Thierry Meyssan: Germany and Syria

Germany and Syria

by  Thierry Meyssan

Relations between Germany and Syria, which used to be excellent under Emperor Wilhelm II, are today abysmal. This is because since the Cold War, Berlin has become the backyard for the Muslim Brotherhood in their attempt to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic. Since 2012, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the federal think-tank SWP have been working directly on behalf of the US deep state for the destruction of the country.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 20 JUNE 2018 

عربي  DEUTSCH  ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ  ESPAÑOL  FRANÇAIS  ITALIANO  PORTUGUÊS  РУССКИЙ  TÜRKÇE  

In Berlin, in January 2015, a march for tolerance united political and Muslim leaders in reaction to the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Madame Merkel marched arm in arm with Aiman Mazyek, general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany. Although he pretends to have broken with the Muslim Brotherhood, and maintains an open dialogue, Mr. Mazyek offers protection within his organisation to the Milli Gorus (the supremacist organisation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) and the Muslim Brotherhood (the matrix of jihadist organisations, under the international presidency of Mahmoud Ezzat, ex-right hand of Sayyid Qutb).

Historically, Germany maintained excellent relations with the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was fascinated by Islam, pursued archeological excavations, notably in Baalbeck, and participated in the construction of the first railways, including the Damascus -Medina line. The Reich and the Sublime Porte stood together against the British when they organised the « Great Arab Revolt » of 1915. Then they lost the First World War, and as a result, were excluded from the region (Sykes-Picot-Sazovov agreements).

In 1953, President Eisenhower received a delegation of the Muslim Brotherhood led by Saïd Ramadan. From then on, the United States supported political Islam overseas.

During the Cold War, the CIA recuperated some of the best Nazi officers in order to continue its struggle against the USSR. Among them were Gerhard von Mende, who had recruited Soviet Muslims against Moscow [1]. In 1953, this senior civil servant installed the chief of the Muslim Brotherhood outside of Egypt, Saïd Ramadan, in Munich [2].

Alois Brunner, considered to be responsible for the deportation of 130,000 Jews, was installed by the CIA in Damascus in 1954, in order to prevent the régime of President Choukri al-Kouatli from concluding an alliance with the Soviets.

In the same period, the CIA secretly sent Nazi officers all over the world to fight the pro-Soviets. For example, Otto Skorzeny went to Egypt, Fazlollah Zahedi went to Iran, and Alois Brunner [3] to Syria. They all organised the local secret services on the model of the Gestapo. Brunner was only to be ousted much later, in 2000, by President Bachar el-Assad.

In the period between the Khomeinist revolution of 1979 and the attacks of 9/11, West Germany remained prudent in their dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood. However, at the demand of the CIA, and while Syria recognised East Germany, it accepted to offer political asylum to the putschists who attempted the coup d’etat of 1982 against President Hafez el-Assad, including the ex-Supreme Guide Issam al-Attar (brother of Syrian Vice-President Najah el-Attar). In the 1990’s, the Brotherhood reorganised itself in Germany with the assistance of two businessmen, the Syrian Ali Ghaleb Himmat and the Egyptian Youssef Nada, who was later to be accused by Washington of financing Oussma Ben Laden.

For many years, German academic Volker Perthes participated alongside the CIA in the preparation of the war against Syria. He directed the most powerful European think-tank, the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), and took part, in the name of the UNO, in the Geneva negotiations .

When the United States began the « never-ending war » in the « Greater Middle East », the CIA encouraged reunified Germany to launch a « Dialogue with the Muslim world ». In Berlin, the Minister for Foreign Affairs based his work for that purpose mostly on the new local chief of the Brotherhood, Ibrahim el-Zayat, and on an expert, Volker Perthes, who would become the director of the main federal think-tank, the Foundation for Science and Politics (SWP).

In the name of the UNO, Detlev Mehlis accused the Lebanese and Syrian Presidents, Emile Lahoud and Bachar el-Assad, of having assassinated Rafic Hariri. His work was based on false witness reports which, when revealed, forced him to resign.

In 2005, Germany participated in the assassination of Rafic Hariri by supplying the weapon which was used to kill him - (it was obviously not a classic explosive, contrary to the propaganda of the special « Tribunal ») [4]. Thereafter, Germany supplied the head of the UNO Enquiry, ex-prosecutor Detlev Mehlis [5], and his assistant, ex-police commissioner Gerhard Lehmann, who was implicated in the affair of secret CIA prisons.

