Gul. “He was never warm in his entire life,” Mr. Gul said. “Not once.”

What’s gut-wrenching is that these preventable deaths from cold, in a country where winter is entirely predictable, is that this all comes after what the NY Times correctly describes as “after 10 years of a large international presence, comprising about 2,000 aid groups, at least $3.5 billion of humanitarian aid and $58 billion of development assistance.”

This is not an attempt to justify or explain away the wrath at the Qur’an burning incidents. 
It is, however, a plea for the need to contextualize.  
And the contextualization is that thousands of Afghani civilians are dying, and children under the age of five are freezing, in spite of billions of dollars in aid.  

You would be angry too, if this were (Heaven forbid) your own children.
The children of Afghanistan, all of our children, deserve better. 

Pamela Geller “Loves” Soldiers Who Urinate on Dead Corpses || LoonWatch

Pamela Geller writes:

Hamas-tied CAIR, once again sides with jihadists against the US military. Always. Apparently they are a  “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization” for jihadists and Taliban and Al-Shabaab, Hamas, Hezb’allah, et al).

CAIR has whipped itself up into an Islamic frenzy because  a video surfaced that appears to show US Marines combat gear urinating on several dead jihadis.

Here’s the thing. Hamas liars, CAIR, say jihad and pure Islam is “fringe,” “extremist.” So why do they CAIR about disrespecting the Taliban? According to CAIR lies, Taliban and jihadists do not represent Islam, they have “hijacked Islam”; so why would CAIR care about “respect”? CAIR calls these Marines immoral, but considers honor killings, clitorectomies, forced marriage, child marriage, polygamy, subjugation of women, slaughter of non-Muslims, Jew hatred moral?

Would anyone have CAIRed if Marines urinated on dead Nazi soldiers during WWII? (Anyone besides CAIR and nazis, that is).

I love these Marines. Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.

U.S. Marines To Investigate Video of Soldiers Urinating on Corpses || TMZ

VIDEO

The United States Marine Corps is launching an investigation into a video which appears to show Marines in full combat gear urinating on several dead bodies … TMZ has learned.

In the extremely graphic video, which appeared on various websites this morning, at least 4 male Marines expose their genitals and urinate on the bodies.

The mystery person who posted the video included a caption that reads, “scout sniper team 4 with 3rd battalion 2nd marines out of camp lejeune peeing on dead talibans.”

Now, Captain Kendra N. Hardesty — a Media Officer for the USMC — tells us, “While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps.”

She adds, “This matter will be fully investigated and those responsible will be held accountable for their actions.”

Jailed Afghan rape victim freed with no pre-conditions || BBC News

I posted this story before the ruling was made. Here’s the update: President Karzai stepped in, but she may end up having to marry her rapist

An Afghan rape victim who was jailed for adultery does not have to marry her attacker to be freed, her lawyer has told the BBC.

Lawyer Kimberly Motley says this was clarified personally to her by President Hamid Karzai’s office.

Mr Karzai pardoned the woman, named as Gulnaz, earlier this week, but some reports had said this was on condition that she married her attacker.

Gulnaz gave birth in jail to a daughter who has been kept with her.

On Friday, Ms Kimberly said that 21-year-old Gulnaz would be released with no pre-conditions and would then be free to marry whomever she chooses.

“She doesn’t have plans for the future, she just wants to get out [of prison],” the lawyer said.

She added that Gulnaz had a “safe place” to go after her expected release.