Monday 28 March 2016

Looks Like It Was a Purim Execution

 photo qasrasharif_zpsnnigi8fv.jpg
The video I posted yesterday showing an Israeli soldier shooting a Palestinian in the head has gone viral in the past 24 hours or so, and even the mainstream media, including the Washington Post and Time Magazine, have been reporting the story.
The video shows a group of soldiers and medics standing around Abdul Sharif, lying prone and incapacitated on the street, with one of the soldiers stepping up and pumping a bullet into his head.
Sharif is the young man on the right in the above picture. Both he and Ramzi Aziz Qasrawi were killed yesterday after an alleged stabbing attack on an Israeli soldier. Both were 21 years old.
Yesterday, of course, was also Purim day celebration in Israel–the annual holiday event marking the massacre of thousands of Gentiles, as told in the Old Testament book of Esther. This is one aspect of the shooting of Sharif and Qasrawi that the mainstream media don’t seem to be mentioning, probably out of a deliberate desire to play it down.
The two men died in Hebron during the morning hours. Here is a video of the Purim celebration that took places on the streets of the same city later that day:
On the 24th March, Israeli settlers from the illegal settlements in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron) celebrated the holiday of ‘Purim’. The settlers marched through the Old City of al-Khalil, starting off from the spot where just a few hours before, Israeli forces gunned down two Palestinian youth and then executed one of them in cold blood.
In the morning, Israeli forces shot and severely injured two Palestinian youth in the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood and then left them lying on the ground seriously injured while Israeli medics were attending to a slightly injured Israeli soldier. Palestinian ambulances, that are not allowed to drive on this road that is only for settlers use, were prevented by Israeli forces from reaching the injured Palestinian youth.  In a video published by B’Tselem, a soldier can clearly be seen shooting one of the youth in the head at point-blank range even though he is lying on the ground and is not posing a threat to anyone.
Only a few hours after this extrajudical execution, settlers started their joyous march, dressed up in costumes, with music blasting from a bus, dancing in the same spot where the two Palestinians were murdered in cold blood.
Purim customarily involves excessive consumption of alcohol, and according to areporton Mondoweiss, a large number of Israelis took over Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque at one point and began using its loudspeakers to sing racist songs calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from the city.
Children of Squatters, 1 drinking wine, 1 holstering a machine gun, 1 another aiming a pistol at onlookers
via ISM
The mainstream media are reporting that the soldier who executed Sharif has been arrested, and an Israeli general has attempted, somewhat ludicrously, to portray the whole thing as some sort of stunning aberration.
 photo almoz_zpsfovdroa7.jpg“This is not the IDF culture or the Jewish peoples’ culture,” said Brigadier Gen. Moti Almoz.
Perhaps Almoz hasn’t heard the news that Israel is a sick society, as confessed by the country’s own president.
For most of us, I guess, it would be hard to conceive of a country where people are left to bleed on the street as being anything other than a sick society, and as one writer put it, “Maybe even worse than the murder itself is the fact that no one in the vicinity seems at all moved by it.”
Ma’an News is reporting today that the Palestinian cameraman who shot the video footage of Sharif’s execution has now found himself the target of threats and harassment.
Israeli settlers on Friday gathered outside the home of a human rights worker in Hebron to hurl abuse at him, a day after he captured on camera an Israeli soldier’s killing of a wounded Palestinian that has sparked international outcry.
Imad Abu Shamsiya, a staff member with Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, told Ma’an after settlers threatened him: “I now fear for my life and the life of my family. I’m afraid they might attack my house and do me harm.”
He added that he fears the possibility of suffering the same fate as the Dawabsha family, who were killed in an arson attack committed by settlers last year in the village of Duma in the occupied West Bank.
It’s unlikely that things in Israel are going to change until some “outside force” puts a stop to it, as author E. Michael Jones put it in this interview with Press TV last December. Jones’ words are well worth reflecting upon. As he sees it, the Israelis are in a “rebellion against reason.”
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
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