In 2008, while the CIA was preparing the Syrian « civil war », Volker Perthes was invited by NATO to the annual reunion of the Bilderberg Group. He worked with a Syrian civil servant of the CIA, Bassma Kodmani. Together, they explained to all participants the profit that could be made by the West by overthrowing the Syrian Arab Republic and placing the Muslim Brotherhood in power. Having adopted the double language of the Brotherhood, in 2001 he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times mocking President Assad who believed he had unearthed a « conspiracy » against his country [6]. In October of the same year, he participated in a meeting of Turkish business leaders organised by the private US intelligence agency, Stratfor. He told his listeners of the oil and gas resources that they could steal from Syria [7].

Clemens von Goetze (director of the 3rd department of the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs ) and Anwar Mohammad Gargash (Emirati Minister for Foreign Affairs), during the meeting in Abou Dhabi of the work group on the carving up of the Syrian economy.

Expanding this work, Germany organised in Abou Dhabi a meeting of the Friends of Syria under the presidency of one of its diplomats, Clemens von Goetze, who shared among those present the future concessions for exploitation which would be awarded to the winners once NATO overthrew the Syrian Arab Republic [8].

In mid-2012, Volker Perthes was tasked by the US Department of Defense with preparing « The Day After » (in other words the government which would be imposed on Syria). He organised meetings at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs with the participation of 45 Syrian personalities, including his friend Bassma Kodmani and Muslim Brother Radwan Ziadeh, who had come especially from Washington [9]. Finally, Perthes became one of Jeffrey Feltman’s assistants at the UNO. With that title, he participated in all the Geneva negotiations.

The positions of the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs were adopted word for word by the European External Action Service (EEAS) of Federica Mogherini. This administration, directed by a French senior civil servant, drew up confidential notes on Syria for the heads of state and government of the Union.

In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had become the world protector of the Muslim Brotherhood, organised the transfer of more than a million people to Germany [10], thus conforming to the demand by German industrial business leaders. A number of these migrants are Syrians, including those the AKP no longer wants, and which Germany does not want to return home.

Chancellor Angela Merkel will be in Beirut and Amman this week to talk about Syria.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Pete Kimberley

      

[1] The CIA under Alan Dulles placed Nazi ex-leaders as supervisors of almost all the secret services of the allied states on all five continents. This system was dismantled in the 1970’s, after the revelations of the Church and Pike Congressional committees. All the Nazi leaders were chased out by President Carter and Admiral Stanfield Turner at the end of the 1970’s. The Europeans wrongly believed that the CIA used the Nazis exclusively in Latin America (for example, Klaus Barbie in Bolivia). But the system was in fact generalised, including in Europe (operation Gladio). In all probability, the placing of these Nazi « experts » was coordinated from Germany by Reinhard Gehlen, whom the CIA nominated as the first head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).

[2] A Mosque in Munich, Ian Johnson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

[3] Alois Brunner is believed to be responsible for the deportation and assassination of 130,000 people, in Austria, Greece, France, Germany and Slovakia. In 2001, he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in France for his responsibility in the death of the children of Izieu.

[4] “Revelations on Rafik Hariri’s assassination”, by Thierry Meyssan, Оdnako (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 29 November 2010.

[5] “The disgrace of the Mehlis Commission”, by Talaat Ramih, Voltaire Network, 12 January 2006.

[6] “Is Assad Capable of Reform ?”, Volker Perthes, The New York Times, March 30, 2011.

[7] « Küresel Enerji Stratejileri Simülasyonu : Türkiye’nin Gelecek 10 Yılı », Tusaid, 6 Ekim 2011.

[8] “The “Friends of Syria” divvy up Syrian economy before conquest”, by German Foreign Policy, Voltaire Network, 30 June 2012.

[9] The Day After Project, August 2012. The Day After. Supporting a Democratic Transition in Syria, United States Institute of Peace & Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, August 2012.

[10] Turkey took over from Saudi Arabia after it had dropped the Brotherhood, following the speech by Donald Trump in Riyadh, 21 May 2017.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article201579.html

Seymour Hersh on Torture and Secret US Assassination Programs

WAR & PEACE

Seymour Hersh on Torture at Abu Ghraib and Secret US Assassination Programs

BY 

Amy Goodman

Juan González

Democracy Now!

PUBLISHED

June 20, 2018

In 2004, investigative reporter Sy Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq that shocked the world. Shocking photos of US military personnel humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib sparked global outcry, as well as national hearings, investigations and finger pointing. We speak with Sy Hersh about his investigation, nearly 15 years later.

TRANSCRIPT

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about, of course, another of your many exposés that received international attention: Abu Ghraib. Could you talk about how you got onto Abu Ghraib and the impact that that story had, not only in the United States, but across the Muslim world?

SEYMOUR HERSH: There was nothing that I wrote that wasn’t known and been reported by Human Rights Watch—a wonderful guy named John Sifton was just brilliant—Amnesty International, were writing—doing reports, talking about torture. It’s the same thing that I was reading in the ’60s about Vietnam, that—by church groups who were writing books about it, that didn’t make the media. And they were doing torture.

And I couldn’t find a—and in the fall of 2003, in December—what happened is, we won the war, we thought, quickly, and it turned out we didn’t win. What Don Rumsfeld, that man, called dead-enders—once we thought the war, in two months—what he called the dead-enders turned out to be the guys ready—the Baath Party people we thought we got rid of. And we were in a civil war, and we were being chopped to death.

In that December, I was in—I went to Damascus, and there was a two-star general. We grabbed most of the generals. Most of the generals who served in the Iraqi Army, we grabbed. We either killed them, or we turned them around and put them in the units that became killer units, or we used them for intelligence. This guy was missed. He was a linguist, a two-star. And I got him to Damascus. I think it cost 700 bucks for him to take a car—you could do it then. It was safe. There was a period, still then. He took a car from Baghdad to Damascus. He had a daughter in med school. He had to stay there, because she didn’t know English, and she wanted—the medical school was in Arabic, and she could do it. I don’t know what happened to him. And I spent four days with this two-star general, who was in signals intelligence and knew everything. And I’m debriefing him, writing—I don’t put anything in the computer.

And about the third or fourth day, he said, “And let me tell you about that prison, Abu Ghraib,” which I had read stuff about. He said, “My friends’ wives and daughters are writing and saying, ‘You must come and kill me, because I’ve been defiled.’” You know, in that part of the world, they deal in shame. We deal in guilt here, in this part—guilt and denial here. But they dealt in shame. And they said they had been defiled. The GIs have done things to them. I’m not sure to what extent. “And you’ve got to come and kill me, because I’m no longer fit. I can’t be a wife, and I can’t—I can’t be a wife, and I can’t be married.”

And so, what’s going on? So I got into it. I mean, I knew then, maybe I could find a way. And then I heard about photographs. And then I heard that CBS had some photographs. There had been a report written, a secret report. And once I got that—I got it. I got the report, written by a brilliant officer named Antonio Taguba, who was fired over it, because Rumsfeld thought Taguba had to give it to me. How dumb is that? I didn’t see him. I didn’t know him for two years. I’m his dear friend. I have lunch with him. He’s a most wonderful man. I would go in a foxhole with him. And there are these people.

AMY GOODMAN: The general.

SEYMOUR HERSH: He just wrote a two-star report, that—he was ready for a third. He was a Filipino. He got out of college, weighing—five-foot-three, weighing 115 pounds. And three times he had asked the Army, as he was in a career, military career, to help pay for graduate school. And they said to him, “You don’t even speak English well. You know, you’re just some little yellow guy.”

AMY GOODMAN: We have a minute and a half.

SEYMOUR HERSH: So, what happened is, I got the report, and it was devastating. And it was all because he had told me how bad it was. And The New York Timespublished it. And CBS had the same photographs I had, and it had refused, for two or three weeks, to publish them. It was just a terrible story.

AMY GOODMAN: These are the photographs of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Right. They had had it for two weeks.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And they didn’t run it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: But, you know, the people doing it, the reporters, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, the producers, wanted to. But the suits stopped them. And so I actually worked out a deal, where they publish it, 60 Minutes on Thursday, before I did the report on Sunday.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The same reporters that ended up being fired, in essence, by CBSlater.

SEYMOUR HERSH: It’s too bad. It’s not good to be good at your job in network television. That’s my theory.

AMY GOODMAN: You also wrote in your book, “There was a widespread understanding that those who died in interrogation were not to be buried, lest the bodies be disinterred later, but had to be destroyed by acid and other means.”

SEYMOUR HERSH: That’s what I wrote. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Yes, it was understood. This is early in the war. There was—excuse me. Do you think it stopped? Do you know how many warfare places we’re in right now? Seventy-six. The United States is conducting war in 76 countries now. If you don’t think assassinations are going on just as much, they are.

AMY GOODMAN: You also wrote about the use of fire ants.

SEYMOUR HERSH: I didn’t write. It was a story we didn’t publish, because it just—it was one of the fights I had with the editors. And he may have been right.

AMY GOODMAN: But the assassinations you’re talking about, in our last 15 seconds, and then we’re going to do Part 2.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I mean, when you have the special operations forces operating all over Africa, if you think they’re telling the truth about what happened anywhere, in Mali or else place—it may be 70 different—we’re all over Africa. Nobody controls what they’re doing. It’s a big problem. And this president, of course, doesn’t know and doesn’t care, you know. But there are people there. There are people behind him who do care. But it’s going to be a long process.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Seymour Hersh, and we’re going to continue with a web exclusive at democracynow.org, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, exposed the My Lai massacre. His memoir is just out. It’s simply called Reporter.

https://truthout.org/video/seymour-hersh-on-torture-at-abu-ghraib-and-secret-us-assassination-programs/

Penny Lane

James Corden in tranen tijdens autoritje met Paul McCartney

VIDEOJames Corden heeft zich in de nieuwste editie van het populaire programmaonderdeel Carpool Karaoke uit zijn The Late Late Show van zijn emotionele kant laten zien. De talkshowhost werd tot tranen toe geroerd toen hij samen met Paul McCartney de Beatles-hit Let It Be zong.

https://www.ad.nl/show/james-corden-in-tranen-tijdens-autoritje-met-paul-mccartney~a32be7006/

NASA's Military Industrial Complex

Post can be found on DollarVigilante.com

06/22/2018

$52 million dollars a day. That’s how much tax money gets sucked out of Americans’ pockets to pay for NASA’s whopping $19 billion annual budget. But folks, things are about to get a whole lot worse...

Anarcho-Capitalist.  Libertarian.  Freedom fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks.  Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante and host of the popular video podcast, Anarchast.  Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world’s freedom, investment and cryptocurrency conferences including his own, Anarchapulco, as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business.  Jeff also posts exclusive content daily to the new blockchain based social media network, Steemit.

Jewish Fascists

The Jewish Mother of Fascism 

Margherita Sarfatti was known in Italy as Benito Mussolini's mistress, but she was much more than that. She was his ideological companion, planned the 'March on Rome' with him, wrote articles in his name, edited the Fascist Party organ and wrote his first official biography.

Saviona Mane Jul 06, 2006 12:00 AM

ROME - Everyone in Italy wanted to forget the "Duce's other woman": the Fascists, because she was Jewish; their opponents, because she was Fascist; and the family, because she became an embarrassing historical burden. As a result, Margherita Sarfatti's story slipped out of the public awareness, and along with it her central role in Italian fascism and the Duce's life. 

Today, more than 60 years after the Fascist dictator was executed, Sarfatti's descendants prefer to view her as an intellectual and a patron of the arts, who worked to distanced Italy from the Nazi danger and was forced to flee to Argentina when Benito Mussolini implemented the race laws. They did not hear from her about the 20 years in which she shared Mussolini's doctrine and bed. Or about the 1,272 letters he wrote her in those years, and which disappeared. No, they are not in her private archive at her home at 18 Via Dei Villini in Rome. At least, that is what her granddaughter, Ippolita Gaetani, who is in charge of the archive, told Haaretz in an exclusive interview. An American cousin, who is also named Margherita Sarfatti, is convinced the letters are in the hands of the Rome cousin. 

Many visitors have recently called at the luxurious building in Rome - journalists, researchers, writers ("Italian Night," by Nicole Fabre, a novel in which Sarfatti is a leading character, was recently published in France). It is a lavish patrician building in ocher, which is a three-minute walk from Villa Torlonia, the Duce's official residence - three minutes from the villa's back entrance, it should be noted. "The villa is being renovated," says a smiling young woman who is working in the courtyard, "but you can visit. Go around to the other side, it's worth it." 

At the home on the Via Dei Villini in Rome, a gilded bell, a vast black gate, a double wooden door, an elevator in an ornate metal cage, a broad marble staircase. The door is opened by Ippolita Gaetani, a spare, blue-eyed woman of 66, who has a determined, no-nonsense manner. The apartment is spacious, sun-washed, and furnished with classical restraint. The documents and photographs of Grandmother Margherita are housed in one room, in the center of which is the "Holy of Holies": Sarfatti's desk. On the wall is a famous portrait of Sarfatti with her daughter Fiammetta, painted by Achille Funi. Next to it are shelves laden with her notebooks and diaries, and a chest with 12 huge drawers. 

Before the interview gets under way, the hostess receives a phone call. "I am being interviewed for an Israeli paper," she apologizes, and adds, "No, no, the 'good' paper." Ippolita Gaetani and her two sisters, Sancia and Margherita, are identified with the Italian left and are quite active on behalf of the Palestinian cause. 

Ippolita was 21 when her grandmother died, in 1961, at the age of 81, but never asked her about her past, about her affair with Mussolini or her role in the Fascist movement. And Sarfatti, she says, never volunteered information on the subject. She talked about art, recited Dante, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and did crosswords in Figaro Litteraire. "After the war there was a deep collective repression, people tried to forget, did not boast about it. There was a kind of self-censorship. People are only now starting to talk about that period, and also about my grandmother," Gaetani says. 

When did you learn about your grandmother's part in Mussolini's life and in the Fascist movement in Italy? 

"Very late, at the age of 17, 18, and from friends. It was not talked about at home. There was repression in Italy. Everything was imputed to the Germans, all the evils, the race laws, the persecutions. In my home, too, everything was imputed to the Germans. When I grew up and started to read, I understood that f ascism and Nazism are interchangeable. My mother did not think so - she continued to say that fascism was all right until it cozied up to Hitler. 

"In my opinion, if the blacks and not the Jews had been persecuted then, many Jews would still be fascists ... In fact, it is the same today. Many Jews in Italy are fascists, because fascism is far closer to today's Israel; they are persecuting the Arabs. If you go to the Rome Ghetto today, you will see that part of the Rome Jewish community is truly fascist, fascist in its mentality, in the head. And the situation in the Middle East complicates matters. They accuse everyone who speaks out against Israel of being anti-Semitic. And in Italian politics they are far closer to the right than to the left." 

Encounter with history

Her mother, Fiammetta, converted to Christianity in 1930 and remained in Italy with her family even after Margherita and her son, Amedeo, went into exile to Argentina following the implementation of the race laws. But Sarfatti feared for the well-being of her daughter and her grandchildren, and after Rome was conquered by the Nazis she made long-distance use of the few connections she still retained from her days of glory in order to ensure that no harm would befall them. Thus Fiammetta found asylum in a hospital, disguised as a nurse; her husband, Livio, who was not Jewish, went into the underground; and their children were sent to Catholic convents. Margherita's older sister, Nella Errera, did not fare so well. She and her husband, Paolo, who officially denied their Jewishness, were arrested in 1944 by the S.S. and sent to the camp at Fossoli and from there to Auschwitz. They died on the way to the extermination camp. 

The coffee is ready and Gaetani pours it into a demitasse. 

Did your grandmother talk about the past or feel responsibility for her sister's death? 

"Not with me, not with us, that was taboo at home. She may have had qualms of conscience, but either you commit suicide or you decide to live. People lived with worse things on their conscience. She was actually involved with art - it is not that she harmed or informed on anyone. On the contrary, some historians say that as long as she was by his side, Mussolini did fewer horrible things. She herself did not do anything bad to anyone. That her man was scum - of that there is no doubt." 

The dramatic story of Margherita Sarfatti's life begins with a tranquil, happy childhood in the ghetto of Venice, where she was born on April 8, 1880, the youngest child of an affluent religious Jewish family, the Grassinis (the father of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg was her cousin). The lovely girl with red hair and green eyes and insatiable curiosity was raised in a protected setting and surrounded by love, especially on the part of her grandmother, Dolcetta Levi Nahmias, a "woman of valor," in the Jewish term, from whom she learned to live in the present and not get caught up in the past. 

"Oh, God," she would mumble every night in a prayer she made up, "make me learn how to be happy and learn how to be grateful for all the good things you have given me." To be happy, at any price: that was the motto that propelled her throughout her life. At the age of 18, despite her parents' objections, she married Cesare Sarfatti, a Jewish lawyer and socialist, who was 14 years her senior. The Sarfattis had three children: Roberto, Amedeo and Fiammetta. 

However, she found life in Venice too confining, and her husband was also eager for a change. The couple moved to the nerve center of Italy - Milan. There Margherita began to carve herself a place in the intellectual elite and to become active in fields which until then had been male prerogatives: journalism and art. To that end, she opened her salon every Wednesday to the city's Who's Who and gained the reputation of an impeccable hostess: beautiful, witty and vivacious. Her home became the center of the artistic avant-garde, the melting pot of Futurism, and later of the Novecento Italiano movement. The leading artists, writers and politicians were regulars in her home. 

"A kind of acute sense of smell impelled me toward gifted people," she wrote in her memoirs, which are really a collection of episodes about her meetings with preeminent world figures, including the inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Pope Pius X, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and many others. Israel Zangwill, whom she calls the "Jewish Dickens," and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the Zionist Revisionist leader, were also among her acquaintances. 

"She was an educated woman, very attentive to the cultural fashions, a manipulative woman, ambitious and uninhibited, with a singular talent for self-promotion (a talent she showed also after her son died in World War I, appropriating his death as another means of self- promotion)," says the historian Dr. Simona Urso, from the University of Padua, who has written a biography of Sarfatti. 

The dramatic pivot of her life - the encounter with history - occurred in 1912, when a young, uncouth and unknown journalist named Benito Mussolini was appointed editor of the socialist journal Avanti, for which Sarfatti wrote art criticism. At 29, he was three years younger than Sarfatti, an ardent socialist from the provinces, a charismatic womanizer with a gift for holding his listeners in thrall with his talk. Sarfatti spotted a "glint of fanaticism" in his eyes and was immediately drawn to the power he projected.

https://www.haaretz.com/1.4856144

Joodse Kolonisten Bejubelen Doden Palestijnse Baby

Kolonisten bejubelen doden Palestijnse baby met brandbom: ‘Ali ligt op de grill!’

In een blijk van complete verloedering tarten religieuze Israëlische kolonisten de grootvader van de éénjarige Ali, die samen met zijn ouders bij een aanslag met een brandbom levend verbrandde. ‘Jammer dat zijn broertje niet ook verbrand is!’

Verloedering heeft een gezicht. Dansend en zingend bejubelen Israëlische kolonisten de moord op Ali Dawabshah en zijn ouders.The Times of Israel 

Het zijn moeilijk te verteren beelden: zo’n twintig Israëlische kolonisten die zich bij het gerechtsgebouw van Lod hebben verzameld om steun te betuigen aan twee verdachten van een moordaanslag in Duma, een Palestijns dorp op de bezette Westelijke Jordaanoever. Daar werden in de nacht van 31 juli 2015 molotovcocktails het huis van het gezin Dawabshah in gegooid. Het anderhalf jaar oude zoontje Ali kwam om in de vlammen. Zijn ouders Riham en Saad bezweken later aan hun verwondingen. Alleen de vierjarige Ahmad overleefde de aanslag. Hij wordt verzorgd door zijn grootvader Hussein.

Na een hoorzitting over de zaak stuitte Hussein dinsdag buiten het gerechtsgebouw op de haag van dansende en zingende Israëlische kolonisten, die hem toeriepen: ‘Waar is Ali? Ali is er niet. Ali is verbrand. Ali ligt op de grill!’ En daar bleef het niet bij: ‘Waar is Saad? Waar is Riham? Jammer dat Ahmad niet ook verbrand is!’

Een korte gefilmde impressie van de gebeurtenis werd op Twitter gezet door parlementslid Ahmad Tibi (Verenigde Lijst). De aanwezige politiemensen lieten de kolonisten begaan. Tibi vroeg zich af hoe de politie zou hebben gereageerd als twintig Palestijnen zich publiekelijk vrolijk hadden gemaakt over de moord op een Israëli:

What would have happened had the situation been reversed? If 20 Arab youths were shouting about a Jewish fatality ‘he’s on the grill, he’s burning’? How many of them would have gone home with broken legs? How many would have been arrested?

Extremistische kolonisten

De daders van de aanslag in Duma, die ook een mislukte poging tot brandstichting in een tweede huis deden, wisten te ontkomen, maar op de muren van woningen was graffiti achtergelaten. In het Hebreeuws stond er ‘Wraak’ en ‘Lang leve de Messias’, teksten waarmee extremistische joodse kolonisten uit de illegale Israëlische ‘nederzettingen’ aanslagen plegen te ‘ondertekenen’.

In januari 2016 werd de 21-jarige Israëli Amiram Ben-Uliel in staat van beschuldiging gesteld. Hij was een bekend gezicht (€) in kringen van de zogenoemde ‘heuveltopjongeren’, jonge joodse extremisten die zich illegaal op heuvels in Palestijns gebied vestigen, de Palestijnse bevolking terroriseren en het gezag van de staat Israël afwijzen. Zij gaan voorop in de gewelddadige overname van wat zij beschouwen als het aan het joodse volk toebehorende ‘Beloofde Land’.

De zaak deed van meet af aan stof opwaaien. Ben-Uliel en een van medeplichtigheid verdachte minderjarige zouden zijn gemarteld door de binnenlandse veiligheidsdienst Shin Bet. Marteling is een veel voorkomende praktijk om verdachten tot een bekentenis te dwingen, zij het met name gebruikt tegen Palestijnse verdachten. Tijdens de hoorzitting in Lod werden de bekentenissen die met geweld verkregen waren ongeldig verklaard. Tegen de verdachten bestaat echter ook indirect bewijs, schrijft de Israëlische pers: zij gaven tijdens andere verhoren details die wezen op hun aanwezigheid in Duma tijdens de aanslag, maar het is de vraag of dat voldoende is voor een veroordeling. Ben-Uliel zou hebben bekend ook betrokken te zijn geweest bij aanvallen op zes andere Palestijnse dorpen.

Daders als slachtoffers

De vraag is of de uitspraak in Lod betekent dat ook bekentenissen van Palestijnse verdachten die met geweld zijn verkregen voortaan ongeldig zijn. Zulk geweld is schering en inslag, terwijl het tegen joodse verdachten alleen bij hoge uitzondering wordt gebruikt. De rechters zagen die bui al hangen en verklaarden dat hun uitspraak uitsluitend betrekking heeft op de zaak tegen Ben-Uliel en de destijds minderjarige medeverdachte.

Commentatoren hebben er geen enkel vertrouwen in dat Palestijnse verdachten op zulke uitspraken kunnen rekenen. Zij wijzen er bovendien op dat Palestijnen van de Westoever die van aanslagen worden verdacht door militaire rechtbanken worden berecht, waar vrijwel iedere zaak in een veroordeling eindigt – als de verdachten al niet zonder aanklacht en proces onder ‘administratieve detentie’ in de gevangenis verdwijnen.

Opgemerkt werd ook dat in de uitspraak in Lod, die 165 pagina’s omvat, slechts tweemaal zijdelings wordt gewezen op het lot van de familie Dawabshah. De zaak draait niet om het lijden van de slachtoffers, maar om het lijden van de vermoedelijke daders. In combinatie met de uiterst trage voortgang in de zaak is er geen reden om aan te nemen dat recht zal geschieden, meent ook grootvader Hussein Dawabshah, die zich in de zaak heeft vastgebeten.

Nieuwe aanslag op familie

Zes weken geleden werd in Duma opnieuw een aanslag gepleegd op een huis van de familie Dawabshah. Ooggetuigen zagen hoe een groep kolonisten in alle vroegte een ruit insloeg en een molotovcocktail naar binnen gooide. De bewoners werden wakker van de herrie en wisten het huis ongedeerd te verlaten, maar het interieur overleefde de aanslag niet. De Israëlische autoriteiten hebben naar verluidt de zaak in onderzoek.

In december 2015 vierden kolonisten de dood van Ali Dawabshah en zijn ouders openlijk tijdens een bruiloft, die bekend werd als de ‘bruiloft van de haat’. Op videobeelden is te zien hoe de bruiloftsgasten zingend en dansend vuurwapens en molotovcocktails omhoog houden en met messen insteken op een grote foto van de omgekomen baby. De liederen die ten gehore werden gebracht bevatten teksten als ‘De moskee zal branden’ en ‘De moskee zal exploderen’. Een klein jaar later werden dertien verdachten opgepakt, onder wie de bruidegom, op beschuldiging van opruiing tot geweld of terreur. De zaak is nog onder de rechter.

https://rightsforum.org/nieuws/kolonisten-bejubelen-doden-palestijnse-baby-brandbom-ali-ligt-op-grill/